The Child of Lava had decided the annoyance was handled.
The dust cloud swallowing the shopping mall's upper floors was thick enough to satisfy, and the creature turned back to its work—one massive arm rising, lava trailing from the elbow like a slow waterfall, ready to continue the systematic erasure of this block and then the next.
A building-sized chunk of debris slammed into its face.
The impact was enormous. The creature staggered backward, feet—arms—grinding deep furrows through the rubble field as its half-body rocked under the blow. The people who hadn't finished running found a second gear they didn't know they had.
The dust cloud was still dispersing.
Through the haze, a figure floated upward from the ruined mall floor, coughing once. Fubuki's dress was torn at the shoulder and hem, hair disheveled, a smear of dust across her cheek. She didn't bother with any of it.
Too close. The arm-swing had been telegraphed—slow windup, the lava creature's movements too large to be subtle—but the impact radius had been worse than she'd calculated. Her psychic shield would not have held against a direct hit at that scale. She knew it. The math wasn't flattering.
She pushed the thought away.
"You think that's enough to stop me?" The blue light rekindled in her eyes, brighter than before—anger as fuel, emotion converting to output in the direct, efficient way that Tatsumaki had always said was a weakness and Fubuki had spent years deciding was a strength. The psychic flame roaring around her now far exceeded her earlier effort. "I'm Hellish Blizzard. Don't flatter yourself."
Every piece of structural debris within range rose in a single coordinated surge.
She drove it into the monster's face like a fist closing.
The impact thundered across what remained of the commercial district. Fubuki landed—barely—one knee dropping to a chunk of collapsed railing, her breath gone, the sudden psychic expenditure hitting her system all at once. The world tilted slightly. She gripped the edge of the railing and held herself steady by pure stubbornness.
Through the smoke, the Child of Lava straightened up.
It shook its head—a slow, contemptuous roll of its massive skull—and refocused its attention on her.
Repulsion, she thought. That was all.
The blue light in her eyes guttered.
Why am I still this weak.
The thought arrived without drama. No self-pity, just the quiet accounting of someone who had pushed everything and found the ceiling exactly where she'd feared it was. All the training, all the effort, all the careful cultivation of technique and power—and a Demon-level monster in an industrial format had shrugged off her best shot.
Sister.
The creature grabbed two more building-sized chunks from the rubble field.
Fubuki watched them coming. Her psychic shield flickered, depleted. She calculated the impact and found no viable outcome. She kept her eyes open.
The debris froze.
Every piece of it—large slabs of concrete, rebar clusters, sections of fractured road—stopped dead within a hundred meters of her position, suspended in green light as though the air had turned solid. The Child of Lava threw its full strength behind the next volley. And the one after that. For almost a full minute, debris rained toward her in a continuous barrage—
—and collected in the air, piece by piece, assembling into a green-lit wall above the street.
"You wretched—why won't it hit—"
The creature's howl of frustration carried across the burning district.
The green light descended slowly in front of her.
Tatsumaki landed between Fubuki and the monster with the unhurried ease of someone who had not broken a sweat, arms folded, her dress undisturbed by the heat still radiating from the rubble field. The psychic energy holding hundreds of pieces of structural debris—material that had taken Fubuki everything she had to move at all—flickered around the S-Class hero like an afterthought.
"You still haven't listened to a word I've said," Tatsumaki said. Not cruelty. Something closer to resignation.
The tension snapped in Fubuki's chest.
She'd been holding herself together through sheer momentum since the first explosion—no time to feel anything, only assess and respond and push harder. Now the momentum ran out, and what was underneath was just relief, sudden and overwhelming, the particular loosening that happens when you don't have to be the last line of defense anymore.
"Sister—"
"How many times." Tatsumaki's eyes swept the debris field she was holding with casual control—hundreds of tons, managed with the fraction of her power she wasn't currently using to maintain conversation. "When it matters, no one comes but me. You know this." Her gaze sharpened. "You feel powerless against this type? You really—"
DUM. DUM. DUM. DUM.
DUM. DUM. DUM. DUM.
The sound came from above—war drums, or what war drums would sound like if they had been composed by something with no interest in restraint. The bass of it resonated in the chest cavity. It built as it descended, mixing with something else—the crack and roll of thunder, the electric charge raising the hair on the back of the neck.
Both sisters looked up.
Lightning split the cloud layer.
Not a natural strike. The angle was too precise, the descent too deliberate—a single golden bolt carving a straight vertical line from sky to ground, aimed with the accuracy of a thrown spear. It hit the Child of Lava dead center.
The thunder that followed was the kind that rearranged furniture.
Out of the lightning, a figure fell.
Tall. Baseball cap. Three scars across the face, visible for a fraction of a second in the flash—conspicuous and severe. Golden fire wrapped his entire body, the same current that had just descended from the clouds still channeling through him, and his eyes burned with the color of it.
His arm was already moving.
"Take this—" King's voice carried over the thunder, over the monster's disoriented roar, over the continued percussion of the King Engine shaking the air around him. His fist connected.
"—'Magnetic Field Rotation, 100,000 Horsepower—Emperor's Burst Fist!'"
The creature's roar cut off.
The impact tore the monster from skull to sternum—not a punch so much as a force of physics, the golden current detonating through the lava body in a chain of internal explosions. The half-torso that had survived a full commercial district's worth of destruction split open at its core.
Something fell from the wound.
A crystal—crimson, faceted, roughly the size of a large desk—trailing arcs of golden electricity as it tumbled free of the monster's chest. The creature saw it and its expression changed completely. The rage went out. What replaced it was a terror that had no performance in it at all.
King looked at the crystal.
He snapped his fingers.
The golden lightning still crawling across the crystal's surface received the command instantly—every arc, every tendril, every trailing discharge redirecting inward, drilling through the facets into the interior. The temperature inside the crystal climbed past the point where measurements become theoretical.
The crystal began to shake.
The Child of Lava had time for one final sound.
The crystal detonated.
The shockwave hit at the speed of the explosion that caused it—a wall of heat and pressure expanding outward from ground zero. Tatsumaki snapped her fingers in the same motion, and the suspended debris field compressed and contracted around herself and Fubuki, layers of green light stacking into a dense shield.
The shockwave arrived in silence and then all at once.
The heat scattered. The light faded. The green shield held without a crack.
The mushroom cloud rose over what had been M-City's North Commercial Street, announcing the end of the Child of Lava with the visual vocabulary of something considerably larger than a single Demon-level monster.
The fires were still burning when the smoke began to clear.
The epicenter of the explosion had become a crater with a monster-shaped mass at its center—blackened lava, still hot enough to glow at the joints, a cooled outline of something that had been twenty stories of rage and geology and had discovered its limitations. The sulfurous smell coming off it was thick enough to taste.
DUM. DUM. DUM. DUM.
DUM. DUM. DUM. DUM.
The King Engine had not stopped.
King stood on top of the creature's remains, one foot resting on the cooled shoulder of the corpse, golden light still fading from his hands. The baseball cap was slightly askew. His expression was the same one that had earned him his reputation—the natural severity of a face that had never in its life communicated ease—and the three scars caught the firelight in a way that did nothing to soften it.
He was the first thing Jordan saw when space finished folding.
Jordan landed at the edge of the crater, took in the burning commercial district, the floating debris wall, the two sisters at his three o'clock, and King standing on top of a lava corpse with the King Engine still rolling like distant artillery.
He let out a slow breath.
Three minutes. I was three minutes away.
"...Good timing," Jordan said, to no one in particular.