Chapter 658: The Joint Attack Plan
[Based on your rescue operations, your Reputation within the United States of America has increased. Current status: Friendly (78/100)]
[Based on your rescue operations, your Reputation within the United States of America has increased. Current status: Friendly (83/100)]
Kaito Shirogane gestured dismissively. At his word, Madara Uchiha and the others dispersed into the shifting shadows. Hakumen and Black Face followed suit, hoisting the unconscious young Spider-Man between them as they marched out of the shattered perimeter.
Seeing this, Tony Stark immediately stepped forward, blockading their exit route.
Hakumen's narrow, gloomy eyes locked onto the Iron Man. To her current corrupted perspective, the most mathematically optimal move was to simply execute the remaining Avengers right here. This worldline was already on the verge of total, irreversible collapse anyway.
Liquidating these primary characters to harvest a final batch of Singularities before initiating a total system regression would ensure they didn't leave empty-handed.
However, Black Face operated solely under Kaito's absolute command. Confronted by the mortal blocking the threshold, he didn't bother drawing his white odachi. He merely narrowed his eyes, allowing a dense, suffocating wave of pure Reiatsu to violently erupt from his spiritual pressure core.
Tony's field of vision instantaneously plunged into absolute black and white. That monolithic, soul-crushing weight clamped down onto his lungs, making it entirely impossible to draw oxygen. His biological heart, already structurally compromised by historical trauma, looked as if it had completely short-circuited past the stabilization thresholds of his chest arc reactor.
Pant... Pant!
His breathing splintered into sharp, ragged wheezes as his vision blacked out, his physical motor functions caving to absolute paralysis.
Without uttering a single syllable, Black Face hoisted the young Spider-Man and glided cleanly past his listing frame to exit the high-rise. Hakumen merely let out a pair of cold, raspy chuckles, turning her head back to cede Kaito a sharp, throat-slitting gesture before trailing directly behind the native deity.
This exact sequence flawlessly matched the chronological visual frames Kaito's precognitive Future Sight had scanned moments earlier.
Tap, tap, tap.
Amused by the script, Kaito Shirogane slowly walked over to plant his weight beside the paralyzed Iron Man, methodically driving his finger straight into a precise neural matrix along Tony's neck.
In the very next fraction of a second, Tony's hyper-ventilating respiratory cycle and failing coronary blood flow miraculously and flawlessly returned to an absolute, stable baseline.
The absolute application of Shen Wulong's [Logic] did not merely grant the practitioner flawless governance over his own physical parameters; when directed outward against external biological entities, it cede the user an extraordinarily high threshold of localized vector control.
Against a completely standard mortal frame like Tony Stark's, it could effortlessly replicate the exact mystical effects of acupoint-sealing techniques from high-tier martial worlds.
"Hey, take it easy, Mr. Stark. They harbor zero intention to inflict actual structural damage upon young Parker~"
Kaito cede the billionaire a completely groundless, unverified guarantee. In material reality, his clinical blueprint held zero precise coordinates mapping what Hakumen would actually execute against the child's framework.
Hakumen was a certified, high-tier psychopath—but she was simultaneously a specialized practitioner who possessed immense strategic insight when it came to excavating hidden narrative data streams.
And Kaito was entirely confident that given her current, near-hysterical lust to secure a full resurrection quota, if her arrays failed to parse a sufficiently high-value hidden quest line from Parker's cells, her fallback route would be to bring the boy right back to his feet so Kaito could finalize his execution to farm Singularities.
Consequently, his reassurance wasn't a total fabrication.
Evaluating Tony's silent, heavy focus, Kaito mulled over his immediate phrasing before noting:
"Regarding the fundamental parameters of who we are... the tactical explanation is highly complex. Your intellect can seamlessly categorize our squad under the archetype of specialized, trans-dimensional mercenaries, or map our presence as a collective of high-tier bounty hunters."
"Our engine proactively tracks down any high-value combat grid across the multiverse, and we draw our blades exclusively to feed our own evolutionary ledger."
Tony Stark's mind reeled as he recalled the sheer, unadulterated cosmic terror of the clash that had just leveled the commercial heart of Manhattan. His internal panic was exceptionally difficult to suppress. Colonel Rhodes and Sam Wilson had been officially confirmed as killed in action.
Black Widow and Captain America were buried somewhere beneath the tectonic shifts, their operational status unknown.
Vision was dead, and Wanda's psychological baseline had completely fractured into a highly volatile, unstable hex field...
This mysterious faction had practically triggered a total, near-extinction event across the active Avengers roster in a single afternoon. And the entirety of New York City had been systematically reduced to a smoldering basin of pulverized concrete over the course of their consecutive grapples.
This was New York!
The premier metropolitan nexus of the civilized world!
Tony found it entirely, processing-wise impossible to accept the scope of the reality materializing around his coordinates. The secure communication lines anchoring the Department of Defense were currently flooding FRIDAY's receiver with an infinite barrage of incoming flags—yet those high-ranking corporate and military officials weren't calling to demand an accounting.
The absolute primary wave bleeding through the encryption was a profound, frantic panic that defied words.
Within the absolute borders of the single most militarily dominant superpower on the planet, across its most prosperous commercial hub, pinned directly against its most heavily augmented superheroes, a handful of unmapped interlopers had effortlessly forced the total demolition of an entire city.
And the military intelligence networks, in actual reality, still possessed absolutely zero baseline data mapping the names, origins, or capabilities of this collective.
"You stated earlier... that your blade would stand on the side of humanity!"
Tony realized with an icy clarity that against this breed of freaks, his conventional engineering assets possessed zero tactical leverage. Even though his sharp intuition signaled that the catastrophic subversion of Wanda and Vision held a direct, unyielding link connecting straight to the silver-haired monster standing before his face...
He decisively chose to refrain from exposing that specific topic at this precise microsecond.
Because... the exact millisecond his scanning arrays tracked this faction committing their assets to execute wide-area rescue operations, his intellect recognized that these mysterious, sudden interlopers did not operate as a unified, single collective.
Flawlessly matching the historical description this freak self-identifying as Mercenary Tao had cede earlier, this gathering had fractured into multiple, opposing alignments.
That black-and-white clad low-stratosphere angel had mindlessly, non-discriminatorily launched an absolute mass execution across New York; he was highly likely the most fundamentally malicious asset on the board.
And the Mercenary Tao standing before his chest, despite his highly suspect tracking parameters, had genuinely launched a head-on, lethal grapple to suppress that entity, ultimately finalizing his execution.
Tony's instruments lacked the precision to verify that the continental submersion of the coastline had been driven purely by Kaito's Serious Punch—but even if his data verified the metric right now, his survival instincts would have dictated bypassing the topic entirely.
Kaito Shirogane's empathy grid cleanly read through the absolute exhaustion and hollow desperation paralyzing this former playboy. This mortal had been completely and flawlessly crushed beneath a weight of "heroic responsibility" that far eclipsed the vessel capacity of his biology.
The exact millisecond an organism is forcefully compelled to bear a structural burden that completely out-scales its native metrics, its psychological framework will inevitably shatter.
At this precise nexus of the evaluation, Kaito Shirogane actually cede the Iron Man—a standard mortal human who could only execute combat metrics when fully encased within a specialized mechanical shell—a rare wisp of genuine professional credit.
He thoroughly, intensely loathed weaklings who possessed zero understanding of their own insignificance yet arrogantly overreached. But conversely, when a weakling held a perfect, lucid comprehension of his own absolute fragility, yet still forced his muscles to stand against the collapse of a world, deploying his own restricted methods to weave a perimeter against an uncontrollable, apocalyptic force... the [Heart] of an individual of that classification would generate an exceptionally unique, beautiful wisp of spiritual light.
Clap, clap, clap.
Kaito casually patted the scarred gold-titanium plating of the Iron Man armor, his features breaking into a wide, playful grin as he cede the billionaire a word of comfort:
"Don't let your internal calculations run wild, Tony. Look at the board: am I not already standing flawlessly on the side of humanity~"
"I have systematically liquidated the angel Solomon who was actively purging the human population of New York, and I have further executed the absolute, interstellar threat known as Thanos before his legions could establish total dominance..."
"Highly likely, your narrow database lacks the processing speed to parse the correlation, Tony, but this campaign actually represents an absolute, high-priority salvage of your personal life force~"
Tony Stark watched the silver-haired monster's vocal cadence drift into a surreal, floating rhythm, as if the stranger were casually detailing how he had forcefully shattered a pre-programmed timeline of destiny, leaving the billionaire as nothing more than a passive benefactor of his intervention.
He couldn't help but furrow his brow. His clinical intellect cede zero credit to concepts of that classification.
But out across the coastal flank bordering the bay, his long-range scanning arrays had indeed verified the material reality of a colossal cosmic dreadnought, paired with an infinite, hyper-advanced army whose conventional weapons were exceptionally lethal—even though that legion had already sustained a catastrophic threshold of casualties under the concussive wind pressure of the previous battle.
The remaining active remnants still posed an absolute, extreme threat to any surviving conventional military forces on the grid.
Kaito's active telepathy easily mapped the precise strategic concerns anchoring the Iron Man's mind. With an exceptionally attentive flourish, he executed a sharp snap of his left fingers.
"Satoru Gojo. Advance across the urban parameters and cede this city a line of assistance. Process every single active Chitauri unit on the board down to absolute termination..."
Propped against the fractured concrete wall, Gojo's smile cleanly widened as he methodically raised a lone hand.
Mocking the archetype of a thoroughly bound, submissive pawn operating under Kaito's absolute dominance, he unhinged his jaw to murmur:
"Understood, Master~"
In the very next fraction of a second, accompanied by a sharp, spatial bang, the local air currents violently imploded as Satoru Gojo vanished from the high-rise via instantaneous teleportation.
The intense killing intent he had been forcefully compressing within his cells for the past world cycles violently and flawlessly detonated across a separate coordinate of the Manhattan grid.
Within the next heartbeat, Satoru Gojo entered a state of total, unadulterated mass slaughter amidst the heavy plasma fire of the Chitauri lines.
Kaito Shirogane quietly monitored his internal panel, watching his localized Reputation parameters execute a steady, non-stop escalation, before directing his vacant gaze toward the marginally placated Iron Man:
"Mr. Stark. Although forcing an evaluation of this nature against your current psychological state might be classified as exceptionally merciless, the clinical reality remains absolute: within three days of chronological time, right at these exact coordinates, a cluster of monumentally powerful entities is fated to execute an orbital entry..."
"Granted, I am by no means demanding that your conventional military forces or the surviving Avengers cede my engine a line of active combat reinforcement. My primary concern is entirely rooted in a separate metric: if my vessel is compelled to throttle my throttles back into that specific multiplier status to execute the defense, I lack the data to verify how many blocks of New York will comfortably remain on the map."
"Why don't we proactively orchestrate a total, wide-area evacuation of the human population of New York right now, Tony? You know with absolute clarity... it is explicitly because my blade stands on the side of humanity that my jaw has unhinged to offer this proposal."
Kaito smiled as he casually threw the tactical intelligence detailing the incoming arrival of [The Primordial Dragon Court] onto the board. As calculated, the Iron Man's entire cognitive process violently wound tight under a fresh wave of severe dread.
The current infrastructure of New York possessed absolutely zero capacity to safely anchor another clash of that apocalyptic scale. Vast quadrants of the metropolis had already caved into structural sinkholes, and forcing a geological restoration would require an immense threshold of time and resources.
"What exactly does your blueprint dictate?"
Stark launched the query with absolute, razor-sharp directness.
The corners of Kaito Shirogane's mouth split into a vastly wider, monstrously contorted grin.
"My directive requires both Wanda Maximoff and Captain Marvel to seamlessly integrate their energetic outputs into the active combat framework. And furthermore... myself..."
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