The blonde beauty had her back to the ocean.
This was, from a pure threat-assessment standpoint, not ideal. But even if she'd been facing the right direction, the principle that has governed survival situations since the first fish grew legs still applied: there is always a bigger fish. And what was currently emerging from the sand behind her was considerably larger than any fish.
By the time she registered the crowd's behavior—the sudden unified pivot of every tourist on the beach, the screams beginning to stack on top of each other, the specific quality of mass panic that precedes rather than accompanies a visible threat—and turned her own head to look, the question of whether she'd had time to react had already been settled.
She had not.
The shadow was larger than a football field.
Six legs, each one covered in spines that caught the afternoon light like a construction site's worth of steel, had punched through the beach from below and now stood planted in the sand with the solidity of load-bearing columns. The body they supported blocked out a meaningful fraction of the sky—not like a cloud, but like a building that had fallen sideways and decided to stay there. The silhouette alone was enough to stop rational thought.
The blonde beauty looked up.
And up.
Her mind, which had been entirely occupied with sandcastle architecture moments ago, went completely blank.
"100,000-year-old Steelback King Crab."
Dragon-level. Here.
"That wasn't an earthquake!" someone in the crowd screamed, with the specific energy of a person who has just processed something they did not want to process. "That's a monster's entrance—"
"An unidentified creature has appeared!!"
The beach became a study in immediate mass evacuation. Every tourist, every vendor, every person who had been contentedly horizontal under a parasol three seconds ago was now moving in the direction of not here at the maximum speed their particular body could achieve. The screams hit a register that was less sound and more physical phenomenon.
The Steelback King Crab observed this with its two massive eyes, elevated on stalks like a Mr. Krabs nightmare rendered at architectural scale, and appeared satisfied. Its enormous pincers—each one large enough to compress a skyscraper into a more compact form—rose above its body and clashed together, the metallic shriek of it generating sparks visible in the afternoon sun, the shockwave of the impact knocking over the nearest palm trees before the sound had even finished traveling.
Its first actual movement did the rest. Every step shook the ground for a hundred meters in every direction. The beast cry it released wasn't exactly a sound so much as a pressure event—a wave of fishy-smelling air that knocked the remaining coconut palms along the Gold Coast flat. Several hundred of the fastest runners had made it far enough to be in the fall zone. The cries of the newly injured added to the existing chaos.
Then the Steelback King Crab drew a breath.
"The insatiable land dwellers," it announced, in the register of something that has been composing this speech for a while, "are the greatest enemy of the sea! The war between land and ocean is inevitable! The land will eventually—"
"—huh?"
A battle cry arrived first. Clear, loud, and accompanied by something that the Steelback King Crab's combat systems registered as disproportionately powerful for its apparent size—a punch landing on the top of its head before its sentence had finished leaving its mouth.
Click.
Click.
Click.
The Steelback King Crab's silver shell—the shell that metallurgical analysis would later confirm could withstand a direct nuclear strike—developed its first crack. A line, then a branching network of lines, spreading outward from a single impact point at the crown of its body.
The Steelback King Crab's enormous eyes, which had been aimed at the fleeing crowd, rotated to look at the top of its own head.
Time did something unusual.
It stretched. Not stopped—but slowed, the way time slows in the fraction of a second before something very fast happens. The Steelback King Crab watched, in what felt like slow motion, as the figure standing on top of it—black shirt, black baseball cap, the brim sitting at an angle that suggested maximum visual drama—drew both fists back in the pulling motion of someone beginning a rowing stroke. The chest expanded. The fists cocked.
"Ora ora ora ora ora ora—!!"
What followed was less a series of punches and more a meteorological event with a personal grudge. The barrage landed at a frequency that made individual impacts indistinguishable from one another, the aggregate sound becoming something like a demolition site's entire operational output compressed into a few seconds—
Konglong. Kanglang. Konglongkang.
The fleeing tourists, who had made it far enough to feel temporarily safe, stopped running. Turned around. Observed.
The Dragon-level monster that had emerged from the sand less than ninety seconds ago was now a rapidly expanding cloud of silver shell fragments, each piece disintegrating further as it traveled, the whole assemblage spreading outward over the Gold Coast in a glittering debris field.
Tens of thousands of ordinary punches in the span of a breath.
Time returned to its normal pace.
The War God shadow clone stood in the air above the former Steelback King Crab and took a single calm sip through a straw—from a drink that had appeared in his hand at some point during the preceding events—and surveyed the aftermath from under the brim of his hat.
Several tourists near the front of the crowd were not moving. Coconut tree casualties. He noted them, reached through the Mind Network, and applied ordinary healing to the worst cases—the kind of straightforward medical intervention that left no visible trace but corrected the internal damage efficiently. The affected tourists sat up looking confused in the way of people who have just stopped hurting without understanding why.
Then he checked under the body of the fallen crab.
The blonde beauty was there.
She had not, technically, been hit—the Steelback King Crab had collapsed around her rather than on her, its legs framing her position rather than landing on it. But she was also surrounded on all sides by the remains of something that had been alive at Dragon-level scale moments ago, in quantities and compositions that were difficult to characterize as anything other than a lot.
The shadow clone's eyes went to the Mind Network layer that Jordan had seeded through the Earth's magnetic field—the distributed base station that gave his clones full coverage across the continent. He found the relevant thread, extended it, and wrapped a precise magnetic field around every fragment and fluid droplet of the Steelback King Crab's former existence.
Large-scale microwave mode.
The tourists, who had been beginning to recover from the first shock and were now processing the second shock of what just happened to the Dragon-level monster, experienced a third shock in quick succession as the debris field—which had been traveling outward in all directions—was simultaneously arrested, compressed, and reduced to its constituent particles in a flash of contained heat that lasted about as long as a camera shutter.
The coastline went quiet.
Tourist: What... what just happened?
The 100,000-year-old Steelback King Crab: (?_?)
The sky above the blonde beauty cleared. One moment: the underside of a Dragon-level monster blocking out the sun and everything else. The next: ordinary afternoon light, unobstructed, as if nothing had occupied that volume of space at all.
The only evidence remaining of the entire incident was the set of six massive holes punched into the beach where the Steelback King Crab's legs had been, each one deep enough to serve as a small swimming pool. Everything else—the creature's mass, its fluids, the debris field—had been reduced to particles fine enough to be absorbed into the atmosphere without visible trace.
The blonde beauty remained kneeling in the sand, surrounded by nothing, where moments ago she had been surrounded by everything.
She looked up.
Above her, at a height where he appeared as a dark figure against the afternoon sky, the War God shadow clone stood with the bearing of someone who has done this before and found it moderately interesting. He was still holding the straw. He appeared to be scanning the general situation with the expression of a quality-control inspector who is basically satisfied.
A slight smile crossed his face.
His silhouette blurred.
Gone.
The blonde beauty's hands came up to clasp in front of her chest, apparently on their own. She stared at the empty sky where he'd been for a long moment.
"S..." she breathed. A sound that was trying to form into a word in at least two languages. "Sukko-ichi—"
Jordan, from approximately a hundred kilometers away, registered the aura signature of the shadow clone's Mind Network activity, confirmed the situation was resolved, and snapped his fingers.
He appeared on the balcony of his Z-City apartment.
It is known, he thought, unlacing his shoes in the brief interval between appearing and stepping inside, that individuals with teleportation abilities use the balcony entrance. The main door is for people who lack options.
He changed into his slippers with the efficiency of long habit and pushed the balcony door open.
The living room was occupied.
On the sofa—his sofa, in his apartment, under a blanket that had migrated from the bedroom at some point in the last several hours—sat a small green-haired person in pajamas. The pajamas had stars on them. She was holding a family-size bag of original-flavor potato chips with both hands and watching television with the focused engagement of someone who has found the correct activity for an afternoon.
Tatsumaki, Tornado of Terror, one of the most powerful psychics on the planet, had both cheeks puffed out with chips.
She heard the balcony door.
Her eyes moved from the television to Jordan without her head moving, in the manner of someone who has been interrupted mid-thought and is determining whether the interruption is worth acknowledging.
"W-why," she said, slightly impeded by the chips, "are you back already?"
For Tatsumaki, the afternoon had progressed at the normal rate of a quiet afternoon spent on a sofa with snacks. For Jordan, the same interval had included a trans-dimensional negotiation, the creation of a new dark god, a campus inspection, a vibranium delivery, and a Dragon-level monster disposal.
"Training program's running smoothly," he said, already moving toward the sofa. "Nothing urgently needs me right now."
He reached the sofa, sat on the armrest, and reached down to run a hand through Tatsumaki's green hair.
She stopped chewing.
Her eyes, which had been fixed on the television with the deliberate intensity of someone who is absolutely not going to react to being petted, drifted closed. Her shoulders dropped approximately three millimeters. The chip bag crinkled slightly as her grip adjusted.
Like a cat that has decided to accept something it was planning to object to.
Jordan smiled and wrapped an arm around her waist—which was, as always, a structural achievement relative to her general attitude about her dignity—and lifted her off the sofa in one motion.
Tatsumaki's eyes opened.
"—I'm not," she said, with the full weight of her personality behind it, the vein at her temple appearing with practiced precision, "a plush toy."
"I know," Jordan agreed, settling back onto the sofa with her in his lap. "The stuffing's different."
She stared at him.
He reached into the chip bag, extracted a handful, and put them in his mouth.
Click. Click. Click.
Tatsumaki looked at the television. Then at her chip bag, which was now being treated as a shared resource. Then at the general situation, which she had apparently accepted without further comment.
Yeah, Jordan thought, leaning back. A comfortable afternoon, a bowl of chips, and Tatsumaki. That's the whole thing right there.