Fear, cold and absolute, locked Noelle's limbs.
Her entire life, magic was her identity. Her failure, her strength, her noble burden. Now, facing a creature that simply unmade magic, she was nothing more than a girl in the path of a monster.
The gray, swirling vortex in the bug's maw promised a quiet, colorless end.
She saw Asta, a desperate black blur on the edge of her vision. Too far.
A searing beam of white-hot energy screamed past her, impacting the creature's head.
BOOM!
The incinerator blast from Genos's cannon struck with enough force to melt steel. It didn't. The energy seemed to sink into the gray chitin, causing it to glow a dull, angry red for a moment before fading completely. The bug didn't even slow down.
"Energy absorption confirmed," Genos's voice stated flatly from the perimeter. "Physical intervention required."
The monster was on her.
Its foul breath, smelling of dust and ozone, washed over her. The vortex was inches from her face.
Then, a defiant scream. "NOT YET, YOU DON'T!"
Asta slid into place between her and the bug, a frantic shield of stubborn will. He drove the tip of the Demon-Slayer Sword directly into the swirling void.
The effect was instantaneous.
The vortex didn't just stop; it imploded. Asta's Anti-Magic negated the very concept of the creature's 'eating' ability. But the physical momentum was still there.
The monster's head, a solid wall of unnatural biology, slammed into the flat of the blade. The impact sent Asta flying, tumbling end over end with a cry of pain before crashing into the wall of a nearby house.
He'd saved her, but he was out of the fight.
The bug, enraged at having its meal interrupted, let out a chittering screech that sounded like scraping stone. It reared its head back, ignoring the downed Asta, and prepared to strike Noelle again.
This time, the darkness answered.
"Dark Cloaked Dimension Slash."
A sliver of pure, void-black magic cut through the air, aimed for the creature's neck. But as Yami's signature attack neared the monster, it frayed at the edges, the darkness thinning to a hazy gray before splashing harmlessly against its hide.
Yami cursed, landing beside Noelle in a low crouch, his katana now glowing with the physical reinforcement of his Ki. "So it really does eat everything."
The bug lunged at the new, more powerful-looking meal. Yami met it head-on. His blade scraped against the chitin with a high-pitched shriek, carving a shallow trench but failing to do any real damage. The sheer force of the blow drove him back, his boots digging furrows into the dirt.
Even the Captain of the Black Bulls couldn't land a decisive blow.
They were all fighting a thing that existed outside their rules. A thing that won just by being near them.
The monster towered over Yami and Noelle, readying the strike that would end them both.
"Hey."
The voice was conversational. Bored, even.
Saitama stood twenty feet away, right beside the fruit stand he'd been looking at earlier. He held a dusty, slightly bruised apple in one hand.
The monster paused, its many eyes trying to process the bald man who had no scent of magic, no threat profile. He was just… there.
"You're making a mess," Saitama said, taking a bite of the apple. He chewed thoughtfully. "And you're really ugly."
It was all the reason he needed.
He took a single, casual step forward. He wasn't fast like Luck, or blurry like Asta. One moment he was by the fruit stand, the next he was standing directly in front of the bug's hideous face.
He drew back a fist.
There was no magical flair. No burst of Ki. No dramatic announcement.
It was just a punch. A "Normal Punch."
His glove made a flat, dull thwack as it connected with the creature's head.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then, cracks spiderwebbed across the creature's entire fifty-foot length. Not just from the point of impact, but everywhere at once. The light-sucking gray fractured, revealing nothing underneath but more grayness.
With a sound like a sandcastle collapsing in a soft breeze, the entire monster disintegrated. It fell apart into a heaping pile of fine, gray dust, leaving a monstrous silhouette on the ground.
The world rushed back in. The colors of the village seemed to brighten. The oppressive silence was broken by the sound of the wind.
Saitama blew some dust off his glove. "Gross."
The Black Bulls stared. Asta pushed himself up from the rubble, his eyes wide. Noelle was still trying to remember how to breathe.
Yami let out a low whistle. He'd seen the punch that erased a devil's singularity. He thought he was prepared. He wasn't. To see that same, world-ending power used with the same effort one might use to swat a fly was deeply, profoundly unsettling.
"Well," Yami finally managed. "That saves some time."
From the nearby house, the cellar door creaked open. The little girl peeked out, her terrified gaze landing on the massive pile of dust in the village square. A flicker of hope touched her face.
"You… you got it," she whispered.
Saitama looked over, about to give a noncommittal shrug.
The girl's face fell again, her small body trembling with a fresh wave of horror. She wasn't looking at the dust. She was looking past it, into the deep woods from which the creature had come.
"Oh no," she whimpered, her voice cracking with despair.
"You only broke one of its legs."