Saitama was having a good day.
The supermarket in City Z was running a 30% off special on king crab legs. Thirty percent. It was the kind of victory that made all the monster-punching worth it. He'd even remembered to bring his reusable grocery bags. A perfect, hero-worthy haul.
The cashier screamed.
That was normal. Usually, it meant some C-list monster was trying to rob the register. An annoyance. But this scream was different. It wasn't just her; it was everyone. Outside, on the street. In the entire city. A single, unified shriek that vibrated in his teeth.
He glanced out the automatic doors.
The sky wasn't blue anymore. It was… cracking. Like a sheet of black glass hit by a hammer. Thin, incandescent lines of pure white light spiderwebbed across the heavens, spreading with an audible groan, a sound like a mountain grinding to dust. At the epicenter of the cracks hung a shape. It was wrong. A three-dimensional object existing in four dimensions, twisting the space around it into a knot of impossible geometry.
And it smiled. A gesture that wasn't a mouth, but an idea. A concept of pure, cosmic amusement projected into every mind on the planet.
"Crap," Saitama muttered, looking at the melting ice in his crab leg bag. "The eggs."
This was going to be a pain.
Far away, or perhaps right next door—distance was quickly becoming a meaningless concept—Asta's boots skidded across shattered cobblestone. The capital of the Clover Kingdom was coming apart at the seams. Buildings twisted into Mobius strips. The very air shimmered, thick with a magic so dense and alien it felt like breathing syrup.
"WHAT IS THIS?!" he roared, Lieb swirling with black anti-magic in his hand. "SOME NEW KINDA SPATIAL MAGIC?!"
Next to him, Tanjiro Kamado kept his breathing even, his hand steady on the hilt of his Nichirin sword. His senses were a screaming vortex of horror. Every scent was wrong. The comforting smell of people, of food, of life—it was all being overwritten by a single, terrifying odor. The scent of an ending. Of a story that had been read and was now being erased.
"It's not magic," Tanjiro said, his voice tight. His enhanced eyes saw the threads, the very fabric of their reality thinning. He could see another world bleeding through—a world of towering metal structures and horseless carriages. "It's the world… it's crying."
A figure coalesced from the shimmering air before them. It wore the pristine white robes of a high priest but had no face, only a smooth, porcelain-like surface that reflected their own panicked expressions back at them. The Herald of the Axiom.
It raised one hand.
Asta didn't wait. He didn't think. He charged. "NOT GIVING UP!"
Black lightning crackled, the Demon-Slayer blade hungry to devour magic. He swung, a perfect arc meant to bisect this new enemy and whatever spell it was casting. In sync, Tanjiro lunged, Sun Breathing igniting his blade with the fury of a dying star. Hinokami Kagura, Burning Bones, Summer Sun.
Two ultimate attacks, one from a world of magic, one from a world of demons.
They met the Herald's single, outstretched palm.
And vanished.
Not blocked. Not deflected. Erased. As if the attacks, the energy, the very intent behind them, had never existed at all. The Herald didn't even flinch.
A moment of pure, profound shock.
Then, the world above them shattered completely.
Saitama watched the floating shape—the Axiom—unleash its… subordinate? A white-robed thing appeared in the middle of City Z, its faceless head turning to survey the panicking populace. It raised a hand, and a sphere of absolute nothingness began to expand, eating the light, the sound, the very asphalt of the road.
"Oh, come on," he sighed. His ice was definitely melted now. This was unacceptable.
He moved.
It wasn't a flash step. It wasn't a burst of speed. He was just… there. One moment by the checkout counter, the next standing between the white-robed monster and the expanding sphere of non-existence. The people behind him didn't even register his arrival.
The Herald paused, its faceless gaze falling upon him. It seemed to… analyze him. Find him wanting. A pulse of energy shot from its palm, the same attack that had erased Asta and Tanjiro's reality-slicing techniques a universe away. An attack designed to unmake concepts.
Saitama raised a hand. A red glove.
A lazy fist.
A normal punch.
There was no sound. No shockwave. No flash of light.
For a single, silent moment, the punch connected with the Herald. And then the Herald, the sphere of nothingness, the Axiom's projection in the sky, and a considerable chunk of the dimensional barrier it had been tearing through… ceased to exist.
He'd punched a hole. Not in a monster. In the world.
Through the ragged, shimmering tear in reality, Saitama saw things. A green-skinned man fighting a purple alien on a crumbling planetoid. A shadowy figure in a high-school uniform walking through a rain of spirits. A black-robed skeleton sitting on a throne of gold, clutching a magnificent staff. A blue-haired… blob?… looking up in alarm.
Then the tear collapsed with the sound of a universe snapping shut.
The good news: the immediate threat was gone.
The bad news: his punch had broken everything a whole lot worse.
The ground beneath him gave way. Not into a crater, but into… somewhere else.
Son Goku grunted, ducking under a punch that could shatter planets. Jiren's eyes were cold, focused, a universe of power held in check. Ultra Instinct flowed through Goku, his body moving on its own, a perfect stream of silver-edged reaction. This was it. The pinnacle. A fight for everything.
He twisted, his knee connecting with Jiren's gut. The Pride Trooper slid back, his aura flaring.
This was getting fun!
Then the fun stopped.
Reality flickered. The Tournament of Power arena, Jiren, the watching gods—they all went static, like a bad television signal. A face appeared in the sky, a bald man in a yellow jumpsuit, throwing a punch that seemed to echo across all of time and space.
And then Goku was falling. Not down. Sideways. Through colors that had no names.
Shigeo Kageyama felt the psychic scream of a billion souls crying out at once. It slammed into his consciousness, bypassing every mental wall he had ever built. The noise was unbearable. An agony that wasn't physical, but existential. His friends. His family. His normal life. All threatened. All screaming.
The number in his head, the one he fought to keep down every single day, began to climb. Not by single digits.
It jumped.
Progress Towards Mob's Explosion: 78%... 84%... 91%...
???%
Ainz Ooal Gown sat upon the Throne of Kings, his composure absolute, his jawbone locked in a regal, unreadable expression. Albedo stood at his side, her devotion a palpable force in the room.
Internally, Suzuki Satoru was having a panic attack of cataclysmic proportions.
The entire Great Tomb of Nazarick had just lurched, a sickening, grinding movement that was utterly impossible. The eternal darkness outside the throne room windows was replaced by a chaotic maelstrom of fractured worlds. He saw a city with flying ships. A forest with trees so large they had their own weather systems. A desolate battlefield littered with titanic, skeletal monsters.
"My lord?" Albedo's voice was laced with concern.
Ainz raised a skeletal hand. "It appears," he said, his Overlord voice booming with false confidence, "that our stage has just gotten significantly larger. EXCELLENT. THIS WAS ALL PART OF MY PLAN!"
(WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING?!)
The Great Sage's voice echoed in Rimuru's mind, devoid of emotion but laced with an undeniable urgency. Alert. The integrity of the dimensional boundaries has fallen below 0.01%. Systemic collapse is imminent. Probability of world destruction: 100%.
Rimuru looked up from his paperwork in the capital of Tempest. Veldora was already outside, roaring at the cracked sky in defiance.
Analyze a solution! Rimuru commanded.
Analyzing… A solution is possible by assuming direct control over the collapsing boundary layer. It would require predation of conceptual information on a multiversal scale. There is a high probability of… evolution.
Rimuru's eyes widened.
"AQUA! YOU USELESS GODDESS! WHAT DID YOU DO?!" Kazuma Satou shrieked, pointing an accusatory finger at the crying deity. Their party was huddled behind a rock as the sky above Axel tore itself open.
"IT WASN'T ME THIS TIME! I SWEAR!" she wailed.
Darkness looked on with a feverish blush. "To be present at the end of the world… My body trembles with… anticipation!"
"Can you just not be a pervert for the literal apocalypse?!"
The fall ended.
Saitama landed on his feet, groceries somehow still clutched in his left hand. The plastic bag with the crab legs was torn. A single, expensive leg tumbled out onto warped, twisted ground that was neither asphalt nor cobblestone, but some horrifying fusion of both.
"No," he whispered. A true moment of despair.
A grunt from nearby. That black-haired kid in the weird green checkered coat and the loud one with white hair were sprawled a few feet away, groaning. Asta sat up first, shaking his head. "Man… that felt like Yami's fist hit my whole body at once…"
Tanjiro pushed himself up, his eyes wide with a mix of terror and wonder. The scents here were impossible. A thousand worlds clashing. Metal, ozone, magic, blood, demon, and something else… something pure, powerful, and ridiculously innocent.
He looked over. A new figure was picking himself up from the ground, brushing off an orange gi. The man looked around, a little dazed but mostly excited, his black, spiky hair a mess.
Then his eyes locked on Saitama.
A grin spread across Son Goku's face. The kind of grin a starving man gives a banquet.
"Whoa," Goku said, his voice ringing with pure, unadulterated excitement. "You're strong."
Saitama just stared at his fallen crab leg.
From the shattered sky above them, pieces of a hundred different worlds began to rain down like ashes. A shard of a high school classroom. A twisted piece of a pirate ship's mast. The gate of a ninja village.
The Shattering had begun.