The sky over Z-City tore.
It didn't crack with thunder or shatter like glass. It tore like old paper, a jagged, ink-black wound splitting the mundane blue. From the rift, something began to fall—not rain, not debris, but letters. Garbled characters and thick, black redaction bars drifted down like poisoned snow.
Then came the scream. It wasn't sound. It was the feeling of a thought being forcibly erased.
Genos hit the pavement first, a streak of polished chrome and gold. His incinerator cannons were already roaring, twin streams of liquid sun blasting into the anomaly that now unfolded from the tear.
It was a monster, but it was also a mistake. Its form glitched, a half-rendered kaiju silhouette overwritten with flickering lines of corrupted code. One moment it had a thousand obsidian eyes; the next, just a single, censor-bar slit. Its roar was the static of a dead channel.
"Threat designation: Abyssal. Classification: Unknown," Genos reported to an empty line, his internal comms fizzling. "Engaging."
His beams struck the creature's chest. For a split second, they seemed to connect, boiling the inky hide.
Then the monster's censor-bar eye pulsed once.
[Attack: Incinerate. Outcome: Nullified.]
The words appeared not on a screen, but in the air, a colorless, system font that hung for a moment before fading. Genos's roaring cannons went silent. The fire didn't just extinguish; it vanished from the last three seconds of history. It had never been fired.
Genos froze, processors screaming as he cross-referenced his own memory with observable reality. A contradiction. A fatal error.
The Redactor—a being born of erasure—swung a limb that was less an arm and more of a moving black box, a walking redaction. It didn't move through space; it deleted the space between it and Genos.
Clang.
A shopping bag dropped to the asphalt. A single green onion rolled out.
"Oh. Monster."
Saitama stood between Genos and the black bar of un-creation, one hand still raised from having just flicked the attack away. It hadn't exploded. It had just… stopped. He looked at the creature, head cocked.
"You're new," he said, his voice flat with a familiar lack of interest.
The Redactor paused, its glitching form trying to process this impossibility. This man wasn't in the script. He was a typo. An anomaly. Its head twitched, and new text bloomed in the air.
[Identify: Anomaly. Designation: Subject-S.]
[Scanning Narrative Weight…]
[ERROR. FILE NOT FOUND.]
[Action: Edit.]
The Redactor's entire body seemed to sharpen, its hazy form coalescing into a lance of pure void aimed directly at Saitama's existence. It wasn't an attack on his body, but on his concept. It was the Editor's backspace key.
Saitama just scratched his cheek. "You're making a mess of the street. And I think you broke my egg."
He glanced down. The carton was indeed cracked.
A sigh. "Bargain day is over, too."
The lance of nothingness struck him.
Nothing happened.
The air didn't shimmer. Time didn't warp. The world didn't tremble. The lance of pure deletion, an attack that could unwrite a law of physics, simply broke against his plain, unconcerned face.
The Redactor froze. The text in the air flickered wildly.
[EDIT FAILED.]
[EDIT FAILED.]
[EDIT FAILED. REASON: CANON IS TOO DENSE.]
Saitama took a step forward. "So, are you going to pay for the groceries?"
He didn't wait for an answer. He moved, his body a simple, clear statement in a world suddenly filled with garbled prose. The Redactor was an edit, a violation of the story.
Saitama was a period. The undeniable, un-editable end of the sentence.
He threw a punch.
It wasn't a Serious Punch. It wasn't even a real punch. It was a half-hearted, annoyed jab, the kind you'd throw at a buzzing fly.
But as his fist traveled, reality buckled around it. The falling text, the ripped sky, the ambient sense of erasure—it all bent toward his knuckles, drawn into the absolute certainty of his action. The punch didn't just carry force. It carried an axiomatic truth.
His fist connected.
The Redactor didn't explode. It didn't scream.
It was corrected.
The corrupted code, the black bars, the glitching form—it was all smoothed over, flattened out. The creature was deleted, but not by its own power. It was overwritten by something more fundamental.
The tear in the sky sealed itself with the sound of a closing book. The weird, text-like snow evaporated. The sense of dread vanished. The sun was just the sun again.
Genos rebooted his optical sensors, staring at the empty space where the monster had been. He looked at his Master, who was now kneeling to inspect his groceries.
"Master, your power is…"
"My eggs are ruined," Saitama muttered, ignoring him. He stood up, holding the crushed carton with a profound sense of disappointment. "This sucks."
He started walking home, leaving his disciple to analyze a phenomenon that no science could ever explain.
[SYSTEM ALERT]
[CANON INTEGRITY BREACH DETECTED IN SECTOR 7-OPM]
The blue notification window shimmered into existence before Sung Jinwoo's eyes. He stood in the silent throne room of his domain, the infinite shadows stretching out around him.
He was alone, yet the message felt like an invasion. He had long since mastered the System, repurposed it as his own. Unauthorized alerts were not supposed to be possible.
[A Redactor of the Null Editor has been neutralized.]
[Source of neutralization… analyzing…]
[Result: [REDACTED] Punch.]
Jinwoo's eyes narrowed. He'd felt it moments ago—a tremor not in the world, but in the very foundation of causality. A story had been assaulted. And something had pushed back with impossible force.
[Threat Level of Redactor: Monarch-Class.]
[Threat Level of Neutralizing Agent: Unquantifiable.]
[Acquiring residual narrative data…]
A small, flickering wisp of black smoke appeared before the throne. It was weak, almost transparent, a dying echo of the defeated Redactor. It was trying to dissipate, to un-exist fully.
Any other being would have seen nothing. But Jinwoo was the Monarch of Shadows. He saw the remnant of a soul. A record.
"Arise."
The word was quiet, yet it carried the weight of an absolute decree. He reached out, not with his hand, but with his will, forcing his authority onto the foreign concept.
The System fought him.
[SYSTEM ERROR: Cannot extract shadow.]
[Target possesses anti-narrative properties. There is no story to record.]
Jinwoo's brow furrowed. No story? Impossible. Everything left an echo.
He pushed harder, his own mana—an abyss of deep violet—enveloping the wisp. He wasn't just commanding it to rise. He was commanding existence itself to recognize that this thing had been real and therefore belonged to him now.
"I said. Arise."
The purple energy flared, consuming the smoke. The System windows went haywire, lines of text scrolling at blinding speed before a final, definitive message snapped into place.
[SYSTEM OVERRIDE: MONARCH'S DOMINION COMPELS EXISTENCE.]
[EXTRACTION SUCCESSFUL.]
From the ground, a new shadow knelt. It was not a beast or a knight. It was humanoid but featureless, a silhouette made of shifting, whispering text. A Redactor, now bound to his will. A piece of the enemy's arsenal, stolen.
Jinwoo felt the connection form, and with it, a torrent of memories that were not memories. They were concepts. Purpose.
He saw it. A glimpse through his new soldier's non-eyes.
He saw a desk that stretched across a galaxy. He saw a hand, neither flesh nor light, holding a pen filled with the darkness between stars. He saw a book, open to its final page.
The being at the desk was not writing a story.
It was proofreading the universe, crossing out every line it deemed an error. Worlds, heroes, gods—all reduced to a neat, black bar of redaction.
The vision faded, but the chilling understanding remained.
This wasn't a war for territory or power. It was a war for the right to exist. The Null Editor was coming, not with an army, but with an ending.
And their world was next on the page.