The sound of his footfall was barely audible—just a dull little thump, like a pebble dropped into a deep pond.
But that casual step set off a scene that made the entire New York battlefield tremble.
Centered on the spot where Saitama's right foot landed, the supposedly solid concrete beneath him reacted as if someone had dropped a nuke into still water.
Rumble—!!!
A ring-shaped shockwave, visible to the naked eye, exploded outward along the ground. It was pure, concentrated physical force, compressed to the absolute limit. Like an apocalyptic tsunami, it blasted away from Saitama's foot in a perfect circle.
Everywhere it passed, the thick blue ice Loki had spread over everything shattered like cheap glass, crumbling into the finest ice dust.
The ruins of buildings, twisted alien machinery, burning wrecks of vehicles… every last obstacle that touched that expanding ring of force was silently ground into powder.
The shockwave was a killing halo, ever widening, racing away from Saitama on all sides. It moved faster than sound.
The first thing in its path—
Was the base of Stark Tower.
Boom—!!!
The skyscraper that symbolized the pinnacle of human wealth and technology met the shockwave… and might as well have been made of paper.
The ultra-strong steel framework wailed like something alive as it buckled. The curtain walls of glass disintegrated into a cloud of glittering dust. From the base upward, Stark Tower folded in on itself along the line of the shockwave, collapsing away from Saitama's position like a toppled stack of building blocks.
The break across its middle was smooth as a mirror.
On the tower's rooftop, the platform that held the Tesseract and maintained the space portal shrieked with alarms. Equipment screeched and spat arcs of electricity as the whole structure lurched and tilted.
The glowing cube at its heart flickered wildly.
"My tower!!!"
Tony Stark let out a scream that sounded like his soul leaving his body as he watched the building he'd poured his fortune and pride into crumble before his eyes.
Up on the balcony, Loki barely had time to give a strangled, panicked cry before the collapsing tower and the shockwave hit him at the same time.
The green godly shield around him shattered like tissue paper. His body was swatted aside by the overwhelming force like a broken puppet, flung as a streak of green into the avalanche of falling debris and rising dust.
He vanished into the storm of rubble. Whether he was alive or dead was anyone's guess.
The shockwave didn't slow. It kept racing outward from Saitama, skimming along the ground, wiping out everything in its path.
It slammed into clusters of Chitauri soldiers that were still frozen in system crash, reducing them—and the ground beneath their feet—to dust in an instant.
It sheared through half-collapsed high-rises, finishing the job in a heartbeat; those buildings, already barely standing, crumbled completely like sandcastles at high tide.
A few streets away, in areas that had been relatively intact, even the asphalt—thick, solid roadbeds designed to carry thousands of tons—buckled and cracked like brittle cookies, arching upward before breaking apart and disintegrating.
Rumble-rumble-rumble—!!!
The earth howled.
All of Manhattan shuddered under that one stomp, like it was in the grip of a once-in-history earthquake.
Only after the shockwave had swept out nearly a kilometer in every direction did it finally start to dissipate.
When the choking wall of dust and smoke began to settle, what the survivors saw froze their souls.
Where Saitama stood was now the center of an enormous hemispherical crater, almost a kilometer across.
The original streets, buildings, and battlefield—gone.
In their place was a huge bowl-shaped hollow, its walls smooth and seamless, sinking down into the ground as if a colossal sphere had been pressed into the earth with unimaginable force.
Stark Tower and the entire block it had stood on had simply ceased to exist.
Only a few twisted pieces of rebar jutting out around the crater's rim hinted that something had once stood there.
The Tesseract and its complex support equipment were nowhere to be seen.
Up in the sky, the towering space portal, suddenly without a power source, began to flicker. The blue light around its edges grew unstable and ragged, like a candle flame in a storm, on the verge of blowing out.
Beyond the crater, ruin stretched to the horizon.
Collapsed buildings. Broken bridges. Highways torn apart and twisted. New York looked like a painting of the apocalypse.
And Saitama stood right at the lowest point in the crater—the absolute center of this man-made hellscape.
He let his right foot rest back on the ground, then casually brushed at his pant leg, dusting off dirt that wasn't there. He turned a slow circle, taking in the "cleaned up" scenery.
He nodded, satisfied.
"Yeah," he said, "much quieter this way."
It was as if he'd just fixed a minor noise complaint.
He glanced up at the shrinking, flickering portal, then at the Avengers clinging to the crater rim, staring down at him like he was some kind of cosmic horror.
Last, his gaze locked—firmly, resolutely—on one thing:
The little "Fragrant Hotpot" restaurant that still stood at the very edge of the blast zone, miraculously intact except for its sign, which now hung crooked and scorched.
"Okay," Saitama said, clapping his hands as if he'd just finished a bit of light tidying. "Now that everyone's done yelling… time for hotpot."
He started walking, unhurried, feet tapping lightly on the glass-smooth wall of the crater as he made his way up toward the rim and the restaurant beyond.
The setting sun painted his shiny head and red cape gold, pulling a long shadow behind him that stretched deep into the center of the giant pit.
He walked like a man taking a stroll in his own backyard.
On the battlefield, only the unstable crackle of the dying portal and the distant popping of isolated fires broke the silence.
Anything still capable of moving—whether the rare surviving Chitauri soldier or the battered Avengers—stood frozen in place, minds wiped blank.
Tony Stark hovered in the air, staring at the empty space where his tower had been. All that remained was a massive, smoking, mirror-smooth hole in the ground.
His lips trembled, but no words came out.
Billions in assets, cutting-edge tech, the pride of Iron Man—
All of it reduced to a bad joke by a single step.
Steve Rogers knelt on one knee amidst the rubble at the crater's edge, his vibranium shield buried deep in a cracked slab of concrete as he used it to prop himself up.
He watched the bald man at the bottom of the pit stroll upward as if he were on a Sunday walk, his only goal a small hotpot shop.
Then Steve looked around at the cityscape that had just been erased as if by a god with an eraser.
A sense of absurdity and helplessness unlike anything he'd ever known washed over him.
What had they been protecting, exactly?
In front of this being, all their desperate struggles felt like nothing more than ants fighting over a breadcrumb.
On the ruins of a half-collapsed building, Natasha Romanoff and Clint Barton leaned on each other to stay upright, faces white as chalk.
As top-tier agents, they'd seen more horror and betrayal than most people could imagine.
But this—this went beyond anything they'd ever categorized as "power" or "destruction."
This wasn't a battle.
This was someone with absurd strength cleaning up the environment because he was annoyed by the noise.
Farther away, Hulk's massive green frame trembled.
He looked down at his own fists—the fists that had always been his absolute pride—then up at the crater and the tiny bald figure at its heart.
A low, confused moan rumbled in his throat, the Hulk's rage drowned in something new and alien: insignificance.
As Saitama neared the top of the crater, only a few dozen meters from "Fragrant Hotpot," it finally seemed like he was going to reach his goal—
Whoosh!
Buzz!
A streak of dark-gold light tore through the air, shrieking like a blade splitting the sky. It carried a suffocating aura of annihilation and came stabbing out of the collapsing space portal at a speed thought, not eyes, could barely track.
Its target wasn't Saitama.
It was the Mind Scepter, still stuck in the rubble at the crater's edge, the blue gem at its tip glowing faintly.
It all happened too fast.
Before anyone could react, the dark-gold light slammed straight into the scepter.
Clang!!!
The impact rang out across the whole city, a deafening chime of metal on metal like some furious cosmic bell.
The Mind Scepter shuddered violently. The gem at its tip flared with blinding blue light as the whole weapon was knocked loose, sent spinning wildly into the air.
Like a baseball launched by a pro pitcher, it whirled end over end, a streak of blue trailing behind it as it shot away from the crater, away from Saitama—
Out toward the depths of Brooklyn.
In a heartbeat, it was gone from sight.
"The Stone!" Tony blurted.
"That attack just now…" Steve's eyes narrowed as he snapped his gaze up to the portal. "It came from the same place as the flagship. Was it something fired from the other side before the ship was destroyed? Or…"
He swallowed.
"Or maybe Thanos isn't completely gone."
The portal flashed violently, edges fraying. At the moment the scepter was knocked away, it seemed to "sigh," letting out one last deep hum as its blue glow guttered.
Then it began to contract, folding inward on itself.
In seconds, it shrank down to a point and vanished from New York's sky, leaving behind only ordinary blue atmosphere—and the massive crater under it.
The wormhole was closed.
The immediate threat above New York had passed.
But no one felt relieved.
Their hearts sank instead.
The Mind Stone had been blasted away by that mysterious golden attack. Somewhere out in the sprawl of the city, the scepter had fallen.
Its power was too great. If it landed in the hands of the wrong person…
"That was Corvus Glaive's Extinction Spear."
Loki's voice slithered up from beneath a pile of broken steel and concrete—weak, venomous, like a snake dragging itself out of hell.
He shoved aside a twisted steel beam and revealed half his face, smeared with blood and dust, eyes burning with hatred.
He locked his gaze on Saitama and gave a hoarse, hateful laugh.
"Ha… ha… Bald man… you think you've won?" Loki coughed up blood, but his voice was full of bitter glee. "The great Thanos… his will isn't something a low creature like you can comprehend. Corvus has already descended. Proxima Midnight, Ebony Maw, Black Dwarf… the Black Order now walks this world."
"They'll find the scepter. They'll take the Stone's power… and they'll make you, and this entire planet, pay the highest price. You think you've destroyed the Sanctuary II, ruined my plans…"
"But all you've really done… is unleash a far more terrible vengeance."
"The curse of Asgard will haunt you forever!"
His voice cracked into a wild, broken shriek on the last word.
Then a wash of green magic light enveloped his battered body. The glow rippled like water—and where Loki had lain a heartbeat before, there was nothing.
He'd spent the last of his divine power to trigger an illusion escape.
"Loki!"
Steve tried to go after him, but his injuries and the chaos around them pinned him in place.
"Corvus Glaive? Black Order?" Tony's expression turned even uglier. "JARVIS! Track that impact. I want every satellite, every camera—trace the scepter's trajectory and flag any abnormal energy signatures on that path!"
The crisis wasn't over.
If anything, it had just gotten more complicated and dangerous.
Thanos had been erased along with his flagship—at least for now.
But his deadliest lieutenants, the Black Order, had slipped through while everyone was distracted.
The Mind Stone was gone, and if those cosmic butchers got their hands on it…
The consequences would be unthinkable.
Once again, everyone's eyes were drawn—uncontrollably, with a mix of dread, awe, and raw confusion—to the bald figure nearing the hotpot shop.
What would he do?
This man, whose strength could erase flagships and cities but whose heart was fixed on cheap dinner—would he chase down the scepter he'd accidentally shaken loose?
Would he go fight these new enemies from the stars?
Saitama stopped in front of "Fragrant Hotpot."
The cracked, dust-covered glass door rattled as he gave it a push.
It didn't budge. Locked from the inside.
He frowned and leaned in, pressing his face to the filthy glass and squinting into the gloom.
Inside, the restaurant was pitch-black. Tables and chairs lay overturned, the place a wreck.
It was obvious the owner had long since run for their life.
Saitama let out a long, dispirited sigh.
His shoulders slumped; his whole posture radiated pure "today really sucks" energy.
"Figures… they're closed," he muttered.
He turned around, putting his back to the enormous crater, the ruins of the city, the stunned faces of the heroes—
And the Mind Scepter, now somewhere out in New York, ready to fuel a brand-new storm of blood and chaos.
He pinched his chin, his smooth head catching the last light of the sunset as he frowned in deep thought over a suddenly very serious problem.
"I'm out of discount eggs too…" Saitama grumbled, scratching his head in frustration. "So now… what am I supposed to eat for dinner?"
He ignored the kilometer-wide crater he'd stomped into the city.
Ignored Loki's escape.
Ignored the scepter streaking off into the depths of the metropolis.
Because right now, to him—
The question of what was for dinner was the most important issue in the entire universe.
(End of Chapter)
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