A heavy, grinding rumble echoed from the forest. It wasn't a roar; it was the sound of the world itself being scraped away.
The ground began to tremble.
Yami grabbed the little girl, pulling her behind him as Noelle erected a wavering, mana-starved shield. Asta scrambled to his feet, gritting his teeth. "What does she mean, a leg?!"
The answer became horrifyingly clear.
At the edge of the forest, the treeline began to move. Trees cracked and fell as something titanic rose from behind them. It wasn't a bigger bug. It was a continent of a bug. The fifty-foot creature they had just fought was, quite literally, just one of hundreds of appendages scuttling beneath a body so vast it was shrouded in the dust cloud of its own rising.
And as its true form became visible, the sky above it began to desaturate. The bright afternoon blue faded to a dull, washed-out gray. The greens of the forest, the reds of the roof tiles, the very color of the air seemed to drain away toward the colossal creature.
This was no monster. It was a blight. A mobile patch of entropy that consumed reality itself.
"Fall back! Finral, get a portal ready now!" Yami yelled, his voice tight with an urgency he rarely showed. This was beyond a fight. This was an extinction event.
Genos's new blue core flared. "Mass is incalculable. It is not an organism but a mobile null-field. All offensive measures are projected to have a 0% success rate."
He was already formulating a plan. He could overclock his core to its absolute limit, creating a meltdown of pure energy. It wouldn't kill the creature, but the resulting explosion might buy the others a few seconds to escape. A worthy trade.
The colossal creature didn't even seem to notice them. It was simply… advancing. The village of Saussy, and everything in its path, would be erased. Not destroyed. Erased.
Asta looked at the monster, then at his sword. He could negate its hunger, but what good was swatting one fly in a swarm the size of a mountain? It was hopeless.
Despair, cold and final, began to settle over them.
Saitama watched the sky turn gray. He looked at the trembling little girl behind Yami's legs. He saw the grim, sacrificial light in Genos's core.
He let out a small, tired sigh. "Oh. So it's a bigger bug."
He set his half-eaten apple down carefully on the remains of the fruit stand. "This is a real pain."
Yami shot him a look. "Baldy, now is not the time for—"
Saitama cracked his knuckles.
The sound was lost in the grinding of the monster, but the shift in his presence was not. The blank, empty aura Yami had sensed before was still there, but now it felt different. It was the calm at the eye of a hurricane. The terrifying silence of a pressure vessel about to rupture.
For the first time since they'd met him, Saitama's face was not bored. It was not annoyed.
It was serious.
He crouched, his body coiling like a spring. The dirt beneath his red boots cracked and spiderwebbed under the strain.
"Okay," Saitama said, his voice a low murmur that somehow cut through the din. "Guess I'll end this."
He took a breath. "Serious Series."
He pushed off the ground.
The sound barrier didn't just break; it atomized. A sonic boom tore through the village, shattering the windows of every remaining house. A crater erupted where he had been standing.
He shot upward like a cannonball, a golden blur against a graying sky, rocketing toward the mountainous creature.
"Serious Punch."
His fist, held out before him, connected with the creature's immense, reality-devouring hide.
There was no sound on impact. Only pressure.
An invisible wave of force erupted from his glove, a perfect line of kinetic energy that defied physics. It didn't just punch through the monster. It passed through its entire body, through the miles of gray sky behind it, and continued onward.
The world split in two.
The clouds above, for as far as the eye could see, were torn apart. On one side was the dull, lifeless gray of the monster's influence. On the other, pristine, brilliant blue. The dividing line was so sharp, so perfect, it looked like a tear in the fabric of the heavens.
Then, the color flooded back.
The punch didn't just destroy the creature's body; it annihilated its entire reality-consuming effect. Blue returned to the sky, green to the trees. The wind started blowing again.
The creature's body, from front to back, disintegrated into a fine gray dust that was instantly scattered by the shockwave of the punch.
Down below, the Black Bulls were thrown off their feet, not by an explosion, but by the sheer displacement of air. They shielded their eyes as a gale-force wind roared over them for a full ten seconds.
When it was over, they picked themselves up, staring at the sky.
At the perfect, impossible canyon carved through the clouds.
Saitama landed softly in the middle of the village, not a speck of dust on his suit. He looked at his fist, then up at the clear sky.
"Guess that was the main body."
In his office, Julius Novachrono dropped a stack of papers. The hands of the grand clock on his wall, which charted the flow of magical time for the entire kingdom, spun wildly for a moment before settling.
He stumbled to his window, his face pale, his heart pounding with a mixture of exhilaration and pure terror.
He couldn't see the village from here. But he saw the effect. He saw the sky split. He had felt it. A moment where the fate of the entire kingdom was weighed, found wanting, and then utterly rewritten by a force so far beyond magic it might as well have been the hand of a creator.
The Wizard King, the master of time itself, looked up at the impossible rift in the clouds, a wound on the face of his reality.
"What… in the name of the first king," he breathed, "have you done?"