Saitama's legs became a blur.
Not metaphorically. His feet were moving fast enough that individual steps stopped being distinguishable—a continuous wheeling motion that generated a dust column impressive enough to briefly concern several nearby drivers. He passed a car doing sixty miles per hour without appearing to try.
The driver caught one frame of a figure in a sweatsuit and then nothing but road.
Was that—
Three lanes of traffic arrived at varying stages of existential uncertainty.
Western district. The intersection where the public school met the residential block.
The collapse had started at one end of the east-west road and rolled—that was the only word for it—rolled westward. Not an explosion. Not a single impact point. A continuous progressive demolition, each storefront triggering the next, a hundred meters of commercial street folding inward like a slow wave. The ground shook. Dust erupted in columns. Glass rained.
Students. Residents. People who had been in the middle of completely ordinary afternoons. They ran.
A section of wall four meters across tore free of its foundation and fell outward, and through the breach—through the smoke and settling dust—something emerged that required tilting your head back to fully see.
Five meters tall. Bipedal. Built like a bull that had made a series of aggressive decisions about its own physiology. The hide was asphalt-gray, the horns curved and sharp, and the eyes—large as streetlights, burning a steady scarlet—swept across the street with the particular expression of something that had destroyed the area it just walked through and found the result satisfying.
Steam jetted from its nostrils in twin plumes, pluming above the gold nose ring. Its mouth, roughly bathtub-sized, hung open to show teeth that had never once been used for grass.
Tiger-level disaster. The Red-eyed Minotaur.
It roared—a sound that compressed the air and made windows vibrate three blocks away—then dropped into a runner's crouch, horns leveled, legs driving into the cracking road surface.
The crowd in its path had no angle. No time. Nowhere near enough distance.
Blue light fell from above.
Not one beam. A cascade—crystalline force fields blooming into existence around every person in the danger zone simultaneously, each one a perfectly spherical bubble that closed before the occupant had registered what was happening. The minotaur's charge hit the line of spheres and scattered them like struck billiard balls. Adults stumbled and found their balance held. Children were tumbling and—weren't. The interiors were stable regardless of what the exteriors were doing.
The spheres drifted. Collisions with rubble produced bounces rather than injuries. Those trapped under collapsed sections of building felt the debris lift—surrounded by blue light, carried upward, deposited at a safe remove from the disaster zone.
The minotaur crashed through the storefronts it had been aiming at and shook the rubble off its head.
It looked around.
...Moo?
The street was empty. The people it had been charging toward were simply gone, relocated to somewhere outside its field of vision. The monster blinked its scarlet eyes, genuinely confused. Post-mutation, it had lost access to human language along with most of human reasoning. Tiger-level threats of this type tended toward the brainless end of the spectrum.
Which, Jordan reflected from altitude, made them straightforward.
He had already moved on from evacuation to triage—the Mind Network mapped the wounded across three collapsed buildings, and green light was falling in slow drifts from his outstretched palms. The Mystical Palm Technique radiated outward in overlapping pulses, stabilizing internal injuries, buying time. Serious wounds wouldn't kill anyone before emergency services arrived. Minor scrapes and bruises resolved as the chakra touched them.
Below, the minotaur had identified new targets: a barbershop with neon signage still somehow blinking at the entrance. It lowered its horns, planted its feet, and launched.
The ground shattered at its first step.
Its second step didn't happen.
A hand had closed around both horns—one ordinary-looking palm, braced between two curved points that each weighed more than a sedan. A figure in a sweatsuit was now planted between the charging monster and its destination, feet driven into the road surface by the transferred momentum, leaving twin gouges that deepened incrementally as the minotaur kept pushing.
"Is this the one causing all this?"
Saitama had arrived, assessed the situation, and inserted himself into the charging lane with the unhurried air of someone holding a door.
He glanced sideways. "King! I've got it held—finish it quickly!"
Dong. Dong. Dong. Dong.
The drumbeat hit first—deep, resonant, the King Engine in full voice. King descended from above the roofline with the visual weight of a thunderstorm given a human silhouette, right fist raised, lightning coiling up his forearm in hot white arcs. The sunlight behind him swallowed his face entirely, leaving only shadow and three parallel scars lit from below by the electric discharge.
"Emperor Burst Fist—150,000 Volts!"
The minotaur hadn't noticed the incoming strike. It was too angry to notice anything. The interruption of its charge had triggered something deeper than tactical assessment—a rage response that lit up the mutation's secondary systems, blood flooding muscle tissue, gray skin flushing crimson, raw output doubling in a single second.
The force against Saitama's palms spiked.
"Wait—huh—"
He was already moving backward, the asphalt carving out beneath his feet in a long ragged trench as the mass differential did its arithmetic. His shoes lost the argument first. Then the lower half of his sweatpants entered a state of accelerated deterioration via friction.
"Oh no, we couldn't—"
King arrived at the space Saitama had been occupying approximately one frame after Saitama vacated it. The fist connected. Lightning detonated outward from the point of impact in a visible ring.
The minotaur's muscles locked. The roar that came out of it was less battle cry and more involuntary electrical response.
Saitama, dangling from both horns as the monster's head whipped skyward, achieved brief vertical altitude. He looked down at King picking himself out of the impact crater.
"Sorry, sorry. I misjudged it—didn't expect this one to be that strong."
"It's alright." King straightened, right hand already recharging, the Engine settling back into its measured percussion. Plasma threads wound between his fingers. "Could you move aside? I'd like to try again."
Saitama grabbed the horns, rotated 270 degrees around them like a horizontal bar routine, used the momentum to plant one foot on the monster's skull, and launched himself sideways in a clean arc.
Dong dong dong dong.
King passed him going the other direction—trailing full particle effects, the Engine at maximum output, the sound of it arriving before he did.
He came down with everything.
"Emperor Burst Fist—200,000 Volts!"
The screech the minotaur produced was absorbed and overwritten by the percussion of the blow. Concrete. Monster. Crater. Smoke.
King stood at the bottom of the impact zone, breathing harder than he'd planned to, and waited for the dust to settle.
He could feel where the breakthrough had happened—the exact moment mid-descent when 150,000 became 200,000 without him consciously pushing for it. The electric current driving his power had found a new threshold, crossed it under pressure, and held there. The King Engine was still beating, slower now, winding down from its peak.
200,000 volts.
He had a strong and specific feeling that it wasn't the ceiling.
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