Chapter 641: Dual Domain Expansion, The Melee Begins
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom...!
A succession of over a dozen sonic booms blasted open, as Captain Marvel moved at speeds utterly imperceptible to the naked eye, painting the sky above New York with the spectacle of exploding sonic clouds.
Solomon, his black-and-white energy wings spanning more than ten meters, narrowed his eyes. In the next moment, he threw his arms wide.
The massive magic circle covering the entirety of New York fully ignited, and silver-white lines of light threaded through the atmosphere like dense, glowing silk.
Following that, rows of Holy Lances materialized, reflecting the blinding gleam of steel.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
At this exact moment, Solomon—having successfully stepped onto the sixth tier of the [Stairway of Light and Dark]—was absolutely certain that under the combined empowerment of two top-tier artifacts, the Darkhold and the Angel's Feather, his power had cleanly surpassed every Reincarnator below the level of a Supreme Being.
Even a monster like Mercenary Tao post-transformation would merely sit within the exact same power tier as him.
And within the same classification of Reincarnators, when evaluated by pure raw destructiveness, a specialized spellcaster like him was naturally vastly superior!
Resplendent like a cluster of newborns stars, a sweeping formation of hundreds of silver-white pinpricks of light violently detonated. This terrifying manifestation instantly caused the hearts of both an increasingly unstable Wanda and a high-velocity Captain Marvel to seize up in unison.
In the very next fraction of a second, Captain Marvel forcefully aborted her flight path from over a dozen times the speed of sound, the violent kinetic deceleration triggering a massive atmospheric displacement that warped the local air currents.
She planted herself squarely within the trajectory of Solomon's incoming barrage. Staring at the hundreds of exploding pinpricks of light, Carol Danvers thrust her hands forward, unleashing a hyper-concentrated torrent of cosmic energy that aggressively began to absorb and siphon away the devastating Holy Power.
Solomon had meticulously calculated the precise limits, nature, and mechanical nuances of Captain Marvel's capabilities well in advance. His eyelids didn't even flicker as he calmly snapped his fingers once more.
The properties of the hundreds of [Dragon-Slaying Spears] currently being siphoned by Captain Marvel instantaneously inverted. The holy artifacts transformed into massive, pitch-black serpents that aggressively slithered up the energy waves radiating from her palms, completely coiling around her frame.
In a split second, Captain Marvel was entirely encased and devoured beneath a writhing ball of hundreds of hundred-meter-long dark serpents. High over the New York grid, the construct morphed into a colossal black sphere that twisted and rolled violently across the sky.
On the ground below, the surviving civilians and core members of the Avengers monitored the cataclysmic exchange with rigid, sweat-stained faces.
Swish~ Swish~
Deep-cover military fighter squadrons blockading the outer perimeter of the New York airspace aggressively unleashed a fresh barrage of guided missiles. This unidentified "angelic" entity had demonstrated an absolute, terrifyingly intent to systematically level New York and purge its human population.
Consequently, the United States government was frantically mobilizing and throwing every scrap of military hardware and strategic asset it could requisition into the meat grinder—whether it was high-end tactical conventional weaponry, specialized black-ops agents, or localized metahumans...
No matter their faction or origin, they were being continuously fed into the burning parameters of this grid.
But Solomon merely flexed his wings. His massive frame effortlessly crossed several kilometers in a fraction of a second, cleanly slipping away from Wanda's tracking Chaos Magic. Simultaneously, he directed a lone finger toward the ground below, targeting the coordinates of Captain America and Black Widow.
As a massive silver lance tore downward, Wanda was forced to raise both hands, deploying her hex fields to forcefully anchor the strike.
Solomon's gaze remained incomparably cold. These native heroes were shackled by far too many moral constraints and structural limitations, while he was continuously and flawlessly siphoning raw power to ascend to his absolute peak.
Before long, he would successfully breach the eighth tier of his stairway—the state of absolute Saint-Demon Unification. According to his calculations, that boundary represented the absolute maximum threshold his current pair of artifacts could forcefully elevate his biology to.
The exact moment he secured his primary objective, he would execute a clean, instant tactical extraction. Even though this world was merely a secondary derivative timeline, the baseline parameters were too volatile; it could easily trigger the sudden manifestation of an unmapped, catastrophic native hazard.
For instance... the Sentry being prematurely brought onto the board due to some localized butterfly effect; or ancient sorcerers like the Ancient One utilizing a hidden contingency to execute a sudden resurrection; or...
Solomon's gaze suddenly locked onto a specific location on the street below. A woman wearing an elegant green gown was currently gliding toward the huddle of core Avengers with an extraordinarily graceful, fluid stride—specifically targeting the unconscious forms of Thor and Loki lying at the rear.
Solomon's mind instantly settled. The absolute highest-tier unstable variable of this worldline—[Hela, the Goddess of Death]—appeared to be, in a certain sense, structurally operating on his side of the board.
His internal caution relaxed a fraction.
Suddenly, an absolute, blinding explosion of light violently erupted from the core of the black sphere of serpents.
Pfft!
Amidst a violent spray of severed flesh and dark biomass, a beam of pure cosmic light violently punched straight through Solomon's torso.
He lowered his eyes, staring in dazed disbelief as he realized that the absolute, infallible defensive arrays woven into his complete [St. George's Sanctuary] had failed to offer a single line of resistance. A colossal, ragged cavity had been cleanly blasted open between his chest and abdomen.
His flesh looked as if it had been instantaneously vaporized down to the atomic level.
Pant... Pant.
The blonde woman's breath was slightly ragged, but her entire frame was radiating an intensely volatile, hyper-concentrated aura of cosmic light. Her sheer presence and localized pressure had forcefully escalated to an astronomical tier.
She held her fist pointed straight toward his coordinates, the blinding flare of energy only just beginning to recede from her knuckles.
Carol Danvers's pupils were completely flooded with an incredibly brilliant, eye-tearing luminescence. At this exact microsecond, her raw power metrics had officially achieved their absolute pinnacle.
With a sharp movement of her frame, it was as if a cosmic FTL drive had been violently catalyzed within her muscles. The moment that blinding radiance bloomed, Solomon barely possessed the time to snap his energy wings closed before Captain Marvel tore through local space to materialize directly in front of his face.
Boom!
There was no physical contact between their bodies, yet the pocket of air sandwiched between them detonated with the concussive force of a heavy artillery shell. Solomon was once again violently shot out of the sky like a cannonball, his frame hurtling toward the pavement below.
Carol Danvers had absolutely zero intention of granting this catastrophic entity a single window to recover. She raised a lone hand high, a devastating matrix of pure cosmic energy condensing around her knuckles.
In the next fraction of a second, a blinding, apocalyptic white aurora plummeted straight down.
Boom!
The entire bedrock of New York shuddered violently.
The absolute first spectacle greeting Satoru Gojo and the Millennium Bug upon crossing back into the primary Manhattan grid was Captain Marvel forcefully entering her full [Binary] state, utilizing absolute, overriding dominance to systematically crush a Solomon who had evolved to an unimaginable tier of power.
"Whoa~ that's pretty terrifying, this world..."
Gojo let out a lazy, playful chuckle, his brilliant blue-white Six Eyes instantly capturing and cataloging every single parameter of the local battlefield. Relying entirely on his preternatural spiritual perception, his senses could distinctly identify four distinct, monumentally powerful entities currently operating on the grid.
Every single one of them, if evaluated purely by the raw weight of their individual presence, did not sit a single fraction below their arrogant, maniacal host.
Ah, wait, correction... there were five.
Gojo turned his head to scan a specific quadrant of the sky. A colossal, jagged dark shadow violently sheared through the cloud layers, the massive kinetic displacement instantly driving a high-intensity atmospheric wave down toward the pavement, triggering a violent gale.
That was a high-tech corporate asset that could never naturally manifest within his original home world—an unimaginably massive cosmic dreadnought, materializing out of thin air directly above the city blocks.
And within that vessel, there existed an individual whose absolute biological tier and presence eclipsed everyone else on the board.
"Thanos... has arrived..."
The Millennium Bug kept his hands buried deep inside his trench coat, his eyes similarly locked onto the cosmic warship. While Reincarnators were naturally an insatiable, reckless breed of freaks who treated narrative derailment as a daily leisure activity, this specific world had officially crossed the event horizon of total, unmitigated chaos.
[The Iron Law]!
His mind instantly recalled the single absolute rule that every single Reincarnator operating above the Third Tier meticulously adhered to within these hyper-advanced worlds: Under no circumstances should you ever actively engage or draw the attention of native plot characters who possess metrics touching the [Mad] tier or beyond.
Even when navigating primary mission parameters, one was expected to actively avoid crossing paths with assets of that tier.
That was a collective Iron Law woven together by numerous Title-tier Reincarnators specifically designed to maximize their operational survival metrics.
But within this specific world, whether it was that fool Solomon or their current insane host Kaito Shirogane, both had treated the Iron Law as absolute garbage.
These two freaks had aggressively and mindlessly hammered against the boundaries of the law, forcefully pulling hyper-advanced cosmic entities onto the board. And now, the bill had officially come due.
The narrative parameters had completely broken down. A dense wave of steadily more monstrous native entities was crashing into the grid, completely and flawlessly erasing a Reincarnator's inherent narrative advantage.
The mercenary lowered his eyes to execute a rapid tactical calculation before noting:
"Let's move. The more chaotic this sector becomes, the greater our tactical advantage when executing the strike."
Gojo clamped his hand around the Millennium Bug's neck, his Six Eyes meticulously measuring the visual lines of the battlefield.
That bastard known as Solomon was currently positioned directly at...
Across Gojo's skin, dense streams of pure crimson and pitch-black cursed energy began to aggressively solidify. Intricate black markings erupted across his face as his trend toward cursed spirit transformation violently accelerated, and a series of sharp, mechanical clacks echoed from his spine as a web of spectral red chains systematically punched through his back.
This was the absolute verification that Satoru Gojo was beginning to unleash the full, unmitigated capacity of his soul.
The corners of his mouth curled into a wide grin as he murmured softly:
"Brace yourself, Mr. Bug. We're going to..."
Boom!
The pocket of atmosphere violently exploded. A distance of tens of thousands of meters was instantaneously compressed into a microscopic, imperceptible point. Captain Marvel descended rapidly toward the impact crater to inspect Solomon's operational status.
And Solomon—whose physical torso had been nearly completely severed by her initial cosmic beam, his internal organs completely ruined—was only just forcing his eyes to snap open.
It was precisely within this microscopic window that Satoru Gojo and the Millennium Bug materialized directly over their coordinates.
"Domain Expansion: Acoustic Slaughter of the Underworld!"
"Domain Expansion: Unlimited Void!"
The Millennium Bug's pupils violently contracted, his heart instantly dropping into his stomach.
Damn it! Did the two of us fail to sync our activation parameters?! Gojo actually triggered his Domain Expansion at the exact same microsecond as me!
Under standard conditions, two distinct domains clashing would trigger an immediate structural interference, systematically depressing the combat efficiency of both barriers.
Just as the mercenary prepared to forcefully abort his deployment to recede his barrier, Gojo's voice cut through the air with absolute authority:
"Don't you dare stop!"
In the very next fraction of a second, the Millennium Bug witnessed a spectacle that completely redefined his understanding of the technique. While his own pitch-black barrier completely materialized to encapsulate the coordinates of Solomon and Captain Marvel, Gojo's stygian, space-tearing domain erupted outward with a vastly more monumental layout, violently expanding across the entire sector.
The barrier displayed absolutely zero intention to close its parameters into a sealed boundary.
This was... an [Open Domain]!
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