The sun rose over a wounded city.
Its first rays illuminated the scars of the previous day's battle: the skeletal remains of office buildings, the massive, cauterized crater left by Mina's cannon, and the strange, unnervingly clean patch of ground where the Cataclysm-Kaiju had ceased to exist.
In a sterile, subterranean laboratory deep beneath Tachikawa Base, the hunt had already begun.
This was the home of the Defense Force's Intelligence and R&D divisions, a place where caffeine was a food group and sleep was a myth. Today, the usual hum of quiet research had been replaced by a frantic, high-stakes tension. Every screen, every terminal, was dedicated to a single, impossible task: "Project Bald Cape."
At the center of it all stood a man who seemed to thrive on this kind of chaos. Kenji Tanaka was the lead analyst for the project, a man in his late twenties with perpetually tired eyes, an unkempt mop of black hair, and a mind that moved at the speed of light. He was a genius, an obsessive, and currently, a very frustrated man.
"Give me the satellite thermals from 18:47," he barked, not looking up from his own holographic display. "Cross-reference with all CCTV, traffic cams, and civilian social media uploads in a twenty-kilometer radius. I want every frame, every pixel."
An operator typed furiously. "Running it now, Chief. Still nothing. The Anomalies vanished from the rooftop. One second they're there, the next... gone. No heat trail, no sonic boom, not even a decent atmospheric distortion."
Kenji gritted his teeth, running a hand through his already messy hair. "That's impossible. Even if they're moving faster than our sensors can track, they have to obey the laws of thermodynamics. They have mass. Their movement must generate heat. It has to leave a trace!"
"It didn't," a calm voice said from behind him.
Dr. Arisugawa walked into the lab, holding a tablet. "We've run every simulation. The energy required for two adult males, one of whom is a dense metallic cyborg, to achieve that kind of velocity would have left a scorch mark across the city visible from orbit. There isn't one."
Kenji spun around, his eyes wide with a manic energy. "Then the simulations are wrong! The models are wrong! We're missing a variable. What about the cyborg? Beta. Can we track him? He has to have an energy signature."
"We tried," another tech chimed in. "He's shielded. Better than any military-grade stealth tech we've ever seen. We can get a faint reading when he uses his weapon systems, but his passive signature is a ghost. We're trying to develop a new sensor package based on the exotic particles we detected, but that could take months."
"We don't have months!" Kenji snapped, slamming his hand down on the console. A few techs flinched. "A being that can punch a 10.0 Kaiju out of existence is walking around out there, and we're blind. He could be anywhere. He could be doing anything!"
"Well, he was doing something about two hours ago," a junior analyst said hesitantly from the back of the room.
All heads turned to her. She swallowed nervously under the sudden, intense scrutiny.
"Um... I was running a pattern-recognition algorithm on low-level police dispatches, looking for... well, anything weird," she explained, pushing her glasses up her nose. "A minor street crime report came in from the Setagaya ward. Three men arrested for assault and robbery. Two were found unconscious. One was... uh... found hanging from a lamppost by his underwear."
Kenji stared at her. "And this is relevant how?"
"The conscious one was babbling," she continued, gaining a little confidence. "He said they were attacked by a 'bored-looking bald guy in a hoodie.' The eyewitness, an elderly woman, refused to give a statement about the attacker. Just said a 'nice young man' helped her. But we pulled the security footage from a nearby ATM."
She brought the video up on the main screen.
The footage was grainy, black and white. It showed the thugs harassing the old woman. Then, a figure in a hoodie and baseball cap entered the frame. The video quality was too poor to make out a face, but the figure's movements... or lack thereof... were damning.
The figure stepped forward. There was a flicker in the footage, a single corrupted frame. When the image stabilized, two of the thugs were on the ground and one was in the air. The whole event took less than a second.
Kenji leaned in, his face inches from the screen. "That flicker... run a frame-by-frame analysis."
The tech complied. Frame 1 showed Saitama standing. Frame 2 was a mess of digital static. Frame 3 showed the aftermath. It was the same phenomenon as the Kaiju fight, just on a microscopic scale.
"His speed is corrupting digital recording equipment," Dr. Arisugawa breathed, her eyes wide with horrified fascination. "The sheer velocity of his localized movement is generating an electromagnetic pulse that our civilian infrastructure simply cannot handle."
"He was there," Kenji whispered, a triumphant, crazed grin spreading across his face. "He was there! We have him! Get me his location!"
"That's the problem, Chief," the junior analyst said apologetically. "The incident happened two hours ago. He's long gone. We tried tracking him from that point, but there's nothing. No public transport records, no traffic cam sightings... he just disappeared into the city again."
Kenji's grin vanished, replaced by a scowl. "So we have a ghost who can punch gods, moves so fast he breaks cameras, and occasionally stops to dish out vigilante justice in the most humiliating way possible. This is a nightmare."
He began pacing, his mind racing. "Okay. Okay. We need a new approach. Brute-force scanning is useless. We need to think like him. What does he want? What is his motivation?"
He pulled up a psychological profile they had been building. It was almost entirely blank.
Subject: Anomaly-Alpha (Codename: Bald Cape)
Age: Estimated late 20s.
Appearance: Male, Caucasian/Asian mix, approximate height 175cm, completely bald, placid facial expression.
Motivation: Unknown.
Threat Level: Incalculable.
Notes: Displays complete apathy even when performing impossible feats. May be motivated by a primitive sense of justice, or simply boredom. Does not appear to seek recognition.
"It's useless," Kenji muttered. "We have nothing to go on."
"Maybe we do," Dr. Arisugawa said, pointing to the ATM footage. "Look. In his hand."
Kenji zoomed in. In the anomaly's other hand was a plastic bag. The logo was visible for a single, clear frame. "OK Supermart."
A jolt went through Kenji. "He went shopping. In the middle of a city-wide crisis... after killing a god... he went grocery shopping."
The sheer, mundane absurdity of it was staggering. It was the most human, most relatable thing they had seen him do, and somehow, it was the most terrifying. A being of that power should have grand plans, cosmic ambitions. But he just wanted to buy groceries. He was unpredictable. Unknowable.
"Get me the security footage from every OK Supermart in the Setagaya ward," Kenji commanded, his voice filled with a newfound purpose. "Get me their transaction records for the last three hours. Cross-reference them with the ATM footage. If he used a card, if he paid with cash, if a cashier saw his face... I want to know."
"On it, Chief!"
For the next hour, the lab was a hive of activity. They pulled records, analyzed footage, and chased down a dozen dead ends.
Finally, the junior analyst spoke up again, her voice hesitant.
"Uh, Chief... I have the transaction logs from the target store. There's something... weird."
"What is it?" Kenji asked, rushing over to her station.
"There was a single, massive transaction around the time of the incident," she explained, pointing at her screen. "For a ridiculously large sum of money. Enough to buy the entire store several times over."
Kenji's eyes narrowed. "An error?"
"That's what I thought," she said. "But the transaction went through. It was paid from a brand new, fully authenticated account from the Bank of Zenith. An account that, according to the bank's records, has existed for over a decade and has a perfect credit history."
"But I thought you said it was a new account?"
"It is," she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. "The account was created two hours and sixteen minutes ago."
Kenji stared at the screen, at the impossible data. The creation of a ghost account, fully integrated and backdated into the most secure financial network in the world, was a feat of cyber warfare that not even a nation-state could pull off. And it had been done in seconds.
For what?
He looked at the itemized receipt for the impossible transaction.
Daikon Radish: 1
Napa Cabbage: 1
Shiitake Mushrooms: 1 pack
Hidaka Kombu: 1
The entire purchase totaled less than 2000 yen.
Kenji Tanaka, the brilliant lead analyst of Project Bald Cape, slowly sank into a nearby chair. He put his head in his hands.
They weren't hunting a god. They weren't hunting a monster.
They were hunting a ghost who could rewrite reality, and his primary motivation seemed to be getting a good deal on ingredients for hot pot.
"This," he said to the silent room, "is going to be the death of me."