Chapter 616: Swallowing an Infinity Stone Whole!
Kaido turned his head and shot Tony a glance. He cracked open his massive mouth, revealing rows of razor-sharp fangs. "Annoying tin can."
The moment the words left his mouth, Kaido tossed the Time Stone directly into his maw. His Adam's apple bobbed, and he actually swallowed the Infinity Stone raw!
The entire battlefield fell instantly dead silent.
Even Thanos was stunned. He had fought his entire life, spent half of it hunting down these stones, and he had never once seen someone just swallow an Infinity Stone whole.
Rocket Raccoon hugged his heavy rifle, his eyes bulging out of his head. "He ate it! He actually ate that thing like it was lunch! Is he not worried about getting the runs!?"
Star-Lord clutched his head with both hands, his expression a picture of absolute breakdown. "Insane! They're all insane! These guys don't follow any logic at all!"
Doctor Strange stamped his foot in frantic panic. "It's over! The laws of time are going to collapse!"
After swallowing the stone, Kaido's body violently stiffened. The energy of the Time Stone completely went out of control inside him. Eerie green light bled out from the cracks between his scales.
A bizarre scene unfolded. The left half of Kaido's body rapidly shriveled and aged. His muscles atrophied, and his scales lost their luster. But the right half of his body erupted with astonishing vitality, his cells dividing and regenerating at blinding speed.
Time was violently tearing at his physical form. Aging and rebirth cycled and alternated in fractions of a second. If it were a normal person, this temporal distortion would have destroyed their body instantly.
But Kaido possessed the Saiyan bloodline!
Every time a Saiyan recovered from a near-death state, their power skyrocketed. The aging effect of the Time Stone constantly pushed him to the brink of weakness, while his terrifying regenerative abilities instantly pulled him back to his absolute peak. This endless cycle was directly exploiting the fundamental rules of the Saiyan bloodline!
Kaido's aura climbed at an utterly unreasonable, exponential rate. The golden aura, mixed with the eerie green light of time, pierced straight into the clouds.
"Worororororo!" Kaido threw his head back and roared with laughter, the sheer sonic force pulverizing the surrounding ruins into fine powder. "Exhilarating! This power is too damn exhilarating!"
He violently snapped his head toward Thanos, his frenzied gaze locking directly onto him. "Grimace! You had a pretty good time hitting us earlier, didn't you!? Now it's my turn!"
Kaido snatched up his massive spiked club. Armament Haki instantly coated the weapon, black-red lightning dancing wildly across its surface. He drove power through his legs, and the ground exploded into a hundred-meter crater. His colossal body blurred into a streak of gold and green, lunging straight for Thanos.
"Thunder Bagua!"
As the club swung down, even the surrounding space was compressed until it shrieked.
Thanos's singular eye went wide. He immediately raised the Infinity Gauntlet on his left hand. The Space Stone and Power Stone lit up simultaneously. Blue and purple light fused to form an impenetrable energy shield in front of him.
BOOM!
The spiked club slammed viciously against the energy shield. A deafening roar echoed across all of New York. The violent shockwave sheared the tops off dozens of the remaining ruined skyscrapers.
Thanos let out a muffled groan. The light on the Infinity Gauntlet flickered violently. The ground beneath his feet simply couldn't withstand the terrifying force. His knees buckled slightly, pulverizing the earth beneath him.
Maintaining his defensive stance, Thanos was forcibly shoved backward for hundreds of meters, plowing a bottomless trench straight through the ruins. The moment he finally came to a halt, a sweet metallic taste rushed up his throat, and he spat out a mouthful of purple blood.
"This is impossible! How can pure physical strength break the defense of the Infinity Stones!?" Thanos stared at Kaido in the distance, his eye full of utter disbelief.
Garp slapped his thigh from the sidelines. "Hahaha! Good hit! That club packs a punch!"
Whitebeard shouldered Murakumogiri, loudly agreeing. "Gurararara! That big loach finally did something worthwhile!"
Smoke and dust choked the air across the ruins. Kaido, carrying the club wrapped in black-red lightning, walked step by step toward Thanos at the bottom of the trench. The golden aura mixing with the eerie green light of time radiated from him, the frenzied pressure making it hard for anyone nearby to breathe.
The Time Stone's energy was still colliding inside him, leaving him half-aged and half-reborn. For an ordinary person, the sheer agony of the flesh being torn apart would have broken their mind long ago. But Kaido wasn't broken; instead, the fight was only making him more ecstatic, his massive grin stretching from ear to ear.
"Grimace! Get up and keep fighting! I haven't even finished warming up yet!"
Kaido swung his club, delivering another unreserved, devastating smash down into the crater. The earth caved in once more, the violent shockwave throwing abandoned cars several streets away high into the air.
Thanos lay at the bottom of the deep pit, violently coughing up mouthfuls of purple blood. His once-indestructible armor was battered and torn, his right eye swollen completely shut.
Struggling, Thanos turned his head and looked at Sanctuary II, plummeting from the sky while trailing black smoke. Massive fragments of the warship continuously crashed into the streets of New York, sparking fiery explosions. The Chitauri army had been routed by this group of unknown lunatics, suffering catastrophic casualties.
Thanos locked his gaze on Kaido, then swept a glance at Whitebeard, Garp, and Shanks in the distance. He knew very well that if he kept fighting like this, he was absolutely going to die here today. On a purely physical level, he had zero chance of winning.
He had no choice but to use his final resort.
Thanos forcefully bit through the bloody foam in his mouth and pushed his battered body up. He raised his left hand high. On the damaged Infinity Gauntlet, the Space Stone and Power Stone erupted with blinding light. The blue and purple energies intertwined, forming an unimaginably violent energy storm.
He was going to snap his fingers!
Even if he only had two stones right now—incapable of fulfilling his grand ambition of wiping out half of all life in the universe—and even if he had to suffer the backlash of the gauntlet tearing him apart, he would use the dual laws of Space and Power to forcibly erase this half of the variables on Earth.
Seeing this from afar, Tony's pupils shrank. He knew exactly what that gesture meant—it was a reality-altering weapon capable of rewriting the universe itself!
"Stop him! Do not let him close his fingers!" Tony roared. Firing his thrusters to maximum, he transformed into a streak of red and gold, rocketing straight toward Thanos.
Steve Rogers didn't hesitate either. He raised his broken Vibranium shield and broke into a dead sprint.
The two of them, one from the left and one from the right, desperately tried to interrupt Thanos before he could snap his fingers.
But they were too late.
An absolute spatial barrier had already formed around Thanos. The moment Tony slammed into the blue curtain of light, blaring alarms screamed inside his armor. The massive repulsive force swatted him out of the air. He tumbled a dozen times before crashing heavily into an abandoned building. Steve's shield slammed against the barrier, and he was equally blasted backward, the bones in his arm groaning in protest.
Doctor Strange rapidly formed seals with his hands. Dozens of Crimson Bands of Cyttorak shot out from the void, wrapping tightly around Thanos's left arm. But the moment the chains touched the light of the Infinity Gauntlet, they shattered into a spray of glowing dust, dissipating into the air.
Wanda's hands glowed with scarlet chaos magic as she tried to forcibly tear the spatial barrier open, only to be violently repelled.
"It's no use, we can't break through the defense of spatial laws!" Doctor Strange's face was ashen. A wave of despair rapidly washed over the Avengers.
Was this really where it was all going to end?
"Hey, hey, hey, Grimace. That gesture of yours looks pretty dangerous."
A lazy drawl suddenly drifted over the battlefield. Shanks, gripping the famous sword Gryphon in one hand, stood atop a towering pile of rubble. He looked at Thanos's raised left hand without a shred of panic in his eyes. On Gryphon's handguard, the orange Soul Stone radiated a warm glow.
Thanos let out a cold sneer, his thumb and middle finger already beginning to create friction. "All of you variables, cease to exist."
In that split second, Shanks made his move. He didn't unleash a world-ending wave of sword ki. Instead, he poured the entirety of his Conqueror's Haki straight into the Soul Stone.
"Keep it down."
The orange light flared brilliantly, manifesting as an invisible blade that completely bypassed the spatial barrier. The attack bypassed all physical laws, striking directly into the deepest depths of Thanos's soul.
Thanos's body rigidly locked up. A tearing, agonizing pain ripped through his mind, nearly forcing a scream from his throat. His fingers, right on the verge of snapping, froze mid-air. The sensation of his soul being shredded made it impossible for him to focus enough to command the power of the other two stones.
"Beautifully done, Red-Haired brat!"
─
Want to read ahead? Join my Patreon for just $7 to get early access to all upcoming chapters!
> Patreon.com/NegativeTranslations