Chapter 223: The Chaotic New Order Forged by The Final Day
An invisible, terrifying force detonated in the space between them.
It was a power with no shape or form, a pure, kinetic blast of telepathic rage. But Kaito Shirogane didn't need to see it. He watched as the marble tiles on the floor exploded upward, one after another, like a line of buried mines. He watched as the screens of the slot machines, one by one, burst in a shower of sparks and glass.
He was already prepared.
Tekkai!
The crushing, explosive, concussive force slammed into his body from all sides. It felt like being squeezed at the bottom of the ocean and hit with a jackhammer at the same time.
And it did nothing.
The force could not, and did not, breach his defenses.
Kaito-kun slowly lowered the arm he had raised to shield his face.
His opponent, the man he now knew as 'Mack', froze, his eyes wide with pure, unadulterated terror. He finally understood.
An opponent who could take a full-force, direct-hit psychic blast and not even bleed... this could only mean one thing. This was a defensive specialist, a monster who had shattered his Constitution Limit Break.
Mack knew, in that heart-stopping instant, that he had no way to win this fight. He couldn't possibly harm this man.
But, a desperate sliver of logic cut through his panic, a man who poured that many stats into defense usually had a weakness. They were almost always slow. Their pursuit ability was generally terrible.
If I can just use the puppets, these mind-controlled mortals, to buy me a single second...
SWOOSH!
The air itself seemed to scream.
A vicious, localized vortex of wind and pressure erupted right next to him. In that one, horrifying instant, Mack was overcome with a profound sense of suffocation, as if the world itself was collapsing in on him.
He didn't even have time to turn his head. His pupils had only just begun to move... and a massive hand, moving faster than his brain could even process, had already clamped down over his entire face.
So... fast... So... strong...!
Immense, undeniable strength lifted him clean off the ground, his body still caught in the forward momentum of his intended escape. He heard, with sickening, crystalline clarity, the sound of his own cervical vertebrae popping out of alignment. C-c-c-crunch.
In that single, agonizing micro-second, Mack understood the absolute, unbridgeable gulf between them. This was not an opponent. This was a predator. This was not a fight he could survive.
This "psycho killer" who was tearing up the borderlands... he wasn't just "tough." He was an apex-tier monster.
With his last, desperate shred of will, his right hand snapped open, his fingers splaying to form a complex sigil, the trigger for his last-ditch escape.
But Kaito-kun, as if he were a prophet from the future, was already one step ahead.
His eyelids were low, his gaze detached, a perfect, cold engine of observation. He was seeing everything. He wasn't just reacting; he was pre-acting. [The Pre-Initiative] was fully engaged.
His left hand, a blur within a blur, shot out and seized Mack's right wrist.
CRACK!
The sound of shattering bone was sharp and wet. Mack's wrist disintegrated, his plan to form the hand-seal utterly annihilated.
And yet...
The very next instant, Kaito's grip closed on empty air.
Mack's body, broken and beaten, had still vanished, teleporting directly out of his grasp.
Kaito's head snapped back, his senses instantly locking on to the man's reappearance, dozens of meters away, outside the building. But before he could even move to pursue, the man vanished again.
Another short, spatial jump.
Interesting... Kaito mused, his mind cataloging the data with cold precision.
This was a Reincarnator with a short-range teleportation ability. More importantly, the cooldown was almost nonexistent, and the trigger mechanism was deceptively simple.
Even after I destroyed his hand to stop the sigil, he still activated it.
That meant the hand-sign was a decoy. A feint. It was meant to draw his opponent's attention, to make them attack his hand while he activated the real trigger.
This was an ability activated by intent alone. A purely mental command.
Kaito-kun leaned his head out the shattered window, watching the man "blink" away, vanishing and reappearing in the distance until he was gone.
Kaito-smn simply... memorized him. He recorded the man's unique "scent," his ki-signature, the very essence of his presence, and locked it away in his mind.
He would let him run, for now.
But the next time Mack dared to appear in his presence... Kaito would not be wasting time with "interrogation" or "capture."
An opponent with an ability this troublesome...
You kill them instantly. No questions, no hesitation.
He turned back to the room. The entire casino full of mind-controlled puppets, their faces slack, their eyes empty, were now letting out guttural, animalistic groans. They were shuffling, and then stampeding, directly toward him.
Kaito-kun simply took one step forward.
He planted his foot.
And he threw a single, simple, straight right punch.
BOOM!
A column of pure, white, compressed air—a miniature, horizontal pillar of smoke—detonated from his fist. The shockwave was a thousand times more terrifying than Mack's psychic blast.
The man at the very front of the mob... he didn't just get hit. He disintegrated. His ribcage instantly imploded, and a geyser of bright red blood, mixed with chunks of his own internal organs, erupted from his mouth and nose.
His body, and the dozen people directly behind him, were picked up by that single, brutal shockwave and hurled backward, a tidal wave of broken limbs and shattered bodies.
Crash! Thud! Snap!
A cascade of sickening, percussive sounds echoed through the casino as the human projectiles slammed into walls, tables, and each other.
Kaito-kun calmly turned, pulled the casino's front door closed behind him, and walked away, his expression one of perfect, placid calm.
He was, in fact, engaged in a very delicate, internal balancing act.
He was consciously controlling the level of his own slaughter, deliberately prodding and testing the limits of his new, enhanced Satsui no Hado.
He could feel it, even now. At Level 2, the power was… hungry.
When the killing intent surged, it was far, far harder to control than it had been at Level 1. It didn't just want him to kill; it demanded it.
This was why he had not simply butchered every last puppet in that room.
But even that "restraint" was a dark, bloody joke.
With his current level of skill, Kaito could have subdued those people in a hundred different, non-lethal ways. He could have broken all their arms and legs. He could have moved with such speed that he knocked them all unconscious before they hit the floor. It would not have been difficult.
But he hadn't.
He had chosen, instead, to smash them all with a single, overwhelming, brutal punch.
He was... a little bit uncertain... if that simple, violent, "efficient" solution was his own... or if it was the whispering influence of his Satsui no Hado and his [Great Sin].
A quiet notification chimed, visible only to him.
[Karma Sequence Synchronization Rate Update...]
[Sin of Tyranny - Sync Rate: 89%]
It's rising so fast...
These Sins, the ones linked to violence, arrogance, and domination... they were synchronizing with his soul at an incredible speed. Perhaps this was just who he was, at his core.
His plan solidified. He would not just settle for one. He would push all of the Sins... or at least, all the ones he could access... to 100% synchronization.
Then... he would trigger the Sequence Sublimation.
He was intensely curious to see what kind of monster the [Great Sin Sequence II] would be.
And... there was another, related factor.
Kaito-kun currently had two other un-activated, raw [Cards] sitting in his inventory.
These items, these cosmic keys... they were things that every Reincarnator in the Nexus was hunting for, and they just... kept... falling into his lap.
He had barely been in this world for any time at all, and he had already encountered the [Great Sin] Sequence, the [Virtue] Sequence, and the [Tarot] Sequence. He personally held three of these "golden tickets."
He knew, with absolute certainty, that if he offered even one of them up for trade, Reincarnators would line up to offer him high-tier Bloodlines, legendary items, anything he wanted.
But Kaito-kun was, by his very nature, a [Greed]-type. A man who was, in fact, already at 100% synchronization with the Sin of Greed.
And a man like that...
He never makes that trade.
He wants... everything.
Mack reappeared in a final, agonizing flash of spatial distortion, his body collapsing against the wall of a fortified compound. He was gagging, fighting the profound, mind-numbing exhaustion that came from draining his psychic reserves.
He had burned through his entire stash of precious, emergency-use potions just to make sure he could maintain the non-stop teleportation all the way back to his home base.
But even here, he could not relax.
Even back at his "home," he was not safe.
They were Reincarnators.
There was no such thing as "friendship." There was no "loyalty" that could possibly outweigh the sheer, glittering temptation of a Crimson Drop Card.
Mack knew, better than anyone, that his teleportation ability was one of the rarest, most desirable "X-Men" style powers in the Nexus. Everyone wanted it.
And even though the odds of it dropping from his corpse were miniscule... he knew that the moment he showed weakness, the moment he truly let his guard down... the very same men he called "teammates" would descend on him like ghouls and tear him to pieces.
He had crossed the border, leaving Wa State behind, and was now deep in the Kokang region.
This territory was, like Wa, another "Special Region," a lawless slice of land where the central Myanmar government's power was non-existent. For... historical reasons... this entire area was the personal kingdom of the "Four Great Families"—the Bai clan, the Wei clan, and the two rival Liu clans.
These families were the "local emperors," and their hands were in everything: massive-scale telecom fraud, illegal casinos, drug trafficking, human trafficking... you name it, they ran it.
Or... they used to.
The moment the Reincarnators had set their sights on this region, the local "order" had begun to crumble from within.
The Reincarnators had moved in, bit by bit, carving up the families' industries like a pack of jackals. The "core members" of those great clans were now either dead, fled, or... controlled.
Mack's own group was a prime example. They weren't a formal "team." They were just a temporary, loose alliance, formed to compete with other Reincarnator alliances in the region. They had, as a group, successfully infiltrated and consumed a massive part of the Wei clan's criminal empire.
After a brief, bloody initial period of infighting, all the Reincarnator groups in Kokang had realized they couldn't possibly rule the entire region alone. So, they had reached a quiet, unspoken truce. They had all hidden themselves behind the original power structure, installing puppets to maintain the illusion that the Four Great Families were still in charge.
The Wa State, Kaito-kun's new territory, had always been "calmer," simply because it had been the claimed territory of Grinder (Mòjiàng), a known and feared member of the [Fatal Fury] faction. No one had been willing to get into a death-match with a member of a major faction over that one, small piece of land.
So, the Reincarnator presence there was minimal.
But now...
Now, this new "Mercenary Tao" had appeared.
He had seemingly killed Grinder.
And [Fatal Fury]... had done nothing. No retaliation. No bounty. Just... silence.
This, more than anything, had made everyone... "get ideas."
This was what had triggered Mack's reconnaissance mission in the first place.
"Mack. You're back."
Mack pushed himself off the wall, his face a mask of casual exhaustion. He walked into the central courtyard of the compound. His "allies" were gathered around a massive, open fire pit, roasting what appeared to be an entire crocodile. The men were all huge, mountains of muscle, and their daily intake of meat was... prodigious.
Mack, pointedly, did not join them. He sat on the outer perimeter wall, keeping his back to it, his eyes on them.
He gave a strained, bitter laugh and nodded. "Yeah. I'm back. I saw him."
"And...?"
"And... he's a hard target. A very hard target," Mack said, rubbing his (now miraculously healed) right wrist. "I almost didn't make it back at all."
He was deliberately showing weakness, but it was the same, paranoid, twitchy persona he always projected. It was his camouflage. It made it impossible for them to tell if he was actually hurt, or just being "Mack."
The man at the fire pit, "Boss Jin," the one who was turning the massive crocodile on its spit, turned his head. He had a brutal, scarred face.
"Oh? Even you almost didn't make it back?"
He grunted, tearing off a massive, sizzling chunk of meat with his bare hands.
"A speed-type? An Agility-focused specialist?"
Mack shook his head. "I don't know what he is. I didn't get a chance to find out. I took one look at him, he took one look at me, and I was almost killed. He's fast. That's all I know for sure."
His report was a perfect, paranoid mix of truth and lies. In a temporary team like this, he'd be an idiot to just hand over the intel he had nearly died to get. Let them find out for themselves. Let them bleed for it, too.
He tried to change the subject. "But, Boss Jin... I thought you said we were leaving? We're all supposed to be heading for [The Empire of the End]. Why are we still picking a fight with the new guy in Wa State?"
Boss Jin bit down on the huge piece of crocodile, ripping a chunk of flesh away with his teeth. He chewed for a long, slow moment, then laughed, a low, guttural sound.
"Did you... really... think," he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm, "that we could just show up at [The Empire of the End] empty-handed? And that the 'Great One' would just... welcome us? Give us a nice house and a pat on the head?"
Mack was still lost. "I don't get it. What does that have to do with... this?"
Boss Jin sighed, a sound of profound exasperation. He stood up, shaking his massive head, as if he couldn't believe the stupidity of the man in front of him. He truly felt that Mack was just a "lucky son of a bitch." If he hadn't, by some cosmic fluke, awakened that one-in-a-million teleporter power, Boss Jin would have personally butchered him and sold his parts ages ago.
"The Empire of the End... it's huge," Boss Jin said, as if explaining to a small child. "And it's full of us. Reincarnators. Now... think real hard, Mack... Who, in that entire Empire... is going to do the work?"
"Who's going to grow the food? Who's going to build the houses? Who's going to run the systems?"
"Do you really think," he spat, "that we're going to import everything we need from the mortal world?"
Mack just stared.
And then... the cold, horrifying, world-shattering implications hit him.
The Transcendent... The Final Day... he had only said that Reincarnators could use their powers freely in his Empire.
He had never said... how that Empire would function.
And now, listening to Boss Jin... the truth was so simple, and so monstrous.
They weren't "invited." They were being "conscripted." And the price of admission... was resources.
They were supposed to go out, into the mortal world, and pillage.
They were supposed to bring... slaves.
This... this wasn't a migration. It was a global, coordinated, mass-kidnapping event.
Mack's blood ran cold. He suddenly saw the future. He saw the fire.
Dozens, maybe hundreds, of Reincarnator teams, all across the globe, simultaneously abducting massive numbers of people and resources.
This was an act of war.
This would force the mortal governments of the world, who had, until now, been content to pretend "super-powered individuals" didn't exist, to treat "Reincarnators" as a single, unified, existential threat.
This would, in an instant, shatter the fragile, unspoken truce. The masquerade was over.
It would be a new, global... Witch Hunt.
For the first time, Mack truly, viscerally understood the sheer, planet-shaking chaos that [The Final Day] had just unleashed by building his "Empire."
"Ah, forget it," Boss Jin grunted, oblivious to Mack's existential crisis. "You can still find that new guy, right? Your 'scent' or whatever?"
He tore off another piece of meat. "Good. In a couple of days, we'll all go pay him a visit. We'll take him out, we'll strip Wa State of every resource and every person we can grab, and we'll ship it all out."
He grinned. "We'd better move fast. The other teams are all going to be getting the same idea, real soon."
Mack just sat there, frozen on the wall.
He finally understood.
A stampede was coming.
The first teams to move, the ones who looted and ran... they would get away clean.
But everyone else, the ones who were too late, too slow... they would be caught in the bloody, desperate free-for-all, fighting each other for the scraps.
He thought, with a strange, detached pity, about the monster in Wa State.
That man... that "Mercenary Tao"... he was unbelievably, terrifyingly strong.
But... it didn't matter.
He was a lone wolf. And he had just painted a massive, unmissable target on his own back. He was going to be the first one the stampede ran over.
"In this world," Mack whispered to himself, his voice shaking, "no matter how strong a lone wolf is... they never last long."
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