The flames surrounding his body hissed the moment they touched the wall.
Despite being designed with fire prevention in mind and using building materials with considerable heat resistance, they melted in an instant like heated butter, allowing Asakura to walk into the tower without any obstruction.
Several Slender Men suddenly dropped from the ceiling, fluttering towards Asakura as if committing suicide.
Theoretically, the defense of Cursed Flame Scale Armor was enough for Asakura to ignore this level of attack; they probably wouldn't even touch Asakura's clothes before being incinerated by the flames of the Flame Scale.
However, Asakura suddenly seemed to sense something, deftly avoiding the attacks of those Slender Men.
He then seized the moment when their momentum was spent and they hadn't yet recovered, reaching out his hand towards them.
[Candle]"
The bodies of those few Slender Men were immediately enveloped in flames.
However, unlike the ghosts Asakura instantly killed in the abandoned courtyard before, these Slender Men only had their outer layers burned off, revealing the things wrapped inside, which then fell to the ground.
Those were humans.
More precisely, they were human children, approximately 12 years old.
Their eyes were tightly shut, their breaths weak, and their conditions didn't look optimistic.
If Asakura had a photographic memory, he would have noticed that these children were precisely the missing persons frequently mentioned in recent news as 'Spirited Away incidents.'
To make him inadvertently kill these children himself, thereby making him waver and expose a weakness? Asakura frowned slightly.
"How disgusting."
Flames rose out of thin air, circled the room, and then, in a fit of impotent rage, incinerated all the surrounding debris.
In the blazing fire, Asakura looked up; although his vision was blocked by the ceiling, the expressionless girl at the top of the Chiba Port Tower seemed to sense something, and for the first time, a slight surprise appeared on her otherwise blank face.
The chanting of the human faces stopped abruptly, as if a pause button had been pressed.
The girl gently clapped her hands, and four of the countless human faces began to melt, then, like adult insects breaking out of their cocoons, slender figures emerged from the melted human faces; they were two new Slender Men.
Their tentacles tangled and intertwined, surrounding the orb of light.
Nothing was more important than the Divine Embryo; when attacked, immediately transferring the Divine Embryo was the highest priority for these ghosts, rather than counterattacking.
However, after a brief pause, nothing happened; the orb of light, which should have teleported to another creation site with the other ghosts, remained in place, emitting an ominous faint glow.
Countless human faces wailed.
The girl looked expressionlessly at the few ghosts that seemed to have crashed.
She already knew the reason for the failed teleportation—space had undergone an anomaly, and they were currently in an abnormal space like a prison; except for this tower, everything else visible outside was almost a false reflection!
They were even unable to connect with the Human-Faced Sore outside.
And in these short few seconds, the threat from below had approached much closer.
The girl—or rather, the consciousness occupying the girl's body—understood the current situation in an instant.
Even if all the current Human-Faced Sore were hatched into ghosts, they would definitely not be a match for the approaching threat below.
Once the opponent broke in and discovered the Divine Embryo, it would almost certainly spell the failure of the great undertaking of the divine being's descent into this world.
But as long as she could find a way to break through this spatial blockade before that—more precisely, find the existence that was maintaining this closed space, whether it was a person or an object—and return the Chiba Port Tower to reality, then the ghosts could escape with the Divine Embryo!
This was their only chance of victory.
The girl waved her hand, and the flesh clinging to the wall quickly contracted, revealing a large hole leading to the outside, which was the harbor that the Chiba Port Tower faced.
The reason why it was determined in a short time that the node maintaining the space was located on the sea rather than the city buildings behind was simple: because from the failed transmission just now, the large area of 'city' behind was basically just a texture map…
Of course, finding that node wasn't simple either, as there were many ships in the harbor, as well as various floating beacons and such.
While it wasn't quite like finding a needle in a haystack, it was still quite troublesome.
"There is no need to search—" the girl murmured softly.
Immediately after, many Human-Faced Sore hatched into ghosts, floating out of the hole like specters, then rapidly rotating around the middle section of the Chiba Port Tower.
The next moment, the upper half of the Chiba Port Tower abruptly vanished.
Half a second later, even though it was only the upper half, the colossal structure, still over sixty meters tall, plummeted from the sky and crashed heavily into the sea!
Because most of the sea surface was mirrored, that broken section of the tower neither sank nor caused a tsunami; it simply stood askew in the sea surface.
But this level of impact was already enough to put a huge strain on the mirrored surface created by Chihaya Anon's Curse [Mirror].
With a tremor that seemed to shake the entire sea, the Mirror pendant nearly flew out of Chihaya Anon's hand, and the sudden, rapid loss of magical power made her almost collapse onto the snake's back.
But even so, she gritted her teeth and managed to hold on.
However, even a momentary distortion was enough.
The moment all false things distorted, the two pink-haired individuals, who were the only ones from reality unaffected by the distortion besides the Chiba Port Tower, were exposed to the sight of the girl and the ghosts.
'I won,' the consciousness occupying the black-haired girl thought to herself.
In just a moment, the ghosts that had taken flight from the Chiba Port Tower swooped down like a swarm of bats, covering the sky and earth, towards the two pale-faced pink-haired individuals!
In the nick of time, the puppy snake, which had been leisurely floating on the sea like a dugout canoe, suddenly whipped its tail like a propeller, accelerating and leaping onto the mirrored sea.
Immediately after, its body rapidly expanded, transforming from a small puppy snake into a five-meter-tall dessert golem.
It scooped up the two pink-haired individuals, who were unable to move because they had to maintain the half-baked Curse, and took off running.
Many ghosts teleported beside the golem, trying to obstruct its movement, but were instead slapped to the ground by the golem.
However, as the saying goes, many ants can kill an elephant; as more and more ghosts clung to the golem, its speed gradually slowed, and it was about to be overtaken by the overwhelming army of ghosts.
Just at this crucial moment.
The other half of the Chiba Port Tower, which remained in place, exploded violently.
Accompanied by countless debris flung by the explosion.
Asakura, draped in a cloak of flames, streaked across the sky like a fiery meteor, heading towards the observation deck of the upper half of the Chiba Port Tower!