Carnage Kabuto thought he could easily break through and smash the young girl into scrap metal, but now, a suffocating sense of danger gripped him.
He desperately wanted to dodge, but the hard truth had already been established moments ago.
Once you were locked on, the difficulty of evading multiplied exponentially—especially since he was currently falling right down the trajectory of the barrel.
Even though he realized something was terribly wrong, there was no longer any room to dodge the incoming strike.
Blue light collided with deep brown fists dead center in mid-air. After a brief, grueling stalemate, sweating profusely, Carnage Kabuto frantically beat his thin wings to wrench himself away from the impact.
Boom!
The shock-absorbing alloy—a material Genus had spent a fortune on, and one that even Carnage Kabuto found nearly impossible to break—was shattered and pierced right through by the light crackling with blue electrical arcs.
True, a railgun wasn't a weapon that relied solely on blunt kinetic force, but... wasn't this a bit too absurd?
Landing on the ground, a look of wariness and surprise washed over Carnage Kabuto's face, but it was quickly eclipsed by a surge of sheer thrill and excitement.
"This is how it should be... this is exactly how it should be!!"
Every single one of his past battles had been an effortless victory; at most, he would play along a bit longer if he was in a good mood.
This kind of crushing, one-sided combat had long since bored Carnage Kabuto to death.
An enemy who could actually make him feel a sense of crisis? It was absolute perfection!
Then, he glanced down at his fists. Only now did a delayed, numbing ache catch up to him.
This was the second time. In fact, this time hurt even more than the last. For a creature who hadn't felt pain in ages, this was a long-lost sensation.
When insects suffer damage, they produce specific proteins that act as a natural pain reliever.
Fused with insect genes as he was, he naturally possessed the exact same mechanism.
He tried clenching his charred, crack-riddled fists. The green blood seeping across them looked incredibly glaring.
With that, whatever rationality Carnage Kabuto had left instantly vanished.
"Oh?"
Saitama immediately noticed the shift. It probably would have been a good time to step in and interrupt, but after glancing at Alice, he ultimately kept the suggestion to himself.
Driven by Carnage Kabuto's fury, his originally deep brown carapace rapidly expanded, gradually becoming overlaid with a bruised, bluish-purple hue.
In the seams of his armor, muscles engorged with green blood bulged violently.
His frame swelled to nearly one and a half times its previous size, and his eyes were entirely consumed by a crimson glow. One look was all it took to know he had gone completely berserk.
"It's Unit-01..."
"It's Unit-01!"
Saitama and Alice spoke practically at the same time. After all, it was a wildly famous anime, so neither was surprised that the other had seen it.
"What the hell is a Unit-01?! I am Carnage Kabuto!"
No longer able to restrain his tyrannical emotions, Carnage Kabuto lunged at Alice once more.
Fists as massive as the girl's entire body slammed heavily against the Sword of Light, which she had already raised in a defensive stance.
"Just defending isn't going to stop me! Aren't you a hero?! If you're a hero, then try and defeat me!"
An unprecedented rush of adrenaline made Carnage Kabuto howl an ear-splitting screech. His fists rained down at blinding speed upon the shield-like, white railgun, every single punch accompanied by a sonic boom loud enough to shatter the surrounding space.
The sheer speed and power of this barrage was enough to level a several-hundred-meter-tall mountain into flat ground in a matter of seconds.
Yet, despite taking the brunt of such an assault, the Sword of Light showed absolutely no sign of damage. Forget breaking—not even a single scratch was left upon its surface.
Watching through the surveillance monitors, Genus felt an intense wave of curiosity burn within him toward the railgun. His emotions were incredibly conflicted right now.
He had assumed that once Carnage Kabuto was deployed, even an S-Class hero would struggle to resist. Instead, reality had dealt him a crushing blow.
Don't just look at how incredibly sturdy that Sword of Light was to withstand Carnage Kabuto's attacks; the robot girl wielding it was utterly terrifying in her own right.
Even the strongest shield ultimately requires a solid anchor to brace it.
Yet under Carnage Kabuto's relentless onslaught, forget losing her footing, the girl didn't show even the slightest hint of stepping back.
While Genus was still lost in thought, Genos—who had recovered his functions and rushed to the combat lab—stood frozen, completely dumbfounded.
He knew Alice was a robot, and he knew there was a performance gap between them, but... only now did he realize that the chasm between their abilities was this staggeringly vast.
Forget intervening in a fight like this; even just watching from a distance made his core shudder.
Looking over at Saitama, who remained completely unfazed and even looked a bit bored in the face of such destructive shockwaves, Genos felt like the collective shock he had experienced over the years couldn't match what he had witnessed in this single day.
Alice was a robot, which meant her creator must possess incredibly advanced technology and power.
Normally, it would seem highly logical for Genos to ask Alice for help to meet her creator as a means to grow stronger.
But Genos had no such intention right now.
Or rather, the moment the thought even crossed his mind, he immediately discarded it.
No matter how talented or brilliant Alice's creator might be, he would only ever entrust his body to Dr. Kuseno, the man who had saved his life.
Just as Genos was lost in thought, a massive explosion shattered his train of consciousness.
Having endured the onslaught all this time, Alice finally caught a fleeting opening between Carnage Kabuto's punches. In a flash, she violently swung the Sword of Light upward from where it rested on the ground.
Several hundred pounds of weight felt like absolutely nothing as it carved a half-circle through the air, parrying Carnage Kabuto's fists while simultaneously forcing his center of gravity off-balance, leaving him completely wide open.
Utilizing her own raw strength combined with the massive recoil generated when she pulled the trigger and fired the Sword of Light, the heavy, colossal railgun smashed directly toward Carnage Kabuto's head.
Crack!
The sound of fracturing echoed from the sharp, massive horn on Carnage Kabuto's forehead.
Having just been in the middle of a crazed frenzy of consecutive strikes, Carnage Kabuto felt his consciousness violently drift away.
A dazing vertigo flooded his brain, leaving him to dig his heels in purely on physical instinct just to stay upright.
But Alice's assault was far from over.
She was a girl who looked no bigger than her enemy's fist, yet the power she unleashed was nothing short of monstrous.
She swung the Sword of Light like a giant brick, smashing it right into his relatively vulnerable flank. As the sound of cracking carapace rang out once more, Carnage Kabuto was sent flying backward by the sheer, overwhelming force of the impact.
Like a cannonball shot from a barrel, the massive hunk of flesh slammed hard against the distant white wall. But even before he hit, a brilliant blue-and-white light was already pulsing at the muzzle of the Sword of Light.
The railgun, which had previously been close to the girl's own size, now revealed its true form.
Through a sequence of mechanical shifts and structural reconfigurations, a three-meter-long weapon resembling a battleship's main cannon materialized in the young girl's hands.
"Balance collapsed!"
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T/N: If you want advance chapters, you can find it at [email protected]/AspenTL