Chapter 846: Mercenary Tao vs. Boros
"Sensei, that makes seven hundred and eighty-seven Dragon Kings you've defeated!"
Genos's optical sensors flickered rapidly as they parsed and archived incoming tactical readouts.
Those entities hadn't lied to his master. In this bizarre dimension, ancient Dragon Kings manifested one after another. Though each was annihilated by a single casual blow from his master, the sheer oppressive presence they radiated upon arrival made Genos keenly aware of one fact: every subsequent Dragon King was distinctly stronger than the last.
Yet the brief flicker of excitement that had previously touched Saitama's face had already waned.
The incoming foes were indeed scaling in raw power—to the point where their opening strikes could blow him back a respectable distance—yet...
It felt completely hollow. Saitama looked down at his gloved knuckles, momentarily spacing out.
He couldn't articulate the source of that dissonance, but his gut told him something was off.
These so-called Dragon Kings were ostensibly growing in destructive potency, yet the underlying texture of combat felt increasingly artificial.
Saitama's stride slowed to an idle halt.
"Come to think of it... the supermarket bargain sale starts soon."
With that casual declaration, Saitama turned his back on the colossal, draconic mountain range looming on the far horizon, ambling back along the path they had come.
Genos found the abrupt pivot unexpected, but he would never presume to question his master's decisions. The two pivoted on their heels.
The next second, an apocalyptic wave of draconic majesty descended from the heavens, warping the atmosphere.
Genos's telemetry suites screamed under the sudden load. The threat index dwarfed any Mysterious Being he had ever encountered by hundreds, if not thousands of times!
Genos whipped around instinctively. Cleaving through the cloud deck was a colossal dragon sheathed in midnight scales, plunging down from the upper atmosphere. The downforce of its wings stirred dozens of towering tornadoes that bridged the earth to the sky.
A cosmic beast whose mere wingbeats triggered natural disasters.
Saitama's brow furrowed. It was happening again. Every single time he decided to leave, an adversary manifested immediately.
This setup felt uncomfortably like the cheap video games he played at home: an endless spawn of palette-swapped mobs engineered purely to waste his afternoon.
He was thoroughly bored.
Saitama rotated his torso, pulling his right fist back to his hip, and threw a clean, unadorned strike in rhythm with his turn.
BOOM!
The sky and earth instantly cleared.
The tornadoes churning the plains and the gargantuan dragon blotting out the sun were erased in a microsecond.
All that lingered was a massive, drifting cloud of crimson aerosol.
"Let's go, Genos."
Saitama called out, picking up his pace toward the exit vector. He had lost whatever fleeting faith he had placed in those draconic messengers who claimed to hail from a distant realm.
Was this tedious farce supposed to be the "peerless adversary" they had promised...?
Across the far side of the lunar surface, a titanic dragon of weathered, ash-gray scales curled its body around nearly half the satellite's circumference. Its scales had long lost their luster, yet with each shallow breath it drew, the lunar sphere seemed to shudder in sympathetic resonance.
The ancient beast rested its gargantuan skull against the regolith. From its nostrils billowed plumes of pale, chalky mist. Within that mist, towering draconic phantoms condensed and shattered in continuous, cyclical loops. The vapor regenerated without pause, weaving esoteric conceptual rules across its perimeter.
At the very nexus of that looping mist, two small silhouettes advanced through an endless shifting maze: Genos and Saitama.
The vertical slits within the ancient dragon's eyes had faded from brilliant gold to dull amber, resembling cracked topaz. Countless hyper-condensed particles of power collapsed within the depths of its retinas.
"Deathwing... be swift... Make it swifter still..."
"This old frame... cannot hold much longer..."
Inside the Hero Association Headquarters in City A, Aurelion—who had successfully folded several suspected Reincarnators into his operational detachment under the pretext of leading them out to be quietly culled—froze mid-stride.
That raspy, fading telepathic murmur reached his consciousness. It was practically the dying declaration of an ancient sovereign of their bloodline.
Epochs ago, multiple primordial dragons had vied for the supreme throne of the Primordial Dragon Court.
Though Bahamut had ultimately claimed the seat of absolute dominion, a handful of peers who had traded blows with the Dragon God had survived into the modern era.
In this world, it was precisely one such silver medalist burning through the dregs of his ancient life force who was manually sustaining an artificial reality devoid of Saitama.
Only through that sacrifice could Lord Deathwing unleash his catastrophic potential without early interference.
Otherwise, given Deathwing's explosive temperament, he would likely have been pulverized by a casual fist from that bald demon before his grand designs could even take root.
That was a tier of absolute output that neither the Third nor Second Sequences could bridge.
Aurelion felt an abrupt wave of disgust toward the petty games he was currently playing. While the primary operational anchor of this deployment was Lord Deathwing alone, for an elite scion of the young generation like himself to waste time finding amusement in herding frail Reincarnators felt pathetic.
Scales bristled across Aurelion's flesh as dense, high-mass stellar particles began condensing into orbit around his limbs.
Draconic blood began to boil; Draconic Fear expanded outward in a crushing wave.
Linked to the Dragon Court's encrypted relays, he understood what was about to unfold.
The strike was here. Right now, at this exact coordinate!
The Reincarnators Aurelion had singled out had been wound tight with paranoia from the beginning. Operatives from the West and North Districts, they were already deeply rattled by Mercenary Tao's proximity.
Seeing this draconic warrior drop all pretense of diplomacy to leak unadulterated hostility, they needed no further prompting.
"Destruction Cannon!"
One operative slammed his palms together. Cybernetically augmented forearms instantly shifted, reconfiguring into a heavy artillery barrel as concentrated particle streams reached critical charge in an eye-blink.
Before the nearby Hero Association personnel could even process the sudden escalation, the particle beam lanced through the air.
He gave zero consideration to narrative consequences. Reputation and quest parameters were worthless; in this cursed world, survival was the sole currency that mattered.
BOOM!
The staff members and lower-ranked heroes standing in the immediate trajectory were vaporized into scorched air. Even the tailored black suit worn by Aurelion—standing mere meters away—charred away into ash.
The cannon strike landed dead-center. The second the explosive payload bloomed, the sky above plunged into pitch-black shadow. A deluge of planetary-cleansing ordnance plummeted from the gargantuan dreadnought that had warped directly into the atmosphere.
The Hero Association Headquarters was instantly consumed by an ocean of flame and collapsing masonry.
The Dark Matter Thieves had made planetfall!
RUMBLE!
A catastrophic blast radius flattened nearly half of City A in a single concussive wave. The dreadnought descended to hover a mere hundred meters above the burning ruins. The suffocating weight of the colossal vessel paralyzed surviving civilians and heroes with primal dread.
Hatches unsealed across the underbelly as swarms of alien marauders poured from the mothership, shrieking in guttural tongues as they descended upon the surface.
Dozens of heroes who had miraculously survived the orbital bombardment were tackled to the asphalt before they could regain their footing.
Yet resilience was the defining trait of this world's defenders. Battered figures began crawling from the pulverized concrete, mobilizing for desperate urban warfare.
Screams, gunfire, and concussive impacts tore through the air in an unbroken cacophony.
Makima stood unmoving amidst the carnage. She looked upon the shattered foundations of the headquarters, where high-temperature fires and residual plasma burned across the craters.
The destructive yield of that orbital salvo exceeded the output of nearly all hybrid devils. Even the Bomb Devil could not achieve wide-area devastation on this scale in a single discharge.
And yet...
Her eyes refocused on the space directly before her. Her dark green overcoat rippled lightly against the shockwaves.
Within a three-meter radius around them, the reinforced flooring and panoramic window panes remained immaculate.
An orbital bombardment capable of leveling a metropolis had failed to even graze the hem of this man's coat. And standing close to his flank, she had been entirely insulated from the concussive pressure, heat, and falling shrapnel.
Makima felt quiet satisfaction at having aligned with the correct patron. Yet as the indiscriminate slaughter unfolded across the avenues, she began mobilizing her assets beneath the surface.
She had initially placed little stock in Madame Shibabawa's prophetic warnings, dismissing them as the senile ramblings of an eccentric seer lacking actionable specificity.
The sheer scale of the present carnage, however, proved direct intervention was mandatory.
If catastrophes of this magnitude proliferated unchecked, the fear generated would spawn an influx of increasingly unmanageable Devils.
With a single pulse of her will, administrative relays deep within Public Safety fired, rapidly assembling Devil Hunter detachments and fiends to City A.
Yet before that machinery could grind into motion...
Makima watched Mercenary Tao for Fun, waiting to see what vector the monster would choose.
Kaito Shirogane merely flicked his forefinger toward the open air. The floor-to-ceiling glass that had withstood the orbital strike shattered outward, sending a circular shockwave of dense white force rolling across the ruins.
BOOM!
At the terminus of the blast wave, dozens of alien marauders were blown into meat paste, their concussive wake sending nearby heroes tumbling across the debris.
With his hands shoved deep into his coat pockets, Kaito took a single step forward. The next fraction of a second, he materialized hundreds of meters away, directly beneath the belly of the mothership.
He tilted his chin upward, appraising the dreadnought. A fleeting thought crossed his mind: could an asset of this scale be hauled back to the physical world?
With Saitama temporarily sidelined and no suitable adversaries within reach, Boros presented himself as an exceptionally viable alternative.
Ignoring the minor skirmishes around him, Kaito strolled toward the main ventral hatch of the vessel.
A swarm of alien raiders converged upon him with bared fangs, only to disintegrate into flying gore the instant they collided with his Three-Part Revolving Force.
The passive slaughter drew the immediate attention of both the alien forces and the surviving heroes.
Across the ruins, apex heroes were mounting their counteroffensives.
From the heart of the association's rubble, brilliant emerald psychokinesis flared into the sky. Tons of pulverized concrete and steel girders inverted their trajectory, transforming into a storm of hyper-velocity lances aimed at the mothership.
Relying on her psychic dominion, Tornado had shielded the vast majority of non-combatants during the initial salvo.
For all her arrogant vitriol, the S-Class Rank 2 carried an undeniable sense of duty.
Sensing the tactical chaos below, she locked onto the dreadnought, raising both hands as her telekinetic aura climbed to its operational zenith.
Kaito's brow twitched. He had no intention of letting Tornado pulverize a prize he had yet to claim for himself.
The next second, a bizarre, tentacled alien shrouded in an equally potent psychic aura materialized in the sky.
The telekinetic clash between Tornado and Geryuganshoop locked the dreadnought in localized equilibrium, arresting its descent.
BOOM!
A concussive shockwave tore through the crowds below. Amidst shrieks of agony, hundreds of combatants were swept up in a violent kinetic gale, hurtling directly toward Kaito's path.
Kaito didn't bother turning his head, casually sweeping an open palm across the air.
Crack—BOOM!
A wall of compressed air slammed outward, scattering the airborne bodies harmlessly across the rubble.
Striding out from the ventral hatchway was a hulking brute draped in dense, emerald-plated musculature. Multiple mouths lined with serrated teeth sprouted from his cranium and heavy forearms.
One of the three top executives of the Dark Matter Thieves, celebrated for mastering over twenty lethal execution arts: Groribas.
Every heavy stride he took shook the asphalt, his physical dominance laid bare as a casual backhand swatted away heroes and alien subordinates alike across hundreds of meters.
An authentic Dragon-level Mysterious Being.
Yet... that was his ceiling.
Kaito's eyelids drooped, completely devoid of interest toward an adversary of this bracket.
His eyes flickered toward Tornado, who was casually playing with the telekinetic octopus in the sky.
Fine Qilin Armor rippled beneath his skin as Tier 9 Setsuna engaged in an instant.
He took a single step. Zero atmospheric friction was displaced, yet his form had already phased directly behind Groribas.
The three mouths across Groribas's anatomy were still clicking open and shut, hyper-concentrated acid pooling within his gullets to ambush the human martial artist.
The next microsecond, a razor-thin ache bloomed across his cervical vertebrae.
Vision faded to dark as his cranium tilted sideways under absolute mechanical failure.
"Eh...?"
"What is... happening to me...?"
Pfft!
Arterial spray and digestive acid erupted into the air simultaneously. Only then did the delayed human cadence register against his auditory nerves:
"You're in my way."
In your way...?
Me...?!
Thud.
Groribas's colossal frame collapsed into the dirt, entirely devoid of life.
Kaito's hands remained buried in his pockets. The execution had been so instantaneous that it appeared as though he hadn't even bothered drawing an arm, or his velocity had simply severed all perceptual tracking.
Engaged in a bitter struggle against Melzargard, Bang caught the entire sequence out of the corner of his eye, his pupils contracting sharply.
While he commanded the technique to execute a monster of that caliber swiftly...
Tearing a Dragon-level organism apart purely through the displacement wake of a high-speed stride...
This Mercenary Tao had genuinely breached the ultimate summit of the martial path!
The next instant, Kaito bent his knees slightly and launched himself skyward, transforming into a streak of black lightning that bored directly into the underbelly of the colossal dreadnought.
Bang moved to follow, but caught sight of Atomic Samurai struggling against their multifaceted opponent.
Atomic Samurai's swordsmanship was peerless, but his boundless arrogance routinely blinded him to structural subtleties.
Bang sighed, choosing to remain behind to dismantle the threat.
Spurred by the display of Mercenary Tao's martial apex, an unfamiliar itch ran through Bang's ancient musculature. Shedding his martial arts gi, his chiseled physique rippled with renewed vitality.
Inside the dreadnought, Kaito strolled unhurriedly through the corridors with his hands still resting in his pockets. Relying purely on his passive Three-Part Revolving Force, he cleared a path through the interior.
Beyond the three executives, the Dark Matter Thieves were utterly devoid of top-tier combat assets.
And the Kaito Shirogane of today stood as an undisputed Above Dragon entity. Low-tier fodder had zero business existing in his presence.
He marched steadily until he crossed the threshold into the central control bridge, where the system interface flashed a familiar notification:
[You have entered the command bridge of Special Construct: Dark Matter Dreadnought]
[Defeat the sovereign of the dreadnought and maintain administrative control over the vessel for 7 days to claim ownership of Special Construct: Dark Matter Dreadnought]
"A seer once told me that upon this world, I would find a warrior worthy of standing as my equal."
Clad in heavy, golden power-inhibiting armor, the cosmic conqueror Boros rose slowly from his throne.
Turning around, his singular, cyclopean eye appraised the human who had dismantled his personal guard with hands casually buried in his coat pockets. He nodded slowly, as though confirming the prophecy's authenticity.
"Tell me... is that adversary you?"
"State your name."
Kaito slowly drew his hands from his pockets, his gaze locking onto Boros as he prepared to benchmark his current operational ceiling.
"Mercenary Tao."
"Let's begin."