Anime Girls are Moist

Chapter 1143 1,142: I'm the one who killed your father

Late at night, in the back streets of Wano's royal capital.

A narrow alley was filled with a chill draft that cut straight through like a corridor wind.

The air carried mildew and the metallic tang of rust. It scraped along the stone walls, cold enough to seep into your bones.

Just a few seconds ago, this place had been full of ear-splitting curses and cries of slaughter.

More than a dozen samurai who had survived the war on Onigashima had raised their polished blades, ferociously hemming in the figure in the corner.

They kept spitting the same insults—"demon's daughter," "Kaido's remnant"—swearing they'd cut off her head to honor their fallen countrymen.

And now, those same bloodthirsty samurai were all sprawled across the icy stone pavement.

Their bodies were twisted into grotesque angles.

Some had arms snapped backward at impossible bends; some had spines completely collapsed.

No one managed to leave a full last sentence behind.

Even their dying screams had been caught in their throats.

It was obvious—they'd been stripped of life in an instant.

Warm blood slowly seeped along the cracks between the stones.

Like a dark-red snake, it crept all the way to her feet.

It soaked the hem of her tattered white kimono, leaving a huge wet stain.

Sticky blood mixed with filth clung tightly to her cold skin.

The scar-faced samurai who had charged at the front was now beheaded.

Just moments earlier he'd been raising his sword to split her skull.

His head had rolled to within half a step of her.

His eyes were still wide open, his clouded pupils filled with terror that hadn't had time to fade.

Not fear of death—

but the bone-deep shock and despair of someone who, at the very end, had seen something so far beyond human understanding that it shattered his mind.

A torch lay on the ground, still burning.

The wood crackled and popped.

Orange-red firelight licked the cold stone walls, staining the whole alley a glaring, blood-soaked red.

The warped shadows dancing on the walls looked exactly like the "demons" those men had been cursing.

It was ironic enough to laugh.

And in the very center of that sea of blood and wreckage, there stood a man.

He wore the simplest black kimono.

Plain cotton and linen—nothing expensive—yet it sat on him crisp and perfect, without even a single crease.

What made your whole body go cold, what raised a tremor from the deepest part of you, was how impossibly clean he was.

In this alley flooded with blood and mud, not a speck of blood stained his hem.

Not a drop of muddy water had splashed his shoes.

Even the black hair falling over his shoulders wasn't out of place by a single strand.

As if the slaughter that had harvested a dozen lives in a heartbeat had nothing to do with him at all.

He simply stood there in silence.

It was like an invisible barrier surrounded him, shutting out every trace of blood, darkness, violence, and ruin.

He didn't belong in this alley that had turned into hell on earth.

Slowly, he turned and looked at Yamato, slumped beneath the stone wall.

The corner of his mouth lifted into a faint smile.

Not flashy, not sharp—just clear, and utterly free of malice.

His voice was cool and clean, like meltwater from the peak of Wano's snow mountains.

It cut through the stench of blood, the crackle of the torch, even the frantic pounding of her own heartbeat, and landed in her ears with perfect clarity.

"Looks like you might need some help?"

Yamato stared at him blankly.

Her mind was completely empty.

As if someone had smashed the crown of her head with a blunt weapon, turning every thought into a tangled mess.

She could feel it clearly—this man carried not the slightest hostility toward her.

And yet the power that had erupted a moment ago, enough to crush everything, made a tremor she couldn't control rise from the marrow of her bones.

She'd grown up under Kaido's pressure; her senses for the aura of top-tier monsters had been sharpened to the extreme.

Kaido's strength was a tsunami, a volcano—violent and overflowing, world-ending in its brutality, crushing most strong fighters until they could barely stand.

But the strength of the man in front of her was completely contained.

Like a bottomless deep sea: calm on the surface, with a terror underneath that could swallow the entire world in an instant.

It was absolute power—far beyond Kaido, far beyond every Emperor she'd ever seen, every Navy Admiral she'd ever heard of.

The kind of unfathomable force that could erase everything with a single thought—so deep you wouldn't even be granted the right to form the idea of resisting.

She opened her mouth, wanting to ask who he was, wanting to ask what he'd done.

But her throat was too dry, like it had been scraped over and over with rough sandpaper, and the heavy reek of blood made it tighten.

For a long time she couldn't make a sound—only a few hoarse, broken breaths forced their way out.

The man walked toward her.

His steps were light.

He moved through the blood pooling over the stones without splashing a single drop.

As if this filthy, bloody hell beneath his feet were nothing more than smooth, clean clouds.

He stopped in front of her.

Looking down at her battered state.

Her kimono was in rags, her body covered in wounds of every depth.

Mud and dried blood smeared her face; her long hair hung in messy strands stuck to her cheeks.

She looked exactly like the "demon's daughter" they had spat on.

But there was no disgust in his eyes, no hatred.

No cheap, condescending pity, either.

He didn't even seem to care about the fact that she was "Kaido's daughter."

There was only a calm gentleness—

as if he were looking at a child lost in a snowstorm,

not a criminal everyone wanted dead, carrying a bloodline's towering sin.

He spoke again.

Not loud, but with a strange, penetrating clarity that settled firmly into her ears, chasing away the buzzing noise in her head.

"My name is Rei Ao."

He paused.

His gaze fell on her pupils, which had tightened sharply, and his smile deepened a fraction.

Then, in a tone so casual it was almost offhand, he added a line that could overturn her entire world.

"I'm the one who killed your father, Kaido."

The words hit like a thunderbolt from a clear sky, exploding in her skull.

Her ears rang. Her vision swam, going dark at the edges.

It was as if she'd been frozen inside a river of ice, locked in place.

She jerked her head up, eyes wide.

Her nails dug hard into the cold stone behind her, knuckles whitening as if they might split.

Her face was pure, absolute disbelief.

Kaido.

The man called "the world's strongest creature."

The disaster that had dominated her life for twenty years, the invincible monster in her mind.

The father she'd fought with everything she had—bones cracking under his blows, crawling back up again and again—yet never once able to shake him in the slightest.

The man she believed had finally been brought down only because Luffy, Law, and Kid had joined forces and gambled everything.

And yet… he'd been killed—personally—by this man in front of her, who looked so ordinary, so mild?

…How?