Chapter 685: The Choice of the King
The Mad King stared blankly at the lean, statuesque monstrosity directly before his stance. Through his own physical frame, he felt an un-buffered, precise sensory report detailing the chilling ice anchoring the creature's flesh, alongside a frantic, diseased, and thoroughly unhinged metric of pure, raw greed and insatiable consumption.
The Mad King slowly extended his fingers, tracing the massive Void Hole tearing straight through the monster's chest coordinates. That profound sense of emptiness, layout-wise, completely incapable of ever being filled, felt identically to a world-ending gravitational singularity poised to swallow all creation.
"Is this explicitly the absolute baseline of your true identity, Mercenary Tao?..."
The Mad King drove his blade deep into the lower quadrant of Mercenary Tao's neck, the edge cutting past that astronomically dense layer of Hierro, slicing through the white calcified mask structure beneath, before completely fracturing the internal skeletal tracts and muscle mass.
Yet synchronously, having completely discarded his obsidian greatsword, Mercenary Tao drove a lone, talon-like claw straight through the Mad King's chest plates, his claws unrefinedly wrenching that silver-glowing heart completely out from his rear spine.
ROAR!
An apocalyptic, blood-chilling biological roar violently shattered the soul tracks.
[Alert: Reincarnator ZX30336603, your character capability—Kingly Authority (S-)—has sustained direct material destruction.]
[Alert: Reincarnator ZX30336603, your conceptual property—The Power of the King (Tier 5, Adaptability 93%)—has sustained the overriding duress of an unmapped [?] variable. Attribute Check Failed.]
[System Notification: The Silver Kingly Authority—Invariance—has been permanently stripped from your ledger.]
[Alert: You have sustained a maximum-intensity spiritual soul-strike. Calibrating against your baseline Spiritual Focus attribute, your system has acquired...]
A massive cascade of system notifications flooded his display like a raging torrent. Within a single microsecond of head-on contact, the Mad King verified that his profile had been forced to undergo an infinite succession of brutal attribute checks.
Deep within the biological pathways anchoring Mercenary Tao's vessel, there compressed an absolute, un-indexable mass of power that layout-wise, completely defied the identification matrices of the terminal.
Across the history of the Infinite Dimension Space, capability tracks, conceptual Authorities, evolutionary Tiers, and standalone character Traits were indeed occasionally tagged under the system identifier [?].
Yet across ninety-nine percent of those historical logs, that designation was an automated consequence of data blur—a scenario where a capability compatibly compressed the parameters of multiple separate paths, prompting the terminal's algorithms to require a grander density of observational anchors to safely lock its definition.
But the Mad King held an absolute, pristine clinical clarity: inside the cells of this fully transformed monster Mercenary Tao, the operational reality was layout-wise, completely distinct.
That was a chilling, chaotic, and thoroughly unmapped primordial Essence.
Pfft!
The space directly before the Mad King's chest plate went completely empty, his Sovereign Blade cutting through nothing but a vacuum. The velocity metric outputted by the monster Mercenary Tao was layout-wise, astronomically terrifying. Was this explicitly the Tier 9 Instantaneous milestone?
His processing unit lacked the priority to safely finalize the calculation.
The All Creation Submits to the Sovereign Spiritual Light had layout-wise, permanently caved past the threshold of ever digesting the absolute entirety of Mercenary Tao's power; his own vessel lacked the systemic compatibility to perfectly encase an infinite density of unmapped essences.
The Mad King's visual tracking suffered a severe frame decay, a full heartbeat crossing before his eyes could re-anchor their focus to isolate the monster floating calmly ten thousand meters away in the upper atmosphere.
The beast was methodically raising that silver-glowing heart high over his jaws, before slowly and unrefinedly packing the meat straight into the massive Void Hole spanning his chest.
At this exact juncture of the timeline, an illusory, black-and-white stairway completed a flawless, sub-atomic compilation to manifest directly beneath the monster Mercenary Tao's claws.
The spatial phantom of that ladder violently pierced straight through the local fabric of space, looking identically as if its vertical trajectory were rocketed straight into the absolute apex of the true sky.
An unprecedented, world-cleaving height; an astronomically unmapped length.
The Mad King rigidly froze dead mid-air. His eyes mapped that stygian crown of jagged thorns encircling Mercenary Tao's horns, before smoothly redirecting his visual stream to evaluate that pitch-black Card face locked within his right hand—[EX00? · THE GOD KING]. Abruptly, his features contorted into a bizarre, wildly manic smile.
"So that's how it is... so that is explicitly, flawlessly the reality of the table, ha~ ha... Hahaha!"
He let out a hysterical, roaring laugh. At this frame of the sequence, an elite practitioner who had completely manual-overrode the system's reliance on Title Capabilities, relying entirely upon his proprietary Tier progression and advanced Concussive Pulse of the Spiritual Light to legitimately touch the boundary parameters of the absolute Apex tier, discarded every shred of civilized composure.
He looked identically as if he had reverted straight back into that frantic, unhinged madman drifting through the Space networks—that farcical jester whom every premier syndicate historically dismissed as a clown, yet whose vessel compatibly encased the collective thoughts, hidden ambitions, and twisted desires of every captured vassal on his ledger.
Pfft!
A lone crimson fish violently erupted out from his illusory silver body, before instantly boring into the void of local space to vanish from the registry.
Following that trigger, a golden one cleanly broke cover.
An infinite multi-colored cloud of raw data strands was continuously fracturing and wrenching itself free from the internal tracking arrays of his [All Creation Submits to the Sovereign] Spiritual Light.
A structural disruption of this magnitude layout-wise, instantaneously flagged the tracking parameters of that transformed beast. In the very next fraction of a second, a pitch-black kinetic flash and a succession of white compression waves crashed head-on into each other with absolute, unrefined violence, a devastating counter-shockwave once again detonating across the stratosphere over Tokyo.
"Breaking news: following the catastrophic November 13 incident where the Japanese home islands sustained a Calamity-grade offensive campaign launched by high-risk ability users, East Asia, the Free Federation, and the European Coalition have officially finalized a joint declaration announcing the immediate creation of the World Unified Governance Coalition. This global executive apparatus is manually engineered to enforce total containment protocols targeting the existential threat of Calamity-grade metahumans."
"Concurrently, this station drops a high-priority advisory to metahumans active across all quadrants: this planet remains the collective heritage of all mankind. The high command expresses an earnest desire holding that every independent [Ability User] will proactively align their files with the Unified Coalition, dedicating their muscle groups to safeguard global stability..."
"Special correspondence from the White Bear Federation: [The Final Sun Empire]—the sovereign metahuman state that historically weaponized high-tier earth-manipulation techniques to construct an artificial island landmass across the Australian maritime basin—has officially clicked its compliance sequence to join the World Unified Governance Coalition. Their state delegates have issued a formal communication pledging to jointly fortify the stability of the oceans and the continental shelves."
"Updates from the East Asian high command: the metahuman-governed independent sovereign city-state known as [Eden], situated within the Myanmar parameters, has permanently caved past all established deadlines without submitting a single response targeting the Unified Coalition's structural invitation. The executive cabinet of the Free Federation has officially finalized a resolution designating [Eden] as an intensely hostile rogue metahuman enterprise, confirming that their strategic divisions are compiling parameters to systematically mark and target every ability user bound to that ledger."
"Emergency bulletin, November 17, 02:00 AM: East Asia, the Free Federation, the European Coalition, and the White Bear Federation have synchronously released their respective high-priority tracking registries mapping Calamity-grade and High-Peril ability users. A global containment dragnet has officially initiated to lock down and liquidate the following un-indexed targets across all real-world quadrants: Mercenary Tao, Hong Ye, Yekaterina..."
"Follow-up reporting, November 18: the March Corporation steering the South Korean theater has verified the absolute completion of their nationwide metahuman archival registry. At this chronological frame, South Korea stands as the lone nation-state machine to successfully finalize this structural lockdown. East Asia, the White Bear Federation, and a multitude of sovereign powers have announced plans to rapidly replicate the Metahuman Agency Bureau framework, systematically hardcoding all ability users directly into the domestic societal infrastructure..."
An infinite stream of digital text logs was continuously and rapidly scrolling across the displays. Across the subterranean levels from B1 down to B3 anchoring the obsidian Black Tower · Tower of Babel within the center of Eden, the quadrants were densely packed with thousands of high-resolution monitors, enterprise server arrays, and a massive compilation of specialized fantasy-side relics whose sub-atomic engineering layout-wise, comfortably out-scaled the technological limits of the current real world.
Within this centralized command vault, every single line of global intelligence—regardless of whether it was broadcasted over public networks or hidden deep within the encrypted channels of state intelligence bureaus—was being harvested and processed at a runaway velocity.
[Mai] kept an advanced energy supplement bar clamped between his teeth, both of his palms furiously hammering away against a custom mechanical input matrix. Directly behind his shoulder plates, the woman whom the global news networks mapped as currently steering the containment loops over South Korea—Eclipse—stood with absolute, un-yielding composure.
This powerful woman radiated a bone-crushing, chilling mantle of demonic energy, her entire presence mirroring a primeval, ravenous predator poised to manually consume a world line.
"Miss Shirogane, does our leadership command a temporary lockdown protocol to freeze all inbound Eden Faction Registration Applications? Throughout the past forty-eight hours, an immense volume of independent Reincarnator assets has aggressively breached our perimeter to request entry. Analyzing the data strands, a massive percentage of these profiles is highly, statistically likely intelligence operatives deployed by the rival coalitions or native state machines to harvest our vital lines. My arrays have already isolated and marked four separate high-tier intelligence brokers."
Mai executed a quick sequence of keys, forcing the central holographic display to project four separate biological silhouettes. The targets displayed highly distinct civilian aesthetics; one asset had smoothly adopted local custom, wearing a loose, vibrant floral shirt, while another was clad in a tailored corporate suit.
At this exact microsecond, these four variables were drifting across separate coordinates of the Eden marketplace, occasionally establishing communication tracks with the local Reincarnator populace. Had Mai's sensory networks failed to monitor the field, isolating their true intentions would have been layout-wise, an exceptionally difficult proposition for standard trackers.
The confirmation was absolute because three among them had manually deployed high-tier disguise artifacts to alter their character templates. Mai had been forced to weaponize advanced biological tracking sub-routines to crack their registries, verifying that these assets had merely restricted their protective shields to blocking mystical divination, fate-side prophecy, and conceptual forecasting arrays.
Granted, Mai's intellect cede zero credit to the premise that his net had swept the board clean; it was clinically logical that a select cluster of high-tier intelligence brokers compressing vastly superior stealth files had smoothly bypassed his diagnostics to slip into Eden undetected.
The total volume of active Reincarnators entrenched within the Eden grid had officially cleared the five-hundred-point milestone—an astronomically massive scale.
Expressed through a strategic framework, this corporate infrastructure comfortably out-scaled the vast majority of coalitions registered across the Infinite Dimension Space.
Eclipse's internal demonic energy continuously flamed with an icy intensity. The macro-geopolitical balance of the planet had sustained an absolute, irreversible mutation as an automated consequence of that apocalyptic duel no organism on the board had calculated.
Previously, although their inner calculation loops had verified that the dawn of the new epoch had initialized its cycle, it was only after witnessing Mercenary Tao and the Mad King launch that catastrophic, world-cleaving campaign that layout-wise, reduced the Japanese home islands to a fractured interior sea, that the Reincarnator collective's terrifying capacity to manually rewrite the material laws of reality was laid bare to the masses.
The world line had been aggressively and unrefinedly driven to accelerate its restructuring; the New Generation had descended upon the table without a single wisp of outstanding debate.
From this exact frame of history forward, Reincarnators would drive their muscles to launch direct, un-buffered interventions to govern global affairs.
This variable was explicitly verified by the structural architecture of that self-identified World Unified Governance Coalition, where the ruling elite had meticulously left a selection of sovereign seats explicitly reserved for absolute, top-tier Ability Users.
The traditional state executives currently steering the old order had officially completed their initial tactical retreat.
Granted, the vast majority of the Reincarnator population held a crystal-clean comprehension holding that this concession was layout-wise, by no means extended to the common herd; it was an automated consequence of the existential panic triggered by those legendary reigning Monarchs and apex predators whose metrics mirrored monsters like Mercenary Tao and the Mad King.
When the equations resolved, those individual engines of destruction had empirically demonstrated that their biological frames operated as literal, absolute single-unit strategic warfare weapons against which modern military science compressed virtually zero viable lines of containment.
An infinite multi-national web of elite think tanks, state brain trusts, and hidden counter-measure bureaus was currently exhaustively burning its processing power, desperately attempting to compile a tactical blueprint to somehow interact against these Calamity-grade metahumans.
And among those parallel calculations... the single most critical, high-priority variable their leadership needed to resolve was establishing an absolute diagnostic confirming whether the two monsters who had orchestrated the total collapse of Tokyo had survived the detonation.
At this precise millisecond of the chronology, a multitude of intelligence streams had finalized a confirmation holding that the asset logged under the codename [The Mad King] had sustained a terminal deletion.
Yet when evaluating the file tracking the entity codenamed [Mercenary Tao], the global data archives cede the terminal absolutely zero indicators—a massive vacuum that was actively leaving a swarm of hidden wolves across the district feeling exceptionally, dangerously bold.
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