Chapter 828: Sovereign of the Realm + All Things Return to the Ruin = Instant Kill
Sizzle—Crack!
Lightning raged like a tempestuous ocean. The Third Sequence God King—no longer restraining his might out of deference to the two encircling Super Saiyans—unsealed his Divine Body to its absolute limits. His sheer physical presence warped the local coordinate space. Suspended mid-air, Kaito Shirogane found his frame passively driven backward by the overwhelming spatial displacement.
Gazing at the two Super Saiyans who had broken off their exchange, Kaito acutely recognized that the God King's reckless interference had disrupted everyone present—himself, Son Goku, and Son Gohan alike.
And to think he had charitably decided against exterminating this nuisance earlier...
"Thunder!"
The Divine Word resonated. Almost instantaneously, Kaito Shirogane was impaled by high-voltage currents. The searing heat and catastrophic electrical discharge pierced straight through the spectral mantle cloaking his frame.
The Cocoon of Greed instantly saturated its absorption ceiling. Blazing golden lightning arced violently across Kaito's perimeter. Because the God King's sovereign domain categorically stripped all lightning resistance and damage immunities, the cocoon failed to grant him additional mitigation.
Kaito's flesh instantly charred to blackened cinders. Even his Qilin Armor failed to arrest the penetrating damage. Yet Kaito merely watched with detached, frigid eyes. Inside his core, the Third Star Particles accelerated their violent revolt, causing his Tier 6 Physique of the Primordial Man—already pushed to its limits bearing the Sixteen-Fold Kaio-Ken—to rupture and collapse on the spot.
Zzt!
In a flash of pure conduction, the God King crossed the distance, plunging his hand straight into the blooming mist of blood. That dense, divine thunder energy carried absolute suppression against all regenerative traits.
Yet a pale, slender hand moved faster than the deity, emerging from the blood mist to seize the God King's massive wrist in an iron vise.
A standard human forearm formed a staggering contrast against a six-meter-tall divine chassis shimmering with golden arcs and divine resonance.
Snap!
The atmosphere detonated into a dense aerosol of shockwaves as raw kinetic force violently asserted its dominance over the material world.
Bang—CRACK!
The colossal arm of the Thunder God fractured into a dazzling cascade of lightning. Only then did the black hair and flesh-and-blood vessel fully reconstitute. Kaito Shirogane looked at the God King reforming his vessel a hundred meters away via instantaneous displacement.
He now held a complete assessment of the deity's destructive yield, velocity, and homing parameters.
An adversary of this profile would wield absolute dominance against ordinary biological entities, and possessed an ideal affinity matchup against the mechanical units of the Machina Court across the way.
He was undeniably the most optimal high-tier vanguard the Void Paradise could deploy into this realm.
"A pity, really..."
The God King heard the God of Martial Arts speak, his cadence dripping with cold pity and regret. Yet within his divine consciousness, he felt the suffocating malice woven beneath those words.
A crimson phantom rippled across Kaito's flesh, draping him in an apparition resembling an evil spirit.
In terms of pure energetic scale, this transformation fell far short of esoteric Eastern arts like the Manifestation of the Cosmic Heavenly Deity.
Yet it exuded a sinister, unsettling malice.
Fortunately, elemental thunder stood at the absolute apex of righteous energies, inherently hard-countering such vile manifestations.
With a thought, the God King mobilized his divine energy once more.
"Divine—"
Hum!
Spacetime buckled with an unnatural frequency inside the deity's senses. An elongated afterimage breached his immediate perimeter, the ambient thunder elements instantly banished from the air.
Too fast!
Before the Divine Word could leave his lips, that grotesque left arm clamped directly over his face, scattering his divine ward in an instant. A burst of Conqueror's Haki flooded the interface, throwing his instinctive elementalization into complete disarray.
Unbridled brute force detonated. The Thunder God's chassis held for a mere fraction of a millisecond before thousands of raw physical attribute points crushed it into golden beams of lightning, driving him down through the twin seas of golden and black Ki.
He punctured the ocean floor, embedding deep into the molten crust beneath.
The sea boiled instantly.
Kaito Shirogane shook his head, engaging Tier 9 Setsuna. His vessel looked like a biological construct on the verge of total collapse, blood weeping profusely from his pores, only for instantaneous regeneration to frantically mend the tears.
It gave him an appearance that was as ragged as it was monstrously savage.
"Mr. Son Goku, and Black King over there—my apologies. Please grant me just... ten more seconds!"
"I'll bring an end to this farce."
Son Goku, locked in Super Saiyan 3, lowered his brow ridge with cool detachment. Though the combatants possessed exotic toolsets, their baseline power remained modest.
Unless Mercenary Tao unleashed that singular strike from earlier, he failed to evoke any distinct sensation within the Saiyan.
Yet Goku held his ground; he fundamentally had no desire to clash with a warrior bearing the exact likeness of his son Gohan.
If the intruder was willing to pause the conflict, it was for the best. Goku attempted communication once more:
"You—"
One-Armed Gohan stared indifferently at the Reincarnator chosen by his counterpart. Unlike the overly benevolent, idealistic Ryo...
This man projected an aura of unadulterated savagery and madness with a single glance.
He embodied the archetype that the Black King Association reviled most among Reincarnators: a pitiless parasite stripping worlds of their informational resources without principle or restraint.
No, this Mercenary Tao was the absolute extreme of the Reincarnator concept, devoid of standard human empathy.
Other Reincarnators, standing before him or his father, would invariably leak fear and wariness no matter how thoroughly they masked it.
Other Reincarnators pursued strength recklessly, but that meager power served merely as a fragile shield to prolong their survival.
This Mercenary Tao was entirely different—like an apex Reincarnator deliberately engineered by that malignant Space.
Ignorant of terror, tireless in execution, stripped of mortal ethics, existing purely for the ravenous accumulation of power and data.
Son Gohan lowered his gaze. An operative of this caliber would never resolve the core crisis.
Luffy had chosen the wrong champion.
Gohan raised his lone right arm, fingers curling, his palm locking onto Mercenary Tao from afar. The longer a Reincarnator like this drew breath, the heavier the burden imposed upon the innocent souls of other dimensions.
To ensure the survival of this single entity, that Space would feed countless lives into the furnace.
Ending him here was likely the correct path.
Swoosh!
A silhouette crossed the distance in an instant, obstructing Gohan's line of fire.
Son Goku shook his head, unwilling to witness such a slaughter.
On the other side of the waters, Kaito Shirogane seemed oblivious to Gohan's killing intent. Amidst the churning seas and billowing steam, the silhouette of the God King of Thunder remained locked within his perception.
The Sight of Arrogance held the target pinned.
Pairing the Martial God's Ultimate Intent with the Sixteen-Fold Kaio-Ken and Tier 9 Setsuna, Kaito took a single stride forward.
The abyssal hydrostatic pressure of the deep sea could not impede his velocity in the slightest.
The ocean parted, and he descended directly to the seabed.
The God King's eyes snapped wide as he registered the concussive pressure of that arrival. His divine consciousness churned with shock at the man's velocity, layered with indignation toward his unbridled arrogance.
Within this domain, all foreign energies were suppressed; aside from pure Ki and select energies possessing extreme resistance traits that could overpower the field through sheer volume, this was a domain designed to purge non-lightning systems.
That was the mechanical foundation of a Third Sequence God King's dominance.
Yet this adversary moved at blinding speeds within that very field, proving his acceleration was derived entirely from pure martial mechanics and physiological output.
Reaching that velocity through biological kinetics alone...
Yet the ocean was an optimal conductor, exponentially amplifying the propagation and lethal radius of his thunder.
Diving into the water meant delivering oneself directly into the center of the kill zone.
An AT Field had its breaking points; it could not neutralize his output indefinitely.
This engagement was his!
"Complete Abyssal Thunder Prison!"
The ocean turned gold in a flash. Unchecked lightning discharged continuously from his Complete Divine Body.
This current would not dissipate or degrade; it struck indiscriminately across thousands of nautical miles, ionizing every molecule in its path.
Zzt...
Electric arcs danced through the water before sputtering out.
The God King stiffened as a hand clamped firmly onto his shoulder from behind.
Stifling soul energy saturated the surrounding coordinates.
The sea was no longer golden; it had shifted into an unnatural, kaleidoscopic spectrum—not of vibrant beauty, but of grotesque, surreal hues.
Translucent pink jellyfish, pitch-black leviathans, and warped aquatic abominations drifted silently through the waters.
This was no longer the sea. This was... the Astral Realm!
An invisible domain expanded behind Kaito Shirogane.
[Sovereign of the Realm].
Behind Kaito, the crimson phantom swelled infinitely within his personal Astral Realm, unfurling into a colossal entity that seemed capable of crushing the cosmos in its fist.
It shared an eighty percent resemblance to the horror lurking behind the Evil Lord of the Spirit Realm, Shigeo Kageyama, in the B711 world.
Kaito Shirogane observed the God King, whose arcs of electricity still faintly crackled within this domain that stripped all non-soul systems. The deity's Authority tier was undeniably high.
Yet his own soul tier stood far above it.
From Black Mask's deferential demeanor and Aizen's arrival, Kaito had deduced that he carried an essence akin to a Soul King Candidate, granting him overwhelming spiritual priority.
He rarely deployed Sovereign of the Realm because it trivialized the thrill of combat.
Stripping an adversary of their arsenal to secure an asymmetrical advantage felt too much like the cheap parlor tricks favored by Yhwach's Quincy.
Yet right now, to cleanly conclude this pointless distraction and return to the duel between the two pinnacle Super Saiyans, Kaito unleashed it without hesitation.
Furthermore, as his hand locked onto the God King's shoulder, the pitch-black sun sigil across his chest seemed to awaken.
The Mythic trait granted by the full awakening of the Myriad Tribulations Yin Spirit Underworld Physique—the Emperor of Death's [All Things Return to the Ruin]—was unleashed simultaneously.
The absolute concepts of Life and Death converged.
Within the Astral Realm, physical matter did not exist. Yet the spiritual fauna drifting nearby decayed in an instant, crumbling into brittle bone and dissolving into fading hues.
"You—"
Crack!
Devastating physical force detonated. The towering Divine Body, stripped of its elementalization inside the Astral Realm, was overwhelmed by absolute kinetic leverage.
The divine chassis fractured. Kaito plunged his hand inward, seizing the mortal core beneath, clamping the throat and snapping the cervical spine in a single twist.
A deity or divine organism was, at its foundation, merely an anatomical construct. Before sufficient physical force, it broke all the same.
The boiling of the sea ceased within seconds. Son Goku watched as Mercenary Tao emerged from the deep, his flesh laced with cracks like shattered porcelain.
The bizarre deity who had commanded the thunder never surfaced again.
Bang!
Before clearing the surface, Mercenary Tao detonated into blood mist once more. The suicidal method of forcing high-multiplier Kaio-Ken through his vessel drew frowns from both Son Goku and Son Gohan.
Though the Saiyans were a warrior race obsessed with battle, they possessed no native cellular regeneration.
Perhaps as a cosmic check against a species that grew exponentially stronger upon recovering from near-death states, their biology could not replicate tissue via Ki, regardless of planetary destructive output.
Entities like Majin Buu and Namekians, by contrast, had developed limb regeneration early in their evolutionary lines.
Mercenary Tao's practice of forcing his battle power past the breaking point, repeatedly detonating his flesh, drew the attention of both Saiyans.
One-Armed Gohan, possessing a more complex perspective than his father, saw through the mechanism immediately.
Majin-tier regeneration and immortality, paired with the Saiyan trait of growing stronger through near-death recovery...
This man was voracious to a terrifying degree.
One-Armed Gohan cast a cold glance at Mercenary Tao drifting skyward to watch the duel, before returning his gaze to Son Goku, who remained unwilling to strike.
Initially, Gohan had felt only fury toward his own destiny and the tragic end of everyone in his timeline.
He knew those disasters were scripted by destiny—the handiwork of the Observers.
Yet seeing his father, who had succumbed to heart disease in his own reality, standing here so pure, naive, and benevolent, stoked Gohan's rage even further.
Beyond his home, countless realities were unraveling under the gaze of the Observers.
A casual glance from those entities dictated the rise and fall of entire worlds.
All life, all souls, and all manifestations of free will dissolved into foam beneath that gaze.
Tearing down that grotesque farce was the foundational premise shared by every Black King.
To return realities to their native states, and isolate the Spaces within their own bounds—that was the ideal end.
Yet to achieve that, his current strength was insufficient. Hopelessly insufficient!
Gohan looked at his father across the sky. His own output fell short, but this man possessed the capacity to do it. Or rather, the Gohan native to this timeline had the potential to do it.
Gohan finalized his resolve.
"Hah!"
With an explosive roar, Son Gohan's short black hair elongated wildly, his Ki spiking through another exponential threshold.
At this level, even his father could no longer maintain a casual stance.
Gohan threw a side hook through the upper atmosphere. Kaito Shirogane's hair stood on end as he engaged Musō Tensei in a fraction of a millisecond.
BOOM!
The atmosphere shrieked as extra-atmospheric debris was vaporized clean across the horizon.
"Father... no, Son Goku. If you don't strike me down right now, I will obliterate this world, and every living soul upon it."
Pitch-black Ki surged like demonic flame, burning fiercely into the heavens.
Having slipped through Gohan's casual backhand, Kaito Shirogane watched the father and son prepare to tear each other apart, his entire being thrumming with raw euphoria.
He cared nothing for their tragic grievances.
Combat. He wanted to witness absolute combat at the apex!
Preferably... the kind where one of them died!