Chapter 677: The Pinnacle of Technique, Show
Hum~
The whistling roar of Ki made Hong Chen's scalp tingle. His long hair whipped wildly into the air without any wind. On the other side, [Mo Shi Mo Wang], a man carrying a Han-style longsword across his back, was a step ahead—he raised a single hand vertically, sending his sword spinning into the sky.
"Careful, it's Mercenary Tao!"
Shoo!
The flying sword shot forward like a white rainbow piercing the sun. The dazzling sword light clashed violently with a golden Dodon Ray bursting from outside the Ginza district, triggering a massive explosion.
BOOM!
The terrifying air pressure erupted instantly, shattering the glass curtain wall facing them and sending shards of glass spraying into the restaurant.
Pfft, pfft, pfft!
The women clamped in the Mad King's grip were instantly lacerated by the flying glass, and the Mad King himself was left thoroughly bloodied by the debris.
Hong Chen could see clearly that Mo Shi Mo Wang had taken the worst of it after drawing his sword to match Mercenary Tao's opening gambit. Refusing to hesitate any longer, a cold flash erupted from his hand as [The Snow Drinking Saber] materialized.
Taking two heavy strides forward, he raised both palms. Along with a bursting explosion of ice-cold energy, the entire Ginza skyscraper split cleanly down the center, a thousand-meter blade energy bestriding heaven and earth.
In the next fraction of a second, it hammered straight down.
At the exact same microsecond, Show's faceplate snapped down. Dropping both hands to his flanks, a pristine white straight sword and an obsidian black one dropped into his palms. His physical frame shot out from the collapsing dust of the skyscraper like a blazing silver line.
Kaito Shirogane's Mind Web tracked every variable with flawless clarity. The smile on his face widened as the upper atmosphere instantly plunged into deep shadow, the ambient temperature plummeting rapidly as if a heavy blizzard were on the verge of buried the city.
Hong Chen's energy profile ranked comfortably within the absolute top tier of Reincarnators Kaito had ever encountered. A martial style of this classification—relying entirely on internal strength to forcefully trigger localized weather anomalies—looked exceptionally domineering.
Kaito completely manual-overrode the presence of the colored-light flashing player swarm before his boots, treating the crowd as mere bugs as he monitored the thousand-meter blade energy descending from the sky.
His vacant twin pupils cede zero baseline tremors, yet both of his palms suddenly raised to frame his flanks.
Clang!
A flash of silver light violently ignited. A silhouette clad in full silver plate armor elongated into a streamlined blur, punching out from the empty air to drive twin swords straight against Kaito's bare hands.
The Three Powers Combined Strength collided head-on against the active shroud of Show's internal aura, triggering a violent atmospheric friction.
Beneath his faceplate, Show's eyes were filled with unyielding resolve. Registering the immovable kinetic weight anchoring Mercenary Tao's posture, his body smoothly executed a fluid, physics-defying twist to break the alignment. Flying backward in an inverted arc, his twin blades unleashed a violent sword-storm that swept upward from below.
BOOM!
A specialized capability engineered to ruthlessly butcher legions of enemies within a dense crowd was manually directed by Show to whip up a hundreds-of-meters-high tempest of steel wind.
Slabs of concrete masonry were ripped from the street one after another, the lifting force attempting to hoist Kaito's entire frame into the sky.
And concurrently, the descending blade energy from above had officially made contact with his frame.
Kaito raised both palms, snapping them together high above his shoulder plates in a perfect, single clapping seal as if he had executed the movement ten thousand times across his history.
The colossal blue-white blade energy was violently contorted and refracted by the Three Powers Combined Strength.
Bang, bang, bang, bang!
The scattered kinetic shockwaves and shattered blade energy detonated violently throughout the surrounding streets, leaving a trail of agonized screams echoing across the block.
With a sharp shift of his mental focus, Show threw his entire body straight into a head-on follow-up assault.
Moving within his stream of silver light, his gaze remained completely, flawlessly locked onto Mercenary Tao's vitals. His psychological focus centralized past all historical thresholds, and his respiratory tracks throttled his heart rate to its absolute maximum limit in a single frame.
This was an unprecedentedly terrifying enemy—an apocalyptic monster against whom it was mathematically impossible to survive without deploying every single card on his ledger.
In the next fraction of a second, Show verified a diagnostic reality: Mercenary Tao's vacant twin pupils smoothly tracked his vector, pinning his focus directly onto his hyper-velocity displacement tracks.
This absolute freak...
Even existing as a battle-hardened champion, Show re-registered that familiar, primitive instinctual alarm at this exact microsecond—the profound, bone-deep terror of a terminal liquidation loop should his motor nerves execute a single error!
Thump!
Following a heavy, concussive pulse of his heart, Show took an aggressive stride to breach Kaito's inner perimeter. The fluid, perfectly balanced force field that had been marginally disrupted by Hong Chen's saber strike now exposed a microscopic operational flaw.
Show possessed zero specialized Mystic Eyes, yet relying entirely upon his pure, apex combat instinct, he methodically stepped straight through the micro-fractures of the kinetic currents. The silver plates guarding his frame threw off a violent shower of sparks as they ground against the distorted internal pressure fields.
His eyes burned with an unyielding fire, yet his inner core remained as clear as absolute ice. Raising his twin swords, his frame skimmmed flat against the Three Powers Combined Strength force field to anchor himself directly before Kaito's chest. Driving the entirety of his muscle mass into a singular boot plant, the concrete beneath caved into absolute ruins.
BOOM!
Amidst the violent shattering of the topography, Kaito Shirogane's skeletal structure merely executed a natural, microscopic counter-balance. Having smoothly ascended to the absolute pinnacle of martial technique, a localized structural collapse of this classification lacked the priority to ever disrupt his center of gravity.
Yet Kaito's vacant eyes forced themselves completely open, a terrifying divine glare locking straight onto the silver knight.
This mortal... is exceptionally elite!
Not measured through a raw energetic pool, but evaluated across his combat logic, mental composure, and technical mastery—he was beautifully, flawlessly elite!
He was layout-wise, monumentally superior to any baseline vanguard!
He could perfectly process the suffocating wave of terror his presence projected, yet his cognitive faculties completely refused to be paralyzed by the fear; his motor pathways were aggressively driven by adrenaline, yet his intellect remained perfectly independent of primitive survival instincts.
Expressed through a strategic framework, this individual operated as a flawless warrior—a breed hardcoded since birth to dominate a battlefield.
"Hah~"
The silver knight executed a sudden, dead stop, his physical frame shifting from hyper-velocity motion to absolute stillness in a single micro-frame. The velocity transition was so extreme, a violent boom of white compression vapor violently detonated before his chest plates the exact frame his boots locked.
Directing both of his blades straight toward Kaito's vitals, his horrific sword intent had already finalized its macro-compilation across his tracks. Ceding zero frames of delay, an infinite array of sword strikes violently exploded outward.
[Starburst Stream]!
The twin black-and-white sword lights, multiplied across the density of his internal aura, violently erupted like a blooming lotus. A fraction of a second prior, a brilliant white concussive shockwave shot outward to systematically blow the surrounding bug-like player swarm clear of the sector.
The spectacle caused Kaito Shirogane to lower his eyelids. Mirroring the movement, both of his palms synchronously raised from his sides, his open hands flattening into rigid sword-blades that pointed straight back at Show's faceplates.
In the very next micro-second, his twin arms completely vanished from the grid, an infinite concentration of kinetic force exploding to meet the black and white sword light head-on.
[Starburst Stream]!
When stripped down to its core mechanics, Starburst Stream was layout-wise, far from a high-order cosmic capability; it functioned exclusively as a high-speed, continuous-striking martial technique. A single glance cede Kaito's engine the absolute priority to master its execution down to the sub-atomic track.
Clang, clang, clang, clang...
An infinite succession of metallic collisions violently vibrated across the block. Millimeter by millimeter, the crimson [Lonely Envious Flame] and the dense [Qilin Armor] began to plate Kaito's skin to absorb the impact.
Show's spiritual focus had centralized to an absolute, unyielding zenith; within his active visual arrays, the entire universe had been systematically stripped of all data, leaving absolutely nothing but the presence of Mercenary Tao on the board.
He completely refrained from allowing his features to manifest a single trace of cognitive hesitation upon verifying that Mercenary Tao was outputting the exact same technical methodology against his blades.
A capability was merely a capability—the absolute primary variable deciding the outcome of a duel was eternally the Reincarnator steering the muscle!
This was the ironclad faith anchoring Show's evolution. Suddenly capturing a fresh strand of preternatural martial inspiration, he took an aggressive stride forward, the twin blades weaving through the air seamlessly shifting their rhythmic profile.
[Rhythmic Strike]—a high-priority passive mechanic where every single verified strike hardcoded a temporary, stacking amplification to reinforce his combat velocity and strike frequency.
Show's blades accelerated exponentially frame by frame, yet Mercenary Tao continuously, flawlessly blockaded every single incoming arc without a single millimeter of error.
The silver knight suddenly drove a single, monumental dual-slash forward, letting his frame lazily float backward through the air currents. Concurrently, the black and white swords flawlessly fused down to the atom, mutating into a singular, narrow-bladed greatsword clearing the two-meter mark.
The raw presence radiating from his vessel shifted from explosive violence into a soft, unyielding fluidity, a sword intent that mirrored a boundless, rushing river flowing across his tracks.
Kaito's sensors instantly identified a highly unique, abstract martial flavor. The technical mastery commanded by the individual before his boots had genuinely touched the absolute pinnacle of technique—and furthermore... he was exceptionally close!
He was dangerously close to unlocking an entirely superior evolutionary tier!
Hum!
Show completely vanished from the grid. The exact frame he re-materialized, his boots anchor-dropped directly into Kaito's absolute blind spot, an infinite concentration of sword arcs violently detonating across his rear flank.
Pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft...
An infinite array of sword strikes slammed directly into Kaito's un-defended muscle mass, cutting through his coat without encountering a single blocking stance.
At that exact microsecond, Show's scalp violently prickled with an intense wisp of instinctual terror. Before his neck could even pivot to verify the structural impact of his [Water Fowl Dance], his entire consciousness was completely overwhelmed by a horrific, earth-shaking draconic roar.
[The World-Shocking Thunder Roar]!
"Hah!"
BOOM!
Hong Chen's physical frame dissolved like an unstable phantom to clear the vertical alignment, both of his forearms bracing his chest plates as the concussive kinetic shockwave rocketed his body several thousand meters across the urban grid.
Staring down at the commercial sector bordering the Ginza high-rise—a territory now completely submerged beneath an expanding nova of blue-white lightning mass—and monitoring Mo Shi Mo Wang as he was similarly blown clear of the perimeter, his core registered an exceptionally complex wave of data.
"That absolute demon... his parameters are scaling past all predictable thresholds with every single cycle..."
Thud!
A heavy, earth-shaking footstep violently detonated straight across Hong Chen's audio channels. In the very next fraction of a second, out from the smoke-veiled ruins of that fractured Ginza high-rise, a colossal, towering biological hull stepped out onto the concrete.
The entire street block depressed by several inches beneath the weight.
"Every vassal on my ledger execute an immediate rearward extraction. My sovereign person intends to... personally launch a frontline subjugation campaign!"
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