Chapter 647: The Only Way Out, The Reappearance of the Black King
The headless torso of Gilgamesh plummeted from Kaito Shirogane's left hand. Because the Eternals were structurally a specialized race possessing high-tier immortality attributes, even if they were teriminally dismantled, their physical forms would eventually execute a full reconstruction.
Kaito failed to receive a kill notification from the Space panel. These biological servants, specifically left behind on Earth by the Celestials to nurture their unborn kin, were currently revealing an absolute, entirely unconcealed hostility toward him as if they were some grand arbiters of cosmic justice.
Hum~
The head-on clash between his golden Ki-Wave and the cosmic heat rays did not drag out. In a fraction of a second, Ikaris violently tilted his head in sheer panic, allowing that specific Dodon Ray to graze past his ear and shoot straight out into the stratosphere, vanishing into the cosmos.
Kaito Shirogane's single remaining hand blurred with immense velocity, continuously pointing his fingers toward Ikaris and every surviving member of the Eternals operating on the grid.
Columns of golden Ki shot out like a succession of rapid, hyper-concentrated auroras.
Down on the pavement, due to the continental submersion being forcefully blockaded and suspended mid-collapse, the legions of Chitauri soldiers Thanos had brought along managed to slip past an absolute extinction event. These cold-blooded biological assets, armed with peak conventional tech, immediately swarmed toward the surviving human population.
Their singular structural directive was to aggressively trail Thanos's coordinates, systematically executing every single living organism on the grid until the Titan explicitly ordered a cessation of hostilities.
A total, multi-faction chaos exploded in a heartbeat. Wearing her elegant green gown, Sersi desperately deployed her molecular-level matter re-engineering capabilities, frantically attempting to reconstruct and stitch together the continental tectonic plates that had been completely vaporized and erased by Kaito's single Serious Punch.
Yet, in the very next fraction of a second, her frame was cleanly struck by dozens of concentrated blaster cannon rays from the Chitauri line.
The fundamental mission of the Eternals was to safeguard the ascension and development of planetary civilizations, explicitly ensuring that the cosmic Celestial slumbers deep within the planet's core could successfully achieve full maturation.
The Celestials represented an absolute, top-tier classification of cosmic entities within the Marvel multiverse, structurally functioning as the literal materialization of abstract cosmic concepts.
These cosmic deities would incubate within the core of specific worlds, continuously siphoning the collective evolutionary force of the local civilization, before eventually executing an absolute [Emergence] once their development cleared all parameters.
The so-called [Emergence] was the exact macrosecond these supreme cosmic entities would violently shatter and tear through the very planet that had served as the biological womb for their incubation.
The total, absolute annihilation of the planetary civilization and its underlying geography served as nothing more than the initial birth-cry and ceremonial celebration for the god's ascension.
And the Eternals were precisely the hyper-specialized race engineered and manufactured by the Celestials to act as the automated guardians of this incubation cycle. The structural rewriting of their cognitive frameworks and individual memories forced them to genuinely believe that their actions were rooted in absolute benevolence and universal justice.
These immortal metahumans spent millennia cradling the development of civilizations with hearts full of supposed justice and mercy—completely oblivious to the reality that the exact millisecond the Celestial completed its incubation and the Emergence was initiated, all life on their world would enter a state of total, absolute termination.
Granted, Kaito Shirogane harbored zero personal interest in mocking the evolutionary cycle of these cosmic deities; he simply evaluated the collective psychology of the Eternals as a cluster of pathetic, hollow insects driven by vacant ideals of justice.
They were a breed of freaks who lived without a single trace of understanding regarding why they had been manufactured, and who would die without ever comprehending why they were being erased.
An entity possessing this caliber of monumental power, structurally endowed with absolute immortality and unyielding lifespans, yet completely incapable of looking through a fundamental riddle that even a clever human philosopher could easily parse—it rendered their existence pathetically small, fragile, and hollow to his senses.
Just like the current layout of the board: omitting Ikaris, who was thoroughly intoxicated by his own exceptional physical metrics, the remaining members of the Eternals still harbored a deeply naive, primitive delusion.
A childish delusion that they could somehow establish a line of communication or diplomatic dialogue with a monster like him.
Heh~
Kaito evaluated the group with cold, pitiless eyes, his greedy gaze smoothly shifting away from their silhouettes to lock straight into the stygian darkness of the colossal subterranean chasm.
Although his analytical matrix had briefly considered the parameters of this unborn Celestial—Tiamut—an absolute cosmic entity of that classification was simply too monumentally vast for his current power parameters to effectively harvest.
Even if the creature lacked a single line of active conceptual authority or dimensional manipulation traits post-birth, a raw planetary-tier biological organism was structurally beyond the capacity of the current Kaito Shirogane to decisively shatter or dominate.
Or to examine it through the grander structural settings utilized across the Infinite Dimension Space: these supreme cosmic deities inherently possessed the true essence of an absolute [Astral Spirit], automatically amassing the underlying capital required to touch the absolute boundaries of the [God] classification—a boundary that not a single active Reincarnator across the realms had ever successfully breached.
They did not require a lifetime of arduous cultivation or structural scaling to touch that boundary; the exact millisecond the [Emergence] was finalized, their biology naturally and flawlessly occupied that tier of existence.
This was highly likely the absolute definition of a true, supreme [Apex Species]~
Ikaris utilized his exceptional velocity mechanics to execute a series of rapid, high-speed evasive maneuvers, cleanly slipping past the incoming Dodon Rays. Possessing flight capabilities, high-speed displacement, a supreme physical vessel, and cosmic heat rays, his combat profile could practically be classified as a localized derivation of a Kryptonian.
Except, evaluated purely through the metric of raw, absolute strength, his limits failed to hit that monumental benchmark—systematically denying him the capacity to pose a genuine, existential threat to Kaito's coordinates.
Following his structural ascent to the sixth tier of the [Stairway of Eternal Return]: The Ultimate Lifeform, Kaito Shirogane naturally possessed the cellular capacity to maintain a two-fold Kaio-ken as a permanent, active baseline without experiencing structural decay. Yet at this precise microsecond, he was aggressively forcing his engine to sustain a full Eight-Fold Kaio-ken output.
Relying upon his regular baseline parameters following the total liberation of his Limiter's first threshold—which sat at an unyielding 120+ points of absolute Strength—the exact microsecond his [Qilin Armor] was activated, his Strength threshold violently shattered the 360-point benchmark. When multiplied across the hyper-accelerated output of his Eight-Fold Kaio-ken, Kaito Shirogane's singular physical attributes were aggressively converging toward the three-thousand-point threshold!
What manner of monumentally cataclysmic, absolute force was this? Thanos—an apex predator whose raw muscle density supported using a few physical punches to beat the Hulk into total cognitive submission—had been nearly completely and flawlessly vaporized down to the atom by his single Serious Punch.
At this exact millisecond, although the vaporization of his right arm from the elbow down had structurally disrupted his perfect internal self-circulation loop, Kaito Shirogane still possessed more than enough energetic capacity to comfortably lock his engine inside the Eight-Fold Kaio-ken status for a brief operational window.
If he harbored the intent, he could forcefully disintegrate Ikaris into a spray of molecular dust in a single fraction of a second.
Kaito swatted at Ikaris with the careless indifference of a man brushing away an annoying insect, before allowing his massive, silver-haired frame to actively plummet straight into the deep coordinates of the abyssal chasm.
Sensing the monumental torrent of raw, unmitigated power bleeding from the depths of the earth, a deeply insatiable, ravenous greed compelled him to aggressively force his hands down to touch a supreme cosmic deity that had failed to ever execute its narrative [Emergence] within the original timeline!
Watching the silver-haired monster drop into the chasm, Solomon's cold expression violently warped. The spiral-like pinpricks crystallized within his heterochromatic pupils illuminated with the resplendent gleam of starlight, and his hands executed two microscopic twitches before rigidly freezing as he forcefully aborted his motor movements.
Within that fraction of a second, his precognitive arrays had scanned countless shifting variations of the immediate timeline. The analytical conclusion was razor-sharp: the exact millisecond he attempted to channel a single spell formula on this grid, Mercenary Tao would instantaneously weaponize his velocity to vaporize his existence from the board.
Furthermore, across a massive percentage of those simulated timelines, his high-tier resurrection contingencies completely caved to absolute futility, failing to trigger a single restart.
He tracked the silhouette of Mercenary Tao plowing deeper into the invisible depths of the abyssal chasm. In the very next microsecond, Solomon forcefully snapped his fingers.
Snap!
A blinding wave of silver-white radiance ignited across the atmosphere once more.
The blonde warrior Thena violently shuddered as a silver-white lance cleanly and flawlessly punched straight through her cosmic armor. In the next fraction of a second, rows of Holy Lances illuminated the sky over the collapsing metropolis of New York once more.
Ikaris's tactical reactions were exceptionally elite; he instantly directed a maximum-intensity pair of cosmic heat rays to blast Solomon through the air.
Solomon's energy wings flexed, his frame utilizing rapid flash-displacements to effortlessly chart a trajectory toward a specific quadrant of the city.
Down below, Captain Marvel aggressively forced her biology back into her full [Binary] state, morphing into a blazing streak of pure white cosmic aurora as she launched a head-on intercept trajectory targeting his coordinates.
Solomon threw his arms wide, his left palm tracking the approach of Captain Marvel while his right hand locked onto the coordinates of Ikaris.
Behind his back, the structural phantom of his ascended developmental stairway had nearly completed its total compilation—one absolute flank burning a pitch-black demonic dark, the opposing flank radiating a pristine holy white. The fragment of the Darkhold was the absolute first asset to ignite into a cinder, followed immediately by the Angel's Feather. As his stored reserves of Holy Power aggressively cratered toward absolute depletion, the relics were systematically burned down to fuel a final output.
Solomon was professionally, meticulously aware that the exact microsecond these two high-tier artifacts were reduced to ash, his framework would structurally lose the capacity to sustain the massive load of a wide-area [St. George's Sanctuary] over the sector. He focused his palms straight toward the quadrant where Hela was currently operating.
Raising both hands high, thousands of silver-white pinpricks of light ignited across the stratosphere. In the very next heartbeat, the entire local audio field collapsed into a dead, absolute silence.
Boom, boom, boom, boom...
Like a synchronized chain detonation of localized tactical munitions, the silver-white Holy Lances plummeted downward in the shape of massive, intersecting crucifixes. Right on their heels came the deep, structural screech of the urban geology and foundational bedrock completely fracturing into pieces.
[Notification: You have terminated Avengers Asset: James Rhodes (War Machine). You have obtained C-Rank Singularity * 2.]
[Notification: You have terminated Asgardian Assets: The Warriors Three. You have obtained B-Rank Singularity * 1.]
[Notification: You have terminated...]
Evaluating the absolute torrent of system notifications aggressively flooding his vision, Solomon's mind grew steadily heavier, trapped under a suffocating weight. This was an exceptionally dangerous, volatile tactical gamble. At this precise stage of the conflict, every single living resource and high-tier asset operating on this worldline functioned as the absolute, direct bait to nourish Mercenary Tao's developmental engine.
He was flawlessly, professionally aware that the only reason his own existence hadn't been systematically erased from the board by that silver-haired monster was explicitly because Mercenary Tao desired a clean, unmitigated deathmatch against his consciousness once his mind was fully lucid and awake.
But if he aggressively plundered the very resources Mercenary Tao had cordoned off to feed his own engine, the exact millisecond the monster breached the chasm to return to the surface, his absolute primary directive would be to forcefully and completely erase Solomon from the logs of the Space.
Yet despite holding a perfect analytical understanding of this outcome, Solomon still forced his hands to execute the slaughter.
He had scanned an immense layout of precognitive futures centering around Mercenary Tao. Across that vast sea of shifting timelines, there existed only one singular, microscopic thread where his own soul... managed to survive!
Solomon practically shrugged off the combined, punishing counter-assaults executed by Captain Marvel and Ikaris, forcefully maintaining a wide-area mass execution across the entire sector.
Whether it was the fleeing human cattle, the core members of the Avengers roster, or the scattered lines of the Chitauri legions, his Holy Lances systematically and non-discriminatorively reduced them all to ash.
His operational Milestones continuously refreshed across his panel, yet Solomon possessed zero baseline focus left to evaluate the text.
Deep beneath the planetary crust, the violent, cataclysmic tremors accelerated at a monstrous rate. Solomon turned his frame around, aggressively directing a maximum-output formation of [Dragon-Slaying Spears] to plow straight toward the regional border parameters of New Jersey.
Finally, directly before his eyes, a dense wall of system warnings—completely flooded with an intertwined, flashing network of deep crimson and pitch-black script—violently erupted across his vision.
[CRITICAL WARNING! The Supreme Entity · The Black King is on the verge of forcing a direct orbital entry into this mission world.]
[All active Reincarnators are ordered to execute an immediate, unconditional tactical extraction from the coordinates.]
(End of Chapter)
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