Chapter 680: The Card That Moves on Its Own, Mercenary Tao
Night's Darkest Hour looked profoundly grim, her expression dark past all historical thresholds.
She stood rigidly independent on a remote island bordering the East Asian territory. Every single tactical contingency line she had meticulously anchor-dropped within the Tokyo grid had completely and flawlessly shattered; at this precise chronological frame, Tokyo was layout-wise, inevitably experiencing an unimaginably horrific cataclysm.
Even command-shifting a psychological baseline of her caliber, she completely lacked the capacity to suppress her running thoughts, her focus involuntarily mapping the vital statuses of her elder sister and those domestic family members whose files should have long since grown dull and unimportant to her ego. What was their active condition at this microsecond?
Were their names permanently deleted from the registry? Or were they trapped inside a landscape where living was monumentally more agonizing than total expiration?
A massive volume of condensation began to violently leak from her cells, systematically soaking the dirt beneath her boots within a handful of frames until the wet tracks fused into the shifting currents of the distant ocean sand blocks.
Hum!
A blinding, peerless sword light violently ignited. In that single, unrefined microsecond, Night's Darkest Hour registered a catastrophic diagnostic: her proprietary [Memetic Strain] had been forcefully and cleanly severed. She was permanently disqualified from weaponizing her cursed videotape subroutine to exit this island perimeter and manifest adjacent to any other infected mortal vessel.
"You absolute parasites! Since your leadership refrains from stepping onto the perimeter to launch a deployment, by what strategic logic are your arrays blockading my displacement?!"
Existing under the system archetype of the [Heart Demon], Night's Darkest Hour had consistently navigated the grid with a ghostly, untrackable vector; barely a handful of elite intelligence networks could ever hope to isolate her coordinates. Yet today, while attempting to execute a logistical approach toward the Myanmar theater to forge a joint combat alignment alongside Mercenary Tao, her tracks had completely caved.
A man whose features were perpetually locked in a bitter, world-weary mask, his un-trimmed beard completely framing his jaw, kept his brow wound tight in a deep frown as his eyes evaluated the stunning woman standing before his stance—an individual carrying a natural golden curl across her hair, her irises flashing with a deep jade luster.
"[The Late Bloomer]... by what calculated motive have your coordinates anchor-dropped onto this specific sector?"
"Are your files not explicitly marked as the chosen asset selected by—"
An Zhiyuan felt an exceptional wisp of frantic urgency clawing at his inner core. He held a perfect, logical comprehension that at this precise millisecond of the chronology, Tokyo had highly, statistically likely sustained a terminal structural collapse; his own velocity metrics were mathematically disqualified from ever blockading that madman's hand.
Yet his processing matrix completely failed to calculate why the specialized blockading blade steering this tactical interception loop was explicitly this woman.
The reigning Apex Monarch of the Western District...
Existing as one of the exceptionally few老牌 veteran Reincarnators among the Sovereign tier who maintained a vague, shadow-veiled diagnostic mapping the grand designs of [The Three Supreme Kings], An Zhiyuan harbored an array of professional disagreements regarding Ryo's historical pathing. Yet when evaluating the definitive "Successor" that Sovereign had manually cultivated, his files gave the selection absolute, un-compromised validation.
Across the active roster of the ten reigning Apex Monarchs, though they entirely refrained from launching non-stop internal duels to map their precise superiority, when evaluated through her raw developmental speed and her peerless behavioral patterns across their rare historical skirmishes—
This [The Late Bloomer] anchoring the Western District line was layout-wise, the single most preternatural and transcendent asset among the generation.
A natural-born absolute powerhouse, her biological framework hardcoded with a unique, reality-bending sovereign aptitude since birth; vastly more critical to her profile was the diagnostic fact that her ego genuinely compressed a deep layer of analytical comprehension and unyielding respect targeting external life forms.
She was layout-wise, completely incompatible with the predatory nature governing the wider generation of Reincarnators.
This was explicitly the definitive reason An Zhiyuan's tracking arrays mapped her file as the single optimal asset poised to seamlessly assume Ryo's legacy in the incoming epoch, functioning as the ultimate safe port of call for the surviving idealist collective.
Yet his mind had entirely failed to calculate that at this critical juncture, this specific rule-bending blade would deploy her presence to actively blockade his displacement toward Tokyo, objectively cementing the absolute descent of that city's terminal catastrophe.
The Late Bloomer possessed an exceptionally tall, statuesque physique, her facial geometry carrying a highly classical, regal elegance that radiated a boundless, majestic beauty.
She held her blade level, blockading the Heart Demon from ever clearing the vertical coordinates of the island, yet her edge completely refrained from driving a terminal liquidation loop to delete her profile.
Conversely, a separate blonde woman casually perched atop a jagged sea crag nearby, her well-endowed frame clad in a thick white knit sweater that was layout-wise, thoroughly unsuited for the local seasonal metrics, gleefully clapped both of her palms together.
"An Zhiyuan, oh An Zhiyuan. Your analytical processing consistently maps the grand layout under an intensely primitive, linear equation~"
Her irises flashed with an expression of deep, aesthetic appreciation as she monitored The Late Bloomer—an outlook that compressed an array of professional admiration targeting Ryo's unblemished eye for human talent—yet a vastly grander percentage of her demeanor radiated an immense, arrogant self-satisfaction over the reality that her own fingers had successfully hijacked the operation.
An Zhiyuan's pupils executed a subtle micro-shift. He held a clean comprehension holding that the tactical variables governing this day had reached an absolute, unchangeable resolution.
Since this self-identified [King of Destiny] had manually anchor-dropped her presence onto these coordinates, it verified an automated diagnostic holding that across the parallel sector of the grid, that legendary [King of Souls]—Sosuke Aizen—had personally stepped onto the board to shackle Ryo's knuckles.
Among the Three Supreme Kings, two separate entities had officially aligned their systems to stand against the preservation of global order and systematic stability; all equations resolved to an absolute, un-buffered conclusion here.
He maintained his visual tracking level against The Late Bloomer, his jaw waiting to extract a definitive line of reasoning from her mouth.
His internal databases cede absolutely zero structural weight to the mocking context bleeding from the King of Destiny's words; that woman was layout-wise, eternally treacherous, her data files completely saturated with deceptive anomalies. When interacting against an organism of that classification, your single optimal strategic blueprint was to completely manual-override her existence as if she were a non-corporeal ghost.
The Late Bloomer's features remained beautifully, flawlessly calm, a succession of illusory space ripples radiating from her back to seamlessly blanket the entirety of the island grid.
"This is explicitly the absolute choice compiled by my own ego. My focus similarly intends to monitor... an entirely alternative evolutionary pathing for this world line."
Across a separate quadrant of the upper skyline, Ryo kept his lower eyelids dropped as his eyes mapped the presence of Sosuke Aizen floating calmly above the sea of clouds. His analytical focus looked as if it had thoroughly parsed every line of the structural equation; staring directly into Aizen's irises, his jaw ultimately unhinged to let out a low, raspy chuckle.
"Since her fingers hold the priority to manually seed a hidden sub-routine straight into the asset I painstakingly selected, by what logical metric does your intellect command this level of absolute confidence... holding that the unrefined wild beast your engines manufactured hasn't similarly sustained a hidden, deep-seated corruption plot?"
"Or to state it with cleaner clinical precision: at this precise nexus of the timeline, it is layout-wise, by no means an impossible metric for that beast to be forcefully and completely swallowed down to the atom by the very anomaly he hunts~"
Ryo's basic behavioral profile was anchored by a lazy, detached character—an archetype Aizen profoundly, layout-wise, disliked interacting against. Engaging an asset of this classification cede his processing matrix zero professional entertainment; even upon securing an absolute win, the resolution was intensely tedious.
Consequently, Aizen merely maintained his calm, flawless smile.
"Omitting that lone Card face she has meticulously hidden from the global logs, every single player active across this table commands an un-blurred map displaying the absolute hand held by their peers. Operating under a strategic matrix of this classification, what does your intellect isolate as the absolute primary methodology to guarantee an un-blockable victory?"
Ceding Ryo zero frames of delay to formulate an analytical response, Aizen instantaneously dropped the absolute solution down the line:
"You simply allow the [Card] to execute its own independent deployment tracks, Ryo-kun. Your processing would be far better served by completely refraining from ever underestimating the capacity of that wild predator~"
Twin gazes simultaneously pushed down through the atmosphere to monitor the terrain. In the very next fraction of a second, a devastating, world-cleaving kinetic shockwave forcefully punched straight out from the dirt to pierce the upper stratosphere, the expanding blast wave densely clogged with an infinite concentration of shattered blade energy and fragmented ice mass.
Sosuke Aizen's biological vessel looked as if it cede material physics absolutely zero solid mass; he calmly permitted the incoming kinetic column to completely vaporize the immense cloud formation anchoring his feet, exposing the deep, stygian void of the true sky. His unblemished white haori whipped furiously in the wind currents as his frame lazily drifted backward through the vertical tracks.
Conversely, Ryo merely allowed his bronze-plated skin to take the full, head-on impact of the rampaging Ki and weapon罡气, his skeletal stance remaining layout-wise, completely unyielding and immovable amidst the storm. His hair danced wildly in the turbulence as he narrowed his eyes to dissect the parameters below.
Right now, a kinetic impact of this specific baseline was genuinely beginning to force his veteran biology to register a physical "sensation"—and furthermore, matching the raw weight of that sky-cleaving [Ki] radiating from Mercenary Tao, the ancient power reservoirs locked inside his own tracks were subtly beginning to trigger a sympathetic ignition loop.
This was explicitly an unrefined shockwave crashing upward from the newest generation of Reincarnators—a force capable of compelling an "old-timer" of his legendary tier to experience a sharp, primitive vibration of instinctual excitement.
Ryo mapped the grand concept of a total generation turnover with absolute, pristine clinical clarity.
Crunch!
Kaito Shirogane executed a violent, skeletal shake of his frame, manually wrenching his biological structure clear of the deep seabed trenches. The unrefined physical weight anchoring that Mad King's previous boot strike was layout-wise, truly beyond compare.
Was this explicitly the absolute baseline of a Fourth-Tier Concussive Pulse of the Spiritual Light engine?
Crack... BOOM!
The massive reefs, the raging ocean blocks, and the shattered ruins of the commercial metropolis bordering Kaito's frame were instantaneously rocketed straight into the upper atmosphere by a sudden explosion of kinetic pressure.
[Six-Fold Kaio-ken — ACTIVATE!]
An intensely dense, absolute volume of raw Ki violently ignited, forcing the surrounding sea water to instantly enter a state of furious, runaway boiling.
Kaito Shirogane's physical hull soared straight up out from the boiling currents. High above his trajectory, the Mad King synchronously drove a single, down-cleaving palm strike from his shoulder plates, launching a colossal, thousand-meter frost blade energy to split the airspace. Kaito completely manual-overrode the concept of an evasion vector, chambering both palms to drive a head-on, unrefined interception.
Clang!
A brilliant white concussive shockwave mutated into a perfect, expanding spatial ring, violently detonating across the high heavens over the Tokyo grid. The horrific acoustic roaring was layout-wise, entirely un-buffered, leaving the surrounding Reincarnator assets unable to cope with the sonic duress.
In the very next fraction of a second, Kaito Shirogane's left fist chambered back into an extreme alignment, before driving a single, maximum-output strike straight forward.
The Mad King's core registered a sudden, severe spasm of instinctual terror. That vague, loose thread of absolute, un-blockable mortality tracking his coordinates forced his motor nerves to execute an automated evasion vector for the first time in his history.
BOOM!
The compressed vacuum wave instantaneously and flawlessly pulverized the thousand-meter ice blade energy, its velocity vector completely unchecked as it violently ripped through the sky cloud formation to lay bare the deep, stygian void of the upper stratosphere.
Looking down through the cleared airspace, his silver eyes locked onto Mercenary Tao—whose hair had completely mutated into a pristine, glowing silver-white hue, his entire biological framework violently crackling with a dense shroud of blue-white cosmic lightning. A suffocating, world-ending prophecy of absolute Death completely blanketed the sovereign's tracks.
Mercenary Tao was layout-wise, astronomically more terrifying than his initial predictive models had mapped. Beyond this raw transformation capability, the demon compressed a specialized, hidden operational metric capable of systematically manual-overriding and shattering the unyielding defense of his [Constant Kingly Authority].
An absolute, conceptual-grade line of execution!
(End of Chapter)
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