Chapter 645: Continental Submersion, Serious Punch!
"Thanos..."
Kaito Shirogane lowered his eyelids, casually tossing the heavy war glaive out of his hand.
Boom!
The war glaive, enveloped in a blazing shroud of white sonic clouds, violently crashed straight into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.
"I hadn't even crossed the stars to hunt you down yet, and you choose to actively present yourself on a silver platter?"
Kaito slowly descended from the air, his voice heavily reinforced by his internal kinetic energy, booming and vibrating directly inside Thanos's ears.
The Titan's physical constitution was monumentally formidable; he merely furrowed his brow, registering a passing wave of discomfort. He evaluated the human before him—no, correction: he was somewhat uncertain whether this entity could even be classified as a human being anymore.
Perhaps an Eternal?
This stranger was currently radiating a wave of presence that could only be described as absolute terror.
Labeling him a humanoid ferocious beast was entirely insufficient to map his metrics. Even if he were a genuine primeval beast, Thanos had slaughtered an unmapped number of them across the cosmos.
Yet, within this "slender" physical vessel lay a compressed, explosive tide of raw violence.
Kaito Shirogane naturally landed on the shattered pavement, bringing his frame less than a meter away from Thanos, the Three Parts Returning to Origin Force on his body surface directly slamming against the Titan.
The distorted force field emitted a sharp, continuous crackling sound, and Thanos raised a lone arm to anchor his stance, the friction tearing sparks from his heavy armor.
Crack.
The concrete bedrock beneath Thanos's boots instantly entered a state of severe fracturing. He could flawlessly bear the monumental downward pressure, but the underlying terrain simply lacked the structural capacity to resist.
Thanos violently threw a heavy fist straight toward Kaito's torso, but Kaito merely applied a fresh wave of downward leverage.
Bang!
The localized force field buckled violently, yet it displayed zero intention to shatter. Quite the contrary: Thanos registered that crushing, terrifying weight hammering down upon his frame once more, his entire being violently shoved deep into the subterranean geology, leaving only his head exposed above the asphalt.
Kaito stood on the fractured ground, bending his frame slightly as his arrogant eyes meticulously evaluated this top-tier powerhouse of the native universe.
At this exact microsecond, he had officially secured a tier of absolute, overriding dominance that supported this caliber of casual subjugation.
His mind briefly recalled his very first entry into a world containing high-tier energetic forces—the B711 universe. Within that territory, he had experienced a state of total, absolute paralysis and helplessness for the very first time.
Whether it was the absolute master of the spiritual plane, Shigeo Kageyama, or the Tornado of Terror, both were cataclysmic entities he possessed zero baseline capacity to resist.
Today, he had finally, cleanly touched the absolute threshold of that grander boundary, amassing the raw power necessary to forcefully swing his fist before an apex predator of that classification.
Snap!
Kaito Shirogane violently clenched his right fist, a compressed sonic detonation exploding within his palm in a fraction of a second. As brilliant white shockwave shards blasted outward from between his fingers, Thanos registered a terrifying wave of atmospheric thermal heat locking onto the coordinates directly above his head.
That was a hyper-intense heat generated purely by the absolute, sub-atomic friction of the displaced atmosphere. There was zero energy channeling involved; merely clenching his fist had triggered this cataclysmic effect.
This freak...
Thanos unleashed a furious, sky-tearing roar, both of his arms violently bursting upward as an earth-shaking wave of raw, titanic power detonated from within his core.
Rumble!
The already tilted, listing commercial sectors of Manhattan violently shuddered as massive blocks of subterranean bedrock and shattered asphalt were shot into the sky in a non-discriminatory sweep.
Amidst the deafening concussive detonations, Kaito spread his arms wide, his entire frame launching upward with the weightless elegance of a soaring crane.
This movement retained absolutely zero components of the Sky Dance technique; his sensory web had flawlessly captured the exact kinetic trajectory of the brutal force exploding from Thanos's frame, utilizing the displaced air currents to plant his weight atop an invisible cushion of energy, floating even higher into the sky.
Subsequently, a series of sharp, mechanical cracking sounds echoed from within Kaito's frame as his joints, skeletal pathways, and meridian networks completely and flawlessly unlocked. A fraction of a second later, his hyper-dense musculature began to smoothly uncoil and stretch with a deep, resonant screech.
Kaito's physical frame visibly elongated mid-air, as if his entire vessel had instantaneously returned to its absolute most optimized, unblemished baseline.
He drew his right fist back into an extreme, deep chamber while keeping his left arm held horizontally across his torso. Like a primitive martial arts apprentice methodically practicing his foundational alignment, he assumed the most basic, unrefined stance for a standard straight punch.
Hum~
Having violently broken free from the subterranean bedrock, Thanos registered that the floating debris and rampaging air currents in the atmosphere had suddenly executed a sharp, synchronized inversion of their trajectories. Rhythmic rings of blazing white air currents began to materialize like a localized vortex, roiling directly over his coordinates.
And the absolute center of that sky-spanning atmospheric vortex was the locked fist of that black-haired human!
Thump!
In this exact microsecond, Thanos felt his heart deliver an exceptionally violent, concussive thud—as if his underlying flesh and absolute predatory instincts had cleanly registered a monumental, existential hazard.
If his heart failed to beat right now, it would structurally lose the capacity to ever beat again.
If his cells failed to unleash their total, unmitigated potential at this microsecond, he would be permanently disqualified from ever doing so.
This single, unprecedented flash of total potential liberation made the battle-hardened Titan feel as if his soul had been instantaneously cast back to his ancient wars against the supreme, primordial deities of the cosmos.
This monster...
Thanos drove a heavy boot down onto the collapsing foundational geology. Accompanied by an earth-shaking tremor, the entire urban sector listing into the bay sank by several meters, while the Titan leveraged the kinetic rebound to violently launch his frame skyward.
He threw his entire body forward, both of his massive fists drawn back to their absolute limits. Every block of his musculature was completely engorged with blood under the sheer duress of the exertion, emitting a strained, mechanical creak as if his tendons were on the verge of violently snapping in the next fraction of a second.
This was a duel of pure, unadulterated physical violence!
Thanos's eyes burned an absolute, crimson red as his twin fists violently hammered forward from his shoulders.
Boom, boom, boom, boom!
A succession of over a dozen sonic booms blasted open directly behind his skull, the raw kinetic force of this strike completely and flawlessly eclipsing anything he had executed prior to this descent.
Bang!
Before the fists could even close the physical distance, a blazing white wall of compressed atmospheric resistance exploded right before Kaito's frame, before instantly fracturing into millions of glittering shards against his distorted force field, spiraling away into the vacuum.
Kaito Shirogane forced his eyes wide open, his pupils completely vacant, his focus entirely unaligned with the purple Titan roaring toward his coordinates.
The scene before Kaito's consciousness had dissolved, replaced by a lone individual from the B711 universe—that detached, expressionless bald man.
As that phantom slowly and methodically chambered his fist forward, Kaito Shirogane smoothly, flawlessly synchronized his own motor movements to mirror the trajectory.
It was as if he had entirely divested himself of conscious control over his limbs, aggressively pushing his instinctual capacity to perfectly replicate any physical movement to its absolute, unmitigated zenith.
Just as Thanos's twin fists were on the verge of violently breaching the boundaries of the distorted force field, his pupils suddenly contracted as his senses registered an extraordinary, unmapped anomaly.
His scalp prickled with an agonizing sting, and his cerebral matrix began to experience a heavy, world-spinning hallucination.
In the next fraction of a second, an infinite barrage of chronological images crystallized right before Thanos's eyes before rapidly shifting: he saw his home planet in its unblemished glory, he saw the faces of countless interstellar races he had systematically purged across the cosmos, and he saw his daughter...
Ah!
Thanos violently broke through the psychological shroud of the hallucination. In the very next microsecond, as his narrow eyes locked onto the black-haired man standing close at hand, he registered that the dense streams of golden Ki enveloping Kaito's frame had completely and flawlessly retracted back into his cells.
The stranger's presence had turned entirely unrefined, primitive, and plain. The only remaining kinetic movement came from his long black hair whipping wildly behind his back—its strands steadily and cleanly bleaching into an absolute, incandescent silver hue.
Weaponizing his unique eyes—organs mathematically engineered to flawlessly look through the vast majority of cosmic illusions—Thanos could distinctly, sharply perceive a torrent of gold-shifting energy flowing smoothly within those silver strands.
The ambient atmosphere and local energy metrics had completely entered a state of total collapse.
Thanos suddenly felt his field of vision plunge into absolute darkness. Directly before the black-haired man's knuckles, a single point of pure, stygian void manifested, before violently expanding to swallow the entirety of his sight.
"This is..."
Thanos's heart sank into his chest as if the muscle had been structurally pulverized down to the atom. Throughout his long existence, his physical vessel had sustained an unmapped number of severe wounds, yet not a single one of those galactic conflicts had ever ceded his soul a sensation this terrifying.
Kaito Shirogane stared through the phantom of the bald man driving his fist forward, his own knuckles smoothly clearing his waist to hammer straight out from his shoulder.
An incomparably fluid, mathematically perfect distribution of force—it was as if his newly evolved, supreme physical vessel was unleashing the absolute entirety of its physical capacity without a single micro-gram of kinetic decay, and without a single shred of structural stagnation.
Exhilarating!
It was nothing short of supreme, absolute ecstasy!
Powerful!
An unadulterated, structurally unfathomable tier of power!
At this exact microsecond, Kaito's mental baseline completely fractured into pure bliss. The intricate black markings covering his muscles violently illuminated—an automated, instinctual cellular reaction triggered to support the execution of an even grander threshold of force.
The corners of his mouth split into a wide, manic grin, an uncontrollable wave of profound, rapturous joy washing over his soul as the absolute apex of physical violence was cleanly unleashed from his flesh.
[Serious Punch]!
In the very next fraction of a second, Kaito Shirogane caught a crisp, structural crack, though his senses could no longer differentiate whether it was the local atmosphere violently fracturing under the pressure, or space itself buckling and splintering into shards under a load it lacked the priority to bear.
Or perhaps it was the continental bedrock below collapsing into the deep.
His visual processing had completely blacked out; he was entirely incapable of cataloging those trivial details anymore.
BOOM!
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