The victory at the Crown of the Heavens was absolute. With the Heart of the Abyss neutralized and their leadership obliterated, the Cult of Diablos's army collapsed into a panicked, disorganized rout. The allied forces of Midgar and Oriana swept the field, a mop-up operation rather than a true battle. The cheers of the victorious soldiers, rising from the plains below, echoed against the silent, strangely flattened peak of the mountain.
Saitama did not join the celebration. He remained on the rooftop of the dark fortress, a lone, yellow-clad figure against the vast, empty sky he had created. He sat on the edge of the tower, his legs dangling over the immense drop, his gaze fixed on the distant horizon. The sounds of victory, the shouts of his name, the triumphant trumpet calls – they were all just… background noise.
The thrill was gone. The brief, beautiful flicker of a real challenge, the momentary joy of using his power in a new, almost clever, way… it had all evaporated, leaving behind the familiar, stale aftertaste of anticlimax. He had saved the world. Again. And it felt exactly the same as taking out the garbage on a Tuesday morning. It was just a chore that needed doing.
Kristoph, Iris, and Lyraelle were the first to reach him, their faces flushed with victory and exertion. They found him there, sitting on the edge, a picture of profound, almost cosmic, melancholy.
"Saitama!" Iris called out, her voice bright with relief and triumph. "You did it! It's over! We've won!"
Saitama didn't turn. "Yeah," he said, his voice flat. "We won. Cool."
The lack of enthusiasm was a bucket of cold water on their celebratory mood. They stopped a few feet away, suddenly hesitant.
"Are you… not pleased, Champion?" Lyraelle asked, her silver eyes studying his slumped posture, sensing the deep well of ennui that radiated from him. "You have averted a cataclysm. You have saved countless lives."
Saitama finally turned his head, looking at them. The usual placid boredom in his eyes was replaced by something… emptier. A quiet, hollow sadness. "Yeah, I guess," he said. "But… what comes next?"
The question hung in the air, simple and yet impossibly heavy.
"What comes next is peace," Iris said, a little uncertainly. "Rebuilding. We celebrate our victory. We honor the fallen. We ensure a threat like the Cult can never rise again."
"So… more talking?" Saitama asked, his voice devoid of its usual sarcastic bite, filled only with a genuine weariness. "More meetings? More parades? More people staring at me and whispering?" He looked at his fist. "I became a hero because I wanted to fight strong bad guys. I wanted that… heart-pounding, blood-pumping feeling of a real battle. The feeling of being alive." He sighed, a sound that seemed to be pulled from the very depths of his soul. "But I got too strong. And now… there are no more strong bad guys. There's just… this." He gestured vaguely at the cheering army below, at the peaceful sky, at the world he had just saved. "Just… a quiet, boring Tuesday."
Iris, Lyraelle, and Kristoph had no answer for that. They were warriors, leaders, beings who had fought and struggled their entire lives. They understood victory, defeat, duty, sacrifice. They did not understand the profound, existential despair of a god who had won so completely that the very concept of a struggle had become meaningless. They stood in a circle of awkward, uncomfortable silence, the cheers from the battlefield below feeling distant, hollow, almost mocking.
Meanwhile, in the catacombs beneath Midgar…
The battle in the darkness was over. The porcelain-skinned woman lay shattered, her ceramic form cracked and broken. The vortex of shadow had been dispersed by Gamma's calculated light-refractions. And Delta, covered in ichor and grinning from ear to wolfish ear, stood over the crumpled, twitching remains of the brute of bone and metal.
And Shadow… he stood before the pulsating, now violently unstable, Core of the Abyss. The final, golden chain of light holding it in place had just snapped, a casualty of the magical backlash from the duels. His opponent, the cowled Lord of the Abyss, was gone, having used the final moments of the battle to merge his own essence with the Core, a final, desperate gambit.
"He has become one with the Core, Lord Shadow!" Alpha reported, her voice tight as she held a defensive stance. "He intends to let it detonate, to take the entire capital with him!"
The Core of the Abyss began to pulse with a blinding, uncontrollable light, its dark energy threatening to erupt in a cataclysm that would make the Cult's ritual on the mountain look like a parlor trick.
Shadow just looked at it, his expression hidden, but his posture radiating a supreme, almost bored, confidence. "A predictable, if theatrical, final move."
He raised his ebony blade, which began to hum, to thrum, to drink in the surrounding darkness. The purple aura around him intensified, no longer just a glow, but a swirling, coalescing vortex of pure, refined magical power. He had spent his entire reincarnated life studying, practicing, perfecting this single concept, this one ultimate technique. The culmination of all his chuunibyou dreams, all his relentless training.
"He seeks to become a god of destruction," Shadow murmured, his voice a low, almost ecstatic whisper. "A fine ambition. But there is a power that transcends even that." He took his stance. "The ultimate secret. The final truth. The power that lies at the very heart of the shadow, at the epicenter of the atomic universe."
He swung his blade.
"I… AM… ATOMIC."
A light, brighter than the sun, brighter than a thousand stars, erupted from his blade. A silent, perfect, all-consuming sphere of pure, violet-tinged annihilation that expanded outwards, not with the chaotic fury of an explosion, but with the serene, absolute finality of a universe being born and dying in the same instant.
The pulsating Abyssal Core, the fused consciousness of the Cult's leader, the surrounding chamber, the ancient catacombs, all of it… was simply… gone. Erased. Unwritten from reality by a power so absolute, so perfectly controlled, it left nothing behind. Not even an echo.
When the light faded, Shadow stood in the center of a new, perfectly smooth, glassy, spherical chamber, his sword held steady, a wisp of purple smoke curling from its tip. Alpha, Gamma, and Delta, who had been shielded behind him, stared in absolute, worshipful awe.
He had done it. He had saved the capital. He had defeated the ultimate evil. He had achieved the perfect, most dramatic, most overwhelmingly cool victory imaginable. It was the absolute pinnacle of being an Eminence in Shadow.
And in that moment of ultimate, perfect triumph… he felt… nothing.
No thrill. No satisfaction. No heart-pounding sense of victory. He had planned for this, trained for this, dreamed of this moment his entire life. And now that it was here… it was just… an outcome. A result. He had executed his ultimate move, and it had worked. Perfectly. Exactly as he had calculated. There had been no struggle, no doubt, no moment where he thought he might fail. It had been… easy.
He looked at his sword, at the perfect, clean results of his ultimate power. And a deep, profound, and utterly unexpected sense of hollow, crushing boredom washed over him.
He had become so powerful, so perfect in his chosen role, that he had eliminated the one thing that had always driven him: the challenge. The struggle. The fun of it.
He sheathed his sword, the triumphant purple aura fading, replaced by a quiet, invisible emptiness. "The mission is complete," he said, his voice the cool, enigmatic baritone of Shadow, but the mind of Sid, of Minoru Kageyama, was reeling. Is this it? Is this all there is?
Two heroes. Two saviors. Two beings of absolute, ultimate power, standing worlds apart, one on a sunlit, windswept mountaintop, the other in a silent, self-made cavern of perfect darkness.
One, a hero by hobby, who had just been forced to confront the immense, boring weight of his own responsibility.
The other, a hero by design, who had just achieved his ultimate, lifelong ambition, only to find it utterly, completely, hollow.
They had both won. They had both saved the world.
And they were both, for the first time, in their own unique, parallel ways, profoundly, soul-crushingly, bored.
The world was safe. The great evil was defeated. But for the two most powerful beings in it, the true, final, and perhaps unbeatable, enemy had just revealed itself: the quiet, empty, and utterly un-punchable abyss of a hollow victory. The real battle, the one against their own, ultimate power, was only just beginning.