Chapter 678: The Power of the King
Hong Chen's face flushed with pure ecstasy, a sentiment instantly mirrored by Mo Shi Mo Wang, whose face was completely caked in dust and soot nearby.
They had fully calculated that with an apocalyptic demon like Mercenary Tao descending onto the grid, their collective of captured titled Reincarnators would highly likely suffer at least a fifty percent casualty rate, forced to waste their lives simply to wear down Mercenary Tao's attributes before that madman would ever deign to step onto the frontline.
Who could have predicted that merely because a lone fool like Show rushed forward to be beaten into a state of near-death, the Mad King would immediately launch a personal deployment?!
"Magnificent! That absolute lunatic..."
Hong Chen instantly reined in his internal strength, allowing the oppressive, low-hanging shadow clouds in the upper atmosphere to smoothly scatter as if the stormy weather had never triggered.
Mo Shi Mo Wang rapidly stacked several layers of defensive talismans over his chest plates, his frame cowering backward in a rare display of vulnerability.
As for the remaining twenty-odd titled Reincarnators whose spirits had previously caved to absolute despair, several deliberately remained buried beneath the masonry of the fractured high-rise, entirely refusing to stand up out of pure terror that the Mad King might command them to throw their bones against Mercenary Tao.
Now, it felt as though every single asset on the board had been forcefully brought back to life.
Kaito Shirogane stood at the center of a pulverized wasteland spanning nearly a kilometer in diameter, erratic arcs of residual lightning still crackling through the air. The silver knight lay several hundred meters away, his silver plate armor thoroughly shattered across major segments as a heavy pool of essence continuously seeped into the dirt beneath his frame.
Kaito shoved both of his hands back into his coat pockets, taking a succession of light, leisurely strides to close the distance until he stood directly over Show's body, looking down at this exceptionally talented warrior.
It was a pity that the mortal's absolute weight class simply occupied a pathetically lower tier compared to his own engine.
No matter how flawlessly an innate Talent can manipulate reality to weave absolute gold out of common clay, if the vessel lacks a grander, unyielding Ambition and matching power, it remains fundamentally disqualified from ever blooming a true miracle.
And furthermore...
Kaito Shirogane was, in his own right, a premier, peerless combat genius.
The corners of his mouth split into a wide grin, completely throwing the mandate issued by [The King of Destiny]—which dictated delivering Show back to her base alive—straight out of his calculations.
Quite the contrary: the reality that the King of Destiny had explicitly commissioned his blade to safeguard this silver knight cede his predatory instincts a monumentally grander interest in finalizing the man's execution.
Those self-identified [Three Supreme Kings] consistently operated under a farcical, shadow-veiled archetype, acting as if their hands steered every variable behind the scenes. Kaito was intensely curious to see: when they nudged his blade to salvage this小有名气 knight, had their fate-side algorithms accurately computed that his knuckles would choose to butcher him instead?
Kaito raised his boot, preparing to drive a single, crushing stomp straight down into his skull.
BOOM!
A colossal, towering biological hull clearing the three-meter mark—a mass that closely resembled a bloated mountain of meat—violently breached several thousand meters of space in a single frame. The displacement velocity was so extreme, the compressed atmosphere emitted a concussive roar that mirrored a heavy artillery shell launching from a barrel.
A massive, swollen foot violently chambered upward to blockade Kaito's descending boot.
The twisted, localized kinetic currents of Kaito's stomp slammed hard into the mountain of fat, instantly causing fresh blood and shredded tissue to spray across the perimeter.
"Ha, haha... Hahaha!"
Amidst a wave of deafening, bone-rattling laughter, Kaito registered a boundless, unyielding physical weight aggressively forcing his boot upward millimeter by millimeter.
"An elite beast~"
"Mercenary Tao, you truly operate as the single most high-priority, pristine predator trapped amidst this swarm of incompetent Reincarnator cattle!"
An intense, nauseating stench of biological corruption violently ignited, accompanied by the raw weight of an supreme biological tier. Kaito's vacant eyes monitored the multi-colored system text tracking the players across the city as the markers systematically dissolved, streaming straight back into the towering flesh-husk before his boots.
The target's physical attributes were scaling upward at a physics-defying, runaway rate.
[GAME OVER]
[Level and Experience Parameters Zeroed Out.]
Every single line of Game Over markers hovering above the slaughtered player swarm mutated into raw energy arrays, converging down to feed his core. The Mad King's Kingly Authority was weaponizing this precise system methodology to forcefully stack his physical metrics.
Crack, crack!
Two monumentally massive thresholds of unrefined physical strength locked horns mid-air, forcing the vacuum to emit a sharp, metallic cracking sound. Every microscopic friction between their fields caused fractured shards of white compression vapor to violently spray outward.
Monitoring the exchange from the perimeter, Hong Chen's mind registered zero shock over the reality that the Mad King held the capacity to blockade Mercenary Tao's knuckles; rather, his diagnostics caved to pure astonishment upon verifying that Mercenary Tao had completely avoided being kicked straight through a mountain!
During his historical duel against the sovereign, his own defensive aura had been instantaneously shattered by a lone kick delivered after the Mad King had manually absorbed a handful of Reincarnator assets into his Tracks.
That was a level of absolute dominance that could only be achieved once an organism's baseline Strength comfortably cleared the hundred-point benchmark. Today, the Mad King had successfully infected an unmapped multitude of civilians via his global memetic strain.
Even if an ordinary mortal cede his pool a marginal drop of raw power, when multiplied across a terrifying, astronomical volume, any fractional calibration would compile into an apocalyptic threshold of destruction.
At this exact frame of the operation, what metric did the Mad King's baseline Strength occupy? Two hundred? Or perhaps three hundred?!
Kaito Shirogane casually raised a lone finger, aligning the point straight with the Mad King's heart. Along with a frantic, tightening rotation of pure golden Ki, a piercing beam shot forward with a sharp hum.
Pfft!
The target's thick flesh was instantaneously split into a gaping cavity, yet within a single frame, the biological tissue flawlessly stitched itself back together.
Kaito's See-Through Skill mapped the interior parameters with perfect clarity: a dense, unyielding layer of silver brilliance was continuously maintaining the structural blueprint of a human form deep within his cells.
The conceptual rule anchoring the Silver King—[Invariance]...
BOOM!
The Mad King drove a violent kick straight into his frame, rocketing Kaito's body through the air like a high-velocity projectile. The atmosphere behind his back detonated into a succession of sonic shockwaves, an expanding trail of white cloud-shards blasting across the skyline.
Kaito's frame smoothly sliced straight through the hollow perimeter of that massive Damocles Sword before his motor pathways executed a natural, physics-defying mid-air pivot to kill his momentum.
A physical force of this baseline classification was fundamentally disqualified from ever forcing his composure to register a wisp of reaction.
He lazily drifted back down through the air currents, his boot landing with a light clack to anchor itself directly atop the Mad King's skull.
The Mad King merely lifted his upper eyelids to track the alignment. He registered zero baseline frustration over the placement, his jaw unhinging to resume his booming laughter. To his perspective, this external flesh-shell was nothing more than a hollow, completely disposable puppet.
His internal comprehension mapping the parameters of life and morality was completely un-linked from standard Reincarnators, entirely distinct from the primitive terror his captured vassals processed when pinned against his shadow.
Deep within his core, he genuinely visualized his own ego as possessing the heart of a "Benevolent Ruler."
When interacting against a Reincarnator asset whose capacity cleared his internal standards, his crown cede them an immense threshold of patience. Take this Mercenary Tao: having his skull stepped on by his boot failed to register as a wisp of degradation to his focus.
Quite the contrary; he processed it as a valid line of interaction—a standard probing sequence.
An organism only requires an exchange of data when both entities carry an equal metric of strategic worth. When interacting against common ants, one simply drives their boot to flatten the insects; who would waste a single wisp of focus to articulate a line of dialogue?
The Mad King held a perfect comprehension holding that Mercenary Tao compressed a specialized capability capable of unleashing a Calamity-grade destructive output. Since Mercenary Tao had completely refrained from deploying that card at this stage of the conflict, did it not verify an identical diagnostic reality... that the demon was similarly experiencing an exceptional wisp of interest targeting his own profile~
Exactly like himself.
Kaito Shirogane suddenly chambered his leg, executing a light, unrefined down-step. The twisted, high-intensity internal pressure fields violently bored straight through the target's skin and muscle mass.
Pfft!
In the very next fraction of a second, the Mad King's entire external flesh-shell caved to absolute ruins from the inside out, columns of fresh essence blasting into the air as the massive meat blocks exploded into raw tatters.
Hong Chen and the surrounding generals rigidly froze. His own blade had historically sliced through the Mad King's biology multiple times, yet protected beneath the unyielding law of the Silver Kingly Authority, the man was layout-wise, completely invulnerable to standard physical destruction.
Kaito smoothly leaped backward through the air currents, his eyes tracking the interior layout of that colossal, exposed skeletal cage as the ruined internal organs spilled loosely across the concrete.
A lone, silver silhouette sat with its arms wrapped tightly around its chest, curled into a defensive ball directly within the absolute center of the skeletal heart coordinates.
"Mad King, is it? The warm-up sequence has officially finalized. Move your fingers... deploy that definitive technique on your ledger~"
Kaito Shirogane made a loose, beckoning motion with his left hand, his pale features completely expressionless. His current demeanor lacked even a fraction of the raw, blood-soaked excitement and technical enthusiasm he had manifested when matching blades against Show.
His intellect had consistently, thoroughly loathed Reincarnators who relied exclusively on an infinite web of external capabilities to govern, particularly an asset of this classification who relied on amassing a swarm of low-tier weaklings to artificially pad their attributes.
The Mad King's skull had been reduced to a bare, silver-sheened cranium. He slowly lowered his skeletal head, his jaw opening and closing mechanically; with his vocal cords and flesh tissue completely vaporized from the ledger, his anatomy cede the air zero baseline sound.
"Ah..."
A phantom-like sigh suddenly echoed through the minds of everyone present. In the very next micro-second, Kaito knit his brow in deep frustration as his sensors verified that silver silhouette methodically unfolding its limbs.
The entity slowly extended a single, silver-glowing foot, tapping the space directly over the concrete as a succession of heavy silver ripples cascaded outward across the atmosphere.
In the next heartbeat, an apocalyptic, world-shattering weight violently exploded out from the high heavens. Kaito Shirogane forced his neck around to look up, his eyes mapping that colossal, sky-spanning Sword of Damocles as its entire hull entered a terminal state of absolute, downward descent.
Mid-flight, the multi-colored, destructive elements of his various Kingly Authorities began to systematically self-detonate and fracture reality. The dense concentration of electrical ions amassing across the atmosphere due to Kaito's World-Shocking Thunder Roar was instantaneously and flawlessly snuffed off the board.
Kaito Shirogane's physical frame morphed into a blazing golden kinetic line, rocketing straight into the upper stratosphere to clear the impact path. He wasn't the only asset executing an immediate regression; Hong Chen, Mo Shi Mo Wang, and the twenty-odd titled Reincarnators hiding amidst the masonry all throttled their internal capability tracks to their absolute limits, transforming into an array of multi-colored rays to punch through the skyline.
In the next fraction of a second, the Sword of Damocles made direct, absolute contact with the dirt.
Kaito's visual tracking verified a pristine, pitch-black gravitational singularity violently punching out from the absolute center of the Tokyo urban grid, its widening event horizon rippling outward like a heavy ocean wave to swallow every coordinate of the prefecture.
BOOM... ROAR!
An absolute continental submersion officially initiated, beginning from the center of Tokyo.
(End of Chapter)
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