After a grueling day and night of travel—punctuated by frequent, massive meals—the party finally pushed through the torrential deluge of the Heavy Rain Zone. Passing through the final curtain of water was like stepping into another world.
Before them stretched an immense, rolling plain, its scale so vast it seemed like the exposed vertebrae of a slumbering planetary titan. This was Horse King Hill. Scattered across the undulating landscape stood the colossal, bizarre forms of Air Trees, organic skyscrapers whose honeycombed trunks ceaselessly exhaled torrents of oxygen-rich gas.
Yet, paradoxically, the air was thin. Dangerously, lethally thin.
For this was the domain of the Horse King Heracles, a mythic species that fed not on grass or flesh, but on the very atmosphere itself. A single inhalation from the adult Herr Heracles could draw in the equivalent volume of the entire Atlantic Ocean—300 million cubic kilometers of air. The land existed in a state of perpetual, voracious low pressure.
Komatsu gasped, each breath a desperate, shallow rasp. His legs felt encased in concrete, knees buckling with every step. The world swam at the edges of his vision.
"Komatsu!" Toriko stopped, his own breath labored. "Your condition—"
"I-I'm… fine!" Komatsu forced a smile, his lips a worrying shade of violet. Cold sweat plastered his hair to his forehead. He slapped his own cheeks, the stinging pain a fleeting anchor. "AIR… is close… I won't… be a burden!"
Toriko's own legendary stamina was being tested like never before. The grilled serpent meat in his hand tasted like ash—a first in his gourmet career. The crushing atmospheric deprivation was leeching the strength from his muscles; each inhalation was a struggle, as if his lungs were filled with hot gravel. He estimated his combat power had plummeted to less than half.
This made the sight of their three companions all the more surreal.
King, Saitama, and Garou moved through the thin air as if strolling through a park. They were still working their way through a truly monstrous quantity of skewered meat, their chewing the only sound in the oppressive stillness. Saitama was even humming a tuneless little ditty between bites. Garou, ever competitive, kept trying to sneak mouthfuls from Saitama's portion, operating under the flawed but earnest belief that in this world, dietary intake directly correlated to power-level gains. He hadn't yet grasped that Saitama's strength operated on a logic that laughed at such trivialities.
"You guys… are something else," Toriko managed, a wry, exhausted smile on his face. This environment was three times more oppressive than the peak where he'd once harvested Ozone Grass!
King finished a particularly juicy chunk, wiping grease from his chin. "You get used to it." Vacuum warfare on the lunar surface had been a far stricter teacher.
Seeing their genuine distress, King reached into his four-dimensional space and retrieved two exquisite silver badges. Intricate blue circuitry pulsed across their surfaces, centered on a softly glowing crystal core. A quick scan of the Xi Empire manuals confirmed their function.
"Personal life-support units," King explained, offering them. "Pin it on. It generates a micro-barrier—oxygen, thermal regulation, basic radiation shielding."
Komatsu accepted his like a man grasping a lifeline. The moment he pinned it to his chest, a soft hum resonated, and a nearly invisible film enveloped him. He took his first full, deep breath in hours, color flooding back to his face. "Incredible! It's like I'm back on solid ground!"
Toriko, however, looked at the proffered badge and shook his head, a fierce light in his eyes. "Thank you, King. But I must decline."
Under their questioning gazes, he clenched his fists, his voice firm with conviction. "True growth for a Gourmet Hunter… it only comes when you push past your limits in the crucible of nature itself! I won't hide from this challenge!"
The statement struck a chord in Garou. He gave Toriko a rare, appraising nod. "Now that's the spirit! Steel is forged in fire, not wrapped in bubble wrap!"
Saitama nodded along, mouth full. "Mhm, mhm… tough environments build character… munch …and make the meat taste better after…"
King simply shrugged and took the badge back. He'd expected as much. The path of the apex predator in any world was paved with willingly embraced hardship.
As they pressed onward, the landscape grew more alien. The titanic Air Trees stood like sentinel gods, their porous trunks roaring with oxygenated jets that were immediately snatched away by an invisible, colossal suction, forming eerie, whispering vortices in the thin air. The very ground seemed to breathe in reverse. The presence of the King was a tangible weight, a silence waiting to exhale.
Garou, scouting ahead, froze. His hand shot up—a sharp, silent command to halt.
He didn't speak. He merely narrowed his eyes and pointed.
The collective breath of the group hitched.
Several dozen kilometers away, sprawled across a verdant plain like a living continent, was a creature of impossible, serene majesty. A horse, its coat a blinding, pristine white, stood with shoulders over three thousand meters high. Two vast, feathered wings lay folded against its flanks, and eight powerful legs supported its monumental frame. Its mane and tail were not hair, but cascading rivers of starlight, shimmering with a galactic luminescence. As it lowered its head in a leisurely grazing motion—not on grass, but on the very air itself—each inhalation bent the light around its maw, weaving temporary, breathtaking rainbows across a hundred-mile radius.
Even at this distance, the pressure was a physical weight, a hum in the bones. Komatsu's knees liquefied anew. "The… the Horse King… Heracles?" he whispered, the name a prayer and a curse.
"No," King corrected, his voice calm, analytical. "That's just a member of the tribe. The true Horse King Heracles is an order of magnitude larger." His eidetic memory supplied the data: Approx. 22,000 meters tall. Mass: ~2 trillion tons.
As if summoned by his words, a sound tore across the world.
It was a neigh that was also a cataclysm. The sonic boom of a continent cracking. The very air trees shuddered violently, shedding streams of condensed oxygen like tears. The ground rippled.
All eyes were dragged to the horizon. What they had mistaken for a distant, jagged mountain range… stirred.
The true Horse King Heracles rose.
It was not an action; it was a geological event. As it lifted its head, thousand-mile hurricanes were birthed, screaming across the plains. Its full height was an affront to scale, its silhouette blotting out a portion of the sky. The pressure radiating from it wasn't just physical; it was temporal, the weight of eons and absolute dominance.
Toriko's throat worked, dry. "That… is the king…"
But where Toriko saw a god, Garou saw a benchmark. His eyes ignited with a hunger that had nothing to do with food and everything to do with conquest. His knuckles popped as he clenched his fists, cosmic energy crackling around them.
Saitama, for once, set his skewer down. Not out of fear, but out of focus. A faint, anticipatory spark lit in his usually dull eyes.
In that shared, wordless instant, a challenge was issued and accepted.
WHOOSH!
Two figures—one a crimson streak of monstrous will, the other a yellow blur of absolute simplicity—blasted forward in perfect, competitive unison. The ground shattered in twin furrows behind them. Garou's goal was supremacy, to land the first blow on this legend. Saitama's was simpler: to secure the first, and presumably best, bite.
King didn't move to follow. A wry, knowing smile played on his lips as he watched them go.
He recalled the fine print from the manga archives in his mind: Horse King Heracles. Age: Tens of thousands of years. Consequence: Muscle tissue has undergone ultimate condensation. Texture: Extremely tough, fibrous. Palatability: Exceptionally low. Often described as 'chewing on a neutron star.'
Let them rush in. The fervor of the hunt was admirable. The disappointment at the dinner table, however, would be entirely their own to manage. He settled in to watch the spectacle, the emperor awaiting a report from his eager, doomed vanguard.
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