He didn't even bother to look up at the terrifying energy cannon that was about to vaporize him along with everything around him.
Saitama just casually raised his right arm, fingers spread, and lightly swung a straight punch toward that massive, armor-plated, metal-structured head.
There was no earth-shattering aura, no blinding light of gathered energy.
Just a simple, ordinary-looking punch.
Pffft.
A dull, almost anticlimactic sound rang out, like someone poking a stick into an overfilled water bag.
For a heartbeat, time itself seemed to freeze.
The Leviathan—this mountain-sized war beast whose monstrous head could shrug off a barrage of missiles—had its skull touched by Saitama's fist… and there was no explosion, no flames.
Instead, it simply collapsed.
Its armored scales, its thick bones, its intricate mechanical components, the mass of destruction energy condensed to the brink inside its skull—all of it, everything that made up that head, was pulverized in an instant by a force that exceeded any physical law.
From the point of impact, the collapse spread at a speed that defied physics. The massive head vanished first. Then the neck as thick as a train car. Then its colossal torso…
It was as if some invisible eraser had rubbed the Leviathan out of reality.
In less than one ten-thousandth of a second, the gigantic beast that had just cast a shadow of death over the battlefield—along with the terrifying blue-white light gathering in its maw—was gone. No smoke, no debris, not even a speck of dust remained to prove it had ever existed.
Only a faint, almost invisible ripple of air spreading outward from Saitama's punch hinted that any of it had really happened.
Silence.
Absolute silence shrouded this stretch of sky.
On the ground, the Chitauri foot soldiers who had been frantically swarming Hulk and trying to slaughter the surviving humans looked up as one. Their crimson compound eyes turned toward the heavens. For the first time, those eyes—designed to lock onto targets and calculate trajectories—showed something like "blankness" and "system error."
Their crude combat logic processors simply could not parse what they had just witnessed.
Hulk, who had been in a berserk rhythm of smashing everything in reach, froze mid-swing. His massive green fist halted above a Chitauri soldier he'd already hammered into the pavement. He glanced up at the empty sky, then down at the alien pulp under his foot. Two snorts of smoke-tinged white breath flared from his nostrils as a confused grunt slipped out of his throat.
"…Huh?"
On the rooftop of a half-collapsed high-rise in the distance, Hawkeye—Clint—was still holding his bow at full draw, an explosive arrow nocked and ready. His mouth hung slightly open, eyes wide, as if he'd just watched God Himself step down from heaven to squash a bug.
Beside him, Black Widow—Natasha—usually so composed, stared in shock. Her electric batons hung limp at her sides, knuckles whitening around the grips.
Down in the sky, inside his red-and-gold armor, Tony's eyes flew open. A second ago, he'd already accepted he was dead.
Now, he was very much alive.
Inside the helmet, his jaw dropped so far you could've stuffed an egg in there. JARVIS's voice came through flooded with data spikes and distortion:
"Target: Leviathan. Energy signature: completely gone. Scanning… unknown residual… unable to analyze… energy pattern does not conform to existing database. Sir… logic core overload. Recalibrating…"
"What the—?!"
Tony's voice cracked over the external speakers, echoing oddly clearly over the suddenly quiet battlefield. The armor hovered in mid-air as he stared down at the street below, at the bald man in a yellow jumpsuit and red cape.
What just happened?
That bald guy… did he just punch the Leviathan out of existence?
And then—
A cold, arrogant voice slammed into every mind on the battlefield like an icy serpent, coiling tight around their thoughts with crushing psychic pressure:
"Enough, insignificant insects! Your pathetic resistance, before true power, is nothing but a meaningless struggle!"
At the center of the battlefield, on the exposed balcony of Stark Tower, a figure slowly appeared.
He wore a luxurious dark-green robe. A golden horned helm gleamed coldly in the dying light. In his hand was a scepter set with a large, glowing blue gem.
Loki.
The so-called God of Mischief, the evil god of this invasion.
He looked down over the ruined battlefield and the battered heroes with a calm, cruel smile. The gem at the tip of his scepter flared, its light like the eye of the cosmos, radiating a pressure that clawed at the soul and whispered promises of submission.
"Look at you… 'heroes,'" Loki sneered, scepter sweeping downward toward the ground. "A mindless beast that only knows how to smash things (Hulk). A fragile mortal hiding in a tin can (Iron Man). Two scurrying little bugs in the shadows (Black Widow and Hawkeye)… Your struggle will only lead to more needless deaths!"
His gaze swept the battlefield with the bored disdain of a god watching ants. The scepter thunked once against the floor beneath his feet.
"Now, accept reality. Kneel before your god—Loki. Swear your fealty. That is your only—"
His grand, carefully rehearsed declaration—loaded with godly majesty and hypnotic power—reached its triumphant crescendo right as he drew out the word "submit"…
And was abruptly cut off by a voice that sounded faintly bored, almost apologetic.
"Hey."
The word wasn't loud. It wasn't dramatic. But it sliced right through the psychic pressure from Loki's scepter and the suffocating atmosphere of the battlefield as cleanly as a blade through silk.
Every gaze on the battlefield left Loki and swung toward the source of the interruption—
The bald man who had just erased the Leviathan with a single punch.
Saitama stood in the middle of a demolished street, surrounded by twisted metal and shattered concrete. He tilted his head back, giving a quick glance to Tony's armor still hovering overhead, faint smoke curling from the thrusters. There was a hint of curiosity in his eyes.
Then he completely ignored the "god" radiating divine menace on the balcony. He ignored the Chitauri soldiers whose systems had metaphorically blue-screened when their master's speech was interrupted.
He lifted a hand and scratched the back of his smooth, bald head, making a soft rasping sound.
His eyes wandered lazily through the haze of smoke and dust, as if he were scanning for something else entirely. Finally, his gaze seemed to land on Loki—or perhaps somewhere just behind him. There was no fear or reverence there, not even much fighting spirit.
Just confusion. And a tiny, almost invisible flicker of expectation.
"Uh, you. The guy in the green robe with the gold horn hat," Saitama called up in his usual conversational tone, like he was asking a passerby for directions. "Sorry to interrupt, but… is there an all-you-can-eat meat hotpot place around here?"
He paused for a beat, then added very seriously, his voice carrying clearly over the dead-silent battlefield:
"After I'm done with you, I'm kinda hungry."
Silence.
Again, absolute silence slammed down over the already hellish battlefield like a layer of ice.
Down below, the Chitauri foot soldiers that had been roaring and slashing at Hulk all froze mid-motion. Their claws hovered in the air. Their killer instincts, their bloodlust—everything stalled.
Those crimson compound eyes turned upward once more—to the empty sky where the Leviathan had been. The spot where a moment ago, a monstrous war beast and its annihilating blue beam had existed. Now there was nothing. Not even an energy ripple.
The primitive logic engines inside those bio-mechanical killing machines clearly overloaded. Red light stuttered wildly in their eyes, flickering like shorted circuits.
"Raa… huh?"
Hulk's massive frame went rigid again. His green fist still hovered over a crushed Chitauri corpse, bits of alien gore wedged between his fingers. He stared at his own hand, then at the empty air where the Leviathan used to be, snorting out two rough, smoky breaths. The pure, straightforward urge to smash was briefly jammed by sheer confusion.
On the distant rooftop, Hawkeye's fingers were still hooked on his bowstring, a crackling arrow ready to fly. But the legendary focus and calm that he prided himself on were gone. His mouth hung open, eyes wide, like he'd just witnessed the birth of the universe.
Beside him, Black Widow's grip on her batons was so tight her knuckles were white. That face tempered by countless life-and-death missions—normally as steady as steel—was now full of raw shock and a kind of stunned disbelief.
She shook her head ever so slightly, as if trying to dislodge a hallucination.
Out in the sky, Tony's helmet flipped open with a hiss. Sweat slicked his face, his expression a mess of lingering terror and utter astonishment.
He even forgot to cut the thrusters. The armor just hovered there, rocking slightly as he stared down at the bald guy in that dirt-yellow jumpsuit and bargain-bin red cape.
"Holy…"
The rest of the word stuck in his throat, refusing to come out. His mind was a scrambled mess of HUD warnings and JARVIS's frantic voice:
"Target: Leviathan. Signal: completely obliterated. Physical structure disintegration: 100%. Energy residue: unknown. Unable to analyze. Logic core overload… rebooting. Sir, I strongly recommend immediately reassessing threat levels. Target individual: classification updating… extremely dangerous. Extremely dangerous!"
Shrill alarms screamed in Tony's ears.
Up on Stark Tower's balcony, Loki's handsome face—usually composed in a mask of smug superiority—had gone an ugly shade of liver purple.
He'd spent so much effort building this moment—god descends, mortals kneel, grand declaration of dominion over Earth. He'd polished his little speech, crafted every syllable to exude power and divine authority.
And now it had all been derailed.
By a bald man.
A bald man in a cheap-looking yellow jumpsuit.
A bald man who had interrupted him in the most crude, disrespectful way possible… just to ask where he could find a discount hotpot place.
It was more humiliating than being slapped across the face with a muddy shoe. A thousand times more.
"You—!"
Loki's fingers tightened on his scepter until the knuckles turned white. The huge blue gem at its tip reacted to his rage, flaring with a blinding, violent light.
Gone was the seductive, hypnotic glow from before. Now that light was raw, condensed fury—like an ancient tsunami of wrath finally unleashed after being bottled up for eons.
"Insolent insect! You dare mock a god?!" Loki's voice had lost all elegance and composure. What came out now was a shrill, unhinged scream, every word scraping at the air like ice on glass. "Feel the wrath of Asgard! Feel the judgment of the lord of the Nine Realms! Be erased in eternal cold and pain!"
Boom!
The scepter's gem erupted, unleashing a deep-blue torrent of energy, a beam several meters thick, condensed to an impossible degree.
Where it passed, the air itself screamed, ionizing with a sharp ozone tang and crackling arcs of electricity.
At the core of the beam was sheer annihilation, power refined to a lethal purity. Around it coiled jagged veins of blue frost, cold enough to freeze steel in an instant.
This wasn't just a blast of energy. It was a fusion of the Mind Stone's psychic shock and the Casket's ultimate frost—a god's full fury focused into a single strike.
Its target: Saitama, still standing in the ruined street, lazily scratching his head like he was only halfway through looking for a restaurant.
"Look out!"
Tony's shout tore from his throat before he even realized it. His repulsors snapped up on instinct, but he knew it was pointless. The beam was too fast.
Steve threw up his shield and lunged forward on pure reflex, despite knowing the distance and speed made it utterly futile. Natasha and Clint both felt their hearts leap into their throats.
The roaring wave of blue annihilation hit the ground where Saitama stood.
Concrete harder than steel vaporized without a sound, leaving behind a deep crater rimmed with jagged ice crystals. The shockwave howled outward, carrying a storm of razor-edged debris and killing cold.
"No!"
Steve's roar was raw and hoarse. He could already picture the bald man's body being pulverized, frozen, and scattered into nothing.
Tony went pale. JARVIS's alarms were a shrieking chorus in his ears.
And then the next moment made every brain on that battlefield lock up all over again.
In the heart of the blue beam, amid the swirling frost and crackling energy, a silhouette still stood.
It wasn't frozen solid. It hadn't been hurled away.
Saitama was still in the exact same spot.
He hadn't even really changed poses—his right hand was still casually scratching the back of his smooth head.
The deep-blue beam of destruction that could have vaporized a main battle tank and frozen an entire block in an instant… stopped half a meter short of his body.
It was forced apart, split open by some unseen, absolute force pressing out from him.
The roaring energy stream bent and curled around an invisible barrier, howling in protest, unable to advance so much as a centimeter closer.
(End of Chapter)
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