Chapter 643: Clashing Beams, Eight-Fold Kaio-ken!
Solomon, whose single strike had nearly caused New York to submerge, now channeled the absolute entirety of that devastating white column of light straight toward the open sea.
Whether it was Thanos stepping onto the shattered boulevard, or Hela—who had effortlessly tracked down her two incompetent younger brothers—both immediately understood the exact strategic implication of this trajectory.
It meant that at this exact microsecond, the entity residing in the stratosphere, radiating an apocalyptic volume of pure energy, had determined that whatever was stepping across the ocean was a vastly, structurally more dangerous threat to the board!
Wanda deployed a dense wall of Chaos Magic with her left hand, forcefully holding the collapsing bedrock at bay to protect her localized sector, while her right hand formed a sharp barrier in front of a semi-conscious Captain Marvel.
Though her mind was trapped in an ocean of pure agony and unadulterated venom, she still maintained a baseline sliver of cognitive rationality. A catastrophe of this scale—one that was actively liquefying the geology of New York and threatening to purge millions of human lives—completely transcended the boundaries of her personal rage.
Had Kaito Shirogane been standing beside her, he would have likely mocked the sheer impurity of her conviction, before aggressively attempting to provoke her into a total mental collapse.
But at this specific moment, not a single surviving Reincarnator dared to interfere with the clash of these apex predators.
Trade Wind clutched a heavily injured Monsoon, their figures transforming into chaotic currents of air as they desperately fled through the lower atmosphere. The skyscrapers and commercial districts along their trajectory were systematically sliced apart by their protective magic.
"We can't take to the upper atmosphere yet. We must forcefully clear the perimeter of [St. George's Sanctuary] first."
Even under the duress of this apocalyptic breakdown, the faces of Trade Wind and Monsoon retained a cold, detached absence of emotion as they rapidly exchanged tactical data.
Evidently, Solomon had encountered a severe operational anomaly. But to their eyes, his cognitive shutdown represented a monumental tactical window.
Although Solomon had previously assured them that upon securing a vastly more compatible developmental stairway he would cede the remaining members their lives, both women were deeply, professionally aware of a Reincarnator's insatiable, treacherous nature. They could not cede him a single line of trust.
Utilizing the window where Solomon's internal processing script was malfunctioning to execute a clean tactical extraction was the only logical route forward.
New York was highly, statistically likely to be reduced to absolute nothingness under the combined violence of these monsters...
Boom!
The apocalyptic column of light violently sheared across the sky, plowing straight into the Atlantic Ocean. The volume of seawater instantaneously vaporized by the thermal energy triggered a massive, suffocating shroud of white steam that made the entire ocean look as if it were executing a cataclysmic boil. A titanic tidal wave was violently pushed forward, roiling toward the core parameters of the sea.
And the perfectly straight silver line cutting across the horizon had finally closed the distance to the collapsing coastline. A massive, heavily muscled man—fully clad in a black trench coat, its dark green satin lining whipping violently in the gale—threw his arms wide, as if casually savoring the raw kinetic force of the oncoming sea storm.
Faced with the devastating volume of the [Emperor Dragon's Sigh] plowing straight toward his coordinates, the man displayed zero intention to dodge or deploy defensive arrays. Quite the contrary: his face carried a wide, ecstatic grin as he stepped forward to embrace the strike.
High above, Solomon's automated John's Pen Mode script registered an instantaneous processing conflict.
"Target identified as un-attackable. Analyzing underlying parameter: Space Contract restriction. Implementing systemic countermeasure..."
An exceptionally eerie, twisting dagger manifested out of thin air within Solomon's glowing palm.
"Deploying [Rule Breaker]. Executing total structural erasure of active Space Contract... Processing..."
Down on the water, the smile splitting Kaito Shirogane's face grew into a monstrously distorted mask of pure ecstasy. The sensory grid of his Mantra network spanned across the entire sector, paired with a real-time, flawless stream of tactical data being continuously beamed to his mind by his most loyal jailer, [Black Face].
He knew exactly what had transpired on the grid. At this precise moment, he practically wanted to stand up and loudly applaud the sheer initiative executed by the Millennium Bug and Satoru Gojo.
Kaito had originally estimated that he would have to wait until Solomon completed his complete stairway ascent, locking down every single asset this world possessed before preparing to execute a system regression, for their non-aggression contract to naturally expire.
He hadn't expected that those two bound yin spirits would forcefully corner Solomon into burning through a trump card of this classification.
The automated subroutine known as [John's Pen Mode] was by no means an omnipotent or flawlessly optimized system; it was merely a highly specialized contingency protocol. When wielded by an individual who already possessed an overwhelming, absolute tier of raw energetic output, it allowed the user to execute absolute, mechanized dominance over a grid.
It systematically identified and deployed the most mathematically optimal spell formula to counter active hazards, completely immune to the vast majority of psychological hijacking or cognitive crowd-control mechanics.
But correspondingly, a Solomon operating under the automated parameters of John's Pen Mode was entirely stripped of that preternatural, highly accurate spiritual intuition that Kaito historically found deeply troublesome—that innate caution that allowed Solomon to forcefully suppress his own ego, ceding massive chunks of immediate profit to prioritize the absolute safest, most conservative tactical route. That variable was entirely gone from the board.
[Notification: Temporary Space Contract D3315 has been forcefully and systematically terminated via external authority.]
The exact microsecond the crimson system notification flashed across his vision, the apocalyptic column of white light slammed cleanly into his coordinates.
Kaito's maniacal laughter erupted at full capacity. Standing atop the crest of the racing tidal wave, the sheer kinetic force of his internal energy blasted the water beneath his boots, propelling his frame forward with monstrous velocity.
The terrifying high-intensity thermal heat and catastrophic pressure locked onto his biology in a fraction of a second. Kaito violently thrust his left hand forward, a hyper-concentrated wisp of golden light instantaneously condensing out of the surrounding atmosphere around his fingertips.
In a split second, the spark compressed into an exceptionally dense, eye-tearing point of pure energy.
[Dodon Ray]!
Boom!
The blinding white beam of the Emperor Dragon's Sigh was forcefully anchored, grinding to an absolute halt less than a meter away from Kaito's left hand. The terrifying thermal energy instantaneously vaporized the massive ocean walls directly behind his frame, completely wrapping a multi-kilometer parameters of the sea within a dense shroud of white steam.
Yet, the hyper-intense heat refused to recede. The [Emperor Dragon's Sigh] was an absolute, continuous saturation-type strike. Solomon directed his palms downward, forcing a massive leverage against the beam.
The column of light, now sporting a diameter of dozens of meters, flared with an even more monumentally powerful luminescence.
As the seawater beneath Kaito's boots continuously vaporized down to the atom, his frame began to steadily sink below the baseline parameters of the sea. His Three Parts Returning to Origin Force violently contorted, displacing the ocean to form a colossal, smooth concave dome that left Kaito looking as if he were planting his weight atop a massive, high-pressure energetic cushion.
Within a split second, he was forcefully depressed to a depth of over a dozen meters beneath the sea surface, and the sheer downward kinetic pressure of the beam was scaling up at an exponential rate.
Superheated steam, apocalyptic thermal output, racing ocean walls, and howling gales—the ambient spirit particles and elemental parameters occupying local space had completely entered a state of violent, chaotic riot.
Amidst the frantic, sky-tearing whipping of his long black hair, the grin splitting Kaito's face remained entirely unshakeable. Quite the contrary: his jaw unhinged slightly further, revealing a rows of white teeth in an expression of pure, unadulterated, and merciless cruelty.
To speak with absolute professional candor: although he was an elite practitioner of the [Ki] energy developmental system, due to his historical proficiency tiers lacking the necessary scaling, his raw Ki volume failing to hit absolute thresholds, or his previous rivals simply being too pathetic to push his limits...
He had never once throughout his existence engaged in a traditional, full-scale, head-on [Beam Clash] against another practitioner.
At this exact microsecond, sensing the monumental, crushing pressure hammering against his fingertips, Kaito Shirogane's soul settled into a state of supreme, ecstatic exhilaration that completely defied words.
A Solomon operating under these precise parameters completely and flawlessly eclipsed the peak metrics executed by Mahakala back then!
According to Kaito's rapid internal diagnostics, Solomon's current destructive output had officially breached the absolute baseline threshold of the [Fierce · Upper] classification.
But...
Kaito abruptly straightened his legs, completely dissolving the kinetic force field compressing the water beneath his boots. Replacing the dome, a dense, blinding coat of pure golden Ki violently erupted across the exterior surface of his muscles.
Beneath the underlying dermal layers of his skin, it looked as if an absolute, flawless membrane of pure golden light was systematically rising to the surface. A hyper-concentrated, sky-tearing volume of pure Ki violently breached his flesh, erupting upward into the exosphere.
Boom!
Deep within the ocean basin, the massive columns of water surrounding Kaito's coordinates were violently and non-discriminatorively shoved away, exposing a clean, dry circular void sporting a diameter of several hundred meters. Standing rigidly at the center of this vacuum, his pitch-black hair—completely enveloped and hyper-activated by the dense streams of golden Ki—visibly shifted into an absolute, incandescent golden hue, ceding any observer a striking, hallucination-like sense of visual deja vu.
Kaito Shirogane tilted his head back, his eyelids lowered as he evaluated the sky.
Maintaining a permanent, active baseline of a two-fold Kaio-ken placed absolutely zero operational duress upon his current physical vessel. Therefore, at this exact microsecond, he scaled the output straight to four-fold!
Rumble!
The sky-tearing column of golden Ki expanded with monstrous velocity. In a fraction of a second, the concentrated spark anchored before Kaito's left fingertips violently dilated into a colossal, blinding sphere of pure energy, forcefully shoving the apocalyptic white beam of the Emperor Dragon's Sigh back by dozens of meters.
Yet, Kaito Shirogane remained intensely, entirely unsatisfied.
Creeeak!
His musculature, skeletal frameworks, and meridian pathways simultaneously emitted a sharp, mechanical screech under the stress, as a dense web of complex pitch-black markings erupted across his skin.
Six-Fold Kaio-ken!
Boom!
The dry circular void, which had previously spanned several hundred meters, was violently and instantaneously pushed outward to a diameter of several kilometers.
Directly before Kaito's fingertips, the golden torrent of pure Ki began to aggressively, relentlessly, and entirely unshakeably plow its way upward, advancing straight toward Solomon's coordinates in the stratosphere.
The absolute, unadulterated majesty of that kinetic violence caused even the narrow eyes of Hela and Thanos to sharply lock onto their positions.
"It's not enough... it's far from enough!"
"Solomon! Stand rigidly at your post and let the two of us push this engine to its absolute, unmitigated zenith!"
Eight-Fold Kaio-ken!
(End of Chapter)
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