King glanced at the hillside briefly—the magnetic field map showing him something mechanical and inert where a living thing should have been—then filed it away. Whatever it was, it wasn't moving. He had more immediate concerns.
The Asura Minotaur. Still standing. Still a problem he hadn't finished.
The difference was that he could see it differently now.
The electric current that had defined his power for the past months was gone—not depleted, but dissolved into something larger. The magnetic field didn't announce itself the way electricity did. There was no crackling, no visible arc before the strike. It was simply present, extending outward from his body into the world like a conversation he'd just learned to have.
The electromagnetic forces in the air moved when he thought about moving them. Every iron particle in the surrounding soil. Every charged surface in his immediate environment. The fields generated by living bodies, by the cooling metal of demolished training ground fixtures, by the cyborg on the hillside who definitely wasn't supposed to be there.
All of it was legible to him now.
No wonder Jordan called electric current propulsion a child who hasn't grown up. King understood that now in a way he hadn't been able to when it was just words. It wasn't an insult—it was a description of the relationship between two things that shared a foundation but occupied entirely different floors.
The aura he was carrying didn't feel the same. The fierce domineering pressure of the electric phase, the sharp aggressive edge of the breakthrough moments—those had been real, but they'd been the aura of effort. What surrounded him now was different. Deeper. The golden current that pulsed at irregular intervals through his frame felt less like power and more like weather—vast, calm, and not particularly interested in announcing itself.
He'd have to test the threshold.
"Jordan mentioned the baseline should be around ten thousand horsepower." King let the electromagnetic forces in the surrounding air converge toward him—not drawn by effort, just redirected, the way water finds the lowest point. Golden lightning condensed around his frame in a sustained aurora. "Whether I've reached it or not—"
He settled into a stance.
"—let's find out."
"Magnetic Field Rotation, Ten Thousand Horsepower—Emperor's Burst Fist!"
The Asura Minotaur had been watching the buildup with an assessment formed from genuine combat experience across multiple lifetimes. It had survived the electric phase. It had survived multiple breakthrough moments. It understood, in the specific way that things which have been hit very hard understand, what King's previous power ceiling looked like.
This was not that.
The golden lightning arriving ahead of the fist was already cutting—a stinging, slicing pressure that reached flesh before contact. The quality of the incoming force registered on every threat-detection system the Asura Kabuto's consciousness possessed simultaneously.
If this lands at full weight—
"Asura—Extinction Strike!"
It concentrated everything into its right arm and threw the strongest punch its shackle-suppressed body could produce.
The two fists met in silence.
One full second passed in which the air between them made no sound at all.
Then the Asura Minotaur's arm cracked from within—golden fracture lines spidering outward from the point of contact—and detonated.
The shockwave arrived. The monster's right side stopped existing below the shoulder. What remained was a cauterized edge that immediately began attempting regeneration, only to have each new growth of granulation tissue carbonized by the golden arcs still discharging from the wound. Fresh tissue. Burning. Fresh tissue. Burning. A cycle that the body's remarkable vitality was losing badly.
The blond man in the golden light charged forward through the flames.
The Asura Minotaur looked at him through the thermal distortion, and a thought arrived with strange clarity in what remained of its higher reasoning.
...The same kind of power. That's why it felt familiar from the beginning.
The other human. The magnetic field.
They're using the same—
"Magnetic Field Rotation, Ten Thousand Horsepower—Emperor's Combo! HAAAAAH!"
The strikes didn't register individually. They registered as a single sustained phenomenon—a beam of golden light that the night sky had no business containing, that turned the surrounding darkness into pale day for the three seconds it lasted. The Asura Minotaur's unfinished thought, and everything attached to it, was comprehensively addressed by the energy torrent.
King stopped.
His chest heaved. Every drop of sweat his body had produced in the last several hours had been instantly evaporated by the magnetic field's heat output, rising around him in golden steam. The King Engine wound down through its harmonics, each resonant frequency fading in sequence until the night was quiet.
He looked at his hands.
That was real.
On the hillside, Jordan stood up from his beach chair with the satisfied air of someone whose investment had just paid significant returns.
He would recall the coach before writing the evening off, though. The Asura Kabuto had done genuine work today, and more work remained. Saitama had clearly found the whole arrangement entertaining enough to sustain indefinitely.
Might as well keep the punching bag alive a while longer.
From somewhere in the psychic equivalent of a personal channel, the Asura Kabuto transmitted something that was recognizably the question: Is this human speech?
Jordan appeared at the center of the explosion site in a flash of blue light, the plasma flames parting around him without acknowledgment. The minotaur's body was resolving into high-temperature ash. He wasn't there for the body.
The two souls were already separating from the physical wreckage—rising into the air, the Asura Kabuto's Dragon-level aura still asserting itself even in death, one hand clamped around the Minotaur's spirit's throat, delivering what appeared to be a comprehensive inventory of grievances about the quality of the host body it had been assigned.
The Asura Kabuto turned.
Jordan was standing three feet away, wearing the expression of someone who had been expecting exactly this.
The beetle spirit twisted, compressed, and attempted to leave the area at speed.
F-boy stepped out of Jordan's body, intercepted the Minotaur's bewildered soul with a motion that managed to convey both efficiency and mild condescension, sealed it into a card with practiced ease, and then opened his palm toward the kabuto spirit, which had made it approximately four feet.
The golden light was very bright and very brief.
[Obtained: Red-Eyed Minotaur (R).]
[Fate Card Draw Count: +1.]
Jordan landed from the dissipating flames and felt it immediately—the magnetic field signature in King's body, close to his own in structure now, different still in scale and texture but operating on the same fundamental principle. The hot churn of King's blood and energy was settling. The King Engine's percussion faded to a resting pulse.
King stood in the quiet and breathed.
"Thank you, Jordan."
"Don't thank me." Jordan put an arm around his shoulders and they walked together toward the training base. "Your effort, your breakthrough. I provided the facilities and the sparring equipment. Minor contribution."
King smiled—the genuine one, not the performance of calm he'd spent years deploying.
"The victory dinner is probably already on Saitama's mind," Jordan added. "We should move before he starts eating the snacks and calling it dinner."
"Alright."
Jordan raised a finger as something occurred to him.
"Oh—one more thing." He glanced back at the hillside, where a specific magnetic signature was still present, still immobile, still very much aware of everything that had just happened.
"I almost forgot. We have a guest to entertain."
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