The air in the Capital didn't smell like oxygen anymore; it smelled like ozone, scorched asphalt, and the metallic tang of blood. Above, the sky was a bruised purple, choked by the soot of a thousand fires.
"FALL BACK! SECURE THE PERIMETER!"
A Hunter named Ryjon screamed, his voice cracking. Before he could take another step, a Mid-Tier Stalker named Ogus—a multi-limbed nightmare of chitin and eyes—slammed a serrated claw down. Ryjon's leg snapped like a dry twig. He didn't even have time to scream before the shockwave of the beast's movement sent him tumbling into the ruins of a nearby bakery. The heart of the local market, once bustling with life, was now nothing but a graveyard of brick and dust.
This was the new reality. Sleep was a luxury. Survival was a coin flip.
The Government had established the Monster Hunters to keep the peace, but they were playing a losing game. Most recruits were barely trained to handle Low-Tiers—pests that could kill a man but not a city. Today, the game had changed.
An Extreme-Tier Colossus had breached the outer wall. It stood forty stories tall, a mountain of obsidian flesh and glowing red veins. With a single, lazy step, it leveled an entire apartment complex. The sound wasn't a crash; it was a dull, heavy thud that swallowed the screams of hundreds instantly. People weren't just dying; they were being erased from existence.
"It's no use!" Jackson, a veteran Hunter with fifteen years of scars, spat blood as he dropped his shattered claymore. The blade, reinforced with mana-steel, had snapped against the Colossus's ankle. "This thing is a city-killer! Where are the Elites? Where is the air support?"
"They're gone, sir!" Barto, a rookie whose armor was three sizes too big, sobbed as he clutched a useless pistol. "The North Sector was wiped out in minutes!"
The Colossus let out a low-frequency hum that vibrated the very marrow in their bones. It raised a fist the size of a cathedral, the air around it shimmering with pure destructive energy. It was the end.
Then, the wind stopped.
The roaring fires seemed to freeze. The chaotic symphony of war fell into an eerie, suffocating silence.
A lone man walked past the retreating soldiers. He wasn't wearing the standard-issue Kevlar-weave or carrying a shimmering relic blade. He wore a rumpled hoodie, faded jeans, and a pair of cheap convenience-store bags dangled from his left hand. He looked like he was coming home from a grocery run, not a war zone.
"Who is that idiot?" Barto gasped, wiping soot from his eyes. "Hey! Get back! You're going to get turned into paste!"
The man didn't look back. He didn't even pick up his pace. He stopped ten feet in front of the towering shadow of the Colossus, his expression not one of fear, but of profound, soul-crushing boredom. He checked his watch and sighed.
"You're late," the man muttered, his voice carrying clearly through the silence. "The ice cream is starting to melt."
The Colossus roared, a sound that shattered every window within a three-block radius. It lunged, its massive fist descending like a falling moon. The shadow swallowed the man whole.
The man didn't take a stance. He didn't draw a hidden weapon. He simply raised his right hand, tucked his middle finger behind his thumb, and gave the air a casual, annoyed flick.
BOOM.
The sound was louder than the monster's roar. It was the sound of the atmosphere being torn apart.
The Colossus didn't just die—it evaporated. A conical shockwave of pure force erupted from the man's finger, parting the clouds in the sky for fifty miles and scouring the street clean of rubble. The "Extreme-Tier" threat vanished into a rain of shimmering golden sparks, its massive biological signature wiped from the Earth in a microsecond.
The soldiers stared, their mouths agape. The survivors in the wreckage stopped crying, stunned into a different kind of silence.
The man looked at his grocery bag, checked the seal on his carton of mint chocolate chip, and started walking again. He stepped over a piece of the monster's charred horn as if it were a common pebble.
In a world defined by tiers—from the Low-Tier pests to the planetary threats of the Divine and the myths of the Godly—one man stood at the peak. They didn't call him a hero. He didn't want the title.
They called him The Strongest.
And he was just trying to get home before his groceries spoiled.
The golden sparks of the Colossus's remains fell like snow, landing on the man's shoulders and melting into nothing. Behind him, the soldiers began to cheer, a hesitant roar of relief that grew louder by the second. They reached out to touch his clothes, shouting questions, calling him a savior, a god, a miracle.
The man didn't stop. He didn't wave. He didn't even smile.
As he turned the corner into a narrow, shadowed alleyway—away from the cameras and the weeping crowds—his shoulders finally slumped. The "boredom" on his face cracked, revealing something much sharper: exhaustion. Not the kind of tiredness you get from a long day of work, but the kind that settles into your soul when you realize you're forever standing on the outside looking in.
He leaned his back against a grime-streaked brick wall and let out a long, shuddering breath. His hand, the one that had just erased a city-killer, was trembling.
It wasn't fear. It was the weight of it.
He looked down at the grocery bag in his hand. The plastic handle had stretched thin from the force of the shockwave, nearly snapping. He reached inside and pulled out a small, crumpled photograph he kept tucked in his wallet. In the photo, he was standing with three other people—Hunters he used to call his team. They were all laughing. They were all wearing cheap, dented armor. They were all weak.
And they were all dead.
"Another one, guys," he whispered, his voice thick and hollow. "Another one I could have saved if I'd just been a second faster. Or if I hadn't been the only one left to do it."
He closed his eyes, and for a moment, he wasn't the man who could part the clouds. He was just a guy who was tired of being the final fail-safe. He was tired of waiting for a threat big enough to actually make him feel alive again—and terrified that if that threat ever came, there would be no world left to save.
Every time he flicked his finger, the gap between him and the rest of humanity grew wider. To the world, he was a monument. To himself, he was a ghost haunting a battlefield that never ended.
He shoved the photo back into his wallet, wiped a streak of soot from his forehead, and straightened his hoodie. He had to keep moving. If he stayed still for too long, the weight of the silence would crush him harder than any monster ever could.
With a heavy sigh, he stepped out of the alley and back into the mundane world of traffic and flickering streetlights, disappearing into the crowd before anyone could realize that the world's strongest man was also its loneliest.