Chapter 869: Void-Tearing Claws
Glimpsing the lingering silhouette of a Magic God's authority draped across Victor, Kaito Shirogane felt no alarm—only visceral delight.
Though he could not verify whether a Magic God could gaze across dimensional barriers to observe the physical earth, to an operative consumed by the single-minded obsession of reinforcing the reality of his homeworld...
Tethering a transcendent entity of that cosmic order to the physical plane was optimal beyond measure.
Crack.
Kaito extended his right hand. Layer after layer of invisible metaphysical warding shattered in sequence as the incandescent golden brilliance of his AT Field flared to life.
Victor watched in paralyzed horror as the three layered bounded fields cloaking his flesh were pierced clean through like paper tissue. Absolute dread spiked through his nervous system.
The instant Kaito's fingers clamped around his arm, an icy numbness seized Victor's spine—the visceral conviction that he had already died once.
Empowered by the Martial God's Ultimate Intent, Kaito possessed the intrinsic authority to strike directly at raw energy, conceptual frameworks, and divine authorities. With the Primordial Dragon Eyes fully engaged, bounded fields of this caliber were completely meaningless.
He did not even need to channel the Kaio-Ken; relying purely on his raw Strength attribute—brute-forced to a staggering 108 points after devouring dozens of Crimson Drop Cards—was more than enough to tear the enchantments apart.
"Victor. I've changed my mind. It seems you have no choice but to join the Paradise now."
Though Kaito addressed the alchemist directly, his gaze was fixed entirely upon the air behind Victor's shoulder: the mummified, purple-robed silhouette of the Sokushinbutsu, the High Priest—the phantom avatar of an authentic Magic God.
The phantom offered zero reaction to Kaito's piercing observation, resembling the faded phantom of Saitama that had manifested when Kaito threw his Serious Punch.
Merely the residual imprint of an operative borrowing foreign divinity.
Yet Kaito's predatory instincts were razor-sharp. Through both the Martial God's Ultimate Intent and the Limit-Break Spiral, he parsed the distinct anomaly embedded within that trait: [Gaze of the Magic God].
Cross-referencing that tag with Victor's celestial mystic eye, Kaito concluded that this man shared an active, unbroken conduit with the Magic Gods.
Victor had fallen beneath the gaze of those supreme entities long ago, entirely oblivious to his own domestication.
An asset of this caliber could not be left roaming the streets; he had to be anchored inside the Paradise.
Victor moved to resist, yet feeling the crushing kinetic grip locking his arm, he looked up into those golden mystic eyes and felt his nerve disintegrate.
He understood the cold reality: Mercenary Tao was not Yoko. Defying a monster of this archetype past his threshold of patience led to a singular terminus—being processed into a Crimson Drop Card.
And no one could measure the exact limits of Mercenary Tao's patience; at the very least, he lacked Yoko's magnanimous grace.
A wide smirk curled across Kaito's lips. He had come to realize that a bloody, tyrannical reputation was far more pragmatically useful than Yoko's righteous standing.
Whether an enlightened sovereign could win the genuine devotion of the masses remained an open philosophical debate, but a ruthless tyrant guaranteed that virtually no one possessed the spine to refuse his demands.
Clamping one hand around the scruff of Victor's neck while scooping up Jin Yue'an with the other, Kaito sank into a deep crouch.
BOOM!
The foundation beneath the pub detonated inward. Blasting through the sound barrier in a fraction of a millisecond, Kaito's Tri-Origin Convergent Force field scoured away all atmospheric drag, sparing his passengers from having their skulls torn from their shoulders by raw kinetic recoil.
By the time the trio touched down within the perimeter of the Paradise, Tenkyo and Black Butler were still frantically parsing intelligence dossiers to narrow Victor's coordinates.
Watching Victor materialize within the central chamber of the Black Tower, Tenkyo froze in stunned silence.
In that fraction of a second, an uncomfortable existential doubt took root in his mind:
Once individual combat supremacy breached a certain threshold, did auxiliary tools and structural logistics lose all functional relevance? Lord Mercenary Tao was steadily closing the distance to that singular realm.
The necessity of their administrative existence was depreciating at alarming speed.
Furthermore, he sensed that the Paradise itself was rapidly shedding its novelty in Mercenary Tao's eyes.
The phenomenon reminded Tenkyo of Saitama from the One-Punch Man world.
When personal mass scaled too quickly, it systematically extinguished the meaning of mundane pursuits.
Yet the terrifying difference was that Mercenary Tao was no Saitama. Saitama possessed an unadorned, childlike heroic heart from his inception; upon losing passion, he simply settled into being an unassuming hero for fun.
What about Mercenary Tao...?
Reflecting on their Lord's ruthless operational history, an icy shudder crawled down Tenkyo's spine.
He quietly shared his telemetry with Black Butler, who subsequently roped Jin Yue'an and Li Qingzi into an encrypted relay.
The inner circle of operatives closest to the throne reached a swift consensus: the development of the Paradise had to be accelerated with absolute urgency.
The culling and evolution of the Reincarnators had to proceed at violent speed. They had to keep Lord Mercenary Tao's predatory interest anchored to this world.
Otherwise, this planet might wake up one morning to find its execution order already signed.
Simultaneously, the Spiritual Calamity tearing through the Eastland began to recede under absolute force. Black Face's suppression of spectral entities was absolute.
Butchering and devouring in unbroken rhythm, his already terrifying baseline scaled continuously. By the time he crossed sovereign borders into the Eastland, standard Menos Grande were cleaved in two by casual strikes from his scabbard.
Faithfully executing the King's will, Black Face systematically cleaved humanity apart from the spectral ecosystem. Any entity crossing into major population centers was purged, absorbed, or violently driven back.
Yet in barren territories and sparse wilderness, even formidable Hollows were deliberately spared.
This savage, calculated culling—waged by an entity who was himself an apex spirit—swiftly carved a new, stable paradigm across the territory.
His campaign showed no sign of slowing, sweeping clean from the southwestern reaches of the Eastland toward the southeastern coastline.
Over the days that followed, legions of official operatives, including Kenzo, confirmed the Paradise's decisive intervention, expressing profound relief and gratitude.
State networks and underground channels began broadcasting communiques declaring that the King of the East had officially intervened to suppress the crisis.
Though Kaito cared nothing for mundane praise, Jin Yue'an and the leadership insisted on driving the PR campaign forward.
Concurrently, Avalon in the West finally purged the spiritual incursions from its major metropolitan sectors. Yet unlike the absolute order established in the East, minor outbreaks continued to flare, though entities of the Fierce Step and above were systematically hunted down by top-tier operatives.
East and West maintained unspoken, synchronized alignment on this singular front: both Yoko and Kaito were actively seeking every exotic force capable of elevating reality into a higher dimension.
A flash of light washed over the courtyard. Biting down on a strawberry lollipop, Dead of Night returned to the physical world, finding herself within the inner perimeter of the Paradise. Through Li Qingzi's clearance, she had secured a private residence remarkably close to the sovereign core.
Under the tireless efforts of arriving operatives, the Paradise had expanded outward like an organic sprawl.
The further one traveled toward the perimeter, the more diverse the architecture became.
Sleek, futuristic pavilions forged of alchemical steel stood alongside living treehouses grown through Wood Release and botanical thaumaturgy, while the vast majority were adobe complexes rapidly molded through Earth Release and transmutative sorcery.
As the headcount swelled, trade liquidity and collective security scaled in lockstep, pulling in even more operatives like a regional sinkhole.
Across the territories surrounding Burma, the resident Reincarnator count had plummeted to near zero; high-tier veterans and low-tier novices alike had been swallowed whole by the Paradise.
Crunch.
Dead of Night crushed the candy between her teeth, her pupils shifting into the clear, cerulean depth of an endless sky.
Her deployment into the One-Punch Man realm had yielded astronomical profits. Riding the coattails of Mercenary Tao's victory over the Primordial Dragon Court alongside subsequent bounties for purging dragon-beasts, her reserves of Singularity Points and Dimensional Points had surged.
The haul had fully compensated for the catastrophic deficit she had incurred from detonating that memetic hazard across the White Bear's borders.
She had liquidated every scrap of that capital to acquire these: the Six Eyes.
Lifting her chin, she locked gazes with Satoru Gojo, who stood suspended in mid-air, hands tucked into his haori, looking down upon her with curved, narrow eyes.
Two pairs of Six Eyes met in unbroken, silent alignment.
Gojo knew well that the collective known as Reincarnators could plunder powers from across the infinite dimensions. Yet gazing upon the proprietary ocular lineage of the Gojo clan nested within this foreign woman's skull still stirred a ripple across his expression.
"Well now... Two-Point-Five Gojo. Still lingering around, I see."
The moment Dead of Night spoke, the ambient temperature plummeted.
Yet commanding the Six Eyes, Cursed Spirit Manipulation, and an anomalous hybrid physique bridging sorcerer and curse, she no longer felt the slightest dread before him.
At the end of the day, Satoru Gojo was merely a native narrative character. Nothing more.
She made no effort to mask her thoughts. She mused that as her cursed energy grew exponentially denser, her passive talent for erasing her presence was steadily decaying.
To be detected so effortlessly by Gojo proved that her stealth parameters had taken a hit.
The smile on Gojo's face gradually smoothed into cold detachment. He distinctly parsed the subtle disdain radiating from the mortal standing beneath his boots.
It was not born of physical superiority; it was anchored in the fundamental nature of their existence!
She looked down upon him simply because he was Satoru Gojo—a lower-dimensional entity whose life trajectory had been observed and consumed like a scripted play.
In the eyes of these Reincarnators, he was merely a... narrative character.
Gojo's expression turned utterly flat. His fingers twitched, the white zanpakuto resting at his hip shifting with a faint, crystalline ring. Yet in the end, he simply dispersed his coordinates, vanishing from the courtyard.
Dead of Night furrowed her brow. What was that sword hanging from his waist just now?
That faint resonance had stirred a cold, visceral tremor deep within her astral body.
"My, aren't you a brave one? Picking a fight with Satoru Gojo like that?"
A woman's voice chimed in from nearby, deepening Dead of Night's irritation. Though her cursed energy was compounding, losing her low-presence baseline meant walking into constant operational hazards.
Since when had her coordinates become visible to every passerby?!
Turning around with a scowl, she found a woman in a long black overcoat, her dark hair bound by a pristine white ribbon. Large, vibrant eyes studied her without blinking.
"Who are you?"
Dead of Night had no record of this face among the Paradise's executive cadre. Yet before she could press further, a young man stepped through the arched gates of the Black Tower.
His brow was furrowed, a massive, unadorned greatsword strapped across his broad back. The moment he cleared the threshold, his gaze snapped directly toward Dead of Night's position.
"Ruoxue. Are you picking fights with strangers again?"
"My apologies, miss. My companion tends to be somewhat scatterbrained."
Dongjin offered no further excuses. While relieved that Mercenary Tao had deployed assets to curb the global Spiritual Calamity, his host's refusal to release his sister felt like an iron collar clamped around his throat.
He hungered for power with desperate urgency.
If the prophecies insisted that he would rise as an apex titan across countless futures, then this time, he would seize that strength with his own two hands!
Hum...
A faint, illusory ripple coiled around Dongjin's frame. Dead of Night blinked repeatedly, verifying her visual telemetry.
Since when... had the Heart's Radiance become so cheap?!
An obscure rookie she had never laid eyes on was already grazing the structural threshold of the Fourth Step?!
"Hey, hey! Dongjin! What was that ripple just now?! You're learning secret techniques behind my back without telling me, aren't you?!"
Ruoxue sensed that exotic resonance as well. As a member of the Destiny syndicate, she held virtually zero institutional loyalty toward the faction.
Dwelling inside the Paradise, she felt none of the stifling dread weighing on her partner.
She was thoroughly relaxed, assuming an insignificant shrimp like herself would never register on Mercenary Tao's radar anyway.
Bickering back and forth, the duo walked past the Black Tower toward the commercial plazas, which had grown noticeably more vibrant than the public squares of the East District.
"Tell me... what is the authentic relationship between narrative characters and you Reincarnators?"
"Or rather... what fundamental difference separates the mortals of this world from the mortals of mine?"
Gojo materialized out of thin air before Kaito's console.
Kaito's gaze remained glued to a newly listed asset on his digital tablet.
[Void-Tearing Claws]
[Type: Bio-Armor / Armament]
[Quality: World's Rarity: Extreme]
[Description: The spatial-rending claws harvested from a Dragon King who held dominion over spatial authority within a certain realm.]
[Usage Requirements: Possession of a draconic bloodline; Constitution attribute not lower than 80; Energy attribute not lower than 50.]
[Effect 1: Upon integration, the user's hands can transmute into draconic talons, possessing structural durability and destructive output equivalent to a Dragon King.]
[Effect 2: By channeling energy, tears open the spatial fabric to execute stable spatial teleportation. Energy expenditure scales directly with transit distance.]
Radiating a deep violet luster, the miniature talons appeared compact, yet represented an exceptionally rare asset in the current meta: a dedicated spatial displacement tool.
Furthermore, it was an elusive biological implant—much like a mystic eye, capable of direct cellular fusion into an operative's vessel.
Kaito's baseline energy attribute remained obscured as an undefined [?]. Because the claws imposed zero restrictions on the category of channeled energy, the match was flawless.
He could comfortably fuel long-range spatial transit using his boundless, overflowing soul reserves.
Kaito locked in the transaction parameters, leaving the tedious logistics for Black Butler to finalize.
An operative capable of securing an asset of this tier was undeniably an apex combatant, and their counter-demands would hardly be modest.
Yet Kaito gave the matter no further thought.
The resource pool circulating through the Space was essentially his private armory.
So long as an item was tradable, securing it was merely a matter of leverage.
On this dimension, he remained the exact same ravenous madman who had stepped into the Space, ready to burn anything for absolute might.
"What? You actually care about something that trivial?"
Kaito offered a dry chuckle, finding it thoroughly absurd that an entity who had just undergone a violent evolution in power was still wrestling with mundane existential angst.
Narrative figures or mundane mortals—beneath the gaze of the Observer, all were merely dust and clay.
Only those who broke through that dimensional ceiling held authentic existential meaning.
A sudden, sharp clarity struck Kaito's mind:
He finally parsed the foundational raison d'être behind the Black Kings and their assembly.
Those entities were not waging war against the Reincarnators.
They were mounting an open rebellion against the [Observer] itself!
Were the Black Kings... an absolute paradox forged to shatter the Observer's design?!