Chapter 832: Shattered Star
Like a crimson laser beam, an aura erupted violently from the sea.
In the span of a heartbeat, it ripped clean through the atmosphere.
The incinerating air, enveloped in the crimson Ki, resembled a flaming red meteor blasting outward from the core of the world in reverse.
Beyond the atmosphere, this blazing comet slammed head-on into the incoming stream of blue-white light arriving from deep space.
Kaito Shirogane could still feel nothing but a raging fury threatening to burn away the last remnants of his sanity. This force triggered a volatile reaction with the Third Star Particles—a unique particle fundamentally distinct from both matter and antimatter—which in turn resonated violently with the Stairway of Eternal Return coiled within his frame.
An incomplete chain reaction had been ignited.
Kaito Shirogane's body felt like an exploding furnace. Infinite Ki proliferated from within. The blood infused with Third Star Particles, the billions of biological cells, and the dormant, anti-life tissues throughout his flesh were all hyper-generating catastrophic volumes of Ki.
It was an inexhaustible reservoir of power, an abyssal singularity endlessly vomiting forth pure, concentrated Ki.
In an instant, an overwhelming sensation of expansion gripped Kaito, as if his physical vessel was about to burst at the seams.
Only the traits of the Sixth Step of the Stairway of Eternal Return, the Perfect Organism, combined with the structural resilience of the Tier 7 Physique of the Primordial Man, prevented him from coming apart. Had he inhabited his prior vessel, he would have long since detonated into a fine mist of blood.
Yet the sheer, erratic friction of the colliding energies left him intensely irritated, stoking the fires of his wrath even higher.
He pushed the Sky Dancing Art to its absolute limit. The reckless eruption of boundless Ki propelled his velocity far past historical thresholds, breaking planetary gravity and breaching the vacuum of outer space in the blink of an eye.
To Kaito Shirogane, the destructive particle beam lancing in from deep space was not a lethal orbital strike, but a clear, unobstructed conduit through which he could vent the suffocating surplus of power tearing through his veins.
He made no motion to throw a strike. Instead, he condensed the overflowing Ki around his form, cycling it across his skin in the operational pattern of the Three-Part Revolving Force.
After merely a few revolutions, the untamed violence of the Ki tore through the circular flow of the technique, spilling uncontrollably into the void.
Driven by his extreme velocity, the escaping energy streamed behind him like two colossal, blood-red wings.
Standing beyond the battlefield of the two Super Saiyans, Black King Luffy calmly watched the crimson meteor intercept the orbital light beam.
In a twisted sense, this bloodthirsty Reincarnator was currently executing the mandate of a savior, preserving the world below.
The Conqueror's Haki veiling Black King Luffy drifted like mist. He stood motionless beneath the two planet-killing Ki waves, silently reflecting on the future he had chosen.
Across countless timelines, countless souls had once staked their tomorrows upon his shoulders, yet none had emerged victorious.
Now, he had made his own wager.
Hum!
Violent Ki clashed relentlessly. The standoff between the Kamehameha and the Special Beam Cannon ground on, the convergence point oscillating erratically between the two fighters.
Should the blast touch the ocean, the world would perish.
Should it be forced back, Son Gohan would almost certainly die.
The sheer volume of Ki had surpassed the realm of conscious control. More crucially, through his Observation Haki, Luffy sensed that the fury burning within the other one-armed Black King had reached its zenith.
It was an unadulterated fury directed inward.
Rage born of his own helplessness, forced to walk this cruel path of patricide.
And the purest, most unyielding wrath directed at the pointless, meddling existence of the Observers.
BOOM!
Beyond the stratosphere, the crimson comet collided dead-on with the blue-white beam of mechanical destruction. A ring of blue-white shockwaves detonated across the orbital threshold, washing instantly across the planetary curvature.
The terrifying concussive wave carried hyper-dense payloads of thermal energy, peeling away the outer atmospheric envelope in a single stroke.
The sun turned blindingly stark. Cosmic radiation poured through the breach, shattering the planetary magnetosphere.
Amidst the cataclysm, the crimson meteor smashed through the blue-white beam with unstoppable momentum, plunging straight into the vacuum of space.
Aboard a captured aerospace battleship safely disengaged from combat, the surviving Reincarnators stood watching the crimson meteor tear through the atmosphere toward deep space.
Snow was the first to shake his head. Without a single word, he chose to terminate his mission.
A stream of data wrapped around his form, and he vanished from the bridge.
Next was Energy Tyrant Aka. The high-ranking officer of Destiny and apex Reincarnator exhaled a long breath. The elemental authorities stripped away by the God King of the Void Paradise had returned to his grasp.
Yet he no longer held the standing to tread this battlefield.
"Heh... A Reincarnator fighting all the way into outer space... He truly is the King of Monsters."
A hum resonated.
Aka dissolved into a cascade of data and departed.
Fenrir observed streams of light flickering across every sector of the vessel, understanding that the remaining Reincarnators in this world were making their exits.
The emergency quest was completely beyond their capability.
The ultimate ownership of the Doorway was not something high-tier Reincarnators could ever decide.
The survival of Mercenary Tao and Yoko was entirely outside their influence.
Their sole remaining choice was to extract immediately, refusing to hand easy faction points to hostile Spaces.
Fenrir had heard the legends of the Machina Court's Planet-Buster Sequence—a force capable of sanitizing entire planetary spheres and slaughtering every Reincarnator within them.
Now, the Infinite Dimensional Space finally possessed an operative capable of meeting that cosmic firepower head-on through sheer individual might.
"Let's go, Ritsu. This world is no longer a stage for us."
Fenrir initiated his extraction. He reached out to tug at the twin-tailed girl holding the Golden Trident. To his surprise, the rebellious, unyielding girl merely cast a lingering look at the stars, then dissolved into data ahead of him.
She had chosen not to stubbornly linger.
RUMBLE!
Blistering high-energy particle flows battered the Ki shielding Kaito Shirogane, burning through his outer defenses in a fraction of a second.
Yet the Ki surging from within him resembled an inexhaustible, infinite engine.
It sustained him like an unstoppable celestial body. Pushing directly against the beam of the field-assembled Planet-Buster Cannon, he shattered the concentrated particle stream, plummeting straight toward the lunar surface.
Across the optical sensors of the three Planet-Buster Sequence Sovereigns of the Machina Court, diagnostic readouts flashed with a glaring crimson [EX].
The Ki unleashed by this God of Martial Arts had breached the transcendent threshold, operating at a tier far beyond the bounds of the Third Sequence.
Planet-Buster Singularity immediately initiated retrospective analysis. Thanks to swarms of nanobots blanketing the oceans, though most had been annihilated by the ambient Ki, a fraction had recorded the prior exchange.
Visual telemetry of Kaito seizing the droplets of blood was transmitted to the Court's central core.
"Elevating threat classification of special unit Mercenary Tao. Probability of target acquiring Super Saiyan biological traits exceeds 46 percent."
"Engage high-energy particle defense arrays."
"Deploy low-frequency neural pulse emitters."
Beams of focused particle lances erupted from the lunar surface, converging upon the rapidly closing God of Martial Arts.
Sizzle—BANG!
Sizzle—BANG!
Every particle lance struck the crimson wings trailing behind him, only to be deflected into empty space. In a matter of microseconds, Kaito shattered the main particle beam and smashed squarely into the structural foundation of the cannon.
Hum—BOOM!
In the airless void of space, the shockwave manifested as a violent, physical buckling of reality. The lunar crust caved inward before rippling outward in seismic waves.
The reinforced alloy foundation shattered on impact, the interconnecting nanobots obliterated in a single stroke.
Kinetic force propagated through the superstructure. The engineered alloys failed to withstand the warped pressure, shearing apart and hurtling into the orbital void.
Before the concussive force could finish dissipating across the crater, the crimson wings snapped wide before the main chassis.
Singularity seized electromagnetic control. Thousands of mechanical components assembled into a colossal combat automaton. The auxiliary arrays of the Machina Court's base—spanning nearly half the lunar surface—plunged into darkness as all available power routed to Singularity.
The titanic machine raised its arms. The fractured lunar surface surged upward, sending colossal earthen dragons and continental plates hurtling toward the God of Martial Arts.
Yet Kaito merely hung suspended in the void, tilting his frame and coiling a single fist backward. The sheer, suffocating pressure radiating from his stance crushed the earthen dragons into dust.
Debris and pulverized regolith were pulled upward into his gravitational wake.
Singularity registered the immense gulf in combat capability. It wasn't merely because his optimal combat chassis had been lost fighting the Black King; the combat output currently exhibited by this opponent eclipsed nearly all Third Sequence parameters.
A near-infinite source of power!
His cognitive units overclocked furiously. Yet cross-referencing Kaito's prior acquisition of Son Gohan's blood, his analytical matrices could not logically equate that essence with the infinite energy reactors of the Androids from that timeline.
Could this God of Martial Arts have siphoned the traits of the Androids who tore Gohan's arm away through the medium of Gohan's blood?
Absurd. Wholly illogical.
BOOM!
Through a field of vision stained entirely in crimson, Kaito caught sight of a faint blue-white light. With a casual flick of his wrist, he lashed out toward the coordinates.
The next second, Cannot Live Under the Same Sky cleaved through the void. There was no resonance of magical energy, nor the radiance of an Authority—only blinding, unadulterated Ki.
Screech!
A massive dimensional slash tore straight through the chassis. The newly assembled titan, forged from the hulls of dozens of aerospace battleships and the pinnacle of Machina Court engineering, was cleanly bisected at the waist.
Having unleashed that blow, Kaito felt a distinct wave of relief wash through his overburdened frame.
He felt as though he had found the purpose he was meant to fulfill.
The next instant, gazing down from the churning seas toward the moon, Black King Luffy watched crimson lotuses bloom across the lunar surface.
Immense continental fragments—or rather, chunks of the satellite itself—were sheared clean off, drifting into deep space as shattered orbital wreckage.
That man had drawn the power of pure Wrath from Gohan's blood.
Son Goku felt the shifting tectonic plates below. With every passing second of this beam struggle, the planet suffered deeper, irreversible trauma.
The crust had begun to fracture, allowing subterranean magma to flood into the oceans, triggering cataclysmic thermal imbalances across the globe.
In blind spots beyond his perception, millions of lives were likely already perishing, a crisis that would only accelerate.
Looking up at Gohan's face, which was twisted with unending fury, Goku could endure it no longer. With a thunderous roar, he poured everything into his blast.
"Hah!"
The Kamehameha surged toward the stars with irresistible momentum.
The Special Beam Cannon could hold no longer. The one-armed Black King Gohan watched with dilated pupils as the strike of absolute death rushed toward him—the authentic might of the Child of Destiny!
He accepted his end with quiet serenity. Yet unexpectedly, he heard another earth-shattering roar from his father, as though the man were tearing the last shred of vitality from his very cells.
In Super Saiyan 3, Son Goku strained every tendon, his skin splitting under the pressure as fresh blood sprayed into the gale.
He was actively dragging the combined payload of their two attacks off-axis.
He refused to accept a future where either the world or Gohan perished!
"Hah... AARGH!"
Watching that apocalyptic force—capable of easily obliterating multiple worlds—being forcibly diverted by his father, the towering fury in Son Gohan's heart evaporated.
A peaceful, quiet smile touched his lips.
Luffy clenched his lone fist, turning away. Another companion was walking toward his chosen end before his eyes.
Across his journey, he had known only loss, yet cold reason constantly reminded him that this was the optimal resolution, the deliberate choice of a comrade.
He despised it. Luffy found himself yearning for his past self—the boy who never knew the meaning of cold reason.
His Observation Haki swept across thousands of miles, locking onto the Thousand Sunny pitching violently amidst the churning ocean.
Aboard the deck, Nami, Usopp, and Chopper were screaming in terror, while Sanji frantically secured his crewmates while clinging to the mast.
Zoro stood alone in the howling squall, holding fast to the rigging with a single arm, anchored like an unyielding reef against the devastating shockwaves.
The boy in the straw hat leaped high from the deck, his fists blurring as he desperately battered away the incoming pressure waves, debris, and crushing tsunamis.
Battered and bloodied, that boy's current Armament Haki stood no chance against the ambient Ki, yet he refused to yield an inch, throwing punch after punch into the storm.
Even having grown numb to his own tragic timeline, Black King Luffy could not help but smile.
He opened his palm and flicked his fingers. A white shockwave traversed space in a fraction of a second, sweeping cleanly across the Sunny.
In an instant, the kinetic pressure, the falling debris, and the towering waves were wiped from existence.
The Sunny settled gently upon tranquil waters, the preceding cataclysm dissolving like a dream.
Having done this, Luffy turned. A spatial doorway unsealed behind him, and he chose to step through, departing the realm.
In the upper atmosphere, Gohan opened his lone arm, throwing himself directly into the path of the cataclysmic blast.
BANG!
Black Ki scattered in all directions, striking Son Goku as he stood frozen in place.
In that single instant, countless memories flooded Goku's mind. He heard this Gohan whisper the story of an entirely different life.
Swoosh!
With a single thought, Son Goku crossed the void to materialize upon the shattered lunar surface, clamping an iron hand around the wrist of the raging King of Wrath.
"Mercenary Tao. Give that thing back to me."