Chapter 836: Shadow
Crack-crackle!
Crimson and pitch-black lightning detonated across the empty air, piercing clean through Hill's torso in a single instant; the telekinetic barrier veiling his skin failed to offer the slightest resistance.
Such was the unvarnished lethality of an idealistic power system. Even Conqueror's Haki—which ranked merely within the median tiers among pure willpower-based abilities—could yield an absolute force capable of shaking reality when wielded by a sufficiently formidable titan.
Hill's limbs seized in violent, uncontrollable tremors. His fingers locked in spasms, his consciousness blanking out for a fractured microsecond as a primal, choking panic welled within his chest.
He felt that the Monster King, Mercenary Tao, was genuinely going to execute him. This burst of Conqueror's Haki was the opening executioner's warrant; stripped of his telekinetic ward, his skull would likely be sheared from his neck in the next breath.
No... I cannot die here! I have to fight back!
The instant that thought sparked in his mind, a neurological relay within his brain seemed to snap open. Subconscious, hyper-dense telekinesis erupted around his physical form, priming itself for an indiscriminate, cataclysmic detonation.
Yet the very next moment, a silhouette manifested directly within his Sea of Consciousness.
It was the sovereign draped in a pristine mantle of white fleece: Yoko Ekaterina.
Her emerald eyes gazed upon him with calm, absolute serenity.
An invisible force pacified the surging dread and hysteria churning within Hill's spirit as the Fire of Humanity ignited across the void within his chest.
Hill instantly reclaimed the capacity for cold, detached reasoning. His psychic storm—already expanding like an unbridled hurricane—was dragged back into his frame as though time itself were running in reverse. Aside from the wooden table before him being pulverized into fine dust, the cafe sustained zero structural damage.
Hill stood pale and shaken, cold perspiration beading along his temples. He sensed that chilling, lake-cold killing intent receding from the center of his forehead.
Having composed his racing nerves, a glaring reality surfaced in his mind: if Mercenary Tao had genuinely resolved to slaughter him, a preliminary strike like Conqueror's Haki would have been utterly redundant.
The man needed only to engage that bizarre transformation, cross the distance at a velocity Hill's synapses could never track, and pluck his head from his shoulders like ripe fruit.
Consequently, unleashing this Haki proved the exact opposite: Mercenary Tao held no immediate intent to kill him.
This was merely a... trial?
To rise to the echelon of Sovereign Monarch, Hill had naturally crushed every competing Reincarnator along his path, gliding smoothly through mission worlds as an apex anomaly feared across the West District.
Yet in this fleeting second, he felt no different from an ordinary, fledgling Reincarnator—a sacrificial lamb awaiting the butcher's knife.
The terrifying weight behind Fenrir's evaluation—an existence occupying a tier disconnected from any top-tier Reincarnator, Sovereign Monarchs included—scaled even higher in his estimation.
Hill now felt that Fenrir's phrasing had been far too conservative. It should have been framed as: the moment a Sovereign Monarch falls within Mercenary Tao's line of sight, the judicial authority over their very survival has already been surrendered to that monster.
"Very well. You are an operative who possesses value. You may live."
The voice whispered directly against Hill's ear. His entire frame sagged in profound relief, his mental reserves completely hollowed out. That intimate brush against absolute mortality was an ordeal he had zero desire to repeat. Without sparing a backward glance to bid farewell to the members of the SONG squad he had escorted, he beat a hasty retreat from the Paradise.
On the sixth floor of the Black Tower, Ritsu, her silver-white hair tied in twin tails, watched Doctor Hill's undignified departure with a mocking smirk playing across her lips.
Formidable as the man might be, the chasm separating him from those two titans remained laughably wide.
Upon returning to the real world, Ritsu had adamantly insisted on severing ties with Avalon to defect to the Paradise. The decision had ignited quite a tempest, but it ultimately concluded with Yoko transferring ownership of the SONG assembly directly to Ritsu, permitting her to lead several key operatives into the Paradise.
None dared question Yoko's strategic calculus. Private whispers, however, speculated that the move was engineered to defuse the suffocating tension between the factions.
Ever since the King of Miracles, Ryo, met his demise, Azure Sky had rapidly lost its grip over the real world. Even if Mori-Summer retained the lethal capacity to cut down virtually any apex Reincarnator, the days when others trembled too greatly to even raise a blade were gone for good.
Moreover, the massive Reincarnator uprisings across the East District had not been quelled by Azure Sky, but by Mercenary Tao of the Paradise. With thunderous brutality, he had slaughtered over a hundred operatives, stamping out the chaos under the terrifying mantle of the Monster King.
Yet after securing nominal dominion, Mercenary Tao had refrained from enforcing the strict behavioral shackles of the Azure Sky era. Instead, as long as Reincarnators altered the fabric of the real world and filed operational petitions beforehand, their actions would be appraised and rewarded with faction merit points.
Rumors circulated that these merit points could ultimately be exchanged for abilities, artifacts, and exotic materials personally bestowed by Lord Mercenary Tao himself.
This policy threw the friction among Reincarnators in the real world into an absolute frenzy.
To compound the chaos, the West District had practically fallen under the absolute dominion of Avalon. News of Avalon marching upon the border between the Eastland and the northern territories, cutting down multiple East District Reincarnators in the process, had leaked like wildfire.
Whispers of an all-out war between the East and West Districts proliferated across every channel; assemblies on both sides were actively mobilizing for total mobilization.
Shifting the operational theater from scripted mission worlds directly into reality spawned multifaceted, catastrophic fallout.
First and foremost, the civil order of the real world would face irreversible collapse.
Secondly, the physical integrity of the planet itself was on the line. In an era where top-tier Reincarnators were crossing into the Fierce tier in droves, unleashing unchecked abilities within urban centers would level metropolises overnight.
The stronger anomalies had even begun exhibiting the capacity to fracture tectonic plates.
The label of "living natural disaster" was no longer hyperbole.
Under such dire circumstances, Yoko—whose heart remained anchored to the preservation of the human race—placing SONG and her own blood sister directly within Mercenary Tao's territory was undeniably a decisive, de-escalating maneuver.
It signaled to the panicked masses of operatives that the sovereigns of the East and West were not yet primed for war.
Furthermore, a third power was rising at terrifying speed between the borders.
Ritsu recalled passing the frozen tundra alongside Hill, catching the shimmering, incandescent canopy of that gargantuan Erdtree swaying in the gale; its radiant pulse had already begun leaking exotic, reality-bending properties.
The Golden Order had definitively taken root within that soil.
That woman, designated Amatsu, had outpaced every competitor on the board, successfully engineering a high-tier reality breach in the physical world—one that might well drag Outer Gods onto the stage.
Ritsu pulled her gaze back, turning to survey her squadmates.
Kanade, sporting short dark hair, clad in black-and-crimson armor, and bearing a heavy tower shield, was a defense-specialized operative. Boasting a physical constitution efficiency rating of 2.0, she was a tank who had cleared the First Step with an optimized build.
Beside her stood an unassuming young man with ruffled blonde hair, dressed in an oversized knitted sweater, his eyes narrowed into perpetual slits. Designated Hane, he was an agility-specialized operative who had already broken into the Third Step. Blessed with transcendent combat instincts, he was a prodigy whom Yoko held in immense regard.
Ritsu had sparred against Hane multiple times. Even with her base attributes holding a total advantage, the outcome had been a string of crushing defeats. Were it not for the high-tier immortality granted by her Demi-Human lineage, matching him would have been an impossibility.
Yet backed by that immortal bloodline, Ritsu maintained absolute confidence in putting him in the ground during a life-and-death duel; after all, their margins for error were separated by light-years.
Moreover, Hane harbored a fundamental flaw in his temperament.
Ritsu lifted her chin slightly, appraising her comrade with a cool, searching stare.
Hane registered the gaze and turned his head with an easy smile. The concussive eruption of Conqueror's Haki earlier had failed to shake him in the slightest, nor did the retreat of the West District's Sovereign Monarch stir a ripple across his expression.
"You lack the most vital quality of all, Hane," Ritsu muttered coldly.
She pulled her gaze away. Initially, she had sought to defect to Mercenary Tao's banner simply because gazing upon that savage, unyielding silhouette fed her with an inexhaustible current of strength—an ambition birthed from raw instinct, a power unique to untamed predators.
She detested her sister's clinical methodology: orchestrating everything, subduing every variable, even suffocating her own desires beneath an iron mantle of duty.
In her eyes, Lord Mercenary Tao's unrestrained, feral dominance was the superior manifestation of might!
Hane possessed staggering martial talent, forever finding impossible attack vectors and executing timing that defied human precision, yet he lacked genuine combat drive—the berserk, rabid savagery needed to tear an adversary to ribbons no matter the cost.
Hane paused, his slit-like eyes cracking open a fraction. The cerulean pupils beneath were as sharp as razor wire. He felt it clearly: since returning from that last world, Ritsu had undergone a profound metamorphosis.
It was neither the shallow vanity of acquiring a novel skill nor the swelling pride of awakening a Spiritual Light. It was an awakening—a grim, total enlightenment born of bearing witness to the unvarnished reality of the cosmos.
It allowed her aura to passively exert a subtle, stifling pressure over him.
It was an elusive, delicate sensation. Hane was favored by Yoko and celebrated by countless veterans as the most lethally gifted novice of the generation precisely because he possessed razor-thin, hyper-intuitive presences.
In the heat of battle, that intuition allowed him to execute tactical decisions that bypassed analytical cognition entirely.
Yet right now, outside of active combat, his senses screamed that Ritsu had been reforged anew!
Hane leaned back against the raw obsidian sill of the unglazed window. Sunlight bathed the dark stone as he narrowed his eyes, peering up through the glare toward the subtle vibrational fluctuations rippling from the apex of the Black Tower.
Was that man—Mercenary Tao, hailed across the districts as the King of Monsters—genuinely that terrifying?
Formidable enough that a single mission cycle could rebuild Ritsu from the ground up, plant an indelible nightmare in Mr. Fenrir's psyche, and win Lady Yoko's total, unqualified respect?
Just what kind of creature is he...?
On the third floor of the Black Tower, Muyu methodically keyed the roster of The Heaven into a tablet provided by Jin Yue'an, successfully staking out an operational plot within the Paradise's perimeter. Beyond land allocations, the Paradise offered zero logistical hand-holding.
Compared to other sovereign syndicates, the Paradise was decentralized to an extreme.
Rather than a unified syndicate, it resembled a territorial enclave where independent wolves converged under a singular banner.
Yet despite this hands-off doctrine, the Paradise continued to reel in high-tier and apex Reincarnators without pause.
Muyu glanced up as Mai escorted Tan Zhishan's entourage onto the floor.
She offered a polite nod, sliding toward a neighboring table. Tan Zhishan settled down across from an adjacent round desk as Jin Yue'an slid a tablet across the surface.
"Please record the comprehensive operational profile of the Final squad: personnel count, active skill trees, baseline attributes, and unique traits in as much detail as possible. This directly dictates your preliminary syndicate evaluation tier."
"Naturally, if operational security is a priority, sensitive parameters may be redacted. You may accept a lower baseline ranking and elevate your tier through subsequent contract missions and combat performance."
Jin Yue'an's delivery was polished and seamless; the influx of applicants seeking entry into the Paradise had surged exponentially in recent days.
With the looming faction war casting long shadows over the districts, the existential pressure was palpable.
The material world stood on the precipice of shattering beneath the clashes of the apex Reincarnators; only an extraordinarily massive vessel could weather the coming deluge.
In the East District, no operative was more qualified to steer that vessel than Mercenary Tao.
Tan Zhishan offered a faint smile. He held little interest in faction reward tiers, yet he grasped that against an entity of Mercenary Tao's current stature, hunting down their squad would require zero informational leverage anyway.
Beyond Mercenary Tao himself, Tan Zhishan maintained immense pride in his own foundations; those capable of taking his life in a clean duel could be counted on two hands across the entire Space.
Tan Zhishan keyed his data into the terminal. Moments later, Su Qingqiu and Su Enfei stepped through the threshold. The duo exchanged stiff nods with Ice, Mahakala, and Mu Li—a tacit greeting among future comrades under the same banner.
"Hah~ To think our old trio would reconvene under circumstances like this... Truly a bizarre twist of fate~"
A bizarre, mocking cadence cut through the air. Cascading violet hair fell nearly to the speaker's ankles, his mere arrival causing the ambient air to turn razor-sharp.
The Death Blade, Thread of Thought, narrowed his gaze, looking between Su Qingqiu and Mahakala. The memory of the three of them joining forces to hunt down Mercenary Tao felt like an epoch ago; yet in less than three months, all three had bent the knee to the very monster they sought to put down.
Su Qingqiu looked away with an awkward cough, while Mahakala's expression remained stone-still.
"Let us hope our next coordinated ambush does not culminate in another pathetic rout," Mahakala stated flatly, causing both Su Qingqiu and Thread of Thought to register a distinct edge in his tone.
Back then, Tan Zhishan had not assembled the three of them at random; their synergistic chemistry was extraordinary.
Su Qingqiu's Pure White Paradise severely suppressed foundational attribute scaling while providing ironclad crowd control and dispels; Thread of Thought was an apex swordsman wielding execution-tier instant-death mechanics; layered atop Mahakala's psychic lockdown and devastating unarmed martial arts, they possessed the toolkit to challenge Sovereign Monarchs above their weight class.
All three had refined their capabilities considerably since that defeat. Operating in tandem, laying a calculated ambush against an unprepared Sovereign was far from an unwinnable proposition.
And within the Paradise's public metrics, putting down a Sovereign Monarch yielded an astronomical bounty of faction points!
At the apex of the Black Tower, Kaito Shirogane perceived every nuance of the calculations churning on the floors below. Having pushed Magnetic Field Rotation past the 500,000 Horsepower threshold, his sensory perception and interception of external brainwaves operated on an extraordinary plane.
At such close proximity, with the sole exception of Tan Zhishan—who held deep foundations in mental disciplines—the cognitive currents of every operative were laid bare across his Mantra Network.
Yet Kaito had begun losing all interest in these figures.
Having witnessed the apocalyptic clash between Son Goku and Son Gohan, squabbles among mortal Reincarnators rarely stirred a shred of excitement within him.
Kaito turned the dark artifact over in his palm.
Contained within this peculiar substance designated [Shadow] lay an energy that felt intimately familiar.
It was more than merely Ki; it harbored an underlying essence.
It radiated a profound affinity, resonating within his chest as though... it shared an ancestral, biological tether with his very bloodline.
Zzt~
A wisp of pitch-black Ki suddenly leaked from the material. Kaito extended his hand, wrapping a veil of golden Ki around the dark filament, dragging it steadily into his core.
[You have acquired a strand of Unique Ki]
[Energy +1. Current: ?]
[Trait acquisition failed]
[Privilege: Binary Choice engaged]
[Trait acquisition—Successful]
[You have acquired Trait: Ki Burst (Rare)]
Kaito Shirogane shook his head in disappointment; this was not what he sought. Though he couldn't confirm whether the Space's caveat regarding extracting Gohan's latent potential at exorbitant cost mirrored this exact process, one reality was cemented:
By consuming the residual Ki of Son Gohan, he could systematically siphon authentic racial traits!