Abilities of the Cognitive Devil

Rumble~

White contrails streaked across the sky, as though a hypersonic fighter jet had just flown overhead.

Lily of the Three-Section Staff, her eyes red as she staggered desperately toward Fubuki, had no mind to look at the sky.

Lilith, who had collapsed to the ground in despair, saw it. She had no Mystic Eyes or any Pupil Technique, so she could not make out who was high in the sky.

But she could see that the white contrail had begun at the site where the brutal battle had just erupted.

Clutching her throat, her consciousness began to fade. At last, she slowly fell to the ground, murmuring,

"Mr. Mercenary Tao, please… kill…"

"What… exactly are you trying to do?!"

During the high-speed flight, Sage could barely breathe. The intense wind pressure was like a wall, and someone had pinned him against that wall with sheer brute force, dragging him along for who knew how far.

So far that even his tough dragon scales began to shatter one by one from the friction. Amid the mangled flesh, chunks of meat fell from the sky.

The white contrail began to turn red as well.

He roared in pain, but perhaps having understood his ability, Mercenary Tao no longer gave him any response. As a result, he could not activate the Cognitive Devil’s ability.

At the same time, because he could not observe Mercenary Tao’s Mind-Body at the moment, he could not use the Manipulator’s ability to find Mercenary Tao’s mental weakness.

He had never imagined that the combination of abilities that had carried him undefeated through so many mission worlds would be broken here by Mercenary Tao in such an utterly unreasonable fashion.

It was like he had created a self-consistent, powerful cycle of rules, only for the other side to walk up, kick over the table, and say, "Fuck your rules. My fist is bigger, so that’s the rule."

This kind of power crushing rules usually only happened when there was a fundamental difference in power level between Reincarnators.

But he was already a Reincarnator at the peak of the Third Tier. How could Mercenary Tao possibly crush him?!

He could not understand it. He simply could not understand it at all.

Sage’s furious roar now was more because he understood that Mercenary Tao simply could not kill him!

Cognitive Devil (Native Devil, High Devil, Hellspawn): A uniquely powerful devil birthed by a higher existence. It alters cognition, devours cognition, and parasitizes cognition. Every lifeform whose cognition you influence will form a contract with you. At the same time, you must regularly feed it vast amounts of twisted cognition, or you will likewise be devoured by the Cognitive Devil.

Long ago, when Sage had followed that exalted one into this world, they had carried out wide-ranging Cognitive Interference upon it, twisting the concept of heroes and successfully introducing Professional Heroes.

Then, through Saitama’s defeat of God, that exalted one had twisted the future, turning the opportunity for the birth of monsters in this world to be ended into a complete distortion of the necessity of the concept of heroes.

In the end, this world centered on heroes gradually lost its heroes.

This was Sage’s proudest work. It was also why he could act so wantonly in this world.

Because he knew very well that even a monster like Tatsumaki would not find it so easy to kill him. No, to put it arrogantly, even whether Saitama could kill him was an unknown.

His life had already become completely linked to the lives of hundreds of thousands, millions, or perhaps even more people in this world.

Sage’s expression twisted as his flesh was continuously ground and torn away. He could no longer maintain the calm composure he had displayed while leisurely drinking tea as Tatsumaki and ??? brutally battled and instantly destroyed an entire city.

"You should have figured it out already, shouldn’t you?!"

"All the ordinary people in this world whose cognition has been influenced by Professional Heroes are my contractors!"

"To kill me, you would first have to kill every last one of them!"

Splat!

His jawbone, along with a large mass of flesh, was ground away. Amid the excruciating pain, flesh and blood sprayed everywhere. Although Sage, due to the existence of the Cognitive Devil, was in a sense also possessed of an Immortal Body, this ability could not exempt him from the pain of death.

That was the fundamental reason he had always used Virtual Personalities to control others and disguise them as himself in battle. He did not want to experience the pain of dying.

The Cognitive Devil was a higher devil that touched upon the conceptual and causal level, a high-level power that ordinary Reincarnators could never encounter even in death.

By twisting cognition and making the other party mistakenly believe that he could decide life and death with a single word, so long as the other party accepted that concept, he could indeed decide their life and death with a single word;

By twisting causality and reversing the concepts of cause and effect in ordinary cognition, he could achieve an attack form that turned effect into cause. So long as he determined that his punch would strike the target, no matter what kind of evasion ability or defensive power the other party possessed, the effect of them being struck by him would occur first, and only then would a reasonable cause be generated.

"In this world… I am invincible… Aargh!"

Splat!

As his head and upper body exploded, another corpse fell. Bai Cangshu was currently within a 128-fold acceleration of seven times Instant.

Ordinarily, his body should already have been unable to withstand the burden.

But with the talent of Limit Break Spiral activated, Bai Cangshu’s understanding of his own body surpassed all normal limits. Even the Level 5 Satsui no Hado, so berserk it was nearly impossible to control, had been tamed within his palm.

In the sky, Bai Cangshu sensed the auras around him. This place was far from ???’s darkness, that power so dark it made him uncomfortable. As he killed Sage, he was searching for this world’s true treasure—the Limiter!

More precisely, Bai Cangshu intended to use this state to experience even greater power, while killing Sage was merely a diversion in the process.

After all, so many Reincarnators had died, yet Bai Cangshu had not obtained many Scarlet Drop Cards. Although Luoxi had promised him that, having caused the Chaos Sage to lose so many members, she should give him considerable compensation.

But Bai Cangshu possessed a greed far beyond all common sense toward everything.

Sage had to die~

Sage had just used the Cognitive Devil’s contracts to twist the cognition of his own death, replacing it with the result of some unknown person dying in his stead. But before he could even see his surroundings clearly—

A large hand pressed down on his head again. Sage shuddered inwardly. From the corner of his eye, he saw that the ends of the other man’s long black hair seemed to have begun turning white.

Hope suddenly rose in his heart.

This state of his had a time limit?!

Perhaps he could…

Splat-bang!

The speed increased once more. Sharply compressed sonic boom clouds overlapped before the two of them as Bai Cangshu expressionlessly pressed Sage’s head forward and rammed into them.

Dragon scales, skull fragments, brain matter, blood—everything erupted into the air at once.

Sage’s mind tightened under the horrific pain of death. Before he even had much time to use his ability to soothe his nerves, he was resurrected once more through twisted cognition.

"Damn it, do you want to kill everyone, Mercenary Tao?!"

"Are you planning to kill tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people?!"

Sage suddenly formed this conjecture. It was precisely because it was so absurd that he had not initially believed anyone would do it.

But if someone truly paid the price of killing hundreds of thousands, even millions of people… then he would die…

Once the concept of death appeared, it triggered immense fear—the fear every intelligent lifeform should possess toward the annihilation of its own existence.

"Do you really know what consequences something like that would have?!"

Bai Cangshu lowered his head, his gaze carrying surprise and curiosity.

"Weren’t you the ones who said these people were all just NPCs and didn’t count as people at all…"

"You’re not one of Azure Sky’s idiots, are you? Heh, good thing neither am I."

There was no cruelty in the smile within his eyes, which glimmered with faint spiritual light, yet it made Sage Yu Huaxin’s heart palpitate even more.

When most Reincarnators called the Plot Characters of mission worlds NPCs, they actually carried an air of superiority. It was proof that they believed their existence to be more noble than those Plot Characters.

But in this Mercenary Tao’s eyes, there was only indifference.

As though this was simply how things ought to be.

Or, more extremely, as though he did not regard anyone other than himself as the same kind of being…

Suddenly, Bai Cangshu’s gaze changed as he looked downward. Within a city below, two resplendent fist intents intertwined, their terrifying force erupting inch by inch.

A dreadful impact burst forth thousands of meters below, then violently shattered the entire atmosphere.

Bai Cangshu’s body moved like a spiritual serpent, instantly appearing behind Sage. He used the dragon-scale-covered body as a shield before him, while completely relaxing his own body and instinctively executing Six Powers: Kami-e.

Booming Air Splitting Fist!

Explosive fist intent blasted upward from the ground. In an instant, Sage’s body exploded like rotten meat.