Chapter 158: What Year Is It?

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There was a soft hum nearby, as my eyes fluttered under dark green light. Opening them, I found myself blinking at a ceiling unrecognizable.

“Huh…” I slowly pushed myself up, slightly surprised at how much it took from me just to do that, a lingering feeling of weakness in my arms.

“Well this doesn't look nice,” I yawned as I said that. Looking around me, I realized the room I was in was terribly small. At least, it wasn't endless hallways. This was not the maze, we've escaped it.

‘How long has it been?’ I tried to get an answer to that by looking around, trying to look for something that'd help me.

This was an old house, from the looks of it, and this room had a bed in the middle where I was lying, and a load of junk laid around. There were empty cans of food, as well as cassettes and broken music players. There was a lot of old technology laid around.

“What is this place, damn,” I yawned one more time and got off the bed, careful to not step on any of those things.

I walked out of the room to gently push the slightly opened door that was leaking a deep, green light inside. The door parted with an echoing screech, and a living room opened in front of me. It was as old and used as my room, if not worse.

No, the living room was far worse. If the bedroom was dirty, this was a sewer.

“Damn,” I scratched my back as I let out another yawn. That made me blink. “Huh. Aren't I yawning too much?”

I felt weak too. Weird, how much chakra do I have left?

I closed my eyes and concentrated, and a grin stretched my lips as I opened them again. “Huh, 40%? That's weird, how did it increase?”

Eh, who cares? I ain't gonna look the gift horse in the mouth.

Instead, I was curious why this place was so empty. Where are the girls?

“Anyone there?” I called loudly but got no response. So I began to walk around the place and kept calling. “Sis? Viv?!”

There was no response. That's weird.

…Did they really leave an unconscious person alone in this haunted house? How very considerate of them.

“Wow, alright.” I shrugged and decided to walk out of the house. I was curious about where this green light was coming from, it's like the sun was suddenly green.

I found the main gate, which was shut tightly. Two metal doors parted together. It wasn't anything as hard as the one that was blocking the ‘Boss Room’, and rather had a button that I pressed and it began to slowly open on its own.

“Huh, neat. At least something inside this house works—....”

My words caught in my throat.

“Holy… shit.”

The doors slid open to reveal a world beyond, snatching the breath from my lungs. My heart skipped a beat as my eyes tried to make sense of the sprawling… cityscape before me.

[Image Here]

Skyscrapers clad in neon lights towered over the streets, piercing the perpetual twilight of a green-tinted world. The glow of myriad signs was distorted by the downpour, painting the scene with strokes of vibrant and yet somber light. It was a city that throbbed with the pulse of unseen life, a symphony of dead traffic, and the soft hum of electric dreams.

This city was a giant, living organism, its steel veins and concrete flesh interwoven with cables and lights, proof of human life here. Yet it did not feel alive at all. Cars were abandoned on the road, and despite the twinkling lights, I saw no man. It felt… dead.

I stood there at the doorway, a lone figure unsure if this was a dream or real life.

What in the dystopian nightmare is this?

* * *

I sat down and stared at the far city, my mind trying to make sense of this. At one point I really wondered if I had died or if I was transported to some other world.

In the end, I decided that thinking in that line wouldn't help my cause. I assumed this was the emerald city, since it was all green, even if it lacked a sky and had a solid rooftop instead.

I stopped thinking and took a deep breath. I should be taking active actions instead of wasting time. But I was unsure if I should leave the house and wander the city ahead. What if my crew was around and came to look for me and found me missing?

Then there was the other fear, how long has it been? If this is truly Emerald City, I wouldn't notice any chance since this place was unfound for hundreds of years and yet remained active on its own. So what if it had been a hundred years, with my girls dead and gone?

I couldn't be sure.

My woodclone that I sent with Hancock was supposed to last a month in the outside world, but I never received its memories in the months I spent in the maze. Even now, after waking up from a long sleep I was unsure of the duration of, I didn't receive any memory from it.

Something must have happened to it, did it die in a way that made it unable to send memories to me? The other theory was that the maze somehow blocked the chakra of the clone that was supposed to come flying to me with the memory carried in it. The last possibility was the range, it was a problem too—perhaps the place where the clone perished was too far from here, and therefore it didn't know where to find me.

Without any knowledge about the outside world, as well as my current situation, I felt left out. I felt like a ghost. I also felt a little… anxious. Not because I was scared for myself, but because I didn’t know how the girls fared without me.

“....”

Dammit.

“That’s it. I need to look around.”

At one point, I decided to go to the city. My [Observation Haki], working together with my [Chakra Scan], failed to find any living life in the city ahead. At least, as far as my range could scan, there was not even a single tree. Why were the city lights on if there was nobody there to enjoy it?

As a city both futuristic and smart enough to sustain itself for hundreds of years, it must have the means to know when to stay active and when to die down. Then, there was a chance that the girls were wandering the city for rations or something else, and the presence of humans activated the city.

My entire line of thought was laid on a few blocks of hypothetical theories, but it gave me a reason to go look.

I unfurled emerald wings of leaves from my back and I leaped ahead. Strong wings carried me like a missile through the air with a single flap. I found myself above a canvas of buildings and skyscrapers after a few more flaps, flying just under the solid roof that encased the city.

That reminded me of something inside the boss room. ‘The white orb had said we'll be granted access to the Underground City if we defeat the boss…’ So this must be the underground city.

“Phew,” I let out a sigh, finally realizing that I wasn't in another world.

Before my sigh could even fully leave, I almost froze in the air. I sensed a single presence entering my radar’s range, one who was familiar to me.

She was coming in my direction.

No, she was going in the direction of the mansion behind me. She wasn't expecting to find me in the air.

I flew to her, her bleeding and wounded body paused for a moment in the sky, her bruised eyes widening. But pausing midair wasn't a good idea, as Nami began to fall like a meteorite. Her long hair, something that I remembered to be short, cascaded in the air as she fell.

“Nami!” I leaped download, catching her before she could flatten against the rooftop of a building, and gently landed on the said rooftop.

I placed her on her back, gently slapping her to stop her rolling eyes. With a jolt, she returned fully conscious and pulled me to a hug with a sharp tug.

“Hashirama! Oh, am I dead already? Am I dreaming?!” She began crying, revealing the weak side of her that she hadn't shown in a long time. She was shaken.

“Hey, calm down, it's alright now. This is not a dream.” I said that while my hand let out pulses of [Mystic Palm] chakra to heal her wounds. Who hurt her this badly?

“A-ahh?” Although she seemed reluctant to believe, she wasn't delusional. She drew her face back to take a proper look at him, and a slow smile formed on her face. “You are finally awake?! Really?! I don't know if I should be happy or mad at the timing-! No, we need to move right now.”

She pushed herself up, and as much as I would have wanted her to rest, I had a bad feeling about this situation.

If she was this injured and fleeing, what of the other girls?

“Tsunade sent me,” she explained as she got up. “She wanted me to come and keep your sleeping body safe, while she and the others were fighting those… those things. We need to move. We need to help them!”

There was no hesitation from me as I held her waist and took off into the air.

I was still unsure how long it had been, my crew seemed to have suffered too much for it to be a short time. But fear not, the Captain is back.

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