Chapter 858: The Creator's World
"According to official reports, in the catastrophic disaster that erupted across City A several days ago, over 7.5 million citizens lost their lives, alongside more than two thousand heroes who fell in the line of duty. The adversaries behind this calamity descended from deep space, from the cosmic void. An extraterrestrial hostility designating itself the 'Primordial Dragon Court' has launched an invasion upon Earth. We must do everything within our power to protect our world..."
"Throughout this brutal engagement, the heroes of the Hero Association, the devil hunters of the Cabinet's Public Safety Special Division, and countless anonymous champions fought to their dying breath. We will engrave their names, monikers, and deeds onto a permanent monument erected upon the memorial ruins of City A."
"Furthermore, this war was far from a total defeat. When those catastrophic entities descended, a solitary superhero weathered unfathomable trials and vanquished every enemy on the field: the newly appointed S-Class Rank 3 hero, the Martial God, Mercenary Tao!"
Across global broadcast networks, high-definition footage of Mercenary Tao played on continuous rotation. Clad in a tailored dark-green overcoat, tall, imposing, and undeniably handsome, his aesthetic matched the public's idealized archetype of a savior far better than most eccentric champions.
More importantly, he had stood directly on the frontline, slaying two walking apocalyptic disasters in rapid succession. To the battered S-Class survivors and Public Safety's Miss Makima, he was the undisputed supreme architect of their survival.
Almost overnight, the hero who had saved civilization rocketed to the pinnacle of global public adoration.
Public discourse flared with fierce indignation over why a savior commanding such unprecedented feats hadn't been crowned S-Class Rank 1. The pulverized headquarters of the Hero Association was widely condemned as incompetent, structurally obsolete, and hopelessly out of touch.
Capitalizing on the administrative vacuum, the Cabinet formally unveiled a legislative blueprint to establish an entirely new "Super Hero Headquarters"—an initiative to which Blast immediately lent his unreserved endorsement.
In truth, neither Blast nor Tornado had any objection to elevating Mercenary Tao to S-Class Rank 1. The bureaucratic obstruction had been orchestrated entirely by Makima from the shadows.
She understood the political theater of institutional revolution: to justify the birth of a new sovereign apparatus, the predecessor had to appear corrupt, paralyzed, and fundamentally flawed.
She had already secured formal clearance from both the Cabinet and the Prime Minister to register Mercenary Tao as the undisputed "Top 1" hero within the incoming global charter.
Standing before a panoramic floor-to-ceiling glass wall, Kaito Shirogane gazed out over the sprawling skyline of Neo Tokyo. The world's distortion index was exceedingly high; stacked atop the original One-Punch Man baseline of twenty-six municipal letters, foreign metropolitan centers and geopolitical sovereign regimes had seamlessly woven themselves into the global fabric.
"Hah. Clearance from the Prime Minister?"
Kaito did not sneer, yet the cold indifference saturating his tone laid bare his contempt for the local administrative state.
Across the room, Li Qingzi and Dead of Night sat on low leather couches. The executive penthouse occupied the entirety of the top floor, a luxury residence Makima had cleared specifically to accommodate Mercenary Tao.
Every luxury and leisure facility was provided, and Makima had even stationed retinues of attractive men and women on the floor below, ready to respond to his slightest whim.
The Control Devil was remarkably obsequious before an entity she genuinely revered.
Makima understood the martial artist's dismissive attitude. Once an individual's destructive capacity breached a certain cosmic threshold, mundane civil authority ceased to hold operational meaning.
Raw force was the foundational currency of all power.
Yet Makima still required the scaffolding of institutional governance. Devils relied on contracts; for the Control Devil, holding administrative custody over a nation of over a hundred million citizens provided an unmatched reservoir for binding pacts.
"Lord Mercenary Tao, you need not trouble yourself with mundane affairs. Under my guidance, those frail mortals will steer the institutional trajectory of this world to align with your will."
"Furthermore, I am coordinating operations to track down the draconic remnants nesting within subterranean faults worldwide. The moment high-value specimens or massive nesting clusters are verified, the tactical telemetry will be forwarded to your console immediately."
Makima wore her crisp white dress shirt, inclining her head in quiet submission. In this suite, she appeared less like the omnipotent devil holding the lives of hybrid fiends in her palm, and more like a dedicated majordomo.
Li Qingzi looked away from Makima with an impassive expression. Her own standing with the civilian coalition had climbed to Revered. Though she and Dead of Night had not traded blows on the frontlines, orchestrating the adaptation crucible between Mahoraga and Garou had served as the pivotal fulcrum preventing the complete annihilation of the surviving S-Class cadre in City A.
That tactical contribution had earned them immense prestige gains, though it remained leagues behind the astronomical standing harvested by Kaito, who had personally dismantled Boros and Deathwing in full public view.
"Mercenary Tao... er, my Lord, what tier is your reputation sitting at right now?"
Dead of Night blurted out the inquiry in front of Makima with casual carelessness, prompting Li Qingzi to furrow her brow. She recognized that the cursed energy power system carried insidious psychological drawbacks: an architecture driven by emotional extremes tended to amplify an operative's latent mania, eroding operational discipline.
Hearing the exchange, Makima offered a polite smile and excused herself from the chamber. She had detected zero conventional mortal desires within Mercenary Tao—he displayed not a flicker of aesthetic interest toward either of the striking women accompanying him.
Following the battle in City A, Makima's cognitive framework regarding absolute might had undergone profound recalibration. She was unconsciously evolving; even toward Mercenary Tao, whom she currently idolized, her innate devil instincts were subtly probing for structural vulnerabilities.
Across localized electromagnetic currents, Kaito registered the shifts in Makima's demeanor. In truth, not a single biological twitch within the skyscraper escaped his perception.
Had he willed it, he could have forcibly extracted the surface thoughts of every occupant in the building in an eye-blink.
That was the current benchmark of his foundation: the Martial God's Ultimate Intent elevating the 500,000 Horsepower Magnetic Field Rotation to an astonishing operational zenith.
[Reputation: Living Legend (Pan-Humanity Faction)]
(Unlocks total exchange privileges across all Pan-Humanity faction stores; permits the redemption of one special item per exchange node per deployment cycle)
This was Kaito's first time observing this echelon of reputation—a tier reserved exclusively for an operative who had functionally salvaged planetary civilization.
Strictly speaking, the entity who had preserved the world was Saitama, alongside Boros's redirecting clash. The cataclysmic beam that had genuinely threatened to cleanse the crust had originated from Kaito himself.
Yet systemic reputation was governed not merely by moral reality, but by factional attribution.
In a global crisis where the Hero Association's emergency mobilization was crushed by the joint onslaught of the Primordial Dragon Court and the Dark Matter Thieves, leveling City A to fine silt, the champion who stepped forward to eradicate the threat was deified by a terrified populace desperate for salvation.
Validated by both the Hero Association and state leadership, bolstered by round-the-clock media coverage of City A's apocalyptic wreckage, Kaito's prestige had shattered the operational ceiling.
He was now authorized to initiate redemption protocols at any regional quartermaster node.
In fact, he had already reviewed the Devil Hunter exchange terminal through Makima's interface—or rather, the inventory governed by the Devil faction.
The crowning reward listed was the concept of the [Control Devil] itself. Under ordinary conditions, accessing this node was impossible; it demanded Revered standing alongside a baseline fee of 500 Reputation Points, whereas high-tier achievers like Li Qingzi and Dead of Night possessed barely 300 points in total.
[Control Devil: A primeval devil governing the concept of Control within Hell. Commands the authority to dominate any target perceived as inferior to the self, while instinctively harboring absolute reverence toward entities perceived as superior.]
Alternative nodes such as [War], [Death], and the [Chainsaw Devil] remained locked in grayed-out status. Kaito deduced that Makima had yet to secure administrative dominion over those concepts.
At his current operational tier, claiming those devils by force was trivial. He was merely weighing which conceptual contract held the highest utility for his build.
The authority of the Control Devil was an efficient administrative convenience: the cosmos was littered with entities weaker than himself, and given his sovereign arrogance, a vast swath of adversaries commanding comparable statistical mass would easily fall beneath his cognitive domination.
Yet at its core, the Control Devil was an auxiliary utility. Before the true apex titans he hungered to battle, its psychological levers were completely worthless.
Securing functional conceptual assets was far more pragmatic. The concepts embodied by devils represented the most accessible, cost-effective entry point into conceptual authority he had encountered.
Back in the B711 world, the Sage had weaponized the conceptual mechanics of the Perception Devil to scale his combat ratings to the threshold of the top tier, establishing passive survivability that surpassed standard sovereign combatants.
Receiving no reply, Dead of Night opened her mouth to press further, but Li Qingzi shot her a sharp, warning glare. Though she had shared physical intimacy with Kaito in the past, as his power scaled into the stratosphere, the distance separating them had stretched into an unbridgeable gulf.
She understood his temperament intimately: he despised unnecessary noise and was thoroughly detached from mundane sentimentality.
Provoking his irritation was suicidal.
"My Lord, Blast has formally entered the theater, yet that 'God' entity has made no move. Now that you and Saitama have pulverized the moon, does the God of this world still exist?"
Li Qingzi spoke smoothly, steering the conversation back toward operational priorities.
Kaito had caught only a fleeting glimpse of Blast before the man warped spacetime and vanished into the void, denying him the opportunity to test his strength.
The behavior felt peculiar: for the S-Class Rank 1 hero, Blast's presence was unusually elusive.
When the Primordial Dragon Court resolved to purge human civilization, Blast was nowhere to be found. The moment the dust settled, he materialized to identify the invaders.
And upon Kaito's return to the surface, Blast had departed immediately, ceding absolute administrative dominance to him without contest.
It was as though Blast already anticipated his every move.
What Li Qingzi did not know was that the God entity had indeed manifested: during his duel against Saitama, Kaito had felt the unmistakable surge of the Divine Sense.
The entity lingered somewhere within the cosmos, yet had refrained from openly bestowing its power upon proxies.
Kaito theorized that either his raw power had placed the entity on high alert, or the systemic presence of the Infinite Dimensional Space barred Reincarnators from receiving direct divine patronage.
Otherwise, given the mercenary nature of Reincarnators, legions of operatives would have lined up to accept divine empowerment, knowing that upon returning to the Space, foreign cognitive control would be severed and cleansed at the Goddess's Sanctuary for a nominal fee.
A high-yield, zero-risk transaction.
Yet no operative in spatial history was recorded achieving sudden supremacy through that loophole.
God... Blast... The Planetary Will...
Kaito turned the interlocking puzzle over in his mind.
[Special Event: Extinction Dragon Calamity has concluded]
[You have successfully participated in this event. Contribution Rating: 68%]
[You have received reward: S-Rank Singularity Point x 1]
[You have received reward: Ability Scroll: Astral Prayer Art (S-)]
[Astral Prayer Art: Directs prayers toward celestial bodies to harvest corresponding stellar blessings. Lore claims the Children of the Stars are born with this authority.]
The expressions of all three Reincarnators shifted as the Space calculated the event's dividends. Rewards varied according to contribution ratings, though the statistical brackets remained consistent; Kaito's harvest was capped at an S-Rank Singularity Point and an S-tier skill scroll.
He glanced across the readouts before dismissing them, contemplating whether another window would open to engage Blast and God before this deployment closed.
In the short term, challenging Saitama again was off the table. The Anchor of Causality was spent; while the Key of Miracles remained active since it had been initiated beneath the anchor's temporal umbrella, challenging Saitama without an absolute rollback carried severe mortality risks.
Blast, by comparison, was a far more suitable target.
That spatial transit authority could resolve the operational bottleneck Kaito felt regarding macro-scale traversal.
While flight through the Sky Dancing Art was rapid, it still required physical transit time. Acquiring an authentic hyperspace displacement art would grant him complete, unconstrained dominion over planetary theaters.
"Track down the questlines tied to Tornado and Blast. See if you can secure an operational wedge."
Li Qingzi nodded and turned to leave. While grinding stray dragon-beasts offered the cleanest material returns, she had no leverage to refuse Mercenary Tao's commands.
Dead of Night hesitated before following. Once through the double doors, she grumbled under her breath that she wasn't an operative of the Paradise and owed him no loyalty.
Li Qingzi merely glanced at her, seeing straight through her hollow defiance.
Now that the suppressing field of the Dragon King's Domain had lifted, Dead of Night's passive low-presence trait was fully operational once more, allowing her to slip past standard security unnoticed.
Meanwhile, in the physical reality of the mortal world...
Aizen strolled down a sunlit avenue with a serene, amused smile playing upon his lips. The pedestrians streaming past remained completely oblivious to his presence.
He reached out, resting his fingers against a pristine white concrete wall. The molecular texture was fundamentally distinct from anything forged of Reishi.
"So this is the world of the so-called Creators... Fragile indeed."
Yet a reality so remarkably frail comfortably housed the conceptual existence of those Creators.
Aizen swept his hand through the empty air. A massive Garganta tore open across the sky, countless Hollows cascading outward through the spatial rift.
As a sovereign mind, how could he fail to offer a proper blessing unto the works of creation?
He understood intimately that his most magnificent masterpiece was currently wrestling with how to reshape this fragile world.
He would simply lend the process a gentle, decisive push.