"Boom!"
On the rooftop of a high-rise, Rex, Kate, and Robot Jack were watching the situation unfold.
All of a sudden, a fierce gust of wind whipped over their heads!
Jovian, draped in a snow-white cape, dropped from the sky.
"This is looking pretty bad…" Robot Jack felt the spinning cold wind, raised his head, and reported to Jovian.
"Jack, Kate, Rex—get the rescue organized. As for the idiots who interrupted my lunch… I'll teach them what it costs to make me angry."
Jovian spoke with hard-edged authority. The next second, he became a blur—like an unstoppable artillery shell—and shot straight at the group of green-skinned "cucumber aliens" marching out of the portal.
"You're ordering me again?!" Rex glared at Jovian's back, furious. He was sick of being bossed around. He was a member of the Teen Team—not anybody's lackey.
"Sorry we're late."
Just as Rex shouted after Jovian, Mark and Eve finally arrived, descending from the sky.
"Jovian seems to be in a really bad mood," Robot Jack asked Mark and Eve. "Do you know why he's acting like this?"
"Probably because someone interrupted his lunch," Mark said, since as Jovian's brother, he knew him pretty well. "Ever since we were kids, he's hated being bothered while he's eating. He says it ruins his mood for the entire day."
"So… the enemy showed up at the wrong time, and that's why he's mad?" Rex folded his arms across his chest and looked at Mark and Eve like he was judging them. "I gotta say, your brother really is a Freeborn—Freeborn in every sense of the word…"
"And also…"
"Eve, were you seriously hanging out with these two flying brothers the whole time?" Rex looked from Eve to Mark, then to the rapidly vanishing Jovian. "I think you owe me an explanation. I'm starting to feel like I'm the one getting played here."
"We're just high school classmates," Eve shot Rex a sharp glare. She knew it—there was never anything decent inside his head.
"High school classmates, huh. Sure. What a coincidence…" Rex sneered, dripping with sarcasm.
"Enough, Rex!" Eve didn't bother arguing further. She lifted off the rooftop and flew toward the battlefield. "We need to support Jovian! There are a lot of enemies—I'm worried he won't be able to hold them off alone!"
"Heh. Now it's 'Jovian' this and 'Jovian' that," Rex muttered, still standing there, still being nasty. "Heh…"
"Rex, maybe you should stop talking," Robot Jack cut in. "We should be focusing on what's in front of us."
"Fine! Fine! So you're all on Jovian's side, is that it?!"
"Jovian's the real Teen Team member, huh? Jovian's the one you've been through life-and-death with, huh? And I'm just the outsider…"
Rex kept complaining in a petty, bitter tone—but when he turned around, he realized everyone behind him was already gone.
"Hey! Don't do me like that!" Rex stared at the teammates who'd completely abandoned him, and for a moment, he suddenly felt kind of pathetic.
On the other side…
Jovian descended like a god, staring at the Flaxans rampaging through the city. His gaze was sharp as an arrow.
"You probably don't understand just how terrifying it is… to interrupt me while I'm eating!"
Floating in midair, Jovian faced the endless waves of green-skinned "cucumber men" pouring out of the portal. He thrust both hands forward and slammed straight into the crowd.
"Shoot! Shoot!"
The Flaxans—barking orders in their alien language—saw Jovian streaking toward them like lightning and shouted at the top of their lungs.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!
Laser blasts streaked out of Flaxan rifles and hammered into Jovian's thick chest.
"Pathetic."
Jovian clamped down with his chest muscles and literally crushed those useless shots to nothing.
"It's not working…" one Flaxan soldier gaped, staring at the completely ineffective attack.
Pff!
In the next second, Jovian—who'd been a hundred meters away—appeared right in front of him and punched his head clean apart.
The remaining soldiers stared at the blood spraying upward and swallowed hard.
Pff pff pff pff pff…
A heartbeat later, the soldiers who looked up in shock had their "beautiful little heads" neatly removed.
"Monster…"
"Run…"
In an instant, hundreds of "cucumber heads" flew into the air—and the remaining Flaxans, no, the remaining "cucumber people," were so horrified they froze.
They looked up at the terrifying figure floating in the sky like a mythic god stepping out of a legend. Weapons clattered to the ground. They opened spacetime tunnels and tried to flee.
"Weak."
Jovian had absolutely no intention of letting them escape.
To him, these Flaxans who looked like cucumbers were nothing but walking bags of experience points.
He accelerated, turning into a merciless scythe of death, harvesting Flaxan lives nonstop. Pure life energy poured into his body, steadily filling the "gap" in the portal energy he needed.
Unfortunately, the Flaxans were just too weak—most of them were only slightly stronger than ordinary people on Earth.
"Do we… even need to do anything?" Eve and the others arrived at the city battlefield and stared, eyes wide, as Jovian slaughtered everything in sight—one man chasing an entire Flaxan army like it was nothing.
"Like Jovian said," Robot Jack analyzed calmly, "maybe we just need to handle cleanup."
"Resist! Resist!"
"There's only one enemy! Pick up your weapons!"
A one-eyed Flaxan with a red cloak draped behind him roared furiously. He was disgusted by the way his army was being torn apart by a single enemy.
He stared viciously at Jovian, as if trying to burn Jovian's face into his memory.
"You don't want to leave?" Jovian's expression turned icy.
"Then none of you are leaving."
Jovian locked onto that Flaxan who looked like their leader—then became a bolt of lightning. In a flash, he grabbed the leader's head with one hand and flew straight into the spacetime tunnel behind the enemy lines.
"Jovian!" Mark shouted in panic as he watched Jovian vanish into the tunnel with the Flaxan leader in his grip.
"Oh my God?!" Eve's heart slammed in her chest. She hadn't expected Jovian to do something like that, and fear for his safety hit her hard. "Quick—tell Cecil!"
"I'm already contacting him," Robot Jack said. In the instant Jovian entered the tunnel, he'd already reached out.
Elsewhere—on the Flaxan planet, swallowed in darkness.
Jovian held the Flaxan leader by the head, while his foot lightly pressed down on the body of a Flaxan general.
"I'm going to show you what it costs… to make me angry."
Jovian swept his cold gaze over the soldiers around him. Then his right hand tightened—just slightly.
In an instant, the Flaxan leader's head was crushed into mush, bursting like a smashed watermelon and spraying red everywhere.
"From this moment on, I'm launching an attack on this planet."
"You can try to resist."
"That much… I'll allow."
In that moment, Jovian—alone—declared war on an entire planet.