Chapter 843: Kamen Rider, and a Somewhat Useful Kaito Shirogane
[World initialization complete]
[Mission World: One-Punch Man Derivative Realm H993 (Primordial Dragon Court has invaded; World Distortion: 76%)]
[Mission Type: Cooperative Survival]
[Challenge Difficulty: Moderate 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:]
World-Ending Sovereign (World's Rarity): Steer the world toward an apocalyptic resolution within this realm.
Number One Martial Artist under Heaven (World's Rarity): Reach the apex of martial arts prestige in this world, becoming the living legend—Number One under Heaven.
Primate Slayer: Slay over 1,000,000 humanoid entities with your own hands.
Dragon-Beast Bane (Uncommon): Slay over 1,000 dragon-beasts.
Devil Hunter (Rare): Defeat over 5 Devils.
[Main Quest Initiated]
[Main Quest: Survive until Day 30]
Optional Quest 1: Align with any recognized faction and raise your reputation to Revered to unlock faction-specific assignments.
Optional Quest 2: Total Faction Extinction—Obliterate any recognized faction in its entirety.
[Special Quest: Heroes Assemble Acquired]
[Heroes Assemble]
Quest Description: The great seer Madame Shibabawa has prophesied that the world is hurtling toward extinction. Consequently, all powerhouses bearing the mantle of Hero have been summoned to assemble in City A in three days' time.
Quest Rewards: Reach the Hero Association Headquarters in City A within three days to unlock the sequential stage of the quest line.
Quest Penalty: Failure to arrive within three days results in quest failure and the permanent cancellation of the special quest: Heroes Assemble.
Kaito Shirogane pulled his gaze back from the departing sedan. The structural distortion of this realm was remarkably severe. Across the sensory perimeter mapped by his Mantra Network and Martial God's Ultimate Intent, elements from at least three disparate cosmologies were actively intermingling.
This was no longer a conventional derivative world; it was a high-tier secondary world.
Makima's arrival merely signaled the convergence of entities from the Chainsaw Man universe—nothing more.
Devils wielded conceptual authorities and were undeniably formidable. Given their recursive cycle of being cast down into Hell upon dying in the human realm, and returning to the mortal sphere upon perishing in Hell, their passive immortality was respectable.
Yet their raw energetic scale was far too modest.
At Kaito's current threshold, the sensory stimulation offered by fiends and devils had depreciated considerably.
With cold detachment, his hands buried deep within the pockets of his longcoat, Kaito strode toward the urban core. He aimed to track down the densest energetic signature within sensory range to ascertain the true topography of this realm.
Frail Reincarnators and apex combatants adopted fundamentally divergent methodologies upon deploying into scripted worlds.
Weaker operatives instinctively concealed their presence, terrified that native plot figures might detect anomalies in their signatures. They crawled through native intelligence channels or relied on mundane technical probes to harvest data piecemeal.
Kaito, however, was an entirely different breed. Even within an expansive secondary world rooted in the One-Punch Man baseline, his combat rating placed him firmly among the apex vanguard.
He commanded the leverage to project his voice across the board, using absolute might to carve out sovereign privileges.
He had zero interest in squandering time on tedious investigations.
Kaito advanced toward his quarry, paying no mind to the terrified civilians parting before his boots. Men and women dressed in tailored business suits skirted around him in a panic, clearing a wide berth around the tall, striking figure.
Walking toward him from the opposite crosswalk was a young man in streetwear, sporting an overturned baseball cap studded with rhinestones.
As he brushed past Kaito's shoulder, a grotesque grin spread across the youth's mouth. He snapped a hand forward, clamping his fingers around Kaito's forearm.
A stylized runic tattoo peeked out from beneath his rolled-up sleeve.
"Mortal... you carry an exceptionally peculiar scent~"
The voice began with human cadence, but mid-sentence, the vocal cords distorted into an unnatural, hollow baritone that severed all resemblance to human speech.
An alien, predatory aura bled into the street. The surrounding pedestrians—their nerves already frayed to the breaking point by the recent surge in Mysterious Being incidents—screamed and bolted in all directions.
That collective terror acted as a detonator. The moment the panicked shrieks erupted, the asphalt fractured open with concussive violence. Bizarre, scaled dragon-beasts lunged from subterranean fissures with deafening roars.
Fresh blood and severed limbs sprayed across the avenue in an instant.
The "human" clutching Kaito's arm underwent immediate metamorphosis. The marble-textured belt buckled around his waist began to pulse with light as his anatomy twisted into an armored chassis.
"I have a premonition that you will make a fine Linto. You—"
Rip!
Before phantom pain could even register across the central nervous system, the unnatural sensation of a limb being cleanly sheared from a torso—accompanied by the copper stench of arterial spray—cut the Gurongi's declaration short.
Kaito's eyelids drooped, looking down with cold, vacant eyes upon this anomalous organism hailing from the Kamen Rider lineage.
A Gurongi. An ancient prehistoric species originating from the Kamen Rider Kuuga cosmology, mutated by the mutagenic radiation of meteoric iron into a brutal, battle-obsessed race of grotesque warriors.
Their individual power tiers varied wildly; the pinnacle leaders among them wielded catastrophic combat potential.
Evidently, the creature standing before him was not among that elite.
Kaito had registered the creature's energetic footprint long before it stepped out of the adjacent skyscraper.
Yet because the signature was pitifully weak, Kaito hadn't felt the slightest spark of battle lust, casually choosing to walk past it.
He hadn't anticipated that the beast would pick up an unfamiliar scent from his flesh—a battle instinct that provoked the creature into initiating physical contact.
Kaito tore the unidentified Gurongi's arm from its shoulder socket like brittle paper. The beast's frame was in the middle of completing its armored transformation, but Kaito had already taken a casual stride past its flank.
The next microsecond, a sickening pop echoed through the air, reminiscent of a watermelon exploding mid-air.
A lash of compressed kinetic Ki snapped clean through the Gurongi's cranium, pulverizing it into fine red mist.
Kaito walked forward without breaking stride. Dozens of meters ahead, dragon-beasts were engaged in indiscriminate slaughter. Crude amalgamations of baseline draconic genes spliced with human tissue, these creatures lacked the power to even graze the threshold of the Strong tier; Kaito held zero interest in engaging them.
He walked through the heaving crowds and flying gore in complete silence.
Suddenly, an arc of thunder cracked across the clear sky.
Zzt—BOOM!
Clad in dark matte-black armor anchored by a radiant golden belt, Kamen Rider Kuuga: Amazing Mighty form intercepted the flank like a bolt of lightning, refracting through the street to spear straight through seven or eight emerging dragon-beasts.
The creatures detonated into shards of meat upon impact.
Though the presence of a Gurongi had confirmed that the Kamen Rider mythos was woven into this realm, Kuuga manifesting so swiftly suggested that the city beneath his boots served as the primary battleground between Kuuga and the ancient tribe.
It prompted Kaito to wonder whether Daguva was lurking somewhere within this metropolis as well.
After brief consideration, Kaito chose to continue his march. His primary objective for this deployment had been locked in from the start:
To clash once more against Saitama!
To experience that absolute, pinnacle fist with his own flesh!
Therefore, advancing the special quest toward City A, leveraging the infrastructure of the Hero Association alongside the reputational standing of his Savior of Villains title to rapidly isolate Saitama's coordinates was his sole priority.
Kuuga's Ultimate Form and N-Daguva-Zeba were undeniably formidable combatants, yet compared to Saitama, their allure remained thoroughly insufficient.
As Kaito advanced, dark arcs of electricity sparked across his path.
"Hey! You were the one who brought down that Gurongi in a single strike just now, weren't you?!"
"Possessing power like that... why did you stand by and watch these people die without lifting a finger?!"
Yusuke Godai's voice cracked with bewilderment and anger.
He had rushed to the sector the moment he sensed the Gurongi's signature, only to find the ancient enemy stalled while subterranean monstrosities mounted an indiscriminate massacre.
What infuriated him further was that a formidable Gurongi had been executed in an instant by the man before him, yet that same warrior was walking away while civilians were being torn to shreds around him.
Kaito had no desire to engage Yusuke Godai in philosophical debates regarding salvation. Wasting breath on moral binaries with an archetype like that was completely pointless.
They operated on entirely different planes of existence.
"I never claimed to be a good person."
Kaito took a single step forward, his form blurring across a thousand meters in the fraction of a millisecond. Godai surged forward to pursue, but with Kaito's subsequent stride, the man vanished entirely beyond the tracking radius of Kuuga's heightened senses.
This human possessed power that defied all comprehension. Was he an S-Class hero from the Hero Association?
Inside the sleek black sedan, Makima withdrew her gaze from the side mirror. The driver, clad in a crisp white dress shirt with his wings folded neatly against his shoulder blades, steered the vehicle in silence, making no move to interrupt her thoughts.
The figure seated in the front passenger seat, however, observed no such professional decorum.
A massive frame that nearly swallowed the front cabin whole radiated dense, explosive power. Golden, slit-pupiled eyes burned within his irises with quiet majesty.
"Miss Makima is remarkably perceptive. It appears you can discern the chasm separating our kind from your own with a single glance."
Despite his gargantuan build, his cadence was gentle and rhythmic, carrying an unhurried cadence that projected total command over the tempo of the conversation.
Makima remained expressionless. Leaning against the window frame, she studied her own reflection cast against the tinted glass.
She felt the condescension woven beneath his use of "your kind" and "our kind."
Yet those entities might genuinely represent a higher order of lifeforms compared to the denizens of this world—perhaps operating on an evolutionary plane far above even the Devils themselves.
Makima replayed the visual data of the man she had caught sight of moments before.
There had been no telltale signatures of exotic energy.
No hyper-developed musculature, no ripples of psychic force, and not the faintest scent of a Devil.
Yet with a single glance, Makima's instincts had flared with profound alarm.
A specialized premonition derived from the conceptual authority of [Control].
That man was formidable—monstrously, incomprehensibly formidable. Across every measurable dimension, he exuded absolute lethality.
An existence that fundamentally could not be controlled.
Makima rested a slender hand against her collarbone. Across her operational history, individuals of that archetype could be counted on one hand.
No one else—not even Superalloy Darkshine from the Hero Association, whose physique shrugged off nearly every assault launched by fiends, nor Flashy Flash, whose velocity bypassed visual perception—had ever evoked that sensation within her.
So long as a creature remained human, vulnerabilities invariably existed. And so long as vulnerabilities existed, behavioral leverage could be engineered to establish total dominion.
Recalling the Chainsaw Devil she had successfully leashed, Makima's fascination with the newly surfaced anomaly deepened.
"Even within your collective, entities of that stature must be vanishingly rare, are they not?"
Makima's voice was tranquil. Seated in the front, the pureblood dragon Aurelion shifted his golden pupils, catching the Control Devil's reflection in his peripheral vision.
Aligning with this woman had been Aurelion's strategic choice. Though Lord Neltharion had dismissed the maneuver, Aurelion maintained that their vanguard possessed more than enough raw might; securing an ambitious, intellectually capable native collaborator was the optimal path to maximize their operational efficiency.
Furthermore, he had to account for the native apex plot figures who posed a legitimate threat to members of the Primordial Dragon Court.
Seers had indicated that Lord Boros, the Dominator of the Universe, had yet to make planetfall.
Lord Neltharion alone was insufficient to steamroll this realm unopposed.
The structural distortion of this world had broken every scale; even with that rule-breaking anomaly temporarily contained by the Dragon Court's assets, caution remained mandatory.
"Indeed. Even within our lineage, anomalies of that profile are extraordinarily scarce. To say nothing of... that fragile, wretched place."
"He likely represents the final, dying ember of hope nurtured by that realm..."
Aurelion's phrasing remained deliberately ambiguous, yet Makima deciphered the subtext instantly. Though both were extraterrestrial invaders, Aurelion and that human-shaped anomaly did not share the same camp.
Different factions meant operational leverage.
Makima shifted her posture slightly. Aurelion, who had previously appeared seamless and invulnerable, no longer seemed entirely devoid of exploitable angles.
Even if an entity's flesh, willpower, and cognitive faculties bore zero weaknesses, leverage could always be engineered through third-party pressure.
Makima sensed the emergence of a pivotal fulcrum.
Leaning against the glass, her inner desire to purge the world burned with renewed intensity. Her ambition had long expanded beyond merely weaponizing the Chainsaw Devil to devour and erase negative concepts from reality.
She intended to make this world cleaner.
"Yes... far cleaner than it is right now."
The black sedan entered the perimeter of City A. The metropolis had remained largely unruffled by Madame Shibabawa's prophetic warnings. As the operational seat of the Hero Association Headquarters, the recent proliferation of Mysterious Beings had catalyzed a proportionate surge in active heroes, leaving local security far more robust than that of neighboring sectors.
Even Devil incursions were markedly suppressed within these city limits.
The vehicle glided smoothly into the subterranean motor pool of the headquarters.
Makima arrived bearing the official credentials of an executive Devil Hunter answering directly to the Cabinet, holding the celebrated title of a "Hero Who Combats Devils."
In truth, Makima had long since brought several key oligarchs financing the Hero Association under her complete dominion; her entrance was an imperative the organization could not refuse.
Stepping out onto the concourse alongside Aurelion, Makima observed heroes of varying ranks shuttling through the plazas. As she walked, a sudden, suffocating atmospheric pressure bore down upon her frame.
Makima looked upward, finding a petite girl with emerald-green hair floating in mid-air, gazing down upon them with cool disdain.
"You're the so-called Devil Hunter?"
"Hmph. Pathetically weak."
Makima offered no verbal rebuttal, merely maintaining a serene, polite smile as she inclined her head toward the formidable, yet emotionally volatile hero.
"Miss Tornado. I am Makima. A pleasure to make your acquaintance."
Step.
A single footstep landed against the pavement. Only a split second later did the accompanying concussive shockwave detonate across the courtyard.
Makima's pupils contracted. Tornado folded her arms, green psychokinetic energy flaring to cleanly dissipate the violent atmospheric wake.
Gazing at the man who had seemingly traversed thousands of meters in a single stride, a sharp, genuine smirk finally crossed the psychic's lips.
"Well, well. Looks like that pathetic Heroes Assemble decree managed to drag in someone who's actually somewhat useful~"
Kaito Shirogane offered a calm, measured nod in acknowledgment of Tornado's appraisal.