That sound shattered the sound barrier.
With that single crack of noise, Iron Man and Spider-Man, who'd been right beside Saitama, were blasted away like leaves in a gale.
Iron Man stabilized himself midair, looked down—and froze.
Saitama was still swaddled in a mess of webbing, but he could move freely again. Worse, a crater yawned under Saitama's feet. Putting the sonic boom together with the hole, Iron Man realized what had happened.
He'd snapped his fingers—with just two fingers—and did all that?
Saitama tilted his head up and looked his way.
"W-wait… wait…!" Iron Man backpedaled hard. Every system in his suit agreed: he was absolutely not a match for that bald monster.
Spider-Man retreated too. Saitama thought for a beat, then smiled. "Kinda feels like a good time to throw a serious discount punch. You two—stay right there and don't move."
He stomped once.
All across Europe, long-suffering civilians felt the ground shiver yet again. In the command room, the officers were on the verge of tears. They wanted these "guests" gone—yesterday. At this rate, Europe was about to become a historical footnote.
Boom!
A fresh crater, over a hundred meters across, punched open in the ground. Earth geysered skyward in a storm of rock and dust. Saitama, of course, was gone from his starting point—he was already in Iron Man's face. One punch. Iron Man's head rocketed away.
Saitama felt nothing for this version. If it were the Tony he knew, maybe he'd have held back. But this was a twisted Iron Man dragged in from another world. No reason to be gentle.
Hit first. Ask questions never.
Headless, the armor's systems chirped, "Pilot loss detected. Confirm… confirm… confirm complete. Initiating self-destruct—"
Boom!!!!
Professor X reacted in an instant, throwing up a maximum-strength barrier right before the shockwave hit, pulverizing everything nearby.
Back in the command room, despair rolled like a tide.
If Paris had merely been "destroyed," you might rebuild in ten or twenty years. Looking at the readouts now? No chance. Not in any realistic timeline.
A murmur ran through the room. Nuclear—no, thermonuclear. And not a small one.
Soon, the numbers came in: the blast was equivalent to more than a dozen of the largest-yield thermonuclear devices at once. At ground zero, temperatures briefly exceeded the surface of the sun. Radiation? Beyond catastrophic.
The French military representative slumped. Paris was finished. With contamination at that magnitude, forget "decades"—even centuries might not make the land livable. Surrounding cities would have to relocate.
Faces blanched all around. A few even wore that grim, schadenfreude look of "there but for the grace…"
Was this… a mutant battle? If something like this could be tossed out casually, then mutants would become humanity's greatest existential threat.
As for Iron Man—completely done.
Spider-Man? In a blast and heat like that, he was flash-ash. His physique could shrug off most kinetic punishment, but superheated inferno was his hard counter. He perished on the spot.
Saitama, by contrast, dropped lightly from the sky, rolled his neck, and walked toward Professor X. "Hey. You guys okay?"
Professor X was near tears. Beast had dragged him for kilometers before he'd thrown up his strongest barrier; only then had they barely survived the inferno. Without that, both he and Beast would've been vaporized.
He was about to speak when applause rippled through the air.
"Remarkable. Of the ten Future Knights I made, you erased them all." Ten figures in odd silver armor descended slowly from the sky.
Saitama frowned. "Don't tell me you're the fourth Horseman."
"How could that be? I am the only god this world requires."
Apocalypse snapped his fingers. "People of the world—watch closely."
At that snap, screens around the globe flipped to the Paris feed. Apocalypse was satisfied with the power—one he'd gained from the sixth mutant he'd absorbed after awakening. The original ability had been pathetic—a trivial control over TV signals to broadcast whatever was in the user's mind. But with Apocalypse's amplification, it became an instant override of every television on Earth.
With toys like these, no wonder he fancied himself chosen—no, the only god.
He was unlucky today, though. Very unlucky. Because he'd met something stronger.
He couldn't strengthen other X-genes further now, nor could he absorb and re-forge others' X-genes indefinitely. But the bald man before him possessed a power no esper, no mutant, no "chosen one" could rival.
Saitama's lips curled. "That so? Then you must be pretty strong."
(End of Chapter)
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