Chapter 667: Changing the World's Trajectory
"What's wrong with Mr. Kaito?!"
Young Cletus Parker's face was filled with worry. He was currently wearing a sleek black-and-white suit—a custom nano-suit specially crafted by Tony Stark to honor the boy's relentless efforts in saving thousands of citizens during the catastrophic collapse of New York.
It was engineered to perfectly adapt to his physique and movements, dynamically deploying to provide exceptionally high defensive protection against most conventional attacks.
Further back, Tony Stark stood in the open, warily eyeing the fractured high-rise. The building had been completely surrounded by an immense swarm of pitch-black creatures, operating visually like a massive hive for these interlopers.
Outside the entrance, the diminutive, black-armored King of Knights stood holding the hilt of her sword. Her pale gold eyes scanned the visibly anxious child; she uttered no words, yet she made no move to blockade his entry.
Parker quickly slipped into the gloom of the hollow building.
Trailing directly behind the boy, the Iron Man prepared to advance, but he instantaneously registered that the female knight's pale gold irises had locked onto his frame like a pair of cold, unsheathed blades.
Nearly half a month had slid past since that apocalyptic clash over the old city limits. The colossal oceanic tremors those twin leviathans had unleashed across the bay were still categorized by Nick Fury as a high-priority, ongoing threat to global security.
However, based on the telemetry captured by Captain Marvel and Stark's own sensory arrays, those massive, serpentine dragon-kin had been systematically and unconditionally liquidated by Kaito and his resurrected inner circle.
Yet ever since the fallout of that battle, Kaito Shirogane had completely refrained from showing his face on the grid. This prolonged vacuum of data led Nick Fury and the higher political echelons to a sharp diagnostic conclusion: the dangerous Mercenary Tao had highly, statistically likely sustained catastrophic, near-fatal trauma during the execution of the dragons.
This critical intelligence resource ignited an array of calculations within the American high command.
And with it came a rising ambition to test his boundaries.
Though Tony Stark had aggressively voiced his professional opposition to the strategy, the longer Kaito remained hidden within the shadows, the more exponentially the ambitions of those political organisms expanded.
An active, unblemished Kaito Shirogane was viewed by the Pentagon as an unimaginable cosmic hazard—but a severely crippled, potentially expiring Kaito Shirogane was an unmapped goldmine of advanced research data that the United States absolutely required to secure its sovereignty.
Even Tony Stark, when examining the data streams clinically, couldn't suppress a deep, burning curiosity regarding the sub-atomic secrets behind Kaito's reality-defying power.
Furthermore, within the active Avengers roster, there currently stood a premier, hyper-augmented powerhouse whose internal drive was completely fueled by a burning vow to avenge his father's execution. Tony distinctly perceived that his own logical arguments were becoming entirely insufficient to repress the god's absolute wrath.
After all, across the history of civilizations, very few variables could compel a man to abandon a blood feud for his father—and an Asgardian god was by no means an exception to the rule.
Consequently, Tony Stark chose to personally step onto the perimeter to manually verify Kaito's current baseline parameters.
Concealing the movement behind his back, the gold-titanium armor of his gauntlet smoothly crept over his fingers, lazily releasing a micro-drone no larger than a common housefly from within the plating.
The automated drone silently drifted toward the masonry, executing a stealth trajectory.
The immense horde of pitch-black entities crawling densely across the skeletal high-rise cede absolutely zero baseline response to the fly-bot, remaining entirely still as if their tracking arrays were offline.
Tony Stark subtly shifted his weight, casually tapping the heel of his leather boot against the rubble, offering a light, synthetic smile to the unblinking Artoria Pendragon.
Artoria slowly closed her eyelids, contentedly allowing the microscopic interloper to buzz past her shoulder and slip straight into the inner concourse.
But in the very next micro-second, accompanied by the metallic, continuous clatter of metaphysical chains—
The drone was violently and flawlessly frozen dead mid-air.
"If Mr. Stark desires to evaluate the interior layout, your intellect would be far better served by walking your own bones through the threshold. Relying on toys of this classification... is profoundly, layout-wise, tedious~"
Pfft!
Amidst a violent burst of electrical sparks, the micro-drone was instantaneously vaporized down to the atom. From within the stygian shadows of the structural corridor, a slender, silver-haired man emerged, a highly flippant, mocking smile anchoring his features.
Tony Stark's clinical mind executed a rapid deceleration, registering a wisp of profound relief that he had proactively blockaded Scott Lang from executing this tracking directive; had Ant-Man been deployed, the active strength ledger of the Avengers would have likely sustained another permanent deletion.
He paused for a frame of calculation, methodically smoothing the lapels of his tailored suit and removing his tinted shades, before taking a heavy stride to march directly into the mysterious, gloom-shrouded base that currently thoroughly paralyzed the confidence of the global intelligence networks.
The exact millisecond his boots crossed beneath the shadow line, Stark registered a sudden, severe drop in ambient temperature. His muscles involuntarily tensed. Scanning the pitch-black entities lining the concrete masonry, his sensors verified an anomaly: a high percentage of these creatures cede his instruments zero solid physical mass, operating completely as non-corporeal spiritual matter.
Certain aberrations even retained a twisted caricature of human anatomy, their skulls and spinal structures contorted along vector angles that completely defied standard biological evolution.
Vengeful spirits!
In a single fraction of a second, his intellect parsed exactly what classification of entities clogged the sector.
Existing as a premier pioneer of advanced sciences, his entire life had been structurally positioned at the absolute furthest possible distance from myths of this nature. Yet, the physical, sub-zero chill aggressively biting his skin, paired with an un-ignorable discomfort boring straight into the marrow of his bones, forced his clinical mind to unconditionally accept the material reality of these spiritual organisms.
Stark had navigated an immense gauntlet of world-altering conflicts throughout his life; his psychological baseline was exceptionally resilient, allowing his focus to completely re-anchor into a calm, analytical state after a few strides.
Tracking his movement from the gloom, the corners of Satoru Gojo's mouth curled into a sharp grin.
This mortal... genuinely possesses an exceptional threshold of innate talent and strategic worth~
Tony Stark meticulously documented the ambient energetic output of the unique individuals active inside the broken hall, his mind compiling an increasingly complex array of blueprints mapping Mercenary Tao's true capabilities.
Subsequently, his focus locked onto the black-haired man who was lazily propped against a collapsed structural support beam, looking identically to an absolute monarch seated atop some primeval, stygian throne.
His face was exceptionally pale, his entire biological framework teetering on a critically compromised baseline.
He still retained that ragged, severed right shoulder stump—but right now, his ocular systems appeared to have sustained an equally catastrophic structural failure.
Stark sharply noted that the host's twin pupils had completely faded into a vacant, grayish-white hue, entirely devoid of independent visual tracking. He looked completely, flawlessly blind.
"Tony~"
Accompanied by a soft, mocking chuckle—as if merely articulating the billionaire's name cede his mind some highly amusing internal joke—that familiar, cavernous voice echoed through the masonry. Tony Stark felt his coronary pathways subtly constrict as Kaito's blind, vacant eyes accurately and flawlessly tracked his exact spatial displacement.
He deliberately shifted his vector by a fraction of a meter, yet those grayish-white irises remained unshakeably locked onto his chest plates.
Kaito Shirogane's grin cleanly widened. He read through the billionaire's microscopic probes with absolute clarity.
Seated entirely isolated in a separate, dark alcove of the hall, Hakumen let out an intense, dismissive snort of pure contempt.
"Hmph. That collective of political swine out there is highly likely calculating the mathematically optimal method to convert your anatomy into a preserved laboratory specimen for sub-atomic research. And this farcical hypocrite self-visualizing as a hero is actively playing the role of a strategic mediator, deliberately using his presence to map your vital signs~"
Despite lacking an explicit mind-reading capability, Hakumen held an exhaustive, pristine mastery over the psychological archetypes, core behavioral profiles, and grander chronological trajectories governing native worlds.
Parsing Tony Stark's immediate strategic motives was child's play to her intellect.
She merely failed to comprehend why Mercenary Tao—this absolute Sovereign of Slaughter—had suddenly chosen to manifest a passing wave of pure benevolence during this world cycle. He had completely refrained from launching an unmitigated mass liquidation, even though the operational constraints denying him that harvest had long since been dissolved.
The current worldline had been fractured well past the point of recognition, its explicit primary narrative tracks thoroughly pulverized by their head-on collisions, systematically depressing the absolute asset value of this universe on the Space ledger.
Furthermore, following the chaotic multi-faction clash between Solomon, Kaito, and the Black Kings—particularly that microsecond where the Goddess Rhongomyniad had forcefully executed the anchor release of her Holy Spear—
The local planetary Counter-Force anchoring this worldline had highly, statistically likely cede its absolute priority, leaving its defensive arrays pathetically broken.
At this precise nexus of the chronology, even if Kaito chose to aggressively execute Iron Man, Spider-Man, Captain America, and every remaining focal character on the board down to the atom, his profile would highly likely sustain zero severe backlashes from the world's consciousness.
Behind her back, her bound [Guardian Spirit · Kamikaze] involuntarily forced its form out from the shadows to pace around her boots, its spiritual resonance flawlessly amplifying the deep killing intent roiling inside Hakumen's core.
"Mr. Kaito, if your physical vessel has sustained severe internal failure, I can immediately coordinate the necessary security clearances to transition your frame into my private medical research compound for optimal cellular restoration..."
Tony Stark methodically logged the parameters of every single special individual occupying the broken hall.
The Asian teenager who had just unhinged her jaw to spew vitriol; the cold, detached, black-haired general silently anchoring the flank; the silver-haired, flippant man who had intercepted his drone; and furthermore...
Stark steered his focus to measure the silent entity standing rigidly against Kaito's right hand, his muscles completely wrapped under a dense network of black execution curses. His memory sharply recalled a definitive metric: this asset possessed the absolute priority to force a mortal's heart to execute an immediate, agonizing collapse with a single glance...
Mercenary Tao's military syndicate was layout-wise, astronomically powerful!
He finalized his calculation: launching a head-on offensive against this breed at this specific chronological juncture was strategically suicidal.
But before he could articulate a line of dialogue to smooth the perimeter, Kaito Shirogane proactively unhinged his jaw.
"It must feel exceptionally suffocating, Mr. Stark~"
"To have every single line of your strategic agency systematically dictated and restricted by a collection of short-sighted, greedy corporate swine. Even for an elite, hyper-advanced intellect like your own, saving a world under an infrastructure of that classification is a pathetically unviable milestone. For instance..."
"The exact millisecond my boots cross the threshold of this ruined high-rise, there is a high statistical probability that a specialized high-caliber sniper round will attempt to punch a vacuum cavity through my skull. And right on the heels of that trigger, a brand-new, absolute war will violently explode across this grid~"
Tony Stark's pupils violently contracted as his mind registered the absolute certainty behind the prediction, yet Kaito's voice continuously rolled forward without a single frame of decay.
"The foundational laws governing this universe have fundamentally, permanently changed, Tony. From this microsecond onward, this planet will continuously experience an exponential, runaway surge of high-tier metahuman variants breaching the map."
"The old structural framework is spent. The time has arrived to systematically re-engineer the global order... and to speak with absolute candor, Tony... my blade intends to cede you a line of active reinforcement~"
[WORLDLINE DEVELOPMENTAL MATRIX — CHRONOLOGICAL REALIGNMENT PROGRESSION]
Current Worldline Collapse Index: 9% (Stabilized).
Localized Reputation Parameters: United States of America — Friendly (83/100).
Active Environmental Variable: The Inner Sea of the Planet successfully integrated. Fantasy-side conceptual laws continuously rewriting the structural infrastructure of the regional grid.
Strategic Blueprint Update: The three-day countdown has finalized. The vanguard intercept elements of the Primordial Dragon Court have been systematically erased from the ledger. The host's engine has touched the absolute boundary of [See-Through Skill], establishing total conscious alignment over his individual [True Ego].
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