Saving such a high-risk operation for the final day was the safest choice.
If anything went wrong, they could simply bail out the moment the mission timer expired.
Shu was secretly grateful that the Main God had matched him with Tsunade this time.
If he’d been thrown in here alone, sealing something like those underground ruins would’ve been completely beyond him.
Just as the two finished making their plans and prepared to leave Dragonfly Pond, a strange sound suddenly came from Miyuki behind them.
“Ugh…
ngh…” A low groan escaped her throat as her body began trembling violently.
“What’s wrong?!” Kirie noticed first and hurried toward her.
“Don’t touch her!” Tsunade shouted, yanking Kirie behind her.
She rushed to Miyuki and quickly examined her.
Within seconds, Tsunade’s expression turned grim.
“She’s been infected by the curse!
It’s spreading extremely fast and has already started affecting the nerves in her brain!” Shu froze.
“Already?!
She shouldn’t have come into contact with any spirals!” “It’s probably this place!” Tsunade glanced toward the pond.
“The concentration of curse energy around Dragonfly Pond is far too high.” “She’s just an ordinary person.
Her body can’t withstand exposure to this level of curse energy!” “Tch.
Just as I thought.
We can’t stay in this damn place for long.” Hearing that, Shu thoughtfully turned toward Shuichi and Kirie.
Something was wrong.
Miyuki might have been an ordinary person with poor resistance, but weren’t Shuichi and Kirie ordinary people too?
They had lived in Kurouzu-cho far longer than Miyuki and had even come into close contact with people infected by the spiral curse.
Yet strangely, neither showed any signs of infection.
Even in the original story, both of them managed to survive all the way until the very end.
If this were still just a manga, Shu could dismiss it as the protagonists having plot armor.
But this was now a real world.
Under the logic of a real world, there couldn’t be some inexplicable immunity for no reason.
There had to be something unusual about them.
Or perhaps…
Some kind of special resistance?
While Shu was thinking, he noticed from the corner of his eye that Tsunade had also turned toward Shuichi and Kirie.
Their gazes met.
Without saying a word, they immediately understood what the other was thinking.
Clearly, Tsunade, as a top-tier medical-nin, had also noticed the two locals’ strangely unreasonable resistance.
Neither of them said anything about it.
“This isn’t the time to think about that.” Tsunade shook her head and refocused on Miyuki.
Miyuki’s body was already beginning to twist unnaturally.
Tsunade immediately acted, using chakra to forcibly suppress the curse inside her.
Miyuki’s trembling gradually stopped.
A moment later, her eyes rolled back and she fainted.
“I’ve only suppressed the curse temporarily with chakra,” Tsunade said.
“The energy concentration here is too high.
My chakra won’t hold it back for long.” She hoisted the unconscious Miyuki over her shoulder.
“We need to leave immediately.
Find somewhere far away from this place to stay!” Shu instantly waved everyone toward the car.
“Get in!
The farther we get from the town center, the better!” Everyone scrambled into the sedan.
With a harsh screech of tires against asphalt, the car sped away from Dragonfly Pond.
Half an hour later, they settled into a small, shabby inn on the outer edge of Kurouzu-cho.
It was far from both the town center and Dragonfly Pond.
The oppressive heaviness in the air finally eased considerably.
Tsunade carried Miyuki into a room on the second floor and began extracting the curse energy from her body.
Meanwhile, Shuichi and Kirie hurried back home.
Now that they had hope of escaping, they needed to convince their families to pack immediately and prepare for the final attempt to flee.
Shu sat on the sofa downstairs, silently sorting through his memories of Uzumaki.
He had reread the manga plenty of times in his previous life, but it had still been many years ago.
Some details had inevitably become blurry.
The important scenes, however, were still burned into his memory.
There was the bullied boy who turned into a snail person.
Then there were the creatures in the hospital that fed on human blood.
And the schoolgirls whose hair mutated into spirals after constantly competing with one another…
All of those were potential opportunities to farm rewards.
The problem was that Uzumaki’s timeline was somewhat chaotic.
After all, the manga had originally been written around horror and grotesque imagery rather than a perfectly structured chronology.
The order of the early curse incidents might not be exactly what Shu remembered.
Only after the curse reached its major outbreak would the fragmented events merge into one continuous storyline.
And once the typhoon spread the curse into every corner of Kurouzu-cho, the entire town would completely transform into hell on earth.
That was the critical turning point.
Thinking of this, Shu stood up, turned on the television, and switched to the local news channel.
Onscreen, a weather forecaster pointed toward a cloud map.
“A once-in-a-century super typhoon is expected to make direct landfall in our city five days from now…” ‘Five days from now?
Perfect timing.’ The Main God’s five-day survival period ended right around the same time the typhoon would arrive.
In other words, this mission wasn’t actually that difficult.
They simply needed to survive until the final day.
Of course, that was only true for someone like Shu who already knew the plot.
An ordinary person thrown in here completely blind probably wouldn’t even understand how they died.
At that moment, the upstairs guest-room door opened.
Tsunade walked out and stretched her arms high above her head.
As she stretched, her already tight shirt pulled even tighter across her chest, forming an exaggerated curve while the buttons strained as though they might launch off at any second.
Shu heard the movement and instinctively looked up from the sofa.
His gaze immediately froze.
‘Hiss…’ ‘No wonder so many Naruto fans can’t forget this woman.’ ‘Sure, I know she’s technically old enough to be called an old hag, but with a body like that…
damn.’ ‘Those things have to be at least G-cups, right?’ ‘Wait…
It’s only Year 55 of Konoha.
Tsunade should be forty-two right now.’ ‘Does that already count as MILF territory?’ “Hey!
Where the hell are those shifty eyes looking, brat?!” Tsunade narrowed her eyes dangerously.
“Uh!” Shu immediately looked away.
“Nowhere!
I was just looking down and thinking…” “Right!
I was thinking about how we’re going to farm rewards next!” “Hmph!” Tsunade snorted.
“I’ve got this strange feeling you were thinking about something incredibly disrespectful.” Shu fell silent.
‘Is this what they call a woman’s sixth sense?’ …