Chapter 646: The Awakening of Tiamat, Worldline Collapse
Falcon stumbled back several paces. He lowered his head, staring in stunned disbelief at his own chest, where a finger-wide vacuum cavity had been cleanly punched through his ribcage.
Thick streams of blood sprayed violently from the wound like a punctured pipeline. Sam Wilson's legs finally buckled beneath his weight, and he collapsed limply onto the asphalt, the heavy mechanical flight wings slung across his back transforming into a structural load his failing biology could no longer hope to support.
He unhinged his jaw to articulate a final warning, but his respiratory pathways merely coughed up another dense rope of fresh blood.
"Sam!"
Captain America Steve Rogers completely lost his operational composure. His face was heavily discolored with deep purples and blues, and his uniform was thoroughly shredded by an infinite grid of intersecting, jagged lacerations.
Steve lunged to plant his weight beside Sam, desperately pressing his palms against the wound to anchor the catastrophic hemorrhaging, but his efforts caved to absolute futility. Sam raised his trembling hand, his fingers clawing for the Captain's shoulder, before his strength completely fractured, causing his limb to slide limply back into the dirt.
[Avengers Asset: Sam Wilson (Falcon) — Status: Terminated.]
Further down the boulevard, Fandral, Volstagg, and Hogun executed multiple frantic attempts to regain their footing, but their shattered skeletal frameworks completely denied them the capacity to stand.
Loki continuously hacked and wheezed. His windpipe had sustained a precise, high-velocity hand-blade strike from Hela, a structural blow that had virtually erased his capacity to pull ambient oxygen into his lungs.
Thor's eyes were opened so wide his pupils looked as if they were on the verge of violently bursting from his skull. His mind was completely flooded with an absolute, primeval fury; he had never imagined his ancient older sister would execute a slaughter this mercilessly, right out of the gate.
"Ah!"
Thor unleashed a savage, beast-like shriek, violently wrenching his right arm free from the jagged obsidian spike pinning his flesh to the earth. Disregarding the heavy cognitive daze anchoring his brain and the absolute agony ripping through his cells, he weaponized his remaining divine authority to call Mjolnir straight to his hand before throwing his entire body weight into a maximum-velocity projectile launch targeting Hela.
Hela's eyelids remained lowered, her lips hooked into that signature, highly mocking smile she had maintained since breaching the perimeter.
She thoroughly, intensely despised Thor; she despised Loki even more; and to speak with absolute historical candor, she harbored a total, unyielding disdain for her All-Father, Odin, who had grown pathetic and soft in his twilight years.
This entire exchange had nearly compelled her to burst into a loud, mocking laugh.
This weak, codependent infant known as Thor was actually the absolute candidate Odin had systematically chosen to inherit the Throne of Asgard?
Farcical.
Bang!
Before the divine hammer—heavily reinforced by Odin's ancient runic blessings—could even close the physical distance to Hela's face, her left hand cleanly and effortlessly clamped around the hilt, anchoring the projectile's momentum instantly.
Every surviving asset on the grid rigidly froze.
Whether it was the native Avengers or the elite Warriors Three of Asgard, not a single one of them had ever witnessed a biological organism execute a clean, front-on, single-handed catch against Mjolnir.
Hela's narrow eyes flashed with naked contempt. Applying a sharp, twisting leverage through her right palm, a monumental tide of Necro-Manifestation Divine Power violently exploded within the metal. The underlying Odinforce anchoring the hammer's structural matrix was instantaneously and completely extinguished down to the atom. In the very next fraction of a second, amidst a chaotic detonation of scattered lightning, [Mjolnir, the Hammer of Thor] emitted a series of sharp, mechanical cracks before shattering into millions of useless, dead metallic fragments.
Hela casually let the de-powered shards slip through her fingers to rain onto the asphalt. Dropping her arms loosely to her sides, she advanced with a slow, deliberate stride toward a Thor who was currently trapped in an absolute state of psychological paralysis.
This time, the surviving insects calling themselves the Avengers did not possess a single line of nerve left to launch another suicidal defensive intercept.
Hela's eyelids remained lowered; when pinned against the absolute, overriding weight of terminal Death, concepts like "heroism" and "courage" caved to absolute nothingness.
This world had operated under this exact baseline logic since the dawn of time; it was an immutable cosmic paradigm.
Hela slowly aligned the tip of her obsidian necro-blade with Thor's throat, preparing to drive it home, when a crisp, structural crack violently echoed through the entire continental shelf.
In the very next fraction of a second, an unimaginably vast, apocalyptic tide of raw kinetic violence exploded straight out of the earth.
Hela felt the bedrock beneath her boots detonate outward as if a localized supernova had just executed a subterranean ignition. Accompanied by the deep, structural screech of the tectonic plates fracturing under a load they possessed zero capacity to bear, the entire spatial configuration of the local grid was instantaneously inverted.
Creeeak... BOOM!
The sky and earth violently contorted. A crushing, multidimensional concussive shockwave radiated outward from every single coordinate, as if a literal gravitational black hole had materialized directly beneath the metropolis, aggressively pulling all physical reality into its core.
Still clutching Sam's cooling corpse, Captain America felt the earth beneath his knees violently bucking. A high-intensity kinetic compression wave struck his chest, forcing him to immediately cough up a thick rope of fresh blood before his support network completely liquefied, causing his frame and Falcon's corpse to slide unsteadily down the rapidly steepening incline.
Down? Steve forced his eyelids up, only to find that the spatial layout of his world had been structurally tilted. The urban foundations of Manhattan that had been relatively unblemished a microsecond ago, alongside the surrounding multi-tiered skyscrapers—everything had completed a severe, catastrophic pivot, visibly plowing down into a central, abyssal sinkhole.
Loki frantically drove a small dagger deep into the fracturing concrete to anchor his mass against the incline, while Thor let out a startled shriek as his heavy frame was violently and helplessly swept down the listing landmass.
Only Hela utilized her levitation mechanics to slowly ascend into the upper atmosphere, completely untethering her frame from the collapsing topography.
Examining the sector from her high vantage point, the entirety of New York City was currently executing a total structural collapse. The absolute epicenter of the sinkhole occupied the coastal flank bordering the bay; a massive purple Titan was currently pinned down, his musculature violently twisted to the side, while a man whose long, incandescent silver hair was whipping wildly toward the sky had his fist driven completely and flawlessly into the bedrock.
Rumble!
The continental shelf was systematically and unshakeably sliding down into the deep, as the surrounding ocean walls and local air currents violently spiraled inward to fill the expanding vacuum.
This single strike had structurally pulverized the very tectonic plates anchoring the region, forcing the entire landmass to enter an instantaneous state of absolute submersion.
This was... Continental Submersion!
Throughout millions of years of Asgardian history, Midgard had always been dismissed by the All-Father's pantheon as a dusty, primitive waste disposal unit—a low-tier world completely devoid of value.
The only reason Odin had historically chosen to hide various high-tier cosmic artifacts across Earth was precisely because its native population was so pathetically weak, ensuring that high-level galactic threats would never naturally bother to direct their scanning arrays toward this coordinate.
Yet right now, a mere mortal insect crawling within this dirt had just used a raw physical punch to completely and flawlessly shatter a planetary tectonic plate.
Boom!
The terrain continued its severe, chaotic fragmentation as a colossal siphoning vortex materialized in the center of the bay. Amidst the distant, panicked shrieks of hundreds of thousands of humans, all structural reality on the grid was dissolving into nothingness.
And the devastation was by no means restricted to the human cattle; from the underbelly of the colossal cosmic dreadnought hovering over the clouds, an infinite horde of Outriders and bio-engineered beasts were similarly being violently dragged down by the inescapable gravitational vacuum, rain-falling straight into the expanding sinkhole.
"Ha... Hahaha..."
Kaito Shirogane clamped his left hand tightly around his right arm; his limb had been completely and flawlessly vaporized from the elbow down. Yet at this exact microsecond, his underlying senses could distinctly, sharply perceive the residual tide of that unmatched, absolute destructiveness brewing directly before his knuckles.
His engine no longer required the high-priority activation reinforcement of the [Mural of Mortal Death]. Any biological entity or cosmic powerhouse that dared to plant its coordinates directly within the trajectory of a strike like this would be instantaneously and completely vaporized down to the atom!
Kaito inhaled a series of sharp, ravenous breaths. Dense columns of golden Ki, mixed with a mist of blood and a thick, superheated plume of exhaust steam, continuously detonated from his lips and nostrils.
The thudding velocity of his heart was only just beginning to decelerate from its peak threshold, and his cerebral matrix was throbbing with an agonizing, blinding sting—the clear indication that his [Hyper-Limit Spiral] had been forcefully driven to its absolute, unmitigated apex output.
Yet, Kaito Shirogane merely wanted to throw his head back and unleash a loud, maniacal laugh. He was entirely, flawlessly certain: that punch was a genuine Serious Punch. Or to analyze it through a cleaner conceptual framework—that was a supreme, absolute strike that perfectly, flawlessly replicated the exact spiritual essence and sub-atomic alignment of the moment Saitama had historically driven his fist through his own flesh to erase his existence from the board!
Although his personal consciousness had broken through the replication matrix at the absolute final microsecond—causing the structural compilation to lose that final step designed to collapse all available force into an absolute, localized point—which systematically triggered a premature energy leakage and a total loss of vector control, the raw kinetic output of the strike still remained completely without rival across the realms.
Among all the Reincarnators Kaito had personally engaged throughout his operational cycles, his diagnostics concluded that even if one evaluated that freak Destiny Eternal or the End-Time Solar Flare—completely omitting their unmapped, high-priority Title capabilities—they would still possess absolutely zero baseline capacity to safely anchor a strike of this magnitude.
Down within the crater, Thanos's psychological baseline was violently vibrating. He had been a single micro-gram of kinetic force away from being instantaneously vaporized by that punch. Although he lacked a clear understanding of why his rival had suffered a sudden loss of vector control at the absolute final microsecond—causing the core of the fist to violently detonate into a scattered blast wave right before his chest—
The battle-hardened Titan had officially developed a profound, preternatural sense of sheer dread.
It was identical to the ancient caution he had historically harbored when facing the absolute zenith of Odin and the Ancient One. No, correction: those two galactic powerhouses were entities Thanos merely respected, choosing to actively avoid initiating an open conflict against them. But the monster hovering above him had just forced a genuine, icy thread of pure terror straight into his soul.
Evaluating the one-armed, silver-haired man, the Titan actually refrained from unhinging his jaw to demand the surrender of the [Mind Stone].
Indeed, the absolute primary driver behind Thanos's decision to initiate a direct orbital insertion and launch a head-on assault against Kaito Shirogane was entirely based on Ebony Maw's analytical deduction that this stranger had systematically plundered the Infinity Gem from Vision's corpse.
Furthermore, his scanning arrays had verified that both Odin and the Ancient One had double-fallen from the board, but...
Thanos evaluated Kaito, whose biological metrics were presenting visible indicators of systemic breakdown following the execution of that punch. Rather than choosing to aggressively launch a follow-up strike to harvest the target, the Titan leveraged the violent downward traction of the listing terrain to roll his massive frame clear of the sector, dropping deeper into the crater.
Kaito Shirogane possessed absolutely zero intention to allow a prime asset to lazily slip from his fingers. He violently snapped his left hand forward, a sharp spear of golden Ki instantaneously punching straight through Thanos's heavy torso before Kaito sharply raised his fingertips.
That hyper-concentrated stream of Ki acted identically to an absolute, solid iron rod, cleanly hoisting the massive Titan's weight into the upper atmosphere.
Thanos let out a low, muffled grunt of pure agony. His twin arms—having been structurally twisted and broken by the concussive wind pressure of that Serious Punch—hung limply from his shoulders like dead meat, leaving him entirely incapable of movement as he forced his narrow eyes up to evaluate his captor.
It was at this exact microsecond that Solomon—whose head had been completely detonated moments earlier—finally completed his absolute biological reconstruction. Having forced his neural pathways to execute a full structural rebuild, his system successfully dissolved the automated subroutines of his [John's Pen Mode Script].
Solomon's eyelids snapped open. Within those heterochromatic pupils—one brilliant blue, one deep crimson—a series of complex, spiral-like pinpricks crystallized to scan reality, as if methodically measuring a profound variable, before his psychological baseline was instantly and thoroughly shattered by the spectacle materializing right before his face.
Enveloped in an intricate, shifting network of pitch-black marks, Mercenary Tao stood rigidly mid-air, his long, incandescent silver hair whipping wildly behind his shoulders, as a wave of localized pressure so immense it verged on pure cosmic horror radiated from his frame without a single line of resistance.
Mirroring the exact, absolute methodology of a Super Saiyan from the Dragon Ball multiverse, the current Mercenary Tao was casually utilizing nothing more than a localized emission of his raw [Ki] to completely hoist the absolute weight of this universe's Thanos.
Granted, this was a Thanos completely devoid of the Infinity Gauntlet; granted, this was a Thanos whose raw metrics were restricted to a cinematic framework; but this was nonetheless an apex predator who possessed the undisputed capacity to systematically and effortlessly crush the combined strength of the Hulk, Thor, and the entire Avengers roster in a head-on engagement.
"Yo. You've finally broken through the processing loop, Solomon~"
The one-armed Mercenary Tao had refrained from allowing his severed right arm to execute biological regeneration, yet Solomon could distinctly, sharply perceive that his own soul was completely encased within an absolute shroud of terminal death.
The black-and-white energy wings unfurled across his back completely ceased their vibration. At this exact microsecond, he was a single step away from successfully breaching the eighth tier of the [Stairway of Light and Dark].
Yet... what did an achievement of that classification even amount to on a board like this...
A Mercenary Tao operating under these precise parameters had cleanly, flawlessly secured an overriding threshold of raw violence. Even if Solomon successfully pushed his biology into the absolute apex of the [Fierce] tier, it would cede him zero tactical leverage.
Once a practitioner of the [Ki] developmental system amassed a volume of energy that systematically and flawlessly eclipsed the operational capacity of a specialized spellcaster, the ensuing exchange ceased to be a battle; it became an absolute, unilateral execution.
He didn't even need to direct his conscious focus toward the Space panel to verify his diagnostics; he knew with absolute, professional clarity that even if he forcefully deployed [Saint's Collapse] or [My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me], it would be structurally impossible to depress a Mercenary Tao of this classification.
When a practitioner's Ki achieved a sufficiently monstrous density, it granted them an absolute, overriding immunity against specialized mechanic-based capabilities!
The board was clean. He had been completely routed...
Solomon had never once calculated that upon activating the [Stairway of Light and Dark], the dualistic圣魔 forces would violently backfire to lock his consciousness inside an automated processing script.
In truth, his tactical matrix had meticulously compiled numerous contingencies to govern his survival metrics should his vessel be teriminally routed by Thanos, Hela, or Captain Marvel. As long as he purposefully refrained from provoking Wanda into executing a total existential erasure, standard physical death was a variable his assets could seamlessly shrug off.
But...
Solomon methodically expanded his sensory grid across the sector, yet his scanning arrays failed to locate a single wisp of Satoru Gojo's elemental signature within the collapsing geology below.
Just as Kaito Shirogane prepared to unhinge his jaw to continue the execution, his predatory instincts abruptly captured a monumental shift in the local parameters. He sharply snapped his eyes downward.
He directed his absolute focus straight into the stygian, pitch-black sinkhole his Serious Punch had violently driven through the bedrock.
Seawater, urban masonry, and massive blocks of continental geology were continuously tumbling inward to fill the void—yet from the deepest coordinates of that subterranean abyss, a wave of pure, unadulterated, and monumentally terrifying presence was steadily beginning to radiate outward.
Hum!
A blinding flare of pure golden light violently illuminated the sky. In the very next fraction of a second, Kaito Shirogane's frame was cleanly struck by a high-intensity, concentrated beam of cosmic energy.
Bang!
As his Three Parts Returning to Origin Force field violently exploded into a spray of kinetic sparks under the impact, Kaito was shoved backward across the upper atmosphere, his grip loosening to allow the broken form of Thanos to tumble spinning back toward the listing earth below.
A biological organism radiating a dense, hyper-concentrated aura of pure golden cosmic energy was hovering lazily in the air, his narrow eyes smoothly locking onto Kaito's coordinates, the intense heat rays only just beginning to recede from his eyes.
And accompanied by a deafening, earth-shaking roar, an exceptionally heavily muscled metahuman belonging to the Eternals violently launched his massive frame from the edge of the collapsing bedrock, his fists tightly clenched as a dense shroud of golden cosmic energy solidified around his knuckles, driving a heavy strike straight toward Kaito's head.
On the ground below, the remaining members of the Eternals were frantically deploying their specialized manipulation capabilities to forge a massive, structural barrier of cosmic light, desperately attempting to blockade the listing ruins of New York to keep the landmass from tumbling into that stygian subterranean abyss.
Solomon's cold expression remained entirely unmoved; his analytical matrix had long since calculated the exact parameters governing the eventual entry of the Eternals onto the board. Directly before his coordinates, a blonde female warrior belonging to the Eternals—Thena—had already crystallized her cosmic energy into a long, gleaming blade, resting the edge of the weapon flawlessly against his throat.
Thud!
Amidst a low, muffled concussive impact, Thena's pupils violently dilated before her entire cognitive process rigidly froze into a state of absolute daze. Standing right before her eyes, the individual who possessed the absolute pinnacle of physical strength among their entire eternal collective—Gilgamesh—had just been cleanly and effortlessly grabbed by the face under a lone hand, hoisted limply into the upper atmosphere.
Registering the anomaly, Ikaris instantly directed another pair of maximum-intensity cosmic heat rays to blast toward the coordinates, but the only response ceding his vision was an absolute, sky-tearing column of pure gold Ki-Wave erupting straight out from the smoke.
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