Elder Centipede shed the latest layer and kept moving, the new shell already hardening as it bulldozed through the gap between two collapsed towers in pursuit of King and Genos.
Then something leaped out of the ruins below them.
The creature's six compound eyes tracked it automatically. The face on its head processed the visual: small, bipedal, mostly bald with a few remaining sprouts of dark hair, wearing red rubber gloves and boots with a yellow jumpsuit and a white cape that moved behind it like a bed sheet someone had decided to take seriously.
What is this.
Saitama reached the apex of the jump and cocked his arm back.
Below, Jordan's thumb lifted from the button on a small wireless speaker. The opening notes of One Punch drifted upward into the ruins of S-City, and everyone within range — S-class, graduates, Senior Centipede's opponents, everyone — looked up with the involuntary reflex of something in the music that said pay attention to this.
Saitama exhaled once, slow and full, the way you do before something that matters.
"Serious Series—"
The Elder Centipede had its mocking smile ready. The human was the size of a finger relative to its head. It had watched S-class heroes hammer it for the last several minutes and grown new shell each time. What was one more—
Something changed in the air.
Not the wind. Something else. The specific quality of attention that a creature's survival instincts apply to a situation when they've recognized a category of threat that the rest of the organism hasn't caught up to yet. The smile on the Elder Centipede's face stopped moving.
Above its head, visible to Genos's sensors and to Jordan's extended perception and — in the particular way that Saitama's sparring partners developed a sensitivity to it — to King: the crimson death aura, the visual signature of zero remaining restraint.
It had appeared before. In training sessions. Over things that survived it because Saitama had pulled back at the last moment.
There was no version of this moment that involved pulling back.
"—Serious Punch."
The fist connected.
The shell that had bounced Atomic Samurai's blade, that had closed over Genos's plasma beam, that had drunk King's electromagnetic discharge and given it back as regenerated carapace — it didn't slow the punch. It didn't redirect it. It parted, the material losing whatever property had made it exceptional, and the force went through the full 10,000-meter body in the direction it had been going.
The face on the Elder Centipede's head stared at Saitama with the specific expression of something that has received information it has no protocol for and will not have time to develop one.
Then, one second after the punch landed, the body simply ceased to be in the configuration it had been in.
No dramatic crumbling. No slow collapse of segments. The Elder Centipede ended — dispersed at the molecular level outward from the point of contact, the force having distributed itself through the structure faster than the structure could maintain any meaningful shape. The detonation was silent except for the sound of displaced air and the subsequent precipitation of purple legs, shed by momentum rather than will, embedding themselves in the rows of shockwave craters on either side.
That was the last mark Elder Centipede would make on S-City.
King had the best view.
He'd been close enough to the creature's head when it happened that close was a relative term — the blast front passed him, the force field of Emperor's Armor responding and containing it without difficulty, and he found himself drifting in clear air where a Dragon-level monster had been filling his field of vision two seconds earlier.
He looked at where the creature had been.
He looked at Saitama, already descending toward the ground below with the relaxed trajectory of someone whose work is complete and whose landing is not a concern.
The gap, King thought, with the tranquility of someone who has had this thought before and has made peace with its contents, keeps growing. I get stronger. He gets further ahead. That's just how this is.
He looked at his own hands — the gauntlets of the Emperor's Armor, the magnetic field still cycling through the power systems at a level that had been unimaginable six months ago. The three scars on his face had stopped bothering him sometime around when his punches started registering on Dragon-class threats.
Jordan put me on this path. Saitama showed me what the path was for. He exhaled. One step at a time. That's all anyone can do.
He raised one hand and dispersed the storm — the black clouds breaking apart, the electromagnetic charge bleeding away, the natural sky reasserting itself over S-City's ruins in the clear blue that had been waiting behind the generated weather.
Saitama landed, shook his fist once to shed the green biological matter that had attached to the glove, and looked at it with the satisfaction of someone evaluating a completed task.
"That's better," he said, to nobody in particular. "Felt right."
Jordan descended to standing height beside him, watching the last of the dispersed matter dematerialize at distance, and experienced something that he recognized as aesthetic appreciation. The complete dissolution of a Dragon-level monster — not defeated, not wounded, not driven off — in a single unrestrained application of the most straightforward combat method available.
Incredibly clean, he thought.
To his left, Atomic Samurai had stopped walking.
He'd been moving toward his disciples when the sound hit — the specific absence of sound that marked the end of the fight — and had turned to process what he was seeing, which was open sky where Elder Centipede had been and the continued existence of S-City's remaining rubble. He stood very still for a moment.
"No matter how many times," he said, to no one, with the tone of a man making an honest observation about a fact that continues to be surprising despite prior exposure. He shook his head. "These two are completely outside the normal frame of reference."
He kept walking toward his disciples.
Good thing, he thought, with the private sincerity of a proud person making an honest assessment, that I didn't press the issue back at the dojo.
In the secondary field, the fight against Senior Centipede ended not because of anything the heroes present did — it ended because the Ghost-level creature stood upright in sudden stillness, the red light behind its eyes flickering, and looked in the direction where Elder Centipede had been.
The Elder was gone. Not absent — gone. Not even a disturbance in the background energy that large creatures generated through sheer presence. Simply not there anymore.
Senior Centipede turned this information over.
"The elder is... dead?"
Not half a corpse. Not a wounded retreat. Nothing.
The heroes who had been pressing the engagement exchanged looks over its head, the shared recognition passing between them that the fight was over in a different sense than they'd expected.
Genos had remained at altitude.
He watched Saitama land. Watched him shake the residue off his fist. Watched him take the relaxed posture of someone for whom this had been a light afternoon and not the climax of an engagement that had occupied several S-class heroes at their operational ceiling for fifteen minutes.
I've improved, Genos thought, with the honesty of a combat chip running an accurate assessment. My output this year exceeds anything I was capable of before. The Potential Guidance, Saitama-sensei's training, Jordan's intervention — the numbers are categorically different.
And Saitama-sensei is still exactly as far away as he was.
The mad cyborg that had destroyed his family existed somewhere, still operational, the goal Genos had organized his existence around before he'd found a teacher. He was stronger now. He would be stronger still. But how much stronger did the math require before the outcome of that encounter changed?
He didn't say any of this.
He descended.
He had gotten very good at keeping his face still in this specific situation, which was the situation of having thoughts he wasn't saying.
Saitama looked up at him as he landed.
"Expressionless," Saitama said, with the confident identification of someone who has been wrong about this so many times that the wrongness has become a reliable data point. "Right now. Very expressionless."
"I am always expressionless," Genos said. "I'm a cyborg."
"You're doing the thing with your jaw."
Genos processed this. "...I am not doing anything with my jaw."
Saitama had already moved on. He turned fully toward Genos, gave a thumbs-up with the hand that was no longer green, and said: "Good work out there. That cannon shot was well-placed."
The response came before Genos had finished deciding whether he was going to give one.
"Thank you, Saitama-sensei."
He heard himself say it. The instinct that had formed from months of that specific dynamic was faster than deliberation.
He stopped. Clenched his fist once. Then: "Teacher. I have a question."
Saitama blinked. "Yeah?"
Genos looked at the sky where Elder Centipede had been and had since stopped being. He looked at the space between what he was and what his teacher was, which was not a space that measurements could make meaningful.
"What am I lacking?"
The question had more weight than it sounded. Saitama, to his credit, took it seriously — scratched the back of his head with the focused expression of someone approaching a problem they actually want to solve correctly.
"What you're lacking..." He thought about it. "Isn't it power?"
The honest directness of this answer was still processing when a figure passed them from behind.
Jordan caught the movement at the edge of his perception and turned.
The young man walking past was perhaps twenty, moving with the unhurried composure of someone who had arrived exactly when they intended to and found exactly what they'd expected to find. The purple of his clothes was the kind of purple that costs money. His face was the kind of face that cameras made careers out of, and he knew it, and he had decided, in the particular way that very beautiful people sometimes decide, that this was simply a fact of the world he inhabited rather than anything to do with him specifically.
He did not look at Saitama.
He did not look at Jordan.
His gaze, passing through the ruins of S-City with the selective attention of someone scanning for something specific, found what it was looking for somewhere ahead of them.
He kept walking.