Chapter 821: Singularity of Terminus VS Kamehameha
Zzt~
Hum~
The golden Ki fermented into countless fine arcs of golden lightning, radiating outward uncontrollably.
Rings of concussive Ki waves naturally manifested around Son Goku's frame, cascading across the entire planet.
At this moment, every organism possessing the capacity to sense power registered that horrifying, absolute presence.
Blood streamed down Kaito Shirogane's face. Though his vision had reconstituted in the blink of an eye courtesy of instantaneous regeneration, the concussive chaos and searing ache within his cerebral cortex had yet to recede.
Yet the anomalous presence and profound informational imprint of the Super Saiyan had been burned directly into his consciousness. Driven by the Limit-Break Spiral spinning at maximum output behind his back, his mind relentlessly attempted to deconstruct and replicate the phenomenon.
His obsession with raw martial might was insatiable. Watching Son Goku trigger the Super Saiyan transformation before his very eyes pushed Kaito to the brink of lucid madness.
His heartbeat thundered like a violent orchestral rhythm. His core essence unfurled as soul energy bled uncontrollably into the operational framework of his Sixteen-Fold Kaio-Ken.
A silver sheen first claimed Kaito's pupils, tracing the kaleidoscopic colors with an argent rim, before bleeding through his hair follicles and pores. Wisps of silver radiance leaked into the air.
It looked as though Kaito had been set ablaze by silver luminescence. That overflowing spiritual energy sublimated from his flesh, mirroring the behavior of raw data streams.
Upon crossing into the Super Saiyan state, Goku's countenance shifted, overtaken by the surging combat instincts native to the Saiyan bloodline.
He stood in place, eyes narrowed. The convulsions of the outer world no longer registered in his emotional spectrum.
Neither the aerospace fleet detonating across the horizon from the aftershocks of their duel, nor the concealed entities casting fearful gazes upon him from the shadows, held any meaning to Son Goku.
"Mr. Mercenary Tao... brace yourself. Here I come."
Hum—BANG!
Goku issued the deliberate warning. The moment the sound decayed, he materialized flush against Kaito's flank.
Kaito's Martial God's Ultimate Intent had already been driven to its absolute threshold. Yet the instant the Super Saiyan moved, his entire mind and nervous system felt electrocuted.
His muscles locked reflexively, but his combat condition was at an unprecedented peak.
Reacting almost simultaneously, he plummeted into the Realm of Nothingness.
Goku drove a side hook directly toward Kaito's jaw. The warped Three-Part Revolving Force offered zero resistance against the strike, but the fist merely registered a ghostly trace of friction before passing clean through empty air.
Hum!
The atmosphere was cleaved horizontally by the blow. Far beyond the sensory horizon of even Fourth Sequence entities, monstrous roars echoed from the deep.
Those were the ancient beasts of exorbitant Gourmet Capture Levels lurking in the forgotten corners of this realm.
Yet now, those cries were nothing more than terror-stricken wails.
Goku registered the peculiar evasion once more. The instant the blow connected, the opponent seemed to vanish from existential reality.
Both his Dragon Fist and this side hook had phased through the man's physical form.
Yet a Super Saiyan in full combat mode did not pause out of curiosity or admiration.
His tactical adjustment was instantaneous.
Crack!
The atmosphere detonated. Wrapped in golden Ki, Goku vanished into thin air, leaving only a concussive burst of incandescent air at his origin point.
An infinite barrage of omnidirectional strikes blanketed the local coordinate grid.
Whether this was an ultra-high-speed displacement technique or a physical phase-shift ability, a saturated blanket offensive would lay it bare!
Whoosh!
Gales swept across the sea. Kaito stumbled out from the wind, flesh writhing across his face. Rattled by the sheer pressure of the Super Saiyan, his physical form had stiffened for an imperceptible fraction of a second, delaying Musō Tensei by a hair's breadth.
That microscopic delay was all it took. The displaced air currents whipped up by a casual hook from the Super Saiyan clipped him.
Even that marginal residual pressure had gouged through the Qilin Armor veiling his Physique of the Primordial Man. Under the synergistic amplification of the Third Star Particle—where physical mass and strength scaled exponentially—his jawline was torn open, flesh ripped from bone.
Against an assault like that, any ordinary Reincarnator would have dropped out of the Realm of Nothingness due to involuntary pain, fury, or terror, forfeiting Musō Tensei and being obliterated by the follow-up blow.
Yet the moment Kaito stabilized, he submerged himself entirely into the euphoria of battle; Musō Tensei remained unbroken.
Evading the opening strike and tracking Goku's vector, his Martial God's Ultimate Intent and Mantra Network mapped out Goku's subsequent movement path in a flash.
Spirit of the Wind!
Engaging Musō Tensei and Spirit of the Wind in tandem, Kaito slid through the disintegrating atmosphere, blown thousands of miles out to sea.
Strictly speaking, he had long been knocked out of the ring. Yet the island hosting the tournament had already been reduced to barren bedrock, its surface razed clean by the clash between the Serious Punch and the Dragon Fist.
Swoosh~
Kaito's gaze sharpened. Disengaging Musō Tensei to reposition, the Super Saiyan materialized at his prior coordinates precisely as anticipated.
Goku lowered his eyes, opening his empty palm, his deep voice carrying clear recognition.
"I see... two distinct techniques. One allows you to dissolve into the wind, while the other is a mastery of evasion that transcends physical instinct."
"Mercenary Tao, you really are something."
Goku had unraveled the dual nature of Spirit of the Wind and Musō Tensei.
He remained stationary, allowing Kaito to pull distance. He could sense that the man's flawless maintenance of the high-multiplier Kaio-Ken was on borrowed time.
And given this Mercenary Tao's temperament, he would not run forever.
Benevolent as Goku was, his combat intuition regarding an opponent's spirit was absolute.
This Mercenary Tao was not the craven, underhanded assassin of his childhood memories, but an entity utterly consumed by the pursuit of raw martial power.
Goku held no aversion toward those obsessed with strength; he was equally devoted to self-cultivation.
Yet this man walked a fundamentally corrupt path, willing to unleash catastrophic horrors upon innocent populations purely to secure an advantage.
Goku dropped into a low stance, squaring his shoulders and settling into a formal martial posture. The casualness was gone.
Kaito's scalp prickled with searing alarm. In his state of Martial God's Ultimate Intent, he was unified with heaven and earth, yet an empirical premonition screamed that he was completely locked down.
The sheer scale of this adversary defied reason. Whether Ryo, Izayoi Sakamaki, or the various Beasts he had encountered in the past, none could bridge the dimensional gulf separating them from this man.
"Hah..." Kaito exhaled a ragged breath, choosing not to engage Musō Tensei. If Goku executed Instant Transmission now, a single strike would erase him.
Yet as he suspected, the pride of the Super Saiyan forbade cheap tricks.
Goku was granting him the window to unleash his absolute strongest strike.
Driven to their limit, the strands of Kaito's Limit-Break Spiral drilled into the void behind him like azure dragons, turning with violent angular momentum.
Spiral, transcend, reach toward higher realms, lust for absolute purity, drive deep into the foundational bedrock of reality, pierce the void!
Across the unseen ether, Kaito caught the resonance of the spiral power he had previously dismissed. Deep within the leveled mountain behind the island, the Reincarnator known as Yoko Ekaterina stood motionless.
The golden radiance in her grasp similarly bored into the void in a tight spiral, carving open a pitch-black corridor.
From that abyssal threshold, Kaito registered fragments of extraordinary data.
That presence is...
Hum~
Kaito's body vibrated at a microscopic frequency, every cell oscillating against the fabric of reality.
His existential anchor began to destabilize.
Spiral power pushed past the breaking point threatened to unravel his biological coherence. The entity known as Kaito Shirogane was on the verge of dissolving into primordial soup under the sheer torque of the spiral.
This was his first time consciously grasping the existence of spiral power and the hard ceiling of his current vessel.
Yet he refused to yield, pulling on the current with voracious hunger.
Before the match began, his rational mind had calculated that dueling Goku in a tournament setting carried minimal risk of death. Defeat would yield severe trauma at worst, which the self-sustaining vitality of his Primordial Man physique, layered atop high-tier immortality and instantaneous regeneration, would effortlessly mend. Challenging Goku was a risk-free investment to siphon the Saiyan's techniques through his occult methods.
He had initially aimed only to force out the Super Saiyan transformation and the Dragon Fist.
Yet now, all calculations were discarded. Pitted against an adversary of this magnitude, pulling back without a total, unbridled collision would leave an indelible scar upon his martial soul.
Once he left this world, epochs might pass before he stood before a titan of this stature again.
Battle. He wanted to fight. He wanted to push combat to absolute ruin!
ROAR!
A soul-shattering roar detonated from within Kaito's spirit.
Argent radiance flared with such density that it suppressed the golden Ki.
Chalk-white spiritual matter surged from his core, spreading across his physical vessel like an encroaching shell.
It was matter condensed from hyper-dense soul energy.
Kaito's frame elongated as demonic horns curved outward from his skull, his physical form buried beneath the calcified spiritual husk.
Over his chest, his flesh dissolved, hollowing out into a gaping void.
Goku's brows furrowed. He had never witnessed a transformation of this nature. The spiritual displacement radiating from the creature exerted a stifling, psychic pressure upon his own chest.
Just as the white shell was about to swallow Kaito's form entirely, an enraged bellow tore from the inhuman throat.
"No!"
The Hollowfication process was forcibly shattered. Illusory shockwaves rippled outward as the silver King's Heart flared within his ribs.
Kaito sought power—the power of pure, unadulterated martial arts to clash against Son Goku—not an unthinking descent into mindless instinct.
Without letting the spiritual energy dissipate, Kaito deployed his final reserve.
Seven seconds remained on the Key of Miracles.
Heaven and Earth Manifestation: Unleash!
Kaito's frame expanded exponentially, his surging life force crushing the encroaching white spiritual matter into oblivion.
At long last, Kaito's presence broke free from the suffocating shadow of Son Goku.
High above the planetary atmosphere, three God Kings stood in alignment: Apollo, Luna, and the King of Thunder, their gazes fixed coldly on the duel unfolding below.
"The Paradise's calculation was sound. The combat output of the special unit Archetype of Terminus and Genesis is completely overflowing; standard Third Sequence assets cannot neutralize him."
"It seems we judged Thor too harshly. To encounter an adversary of this scale in a secondary world... his demise was an honorable necessity."
The patriarch of the Thunder pantheon—a scarred, silver-haired deity with a bare torso—finally laid down his grievances. The loss of both a Son of God and a True God in a single world had been an intolerable insult to his martial pantheon, yet witnessing this display granted retrospective legitimacy to Thor's end.
"Wait... is that the Eastern pantheon's Heaven and Earth Manifestation?!"
The Void Paradise possessed its own Eastern mythological sequences. Looking down at the sea, the Archetype of Terminus and Genesis had swelled to astronomical proportions, his feet planted upon the ocean floor while his crown brushed the upper stratosphere.
That titanic mass and terrifying presence warped physical reality, grinding against the space occupied by the three God Kings.
The presence of True Gods naturally bent the material realm to their will. Yet now, an overwhelming tidal wave of foreign presence hammered violently against their own domains.
Looking through the thinning atmosphere, they met the gaze of that colossal visage, half-caked in calcified spiritual remnants, glaring down at the speck of gold below.
The titan coiled his right arm back. Endless currents of Ki, kinetic mass, and soul force collapsed inward.
Hum—CRACK!
Through the True Eyes of the Sun, Apollo observed the chaotic interplay of forces within the martial titan. Disparate, incompatible currents collided, compressed violently under the iron authority of an overarching essence, and fused into an entirely new genus of power.
Settling into the stance of the Serious Punch, Kaito drove his absolute apex strike down toward Son Goku standing upon the churning sea.
Heaven and Earth Manifestation + Sixteen-Fold Kaio-Ken + Limiter + Abyssal Art: Singularity of Terminus!
BOOM!
The mere motion of lifting the fist caused the entire island shelf to shatter and lift skyward, dragging billions of tons of matter into the vacuum wake of the strike.
The ocean surged upward toward the heavens.
The planet itself seemed to be violently hauled off its axis.
At that moment, Son Goku registered the ultimate martial art of an entirely foreign cosmos.
He sank into a deep, disciplined stance, cupping his hands at his hip.
Golden Ki condensed to an absolute, blinding point.
"Ka..."
"Me..."
"Ha..."
"Me..."
BOOM!