The sonic boom arrived before the body did.
One moment the Asura Crocodile Monster was there—Dragon-level threat, scales like tank armor, jaws that could swallow a car whole. The next it was a streak across the sky, a meteor with teeth, carving a furrow fifty meters long into the training ground's devastated earth.
The impact shook birds from trees a kilometer away.
Saitama landed a half-second later, brushing dust from his jacket like he'd stepped in a puddle. He crossed the crater in three easy strides, grabbed the dazed crocodile by its jaw before it could process what had happened, and sat on its head.
"Okay." He cranked the creature's mouth open with both hands, the muscles in its massive neck straining uselessly against his grip. No matter how much it rolled, thrashed, or tried to bite down, the jaw didn't move a millimeter. "If you're ready, Genos, I'm letting go."
Orange-red flame split the sky.
Genos descended from altitude in a controlled burn, thruster-flame painting a streak across the clouds, and hit the ground with enough force to crack the hardpan in a ring around him. He straightened from the impact crouch in a single fluid motion, both palms extended, power cores cycling to full output.
The smoke parted around him. His blond hair—currently shaped into a magnificent afro courtesy of the incineration cannon's earlier backwash—did not move in the wind.
He was still ready. That was what mattered.
"Teacher, I'm ready!"
Saitama was already extracting himself from the mud when Genos called out. He shook a clump of dirt off his head, glanced at the cyborg, and released the crocodile's jaws.
"Then let's get started!"
He was gone before the sentence finished. Not retreating—moving. The man crossed twenty meters before the Asura Crocodile Monster had even registered the loss of the pressure on its head.
The monster rose.
It uncoiled from the earth like something primordial, scales shedding dirt, and roared at the sky with a sound that turned the nearby air into a physical force. It had been outwrestled by the bald man. It had been launched like a stone from a sling. It had bitten down on that grip with everything it had and felt nothing give.
Those two were aberrations. Monstrosities wrapped in human skin. Some category of thing that didn't belong in any hierarchy the Asura Crocodile Monster understood.
But this new arrival—
This one I can work with.
Its hateful gaze locked onto Genos.
A young face. A slight frame stuffed into a polished combat chassis. The creature's intelligence was limited, but it understood what "smaller and less threatening" meant. If it couldn't beat the freaks, it could at least dismantle the robot.
It fixed Genos in its sights and lowered its head to charge.
Genos did not flinch.
The combat chip behind his eyes was already running simulations—input the monster's mass, observed speed, current force-output data from the last exchange, project optimal counter-scenarios—
Conclusion: Danger. Danger. Danger.
None of the projections ended well. The gap between a seventeen-year-old cyborg, even a state-of-the-art one, and a Dragon-level disaster was not a gap you crossed with superior tactics. It was categorical. Quantitative arguments didn't apply.
Genos had already reached this conclusion on his own, watching from the hillside before he'd ever introduced himself to the group. He'd reached it again every morning of training this week when he ran his pre-combat diagnostics.
He'd decided it didn't matter.
He raised his palms and let the power cores cycle to maximum.
"Incineration Cannon."
Twin columns of high-temperature plasma erupted from his hands. At contact with open air they expanded instantly, becoming two roaring towers of superheated energy that slammed into the Asura Crocodile Monster with enough force to stop a freight train.
The scorching pressure-wave hit. The air in front of Genos became a furnace. The crocodile's scales should have melted.
Instead, the monster puffed out its cheeks.
And exhaled.
A wall of pressurized foul breath met the incineration cannons mid-stream. The plasma columns crumpled like tissue paper hitting a gale, folded back on themselves, reversed direction—
—moving faster than they'd arrived—
There was no time. Genos was still firing when the flames rolled back over him. The world turned orange-white and very, very loud.
Saitama winced.
He'd been watching from a safe angle behind a half-demolished concrete pillar, arms folded, trying not to look too concerned. He'll be fine, he told himself. He's a robot. Robots can take fire. That's, like, a whole thing robots do.
The fireball expanded. Stayed expanded. A lot of crackling. No Genos.
Saitama's foot shifted toward the blast zone.
A hand settled on his shoulder.
"Give it a moment." King's voice was calm. His eyes were distant in that particular way they got when he was reading the magnetic field around them—the technique he'd been refining all week, a second layer of perception laid over ordinary vision. "His life signature's weakened, but it's stable. He's not done."
Saitama exhaled slowly. "You sure?"
"Dr. Kuseno built him to survive his own weapons. The incineration cannon's heat resistance has to be part of the design baseline." A pause. King watched the fire. "Also, I can feel him moving in there."
Saitama's hands unclenched. He stayed where he was. "Watching is so agonizing. More nerve-wracking than going myself."
King glanced at him, something close to a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. "That's because you care how it goes."
"Huh?"
"Saitama's adapted well to the role of teacher."
Three vertical lines appeared on Saitama's forehead. "No, I haven't. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be teaching him. I can't exactly have a robot train muscles, can I?"
"Maybe not," King said. "But you'll figure something out."
He said it with complete confidence. Saitama didn't know what to do with that, so he went back to watching the fire.
A figure punched out of the inferno.
It left afterimages in its wake—three, four, five distinct impressions of a body in motion, a blur of chrome and determination that cleared the burning radius in a series of explosive leaping strides. Genos landed beside the Asura Crocodile Monster in a spray of hot ash, and the smoke billowed out around him.
His blond hair was now fully, magnificently, and irreversibly afro.
He didn't seem to notice.
"Machine Gun Fist."
Both arms blurred into motion—not metaphorically, but literally, the servos cycling faster than the eye could track. The Asura Crocodile Monster's armored chest became the target of a sustained barrage that sounded like high-caliber gunfire. Strike after strike after strike hammered into the scales in rapid succession.
The creature stood there.
Its feet didn't move. Its scales didn't crack. The cruel smile was already forming.
"Useless. Useless. Useless." Each word came out with the contemptuous patience of something that had never lost. "Do you not understand? There are dimensions between us, you piece of junk. An infinite number of them. Your kind cannot—"
A scaled fist the size of a refrigerator came around in a sweeping haymaker and caught Genos square across the face.
The crack of impact echoed off the distant treeline.
Genos was airborne before he finished processing it had happened.
He spun like a ragdoll, mechanical components screaming, and flew backward in a wide arc—arms out, head back, the combat chip temporarily too overloaded to calculate anything useful.
Saitama was already moving.
He caught the cyborg three meters off the ground, took the momentum on his feet, and landed clean. Genos's full weight settled into his arms.
"Hey." He looked down. "You... okay?"
Genos raised his head slowly from Saitama's chest. The servos in his neck clicked and stuttered as they recalibrated. His left eye—or the housing where the eye had been—was now a smoking hole. Somewhere inside, an electrical wire had come loose, and every few seconds it threw a brief spark.
His hair was still perfect.
"It's alright, Saitama-sensei." Genos's voice was steady, even as his chassis vented smoke from three different seams. His expression, what was visible of it, was ashamed rather than pained. "I'm sorry. I was careless."
Saitama stared at him.
"Careless." His eye twitched. "Your eye is gone. There's a hole where your eye was. It's sparking." He held Genos slightly away from him to look at the full scope of the damage. His voice reached a register that was somewhere between exasperated and genuinely alarmed. "You're completely disfigured!"
"That's not accurate." Genos considered this with the detached precision of a man reviewing an engineering assessment. "Except for the brain, all components are field-replaceable. I'll schedule reconstructive work with Dr. Kuseno." A pause. Another spark from the eye socket. "The brain is undamaged."
"That's the worst justification I've ever—" Saitama stopped himself. Restarted. "Are you saying you can still fight? Looking like that?"
The chassis creaked. Something inside Genos made a sound that was almost certainly not a designed sound. The combat chip finished running its most recent analysis and delivered its report.
"...Yes," Genos said. "I can still fight."
Saitama opened his mouth.
The Asura Crocodile Monster's claw came down at King like a falling building.
The air in front of him erupted gold.
The Emperor's Engine thundered—a deep, resonant drumbeat that seemed to come from inside the earth rather than from any human chest. Golden lightning crackled up out of nowhere, magnetic force given visible form, and an invisible barrier hardened in front of King like a wall of compressed reality.
The claw hit it.
The claw stopped.
The creature stared at the thing it could not see—the wall of crackling golden energy that had simply appeared between its strike and the unmoving man—with the dawning, horrible realization that it had encountered this before. This pattern. This aura. This category of power.
"Enough." King met the monster's eyes. His voice was quiet but it carried, the way thunder carried even after the lightning had faded. "Game over."
He stepped forward. His fist drove into the Asura Crocodile Monster's jaw.
Golden light flared on impact.
The creature's feet left the ground. It described a long, high arc across the afternoon sky, and came down somewhere in the far edge of the training field with a crash that shook the earth.
Saitama watched it land from across the field. Genos, still in his arms, watched it land. King lowered his fist, and the golden crackle around his knuckles faded.
The real training round began again.
Saitama set Genos carefully on his feet, made sure the cyborg was actually stable, and turned to look at the distant impact crater. He thought about the week they'd put in. The rotation of vessels. The escalating output. The ceiling he'd been straining against every single day—holding back, calibrating, trying to find the exact amount of force that trained without ending the session in ten seconds flat.
Damn it. He rubbed the back of his neck.
It's still way off.