Bang was far enough away that only someone with very good hearing would have caught what Saitama had said.
Bang had very good hearing.
He nearly stumbled.
Showing off. The old man steadied himself and kept walking. Calling it a "peaceful afternoon." Right in front of the man. Atomic Samurai, if you have any professional pride left, you will make him regret that.
"Stop posturing." Atomic Samurai's voice had gone flat—the specific flatness of a man who had passed through fury and come out the other side into something colder and more functional. He gripped the sword with both hands, blade leveled. "Your name is Saitama. I'll give you the first move. Go ahead."
"Augh." Saitama looked at the blade. Then at Atomic Samurai. Then at the general situation, which he seemed to find exhausting. He climbed off the wooden stake with the energy of someone accepting an inconvenience. "This is so much trouble. I came here with Genos to let him train. I thought I could at least rest a little."
Atomic Samurai's expression did something complicated. "...I'll say it again. Attack first."
Saitama scratched his cheek. Shrugged. Pulled back his fist.
"A normal punch."
Atomic Samurai heard the words and felt the recognition land before the punch did—that specific phrase, that specific delivery, identical to what had come out of the imaginary space less than an hour ago. His mind went blank for a fraction of a second.
He recovered in less than a second. Sword came up. The blade intercepted.
The contact produced a sound that was less a ring of metal and more a crunch—the specific protest of a weapon being asked to absorb forces it was not designed to absorb, grinding through the task anyway. Atomic Samurai felt the blade flexing under his hands, felt the limit approaching, and in that closing window he angled the impact and redirected, shunting the force sideways rather than absorbing it dead-on.
The sword held. Barely. His face, in the wind pressure generated by the deflected blow, did not fare quite as well—the shockwave hit him like a flat palm, pushing the skin of his cheeks back, creasing his expression into something that would have been undignified under any other framing.
But the deflection worked.
The redirected force hit his shoulder instead of landing cleanly.
The next moment he was airborne.
He got a flip in before landing—one rotation, a technique learned across decades for exactly this situation, letting the air cushion the drop, converting forward momentum to vertical and back out to horizontal. He came down on one knee, sword planted beside him for balance.
Steady.
The three disciples exhaled.
Then he clutched his chest. The blood rose before he made the decision to move—hot, immediate, the product of the shock wave's percussion through his internal organs. He coughed it out, a single harsh mouthful, and felt the pressure behind his sternum release.
His color returned almost immediately. The face that looked up was composed, jaw set, the expression of a man who had just been hit harder than he had any expectation of being hit and was finding this extremely interesting rather than devastating.
"All right." He wiped the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. His smile had an edge to it. "Another one who holds nothing back. Good."
Two of them. The internal thought moved quickly and was not repeated. In one day. What exactly is happening in this era?
Across the training ground, Iaian had his hand on his hilt without consciously putting it there. Something in his chest had moved—the involuntary response to watching his master take a blow that would have ended most A-Class fights, and then stand back up with that expression.
"Master's found—" The words came out rough. "Master's found opponents like this today?"
"That man's strength is monstrous." Bushidrill had three visible beads of cold sweat on his forehead. His voice was low and precise. "To redirect that force in the time he had—I couldn't have done it. I wouldn't have walked away." A beat. "He's earned every bit of that reputation."
Okamaitachi had cupped both hands around her mouth. "Master! Keep going!" Her voice cracked slightly on the last word. She was crying.
"Uncle, are you alright?"
Saitama was watching Atomic Samurai with the expression of a man who was now genuinely concerned he'd overdone it. "I probably shouldn't have done that... I'm hoping this isn't going to turn into a compensation situation."
"I don't need your concern." Atomic Samurai got to his feet. The arrogance was intact—adjusted, recalibrated, but intact. He had the bearing of someone who had absorbed new information and updated his position accordingly without being destabilized by it. "I'll tell you straight—compared to that other man's fist, you're still not quite there."
Saitama's expression moved through several stages: "Really? That seems hard to believe." He looked at Atomic Samurai carefully. "Uncle. If it's actually too much, there's no shame in stopping."
Atomic Samurai drew his sword.
A net appeared in the air between them—not metaphorically but effectively: blade-light in overlapping arcs, Atomic Samurai's signature technique deployed at full speed and with zero restraint, the grid of it covering every possible angle of approach and exit simultaneously. Laser-bright at the edges, the lines crossing and recrossing in a pattern that wasn't designed to be navigated.
"What a fast blade," Saitama said.
He walked through it.
Not quickly—that was the thing. He moved at something close to a casual pace, swaying left, then right, his body finding the gaps in the net with a naturalness that suggested he was reading the geometry of the whole thing simultaneously, each shift small and unhurried. Afterimages. He was walking at a pace that left afterimages.
He stepped out the other side.
Iaian's mouth was open.
No one breaks the Atomic Slash like that. He ran the motion back. No one walks through it. That's not—that shouldn't be possible at that speed.
Saitama stopped. His hand came up.
In it: a small tuft of hair. A few strands that hadn't quite made it through the net.
He stared at them.
His body went still—the specific stillness of someone who has received genuinely bad news.
"My... hair."
The three disciples looked at each other.
He dodged out of the Atomic Slash. Okamaitachi's mascara had made it to her chin. He's completely insane.
But he's focused on... the hair?
I truly cannot understand this person.
Atomic Samurai felt the mockery—real or perceived—land somewhere that required a response.
He sheathed the sword in a single motion, and the air around him changed. The venting was done. The aura of a swordsman who has exhausted the preliminary stages of a fight and arrived at the point of genuine commitment settled around him like weather. His eyes were fully alive.
He moved.
He was behind Saitama before any of the watching disciples had registered the transition—appearing out of the space between moments, low, the draw stance already loading into his legs and hips and wrists, every technical element of his career compressed into this single gesture—
"Master's ultimate technique—" Iaian's voice broke. "He's going for it—"
Okamaitachi and Bushidrill had both stopped breathing.
Atomic Ichimonji Slash—
"Ugh—"
Saitama's fist moved.
It was not a technique. It was a punch. A simple, impatient punch, thrown by someone who had been having a frustrating afternoon and had now had hair removed from his head by a man who was currently winding up behind him.
The blade-light that had begun to birth itself—the beginning of something that would have been genuinely remarkable—ran directly into the punch and stopped.
Atomic Samurai, and the blade-light, and the interrupted technique, became a single red-cloaked shape that crossed the sky in a clean parabola and disappeared into the trees at the far end of the training ground. The sound of his landing arrived a moment later, muffled by distance and foliage.
"So annoying!" Saitama looked at the clump of broken hair in his fist with an expression of real distress—more emotion than he'd shown at any point in the fight. "I said not to fight, not to fight! Now I've lost this much hair—my hair was already thin!"
He turned the broken strands over in his hand. The distress was genuine. He was genuinely more upset about this than about any of the swordsmanship.
"This stubborn old man. He just never listens."
In the distant tree line, there was a rustling and then silence.
The three disciples stood on the training ground and stared at the place where Atomic Samurai had been.
At some point during the last thirty seconds, Saitama's form of address had shifted from uncle to stinky uncle, and none of them had any bandwidth left to register this.
Iaian became aware that his forehead was wet.
He reached up and confirmed that yes, he was sweating. He looked at Okamaitachi and Bushidrill.
They were also sweating. Okamaitachi was sweating and crying, which she appeared to be managing simultaneously without visible effort. Bushidrill had the thousand-yard stare of a man revising his understanding of the world.
Sweating inside a helmet is a specific kind of miserable, Iaian thought, distantly.
He removed his helmet.
The three of them stared at the tree line together in silence.