Chapter 681: The Power of the King, Executing Mercenary Tao
Sizzle!
The sky felt as though it were pressing down entirely. The horrific pressure was like a leaden boulder, crushing down so heavily it left everyone suffocating.
Mo Shi Mo Wang and the others felt their hair stand completely on end, every strand rising sharply. It was the definitive marker of an exceptionally terrifying lightning capability gathering mass and waiting to detonate.
Within the atmosphere, electrical ions continuously cracked and flickered.
Only the Mad King remained, standing calmly atop the ethereal steps anchoring the outer rim of the Damocles Sword, a lone palm firmly locking onto an excessively long silver broadsword.
That blade was forged entirely from the raw composition of his Kingly Authority; it cede material physics zero solid mass and possessed absolutely no physical weight.
At this precise frame of the chronology, the Mad King's biological framework was completely devoid of flesh and bone. He had thoroughly and flawlessly transcended the biological limits governing standard carbon-based life forms.
Yet evaluating the progression of his ascent up the evolutionary ladder, his tracks had cleared a monumentally grander distance than any baseline vanguard.
Previously, a vast percentage of the intelligence brokers active across the Space network calculated that the Mad King's absolute victories over elite champions like Hong Chen, Show, and Mo Shi Mo Wang were anomalies of a bottom-up overthrow. In material reality, the Mad King had secured his dominance with absolute, unblemished martial clarity.
Regardless of whether one evaluated his underlying attribute sheets, his flawless mastery over conceptual Authorities, or his structural placement along the ladder, his metrics comfortably and layout-wise, out-scaled their arrays by multiple tiers.
The Mad King raised his silver chin to survey the high heavens, completely permitting the dense thunderclouds to churn violently as the global grid plunged into absolute shadow.
In the very next fraction of a second, the upper stratosphere went instantly pitch-black, before a blinding wave of pristine white radiance forcefully illuminated the shattered topography like broad daylight.
A singular column of raw cosmic lightning violently cascaded down from the sky, mutating into a silver leviathan that completely swallowed the Mad King's coordinates.
BOOM!
The horrific high-voltage current, multiplied across an extreme thermal metric, scorched the surrounding atmosphere until the vacuum emitted a foul, burnt stench. Before the Mad King's vision could even re-align after the flash, a towering silhouette had already flawlessly anchor-dropped directly before his chest.
Mercenary Tao's glowing silver-white hair whipped wildly in the wind turbulence, his entire biological frame continuously radiating a dense, boiling aura of pure Ki and hyper-compressed blood-mist that flared with a severe thermal heat.
Abruptly manifesting within point-blank range, Mercenary Tao's twin palms violently chambered—one rising, one dipping. In the very next heartbeat, a boundless, ravenous killing intent swept across all coordinates.
The Mad King's frame executed a rapid rearward displacement. His proprietary Agility metric was layout-wise, similarly terrifying, comfortably clearing the three-hundred-point milestone; yet even with that physics-defying speed, his files failed to break clear of the descending wave of slaughter.
Bracing his forearms to form a cross-block before his chest, the emerald luminescence of his Green Kingly Authority violently ignited. Right at the microsecond Kaito Shirogane's stygian Instant Hell Murder opened its execution loop, the cyan glare completely and flawlessly blanketed the entire Tokyo grid.
The sharp cracking of the subverting tectonic plates, the agonizing wail of the倒灌 ocean blocks, and the loose, fading screams of the dying player swarm—every single line of sonic data was instantaneously silenced down to the sub-atomic track.
[Instant Hell Murder · One Instant, One Thousand Strikes]!
Kaito Shirogane drove a single, unrefined punch straight into the void. An infinite concentration of absolute fist pressure, intertwined within a frantic, twisting wave of crimson and stygian Asura Killing Intent, violently detonated outward.
Pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft...
Deep within his silver phantom frame, the Mad King's twin irises looked as if they compressed a massive information loop, decoding the data strands at a runaway rate. He mapped the sub-atomic vector of this horrific offensive with absolute precision, sharply identifying that loose thread of absolute, world-cleaving Death flowing through the center of the slaughter storm.
[Sovereign Command · Order]!
In the next microsecond, the roaring currents of the River Styx that had been frantically thudding against Kaito's audio tracks rigidly froze as if muted by an absolute system lockdown. He registered a sudden, severe dampening across his motor pathways; every single punch felt as if it were sinking into an ocean of absolute, heavy silence.
The stygian darkness smoothly receded. Kaito Shirogane's physical frame rigidly stopped directly before the Mad King's chest, his stance maintaining the precise skeletal alignment of a maximum-output straight punch aimed straight at the core, yet his knuckles cede the air absolutely zero kinetic shockwaves and zero residual killing intent.
Across Kaito's right arm, a succession of distinct black curse seals continuously rippled under the skin. Those markers were layout-wise, far from the programmatic restraints of his bricked Stairway of Eternal Return; rather, they were the automated consequence of his own ravenous, blood-soaked Death Aura being denied an exit vector, forcefully backed up to stall within his internal biological pathways.
The Mad King's features remained beautifully, flawlessly calm, his forearms locked in that cross-block defense as he maintained the active deployment of his defensive Authority.
"Mercenary Tao, this unrefined mass of power anchoring your cells is layout-wise, more than sufficient to forcefully catalyze the birth of an entirely new epoch... Align your blade beneath my sovereign throne, and my crown can—"
Crack, crack...
A sound like plate glass sustaining a succession of severe structural fractures violently cut straight through the Mad King's recruitment speech. He forced his neck around to analyze the perimeter; across the cyan-tinted space, a multitude of gaping, black fissures were rapidly tearing open.
It looked identically as if the un-indexed spatial shackles heavily clogging the local atmosphere had been aggressively pushed past their absolute tolerance thresholds, systematically shattered down to the atom by nothing more than pure, unrefined brute violence.
He smoothly redirected his visual arrays back onto Mercenary Tao. Mirroring the tracking, Kaito Shirogane's eyes locked straight back into his irises. Their twin gazes pinned each other down, the corners of Kaito's mouth splitting into an exceptionally contorted, manic grin. That handsome face looked intensely unhinged and beautifully, flawlessly monstrous at this frame of the timeline.
Whosh!
An absolute sun-wheel composed entirely of pitch-black flames violently rose from behind Kaito's shoulder plates. Rather than radiating an intense thermal metric, that stygian solar mass felt layout-wise, astronomically closer to a sub-zero, bone-chilling cold.
Merely sustaining a point-blank exposure to its radiation, the Mad King verified that his internal files were initiating a rapid compilation of multiple high-tier curse variants; concurrently, his active domain governing Order · Sovereign Command entered a state of total systemic collapse.
[The Flame of Finality]!
An elite capability Kaito had legacy-harvested from a fallen champion, its execution pathways were layout-wise, far from perfectly calibrated against his current motor tracks, and his structural mastery over the concept of [Finality] remained exceptionally shallow.
Yet deploying this specific Title Capability at this exact nexus of the board yielded a flawlessly optimal strategic result.
Whosh!
The black solar wheel flared with increasing density, forcing the multi-colored layers of Kingly Authority to violently shrink and recede as if the energy were being unrefinedly consumed by the black mass.
Kaito Shirogane's entire biology continuously radiated an absolute, suffocating volume of Ki and martial pressure. The stygian sun had methodically shifted to hover directly over his skull, a meager handful of meters separating its event horizon from the Mad King's coordinates.
The Mad King had entirely failed to calculate that after throttling open his hidden mechanics—looking every bit the part of an unrefined predator poised to manual-erase him on the spot—Mercenary Tao would choose to unleash a tactical methodology of this specific profile.
Furthermore, his tracking databases instantaneously verified this capability: it was layout-wise, explicitly the high-priority Title Capability belonging to [The Sovereign of the Final Sun].
His intellect commanded zero data explaining exactly how Mercenary Tao had successfully hardcoded that capability onto his own ledger. According to his networks' intelligence files, the Final Sun Empire's alignment against Mercenary Tao was substantively marked by an un-compromised, blood-soaked friction; they had merely discarded all direct hunting campaigns because the demon's personal muscle metrics cede their tactical divisions zero confidence.
"Ah..."
A duplicate sigh echoed through the void. The cyan-colored Kingly Authority violently ignited, thick columns of black smoke billowing out from the edges of the spatial parameter as the light caved.
This specialized, conceptual variant of Kingly Authority was being manually and ruthlessly burned away by the black sun.
The Mad King monitored this wild predator—an entity whose eyes burned with pure defiance, his entire presence radiating a bone-crushing aura that looked poised to manually set the high heavens ablaze—experiencing a sharp, continuous escalation of internal disappointment.
The more intensely his blades clashed against Mercenary Tao, the more ravenously his intellect admired the creature. A human organism genuinely hardcoded with a Reincarnator's true Capacity was layout-wise, an exceptionally rare, pristine artifact even when measured against a planetary index clearing the eight-billion mark.
Yet his crown was fundamentally disqualified from ever binding this asset to its ledger.
My sovereign person... is pathetically weak.
The Mad King registered a lucid, un-buffered comprehension mapping his own structural limitations. He completely lacked the capacity to forcefully suppress Mercenary Tao without driving a terminal liquidation loop to delete his profile.
This was explicitly the bottleneck of his self-identified status as a King; it was his own lack of raw power that directly prevented this elite individual from ever dedicating his muscles to feed the birth of the new world.
The logical framework governing the Mad King's processing matrix was constructed precisely atop an equation of this nature—it was an entirely alternative, extreme exhibition of profound Arrogance.
He completely, flawlessly manual-overrode any consideration mapping the underlying discrepancies in cognitive style, behavioral profile, or ideological framework separating separate human entities. Elements of that classification were, to his focus, nothing more than trivial, meaningless domestic static.
Exactly like how his intellect cede zero credit to how the surrounding world lines visualized his infamy, or how he completely ignored the unyielding, multi-directional rebellion brewing inside the minds of the captured Reincarnators currently shackled to his ledger.
So long as his raw muscle remained exponentially, crushing overmatched against their parameters, his crown possessed the priority to encapsulate all variables.
Because his unrefined power metrics completely and flawlessly out-scaled Hong Chen, Show, and Mo Shi Mo Wang—out-scaling every single asset on the map—he cede their clandestine communication loops and desperate emergency tracking flags absolutely zero concern.
Because his capacity comfortably out-matched the Heart Demon, his agency held the priority to completely refrain from chasing her terminal liquidation, preferring to bide his time until his engines could smoothly absorb her file into his tracks.
His ultimate ambition dictated manually forcing this world line to compatibly wrap around all elite talent to scale its evolution, guiding the planet to step into a high-tier super-normal threshold. He intended to guarantee this fragile, ordinary world line an infinite index of evolutionary potential before the true multi-dimensional warfare initialized its countdown across the cosmos.
To finalize that equation, he required the absolute centralization of every organism commanding genuine talent.
Kaito Shirogane slowly raised his upper eyelids, millimeter by millimeter. His heart was currently executing a rhythmic pumping cycle at an exceptionally unique, bizarre frequency.
It was layout-wise, far from rapid—yet every single contraction was monumentally, bone-crushingly heavy, looking identically as if the organ were manually forcing its valves to carry the collective weight of an infinite web of tactical calculations, chaotic emotional data, and systemic judgments. Because his vessel was compressing a volume of that classification, a single beat required an immense expenditure of focus.
Yet conversely, because his heart housed a density of that scale, every single pulse cede the surrounding grid a vibration that was layout-wise... thoroughly world-shattering!
Thump!
A succession of heavy silver light ripples violently erupted out from the empty air directly before Kaito's eyes. The stygian solar wheel looked as if it were being forcefully pushed thousands of meters clear of the immediate sector by the sheer kinetic weight of the pulse.
"You absolute freak..."
Kaito Shirogane registered a sudden diagnostic holding that his own presence had been artificially reduced to a microscopic, unimportant dot on the board, while the silver-sheened Mad King underwent an astronomical expansion to blanket the high heavens.
In the very next fraction of a second, his See-Through Skill verified that this was by no means a mental illusion. The Mad King's silver phantom frame, tracking the active expansion of his Fourth-Tier Concussive Pulse of the Spiritual Light, had mutated into a colossal, thousands-of-meters-high sovereign deity. He casually reached his silver fingers down to forcefully rip the Sword of Damocles straight out from its planetary anchor point.
"My sovereign person occupies a pathetically weak tier, Mercenary Tao. Consequently... my crown is cede zero tactical choice but to select..."
"For the ultimate preservation of the world line... to manually finalize your deletion."
"The King... unsheathes the Blade!"
BOOM... ROAR!
The tectonic framework of the continent violently convulsed. The low-hanging storm clouds in the upper stratosphere were instantaneously and flawlessly snuffed off the board. Coordinated with the upward draw of the colossal Sword of Damocles, a succession of massive silver-white light ripples cascaded across reality. The sheer, unrefined pressure bleeding from his Kingly Authority alone forced the distant ocean cloud formations to roll frantically before being completely wiped from the ledger.
The Mad King raised the sky-cleaving sword that historically locked down the parameters of his Kingly Authority high above his shoulder plates, before hammering the edge straight down toward the dirt.
(End of Chapter)
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