"Cough... Ghk!"
Esdeath never imagined in a million years that she would be pinned by the throat in a single move.
Could he be wearing some kind of defensive Teigu under his clothes? Impossible. Even when facing protective Teigu in the past, none have ever completely neutralized my blade without taking a single scratch, his clothes aren't even torn!
"Release Esdeath-sama!"
Seeing her captured, her personal vanguard, the Three Beasts, charged forward valiantly, though, to put it bluntly, it was nothing short of suicidal. Unlike the rest of the foot soldiers, these three wore tailored suits rather than standard military uniforms, and their unmasked faces instantly set them apart as elite officers.
BOOM—!!!
Suddenly, a vast, peerless wave of pressure swept across the entire fortress. Every single soldier clad in a military uniform collapsed instantly, their eyes rolling back beneath their masks as they lost consciousness.
"..."
Among the Three Beasts, Nyau and Daidara slammed face-first onto the ground. Though they managed to retain consciousness, they were left gasping wildly for breath. Nyau clutched his mouth, vomiting uncontrollably onto the stones.
The eldest of the three, Liver, dropped to one knee, propping himself up by pressing a trembling palm against his face. "W-What... absurd... power..."
Had anyone from the world of pirates been present, they would have easily mistaken this for Conqueror's Haki. In reality, it was purely Alucard's raw, unfiltered murderous aura. However, because he had absorbed numerous Conqueror's Haki users into his River of Death, a residual trace of that royal willpower naturally laced his aura whenever he unleashed it.
"Esdeath?"
Alucard idly repeated the name Liver had just spoken. He recalled the patrol guards shouting the exact same name right before his bullets tore through them.
Yet, Alucard knew with absolute certainty that this level of murderous aura wouldn't even cause a seasoned Marine Vice Admiral to flinch. To think that a mere drop of bloodlust could instantly incapacitate an entire army left only two logical possibilities:
Either these soldiers were a joke, the absolute dregs of an army;
Or, the combat threshold of this entire world was pathetically low.
"You're supposed to be this world's strongest?" Alucard asked, maintaining his iron grip around Esdeath's trachea, though he loosened his fingers just enough to let her speak.
"I am merely... someone who has never found an opponent capable of satisfying me," Esdeath replied, her face flushing crimson from the prolonged lack of oxygen. While she didn't explicitly claim the title of "the strongest," her answer made it clear enough.
Alucard's expression immediately soured into a look of profound, deeply insulted disappointment.
From the moment he arrived in this world up until Esdeath boasted about slowly torturing him, Alucard had actually harbored high expectations for this uncharted reality. Yet, seeing that the apex predator of this world was a mere weakling, his initial excitement pulled a violent 180-degree turn, morphing into profound dissatisfaction, or rather, sheer disgust.
What kind of pathetic, low-tier world have I stumbled into?
As if discarding a piece of worthless garbage, Alucard threw Esdeath aside, sending her crashing violently against the stone wall of the fortress.
"Ugh..."
Feeling a sharp, agonizing ache flare up across her back, Esdeath gritted her teeth to suppress a scream. She snapped her head up, only to see Alucard casually walk over to her Three Beasts and press the barrel of his pistol against Liver's forehead.
"Dogs," Alucard muttered coldly. "The blood flowing through your veins smells utterly rancid. It isn't even worth drinking."
Despair.
That was the solitary thought paralyzing the minds of the Three Beasts. They had genuinely believed that Esdeath, whom they blindly followed, stood completely unrivaled across the globe. Never did they expect that their northern campaign would cross paths with a monstrous anomaly that defied the very laws of reality.
BANG!
With a single pull of the trigger, Alucard's white gun, Casull, completely obliterated Liver's head. In the next breath, his left hand slipped into his trench coat to draw his black gun, Jackal. Crossing his arms, he unleashed a fluid barrage of gunfire, sending the remaining two Beasts, Nyau and Daidara, straight to the afterlife.
Alucard had absolutely zero interest in absorbing such fragile souls; even if he added them to the River of Death, they would be nothing more than cannon fodder among cannon fodder. Right now, his only motivation was pure vent-driven frustration.
This felt exactly like entering a grand lottery, being told by the clerk that you won the ultimate grand prize, and then being handed a single napkin. It was an incredibly insulting joke.
The pool of blood beneath Alucard's feet began to ripple and expand, and a colossal, monstrous paw clawed its way out of the depths, the True Ancestor Familiar, Baskerville!
"Ah..."
Watching the horror unfold, Esdeath completely forgot her prestigious rank as the Empire's Supreme General. She could only watch in stunned silence as the tens of thousands of soldiers she had marched into battle were savagely torn apart and swallowed whole by the massive black hound, like a stray dog devouring kibble.
In an instant, severed limbs and ruptured flesh rained from the sky, painting the silver walls of the fortress a brilliant, stark crimson.
Before she could process the carnage, Alucard materialized directly in front of her. His black gun leveled dead against the cross-shaped tattoo on her chest as he sneered, "Are you a human? A dog? Or merely a monster?"
Esdeath bit down hard on her lower lip as the absolute depth of her icy aura erupted from within. "The weak deserve to die. If I am weaker than you, then I have no right to complain about my death!"
As her words echoed out, the freezing tempest radiating from her body surged even higher, momentarily threatening to eclipse the absolute output of Kuzan.
"But before I go down, taste my newly awakened masterpiece!"
A localized dimensional distortion rippled outward from Esdeath's core. It wasn't a physical projectile or a direct slashing attack; instead, it completely froze and suspended the fabric of spacetime itself within a specific boundary.
"Mahapadma!"
In a flash, the entire world was drained of color, dyed in a static, glacial blue. Standing directly in front of Esdeath, Alucard remained completely frozen mid-stance, his gun still half-raised and utterly motionless. Further away, Baskerville stopped entirely, its jaws locked mid-bite.
It wasn't that they had personally ceased moving; rather, the very space they occupied had been temporarily frozen in time.
"Magnificent... You are so strong that I can barely bring myself to kill you. I want nothing more than to break you slowly," Esdeath muttered, forcing her battered body upright as she manifested a jagged blade of ice in her palm. She drove the frozen shard straight into Alucard's heart. "But the strong live and the weak perish. The dead have no right to a voice."
The moment she confirmed the ice blade had pierced clean through Alucard's heart, she prepared to deactivate Mahapadma. Yet, the exact microsecond the spacetime freeze dissolved, a high-caliber bullet tore a massive, gory crater straight through Esdeath's abdomen, sending blood and flesh erupting out her back!