Chapter 853: King of Wrath Kaito Shirogane vs. Saitama
Boros's senses were rapidly fading, his consciousness sinking into an encroaching void. His cyclopean eye, which had once perceived all things across the stars with razor clarity, could now scarcely resolve the outline of Mercenary Tao standing before him.
Boros tried to raise an arm, but his cellular structure was already coming apart at the seams.
Yet in the very next instant, a wave of Ki beyond all conceivable scale erupted with a deafening roar.
Boros felt as though his fading vessel were about to be incinerated purely by the radiant heat of that surging aura.
Formidable—unfathomably, monstrously formidable. Leagues beyond the power displayed during their own duel!
As I thought... I was never truly his destined rival. That man... from the very beginning, he was waiting for this human named Saitama...
What a pity... I won't be able to see how this clash ends... But it will surely... be magnificent...
Kaito Shirogane casually closed his fingers, crushing the spinning prism in his grasp.
[You have used the artifact: Anchor of Causality]
[Current space-time coordinates, causality, and personal state have been anchored. You may designate an instantaneous return to this anchor point at will. Upon the death of the Reincarnator or the expiration of the five-minute duration, you will automatically revert to this anchor. The Reincarnator may voluntarily terminate the anchored state at any time.]
The peerless relic dissolved between Kaito's fingers into a shower of glittering starlight. Across the surface of his skin, the power of the Crimson Great Sin erupted from the marrow outward.
An unquenchable, bottomless fury surged through his bloodstream, instantly burning away the last vestiges of cold rationality.
Ki—an inexhaustible, roaring ocean of Ki. Even stacked atop the Sixteen-Fold Kaio-Ken, Kaito's Ki continued to swell exponentially, welling forth from an infinite source.
Even with the pinnacle control afforded by the Martial God's Ultimate Intent, he could not prevent the catastrophic aura from shearing through the atmosphere, producing a dense, restless crackle like unbroken thunder.
Saitama lifted his eyes. The bizarre martial artist before him was radiating an abnormal, suffocating momentum, heavily warping the ambient reality around them.
Standing rooted in place, Saitama weathered wave after wave of golden Ki crashing over him like a celestial tide, his expression remaining completely placid.
He did not ask why this man wanted to challenge him, nor did he ask how this stranger knew the depth of his power.
Before a fighting spirit that climbed into the heavens with such absolute purity, such inquiries were entirely devoid of meaning.
Right now, the martial artist who had thrown a strike mirroring his own Serious Punch from the moon had devolved into a beast entirely governed by battle lust and unbridled fury.
Perhaps at this moment, the man was far closer to being a Mysterious Being.
Saitama indulged in a rare moment of philosophical reflection.
The next microsecond, the golden Ki detonated into a blinding spray of luminous embers. Saitama's pupils shifted in a flash, looking toward his front-left flank as though anticipating the vector ahead of time.
There, an entity stretched into a beam of golden light practically tore through the fabric of space itself. His eyes were turned completely white, his trailing aura extended like comet tails, with streaks of radiant luminescence streaming from the corners of his eyes, the hem of his clothes, and the tips of his hair.
The surplus energy leaking from within his vessel was so volatile that its mere ambient wake churned the distant sea into towering tsunamis.
BOOM!
Saitama remained motionless. He raised a single hand, intercepting the right fist that had barely begun its forward trajectory. Yet in the next instant, that fist warped with impossible fluid dynamics like a golden serpent, its striking vector contorting with erratic ferocity as a draconic shockwave detonated directly from the knuckles.
The instant the punch initiated, the local coordinate space fractured in its entirety, blanketing the whole island in an aerosol of shattered white cloud rings.
CRACK!
An incandescent white shockwave mushroomed outward into the upper sky. Saitama felt the solid ground beneath his boots lose all mechanical cohesion.
The sandy beach beneath them was ignited by the catastrophic kinetic friction and blistering heat, vitrifying into a smooth plane of golden glaze. Boulders, reefs, and dunes were pulverized and swept into the sky in a single stroke.
The lush forest blanketing the island was ground into fine dust, wiped out of existence within a fraction of a millisecond.
Only then did the full kinetic payload of the strike detonate.
The casual guard Saitama had raised to parry Boros's strikes was bypassed by that unnatural martial curve, landing dead-center against his chest.
Saitama, who had still been wearing a slightly bored expression, looked down at his sternum with a flicker of genuine surprise.
Without even a microsecond of pause, Saitama turned into a black speck, vanishing clean into the distance. Only afterward did the thunderous sonic boom and concussive shockwave detonate across the sea.
Kaito's frame seemed to dissolve straight through the air. In this state, conventional flight techniques had lost all relevance; he felt himself breaking through the structural constraints of space itself. Instinctively mimicking Boros's luminescent displacement, he cleaved through the atmosphere at a velocity far outstripping Saitama's natural trajectory.
The ocean was sliced in half behind his wake. Saitama, hurtling through the sky with his dead-fish eyes intact, watched Kaito materialize directly before him once more as a beam of golden light. Saitama reached out an arm, seemingly intending to grab him.
Yet with an even swifter, more bizarre evasion, Kaito snapped both fists together, hammering them downward with concussive force.
Saitama's linear flight path was instantly deflected, driving him downward to crash violently into the sea.
The water did not splash. Saitama struck the ocean as though it were solid concrete, punching an abyssal black crater through the waves. Before the water could even flow back to fill the void, the sheer kinetic mass drove him straight through the seabed and deep into the continental crust.
The apocalyptic shockwave manifested as a violent underwater quake, driving Saitama straight down into the molten mantle.
Feeling the extreme heat around him, Saitama glanced down at his cape, which was beginning to singe, and casually waved an arm.
BOOM!
A terrifying concussive wave detonated from the ocean floor.
The surrounding magma cooled instantly, solidifying into pitch-black oceanic basalt. His uniform was slightly scorched at the hem, but his physical flesh remained completely spotless.
[You have made contact with Concept: Absolute Defense]
Spatial notifications cascaded across Kaito's interface. While his current state prevented him from executing delicate micro-operations with abilities like the Limit-Break Spiral, the passively running matrix continued to harvest raw information without pause.
Yet Kaito no longer cared in the slightest. In the state of Ultimate Great Sin: King of Wrath, he was thoroughly submerged in an ocean of pure fury.
Saitama tilted his head back, meeting a pair of eyes trailing hundreds of meters of golden light—the man was plunging straight down from the heavens into the crust.
This martial artist was, in velocity, strength, durability, and regeneration, the undisputed strongest entity Saitama had ever encountered.
And more than that... Saitama was witnessing the authentic reality of a martial artist: that bizarre striking leverage meant that even if the raw physical parameters weren't leagues above Boros, the kinetic payload delivered and the surgical precision demanded to defend against it operated on a completely different plane.
"You're really strong."
Saitama's voice echoed through the depths, his casual demeanor vanishing entirely.
He raised both hands, cleanly intercepting the plummeting martial artist. The catastrophic kinetic shockwave dissolved into nothingness between Saitama's palms.
Yet the basalt floor beneath his feet, which he had just solidified with a wave of his arm, shattered into powder. A destructive shockwave bored straight down toward the planetary core.
The immense structural damage instantly destabilized the tectonic plates beneath the ocean floor.
Saitama registered the threat immediately. He could not permit this man to unleash his strength without restraint, or the collateral ruin would vastly eclipse the devastation wrought by that black dragon earlier.
Crack!
The AT Field before Kaito fractured with a sharp sound. Saitama's red-gloved hands clamped down onto Kaito's knuckles; unable to bear the load, the field began to disintegrate.
Saitama took a single step forward. The motion was as plain and unadorned as an apprentice practicing foundational footwork, yet his displacement was so blinding that even Kaito, operating in this ultimate state, was cleanly outpaced.
BOOM!
Saitama swung both arms upward, using a textbook shoulder throw to heave his opponent straight from the oceanic abyss toward the sky.
Absolute, ungodly kinetic force detonated in a single stroke.
Within the deep sea, a circular shockwave swept across the trenches. Thousands of miles of seabed crumbled into fine silt, obliterating all deep-sea life in an instant.
The ocean waters were too slow to collapse inward, violently parted into an abyssal trench by the golden silhouette tearing toward the heavens.
Kaito's blood-red, furious field of vision cleared for a fractured microsecond. As light, environmental geometry, and sensory feedback were stripped away by pure velocity, his sight reverted to the rawest baseline of optic nerve stimulation.
Bizarre bands of kaleidoscopic light surfaced before his retinas like a twisted temporal corridor.
Pop.
A faint, almost inaudible sound of snapping echoed through his frame. The AT Field across his skin shattered entirely. He felt the binding shackles upon his flesh dissolve into nothingness, as though an ancient chain wound tight around his soul had finally been unclasped.
The terrifying kinetic inertia from Saitama's throw finally bled away. As his momentum stabilized, the Sky Dancing Art engaged instinctively. Kaito anchored his footing in the void, beholding the pitch-black starscape before him, and the vast, azure globe filling his vision!
Saitama had thrown him clean out of Earth's atmosphere!
High above the cosmos, Kaito's cellular vitality surged to unprecedented heights. His internal biology adapted organically to the void; the crushing vacuum and absence of oxygen were powerless to end his life. He acclimated to deep space in an eye-blink.
Gazing upon the colossal blue planet below, the King of Wrath opened his arms by pure instinct. Golden Ki, cataclysmic and untamed, flowed across his skin like molten gold.
The dark divine sigils etched into his flesh by the Emperor of Death were entirely overrun by golden Ki.
Golden energy coursed through his circulatory channels like a surging river of plasma, expanding exponentially within his core.
The boundless, inexhaustible power native to the King of Wrath continued to stack past all theoretical thresholds.
Beyond the atmosphere, silhouetted against the dark expanse of space, Kaito's frame seemed small, yet the pulsating conduits traced by his golden Ki shone like an incandescent sun, burning brighter with every passing microsecond.
Within his chaotic thoughts, Boros's Collapsing Star Roaring Cannon seemed to play in slow motion, repeating its execution over and over.
For the first time in the King of Wrath stance, Kaito tasted a moment of pristine, crystalline clarity. He felt as though he had reclaimed a measure of cold reason—looking down upon his boiling, volcanic self from an unreachable, transcendent height.
This state was... Divine Sense!
He remembered: every time he had received the blessing of an Outer God's power in the past, he had inhabited this exact aloof, transcendent posture. But unlike his fragile former self who could not comprehend the nature of that authority, Kaito was now an apex Reincarnator capable of slaying the native deities of scripted worlds with his bare hands.
He perceived the presence of this Divine Sense with absolute precision, and in that same heartbeat, he deduced its origin!
The so-called God was merely an extension of this world's native will—a higher-dimensional consciousness birthed to purge human civilization.
Right now, Kaito's actions were perfectly aligned with the planetary will, and he had displayed destructive output that far exceeded the limits of any Mysterious Being the world had ever nurtured.
"Collapsing Star Roaring Cannon!"
Kaito cared nothing for being chosen by an alien entity, nor did he spare a thought for whatever cosmic conspiracies were churning in the shadows. He knew only that his operational condition was unprecedentedly flawless—a state he might never replicate under ordinary circumstances.
He harbored not a shred of pity for the billions of mortal lives dwelling on the sphere below.
In this hour, only power capable of absolute destruction was worthy of challenging Saitama—only absolute ruin could touch the true summit!
"HAH!"
Apocalyptic golden radiance erupted from Kaito's frame, before shifting into a kaleidoscopic, prismatic spectrum. The sheer concentration of power had warped the visual spectrum of all observing lifeforms, rendering them incapable of accurately perceiving the true nature of the energy.
Ordinary mortals and lesser deities alike were barred from even comprehending energy condensed to this magnitude.
With both hands thrust forward, the cataclysmic payload detonated. Kaito felt an unbridled, euphoric release, as though everything he had ever experienced in his entire life had converged into this singular, blinding point.
BOOM!
The kaleidoscopic energy collapsed into an abyssal, pitch-black beam of absolute death. Erupting outward with Kaito as its nexus, the ray of annihilation plummeted straight toward the azure Earth like a planetary executioner's lance.
Down amidst the ruins of City A, Tornado's senses screamed. She snapped her head upward, her face frozen in pure shock.
Ignoring the shouts of the surviving heroes, she pushed her emerald psychokinesis to its absolute limit, tearing into the sky at maximum velocity while coughing up mouthfuls of blood.
Makima shuddered with genuine, paralyzing dread. Tilting her chin up, she beheld the apocalyptic beam of death lancing down through the pale sky. The other survivors registered the descent in tandem.
Yet none could comprehend the nature of that power.
Amidst the crowd, Garou—who had lost interest in the fight after being stripped of a worthy adversary, ignoring Bang's lectures regarding the martial apex Mercenary Tao—had been preparing to leave.
Yet looking up at that descending beam of death, a strike that seemed primed to extinguish all living things, Garou's momentary shock warped into a wild, feral grin. He dropped into a deep, crushing crouch, his muscles compressing like hyper-dense steel.
Martial intent, pitch-black cursed energy—every scrap of power he had adapted and stolen flared to life within his veins.
With the loud, metallic creak of straining sinew, Garou's clothes shredded to pieces. He launched himself skyward, turning into a streak of black lightning tearing toward the firmament.
Just as Garou and Tornado breached the lower cloud deck, that cataclysmic beam pierced the upper atmosphere, tearing the planetary envelope to shreds in an instant.
Nearly half the globe looked up to see the daytime sky stripped away, exposing the cold black void of space and the apocalyptic beam bearing down upon them.
Tornado turned paper-white, while Garou clicked his tongue in frustration mid-flight.
The world seemed to have entered its final countdown.
Yet the very next fraction of a microsecond, a silhouette bypassed them both at a velocity that defied all physics.
A pristine white cape billowed in the solar winds. Red rubber gloves, no longer carrying the faintest hint of comedy, radiated absolute, terrifying solemnity.
The bald man vaulted directly from the ocean depths into outer space, looking upon a cataclysm that eclipsed the cosmic pirate's ultimate strike.
He held back no longer.
"Killer Move: Serious Series... Serious Punch!"
BOOM!
Saitama drove his fist forward, striking dead-center against the vanguard of the Collapsing Star Roaring Cannon.
The next second, the pitch-black death beam fractured down the middle, parting cleanly to both sides. Saitama stood like an immovable shield before the planet, splitting the apocalyptic beam in two, sending the twin torrents scraping harmlessly past both flanks of the Earth into deep space.
Even from that glancing deflection alone, a massive layer of the atmosphere on both sides of the planet was cleanly sheared away.
Crack—BANG!
Kaito felt that crushing, unavoidable kinetic force arrive like an absolute extinction event. His white-out pupils, bound by the King of Wrath, flickered back into a prismatic spectrum.
Watching the Serious Punch bore straight toward his face, his nervous system ignited into absolute, euphoric delirium.
Inside his core, the Third Star Particles accelerated at operational limits, while the Limit-Break Spiral unfurled across the starscape like a cosmic leviathan.
BANG!
Kaito detonated on the spot. The concussive shockwave of the Serious Punch pulverized his physical vessel into nonexistence, before blowing through the drifting asteroid belt behind him, grinding millions of celestial fragments into cosmic dust.
Saitama watched the void in silence, before beginning his descent, letting gravity pull him back toward Earth.
Tornado and Garou stared up in absolute bewilderment at the descending bald man. Just as both assumed the final curtain had fallen, brilliant golden light detonated across the cosmos once more.
The martial artist known as Mercenary Tao reconstituted from the blood mist in an instant. Transforming into a streak of pure luminescence, he intercepted the falling bald man, wrapping around him to drive them both hurtling deeper into the star-dusted abyss of deep space!
This battle was far from over!