Chapter 674: Kingly Authority, the Hunt Begins
Tokyo, once hailed as the premier metropolis of Asia, retained virtually zero traces of its former prosperity. The entire city line was choked beneath a rising tide of localized detonations and frantic shouting.
Looking down from the upper atmosphere, one could track hordes of teenagers whose bodies flashed with an array of unstable, multi-colored light. They were aggressively waving their limbs in a state of hyper-exhilaration, occasionally launching columns of fire and jagged arcs of lightning to reduce street-side transport and commercial storefronts to burning husks.
This collective had entered a psychological state of near-total, runaway euphoria—and the more monumentally frantic their excitement grew, the more brilliantly the light coating their skin flared.
"Incredible! This is absolutely incredible!"
"[The Game] is flawlessly real! We've successfully evolved into metahuman [Ability Users]!"
"Move, move! Move out toward the Police Department coordinates to harvest some more faction points!"
A swarm of youths barked out orders, roaring away on modified motorcycles to press further into the urban grid.
Conversely, those traditional social elites who historically occupied corporate offices in tailored suits were currently huddled in a state of total panic inside subterranean bomb shelters and fortified security vaults. Those trapped inside high-rises barred the doors, their analytical matrices completely unable to parse the structural failure of the local order.
Initially, the crisis had merely manifested as a few sparse reports circulating through the news networks, noting a slight statistical escalation in regional metahuman sightings and urging the public to maintain absolute composure while reporting any anomalies to the local precinct.
Yet within a handful of days, the total number of newly awakened metahumans underwent an exponential, runaway explosion.
A vast multitude of half-grown teenagers who a week ago were merely working part-time shifts at local convenience stores or lazily drifting through the streets had seamlessly remade themselves, stepping onto the board under the archetype of elite Ability Users.
This group began to unleash raw violence with increasing, unconcealed arrogance. The exact microsecond the military security forces initiated a localized lockdown campaign, a colossal, majestic Sword of Damocles forcefully anchor-dropped its presence directly into the high heavens over the city.
Following that trigger, every single line of societal stability caved to absolute ruins. Those youths began to launch non-discriminatory, blood-soaked assaults as if driven completely mad, while fresh clusters of metahumans continuously sprouted from within the panicking crowds.
The sole identifying marker common to this entire generation of "awakenings" was the constant, erratic flashing of that colored luminescence across their skin.
The veteran Reincarnators hiding amidst the civilian populations had long since parsed that the operational environment had turned intensely hostile. A few individuals launched aggressive, head-on counter-offensives, attempting to forcefully suppress the newly manifested metahuman swarm with their bare knuckles.
Yet their resistance was rapidly and systematically crushed by the sudden intervention of vastly superior, un-indexed Reincarnator assets who had aligned with the chaos.
Others unconditionally clicked their extraction sequences to flee the perimeter, yet the enemy network appeared to command an absolute, high-priority real-time map displaying every Reincarnator's spatial coordinates. A catastrophic cascade of internal betrayals and bloody civil wars violently exploded across the district.
Ultimately, Tokyo sustained a total, permanent rout. And this structural mutation was actively expanding outward in a perfect, widening radius, aggressively dragging neighboring prefectures into the void.
Deep within a high-end restaurant in the Ginza district, [The Mad King] sat with absolute, leisurely composure, meticulously slicing his medium-rare steak and sipping premium red wine. The female attendants tasked with anchoring his service profile were deathly pale, their muscles trembling violently. A few meters away, the thick plate-glass exterior walls of the establishment had caved into jagged, gaping cavities.
Those structural fractures were the raw, material remnants left behind by a brief, high-intensity skirmish moments earlier, where an opposing asset had been manually thrown straight through the structural masonry.
Solar Flare sat rigidly on the opposite flank of the dining hall, slowly consuming her meal while her internal calculation loop meticulously evaluated a single variable: whether that foolish woman had successfully managed to map their spatial orientation to bring Kaito Shirogane's blade straight down onto the board.
The gaze she directed at the Mad King was exceptionally heavy and clinical.
The velocity at which this freak was scaling his raw power metrics was layout-wise, astronomically terrifying; that specialized Damocles Sword floating in the upper atmosphere was exponentially expanding its hull every single frame of the clock.
Based on her active tracking arrays, Solar Flare had verified that within the Mad King's Kingly Authority, omitting [The Red Allegiance] which forced fellow Reincarnators into an ironclad master-servant compliance loop, and [The Green Propagation] which manual-overrode the information networks to stream the memetic curse, his profile naturally housed [The Silver Invariance]—the exact conceptual rule that mathematically guaranteed his Damocles Sword would never suffer a cataclysmic structural descent.
Yet the spectrum of Kingly Authorities anchoring his vessel was far too dense; evaluating the visual light frequencies alone, her eyes had logged no less than seven distinct hues, verifying that his files compressed a monumentally grander array of unmapped capabilities.
That young girl who had successfully weaponized the open water blocks to escape his initial dragnet was highly, statistically likely [Heart Demon]. Since Heart Demon's proprietary stealth mechanics had permanently caved when pinned against his arrays, it was clinically logical that the Mad King simultaneously commanded a top-tier detection or fate-side tracking sub-routine.
Solar Flare suppressed a rising wave of frustration, rubbing the center of her brow. Her martial alignment intensely loathed targets who relied on an infinite web of specialized mechanics to govern the field, and this Mad King was explicitly an extreme, premier exhibition of that archetype—a freak completely saturated with unique conceptual capabilities.
Damn it all to hell!
Evaluating the current structural layout, the single assets her intellect could isolate as commanding the raw capacity to forcefully terminate this global hazard—omitting those legendary reigning Monarchs—was exclusively that monster, [Kaito Shirogane].
Historically, the cold, blood-soaked malice radiating from Kaito Shirogane's knuckles would have left Solar Flare's core experiencing a profound wave of professional anxiety; yet right now, her predatory cells were deeply, intensely biding their time to witness that unrefined Demon launch a head-on collision to dismantle this sovereign lunatic.
"My tracking networks have logged reports indicating that a multitude of low-tier cattle have fled across the perimeter to contract a blade to liquidate my sovereign life force?"
The Mad King's physical frame had grown visibly gaunt, yet his analytical sanity remained flawlessly intact. He dropped the query down the line with absolute finality. Under the overriding programmatic restrictions of the master-servant contract, Solar Flare and the remaining captured Reincarnators lacked the baseline priority to ever construct a lie or refuse a verbal command.
They could only brace their nerves to drop the raw intelligence resources onto the ledger:
"Your calculation is unblemished, Your Majesty. Our collective coordinates have officially leaked to the external networks. A high percentage of independent Reincarnator assets are actively establishing direct trade protocols with the elite Third-Tier coalitions, attempting to commission an absolute execution campaign against your person..."
"Yes... my sensors have confirmed that an agency has successfully established a patch to contract... Mercenary Tao..."
"We remain uncertain whether any reigning Monarch intends to personally step onto the perimeter..."
A dense compilation of tactical data streams centralized before his throne, painting a grim picture holding that his empire was currently standing on the absolute event horizon of a terminal siege—yet the individual self-visualizing as the Mad King merely unhinged his jaw to let out a booming, rapturous roar of pure laughter.
"Let them march! Force every single one of them to accelerate their displacement toward my coordinates! The volume of Reincarnator assets currently bound to my sovereign ledger is pathetically insufficient... their raw metrics are simply not strong enough!"
His biological structure began to expand millimeter by millimeter, his massive hull rapidly flattening the plush framework of the sofa beneath his weight. A female attendant let out a frantic, terror-stricken shriek as she tried to violently break away from his perimeter, but his massive palm shot out to flawlessly clamp onto her bones.
Amidst the sharp, sudden sound of tearing fabric, a succession of horrific screams echoed through the hall as biological tissue was unrefinedly ripped apart down to the bone.
Solar Flare let out a silent, internal click of her tongue. The more massive the volume of external Kingly Authorities this freak absorbed into hisTracks, the more catastrophically his cognitive processing plummeted into a landscape of total, chaotic madness.
Accelerate your velocity, Kaito Shirogane... an apocalyptic, warped prey of this classification is explicitly the exact breed of flesh your engine loves to harvest~
Whosh!
Jiming Shirogane outputted an exceptional velocity metric, his physical frame executing a rapid succession of physics-defying vector adjustments to slice through the dense forest ranges. Suddenly, his boot compressed against the fragile apex of a bamboo stalk, leveraging the kinetic tension to launch his frame high into the upper stratosphere. Pivoting his shoulder mid-air, his left fingers violently drew the heavy katana mounted across his spine.
He drove a single, blinding slash forward from his shoulder.
[The Blade of Light]!
A pristine, eye-searing flash of pure luminosity violently ignited. In the very next fraction of a second, an elite intelligence operative coughed up a thick spray of fresh essence as the kinetic shockwave shot him backward through the air.
Yet that tracker refrained from committing his assets to a head-on gamble; the exact millisecond his boots re-anchored against the dirt, he forcefully detonated a high-tier smoke containment cell, splitting his visual signature into dozens of flawless phantom afterimages that scattered toward separate coordinates to maximize his escape parameters.
Existing as a specialized tracking asset manually deployed by the East Asian high command to map Jiming Shirogane's vital lines, his profile was entirely unoptimized for high-intensity physical combat—yet his capability files commanded an exceptional tier of confidence regarding absolute evasion and stealth tracking.
Jiming Shirogane's irises vibrated with an intense, bloodthirsty killing intent. His jaw unhinged to emit a low, raspy snort before he smoothly spun his frame around to resume his high-speed tactical retreat.
His clinical focus had permanently failed to verify exactly which high-tier syndicate had marked his file; an infinite swarm of Reincarnator assets was continuously and aggressively locking onto his spatial coordinates.
Had his system status as an active Scarlet Mortal Sin Reincarnator officially leaked to the global networks?
Or had the unrefined atrocities his blade historically executed across those distant quadrants finally breached the data arrays of the apex coalitions?
Jiming Shirogane knit his brow in deep frustration, preparing to throttle his motor pathways to step onto a fresh speed track—yet his boots rigidly froze dead, a若有若无, razor-sharp aura of absolute death flawlessly blanketing his coordinates.
He slowly lowered his eyelids, his focus cutting straight through the dense canopy of the bamboo forest to isolate a lone figure standing amidst the dirt—a woman whose long purple hair whipped wildly in the wind currents.
Her fingers firmly locked onto the hilt of an obsidian black sword, an unyielding mantle of raw killing intent bleeding from her cells. Registering that the target's focus had successfully mapped her orientation, the woman slowly lifted her chin to lock her eyes straight onto his pupils.
It was [The Death Sword · Solar Flare]!
An absolute, blinding flash of pure clinical clarity violently detonated within Jiming Shirogane's brain tissue. Evaluating the historical files, the elite tracking vanguard that had previously launched a head-on ambush against his coordinates was manually commanded by Su Qingqiu of [The Heaven].
Solar Flare, Su Qingqiu... these two premier titled champions...
In the very next fraction of a second, his eyes forced themselves wide open, his internal killing intent exponentially skyrocketing past all historical benchmarks.
"You absolute parasites... you operate under the master-servant ledger of Mercenary Tao!"
To a Scarlet Mortal Sin Reincarnator, the absolute ultimate cosmic enemy—and concurrently, the single highest-priority evolutionary flesh their engine could ever hope to digest—was mathematically, flawlessly another active Mortal Sin Reincarnator!
Every single line of his calculations finalized a definitive solution here: his own biological vessel had been systematically marked as nothing more than a high-tier trade asset, bartered away to satisfy Kaito Shirogane's ravenous hunger?!
Jiming Shirogane locked both of his palms onto the hilt of his katana, a boundless ocean of raw energetic mass and blood-soaked killing intent compiling within his muscles.
Standing below the canopy, Solar Flare's sensors distinctly, sharply verified that this Scarlet Mortal Sin known as [Temür] commanded an exceptionally unique, bone-crushing threshold of Presence.
It wasn't an automated consequence of his raw energetic pool; rather, it was a specialized, abstract parameter rooted deep within his—
Hum!
A pitch-black, fan-shaped vacuum cavity violently and out of thin air sliced through the forest from his rear flank. Solar Flare's pupils violently contracted to the size of pinheads.
Incredibly fast!
This velocity metric completely and flawlessly out-scales standard physics!
Solar Flare's spine executed a sharp, physics-defying micro-bend as if her waist were cleanly broken in two, her entire physical body practically skimming flat against the top of the dirt to allow that black slash to pass harmlessly over her skin. Twisting her wrist, her blade unleashed an absolute, torrential downpour of heavy kinetic sword strikes that completely and flawlessly saturated a localized parameter of several hundred meters.
A dense shroud of stygian, absolute Death flamed furiously within the center of her storm.
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