Chapter 845: Boros Attacks, The Disappearance of Saitama
Not until the tedious assembly drew to a close did Kaito Shirogane sense the Dark Matter Thieves from the original canon.
Nor did the cataclysmic strike that instantly wiped City A off the map materialize to trigger the confrontation.
Kaito kept his eyes hooded. The other S-Class heroes and the gathered reinforcements wore varied, calculating expressions.
Tornado yawned and took her leave ahead of the rest, arrogantly barking that they should only bother summoning her if an unmanageable calamity occurred; mundane fodder was best left to the trash gathered in the room.
As she turned away, her gaze deliberately lingered upon Kaito for a fleeting second.
[Your reputation with Plot Character: Tornado has increased. Current: Friendly (7/100)]
Kaito did not react. This sort of reputation gain was entirely an issue of disposition and temperament. Just as it was nearly impossible for him to cultivate goodwill with orthodox, self-righteous figures, his compatibility with villains or wild, untamed archetypes like Tornado was exceptionally high.
Possessing verified, overwhelming martial might was enough to win her baseline respect.
Kaito calmly swept his gaze across the measuring, probing looks of the S-Class cadre, past the curious crowd lingering in the concourse, and made his exit.
The moment he cleared the threshold, clear whispers filtered into his Mantra Network from the main floor.
"Damn it all, it really is the King of Monsters from the East District!"
"Why was that psycho tossed into this world? What kind of cosmic horrors are we being forced to face this time...?"
"Rumor has it that the Primordial Dragon Court dumped astronomical capital into this realm, warping the world beyond recognition. That notorious White-Skin Hunter squad from the South District vanished without a trace in a border city. An entire metropolis was wiped off the map in a single strike. No one knows if it was a native titan, a high-ranking Dragon King, or..."
The speakers wore flamboyant, exaggerated hero suits—Reincarnators masquerading as local champions.
They cast wary glances toward the corridor Kaito had taken.
Entities capable of obliterating an entire city in a single strike were vanishingly rare here, ruling out the vast majority of native figures.
Those commanding that caliber of destructive output were almost universally categorized as Above Dragon horrors.
And that roster naturally included the newly arrived sovereign of the East: Mercenary Tao.
Whispers claimed Mercenary Tao was the Space's supreme Great Sin operative—a bloodthirsty butcher who had slaughtered over a hundred Reincarnators in a single afternoon in reality, putting down the East District's riots with absolute, terrifying violence.
Their hushed chatter was cut short by the arrival of Aurelion, the draconic humanoid.
Those burning golden pupils were the unmistakable hallmark of a pureblood dragon.
Across high-tier secondary and primary worlds, compared to the sterile logic of the Machina Court or the convoluted divine pantheons of the Void Paradise, the Primordial Dragon Court was the faction Reincarnators dreaded confronting most.
While these dragons rarely indulged in convoluted conspiracies, every individual operative commanded combat power that sat at the high-to-broken ceiling of their operational step.
Immense physical durability, passive immunities against status afflictions, elements, sorceries, and curses;
Mastery of draconic language magic paired with the crushing biological supremacy of an apex species in hand-to-hand combat.
Aurelion cast a detached gaze across the assembly, instantly isolating several signatures whose biological vitality outstripped the baseline mortals around them.
Ruling out cataloged native figures, the rest had an overwhelming probability of hailing from rival Spaces.
Serving as a self-styled intellectual among this vanguard, Aurelion lacked the berserk savagery of Lord Deathwing, who defaulted to slaughtering every living being in sight at the slightest irritation.
Still, he did not mind clipping a few frail weeds ahead of schedule.
Aurelion muttered a few instructions to the Hero Association liaison trailing him, pointing directly at the Reincarnators he had flagged. He demanded their immediate transfer into his detachment under the pretext of coordinating operations with Public Safety.
The flagged Reincarnators turned pale on the spot.
Meanwhile, Kaito had arrived on a different floor.
Here, Makima stood alone beside a panoramic floor-to-ceiling window like an absolute monarch. Association personnel clad in crisp black suits stood around the perimeter, heads bowed in rigid, reverent silence.
No one moved to intercept Kaito. He strolled directly to Makima's side without resistance.
"Mercenary Tao. You do not belong to this world, do you?"
Makima's cadence was tranquil and melodic. Dressed in a pristine white dress shirt, her hair pinned in a neat braid, she projected the aura of a calculating corporate executive who had charted every contingency down to the millimeter.
Yet coiled beneath that veneer lay a Devil who would burn through any line to secure her designs.
Whoosh!
The atmosphere was sheared apart in an instant. The security detail behind her drew their firearms on reflex, but Makima casually raised a palm. The mortal throngs under her absolute dominion lowered their weapons immediately.
Firearms were completely decorative against a monster of this profile.
That lesson had been etched in stone weeks ago, when the Gun Devil—assumed to be an unstoppable engine of global slaughter—had been disassembled and subjugated in an eye-blink by the entity calling himself Deathwing.
Before beings that breached certain structural thresholds, conventional arms and standard tactics ceased to hold meaning.
That was precisely why Makima had leveraged the Heroes Assemble decree to embed herself within the core of the Hero Association.
Her designs could no longer be realized simply by domesticating a handful of hybrid fiends; she required far greater leverage.
Makima ignored the forefinger leveled flush against her brow. Her ringed, amber eyes ignited with manic, unvarnished fascination, gazing unblinkingly at the towering martial artist.
Through her internal clearance, she had reviewed the complete operational profile of Mercenary Tao for Fun.
The records vaguely indicated that he had mounted a wide-scale slaughter of Mysterious Beings in City J during an earlier deployment, preserving numerous civilians in the process.
Yet the dossier was frustratingly sparse, failing to capture even a fraction of the devastating might he currently radiated.
According to the Association's analytical models, Mercenary Tao for Fun was projected to hover merely around the lower echelons of the S-Class.
Yet the reality standing before her was a cosmic anomaly on par with Tornado of Terror—a supreme combatant who looked down upon the rest of the S-Class from an unreachable peak.
Makima tilted her head forward.
The kinetic force coiled around Kaito's fingertip pierced clean through her skin and frontal bone upon the faintest contact. A fraction more pressure, and her cranium would be blown into red mist.
Even if Devils commanded cyclical immortality, Kaito possessed the tools to erase her permanently.
He was, after all, the Emperor of Death.
Warm blood trickled down her forehead, tracing a crimson path across her pale cheek. Dropping her calculated composure, the woman exposed an untamed, demonic fervor.
"Mercenary Tao. I know... you didn't come here to play house as a hero~"
"You have your own agenda..."
Makima slowly raised her hands, wrapping her slender fingers over Kaito's wrist. Even across the impenetrable barrier of golden Ki, her lips parted into a serene smile.
She had not been pulverized.
With his level of output, erasing her was effortless. Even if she summoned Aurelion back to her side, the dragon could not shield her.
Even if she unleashed every devil and hybrid in her kennel, they could never bridge the chasm against this man.
Yet he had stayed his hand.
That meant...
Thump, thump.
Makima's pulse accelerated by an imperceptible margin. An unnatural, razor-sharp clarity washed over her thoughts. In this fraction of a second, she felt as though she had caught the rhythm of the titan before her.
She guided the hand leveled at her brow downward. The sting of compressed Ki scoring through her facial flesh and throat only heightened her quiet euphoria.
She dragged Kaito's fingers past her cheek, down her throat, coming to rest directly over her sternum.
"Lord Mercenary Tao. Please... make use of me!"
Kaito gazed down at this fragile, warped creature, his brows lifting by a fraction.
Among native narrative figures, extraordinarily few managed to stir his interest through means outside of pure, overwhelming violence.
Yet this Control Devil felt unmistakably vibrant and alive.
Pfft!
Kaito drove his fingertips an inch into her chest. The copper scent of fresh blood bloomed heavily throughout the executive suite.
Golden Ki coiled around his nails. The searing heat caused Makima's serene expression to twist into a grimace of raw agony.
"Tell me everything you know."
"Then, I will listen to your plan."
Kaito retracted his hand, the residual blood vaporizing into ash beneath a flare of Ki.
He turned and settled into an armchair by the glass facade. Makima rose smoothly to her feet.
Her cognitive faculties were operating with crystal clarity.
Managing an operational partnership with Mercenary Tao could never mirror the manipulation she exercised over Denji and the fiends.
The entity before her was absolute, warped, terrifying, and utterly detached from mortal logic.
Since stepping into her field of view, he had betrayed zero appetites recognizable to humanity.
Power, status, aesthetic vanity—none of it stirred a ripple across his temperament.
Furthermore, those eyes treated mortal lives as negligible raw material to be harvested and discarded at whim.
Down in the first-floor concourse, she had recognized that had she not intervened through the staff and Tornado, Aurelion would likely have been executed or crippled on the spot.
Entering a pact with this man required surrendering absolute operational dominance from the outset.
Yet Makima was thoroughly comfortable with that concession. Dominance did not require being clutched in one's own hands to bear fruit.
The strong operated by their own sovereign logic; the weak preserved themselves through calculated submission. She needed only to locate the precise structural balance to claim her prize.
Makima made no attempt to conceal her ambition. She knew an entity of this magnitude looked upon her schemes with complete indifference.
She methodically recounted the events of the preceding week: the Gun Devil had been unsealed, embarking on a wide-scale purge of the continent. At that juncture, the man calling himself Deathwing had descended, subjugating the Gun Devil in a matter of seconds before cornering her directly.
Following that, Deathwing had assigned Aurelion to her flank, initiating a formal joint operation.
Deathwing and Aurelion demanded that Makima furnish actionable intelligence to assist them in hunting down "anomalies." In Makima's assessment, those anomalies were foreign entities like themselves—possessing exotic powers while holding zero baseline roots within this world.
Given her official portfolio answering directly to the Cabinet, coordinating such surveillance across the territories was effortless.
Kaito understood that the Primordial Dragon Court's objectives were far more expansive, but he did not interrupt. He held zero authentic curiosity regarding the Dragon Court's factional agenda anyway.
His operational priorities remained cleanly ranked:
First priority: Isolate Saitama's coordinates, force a confrontation, engage his core trump cards under the empowerment of the Key of Miracles, and experience the absolute limits of the Limiter and that unavoidable, lethal fist once more.
Second priority: The imminent arrival of the Dark Matter Thieves. Boros was a warrior of staggering caliber. For Kaito's current baseline, Boros was perhaps an even more suitable dance partner, offering an exchange contested on remarkably balanced terms.
Third priority: Sifting through the other latent boss-tier narrative assets seeded into this realm—whether an unawakened Garou or pinnacle adversaries from the Kamen Rider mythos.
As for the Primordial Dragon Court, having just clashed against the Void Paradise and the Machina Court, Kaito found his interest in foreign Reincarnator factions slightly dulled for the moment.
Even if, by Makima's description, Deathwing exuded an energetic presence that defied conventional parameters.
Kaito lightly tapped the glass pane. Compressed kinetic force rippled outward through the surface in white, vibrating rings, yet the structural integrity of the pane remained spotless.
He trained continuously, sustaining the posture of the Martial God's Ultimate Intent as a passive second nature.
Every slight motion unconsciously laid bare his evolved mastery over force.
It was not merely a mechanical scaling of raw attributes; it was a qualitative metamorphosis of martial execution. Even if his stats were suppressed below twenty points and his active traits stripped away, Kaito would still dismantle high-tier Reincarnators through pure martial precision alone.
"You mentioned Aurelion and his cadre led Saitama away?"
Makima nodded. Her attention to tactical detail was immaculate, and the dragon-man Aurelion—convinced of his own supreme intellect—routinely leaked arrogance before her.
Both Deathwing and Aurelion carried an unshakeable, condescending aloofness.
Their operational security around her was remarkably lax.
Despite understanding the nature of her authority, they casually permitted mortal personnel to circulate through their perimeter.
Makima had exploited that oversight long ago.
"Aurelion once noted that their faction paid an exorbitant toll to bind that man, and that the operation could brook zero failure."
"Deathwing stated that if that bald mortal could be quarantined for a set operational window, their primary objective would be guaranteed."
"Synthesizing that telemetry with the profile of the man you seek, I am certain the Saitama you are tracking was quarantined by Aurelion's lineage using a specialized containment artifact."
Reviewing the staggering seventy-six percent world distortion, Kaito had initially assumed the anomaly stemmed from the dense fusion of external cosmologies like Kamen Rider and Chainsaw Man.
He had not expected the Primordial Dragon Court to execute a maneuver of this scale: directly luring and sealing away Saitama, the absolute Child of Destiny of this realm!
Just what operational vector had they deployed...?
Kaito dismissed the puzzle quickly. Formidable as Saitama was in direct combat—his cognitive instincts turning razor-sharp the second he entered serious mode—in his day-to-day existence, the man was profoundly indifferent, completely lacking ordinary worldly caution or vigilance against convoluted schemes.
In the B711 world, Eternal Destiny and the Sage had exploited that very psychological blind spot, manipulating global perceptions to engineer a localized containment field around him.
With sufficient preparation, and assuming one was prepared to pay the apocalyptic price once Saitama cracked the seal, binding him temporarily was within the realm of possibility.
Kaito's tapping against the pane grew heavier. He had to recover Saitama; otherwise, the primary purpose of his deployment was forfeit.
Suddenly, Kaito jerked his chin upward.
Beyond the upper atmosphere, an immense mass breached spatial coordinates. A concussive shockwave of atmospheric displacement plunged toward the earth.
A colossal, pitch-black dreadnought blotted out the sky, plunging the metropolis into artificial night.
The Dark Matter Thieves had arrived!
Lacking Kaito's sensory perception, Makima only registered the shift when the sunlight died across her face.
The next second, a deluge of planetary-cleansing ordnance rained from the clouds.
BOOM!