The trip back to the Black Bulls' base was eerily quiet.
Finral's portal, when he finally managed to open one, was unstable. He felt like he was punching through a wall of static. The ambient mana in the Clover Kingdom had been violently, fundamentally shaken. It was buzzing like a plucked string.
When they stepped through, the rest of the squad was waiting, drawn by the reverberations they had all felt.
Magna pointed a trembling finger out the window. "What was that?! The sky just… cracked!"
Vanessa had a hand pressed to her head. "All my red threads… they're in a knot."
Yami walked past them all, his face a grim mask. He didn't speak. He went straight to the liquor cabinet, poured a glass, and downed it in one go.
Noelle and Asta, still covered in dust, found seats and sank into them, their minds blank with shock. The scale of what they had just witnessed was too large to process. A punch that had literally parted the heavens.
Saitama, meanwhile, walked over and picked up the bruised apple he'd left on a table before the mission. He looked at it. "Looks okay." He took a bite.
Genos approached him, his blue core pulsing calmly. He had filmed the entire event in high resolution, running thermal, kinetic, and extradimensional spectrum analysis. His processors were still trying, and failing, to quantify the data.
"An exemplary display of overwhelming force, Sensei," he said with a formal bow. "The threat has been comprehensively neutralized."
"It was just a big bug," Saitama mumbled through a mouthful of apple.
Luck, for the first time, wasn't smiling. He was watching Saitama with a wide-eyed intensity, like a mathematician who had just been shown proof that one plus one equals a fish. The world no longer made sense.
"Captain," Noelle finally managed to say, her voice shaky. "What are we going to report?"
This was the question hanging over them all. How do you report a power like that? "Subject neutralized a kingdom-level threat with one punch" was not a line item on any standard mission form.
Yami set his glass down with a heavy thud. "We report the truth." He looked around the room, his dark eyes lingering on each of them. "An unidentified creature was devouring the mana near Saussy village. We engaged. It had a larger form. We destroyed it. Mission accomplished."
"But… how?" Finral stammered. "They'll ask how! That thing split the sky from here to the Spade Kingdom border!"
"I handled it," Yami said, his voice leaving no room for argument. He tapped his own chest. "My magic. Pushed myself past my limits. Made a big boom. Got lucky. The end."
The lie was so bald-faced, so completely inadequate to explain what had happened, that it was almost brilliant. He was taking credit for an act of god.
Asta looked stunned. "But Captain, you can't—"
"I can," Yami cut him off. "And I am."
He turned his gaze to Saitama. It was a long, appraising stare.
"Listen up, you lot. Especially you." He pointed at Saitama. "A power like that… it doesn't attract praise. It attracts fear. Greed. The nobles, the other kingdoms, the devils in the shadows… they see something they can't control, they don't celebrate it. They try to chain it, dissect it, or destroy it."
He let the words sink in.
"This man," he said, jabbing a thumb at Saitama, "is now a Black Bull. That makes him one of us. That makes him my responsibility. And I'm not letting some powdered wig in the capital turn him into a science experiment."
He was protecting him. In the bluntest, most Yami way possible, he was throwing his own reputation, his own formidable shadow, over Saitama to hide him in plain sight.
"From now on, anything weird that happens, anything that breaks the rules of magic… that was me. Understood?"
The squad looked at each other. They understood. They were a family of misfits. This was just their newest, most profoundly misfit member. Protecting their own was the one rule they never broke.
"Good," Yami grunted. He picked up a strange, clam-shell-like device from his table. A magic communication tool. He keyed it. "Yami Sukehiro, reporting to the Wizard King."
A moment of static, and then a calm, curious voice answered. "I'm here, Yami. I assume you have something to tell me about the rather… dramatic weather."
Yami leaned back in his chair, putting his boots up on the table. "Yeah. About that. You're not going to believe this, but I punched a bug really hard."
In the Wizard King's office, Julius Novachrono listened to Yami's deadpan, completely unbelievable report. He held his own communicator tightly, looking out his window at the slowly mending scar in the sky.
He saw every possible future. He modeled every outcome. But the existence of this man, Saitama, was a blind spot, an unknown variable that made every calculation worthless.
Yami was lying, obviously. And Julius knew it.
A lesser man would have been afraid. A lesser king would have seen a threat that needed to be contained.
But Julius Novachrono was fascinated.
Magic was the governing law of his world. And a man who lived entirely outside that law, a man whose grimoire was a blank slate and whose power defied every known principle, was not a threat to the world.
He was a threat to the rules.
And to a man obsessed with discovering new and interesting kinds of magic, that was the most exciting thing in the universe.
"Is that so, Yami?" Julius said, a slow, dangerous smile spreading across his face. "A very impressive punch indeed. Please, do be sure to file a detailed report. I'll be very interested in reading… all the specifics."
He hung up, the smile still on his face. He knew Yami was hiding him. Fine. Let him. It was a better crucible for observation than any royal laboratory.
He needed to see this man for himself.