Chapter 842: Makima in the One-Punch Man World
[You have obtained Advancement Quest: Flesh of the Enemy, Sustenance of Mine IV]
"You have truly, finally arrived at this realm~"
Having reverted to her mature, adult form, the Knight Girl's eyes shimmered with a rich golden luminescence. Watching the Reincarnator Mercenary Tao—whom she had observed ascending step-by-step from his earliest days—her gaze brimmed with quiet gratification.
She admired the strong, but she admired the unquenchable ambition burning within this Reincarnator's eyes even more.
Only that look could carve a path forward along the obscure, endless ascent of the Divine Stairway.
In the preceding Gourmet World, Kaito Shirogane had locked in an evaluation surpassing S-Rank. Yet because he had not cleared his advancement trial, the smelting of materials along the Divine Stairway remained temporarily locked.
That was the primary catalyst driving his haste to initiate another deployment.
His entry into the Gourmet World had been a special quest triggered via a consumable token; it did not count against his natural deployment cooldown.
Thus, Kaito stood primed to launch a new deployment cycle immediately.
His resolve was already set: he would burn the [Heroes Assemble] token to anchor his next mission specifically to a derivative universe of One-Punch Man.
Whether it was the desolate B711 world—practically retired from standard spatial deployments—or an alternate branched timeline, it mattered not.
He had resolved to stand before Saitama once more!
Having borne witness to the apocalyptic clash between Son Goku and Son Gohan, squabbles among mortal Reincarnators and conventional plot characters had lost their flavor.
The power his soul hungered for resided exclusively in the hands of titans like that.
The second that Anchor of Causality landed in his grip, he had decided to spend it on Saitama.
Only a force of Saitama's caliber warranted engaging without regard for the consequences; only a creature like that was worthy of consuming an artifact of that rarity.
He wanted to feel the absolute weight of that fist again!
Kaito strode out of the newly remodeled Step Appraisal Pavilion with his head bowed. Watching his retreating back—a man whose gaze seemed permanently anchored to some distant horizon, a mad, intoxicated grin playing upon his lips—the Knight Girl's brow arched. It had been an age since the Space had nurtured an anomaly of this breed.
Perhaps the next round of the Dimensional War was closer than anyone imagined...
Kaito rounded the perimeter, heading across the vast white jade plaza toward the newly constructed Training Grounds.
The facility had been erected as an immense circular structure rising nearly fifty meters into the air, accessible from every vector. The interior dimensions for each entering Reincarnator were isolated, retaining environmental parameters from previous sessions.
The moment Kaito stepped through the threshold, both gravitational pull and atmospheric oxygen concentrations shifted. The terrain melted into a churning sea framed by roaring volcanic vents.
Yet this baseline had long ceased to challenge his physiology.
With staggering resources at his disposal, his Dimensional Points seemed virtually bottomless. Slaying an upper-tier foreign combatant yielded spatial bounties calculated in the tens of thousands—more than enough to squander in the training chambers.
Shedding his Ulquiorra-style longcoat, Kaito stepped barefoot into the pooling lava and waded into the surf.
Temperatures of that magnitude inflicted negligible trauma upon his Tier 7 Physique of the Primordial Man. Adjusting his physical density to ignore the sea's buoyancy, he sank toward the ocean floor.
Amplified by tenfold gravity, the hydrostatic pressure of the deep grew crushing.
Yet the deeper he descended, the more natural his body felt.
It was as though extreme, crushing environments were the native cradle his vessel was built to inhabit.
He marched steadily across the abyssal floor. Far above, the submarine volcanoes detonated, spewing rivers of white-hot magma into the ocean, burying Kaito beneath a molten shroud.
[Deployment cycle initiating]
[3]
[2]
[1]
[Deployment commenced]
A predatory smirk touched Dead of Night's lips, a sharp canine peeking past her mouth. Clutching her brow with one hand, she struggled to swallow the burst of laughter threatening to tear from her throat.
She laughed at Tan Zhishan's shortsighted cowardice for abandoning such an effortless path to power.
And she laughed at her own providence. An unseen hand seemed determined to forbid her from ever settling into mediocrity.
She possessed a working grasp of destiny-side mechanisms and suspected she was being gently steered along a scripted board, but to her current self, none of that held weight.
She had felt the advent of the Jujutsu leylines across the northern territories of the White Bear. Under her direct stewardship, negative-energy entities mirroring Cursed Spirits had begun to manifest.
More importantly, the [Cursed Spirit Manipulation] technique—a toolset with boundless scaling potential—could devour and subjugate those negative-energy organisms without friction.
That verified their authenticity as genuine Cursed Spirits!
Her base energy attribute was even swelling from an untracked source, prompting spatial notices urging her to anchor the mutation at the Goddess's Sanctuary.
She had ignored them. To propagate the occult memetic curse, inflate civilian terror, and elevate the ambient density of negative energy across the tundra, she had drained her reserves dry.
Even if she stepped into the sanctuary, she lacked the Singularity Points to sate that extortionate Goddess.
It was of no consequence. She stood upon the threshold of the top tier. She needed only to clear this mission cycle, return to harvest the mature Cursed Spirits, and wait for the systemic equilibrium to buckle; the macro-memetic field would wildly amplify every Cursed Spirit in existence.
Her hybrid half-curse biology would harvest that empowerment in tandem!
Following that, Reincarnators would plunge into slaughter over the spoils, with jujutsu-aligned operatives turning on each other to claim the trait.
The purge of sorcerers would shatter the balance again, prompting the overarching system to violently pump raw power into the surviving sorcerers.
And she, retaining her status as an authentic sorcerer, would drink in that second wave of empowerment just the same.
This was the systemic loophole Amatsu had spoken of: a self-feeding exploit where seeding the Jujutsu realm into reality rewarded specific builds with compounding, passive attribute gains.
While the ceiling of the Jujutsu universe was modest on paper, in the hands of a Reincarnator, anomalous cursed techniques paired with endlessly scaling cursed energy harbored lethal viability.
Tan Zhishan had pursued a similar methodology.
Streams of data cascaded across Dead of Night's vision, snuffing out her senses.
"Aaaagh!"
"Help me!"
"A monster!"
Piercing shrieks tore into Dead of Night's ears. Her brow furrowed as sensory reality slowly pieced itself back together.
Her sense of smell reconstituted first, overwhelmed by the copper stench of fresh blood.
A hemorrhage of that concentration signaled catastrophic casualties.
She opened her eyes, finding an avenue carpeted in severed limbs and shattered torsos. Mortal remains littered the asphalt, interspersed with the mangled scraps of colorful, form-fitting costumes.
[World initialization complete]
[Mission World: One-Punch Man Derivative Realm H993 (This derivative timeline has not yet been influenced by prior Reincarnators)]
[Mission Type: Cooperative Survival]
[Challenge Difficulty: High to Unknown]
[Time Limit: 30 Days]
[Note: Universal Language Module has been permanently anchored for this deployment]
[Within this world, you may unlock the following Milestones. Milestones will influence final mission evaluations and title acquisitions:]
Super Hero: Achieve Revered standing or higher within any recognized Hero faction.
Martial Artist: Study and master any martial arts school, acquiring the corresponding specialization.
Mysterious Being Slayer: Slay over 100 Mysterious Beings.
Majin: Acquire the Majin bloodline.
Primate Slayer: Slay over 1,000,000 humanoid entities with your own hands.
The deluge of milestones appeared chaotic, dominated by objectives revolving around heroes and monsters. The distribution gave Dead of Night a distinct, sour premonition.
It reminded her of an earlier world—a deployment where she had barely escaped with her life.
ROAR!
Amidst a foul, sulfurous bellow, several reptilian monsters boasting humanoid torsos, thick scaled hides, and dinosaur-like skulls burst through the concrete facade of a high-rise.
Fresh shreds of human flesh hung from their serrated teeth.
Dead of Night lowered her eyelids.
She made no pretense of being a saint, and taking lives was second nature, but watching sub-human abominations casually feed upon her own species stirred revulsion within her gut.
Call it biological instinct or a genetic chain.
She took immediate, personal offense at the pack before her.
"Run... Run away..."
Dead of Night turned toward the sound. Half-buried beneath a shattered structural pillar lay a man, only a fraction of his skull clear of the rubble.
He was clad in a garish crimson bodysuit, clutching a cartoonish, equally ridiculous red mallet.
She couldn't place his identity—likely a minor hero from the local hero associations.
Gasping on the brink of death, the hero spotted the girl stepping out from the wreckage, looking entirely oblivious to the carnage. His arm twitched, attempting to heave himself forward, only to fail repeatedly.
"Run... Let me... protect you..."
Tch.
Dead of Night clicked her tongue in annoyance.
She despised weaklings who lacked the strength to preserve their own breath or measure the chasm between them, yet insisted on spewing sanctimonious grandstanding.
In her irritation, she failed to notice that her low-presence stealth—normally imperceptible to ordinary sight—had been bypassed by a dying mortal.
Emboldened by the systemic exploit she had secured in reality, her confidence had swelled. She raised both hands.
Black vortices opened in the air as the twisted silhouettes of Cursed Spirits surfaced from the dark.
A frigid, malicious cursed energy wrapped around her frame.
Multiple serpent-like curses erupted from the void, coiling forward to strike the draconic humanoids.
BOOM!
Scales shattered under the impact as dark blood sprayed across the asphalt.
Dead of Night unleashed her cursed energy with reckless abandon, her right palm opening as lesser curses collapsed into a concentrated vortex of pure destructive power.
An Ultimate Technique operation: Maximum.
She intended to vaporize the creatures with a focused cannon of pure curse power.
Hum~
An invisible forcefield swept across the district. Dead of Night froze, her cells seizing in terror under a crushing wave of biological dominance.
She lifted her head to the skyline. A colossal black dragon was cleaving through the clouds, its wings blotting out the sun, a slit-pupiled draconic eye looking down upon the burning city.
Dragon Fear. An absolute, suffocating Dragon Fear!
Dead of Night felt as though she had been stripped bare and abandoned on an arctic ice sheet.
The chasm in biological hierarchy made drawing a breath agonizingly difficult.
"Damn it... What is that thing—"
[Warning]
[Special Unit: Deathwing has entered the battlefield]
Special Unit... Wait... The Primordial Dragon Court?!
BOOM!
A breath of cataclysmic fire rained from the heavens, flattening the metropolis in an instant. Watching the city unravel beneath that destructive output, a wave of profound helplessness swallowed Dead of Night whole.
Her build was notoriously deficient in raw mobility.
She relied on low-presence stealth to assassinate targets from the shadows, broadcasting memetic curses and wielding negative energy.
The ultimate counter to her framework was this exact brand of indiscriminate, wide-area annihilation.
Damn it all...
Just as the rolling wave of incandescent death was about to scour the street, an argent streak flashed through the ruins.
Dead of Night felt an iron grip seize her collar, the concussive demonic energy radiating from the limb causing blood to seep from her lips and nostrils.
"You're... Moon Demon?!"
[Deployment commencing. Please return to personal quarters immediately]
Deep within the subterranean volcanic beds, Kaito Shirogane opened his eyes. Twin beams of golden Ki lanced outward, churning the deep sea into violent cross-currents.
With a subtle flex of his frame, the cooled basalt encasing his limbs shattered into silt.
He breached the ocean surface in a single leap.
He had made minimal preparations; for this deployment, the only true threat that mattered was Saitama.
Against an entity of that nature, tactical schemes were functionally decorative.
Unless he could secure a half-dozen more artifacts on the tier of the Anchor of Causality, elaborate preparations held little value.
Those would at least buy him the luxury of throwing several authentic strikes.
[3]
[2]
[1]
[Deployment commenced]
Silver data streams flooded his vision, peeling away his physical senses.
He shifted into an information stream, cutting through dimensional rifts to cross the dark cosmic sea above primordial chaos.
With his Limit-Break Spiral idling in a passive state, broad telemetry trickled into his awareness.
His perception outstripped standard operatives by a mile; the second he dropped into the atmosphere, raw signatures inundated his consciousness.
Anomalous lifeforms resembling hybridization between insectoid and human biologies pulsed across various urban coordinates.
Subterranean signatures radiating vitality far exceeding ordinary transcendent beasts lurked beneath the city's foundations.
Draconic lifeforms...?
The moment his boots touched solid ground, Kaito caught the systemic distortions of this realm.
This was neither the B711 world nor a clean derivative of the standard One-Punch Man cosmos.
This reality had suffered severe external contamination.
As the world's telemetry loaded into his interface, Kaito shifted his gaze toward the adjacent street.
There, seated inside a sleek black sedan, a pink-haired woman clad in a crisp white dress shirt and a black necktie was rolling smoothly past the intersection.
Through his heightened dynamic vision, Kaito tracked her gaze meeting his own. Her pupils dilated slightly, sparkling with cool intrigue.
A slow, predatory grin curled Kaito's lips.
Makima...
It truly wasn't a standard One-Punch Man world after all.