Chapter 847: Battle Above Dragon
In the original timeline, Boros had traversed the cosmos chasing a prophecy of finding an adversary who could stand as his equal, only to cross paths with Saitama, meeting a crushing defeat and his ultimate demise after an agonizing struggle.
He had arrived upon Earth at the wrong hour, colliding with someone he could never hope to rival.
This time, however, through the machinations of the Primordial Dragon Court, Saitama had been lured away and quarantined. Standing in his stead before the Dominator of the Universe was Kaito Shirogane.
Boros took a heavy step forward with his singular eye. His strides widened, his velocity compounding exponentially until he broke through the viscous drag of the air in the blink of an eye.
He phased through the displaced atmosphere in an instant.
With a slight shift of his cyclopean gaze, Boros manifested at the left blind spot behind Kaito's skull, his eye instantly locking with the pupil that snapped around to meet him.
Boros froze for a fraction of a millisecond, an overwhelming thrill erupting within his chest.
Yes... this is it! This is the feeling, this is the opponent!
It had been far too long since he had faced a true adversary. The Dark Matter Thieves had rampaged across countless galaxies; across planetary systems without number, the champions of alien worlds couldn't even register his movements while he remained in his sealed armor, let alone engage him as an equal.
He had forgotten the ecstasy of a pounding heart. With merely a single exchange of glances, he grasped that this tall human male was the exact peer he had hungered for across epochs!
Boros cleaved downward with a chop of his hand. The atmosphere parted like a solid barrier, cleanly severed by pure brute kinetic force. That concussive blade of force trailed like a streak of pure light, bearing down directly against his foe's cervical spine.
At his current echelon of power, so-called flying slashes were merely the casual displacement of a flick of the wrist.
BANG!
A solid, unyielding impact shuddered through Boros's arm. As though ignoring spatial metrics, the human's arm intercepted his chop in an instant. Before flesh could even make contact, twin concussive blades of vacuum collided mid-air, detonating with the hollow roar of artillery fire.
A blazing white shockwave exploded in a violent ring, carving deep, warped fissures across the reinforced alloy hull of the dreadnought.
Suspended mid-air, Boros stared down at the warrior parrying his chop. He could sense that this human's baseline muscular mass sat beneath his own.
Yet the timing, execution, and biomechanics of the strike were flawless, carried by an esoteric cadence he could not decipher.
"Splendid... Truly splendid, Mercenary Tao!"
Boros roared with laughter. Tumbling backward through the air, his golden armor flared with incandescent light. He planted his boots against empty space, detonating forward like an artillery shell to appear directly before Kaito, bringing both clasped fists smashing downward like a falling meteor.
Wail!
The shrieking of the displaced atmosphere spiked to a frequency that would rupture mortal eardrums.
Yet Kaito remained rooted to the spot, his left arm ascending into a casual upward block before Boros's hammer blow could even land.
His eyes were cold and unruffled. While Boros in his sealed state wielded terrifying speed and mass, backed by the Martial God's Ultimate Intent, Kaito required only the threefold efficiency of the Qilin Armor paired with the twofold passive scaling of his baseline Limiter to cleanly arrest the blow.
BOOM!
A cataclysmic shockwave crashed against Kaito's left forearm. The Sovereign's Left Arm held firm without a scratch.
Crack!
Instead, it was the golden armor encasing Boros's gauntlets that shattered with a brittle snap.
Kaito lifted his gaze. The next microsecond, a boundless tempest of raw energy erupted from Boros's frame, his presence skyrocketing through the stratosphere.
Kaito watched his left arm get forced back against his torso, driven down against the shimmering surface of his AT Field.
Snap—CRASH!
Far below the gargantuan dreadnought, the ground heaved beneath a seismic pulse. A rolling wave of earth and displaced concrete several meters high surged outward across the ruins.
Alien raiders and heroes alike were tossed into the air like dry leaves caught in a typhoon.
Amidst the devastation, only the handful of genuine apex combatants registered what had just transpired.
Having clamped the tentacled alien in a vice grip of telekinesis, Tornado frowned, turning her gaze toward the crater yawning open beneath the dreadnought.
The sudden eruption of raw output from that sector had arrested her attention.
Before she could probe deeper, a pillar of golden Ki erupted from the depths of the abyss, shooting straight into the heavens.
Hum—BOOM!
Tornado tracked the sequence clearly this time: Mercenary Tao for Fun, enveloped in blazing golden energy, had seized a pink-haired, cyclopean monster by the throat, blasting upward out of the crater to bore clean through the superstructure of the massive dreadnought!
Feeling that unbridled violence, Boros's superficial lacerations closed in an instant. Far from feeling fear, his battle lust ignited into a raging inferno.
Sonic boom rings shattered behind his back as his frame was driven through the hull, yet he felt no pain—only the euphoric intoxication of finally meeting a true peer after decades of crushing solitude.
Incomparable velocity and physical force, martial precision that eclipsed his own, staggering cellular regeneration, and... that bizarre, multiplicative pattern of explosive output.
The creature before him was the absolute manifestation of what Boros recognized as a supreme warrior.
Suddenly, an icy chill gripped Boros's senses. He snapped his neck sideways just as a concentrated thrust of Senra Intent of Death and pressurized Ki ripped through the vacuum where his skull had been a microsecond prior.
The strike whistled past, the sheer kinetic wake tearing through his flesh, allowing Boros to slip free from Kaito's grip.
"What technique was that?"
Boros ripped away the remaining fragments of his golden armor, unsealing his full combat form.
The warrior before him was a titan against whom holding back his power was entirely unnecessary.
Boros paid zero attention to the skirmishes between his crew and the mortals below; his singular eye was fixed entirely upon the human floating before him.
Kaito observed Boros, who was completely intoxicated by the duel, and shook his head lightly. His muscles tightened like coiled bowstrings, fine wisps of white vapor hissing from every pore of his vessel.
"Hey now... are you satisfied with merely this much?"
"I haven't even warmed up yet, Dominator of the Universe~"
The title whispered directly against Boros's ear. His cyclopean eye contracted sharply, catching sight of a pitch-black hand-blade already descending toward his neck, the biomechanics mirroring his own opening chop down to the millimeter.
Yet the air produced no concussive wail. While the explosive Ki continuously tore through the perimeter, the strike itself was as silent as the cosmic void.
Energy cycled through Boros's circulatory channels as his form shifted into a luminous, stream-like state, hurtling backward.
Pfft!
A severed arm and a spray of blue blood tumbled through the sky.
Kaito didn't bother tracking the limb, casually flicking his wrist to detonate it into a fine mist of blood.
Before Boros could utter a word, Kaito phased directly out of the howling gale once more.
Maintaining the Four-Fold Kaio-Ken imposed negligible biological burden upon his evolved vessel. Guided by the Martial God's Ultimate Intent, his Spirit of the Wind trait was ethereal; absolute velocity combined with elemental wind-shifting made him impossible to pin down.
Boros's eye quivered. He felt genuine, suffocating pressure. The shivering of his neck cells brought an unprecedented thrill. He raised an arm, matching the spatial displacement to meet the strike.
BANG!
He managed to intercept the incoming hand-blade this time, only to be hammered backward by a brutal snap kick to his ribs.
Kaito's offensive was omnipresent. That overwhelming velocity paired with erratic, predatory footwork placed an agonizing strain on Boros's defensive calculations.
Boros let out a thunderous roar, releasing a cataclysmic barrage of unbridled energy.
He recognized that his close-quarters martial precision fell short of his opponent's.
A blinding sea of plasma erupted across the upper canopy of the dreadnought. Before the thermal wave could reach Kaito, the martial artist exhaled and shouted into the sky:
"Hah!"
[Earth-Shattering Thunder Roar]!
A cataclysmic detonation ripped across the firmament, drowning the sky in blinding radiance. Even with the dreadnought acting as a physical shield, the atmospheric shockwaves and rolling heatwaves caused the sprawling melee below to freeze in terror.
Both the alien raiders and the defending heroes felt the onset of an unfathomable, existential dread.
Even the S-Class cadre hardened their expressions; the operational ceiling of the battle raging above had blown past the parameters of ordinary Dragon-level disasters.
Tornado tossed aside a pulverized lump of alien meat, launching herself skyward.
Though she recognized Mercenary Tao carried genuine capability, leaving an adversary of that magnitude to someone else sat poorly with her.
Suddenly, the continental crust shuddered with violent tremors as a titan awakened from beneath the city's foundations.
BOOM!
Nearly half of City A collapsed inward. A colossal, abyssal draconic silhouette surged out from the depths of the earth, its mere emergence shattering the remnants of the urban grid.
ROAR!
The draconic bellow rattled the heavens, twisting the atmosphere into screaming currents.
Atomic Samurai stumbled, driving his blade into the asphalt to arrest his momentum. Beside him, Bang braced his arms before his chest with a furrowed brow, resisting the indiscriminate pressure washing over the sector.
Bang felt every cell in his aging body groan in protest, his limbs seizing in involuntary tremors. In this state, the precision of his martial arts was severely compromised.
Whether parrying or striking, biomechanical accuracy was hard to sustain.
Tornado raised both hands, projecting a colossal psychic barrier to encase the surviving civilians and lower-ranked heroes.
Yet Deathwing, rising from the core of the city, granted her no breathing room, opening his jaws to unleash an incandescent breath.
Unadulterated draconic flame and cataclysmic thermal currents washed over the perimeter of City A, obliterating half the urban zone in an eye-blink as it surged toward the underbelly of the mothership.
"Dragons... Take flight!"
A deep, ancient cadence resonated across the battlefield as legions of winged dragon-beasts took to the sky.
Within the ranks of the heroes, Aurelion stepped over the corpses of several Reincarnators he had quietly culled. Looking up at Tornado, who had swept him into her defensive shield, he lifted his forefinger. Imaginary-mass cosmic particles orbiting his frame condensed into a crystalline lance, piercing through the void straight toward Tornado's back.
The second Tornado sensed the attack originating from within her own barrier, she could only snap her head around, while the cataclysmic dragon breath slammed into her frontal ward.
Pfft!
Tornado's pupils contracted to pinpricks.
A pink-haired woman was impaled through the chest by the cosmic lance, dragged backward through the air, and nailed firmly to the ventral hull of the colossal dreadnought.
Tornado recognized her: the frail Devil Hunter from Public Safety. What was her name again?
BOOM!
The torrent of draconic fire crashed dead-center into the emerald psychic barrier, shearing local space apart.
The next instant, Tornado felt her psychic ward buckle. A slender silhouette bearing a tail over two meters long lanced through the breach like an arrow.
Hum!
Spacetime twisted as a fist drove into the psychic barrier inches from Tornado's chest.
Deathwing Neltharion roared with unbridled battle lust. Enveloped in fractured emerald light, Tornado was launched like a weightless pebble, smashing through the remaining ruins of City A before vanishing beyond the horizon.
Neltharion knew his window was razor-thin; the ancient one could not quarantine Saitama indefinitely. He had to establish absolute dominion over the order of this world before that seal cracked.
The Heroes Assemble decree had gathered the champions of every major faction: Devil Hunters, fiends, and Kamen Riders were all concentrated on this front or rushing toward it.
Boros, whether he tied down Tornado or someone else, had bought him the operational breathing room he needed.
Deathwing shifted back into his colossal draconic form. His mobility and tactical fluidness outstripped standard dragons by leagues.
And his destructive output was absolute!
Screech!
A flash of silver sliced through the burning air. Flashy Flash had held little interest in the engagement, knowing that with Tornado present alongside that newly arrived Mercenary Tao, multiple Dragon-level threats could hardly mount a meaningful offensive. He had been preparing to depart.
He hadn't anticipated witnessing that cataclysmic breath the moment he cleared the city limits.
Blades flashed against dense draconic scales.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
Amidst the ringing of deflected steel, the local space was flooded with blinding golden radiance.
Flashy Flash felt his limbs freeze as if suspended in amber.
The next second, a pitch-black tail whipped through the air, shattering the sound barrier as it struck his torso.
His blade snapped on impact, and Flashy Flash plummeted to the earth, plowing a trench over a thousand meters long across the scorched plains.
Neltharion shifted back into his human-dragon hybrid state, armored in thick, iridescent scales. His golden slit-pupils swiveled, rapidly locking onto the remaining S-Class heroes and the arriving Kamen Rider Kuuga.
He intended to execute them all in a single sweep.
[Dragon King's Domain]!
Golden radiance washed over the sector once more, severing and stripping foreign abilities from the air.
Neltharion turned into a streak of black lightning, drawing lethal vectors between each target.
Clang! Rip! Tear!
Superalloy Darkshine's skin rang like struck iron as it was caved in, while Atomic Samurai and Bang were impaled, their flesh torn asunder by draconic talons.
Yet Neltharion's lethal trajectory was arrested mid-air.
A silhouette had intercepted him from behind Bang, locking his talons in an iron parry.
Neltharion lifted his head, meeting silver-white hair sweeping skyward and a face contorted with unbridled arrogance.
It was Garou—the target he had spent considerable resources trying to hunt down and assassinate earlier, to no avail.
This brat...
Neltharion's gaze shifted sideways, settling on two women—or rather, two Reincarnators—who were currently administering emergency stabilization to Flashy Flash.
One of them, a petite woman, met his stare with an open sneer.
She casually rotated a wheel-like apparatus in her grip.
That relic... he remembered it was tied to some high-tier Cursed Spirit.
Neltharion had never respected low-tier curses.
Yet his hyper-cognitive brain parsed the tactical truth in an instant:
This Reincarnator had weaponized an adaptive cursed spirit against Garou—a prodigy whose core talent was observing, adapting to, and evolving past enemy styles. The two anomalies had engaged in an artificial feedback loop of compounding evolution.
In the absence of suitable top-tier plot figures, they had forcibly catalyzed Garou to this terrifying threshold.
"Heh... Reincarnators. Still indulging in these pathetic parlor tricks, I see."
His voice echoed clearly into the ears of Dead of Night and Li Qingzi.
Though her biological cells still shuddered beneath the crushing weight of his Dragon Fear, Dead of Night spat back with a venomous sneer:
"Aren't you the one who had to resort to cowardly schemes just to scurry away from Saitama and Mercenary Tao? Hah... Dragons~"