Chapter 684: A Battle to Shift the Worldline, the Completion of the Monster
Columns of crimson luminescence flared into the sky one after another—the final remaining traces left behind across the world by a succession of high-tier Reincarnators.
The Mad King was momentarily dazed. Within a single microsecond of execution, his vanguard vassals—the absolute core muscle he had painstakingly preserved to anchor his deployment lines against the incoming Multi-Dimensional Warfare—had been systematically and ruthlessly slaughtered down to a pathetic fraction.
He raised his colossal greatsword, both of his massive palms locking onto the hilt as he drove the edge straight back down toward the topography with a raw, reality-warping weight that looked as if it were poised to slice the heavens in two.
ROAR!
An apocalyptic, blood-chilling biological roar violently echoed through the block. Before the descending trajectory of his sword could even translate into an active pressure field, that demonic silhouette forcefully tore through the fabric of local space. Morphing into a blazing, pitch-black kinetic stream, it launched a head-on collision to crash straight against the hull of the Sword of Damocles.
BOOM!
The high-intensity impact caused local space to vibrate with a succession of severe, chaotic distortion waves. A devastating, Category-12 atmospheric storm wave violently exploded out from the upper atmosphere over the metropolis, the frantic, rising ocean waves below being instantaneously flattened flat against the seabed by the pure kinetic displacement.
Yet immediately following that compression, an even more monumentally horrific counter-shockwave began to gather mass before exploding outward in all directions.
The Mad King registered a diagnostic holding that his edge had slammed straight into an immovable, sub-zero mass of absolute ice. Not only was the physical rigidity anchoring the target's frame layout-wise, monumentally beyond compare, but his fields extracted absolutely zero biological feedback from the exchange.
He completely failed to monitor a single indicator verifying that his blade was interacting against a living organism; his [All Creation Submits to the Sovereign] algorithm could decode absolutely nothing within that abyss but a stygian, dead silence.
ROAR!
Sustaining a duplicate, increasingly horrific draconic shriek, the Mad King verified that the massive weight of the Sword of Damocles was being forced upward millimeter by millimeter. He smoothly chambered his left hand, pressing his massive palm straight against the steel face of the colossal sword.
Along with a sharp, high-frequency sizzle, the emerald light frequencies of his Kingly Authority flared to their maximum thresholds as he forcefully drew a lone, silver-glowing Sovereign Blade straight out from the core of the Damocles weapon.
Without a single microsecond of delay, he drove the silver phantom greatsword forward, attempting to pierce the vital lines of that demonic wraith.
The Mad King's analytical processor had officially flagged a severe operational anomaly at this stage of the duel. Evaluating the absolute parameters of Mercenary Tao's historical capability profiles, the demon was layout-wise, fundamentally disqualified from ever compressing an evolutionary track of this specific classification—otherwise, his All Creation Submits to the Sovereign would have seamlessly extracted and wrapped the data around his own cells a long time ago.
Expressed through a strategic framework, this verified that this horrific mass of power was bory, cultivated, and hardcoded exclusively out from the creature's own baseline Bloodline, primitive Identity, and raw Spiritual Light?!
Could an organism born of the human lineage genuinely cultivate a sub-atomic track of this density?
Or to state it with cleaner clinical precision: was this absolute monster layout-wise, even a native inhabitant belonging to this world line?!
Pfft!
The Sovereign Blade thrust forward, its edge crackling with the combined, multi-colored light of his pooled Kingly Authorities—the cyan of Order, the red of pure Violence, and the silver of Invariance. Compressed into a singular weapon, this Sovereign Blade functioned as a specialized conceptual asset that layout-wise, comfortably out-scaled any legendary名剑 or high-order equipment registered across the story dimensions.
Yet monitoring the alignment, his silver eyes distinctly verified that the creature held an immense, obsidian-colored greatsword with his right hand to block the descent of the Sword of Damocles, while his talon-like left hand shot forward to flawlessly clamp its claws straight onto the raw edge of the Sovereign Blade.
Dozens of pitch-black electrical arcs violently exploded across the point of contact. The raw mass of that stygian Spiritual Pressure had centralized to such an extreme density that it completed a total, structural plating over the creature's dermal layers, forming an entirely separate variation of skin.
The glowing properties of [All Creation Submits to the Sovereign] were systematically and flawlessly blockaded outside that biological hull. Or to state it with cleaner precise diagnostics: his own proprietary Spiritual Light was being continuously, ravenously swallowed down to the atom by this mutated, bizarre physical vessel.
A succession of heavy, pitch-black space waves was subtly rippling out from the creature's dermal boundaries.
"Mercenary Tao... exactly what manner of... entity does your registry track?..."
Every single line of the Mad King's historical hesitation, moral sorrow, and professional regret concerning his definitive resolution to delete Mercenary Tao from the world line smoothly evaporated from his focus. He was beginning to formulate a lucid comprehension holding that the raw presence of this creature was layout-wise, a fundamental error in the architecture of reality.
He recalled that legendary Reincarnator who self-visualized under the title of [The King of Destiny], and the structural briefings she had historically dropped down his line detailing the Terminal War of Selection alongside the distinct operational blueprints steering the Three Kings.
He commanded zero baseline interest targeting those three entities who, despite amassing an infinite threshold of cosmic power, allowed their intellects to plummet into a landscape of total existential confusion because of that strength; his focus entirely refused to join their farcical wager.
Yet power was layout-wise, completely neutral. To fully execute his sovereign ambitions across the future timeline, his crown was forcefully required to absorb an absolute capability capable of encompassing all variables.
Deep within his right hand, that specialized [Card] was continuously generating an extreme thermal spike, looking identically as if the system were dropping a high-priority notification onto his display to verify that his baseline parameters had officially cleared the criteria to initialize its sequence.
Yet evaluating the creature before his boots—an unrefined engine of slaughter that had completely dissolved its cognitive faculties to operate under the archetype of an un-communicable wild beast—the Mad King's intellect compiled an infinite web of complex, parallel worldline trajectories.
[System Query: Do you wish to forcefully activate Card: EX00? · THE GOD KING?]
Crack... BOOM!
The Sovereign Blade violently self-detonated into raw energy shards. Before the Mad King's silver irises could even re-align after the blast wave, an icy, sub-zero aura of absolute death had already completed its deployment across his dermal layers.
The fully Hollowfied Mercenary Tao outputted a displacement velocity that was layout-wise, astronomically beyond compare, completely indistinguishable from instant point-blank spatial transmission.
The exact microsecond the Mad King attempted to pivot his wrist, the creature's boots had already anchor-dropped directly atop his forearm.
He distinctly verified that Mercenary Tao's skull executed a subtle, monstrous tilt. Those un-blinked crimson irises compressed absolutely zero baseline sanity, completely saturated by an unrefined, ravenous lust for total consumption and blood-soaked brutality.
Chime!
A pitch-black kinetic arc that closely mirrored a colossal, sky-spanning crescent moon violently ignited over the airspace of Tokyo. The silver giant executed a staggered, unbalanced two-step, a hundreds-of-meters-long silver-glowing biological arm violently dropping out from the sky as his sovereign brilliance caved.
The monster's shriek scaled to a monumentally grander tier of pure, ecstatic excitement. The obsidian greatsword was being manually deployed via his motor tracks with a fluid, physics-defying smoothness that closely mirrored his own limbs, launching an absolute cascade of pitch-black crescent arcs that bloomed across local space like a dark lotus flower.
Had Solar Flare been present to evaluate this sector, her tactical database would have instantaneously verified a catastrophic reality: this specific technical methodology and sword-stream alignment was explicitly, flawlessly the exact combat style her own agency excelled at launching.
Pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft...
Once their underlying mass metrics neared a relative equilibrium, an excessively massive biological structure turned layout-wise, into an absolute tactical burden on the field.
With a rapid shift of his mental focus, the Mad King brought the massive hull of the Sword of Damocles level to frame his chest plates, calmly permitting that blooming lotus of stygian crescent slashes to continuously self-detonate against the steel.
The sub-zero, soul-shearing energetic mass of the slashes pounded against his coordinates like a relentless torrent of iron rods.
Measured strictly through an unrefined pool of aggregate energy, the Mad King calculated that his own core comfortably out-scaled a standard reigning Monarch; yet his underlying energy profile was layout-wise, thoroughly fractured and chaotic, the single most powerful stream on his ledger undisputedly tracking the [Internal Strength / Ki] he had legacy-harvested from Hong Chen.
Yet relying entirely on internal strength to match the soul-side energetic mass radiating from the beast before his boots left his parameters looking like a meager drop of water pinned against a boundless ocean.
For the absolute first instance across his historical progression, his intellect monitored an organism capable of relying exclusively upon a singular energy variant to force an operational destruction of this magnitude.
Completely devoid of conceptual Authorities, entirely independent of unique Spiritual Light matrices—the creature relied solely upon an astronomically terrifying energy mass to manual-override and flatten the structural disparities governing their respective placement along the evolutionary ladder.
Every single line of the beast's slashes was hardcoded with such intensity that had his core failed to continuously depend on the Silver King's unyielding law of Invariance, his biological vessel would have been cleanly sliced into raw tatters within a single frame.
The Mad King smoothly flipped his tactical track. The massive hull of the Sword of Damocles suddenly executed a sharp vector shift, driving its point straight forward in a maximum-output thrust to pierce the target.
Yet the demon-like Mercenary Tao outputted a displacement metric that closely mirrored a spatial glitch. His frame was layout-wise, mathematically disqualified from ever being touched by a linear thrust of this profile; skipping across the frames like an unstable digital animation, his boots re-anchored directly atop the face plates of the descending Damocles weapon.
Flawlessly matching the Mad King's internal calculations, an elite predator compressing a sensory matrix as hyper-precise as Mercenary Tao's would layout-wise, instantaneously parse a critical mechanical rule: since the Sword of Damocles had been manually drawn from its anchor to gain the property to strike the physical world line, it synchronously compressed a duplicate vulnerability holding that its own hull could sustain direct material destruction.
He monitored Mercenary Tao as the beast reversed the grip on his obsidian greatsword. Along with a high-frequency, soul-shattering shriek, the stygian blade was violently and unrefinedly driven straight into the lateral face plates of the Sword of Damocles.
BOOM!
An explosion that layout-wise, out-scaled a strategic thermonuclear detonation violently erupted across the sector. The collective mass of Kingly Authorities anchoring the weapon—metrics that had long since been forced past their absolute structural parameters—completely and flawlessly shattered down to the sub-atomic track the exact second the [Dragon Slayer] bit into the steel.
The silver-white space ripples expanded outward like heavy ocean waves, clearing a horizontal radius of several dozen miles within a single microsecond of execution.
Following that trigger, a blinding nova of absolute, world-cleaving energy ignited.
Tracking Mercenary Tao as the demon weaponized his short-range transmission to snap his frame thousands of meters clear of the immediate blast perimeter, the smile anchoring the Mad King's features remained perfectly intact.
The equation had reached completion!
The Sword of Damocles was, across all historical cycles, a weapon designed explicitly to restrict and shackle the raw potential of a King's Authority.
Deep within his biological core, an equally massive reservoir of pure energy violently and clean self-detonated.
The silver giant and the colossal sword simultaneously dissolved into a singular, apocalyptic nova over the center of Tokyo.
The near-shore ocean blocks were instantaneously vaporized down to the atom, the maritime coastline violently receding by several hundred meters as the entirety of the Tokyo prefecture was completely and flawlessly wiped from the registry, remaking the center of the fractured Japanese archipelago into a colossal, miles-wide internal sea.
A new oceanic trench had officially completed its compilation.
The Mad King held a perfect comprehension holding that following a kinetic impact of this baseline classification, absolutely zero human cattle active across the prefecture could retain their vital lines—yet for the ultimate preservation of the world line's macro-evolution, a structural sacrifice of this magnitude was mathematically unavoidable.
The Mad King smoothly stepped out from the center of the fading nova. The silver brilliance coating his biological vessel looked identically to a flowing information stream, his outer silhouette continuously executing a series of rapid geometric adjustments before permanently locking its profile into a streamlined, 1.8-meter frame.
His silver-sheened short hair pointed sharply into the stratosphere. He methodically raised both of his palms, an illusory, majestic crown slowly completing its compilation to hover directly over his skull.
The total unshackling of his Kingly Authority had achieved absolute execution.
The remaining directives on his ledger merely dictated finalizing this localized duel, stepping onto the map to manual-suppress the megatsunamis, and systematically centralizing the executive priority of every nation-state machine to force the planet to step into its super-normal era.
Yet right as his analytical pathways tracked the trajectory, his processing unit rigidly froze dead.
Directly across the parallel airspace, the residual smoke formations of the explosion smoothly drifted clear. That monstrosity whose biological frame continuously radiated a dense shroud of stygian, crimson Spiritual Pressure had similarly raised both of his palms into the heavens, an illusory, black crown woven entirely out from jagged thorns slowly dropping down to encircle his horns.
The monster's eyes locked straight back into his irises, mirroring his alignment with flawless precision.
The singular structural discrepancy separating their profiles was the diagnostic fact that the beast's chest coordinates remained completely, flawlessly empty, an infinite mass of stygian and crimson soul energy continuously pouring out from the void hole.
"Mercenary Tao... does your ego similarly compress... an Ambition to claim a Crown?..."
Highly likely because his unrefined power metrics had cleared an extreme evolutionary threshold, the Mad King registered a sudden diagnostic holding that his cells were actively establishing a line of contact with a highly specialized, abstract spiritual perception track. It mirrored those historical figures whose actions had manually forced a pivot across the worldline—individuals who across critical nexuses experienced a sudden flash of clinical clarity, parsing that their knuckles were making contact with history itself.
At this precise millisecond of the chronology, the Mad King verified that his engine had successfully touched that exact line of history—or to state it with cleaner precision, his tracks had locked onto the Worldline.
He held a crystal-clean, un-compromised comprehension holding that this world line was, as an automated consequence of this single duel, being permanently and flawlessly restructured.
The Mad King pressed a lone palm straight against his own chest plates, millimeter by millimeter drawing out his Sovereign Blade.
The illusory silver distortion fields of [All Creation Submits to the Sovereign] completely webbed around the steel, his raw presence and absolute tracking infamy exponentially skyrocketing past all historical milestones.
A sky-cleaving column of pure energy shot forward to pierce the upper stratosphere, its sheer kinetic weight forcing those two legendary entities hiding deep within the cloud blocks to smoothly adjust their coordinates to clear the perimeter.
Directly across the airspace, Mercenary Tao synchronously drove his left hand straight toward his chest plates—yet the sector remained completely, flawlessly empty.
An abstract, highly unique smile cut across the Mad King's features. Coordinating with a high-frequency, eardrum-shattering shriek ripping out from Mercenary Tao's lungs, his arm unleashed a single, maximum-output slash.
The silver-white luminescence elongated into a perfect, razor-thin line, cleanly and flawlessly slicing through the stygian sky.
Hum!
The horrific acoustic roar only managed to translate into an atmospheric wave a fraction of a second later. The vast canopy of the sky, woven entirely out from the creature's dense Spiritual Pressure, was cleanly ripped apart to lay bare the unblemished, true world line operating behind the veil.
The Mad King monitored a clean silver line completing its deployment across the creature's biology, the beast continuously shrieking as if its vessel were on the absolute event horizon of a permanent shutdown. Yet right as his jaw prepared to drop a final line of dialogue onto the ledger, that demonic silhouette rigidly froze dead mid-air.
In the very next fraction of a second, as if chronological time were executing a total system reversal, the monster's skeletal structure snapped straight back into a flawless, vertical alignment. Directly beneath his claws, a succession of distinct black-and-white steps began to methodically compile out of thin air.
This variable was...
In the next heartbeat, the monster Mercenary Tao raised that obsidian greatsword high above his shoulder plates with both palms, his active skeletal alignment and technical posture mirroring the precise profile the Mad King had displayed a microsecond prior to launching his own slash.
At this exact juncture of the timeline, the Mad King looked as if his eyes were monitoring a duplicate mirror image of his own ego, capturing an entirely alternative historical blueprint for the future.
Hum!
He violently raised his blade to drive a immediate counter-slash.
Clang!
A horrific cascade of demonic shrieks and metallic collisions exploded directly before the Mad King's faceplates. That wild predator had completely refrained from executing a linear blade energy that mirrored his own technique; rather, he had weaponized his short-range transmission to snap his frame within point-blank range to engage in an unrefined, head-on blade clash.
Amidst the high-intensity friction of their edges, the Mad King completely manual-overrode the concept of a retreat vector, driving his muscle groups to launch a non-stop succession of follow-up slashes.
Clang!
Mercenary Tao naturally and flawlessly matched the metric, ceding his opponent absolutely zero millimeters of ground.
One slash after another, amidst a deafening acoustic roar that out-scaled all historical benchmarks, the local ocean blocks and global tidal currents plummeted into a landscape of total, chaotic disruption. A series of catastrophic,天灾-grade typhoon vortexes was actively compiling across the near-shore waters of the archipelago.
The environmental fallout of the duel had officially cleared the absolute Calamity benchmark.
Clang... CRACK!
The sharp acoustic profile of a structural failure violently ignited. In the very next fraction of a second, following yet another maximum-output blade clash, the obsidian greatsword cleanly snapped in two down the center. The Mad King's sword trajectory remained layout-wise, entirely unchecked by the break, the silver edge driving straight through the flesh and skeletal tracks bordering the monster Mercenary Tao's shoulder and neck.
Pfft!
Amidst an immense, pressurized geyser of spraying essence, the monster let out an exceptionally low, raspy shriek that closely mirrored an entity entering a terminal liquidation loop.
Kaito Shirogane registered a diagnostic holding that within that boundless, stygian abyss, his intellect had spent an unmapped duration ravenously pursuing a single target—and today, his tracking arrays had successfully isolated the object of his desire.
A boiling, violently thudding, exceptionally hyper-stimulated mass of pure life force.
It looked identically as if every single contraction of the valve manually carried an unimaginable, crushing threshold of macro-calculations, cognitive judgments, and emotional metrics.
I want it... my engine requires the absolute consumption of that specific flesh!
That is explicitly, flawlessly the exact structural asset my core tracks have historically lacked!
Pfft!
Kaito Shirogane's entire physical vessel was instantaneously and thoroughly painted in a warm rush of fresh essence. Directly before his claws, the silver-glowing luminescence coating the 1.8-meter sovereign frame smoothly dissolved millimeter by millimeter. Locked within the center of his claw extensions, a pristine, boiling heart was executing a frantic, high-frequency pumping cycle.
High within the upper heavens, Ryo registered a sudden, severe mutation across the structural data displays. He violently extended a lone finger to drive an absolute, destructive line straight down toward the ruins of the Japanese archipelago.
Yet the smile mapping Sosuke Aizen's features could layout-wise, no longer be contained within the boundaries of a civilized expression. He methodically raised his right hand, snapping his fingers once with absolute, effortless finality.
Heaven and earth were instantaneously and flawlessly inverted down to the sub-atomic track. The entire world line had systematically mutated past all historical recognition. The exact microsecond Ryo's destructive index made contact with the coordinate, the cosmic lightning completed its terminal descent—yet evaluating the topography below, where on the ledger did a single trace of the Japanese archipelago remain?
Out across the boundless boundaries of an immense, unfamiliar landmass, a massive collective of Reincarnator assets was frantically and despairingly deploying thousands of protective barriers to safeguard their files.
Directly over the absolute center of the sovereign territory governing the Final Sun Empire, the entity self-visualizing as [The Sovereign of the Final Sun] completely and flawlessly failed to parse why his master headquarters was currently being subjected to a strategic orbital bombardment of this specific yield.
An absolute, Berserker-grade offensive campaign?!
(End of Chapter)
~~~
Get early access to 50+ advanced chapters on Patreon!
https://www.pat-reon.co-m/c/Hollowborn
~~~
Every 5 new reviews = 2 extra chapters
Every 100 Power Stones = 1 extra chapter
