Saitama's voice fell over the Waverider's control center with a calm that left no room for doubt, as if he were merely confirming something already on the schedule.
But those plain, simple words were like a boulder dropped into a dead, still pond—
The ripples exploded instantly.
"1975? Ivy Town campus district?"
Honorary captain Rip Hunter frowned, repeating the coordinates on reflex. His fingers tapped unconsciously on the console.
"Gideon, pull up the historical data and temporal stability report for that target time point. Now."
The Waverider's AI core—Gideon, that soft yet immense cluster of light—responded at once. Her cold, efficient synthetic voice echoed through the cabin.
"Command confirmed, Captain. Accessing 1975 Ivy Town campus temporal node. Warning: severe temporal turbulence detected near the node. Energy readings exceed normal thresholds by 47.8%. Correlated event: Dr. Palmer's lost atomic power circuit board. Its energy signature has been locked and confirmed as the primary source of the disturbance. Risk level: extreme. Recommended: reassess operational plan."
"Extreme risk, huh?"
Captain Cold—Leonard Snart—folded his arms, his habitual smirk tilting down at one corner. The cold gun at his hip caught a shard of console light and flashed.
"Sounds like our usual day at the office."
He turned toward the bald man at the center of it all.
"But Saitama… you sure we're not diving headfirst into a trap the Time Court dug for us? You humiliated them pretty badly with that whole Savage fiasco—they're probably dying for a chance to hit back."
Heat Wave, Mick Rory, took a huge swig of liquor from who-knew-where, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
"Snart's right. Those time-bastards hiding in the future, barking orders at everybody—they're definitely up to something."
He let out a loud belch, eyes shining with battle lust.
"But who cares about traps? If there's a fight, that's all I need. My hands are itching anyway."
He slapped the newly upgraded flamethrower slung across his chest, the metal still carrying a faint scent of oil.
Sara Lance didn't look at anyone. Her fingertips ran nervously along the cold sheath of the dagger at her waist, tracing every line and edge. Her gaze seemed to punch straight through the Waverider's alloy bulkheads, fixing on some faraway, painful point in time.
"1975… Laurel…"
The name slipped from her lips in a low murmur, unbearably heavy.
Saitama's prophecy about her sister's fate was like a needle of ice lodged in the softest part of her heart.
Change. It had to change.
For that, she was prepared to follow Saitama into any danger—
Even if what waited ahead was a trap crafted by the Time Court themselves.
Barry Allen, the young Flash, looked almost inappropriately excited.
He zipped around the control center at high speed, a trail of golden-red afterimages flickering behind him. His voice vibrated oddly from the sheer velocity.
"Whoa! Ivy Town campus? The seventies? Retro era! Saitama, you said you'd help me go back, right? Once we deal with this little 'circuit board problem,' we head straight to the year 2000—right?"
He skidded to a stop in front of Saitama, staring up at him.
On his face, anxiety and almost childlike trust mixed together.
His longing for his mother and his reliance on Saitama's power made him forget, for the moment, how dangerous all this might be.
Ray Palmer—the Atom—just looked guilty.
He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and instinctively tried to make himself smaller.
"Uh… yeah… I'm really, really sorry, everyone. I swear I didn't mean for this to happen. I was fighting those time agents and that thing was just so slippery it just…"
His voice grew quieter and quieter, especially under the unfriendly stare coming from Mick, until it faded out completely.
"Now isn't the time for blame, Dr. Palmer," Hawkman, Carter Hall, said gravely.
His broad wings drew in slightly in the cramped space; the metal feathers scraped softly against each other.
His partner, Hawkgirl Kendra Saunders, stood at his side, her expression equally tense.
"What matters most now is fixing the mistake. The Time Court won't pass up any chance to widen this chaos. We have to move before they do."
"Agreed."
Professor Martin Stein's voice carried that calm, analytical tone unique to scholars. Firestorm's other half, Jefferson Jackson, echoed the same resolve through him.
"The consequences of forcibly twisting history are impossible to fully predict. Right now, Saitama's judgment is our best option."
One by one, everyone's eyes turned to Saitama.
He was still in his familiar beige coat, crimson cape hanging down his back. His calm stood in stark contrast to the tension around him.
He nodded once. No rousing speech, no theatrics—just a simple, direct order.
"Let's go."
"Understood!"
Rip Hunter drew a deep breath, forcing down his unease about the abnormal temporal turbulence. Then he slammed both hands onto the console.
"Gideon! Lock in the temporal coordinates—1975, Ivy Town campus district! Maximum power! Fire up the time-jump engines! Everyone, secure yourselves!"
The engines' roar surged in an instant to a deafening pitch.
Outside the hull, rings of emitters spat out countless blazing blue streams of temporal energy, like furious rivers. They swept over the Waverider in a single breath, enveloping the ship completely.
The whole vessel shook and hummed under the violent forces, as if it might be torn to pieces by this power that surpassed dimensions themselves.
Right at the critical point of the jump, Saitama felt a faint flicker deep within his consciousness.
The SSSR-grade Multiverse Card he'd just obtained—its surface swirling with nebula-like light—let out a barely audible crack, like a shard of ice splitting.
An indescribable cold, vast spatial fluctuation spread outward, subtle as a stone dropped into water—yet it instantly threw the already-unstable time flow around the Waverider into complete chaos.
Gideon's light surged wildly, and her voice leapt several octaves into a sharp, urgent alarm.
"Warning! Warning! Unknown high-dimensional spatial interference detected externally! Temporal flow vectors have become unpredictable! Jump coordinates lost! Energy overload! Core meltdown risk at 97%! Repeat, core meltdown risk at 97%!"
"What?!"
Rip Hunter's face went white.
He shouted, fingers flying desperately over the controls, trying to stabilize their trajectory—
But on the display, the icon representing the Waverider was tumbling like a leaf in a hurricane, tossed helplessly inside a cyclone of chaotic temporal storms.
Its coordinates scrambled like glitched code, flickering and jumping, completely out of control.
"Hold on—!"
Captain Cold's roar was swallowed by an even greater roar of raging energy.
The Waverider was seized, twisted, and stretched by a force far beyond the time stream itself.
The hull groaned with a tooth-grinding screech of tortured metal. The protective field flickered like a fragile bubble, swelling and shrinking unpredictably.
Inside the cabin, the world spun wildly. Gravity flicked on and off. People and loose equipment were flung around like they'd been thrown into a gigantic blender.
Barry tried to use the Speed Force to steady himself, but the raw spatial shearing forces clawing at his body made it impossible to move. All he could do was cling desperately to the nearest handhold.
Sara's fingers locked around a support bar, her knuckles turning white.
Snart and Mick were hurled hard against the bulkheads.
Hawkman wrapped his wings around Hawkgirl, shielding her as best he could.
The Atom's body flickered between solid and intangible, teetering on the edge of losing cohesion.
Firestorm's fusion between Martin and Jefferson fluctuated wildly, their combined energy barely holding together.
Only Saitama stood firm.
His feet might as well have been welded to the violently bucking deck. His red cape snapped and cracked in the raging energy storm.
His brow furrowed—not in fear, but because he felt something he'd never experienced before.
A colossal force, not of time, but of pure space—
A brutal, alien pressure, more domineering and unfamiliar than Chronos's time-erasing beam.
In the depths of his consciousness, the Multiverse Card glowed faintly.
It was like a coordinate point—
Or more like a hungry black hole, ravenously devouring the chaotic temporal energies around it.
BOOM.
A sound beyond description—like the tearing of the universe itself—exploded in everyone's souls.
The Waverider's nigh-indestructible hull, forged to ride the currents of time, crumpled like a toy in an invisible giant's grip and split in half with a deafening crack.
Blinding white light swallowed everything.
The raging spatial storm poured in all at once.
Time and space themselves shattered.
In that instant, the very concepts of "before" and "after," "here" and "there," completely disintegrated.
A colossal suction yanked at everything—ship fragments and the people screaming on them were dragged like trash into the white glare and flung into an unknowable, chaotic abyss.
The moment his body was hurled free, Saitama only had time to clench his fist on instinct.
He felt like a pebble thrown into a supernova, tumbling and crashing through a flood made of pure energy and broken laws.
Countless bizarre, incomprehensible images flashed past his eyes:
Twisted nebulae. Collapsing galaxies. Fractured timelines. Planets weeping. Grinning demonic silhouettes.
Vastness and emptiness, creation and destruction, all colliding in their rawest, wildest form.
He had no idea how long it lasted.
Maybe it was a single instant.
Maybe it was an eternity.
Then, all at once, that annihilating tearing force vanished.
THUD.
Saitama slammed hard into something cold and solid. Dust exploded around him.
Even with a body that was nearly on the level of a walking law of nature, that rough, cross-border landing left him a little dazed.
He shook his smooth head, scattering the faint dizziness, and pushed himself up off the ground.
A sharp stink of smoke and burning metal hit his nose all at once, mixed with the tang of ozone—
And thick, choking blood.
Explosions boomed.
Metal screamed as it twisted.
Energy weapons whined.
The dying shrieked. Others shouted in despair.
It all crashed together into a mad symphony from every direction at once, battering his ears.
As the dust thinned, even Saitama—who'd seen more than his share of disaster scenes back home—raised his eyebrows slightly.
The setting sun smeared the sky with blood, a sickly orange bleeding into filthy gray-black.
He stood in the middle of a wide street that had become nothing but ruins.
Towering skyscrapers that once pierced the clouds now looked like toys stomped on by giants. Glass curtain walls were shattered and hanging, twisted steel bones jutting from them like jagged fangs.
Fires roared hungrily along every fallen surface, black smoke boiling upward to blot out the sky.
The street was pocked with craters and choked with debris.
Burning car husks lay everywhere, warped into grotesque metal corpses.
The entire air reeked of death and war.
More striking than the ruins, though, were the things rampaging across the sky and ground.
Up above, swarms of alien craft—some shaped like metallic whales, others like monstrous mechanical insects—poured in from a colossal spatial wormhole, its rim flickering with unstable blue light.
They shrieked in razor-edged tones, engines spitting eerie blue fire as they dived and wheeled.
Lances of blue energy rained down like a storm, mercilessly harvesting every life they could see.
On the ground, smaller, hound-quick alien foot soldiers rushed through the wreckage.
They wore dull metal armor shells and had blood-red compound eyes, howling in inhuman voices as they swept every corner with their guns and blades, hunting down the last pockets of resistance.
At the heart of the chaos, a handful of figures fought with everything they had—tiny boats in a storm, about to be swallowed.
A massive giant covered in rippling green muscle—Hulk—was roaring his fury at the sky.
He rampaged through the Chitauri ranks like a runaway tank, every punch and stomp smashing multiple aliens into twisted scrap or bloody paste.
But their numbers were beyond counting, like an endless ant swarm.
The moment he shattered one wave of attackers in front of him, a new hail of blue blasts came from every direction, peppering his hide in bursts of sparks and pain.
More alien soldiers threw themselves at him without fear, claws and energy blades slashing and stabbing, trying to bury him under sheer numbers.
Hulk's skin was already crisscrossed with fine cuts and scorched black burns.
None of it could truly injure him—
But it slowed him down, dragged him deeper into a mire of rage he couldn't quite break free from.
Higher in the sky, a red-and-gold figure—Iron Man—darted among the swarming Chitauri sky-chariots and infantry like a swift, desperate swallow.
His chest repulsor and the micro-missiles on his shoulders spat constant streams of fire, blowing one flying craft after another out of the air in blazing blossoms of wreckage.
But there were too many.
Their beams crisscrossed the air in a deadly web.
"Mark 7 power at 38%… left thruster lightly damaged… rear lock-ons increasing…"
JARVIS's cool prompts chimed in Tony Stark's ears.
Tony rolled the armor in a last-second barrel roll, narrowly slipping between several crossing beams. One shot still grazed the armor's leg, leaving a long, charred streak.
Inside the suit, Tony clenched his teeth. Sweat soaked his temples, his breathing rough and fast.
He needed a breather. He needed to regroup.
The enemy wasn't interested in giving him either.
"Tony! Above you!"
Black Widow's urgent shout crackled through the comms—
But it came just a heartbeat too late.
Somewhere behind the smoke and chaos, a colossal Chitauri Leviathan had silently swung around.
The monstrous bio-mechanical beast loomed like a flying fortress, its fanged maw yawning open toward the darting Iron Man.
Deep inside its throat, blue light gathered in a pulse of pure destruction.
The energy building there was enough to vaporize whole blocks in an instant.
Every alarm in Tony's HUD flared to maximum at once.
"Extremely high-level energy reaction detected. All evasion paths blocked. Energy shields cannot fully withstand predicted impact. Sir, I recommend—"
JARVIS's voice, for once, held a rare trace of urgency.
Tony's pupils contracted. He threw everything into the thrusters, trying to break free—
But Chitauri sky-chariots swarmed in from all sides, hemming him in with pinpoint-fire.
There was nowhere left to dodge.
He watched, wide-eyed, as the Leviathan's glow reached its peak.
The smell of death hit him like a wall.
At the last instant, he even found himself closing his eyes on reflex.
And just as that annihilating blue beam was about to erupt—
A blurred yellow figure appeared in front of the Leviathan's massive head, as if it had simply popped into existence.
Compared to the sky-darkening beast, the figure was nothing more than a speck of dust.
(End of Chapter)
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