Chapter 860: Plane Authority
Kaito Shirogane's brazen arrogance clearly exceeded this "God's" calculations. Its design to bestow power from an aloof, supreme height and corral him into its fold collapsed on the spot.
The mortal standing before it possessed not only terrifying combat might, but also the lingering gaze of an unfathomable higher power draped across his existence.
A sovereign force that stood above gods, planets, and even the cosmos.
Even God could not pierce the full truth of that existence. It knew only that an impenetrable mist perpetually blanketed this powerful human, rendering it impossible to directly invade and rewrite his mind.
This meeting was merely orchestrated by riding the currents of Kaito's prayer to the celestial body, guiding him into an audience.
Kaito understood this reality intimately. Had God possessed the capacity to manipulate him the way it bent Garou or whispered to Tornado in the original canon, it would have struck during his duel against Saitama.
Yet during that clash, God had managed to bestow only a fragmented trace of Divine Sense, unable to manifest even a fleeting mental illusion. Kaito knew God possessed zero direct leverage over his soul.
Consequently, Kaito saw no reason to adopt a subservient posture.
In fact, his demeanor crackled with restless hunger.
God... Deities... Across countless secondary realms, his strength had long sufficed to claim divine standing, and legions of self-proclaimed gods had fallen beneath his fists.
He was genuinely curious to see how much weight the resident deity of this high-tier world actually carried.
Hum~
The lunar surface beneath Kaito's boots seemed to expand at exponential speed. Across his vision, the terrain stretched out into an infinite, boundless continent, wrapping reality around him.
Kaito's presence began to dilute under this endless expansion of space. When ordinary mortals stood before such an unyielding, infinite expanse, an involuntary sense of biological insignificance naturally took root.
Kaito merely stood in place, unmoved. God's grand psychological staging failed to stir a single ripple across his mind.
"Are you finished, Lord God? Can we properly discuss our transaction now?"
His tone was thoroughly dismissive, and the title "Lord God" dripped with heavy mockery.
The infinite lunar landscape halted its expansion. When an illusion failed to shake the adversary's mind, sustaining it was pointless parlor trickery.
"You hunger for power; I can grant you power."
"You hunger for the authority to reshape worlds; I can bestow that authority upon you."
"So long as you... eradicate the human civilization of this world."
God did not explicitly demand Saitama's death, but the operational prerequisite was functionally identical to commanding Kaito to strike Saitama down.
Saitama served as the unique Counter Force of this cosmology—an entity aligned with the planetary will.
Whenever the planetary consciousness sought to wipe mortal civilization clean to initiate a reset, Saitama checked that impulse, ensuring human continuity endured.
The planetary will catalyzed Mysterious Beings; Saitama slaughtered them.
An unbroken, causal loop.
Kaito did not reject the offer outright, answering casually: "That deal holds terrible value. You understand as well as I do that in the short term, it is completely impractical."
Kaito knew the task was not entirely insurmountable. Formidable as Saitama was, he was not immune to containment.
Much like the Primordial Dragon Court's strategy: luring Saitama away, binding him temporarily through non-combat Authorities, or weaponizing perception-warping and mass cognition to deceive him via entire municipal populations.
It was entirely feasible to quarantine Saitama beyond the world's perimeter for an operational window.
Had the Dragon Court deployed a titan from a higher sequence, or had the timeline not coincided with Boros's arrival and Kaito's deployment, the dragons would have held strong odds of completing their purge, annihilating human civilization to harvest the planetary rewards.
Yet Kaito held no interest in the petty scraps of divine power this God offered.
His gaze was fixed on a far grander horizon.
He was eyeing God's ability to bestow divine authority upon mortal vessels, and the metaphysical process by which the planetary will catalyzed a deity.
Kaito hungered to accelerate the evolution of the real world more than anyone. His volatile soul felt suffocated by the fragility of the physical earth.
As his combat rating scaled higher, the real world risked devolving into a cosmic cage, paralyzing his movements.
Much like the Magic Gods of the A Certain Magical Index cosmos, who held total dominion over reality yet could not take a single step forward, backward, or sideways without shattering the world into dust.
Those Magic Gods had ultimately forged specialized Phases, sealing themselves away from the material plane.
A pathetic, helpless compromise—an outcome Kaito refused to accept.
Why should the strong imprison themselves simply to preserve the weak?
Yet Kaito was equally unwilling to accept a future where he obliterated the earth only to drift through the cold void alone.
Therefore, the only viable path was elevating and reinforcing the real world itself!
Elevating reality until every exotic, transcendent system could detonate across the crust without consequence. Only then could he wage unconstrained war.
Whether against Yoko, the remaining Sovereign Monarchs, the King of Rats, or... Sosuke Aizen!
The fire burning within Kaito's eyes radiated an ambition so unhinged it struck even this resident deity as absurd.
"Lord God, cast your gaze toward grander horizons. I can serve as the bridge guiding you into countless worlds..."
Without a sound, Kaito donned an artifact he had not summoned in ages: the [Crown of the Outer God]. While equipped, the bearer was recognized across systems as the "Founding Patriarch of the Outer Gods."
"Miss Tornado, does S-Class Rank 1 Blast have no intention of joining the subsequent sweeps against the dragon-beasts?"
Makima spoke in a quiet, measured cadence. By deliberately using her own body to shield Tornado during the battle in City A, she had successfully cultivated significant goodwill with the S-Class Rank 2 hero.
Though Tornado perpetually carried an abrasive, impatient demeanor, Makima understood that this volatile psychic was deeply protective of others at her core—a classic case of harsh words masking genuine concern.
A subtle smile touched Makima's lips. Her tactical shift was yielding results: entities whose raw physical supremacy made them unapproachable through direct domination could still be domesticated through alternative vectors.
Makima narrowed her eyes slightly.
Tornado cast a sideways glance at the red-haired woman. She had intended to brush her off, but observing how this frail mortal still fretted over global security, she clicked her tongue: "Hah?"
"Do you think small fry like stray dragon-beasts warrant Blast's direct intervention?"
"Your devil hunters alongside the remaining deadweights of the S and A-Classes should be more than enough to handle them."
"If Blast, myself, or that Mercenary Tao have to intervene in every minor skirmish, this world might as well just collapse and be done with it."
Tornado's sharp tongue remained intact, yet her words inadvertently revealed that the top three S-Class combatants were earmarked for a separate operation.
Having secured a fragment of the puzzle, Makima pressed further, floating beside Tornado to pry into operational specifics, subtly hinting that she was managing Mercenary Tao's logistics and needed clarity for his deployment.
"Subsequent plans?"
"Hmph. It's just that Blast uncovered where those dragon bastards are staging their next move in some alternate space. The three of us only need to wait until—"
Tornado snapped her head around mid-sentence, looking down at Makima with narrowing eyes, green psychokinetic energy beginning to spark across her hair.
Recognizing the boundary, Makima bowed her head with submissive grace, promising to relay the directive faithfully to the Martial God.
Feigning fear on the surface, Makima calculated in cold silence: the stronger an entity was, the more easily they lowered their guard against the weak. Even when sensing an undercurrent of ambition, they dismissed it as beneath notice.
Miss Tornado was like this, and Lord Mercenary Tao... was no different.
Kaito opened his eyes as the motes of white starlight dissolved around his frame. Entering the penthouse, Makima noted the anomaly, but masked her expression with practiced discipline.
She delivered Tornado's intelligence with clinical precision, far outpacing the operational gathering of Li Qingzi and Dead of Night.
She understood her standing: the Control Devil could no longer bargain as an equal with Mercenary Tao. To preserve this partnership, she had to provide continuous, high-value utility.
Listening to her briefing, Kaito deduced this was a sequential chain quest.
The backlash from the Primordial Dragon Court's violent distortion of this realm was continuing to unfold. The planetary will was mounting a ferocious counter-offensive, backed by the subtle steering of the Infinite Dimensional Space.
This was Kaito's first time observing a Plane's native authority mounting a direct counter-attack against a spatial faction.
When a world housed sufficiently powerful native narrative figures, its planetary will held genuine teeth.
Which meant...
Higher-tier worlds likely forced standard Spaces to tread with extreme caution.
Crude assignments demanding the eradication of civilization or planetary annihilation were never issued in realms of that magnitude.
Because failure invited the wrathful retribution of an entire cosmic plane.
Kaito's thoughts leaped rapidly. He recalled that the real world had once suffered an incursion from the Void Paradise, which had obtained Earth's coordinates through unknown channels, deploying God-Favored vanguards to plant localized spatial beacons.
Though swiftly purged by resident Reincarnators, the incident proved that Earth could be recognized as a viable mission target.
Spaces like the Void Paradise, the Primordial Dragon Court, and the Machina Court could designate the mortal realm as an operational theater.
Could a fragile Earth be targeted by external quests demanding the cleansing of human civilization...?
Kaito's conviction hardened.
The time to forcibly elevate and reinforce the real world was right now!
"Very good, Miss Makima. I appreciate your efficiency."
"Name your request."
Makima looked up, meeting his calm, unruffled gaze. Reflected in the massive glass wall behind him was the silhouette of the sprawling metropolis beneath an azure sky, looking as though reality itself rested upon his shoulders, ready to be upended at his whim.
"I... I wish to purge those concepts completely."
"War, disease, famine... everything that robs humanity of happiness, I want it erased!"
"Lord Mercenary Tao, please help me achieve this!"
[You have triggered Side Quest: Makima's Petition]
[Quest Description: The Control Devil Makima has petitioned your intervention, requesting assistance in eliminating the War Devil and other conceptual entities.]
[Quest Rewards: Random Devil Bloodline Item based on completion rating.]
[Failure Penalty: None.]
This "None" was fundamentally different from previous death-contingent quests. This was an authentic plea directed to Kaito, merely observed and logged by the Space.
Even if Kaito failed to deliver, Makima held zero systemic authority to enforce a penalty.
Kaito nodded. The petition was reasonable, and it dovetailed with his personal agenda.
While Makima viewed these conceptual devils as the root of earthly suffering, Kaito saw them as prime catalysts to catalyze the real world's evolution.
The physical earth harbored disease, war, mortality, and pestilence—every misfortune present here existed on Earth in even greater concentration.
Yet reality lacked the foundational laws to synthesize those horrors into supernatural power.
Kaito cared nothing for mortal happiness; he hungered for the emergence of the supernatural!
If the mortal realm lacked that spark, he would simply import it himself.
In that sense, Aizen's actions back on Earth were hardly an unwanted framing; they aligned squarely with what Kaito intended to unleash.
Schwing!
A flash of golden sword light cleaved the sky as a Gillian dissolved into particles of Reishi, scattering into the wind.
Yoko Ekaterina lowered her blade, lost in thought.
Formidable though these Menos Grande appeared, they lacked decisive utility against apex Reincarnators.
Had that individual truly wished to weaponize these entities, deploying mindless Gillians was inefficient; an army of Gillians held less tactical weight than a single Vasto Lorde.
Yoko naturally refused to believe the prevailing rumors branding Mercenary Tao as the architect of this outbreak.
The "Supreme Three Kings" was a classified myth known only within the innermost echelons of apex Reincarnators.
The identities and capabilities of those three remained an enigma to most operatives.
Ryo of Blue Sky was the most publicly recognizable among them, yet most operatives viewed him merely as the guildmaster of Blue Sky—a mediator capable of staying the hands of Sovereign Monarchs—entirely blind to the ontological chasm separating Sovereigns from Ryo himself.
The only entity commanding the authority to orchestrate a deployment of this nature was the master of the Void Throne, the King of Souls: Sosuke Aizen!
Yoko's brow furrowed tightly. Among the Supreme Three Kings, Aizen was the most elusive, leaving virtually zero operational footprints.
Unleashing this calamity across the mortal realm completely defied his usual calculated detachment. What was his true objective...?
"Could he be attempting to frame Mercenary Tao?!"
"Is that entity finally moving against Lord Mercenary Tao?!"
Echo voiced her hypothesis, but Yoko shook her head. Ryo had once confided that Mercenary Tao was almost certainly the vessel chosen by Sosuke Aizen.
If so, was this Spiritual Calamity intended as a boon for Mercenary Tao?
Yoko recalled that Kaito's build incorporated spirit summoning mechanics.
Her pupils contracted sharply. Could Aizen be cultivating an ocean of spirits specifically for Kaito to harvest...?!