The fire raging across the titan was incredibly bizarre. As Li Ke watched intently, he noted that the mystical flames left the surrounding trees and dirt completely untouched. Yet, they were melting the colossal flesh-mountain with devastating efficiency.
Under the searing heat of that unique blaze, the monster's armor-like skin rapidly liquified. But the abomination was already launching a brutal counter-attack. Dozens of tentacles—each spanning a full kilometer in length—surged forward in unison to intercept Nezuko. This writhing forest of limbs completely blotted out the sky, cutting off every single one of her escape routes.
At the exact same time, the creature unleashed a deafening, earth-shaking roar. Combined with the supersonic swing of its massive appendages, the resulting gale-force wind and sonic blast created the chaotic aftermath of a category-five hurricane. The healing flames Li Ke had attached to the injured Hashira were instantly snuffed out by the howling storm. If Li Ke hadn't stood firmly at the very front to anchor them against the brunt of the kinetic blast, the slayers would have been violently thrown across the landscape all over again!
This was a creature that no mortal should ever have to face!
"They belong to two completely different realms of existence!"
Li Ke raised a heavily braced forearm to shield his eyes from the dust. He watched Nezuko blur out of existence and materialize in another vector, continuously raining down her supernatural fire, and couldn't help but complain out loud.
Though he had realized the absurdity of the situation the moment he laid eyes on this mountain of meat, actively engaging it in combat made one thing crystal clear: a world-corrupting horror like this was not something people at their current tier could easily match. The previous two monsters had already pushed the absolute limits of physical strength, but the beast standing before them now was a nightmare on a completely different scale!
If Li Ke didn't possess the unique ability to escape by traveling through different universes, he would have died a dozen times over by now, regardless of his special physical constitution!
"No wonder the 7 Days to Die world was completely shattered before we even arrived... The most terrifying part is that this monstrosity might not even be the final boss..."
Thinking back to the horrific entities mapped out on that dimensional chart, Li Ke's heart sank heavily. If retrieving future World Fragments from the 7 Days to Die universe meant trading blows with abominations of this caliber every single time, he would seriously have to consider picking a brand-new target.
After all, fully restoring the 7 Days to Die world wasn't a mandatory mission for him.
This was an all-out war between a cosmic planetary consciousness and a swarm of dimensional parasites. But as far as Li Ke was concerned, he didn't even qualify as a parasite in a fight this grand!
Despite his practical complaints, Li Ke still wanted to see if there was any way he could tip the scales.
Staring at Nezuko, who was continuously exhausting her Energy to manipulate the flames, Li Ke tightly gripped the hilt of his blade. He gestured for the surviving members of the Corps to pull back immediately, preparing himself to dive into the fray at a moment's notice.
As long as even one of the three girls currently on the field could safely retreat to a secure distance, Li Ke could instantly use his system skills to escape any lethal blow.
However, even though Nezuko's specialized fire had successfully engulfed the entirety of the flesh-mountain, Li Ke could easily tell that the actual depth of the structural damage she was inflicting wasn't high enough to secure a kill.
Right at that moment, he felt a distinct, heavy resonance humming through his soul—the consciousness of this world was actively calling out to him.
Li Ke had absolutely no idea what specific actions he was supposed to take. After all, that gargantuan, twitching central eye was still locked onto his exact position with lethal intent.
Taking a deep, calculated breath, he prepared to slide closer to the epicenter of the low-gravity zone. But the very microsecond he shifted his weight forward, several massive tentacles that had been fruitlessly chasing the teleporting Nezuko violently swung downward. They slammed into the earth right in front of his face, unleashing a terrifying shockwave of pressurized air, dirt, and stone.
A torrential storm of shattered boulders and uprooted trees tore through the air like a volley of heavy artillery rounds. Li Ke forcefully twisted his body in mid-air, barely avoiding a direct impact by a hair's breadth. But the mountain peak directly behind him wasn't so lucky—the flying geographical debris violently pulverized the stone ridge, leaving behind a dozen massive craters well over two meters deep!
If his reaction time had been delayed by even a fraction of a second, Li Ke would have been instantly reduced to a bloody paste.
"Well, look at that... it's genuinely terrified of me."
Wiping a stray drop of blood from a shallow scratch on his cheek, Li Ke took a deep breath. Even though the lingering buffs from the world had dissolved into golden light particles and vanished, he could still channel his own fiery core.
Li Ke drew his twin samurai swords—the exact pair he had purchased during his last shopping run. His elemental flames lacked high-velocity thrust on their own, so he always needed a physical medium to carry his Dragon Power across long distances.
But the very millisecond the steel left its scabbards, the wind patterns across the entire battlefield shifted.
The natural air currents of this planet began to violently swirl right around his skin. Initially, Li Ke didn't think much of it. But as he heavily coated his twin blades in dense Dragon Power flames, the surrounding winds became increasingly erratic and hyper-aggressive.
An endless, roaring gale spun violently around his perimeter, locking him at the absolute center of a localized tornado. Witnessing this structural phenomenon, Li Ke instantly deciphered the exact intent of the planet's consciousness. He continuously unleashed his golden flames, smoothly venting the thermal Energy directly into the spinning vortex.
Within seconds, the roaring localized hurricane transformed into a spectacular, blindingly radiant golden storm. The colossal meat-mountain wasn't blind to this development; it hoisted several massive tentacles high into the heavens, preparing to smash Li Ke into oblivion all over again. Yet, Li Ke didn't panic for a single split second, because his sensory awareness picked up an impossibly massive subterranean force surging directly beneath the titan's feet.
He watched the titanic appendages descend toward his skull without a shred of fear, because—
"Here it comes!"
The planet roared. The surrounding crust violently ruptured, instantly launching thousands of tons of bedrock and earth ten thousand meters straight up into the upper atmosphere. Driven by the raw, primordial physics of the tectonic upheaval, the abomination was forcefully blasted skyward, launching toward the outer reaches of the starry void.
Yes, the very earth had split wide open!
A torrential eruption of molten magma, carrying the unmitigated fury of the planet, violently slammed into the flesh-mountain, launching its massive bulk straight up into the clouds. This primitive, geological rage instantly threw the monstrosity far away from Li Ke's position, naturally pulling those colossal tentacles completely away from his head.
Before he could even process the geographical shift, Nezuko materialized right at his back. Her hands, which had grown to match the exact size of his own, reached around to firmly grasp Li Ke's hands from behind. Her unique, world-blessed fire instantly fused with his Dragon Power core, creating a spectacular, spiraling storm of gold and crimson.
At that exact microsecond, the blades in Li Ke's hands underwent a bizarre, structural mutation. The ordinary steel of the samurai swords cracked and shattered line by line under the immense pressure of the gale. As the metal fragments were swept away by the wind, the underlying energy condensed, reshaping the weapon into a blade sporting numerous distinct, branch-like protrusions!
"The Seven-Branched Sword? You've got to be kidding me."
Li Ke instinctively blurted out the name of the legendary mythological relic. However, the moment his back pressed against Nezuko's front, his skin registered the distinct shapes of a magatama bead necklace and the outline of a rigid mirror hanging right against her chest, and he went completely silent.
If his mythological guesswork was accurate, the current setup meant the Three Sacred Treasures of ancient lore had officially assembled on the field!
"So the local deities of this universe actually were working hard behind the scenes? But why the hell didn't they just step onto the battlefield themselves?"
Harboring this logical complaint, Li Ke decided to shift a portion of his mental focus toward appreciating Nezuko's surprisingly ample chest pressed firmly against his shoulder blades.
He had to admit, a main heroine's attributes truly lived up to the reputation—they felt absolutely wonderful!
Experiencing Li Ke's back continuously rubbing against her front, the literal Will of the World—who was currently hyper-focused on saving the planet while possessing Nezuko's physical vessel—was completely flabbergasted.
"You... focus."
She finally couldn't help but speak up. In her eons of existence, she had never imagined that during a sacred, world-saving event of this scale, the man chosen to deliver the final strike would actively choose to distract himself by hitting on her avatar's chest!
The icy, clear female voice instantly snapped Li Ke out of his sensory appreciation. The absolute lack of human emotion behind the words confirmed without a doubt that this consciousness did not belong to the normal Nezuko. This prompted Li Ke to throw out a direct question.
"Are you Nezuko, or are you the Will of the World?"
Of course, driven entirely by his survival instincts, he wisely stopped shifting his back against her.
"I am both," the voice of Nezuko echoed, still completely devoid of any emotional fluctuation. "I am everyone, and everyone is me. I am the collective consciousness of all things."
The fiery storm enveloping the two of them expanded at a breakneck pace. Yet, despite its cataclysmic force, the moment the raging vortex swept outward, it left every single bystander completely unharmed.
Li Ke watched as Nezuko's unique flame continually fed power into his own Dragon Power, twisting the storm into a colossal tornado of blinding golden fire.
Even the molten magma erupting from the fractured earth was violently caught up by the howling gale. The white-hot stone was vacuumed into the funnel cloud, spiraling toward the sky to engulf the airborne flesh-mountain.
A display of power this monumentally grand left Li Ke completely unable to find the words to describe it. Under the intense friction of the vortex, the very air molecules had split apart into a glowing plasma state. The deafening screeches of the meat-mountain couldn't even pierce through the roaring thrum of the wind.
This was, without a doubt, a tier of power that belonged strictly to a god.
"Then why..."
He desperately wanted to ask. If the planet itself possessed the raw strength to settle these dimensional anomalies on its own, why did it ever need a human contractor like him to hunt down those monsters?
But before he could even finish articulating the thought, the 'Nezuko' at his back cut in to answer him.
"Because executing a counter-measure like this requires the death of countless living organisms. Furthermore, I cannot instantly pinpoint the exact vector of an infection the moment it breaches our borders. Therefore, utilizing contractors like you remains the cleanest solution."
As 'Nezuko' laid out the cosmic logistics, a barrage of sensory illusions flashed directly across Li Ke's vision. The projections were so vivid it felt as though he was physically experiencing them. He witnessed how this sudden tectonic eruption would permanently shift the tectonic plates, causing massive earthquakes that would claim hundreds of thousands of human lives in the years to follow. He saw how the localized weather patterns conjured for this battle would destabilize the climate for the next two centuries, causing summer blizzards and winter heatwaves where temperatures would randomly rocket to over forty degrees Celsius, only for a sudden cold front to bring torrential hail and drop the temperature below freezing the very next month.
Worse yet, due to the rapid shifts in internal thermal currents, the volcanic cycle of Mount Fuji had been violently accelerated. It would now suffer a massive, catastrophic eruption once every fifty years, trigger severe earthquakes measuring over magnitude eight on the Richter scale, and cause widespread famine and ecological collapse.
The rest of the planet would experience minimal disruption. But this specific island nation would bear the full, unmitigated brunt of the cosmic backlash.
"But keeping the fallout restricted entirely to this single island chain represents the absolute minimum loss scenario. If I had been unable to channel your concentrated power as a localized anchor, my only play would have been to forcefully advance the global continental drift, reverting this entire planet back into a molten world of primordial lava. Only after completely incinerating every single extra-dimensional parasite would I allow the crust to cool and re-seed biological life from scratch. And if even a global reset proved insufficient to purge the infection, I would have forced the local star into a massive solar prominence event to completely swallow this star system. Fortunately, your steady efforts have spared me from resorting to such extreme measures."
You call this 'not extreme'?
The thought blurted out silently in Li Ke's mind. The monotone voice of 'Nezuko' echoed once more.
"An extreme measure would involve compressing your local galaxy into a massive black hole to force total annihilation. Or, to put it more simply, completely erasing all matter within this entire sector of space."
The voice of 'Nezuko' remained entirely flat, but the casual manner in which she detailed the concepts left Li Ke staring face-to-face with the crushing reality of his own insignificance.
Faced with a cosmic titan who casually talked about wiping out stars, restructuring galaxies, and deleting entire sectors of deep space, his human brain simply couldn't process the scaling anymore. His absolute maximum destructive output was merely wiping out an ordinary street of human beings with a single charged swing—and he couldn't even guarantee a hundred percent kill rate. Yet, the entity riding piggyback on his shoulders treated cosmic extinction like a routine house-cleaning chore.
Wait a second. Didn't he literally just grind his back against her chest a moment ago?
A cold bead of sweat slowly rolled down his neck.
"However, when your kind handles these local matters directly, there is no need for such destructive measures. Unfortunately, I severely miscalculated your baseline power level. From my perspective, I had simply never encountered an individual of our shared species who was quite so incredibly weak, which is why I handed the assignment over to you in the first place."
Next time you hand out a job, please don't mistake a regular human being like me for one of your cosmic peers, okay?
Li Ke offered a silent, sarcastic critique in his head, but he made sure to commit every single word of her warning to memory.
"Did you just say... I am your peer?"
Nezuko didn't offer a verbal answer. She simply tightened her grip around Li Ke's hands. Recognizing that the critical window had officially opened, Li Ke forcefully swung the completely mutated, branch-like blade down toward the airborne flesh-mountain.
The very next microsecond, the earth beneath his boots convulsed once more. Torrents of white-hot magma violently erupted from the crust. The swirling, hyper-compressed Elemental Bender storm that had been gathering momentum for so long finally detonated, hurtling straight into the heart of the cosmic abomination!
The catastrophic vortex of gold and crimson instantly tore right through the terrifying organism. Li Ke's raw Dragon Power flames aggressively began to incinerate the massive meat-mountain from the inside out. In that exact fraction of a second, Li Ke could feel the 'Nezuko' guiding his arms execute a mind-boggling one hundred and thirty million distinct slashes simultaneously! Every single micro-cut split the mountain of meat apart down to its cellular structure, though the exact dimensional physics of how she pulled off such a feat remained entirely beyond his comprehension.
By the time his conscious mind snapped back to reality, the roaring storm had completely vanished. The earth had fallen dead silent, leaving behind only cooling fields of bubbling magma.
Up in the atmosphere, the gargantuan flesh-mountain had completely disintegrated into a brilliant cascade of golden World Fragments light particles, gently scattering across the entire world. Right then, the entity anchoring herself to his back finally let go of his hands.
Li Ke spun around. He watched as a soft, shimmering golden aura began to radiate from Nezuko's form. The frozen, cold expression on her face softened, melting into a gentle, knowing smile.
"Because you, too, possess the inherent potential to become a living world yourself. That is exactly why I address you as my peer."
The Will of the World offered a quiet chuckle, reaching out to grasp Li Ke's hand.
"Even though I ultimately had to step onto the field myself to secure the finish, you still accomplished exactly what was expected of you. Therefore, I will naturally deliver your promised reward. Though, I suspect you will highly prefer a bounty of this particular variety."
The moment the words left her lips, 'Nezuko' grabbed Li Ke's hand and firmly pressed his palm right against the plush softness of her chest. Closing the distance between them in a flash, she tilted her head up and pressed her glowing, golden-dusted lips directly onto his.
The incredibly soft, intoxicating sensation left Li Ke completely mesmerized. But just as he was about to lean into the kiss and deepen it, the divine, cosmic presence vanished into thin air. The serene, godly expression on Nezuko's face shattered instantly, replaced by the sheer, frantic panic of an innocent teenage girl.
"Li Ke-san! What on earth do you think you are doing?!"
Nezuko forcefully shoved Li Ke backward. Crossing her arms over her chest to shield herself, she spun around and crouched down onto the ground, her face burning with explosive embarrassment.
Staring down at Nezuko, who had completely reverted to her standard human form, Li Ke's jaw twitched. He opened his mouth to ask a question, but looking down at the fading golden fragments dissolving in his palms, and noting the new notifications popping up on his system status screen, he could only let out a thoroughly helpless, amused sigh.
"What a thoroughly wicked woman... But since you chose to tease me like this, you'd better be ready for me to dive into your black hole later down the line."
However, the only thing that rose to answer his playful threat was a gentle, teasing breeze swirling through the morning air.