Chapter 855: Limiter Unbound, The Serious Saitama
"Ha... Haha... Hahahahaha—!"
Across Kaito Shirogane's physical frame, fine flecks of golden luminescence scattered into the cosmic void like radiant starlight. Within him, an asynchronous friction opened between his inner soul and his outer physical shell.
Kaleidoscopic radiance bled continuously from his colossal irises.
Staring down the throat of absolute mortality, his body had executed the sequence by pure biological instinct.
As his fists blurred into motion, Kaito glimpsed the collapse of boundless forces within Saitama's biomechanics. Countless concepts coalesced and folded inward, until even those foundational rules imploded into a singular, unvarnished point.
The miraculous blessing of the Key of Miracles held fast. Even though the Limit-Break Spiral behind his back was spinning far past operational tolerances—a rate that should have unraveled his cellular lattice—and the Unknown Art had exceeded its safety thresholds to the point where his existential identity should have unraveled into noise...
A golden miracle ignited across the starscape. Kaito's physical form remained anchored in reality, the forces overshooting his biological parameters forcibly harmonized and bound within his flesh by the law of Miracles.
The Limit-Break Spiral and the Unknown Art relentlessly probed the foundational truth behind Saitama's might, while Kaito's vessel acted as a ravenous sponge, drinking in every shred of parsed telemetry.
Saitama's Consecutive Serious Punches locked down all vectors of escape. It was an unavoidable execution sequence. In truth, even without that intrinsic tracking, the metaphysical Lock of Destiny binding them ensured that every blow thrown by either combatant would land with absolute certainty.
Searing agony tore through Kaito's cerebral cortex and optic nerves—a blinding friction that, without the insulation of Miracles, would have shattered his nervous system tens of thousands of times over.
Under the protection of the Miracle, his neurons, retinas, and biological cells refused to cross into cellular death, yet the visceral trauma born of wielding power far beyond his vessel forced thick, purple veins to snake across his skin.
Kaito's laughter warped into a soundless, manic grimace, lost to the cosmic vacuum. Every ounce of his spirit, flesh, and conscious focus was poured unreservedly into this exchange.
He had no surplus bandwidth left to squander.
Kaito's hands blurred faster and faster, compounding in frequency until his rhythm and posture diverged entirely from Saitama's original cadence. Observing the transformation, Saitama's dull eyes widened in rare bewilderment.
The colossal golden martial artist moved with clumsy, exaggerated strokes, resembling an amateur blindly flailing in the dark. Yet gazing upon that awkward execution, Saitama caught an unmistakable reflection of his past self.
Throughout his three years of hellish conditioning, he had endlessly visualized and rehearsed how he would face the Mysterious Beings of tomorrow.
Through countless brawls, his movements had shed their excess, growing increasingly economical until all that remained was a plain, unadorned punch.
Before that singular strike was perfected, Saitama had thrown billions of unrefined strikes just like this.
Right now, the martial artist known as Mercenary Tao was reenacting that exact evolutionary crucible before his eyes.
Yet that nostalgic sentiment flickered within Saitama for merely a microsecond before evaporating. He had long outgrown such idle musings.
The warrior before him still failed to kindle the icy, fatal dread of a true life-and-death struggle.
Saitama coldly drove his Consecutive Serious Punches forward. A deluge of crimson fist phantoms engulfed the ten-thousand-meter golden titan, every individual blow packing the kinetic mass to erase an adversary from existence.
With that abnormal regenerative biology, this man could probably survive his fists... probably.
Saitama could sense that this opponent was neither an authentic Mysterious Being nor an ordinary mortal.
That unconstrained, predatory combat demeanor—even aiming an apocalyptic planetary beam directly at Earth earlier—proved he was far from a righteous soul.
Yet Saitama held no desire to slaughter him outright. He intended to beat the man until his combat capacity collapsed, then drag him back to Earth.
He was notoriously inept at handling martial artists who had blinded themselves in the relentless pursuit of raw might.
Hum!
Spacetime buckled. The golden titan's arms accelerated past all observable limits, crossing a critical operational boundary just before the barrage of crimson fists could make contact.
Hum—hum—hum—!
Across the silent vacuum, gravitational fields shifted violently beneath the sheer displacement of force—a fluctuation Saitama parsed the second it manifested.
The next microsecond, a mirrored, anomalous force erupted from the void as a storm of golden fist phantoms descended from above.
Facing his own Consecutive Serious Punches for the very first time, a rare, unvarnished spark of joy ignited within Saitama's chest.
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!
Golden and crimson fist phantoms collided with apocalyptic violence across deep space. Cataclysmic shockwaves erupted in concentric rings, warped gravitational waves tearing through the local coordinate plane in lockstep with the fracturing of space.
Caught in the explosive epicenter, Saitama's frame was blasted backward through the vacuum.
Opposite him, the golden giant fared far worse. Struck by an irresistible, crushing payload, the impossibly dense Ki shielding his frame was shattered clean off his flesh.
Pulverized alongside it was the titanic divine vessel of Phenomenal Manifestation of Giant.
The colossal form—manifested through the compression of astronomical Ki—was gouged with abyssal tears, golden Ki bleeding into the void like arterial spray.
The golden titan tilted backward into the abyss, his orientation tumbling erratically amidst the warped gravitational tides. Blood ruptured from Kaito's lips and nostrils as his flesh began to disintegrate at the cellular level.
[You have suffered an attack from Rule-Breaking Narrative Character: Saitama. Based on the Spirit attributes of both parties, you have acquired the following information:]
[You have been struck by Consecutive Serious Punches. Massive cellular vitality has been eradicated; your ability: Phenomenal Manifestation of Giant has collapsed.]
Kaito's pupils quivered violently. The Limit-Break Spiral and the Unknown Art continued their frantic, overclocked calculations, his conscious mind entirely filtering out the spatial alerts cataloging his biological collapse.
Such trivial warnings held zero meaning. The Space was merely nudging him to pop the Anchor of Causality and abandon the engagement.
When physical death itself would automatically trigger the temporal rewind, why in the world would he stop now?
Ding—
Like a solitary needle piercing the calm surface of an ocean, a solitary speck of golden light ignited within the dark void where the burning giant was collapsing.
Then, an ocean of golden fire bloomed across the cosmic expanse.
Concentric rings of translucent ripples expanded behind Kaito's back, the rhythmic roar of oceanic breakers echoing through the airless dark.
By pure biological instinct, Kaito transmuted the Sea of Miracles into the likeness of a Spiritual Light he had observed only once before:
The unique Heart's Radiance wielded by Yoko Ekaterina!
The Sea of Miracles blazed into an infinite ocean of golden fire, yet radiated zero scorching heat.
Instead, Kaito felt his vitality surge to unprecedented heights, as though countless incandescent souls had taken up residence within his vessel.
The unyielding courage, blazing intellect, and singular miracles forged by frail mortals standing defiant against crushing despair!
Fwhoosh!
The dark void was set ablaze. Kaito's falling body snapped back to an upright stance as though time itself were rewinding.
The divine vessel of Phenomenal Manifestation of Giant, stripped of vitality by the Consecutive Serious Punches, reconstituted piece by piece.
Golden sinew and marrow condensed from the sea of aura; skeleton, muscle fibers, meridians, and flesh were reconstructed in absolute perfection.
Across the palms of his titanic form, intricate golden sigils began to crystallize—markings bearing profound similarities to divine authority brands, yet mechanically mirroring the biological conduits Boros had displayed in his ultimate state.
Dedicated channels engineered to allow energy to circulate without a shred of internal friction.
Reversing his momentum, Kaito watched Saitama vaulting back through the drifting sea of asteroid dust. The bald hero wore a look of subtle surprise, clearly bewildered as to how his opponent was standing completely unscathed.
Then, Saitama's expression flattened into authentic seriousness.
Though he could not decipher the underlying metaphysics, the golden giant before him radiated an essence that felt completely distinct from before.
It lacked the grotesque malice of a Mysterious Being, and it lacked the unstable, twisted arrogance of the titan moments ago.
It resembled the boundless, collective might of countless fragile mortals banding together into a singular, colossal organism.
Mortal humans were frail creatures, bound to lean upon one another simply to endure from the primordial dawn to the modern age.
Yet when mortals converged into an unbroken whole, terrifying transformations took root.
The human standing before him was undergoing that exact metamorphosis: countless embers uniting into a light so stark and blinding it stung even Saitama's eyes.
Badump... Badump... Badump...
The heartbeat that had long vanished from his chest returned—erratic, chaotic, and deafeningly rapid.
Simultaneously, the golden giant raised both fists once more. This time, there was no awkward flailing; the titan sank his waist and pulled his fist back in a fluid, seamless motion that mirrored Saitama's own stance down to the marrow.
Kaito sensed the qualitative shift occurring within his core. His internal energies were surging in wild, unprecedented discord.
His mind processed the incoming telemetry at blinding speed.
Is this the synthesis born of combining the Miracle left behind by Ryo with the Spiritual Light of Yoko Ekaterina?
Were those two planning to weaponize this power to rewrite the board?!
The unshakeable conviction in human will, the absolute creed that mortal strength can overcome heaven itself—a sovereign authority anchored in the concept of Humanity, forged specifically to crush existential calamities?!
Or did the primordial Chaos coiled in my soul naturally evolve this branch when pushed to the brink—the sole viable path available to me if I wish to trade blows with Saitama?!
Or is the nascent Observer of the Infinite Dimensional Space manually accelerating my evolution, unwilling to let its apex champion perish here, driving me up the divine stairway?
Kaito commanded the rare constitution of the Myriad Tribulations Yin-Spirit Underworld Physique, a foundation that had granted him the status of the Emperor of Death upon reaching minor mastery.
That mantle inherently carried the authority to command tens of millions of ancestral spirits.
Extrapolating along that vector, harmonizing the collective strength of countless souls into a unified whole was a natural extension of his build.
Did the Space intend for me to wield my constitution like this all along?!
Memories of spirits he had once relied upon—souls he had gradually discarded as their operational ceilings lagged behind his violent ascent—surfaced in his mind.
The dying entrustment left to him by Shigeo Kageyama in the B711 world.
And further back, the desperate, unreserved sacrifice of the spirit Corey in the One Piece realm... Kaito suddenly glimpsed an unbroken karmic thread.
A design far more subtle, ancient, and vast than the petty webs spun by that so-called King of Destiny.
The potential to walk this exact path had been woven into his foundation from the very beginning!
Agony spiked through Kaito's nervous system as the Limit-Break Spiral spun far past operational tolerances. Reality parted like an unsealed gateway to the Root, pouring a deluge of raw Information into his mind.
"Killer Move... Consecutive Serious Punches!"
Kaito took a heavy stride forward, unleashing his Consecutive Serious Punches before Saitama could initiate his own strike!
This time, the phantom of Saitama did not manifest behind his back. Instead, a towering golden phantom of Kaito himself loomed behind the cosmic giant.
Kaito had begun throwing a Serious Punch that belonged entirely to him!
Ki and brute force, soul and flesh, Life and Anti-Life—all disparate frameworks imploded inward in absolute unison.
That total collapse of energy condensed into an absolute, unvarnished Concept.
[You have mastered Concept: Absolute Strike]
[You have made contact with the Fifth Step: Conceptual Step]
The system notifications cascaded across his interface, yet Kaito spared them not a single glance. He knew only that at this exact fraction of a microsecond, he had grasped the foundational essence of this strike.
Saitama's Serious Punch—the so-called collapse of physical forces, the crystallization of absolute concepts—was merely the superficial wake of the blow.
The true source of that strike was Saitama's infinite, unbound expansion following the shattering of his Limiter, projecting his raw existence onto the canvas of physical reality.
Every casual strike he threw was an entity whose personal Vessel had swollen far beyond the structural constraints of the universe, punching inward into the material world.
Mysterious Beings whose innate vessels were merely dozens, hundreds, or thousands of times larger than an ordinary human's could never hope to endure that mass.
They were not slain by martial arts; they were crushed to paste beneath the sheer weight of Saitama's bloated Vessel.
The foundational root of Saitama's supremacy had always been the Limiter!
[Limiter shackle has been dissolved]
[You have made contact with the complete Limiter]
[You may now inspect the parameters of your personal Vessel at any time]
[Limiter: Passive State (Tier 2) has evolved to Limiter (2x Multiplier)]
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!
Countless golden fist phantoms ignited with celestial fire, setting the starscape beyond the ruins of Mars ablaze in a blinding flash.
The planetary fragments shattered by Saitama's vault, alongside the asteroid belt pulled into the sector by chaotic gravitational waves, were instantly reduced to cosmic dust beneath the descending storm of golden fists.
Saitama stood suspended in the vacuum. He no longer drifted aimlessly beneath absent gravity, and he no longer paid heed to the breath held within his lungs.
With absolute seriousness, Saitama watched the golden titan throw that strike. That swelling physical presence and that magnificent, roaring execution had completely broken past the parameters of the previous exchange.
Saitama recognized that a casual counter-attack could no longer disperse a strike of this magnitude.
He had to... make an adjustment.
Saitama had practically forgotten the sensation of fighting with true, unreserved focus.
It had been far too long since he had faced an adversary who forced him to calculate, to brace his frame, to genuinely exert his might.
Every Mysterious Being dissolved into meat paste beneath a careless backhand.
Even Dragon-level threats were snuffed out by a casual swing of his arm.
Boros, the cosmic overlord, had been the pinnacle champion among them all, yet he had merely managed to prolong his breath beneath Saitama's knuckles through cellular regeneration.
Had Saitama truly willed it, no adversary in existence could have mounted meaningful resistance.
It was a cold, suffocating, tedious supremacy.
Without realizing it, Saitama had drifted into his present, detached existence.
Losing all passion for combat, weathering enemy attacks with indifferent apathy, and ending the engagement with a single unadorned strike whenever he grew bored.
Yet this hour was different. The titan burning with golden fire before him radiated the sensation of countless souls throwing a synchronized fist straight toward his jaw.
The corner of Saitama's mouth twitched upward—an unconscious impulse to smile.
Enveloped in the storm of incoming golden fists, Saitama sank into a low crouch, pulling his right arm back until the elbow coiled tight against his ribs.
He took a massive stride forward with textbook precision. Kinetic force ignited from the soles of his boots, coursed through his calves and thighs, transferred seamlessly through the violent snap of his hips, and channeled cleanly into his fist.
Then, he drove the punch forward.