The World's Strongest
“And so, granting them a peaceful death before they meet agonizing destruction at the hands of the Demon God is their only salvation.”
“There is no need for that.”
Yeonil’s voice was flat and unyielding, cutting cleanly through Tom’s impassioned rhetoric. He saw no reason to indulge the man’s twisted rationale any longer.
“Even if the Demon God returns, I will cut him down.”
“Good grief. Aren’t you speaking rather lightly for a stranger to this world? No... perhaps it is precisely because you are an outsider that you can speak so carelessly.”
“I’ve heard quite enough. Even if defeat were certain, it is far better to struggle tooth and nail until the very, bitter end. You have no right to unilaterally bring this world to a close.”
“...How disappointing. In the end, you too fail to grasp the greater good.”
“Even if it truly were for a greater good, forcing it upon others—”
Before Yeonil could finish, a spherical force field snapped into existence around Tom’s body, erupting outward with violent concussive force. An ordinary person would have been pulverized on the spot, as if struck head-on by a runaway locomotive. Yet the barrier's purpose was not destruction; it was meant merely to buy a few precious seconds.
Clank, clatter.
Tom’s physical form began to warp. The synthetic flesh that mimicked human skin rolled back, revealing a cold metallic chassis underneath. Welded seams and interlocking plates of polished steel crisscrossed his frame. His eyes narrowed into mechanical lenses that flared with a sinister, crimson gleam, while high-caliber futuristic armaments deployed from hidden housings across his body, locking him into a full combat configuration.
An android... or a cyborg?
Though humanoid in silhouette, he was far closer to an engine of war than a man. Yeonil had to admit there was a certain sleek elegance to it. Having never laid eyes on such a machine in either of his lives, a spark of genuine curiosity flickered through him.
Hssssss—!
Vents along Tom’s spine hissed open, spewing a thick cloud of microscopic metallic dust that billowed across the sky, blanketing the airspace. Though Yeonil did not know the technical jargon for such an apparatus, he instantly recognized its function: a spatial scrambler designed to sever coordinate-locking and prevent teleportation. Tom had assumed Yeonil's silent appearance at his back moments ago was the result of a short-range blink.
“In the end, you are nothing more than a foolish pawn, content to remain a slave to destiny.”
“Perhaps. But I hardly think your little crusade qualifies as wisdom either.”
“Do you truly not understand?”
Among those capable of traversing dimensions, anyone who could not be forged into an ally was an existential threat. Of course, no matter how desperately these fools struggled, none could ever hope to challenge his master; nevertheless, they could become irritating nuisances that hindered the grand design. Rather than wasting breath on further debate, Tom raised the eight particle cannons mounted along his chassis, locking their sights onto Yeonil.
“Commencing bombardment.”
Eight beams of condensed particle energy lanced forth in unison. Traveling at relativistic speed, they demanded that Yeonil react before the triggers were even pulled. He slipped aside by a fraction of an inch; the searing lances of light pierced clean through the cloud cover above, boring endless tunnels into the stratosphere. Being well out of sword range, Yeonil whipped his blade through the air, sending a massive arc of sword qi slicing forward. Rather than evading, Tom took the slash full-on. With a dull, ringing clang, the crescent of light deflected off his reinforced plating and dissolved into the ether.
In the next instant, Tom vanished.
Having reconfigured his right arm into a vibro-blade, he breached hypersonic speed in a fraction of a millisecond, slashing down at Yeonil. The blade hummed at extreme frequencies far exceeding standard parameters, clashing against the black sword and detonating a colossal shockwave.
Krr-shiiing!
A screeching, bone-jarring metallic shriek assaulted the eardrums. Though Yeonil parried the strike cleanly, the sheer kinetic pressure pushed him skidding several dozen paces backward through midair.
It didn't shatter. Divinity is lingering within that weapon.
Mid-assault, Tom's optical sensors ran a structural scan on Yeonil’s weapon—a single-edged saber with a pitch-black blade. An armament of that design had never existed in the original lore of Blue Fantasy.
He must have acquired it using meta-knowledge from the original work.
Tom had culled dozens like him across multiple dimensions. Possessors, reincarnators, transmogrifiers—scavengers who had fallen into familiar fictional realms and hoarded hidden advantages using their secret knowledge. Yeonil’s exotic blade was likely the product of such opportunism. Even as these calculations flashed through his central processors, Tom’s frame moved without hesitation to execute the kill.
Maintaining crushing forward momentum, Tom fired twin thermal beams from his optical lenses. Though classified as "rays," each beam burned thicker than a man’s torso. In the span of a heartbeat, Yeonil drove his palm upward into Tom’s chin, violently jerking the cybernetic skull back and sending the twin lasers searing harmlessly into the sky, before slamming his heel into the machine’s chest to kick himself clear.
Tom gave him no room to breathe. Calculating the most optimal attack angles in real time, he pursued relentlessly, swinging his reinforced limbs through unnatural, joint-defying arcs impossible for human anatomy. Yet Yeonil dismantled the onslaught with astonishing ease. With subtle, fluid twists of his wrist, he deflected every single strike. When a crimson laser burst without warning from Tom’s chest plate in a point-blank ambush, Yeonil folded his waist backward, letting the beam scorch past by a paper's breadth.
Reading the evasive maneuver as a broken stance, Tom redlined his internal anti-gravity propulsion, driving forward with explosive thrust to blow Yeonil back. In the same breath, multiple micro-missile silos snapped open from subspace storage around him, unleashing a dense swarm of warheads.
KABOOOOM!
Blinding radiance tore through the atmosphere before the sound could even travel. A catastrophic detonation followed, churning up a deafening roar, a tempest of shockwaves, and a swirling vortex of superheated ash. Every single missile carried the destructive payload of a tactical nuclear warhead; a direct hit would have vaporized even entities worshipped as gods. To the mortals observing from the earth far below, it must have looked like a bolt of apocalyptic thunder crashing from a clear sky.
“You’ve spent your time here monopolizing fortuitous encounters, hoarding destiny, and gorging yourself on advantages that only you knew about,” Tom said, a cold sneer vibrating through his synthesized voice. “Naturally, you stripped everyone else of their chance to grow strong. With no one left to challenge you, you grew complacent in your tiny pond. That arrogance is what killed you.”
Tom scoffed at the smoking crater of air. Dimensional crossers were unpredictable and inherently dangerous, but if this one was so fragile as to die to standard ordnance, he wondered why he had even bothered wasting so much power.
“...I have no idea what delusions you’ve been feeding yourself.”
The calm voice drifted from directly behind him.
Tom swung around on pure cybernetic reflex, but the pitch-black blade was already descending toward his skull.
“How?!”
Panicking, Tom crossed his armored forearms to block, but the concussive force sent him hurtling backward like a cannonball.
“How did you survive that explosion?!”
“By not letting it hit me in the first place.”
Yeonil answered flatly and pressed forward, his blade carving through the air. Unlike before, his upper body was now bare. His shirt had been shredded to cinders by the peripheral heat, revealing a sculpted, lean physique of dense muscle that bore not a single scratch or burn. Worse, Yeonil’s tempo had changed entirely—as if he had merely been humoring Tom earlier, the cyborg now found himself utterly unable to keep pace.
“With such primitive scrap—?!”
Tom’s jaw split wide, discharging a high-frequency acoustic wave designed to shatter molecular bonds at a cellular level. Yet a blinding ribbon of golden radiance flared from the tip of Yeonil’s sword, cleaving the sonic wave cleanly down the middle before gouging a deep, molten trench across Tom’s chest chassis. Though his primary core remained intact, a shiver ran through Tom's internal telemetry.
This bastard...
His movements were on a completely different plane. Only now did Tom grasp the humiliating truth: Yeonil had been playing with him the entire time.
It's still just parlor tricks!
Tom overcharged the tachyon circulator embedded in his core. As subjective time dilated to a crawl, his cognitive perception and physical velocity accelerated exponentially. No matter how dazzling or intricate a swordsman’s technique, extreme speed would always crush it. He fully expected to run rings around Yeonil—
...What is this?
No matter how high he dialed his acceleration, the distance refused to close. His optical tracking sensors were still redlining just to follow Yeonil's posture and orientation. Under this degree of temporal dilation, the physical gap should have shifted overwhelmingly in his favor, yet the relative difference in their speeds remained completely unchanged. For a fraction of a second, Tom wondered if his tachyon drive had suffered a critical malfunction.
It hadn't.
Yeonil was simply matching his speed to Tom’s acceleration.
Technically, Yeonil was moving just a hair slower than Tom's top speed, yet the cyborg was completely incapable of parrying the incoming strikes.
Why?!
The blade of a martial artist who had attained the pinnacle could not be countered simply because one’s sensors could register its path. Not unless the opponent stood within that exact same realm of martial perfection.
Within seconds, Tom was sliced and battered from every conceivable angle. The only saving grace was that Yeonil's cuts had not yet breached his innermost structural skeleton.
Tom immediately discarded his close-quarters programming. His opponent was a quintessential supreme martial artist; trading blows within sword range was suicidal. He needed distance and overwhelming firepower.
Engaging his vernier thrusters, Tom rocketed backward into the upper atmosphere. He deployed autonomous drones to harass Yeonil in endless waves while opening every missile pod and particle battery, saturating the sky with heavy artillery. A relentless storm of apocalyptic detonations bloomed across the azure expanse, turning the heavens into a sea of fire.
Something is wrong.
Even as he cycled through every piece of cutting-edge hyper-weaponry in his arsenal, a cold dissonance crept into Tom’s logic circuits. He still hadn't inflicted a single graze on the man. By now, he was fully aware that Yeonil was merely testing him, withholding the vast majority of his power.
And what Tom could not comprehend was how that was even possible.
He's too strong. Even if someone monopolized every fortuitous encounter in an incomplete world like this, even if they gathered all its power into a single vessel—how could a standard dimension crosser be this absurdly powerful?
Yeonil's strength was an anomaly. This was not the tier of an ordinary world-hopper. Tom had hunted and butchered countless such transmigrators. Occasionally, one would possess an esoteric cheat ability that proved annoying to counter, but Yeonil wasn't using odd gimmicks. His raw baseline specifications were just overwhelmingly, incomprehensibly immense.
Could he be... a 'World's Strongest'...?
Subspace rifts tore open all around Yeonil. Swarms of drones darted from his blind spots, discharging thermal lances and monomolecular blades. Yet Yeonil slipped through the crisscrossing beams without even turning his head, his fluid evasions resembling an effortless dance. Tom morphed his right forearm into a rotary autocannon, unloading a high-density kinetic barrage to maintain spacing. Rather than swatting the projectiles with brute force, Yeonil tilted his blade at micro-angles, letting the supersonic rounds ricochet harmlessly off the flat of the steel.
There was no time to marvel at such preternatural mastery.
Shhk.
Before his sensors could register the motion, a flash of light flickered across Tom's visual feed. His gun-barrel arm detached cleanly at the elbow, tumbling into the void.
A hyper-alloy with molecular-bond reinforcement... cleaved in a single stroke?!
Standard sword qi shouldn't have been able to leave a scratch on it. In a panic, Tom deployed a maximum-output kinetic barrier, but the golden radiance shredded the energy shield like wet parchment, carving deep into his shoulder joint.
Sword gang. Or by another name, intent-qi.
An esoteric manifestation of will that far surpassed standard sword qi—a transcendent ability accessible only to martial artists who had stepped into the absolute pinnacle realm. Because Yeonil’s Heart Sword outwardly resembled mundane sword qi, Tom had been critically late to recognize what he was up against. Only now did the cyborg realize with horror that the energy wavelength emanating from the blade had fundamentally shifted. Where it had once resembled a flickering candle, it was now an untamed solar flare, its destructive density and complexity soaring by orders of magnitude.
I can't... read his movements.
He had exhausted nearly every weapon in his chassis, yet a path to victory was nowhere to be seen. He had to stake everything on a final gamble right now.
Activating the dimensional phase-drive he had kept in reserve, Tom vanished entirely from physical and spatial sight. Simultaneously, his holographic projectors populated the sky with over a hundred identical decoy signatures, while every remaining drone and artillery port opened fire at once. Searing pillars of light laced through the sky like a radiant, incandescent web, painting the heavens with an artificial aurora.
Not yet!
The alarm protocols in his processor refused to silence. Tom engaged all short-range radar arrays to sweep for Yeonil in real time, yet finding nothing only heightened his dread. Driven into a corner, he initiated his core’s self-destruct protocol, intending to vaporize the entire region along with himself.
And as if piercing straight through that intent, Yeonil materialized directly before his eyes.
Again!
He had closed the distance without tripping a single proximity sensor. How was this even possible?
Before the calculation could finish, the pitch-black blade, coated in radiant golden light, split cleanly through the primary core embedded in Tom’s chest.