The aftermath of the "Tachikawa Incident" was a week of tense, suffocating silence.
There were no official reports. No reprimands. No debriefings. The civil war hadn't ended in a treaty; it had simply... evaporated. The entire affair, from Hoshina's coup to Saitama's intervention, was buried under a mountain of Level-10 "Eyes Only" classifications.
The factions were still there, but the fire had gone out of their conflict. Hoshina retreated to his lab, his radical fervor replaced by a quiet, haunted introspection. Kikoru drilled her squad with a grim, joyless intensity, the arrogance of the prodigy gone, replaced by the frustration of a student who had finally realized the scope of her own ignorance. Mina Ashiro, recalled from a Kaiju battle that turned out to be a pathetic dud, found herself trying to hold together a broken, demoralized command structure.
They had all played their parts in a grand, dramatic chess match, only to have a bored god walk up to the board and flick all the pieces to the floor. Their ambitions and ideologies felt small and foolish.
And at the heart of it all, Kafka Hibino sat on a familiar park bench.
He was a man without a category. The Defense Force hadn't officially declared him a deserter, but they hadn't welcomed him back either. He was a non-entity, a living, breathing classified document. He was free, but he was also completely adrift.
Saitama sat beside him, finishing off a can of coffee. For once, their comfortable silence was tinged with an unspoken question.
"So, what's next?" Kafka finally asked, the same question he'd asked a week ago, but this time it had a different weight.
"I dunno," Saitama said, crushing the can. "Grocery sale on Saturday. Might check that out."
Kafka let out a small, tired laugh. "No, I mean... for me. What do I do now? My dream of being in the Defense Force... it's over. Hoshina will never let me go. Mina will always see me as something to protect. Kikoru sees me as... I don't even know what she sees me as. And the Director General sees me as a problem that won't go away. I don't fit."
"So don't," Saitama said simply.
Kafka looked at him, confused.
Saitama stood up and stretched. He looked out at the city, at the cars moving, at the people walking, at the mundane, beautiful peace of a normal afternoon. A peace he had, once again, reluctantly secured.
"You've been trying to squeeze yourself into their little boxes," he said, his back to Kafka. "The 'soldier' box. The 'hero' box. Even the 'monster' box. They're all too small. It's dumb."
He turned, his face for once not bored, but carrying a faint, simple clarity. "Remember what I said? Show up. Punch the bad guy. Leave. You don't need a uniform for that. You don't need permission."
He was offering him a choice. Not just a plan, but a philosophy.
Saitama's own heroic journey had been a long, slow process of accepting his own, unwanted isolation. He had tried to be part of the Hero Association, to play by their rules, and it had brought him nothing but frustration. He was happiest when he was just a guy, doing a thing, for his own simple reasons. He was extending that same, hard-won freedom to Kafka.
This was Saitama's Choice. Not a grand, cosmic decision presented by a final boss, but a quiet, personal one offered to a friend on a park bench. Do you keep fighting for a place in a system that will never accept you, or do you accept what you are and forge your own path?
Kafka looked down at his own hands. Hands that could clean up monster guts. Hands that could punch through Kaiju armor. They weren't the hands of a soldier or a monster. They were just... his.
He thought of the family in the apartment complex he had saved. The look in their eyes wasn't reverence or fear. It was just... gratitude. They hadn't cared about his uniform or his species. They had just cared that someone was there.
A slow smile spread across his face, the first genuine smile he'd had in months. "Punch the bad guy. Leave," he repeated, testing the words. They felt... right. They felt simple. Free.
His dream of joining the Defense Force, the dream that had defined and tormented him for over a decade, finally, quietly, died. And in its place, a new, more honest purpose was born. He would not be Numbered Weapon 8. He wouldn't even be Kaiju No. 8.
He would just be Kafka. A guy who could turn into a monster. And who sometimes helped people. It was a weird, messy, and completely undefined role. It was his.
"Good," Saitama said with a nod, as if the matter were now completely settled. "That's sorted then. You still owe me for that takoyaki, by the way."
Kafka laughed, a real, genuine laugh. "Yeah. Yeah, I do."
A new era was beginning. Not just for the fractured Defense Force, but for Kafka. He was no longer a piece to be fought over, a prize to be won. He was a free agent. A monstrous, rogue hero operating in the shadows of the world's most powerful, and laziest, being.
His struggle was no longer about fitting in; it was now about carving his own legend. A legend that would likely never be written down, a story that would be whispered in the same forums that spoke of a Silent God. The story of a mysterious, monster-like protector who showed up when things were at their worst. The Monster's Advocate had found his true calling. He was no longer Saitama's reluctant sidekick. He was his first, and only, partner. And their strange, quiet, city-saving adventures were just beginning. The final, foundational pieces of the new world were now in place.