Gaio heard the ethereal voice and chuckled lightly. "Sure, if you can pull it off."
Suddenly, Psykos felt like she couldn't breathe—as if the entire space had been sucked into a vacuum.
Gaio assumed the starting stance for an iaido slash, his smile fading, eyes sharp as a blade.
"Dimensional Slash: Absolute."
No drawing of the sword.
Just a blur of his right hand gripping the hilt, and then—
Zzt! Zzt! Zzt!
Countless blue rifts appeared out of nowhere around the remnants of the fleshy mass!
Each rift sliced through space with surgical precision, carving the remains into perfect cubes.
The cuts were so smooth they mirrored Psykos's terrified face.
Her legs buckled as she stared at the hundreds of floating meat cubes.
Black threads inside each cube writhed, like severed worms.
Suddenly, all the cubes trembled at once!
[Interesting…] The ethereal voice turned solid, echoing from every cube at once. [Your spatial ability… does it come from a higher dimension?]
The sliced cubes were reassembling!
Not just piecing back together—each cube was multiplying, replicating like cancer cells gone wild.
In a flash, the space beyond the observation window was packed with writhing flesh!
Psykos let out a despairing whimper.
She saw black threads stretching between the chunks, weaving something like a 3D printer.
A vague humanoid outline was taking shape…
Gaio suddenly grinned.
He flicked his Enma Blade, the spark of interest in his eyes burning brighter. "I see. You're not trying to possess—" he pointed the blade at the twisting mass, "—you're trying to evolve."
As if in response, the flesh accelerated its reformation!
Black threads wove into bones, chunks fused into muscles, and a humanoid creature gradually took form…
Still half-formed, it swung a palm at Gaio through the observation window.
A visible slash cut through the air, slicing the window and severing the metal corridor beyond.
The cut was so clean that the metal's edge gleamed like a mirror, reflecting the flutter of Gaio's coat as he sidestepped.
His face lit up with a grin. "Nice! You learned to slash already?"
[God] looked down at its newly formed palm, where black-threaded muscle fibers still twitched. [No, not your slash. It's… different.]
Its voice carried confusion—those blue rifts were fading from its palm.
Gaio didn't give it time to think.
"Let's go again!"
His figure blurred, reappearing nose-to-nose with [God].
The Enma Blade slashed upward from right to left, a classic kesa-giri cut arcing like a crescent moon!
[God] hastily raised its hand, blue rifts bursting from its palm—
BOOM!!!
The shockwave from the clashing slashes twisted the surrounding metal walls into knots.
Psykos was flung back by the blast, slamming into a warped wall, blood spraying into the vacuum as eerie red beads.
"Cough… monster…" She crawled toward the elevator, nails scraping ten bloody streaks across the metal floor.
Behind her, the crisp sound of space shattering rang out, like someone was smashing the world like glass.
The battlefield had become a dimensional maelstrom.
Each swing of Gaio's blade unleashed dozens of spatial rifts, and [God]'s counters grew more precise—its initially clumsy slashes now struck freely from any angle.
Gaio's eyes gleamed with approval. He ramped up the Enma Blade's speed by thirty percent.
The blade's path left blue afterimages in the air, and [God] matched its ferocity—
It swung its palm, unleashing slashes, the collisions pulverizing the metal walls into dust.
"You're a quick learner," Gaio said, mid-swing, suddenly switching from a kesa-giri to a reverse cut, his blade weaving a Z-shaped flurry!
[God]'s right arm was severed instantly, but black threads writhed at the stump, regenerating it in a blink.
RUMBLE!
A dull roar echoed from above.
The 5,000-meter-thick rock ceiling began to crack, massive boulders raining down.
Both fighters looked up, then simultaneously swung—Gaio's slash cleaved the falling debris, while [God]'s rifts swallowed the rocks whole.
"Let's take it topside," Gaio said, flicking his blade upward. [God] followed in sync, leaping after him.
Their figures became streaks of light, shooting upward, blade and rift weaving a destructive web, slicing through rock like tofu.
Z City's city center began to quake.
The Hero Association's monitoring station blared with piercing alarms.
"Massive energy breaching the bedrock!" Staff scrambled to helicopters, instrument dials swinging wildly.
A chopper barely cleared a hundred meters when the city's central plaza collapsed!
Asphalt shattered like eggshells, a kilometer-wide sinkhole expanding at terrifying speed.
An observer glanced back just in time to see two figures burst from the ground—
Gaio leapt into the air atop flying debris, his Enma Blade trailing a hundred-meter-long blue arc;
[God] followed, its towering frame now morphed into a 175cm humanoid.
The instant their slashes collided, the shockwave sliced ten skyscrapers in half!
"What… what is this?!" an observer's scream was drowned by the explosion.
The helicopter tumbled in the blast wave. Outside the window, Gaio and [God] became tangled beams of light, shooting into the clouds, leaving a city of ruins and towering smoke.
The shockwave from their clash spread in a ring, toppling Z City's last skyscrapers like dominoes.
Gaio stood on a floating chunk of concrete, locking eyes with the 175cm [God]—it felt more and more like Saitama.
"Tch." Gaio sheathed his blade with a click. "Guess those old internet theories about [God] weren't totally off."
[God] tilted its head, its voice piercing directly into Gaio's mind: [Your slashes feel… off. You're holding back.]
"Not the place for going all out," Gaio shrugged, glancing at the ruined Z City below.
Before he finished, [God] pulled its right fist back to its waist, a textbook power stance that made Gaio's pupils shrink.
A Serious Punch reenactment.
Gaio's right fist ignited with blue demonic flames, raised in front of him: [Royal Block]!
The instant their fists met—
BOOM!!!
The punch's force, perfectly blocked, split into two torrents, surging outward in a V-shape.
The left torrent carved a corridor of ruins through Y City; the right tore through X City, heaving the crust into a 3,000-meter-high wave of rock.
In the aftermath's standoff—
Gaio shook out his numb right arm, his cold smirk frozen—[God] was staring at its own fist, deep in thought.
[God] pulled its fist back again, space warping into a vortex around its charge.
This time, Gaio didn't block. The Enma Blade unsheathed in a flash—
Zzt!
The blade's path tore open a blue rift, swallowing the raging punch.
Light-years away, a ten-kilometer asteroid exploded into dust.
[You tore through space?] Its head tilted, glitching like a bad video. [Your slashes can rip space apart?]
For the first time, the black-threaded face showed something like a frown.
Gaio didn't answer. He couldn't let this thing keep going—it would destroy the entire world.
Blue demonic flames seeped from his body, coalescing behind him into a three-meter-tall demonic phantom.
The phantom mirrored his grip on the blade, assuming an iaido stance, rippling the space around it.
[God]'s fist tore through the air but froze a meter from Gaio.
The world seemed to hit pause—flying debris hung in midair, shockwaves solidified into transparent ripples.
Only the three-meter demonic phantom behind Gaio kept moving.
In sync with its master, it drew the blade. As the Enma Blade unsheathed, its path left a dazzling trail of starlight.
"All Things Return to Nothing," Gaio's voice echoed in the frozen space, his eyes blazing with demonic fire. "—Cause, time, traces of existence—all severed by a single slash!—"
The Enma Blade erupted in blinding light.
Gaio's right arm bulged, his slash too fast for time to register.
"Dimensional Slash: Absolute Severance!"
A flash of blade light.
No earth-shaking explosion—just a thin blue line piercing [God]'s chest.
Where it passed, space faded and peeled like an old photo, revealing the void beneath.
Time resumed.
The instant it did, wind roared in their ears.
Falling debris clattered down but passed through [God] as if it were a ghost—its body was disintegrating from the chest wound, black threads scattering like sand in the wind.
Gaio sheathed his blade, watching the figure turn transparent. "Nice work. I had some fun."
[God] stared at its dissolving hands, the black threads unraveling faster.
It looked up, its featureless face somehow showing realization: [My concept of existence… severed, split…?]
Its last words cut off as its body crumbled into ash.
A sudden gust swept through the ruins, carrying the ash skyward. In the sunlight, it shimmered an eerie blue, then vanished like pencil marks erased, leaving not a speck of dust behind.