Parallel world Manga Artist-Chapter 228: Poor Man’s Rose

"Don't get cocky just because you managed to land a hit by luck. The real battle starts now," Netero said.

"Your fighting spirit hasn't diminished at all. Truly admirable."

"My games with Komugi have taught me to read a battle more clearly. The moves you subconsciously avoid are your weaknesses. Next time... I will take your left arm," the Ant King said calmly.

At this moment, the overwhelming presence of the Ant King was fully unleashed across the manga's pages.

Netero, explicitly described in the narration as the strongest human Nen user in his prime, was like a toy before the Ant King.

In the manga, after another brilliantly drawn exchange of offense and defense... Netero's left arm was indeed taken by the Ant King.

Only then did the Ant King sit down at his leisure. He felt no killing intent toward this old man.

He simply continued to ask, because this was the agreed-upon wager.

If the Ant King won, Netero had to reveal the Ant King's true name.

"Tell me. What is my name!" the Ant King demanded.

But even so, Netero refused to concede. Having lost both an arm and a leg, he gathered every last drop of Nen in his body and, targeting the Ant King in that brief moment of relaxation, unleashed a single blow condensed from everything he had left.

The entire battlefield was obliterated. When the dust cleared, Netero had been reduced to a withered, shriveled husk of a man, barely a sliver of life remaining, propping up his upper body with one trembling hand.

And the Ant King simply walked out of the wreckage looking slightly disheveled, with a few surface abrasions but not a single drop of blood drawn.

Haruki stared at the pages in despair. "The gap... is this wide?"

"As the King, all species evolved for my sake. You are a human individual, not a King. That is the difference that decides victory and defeat," the Ant King declared.

"Humans, who prize diversity, cannot possibly defeat me. For your sake, I will establish a special preserve where humans may live in perpetuity. As for the humans used as food, I will carefully consider both their quantity and quality. Your solitary struggle was not in vain."

Netero's fight had earned the Ant King's genuine respect, and prompted him to offer a final mercy.

But the more Haruki read, the angrier he became.

So you'll still eat humans, but you promise not to be wasteful about it, and that's supposed to be the Ant King's mercy toward humanity?

He could understand the Ant King's perspective on an intellectual level. But Haruki was a human reader, fully immersed in the story.

Looking at the shriveled figure of old man Netero on the page, barely clinging to life, with almost nothing left, he felt genuine pain.

'Gon, what the hell are you doing? Aren't you supposed to be the protagonist?'

'Killua's grandfather Zeno, you too! Did you seriously just leave?'

'Someone from the Extermination Team, anyone, hurry up and help him!'

But this was exactly where Hunter x Hunter differed from every other manga.

Its cruelty spared no one.

There were no reinforcements arriving in the nick of time. No last-second rescues. No cavalry.

In his final moments, Netero revealed a smile that sent a chill down Haruki's spine. The unyielding malice of a man who refused to die quietly was etched into every line on the manga page.

"I... am not alone."

Netero's sudden shift in demeanor made the Ant King uneasy for the first time.

"Don't underestimate humans! Meruem!"

The Chairman fulfilled his promise and spoke the Ant King's name aloud.

"You understand nothing... of the bottomless, boundless malice of humanity!"

Then Netero flashed a villainous grin, and plunged his finger into his own heart.

Across the manga's pages, a mushroom cloud erupted skyward, its shockwave visible from miles away. The scorching heat waves bloomed outward in the unmistakable shape of a rose.

The Poor Man's Rose.

From the narration, Haruki understood. Netero had long ago implanted humanity's forbidden weapon, the miniature rose bomb, inside his own body. It was designed to detonate the instant his heart stopped beating.

"Isn't this... isn't this basically a nuke?" Haruki's jaw hung open.

Looking at the violent explosion sprawled across the manga page, a strange feeling rose within Haruki, a mixture of absurdity and inevitability.

Of course. If the Hunter Association had phones, it had satellites. If it had guns, cannons, and cars... why wouldn't it have something like this?

Besides, back in the Yorknew City arc, Uvogin had explicitly stated that his ultimate goal was to make his punches as powerful as a nuclear explosion.

But this... this was still utterly outrageous, wasn't it?

The plot was logically sound, sure.

But was the Ant King, built up across so many chapters as the most terrifying force in the Chimera Ant arc, really going to be brought down like this?

What about the storyline between the Ant King and Komugi?

What about the Royal Guards?

If the Ant King, after all that buildup, simply died here... the entire Chimera Ant arc would feel completely anticlimactic.

After this chapter dropped, the Hunter x Hunter fanbase across Japan erupted.

It was difficult enough for readers to accept Netero dying at the Ant King's hands. But it was even harder to accept the Ant King potentially being taken out by Netero in this manner.

Especially in a manga like Hunter x Hunter, where most battles revolved around Nen abilities and close-quarters combat—the final method of dealing with the Ant King turned out to be a bomb?

"This plot is a bit much."

"Netero, don't die! I actually teared up reading this."

"But isn't this kind of a deus ex machina? There was zero buildup for this Poor Man's Rose."

"What else could they do? The Ant King was set up as being too overwhelmingly powerful. He's at a level where no conventional means could defeat him. I think this is fine, at least I can accept it."

"Accept it? If the Ant King dies like this, the entire arc is ruined. All the buildup between Komugi and the Ant King becomes a joke."

"Who said the Ant King is dead? He clearly isn't going to die from that, right? Is anyone actually certain the Poor Man's Rose can kill the Ant King?"

"But if the explosion didn't kill him, then who on earth can stop him? Gon? Killua? Morel? Knuckle?"

"Don't be absurd. Even if they all teamed up, it'd be a one-sided massacre, the Ant King would wipe them out nine times over in a single minute."

"Nine times over? You're being generous to the protagonists."

"Am I? Every last one of them together probably couldn't even crack Netero's defense, let alone challenge the Ant King, who treated Netero like a plaything."

"The further I read, the more my scalp tingles. I have absolutely no idea where the plot goes from here. And the better and more exciting it gets, the more anxious I feel, I'm terrified Shirogane-sensei might fumble the landing."

"Same here. Especially knowing the manga is going on hiatus after the Chimera Ant arc wraps up. I'm afraid something will go wrong in the final stretch and tarnish Hunter x Hunter's legendary reputation."

"You're all worried about that? I'm worried that the Chimera Ant arc is so good, Shirogane-sensei will never be able to top it. He said explicitly in an interview that the hiatus would only end once he conceived an arc of equal or greater quality. Who knows how long that could take."

"Let's not worry about things that far off. The most critical question right now is what happens in the next chapter. The Ant King's status is unknown. It's unclear whether Komugi can be saved. Gon is in a standoff with Neferpitou, waiting for the agreed-upon one hour of treatment to expire before attacking.

Menthuthuyoupi is on a rampage, none of the Hunters besieging him have been able to withstand his attacks head-on or break through his defense. How does the Chimera Ant arc actually end? Will the ants be completely wiped out? Or will the Ant King survive, undergo some kind of transformation, and reign over the world?"

Netero's death stood as one of the defining climaxes of the Chimera Ant arc, elevating the story's thematic depth to an entirely new height.

After its publication, every major ACG website in Japan was flooded with discussions about this chapter's plot.

Even the new Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba series, which Hoshimori Group and Rei had been promoting with everything they had, was completely overshadowed by the tidal wave of Hunter x Hunter discourse.

Unlike in Rei's previous life, where the Chimera Ant arc had been serialized intermittently over the course of eight agonizing years, causing fan enthusiasm to steadily erode and preventing any truly massive, unified wave of discussion from forming...

In this life, Rei had serialized the Chimera Ant arc to its later stages in just a single year. The result was a cultural phenomenon. Hunter x Hunter had ignited discussions across Japan on a scale that surpassed even the peak popularity of the "Big Three", Naruto, Bleach, and One Piece, from his previous life, rivaling the legendary fervor that Dragon Ball had once commanded.

In any creative industry, the lesson was the same: momentum was everything. With both serialization speed and quality firing on all cylinders, Hunter x Hunter's staggering influence was extraordinary, but entirely earned.

...

STONES PLZ

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