Controlling her Nen thread, she shaped one strand into a blade and stabbed it into various parts of the mummy one by one—eyes, mouth, ears, heart…
The muffled sound of something piercing flesh rang out.
Machi's eyes lit up, and she drove several more threads into the same spot. The mummy convulsed violently. Moments later, it threw its head back and opened its mouth wide, spewing a massive quantity of smoke—enough to fill the entire chamber.
Ron's face shifted at the sudden threat.
A fierce burst of fire exploded around Natsu, forming a flaming ring. Machi darted toward Ron. For a moment, the two of them were protected inside a small sphere of flames while the smoke swirled around outside like headless flies. It couldn't get near them, quickly burning away.
Only after the smoke had completely vanished did Ron order Natsu to extinguish the fire. Nothing remained of the smoke.
As for the mummy, its body had become alarmingly brittle.
Its entire form collapsed, crumbling to dust on the floor. Right then, Ron sensed his Rotten Life Blade at his waist give a faint twitch. Ever since the Taris incident, the blade had fallen silent—no signs of progress. Ron, having witnessed it evolve once before, wasn't worried. Yet with so much time passing and no results, he was beginning to grow impatient.
Now at last, the blade reacted again. A trace of "deathly aura" rose from the shattered mummy and drifted into the Rotten Life Blade, drawn there like iron filings to a magnet.
A newly revealed door in the wall creaked open.
Machi glanced at Ron.
"No." Ron shook his head. "Let's keep moving."
They walked through the door and into another chamber. Inside were more mummies—this time, two of them.
Immediately, the newcomers attacked. Ron and Machi each had to deal with one. Unlike the previous mummy, these had traded some defensive might for greater offensive capability. No sooner had Ron and Machi stepped inside than the pair of corpses lunged with surprising speed.
Natsu rushed forward. Before acquiring him, Ron had often relied on Hanma Baki to tank incoming hits, but Natsu's defense proved even better. Flames flickered across Natsu's body.
Ron gripped the hilt of his Rotten Life Blade. He could sense one particular spot on the mummy that felt different—almost like a lingering wound from its living days, now radiating the "death aura."
Following Ron's command, Natsu endured a direct attack from the mummy, then smashed its critical point with a searing blow.
In an instant, the undead creature exploded apart—this time, no toxic smoke. Another wisp of deathly aura seeped from the corpse's remains, and the blade at Ron's side absorbed it.
"It's their fatal injury from when they were alive. High chance these things are the bodies of past invaders who tried and failed to breach the Kurta Clan. After they were killed, their corpses got converted into these mummies. Their weakness is their pre-mortem death wound."
He turned to see how Machi fared.
"With that in mind, if we find that old wound, we can take them out."
Machi nodded in agreement. She had already suspected something similar. But the mummy attacking her was tricky enough that she couldn't put her theory to the test right away. Upon hearing Ron's confirmation, she switched tactics.
This time, Machi threaded directly into the mummy's old wound. The creature went rigid, then crumbled into fragments of rotted flesh and bone, its deathly aura also drawn into Ron's blade.
He felt the Rotten Life Blade edging closer to reawakening.
Another door opened in the wall. The two of them walked through—and were greeted by yet another room of mummies, more numerous than before.
"I'll pin them down with my threads," Machi proposed, "while your Nen Beast finds the weakness."
"Sounds good," Ron agreed.
Not long afterward, they'd cleared the room. Yet as they stepped across the threshold into the next area, something changed. Ron found himself in a vast, desolate landscape littered with bones, silent as the grave—and Machi was nowhere to be seen.
The sight before Ron brought to mind a place he'd visited before: the "Nirvana Grounds" in the Kingdom of Fiora.
"It's so much like that…
The ambience, the scene…"
He guessed these skeletal remains likely belonged to deceased Kurta. A quick glance at the crystal sphere hovering nearby showed its progress already at twenty percent. The rate of absorbing new traits had soared.
"It's even faster than when I was in the Zoldyck Estate.
But what exactly awaits me here?"
Ron had no intel on any of these strange defenses: not the withered branches, the burrowing worms, the desert crows, or the pyramid mummies. Yet he recalled from the original storyline that the Phantom Troupe members emerged from hunting the Kurta Clan mostly unscathed. Meanwhile, the Kurta themselves hadn't all specialized in combat. Many had purely supportive or utility-type abilities.
When Ron caught a glimpse of Franklin earlier, he estimated that most Troupe members were around B-rank, maybe a few at A, and possibly even some at C. It was obvious they had enough power to bulldoze the clan once they located them. Still, none of that explained the lonely, corpse-strewn place Ron found himself in—or what challenge he'd face next.
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