The clang of a sword coming to readiness rang out behind Atomic Samurai.
"Master." Iaian's voice had the quality of a decision already made. "We're going with you."
Atomic Samurai kept walking. Behind him, he heard the additional footsteps — Iaian's controlled stride, Bushidrill's heavier gait, and Okamaitachi, whose pre-battle focus had finally resolved the aesthetic reverie he'd been in for the last several minutes into something operational.
"No."
He stopped and drew.
The sound the blade made leaving the scabbard was clean and immediate. What happened next was not the sound of a demonstration but the result of one: the ground between Atomic Samurai and his three disciples opened in a clean diagonal line, the cut running deep enough that the bottom wasn't visible, the air above it sharp with the residual charge of sword energy that had passed through. It stung the skin of anyone standing in its radius.
Iaian, Bushidrill, and Okamaitachi stopped walking.
Atomic Samurai did not look back. He sheathed.
"That monster isn't at a level any of you can address right now." His tone held no judgment in it — it was simply a tactical fact, delivered by someone who had already done the calculation. "Iai. Drill. Okamaru." The three nicknames, one each. "Stay here. Watch."
He turned enough to show the edge of the smug expression he couldn't fully suppress. "Pay close attention. It isn't often you'll see your master work at this level."
The three disciples exchanged a look that communicated, without words, a resigned consensus.
"Yes, Master." Three voices, approximately simultaneous.
King had already reached altitude.
In the Emperor's Armor, he was a different visual proposition from the King who sat quietly at the edge of training grounds reading combat patterns. The golden plasma in his eyes had replaced the usual measured calm with something older, and the three scars across his face — ordinarily part of the background — looked like what they actually were under the flickering magnetic discharge: the marks of something that had survived a very long time.
He pulled his fist back at the apex of his arc and brought it down.
The concentrated magnetic field hit Elder Centipede's forward mass like a second geological event on top of the first.
Below, the ruins of S-City that had settled from the initial destruction were unsettled again — concrete and steel fragments lifting at the edges of the shockwave, thrown upward and then outward in a spreading ring before coming down in sections. The sound arrived a half-second later, enormous, below the register most people associated with sound and more in the register associated with things happening to the earth.
From above the creature's head, Genos's hands came together.
The universal capsule left the storage compartment in his arm and deployed in a burst of white smoke that cleared instantly to reveal an extended cannon assembly locking onto his outstretched frame — black barrel, high-caliber, temperature already building at the muzzle from the energy condensing inside.
"Spiral Acceleration Incineration Cannon."
The barrel glowed. The discharge left it in an orange-red arc that crossed the distance between Genos and the carapace junction behind Elder Centipede's head in less than the time it took to register as motion, and then the junction was processing an input it hadn't been designed to process.
The combination was visible from several city blocks in every direction: golden electricity from King's punch propagating along the centipede's segmented body toward the tail, and the orange-red fire from Genos's cannon threading through the gaps in the damaged shell in the opposite direction, both running simultaneously, the two damage types interfering with each other in ways that produced light rather than canceling. The band of illumination stretched for tens of thousands of meters — a straight line of destruction drawn across S-City's skyline.
The explosion that followed was the kind that required eye protection.
Several heroes activated the reflex immediately, nano-vibranium particles flowing from their suits to form narrow visors across their faces. Others shielded with their hands or turned. The flash made the sky white for a long moment before it began to fade.
"That was—"
"King just—"
"With that, the monster has to be—"
"The monster," Bang said, quiet against the ambient noise of settling debris, "is still there."
The light finished fading.
Where the Elder Centipede's purple carapace had been, the shell was simply gone — dissolved or blasted away, leaving the underlying structure exposed in a configuration that looked like something between a skeleton and a scaffold. The new form was visibly wrong, the gaps in its coverage showing tissue that had never needed to meet open air before.
Genos, still airborne, ran the assessment. His chip had expected the vitality readings to show a meaningful decrease. They showed almost none. The attack had connected, both attack types had connected, and the creature's operational status was functionally unchanged.
The exposed tissue darkened as he watched.
Then it hardened.
In the space of seconds, new shell material formed and deepened in color until it reached the same purple density as the original. On top of the new body, the human face — the old one gone now, dissolved with the old shell — pushed through green biological matter and took shape again, wrong-proportioned and too familiar and already building toward its habitual expression.
"Hehehehe." The laugh had the quality of something that had made this sound many times before, from many faces, none of which had permanently stopped. "It doesn't matter how many times you try that. I." The emphasis landed on the pronoun with the specific satisfaction of something that has verified its own theory. "Am an immortal monster."
King's fist was loading for the second approach when the red blur crossed his peripheral vision.
Atomic Samurai hadn't announced it. There was no stance, no visible preparation — just the transition from stationary to gone, and then a displacement of air where he had been, and the cutting was already happening across several kilometers of sky simultaneously, more blades of light than the eye could track or count, the aggregate coverage spanning a quarter of Elder Centipede's total body length in a single extended release.
The legs on that section — dense, blade-edged, each one several stories tall — cracked at their roots and came down, hitting what remained of the street grid below like an artillery barrage.
The assembled heroes went loud with it.
Atomic Samurai landed. His sword returned to the scabbard with a sound that was slower than the sheathing deserved, which was the tell.
He was frowning.
The technique had covered the distance it was supposed to cover. The blades had reached the body. The cuts had connected with shell material and penetrated — some of them. The others had found resistance they shouldn't have, angles where the carapace's density had redirected rather than yielded. The legs had come down, but the segments they'd come from were already beginning the repair sequence.
Didn't cut through cleanly, he thought. Coverage is easier than lethality at this scale. I need to think about the angle differently.
"Even Atomic Samurai's technique doesn't fully penetrate the defense," Genos said, from altitude, with the uncolored precision of a combat chip reporting a conclusion. He discarded the cannon barrel assembly — deformed past usable tolerance from the heat of its own discharge — and turned his attention to the storage compartments in his arms.
The universal capsules deployed in sequence.
The components they contained were not small.
What assembled around Genos in the sky, piece by locked piece, was an artillery installation that had been designed with access to more storage capacity than any external observer would guess was available. The barrel alone exceeded fifty meters. The caliber at the muzzle was 1,200 millimeters, which placed it in a category associated with WWII railway guns that required dedicated infrastructure just to move, here constructed in thirty seconds around a cyborg hovering over a Dragon-level monster. The overall form was oppressive in the specific way that technology designed without compromise on lethality becomes oppressive.
Below, Saitama was shading his eyes with one hand and looking up.
"Where does he keep all of that," he said, in the tone of someone asking a genuine question while already being somewhat resigned to not fully understanding the answer. "And wouldn't it all just fall off if it were on a normal person?"
Jordan tracked the assembly with professional appreciation. "Genos is a cyborg. The components have their own propulsion systems — they're not being held up by him. They're flying in formation around him."
Saitama considered this.
"...Oh."
Above them, the barrel finished aligning with its target, and the charge began to build.
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