Several Anime Girls Appeared in my World

Chapter 55: Empress and Erza: Against the Conqueror

The desolate wind howled a mournful, lamenting dirge across the infinite vastness of ash and ruin. Boa Hancock, the Pirate Empress, rose with an effort, her body trembling not with fear, but with a rage born of the deepest pain.

The vision—the lifeless figure of Luffy, her slaughtered sisters, her nation turned into a tomb—had seared itself into her mind, a blasphemous prophecy she refused to accept.

"You bastard!" she snarled, her voice a venomous hiss that promised agony. "You will pay for showing me such a vile lie! I will shatter you into a thousand pieces!"

Ignoring Erza's plea for restraint, Hancock launched herself at the hooded man, her Perfume Femur kick aimed to pulverize.

The attack, imbued with the force of her Haoshoku Haki, met only air. The figure flickered, and her leg passed through him as if he were a heat haze.

"Your anger is a luxury, Empress," the man's voice stated, tinged with an almost clinical detachment. "A luxury for which neither you nor I have time."

Erza stepped forward, not to defend the man, but to salvage the moment. His figure was beginning to destabilize, the edges of his dark cloak blurring with the grim twilight.

"He is our only source of information," she said, her voice rough and authoritative, cutting through Hancock's fury. She faced the shimmering figure. "This Conqueror... what are his weaknesses? How do we fight him?"

"His weakness is an arrogance born of absolute power," the hooded man replied, his voice fading slightly. "He considers himself invincible. As for how to fight him... you must first find allies."

His figure trembled violently now, the image of the dead world around them flickering.

"My time is up," he declared, the words laden with finality. With a slow, deliberate movement, his glowing hands reached for his hood. He pulled it back, and then the mask beneath.

For the first time, they saw his face. It was indistinct, with the features of no one and everyone, a face that could easily be lost in a crowd.

However, it was marred by two cruel scars, running vertically through each eye, puckered and white against his pale skin.

His expression was a flat, emotionless mask of indifference, a terrifying emptiness that suggested a man who had seen too much to care about anything.

He then reached into the folds of his dissipating cloak, a gesture that made both women tense. He withdrew a small, dull gray stone, the size of a bird's egg. It pulsed with a faint, internal light.

"Take this with you," he said, his voice taking on a surprising tone that sounded like... exasperation? "It helps you understand and speak the language of my world and other travelers." He tossed the stone lightly, and it landed on the cracked earth between them.

"For some reason, you both speak the same language, and yet you decided to act like idiots."

Hancock's eyes flashed. "Idiots? You dare–"

"Yes, idiots!" the hooded man snapped, a flash of an older, more petulant personality breaking through his weary facade.

"Trying to kill each other when a cosmic horror is about to devour everything. Brilliant." He sighed, the weariness returning.

"But I would like you to try and understand each other. I think you could be good friends, despite everything." A touch of something unreadable softened his tone for an instant.

"But don't think everyone else will understand you either. So, take this with you. Of course, if you decide to stay."

"You have two choices," the scarred man said, his voice now a mere whisper against the wind.

"I can send you back to your own worlds. But my power is frayed, its purpose almost exhausted. I can only take you... The others from your worlds—your friends, your sisters—who have already been brought here will remain, abandoned. You will have to face him when he appears, with only those who are left."

He paused, letting the weight of the offer sink in. Hancock held her breath. To return to her world... now... but to perhaps abandon Luffy, Marigold, and Sandersonia? The choice was a physical blow.

"Or," the man continued, looking at Erza, "you can return to where you were taken—the city of Healdsburg. There, you will have to fight him with the help of the others who have been displaced, the champions and pawns from various universes that he has gathered on this battlefield. I can no longer help you."

His face showed no pity, no encouragement. Just the stark reality of the situation. "The choice is yours."

"And my name," the hooded man said, his voice trembling, "is Joey." He looked directly at Erza, then his gaze shifted to Hancock, a strange mixture of pleading and disgust in his unseen eyes.

"The person I abandoned... will probably be by my side if you find me."

"I ask you not to let me abandon her again. Nor you." He looked at both of them then at Hancock as he added, almost as an afterthought: "Even if I don't like you very much."

Five seconds.

Erza's mind raced. Healdsburg. A young man named Joey... he and this powerful, dying being shared the same name? And a plea not to let him—his younger self—abandon someone.

The strategic imperative was clear: a united front was the only chance against this "Conqueror." To return to Fairy Tail alone, leaving her friends and this world to face such a threat, felt like a betrayal of everything she stood for.

Hancock was a storm of conflicting emotions. Luffy! Her soul screamed his name. But her sisters... The vision of them dead... And this... Joey... his blatant dislike was a petty mosquito, but it still stung. But his plea... to abandon them? To abandon the chance to prevent that horrific future?

"Three..." Joey's voice counted down, and his scarred face began to fade.

Erza acted. She snatched the stone. Its faint light pulsed warmly in her palm. "Healdsburg," she declared, her voice filled with resolve, meeting Hancock's tormented gaze. "We fight together."

Hancock stared at her, then at the fading figure of the man who called himself Joey. The image of Luffy's dead eyes, her sisters' shattered bodies... it was a future she would not, could not, allow.

Her own world, her own love, would be meaningless if the Conqueror prevailed. Swallowing her immense pride, the bitter taste of an unwanted alliance on her tongue, she gave a short, almost imperceptible nod.

"Two…"

The scarred face of the dying Joey flickered, a ghostly afterimage. "One…"

The world vanished.

In the sterile, white confines of a subterranean cell, Zylar, the engineer, saw none of the cosmic drama unfold.

His universe was confined to the three-by-three-meter space and the low hum of the energy field that served as his door. His focus was singular: escape.

For weeks, he had been meticulously mapping the cell's systems using the data-slate he had managed to steal. The security protocols were complex, layered with redundant failsafes.

It was impressive work, for primitives. But it was still based on predictable power distribution and timed data pings.

His fingers, nimble and sure, tapped a sequence into the slate's interface, a self-made worm designed to exploit a microsecond refresh cycle in the door emitter's control. Lines of code scrolled by, a silent battle waged in the digital realm.

Suddenly, the lights in his cell flickered. The constant, low hum of the facility wavered for a single, breathtaking second. On his slate, a new cascade of error messages appeared—a system-wide power fluctuation. It was chaos. And chaos was opportunity.

The security protocol he had been trying to breach, which would normally take hours to brute-force, was now stuck in a loop, its internal checks failing due to the power instability. A single line on his screen flashed green: ACCESS GRANTED: Emitter Diagnostics.

Zylar held his breath. It was a backdoor, a maintenance port, left vulnerable by the power surge. It wouldn't last. He began typing furiously, his mind racing. He didn't know what was happening in the world outside, what strange forces were at play on this backwater planet.

He didn't care. All that mattered was that for the first time in days, a crack had appeared in the walls of his prison. And Zylar was a man who knew exactly how to widen a crack into a doorway.

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