The distance between Matsubara Tsuyoshi's comet-like spear and the Tiger King's crushing hammer-fist was less than a meter, compression heating the air between them to a searing point right before the impact.
Then, space fractured violently as a swirling vortex of pitch-black darkness and blinding light tore open directly in the crossfire.
To the surviving hunters watching from the safety of the tree line, everything happened in a literal heartbeat.
There was a sudden flash, a violent tear in reality, and then—
BOOOOOOOOOOM!!!
A massive explosion of kinetic force detonated in the center of the clearing, causing the humid jungle air to erupt as wet mud, decayed leaves, and mossy stone ruins vanished under a blinding cloud of pulverized earth and boiling steam.
The sheer pressure blew the surrounding trees backward and snapped thick vines like cheap string.
Tsuyoshi was thrown sideways from the force, his boots plowing deep trenches into the mud as he struggled to keep his balance while staring into the swirling veil of dust with wide eyes.
Inside that split-second explosion, time felt entirely different for the body falling head-first from the rift as Garou's eyelids, heavy and crusted with dried crimson, snapped open.
Severe pain ripped through his torso from the broken ribs Bang and Genos had left him with, but his hyper-tuned martial instincts overrode the agony to demand immediate survival.
As he fell with his back arched toward the ground, his peripheral vision picked up a golden spear humming with dense energy to his left and a colossal, fur-covered fist packed with massive weight to his right.
His broken body moved on pure muscle memory as he whipped his right arm upward to clip the side of the golden spear shaft.
He leveraged the fluid motions of the Water Stream Rock Smashing Fist to glide along the weapon's massive piercing power rather than blocking it directly, which nudged the tip just a few inches off course and sent the spear's wielder stumbling blindly into the periphery.
Simultaneously, Garou twisted his torso mid-air to flip his chest toward the damp earth, his crimson-stained hair whipping through the air as his silver eyes locked onto the incoming fist of the apex predator.
He coiled his leg and stomped down with brutal precision directly onto the knuckle of the monster's giant fist, using the Tiger King's downward momentum against it.
Garou acted as a lightning rod to guide the entirety of that physical weight straight past his own body and force it directly into the earth below, causing the monster's arm to buckle and its perfect combat stance to fold instantly.
The giant fist plowed into the ground and dumped its massive kinetic energy into the soil, which shattered the bedrock beneath the mud into a million pieces and created a deep, wide crater that swallowed the beast's lower body.
Riding the violent rebound of the impact, Garou flipped gracefully through the air to absorb the shock through his knees and landed lightly on his feet at the edge of the newly formed crater.
As the dense cloud of steam and dirt finally began to settle, a heavy silence fell over the ruined jungle clearing while the surviving hunters blinked away the dust.
Standing dead-center inside the smoking pit was the Tiger King, its massive arm trembling from the impact and its ice-blue eyes burning with an entirely new, bewildered rage as it grunted.
Stumbled completely outside the crater, gripping his golden spear with white knuckles, was Tsuyoshi, who wiped sweat from his face while staring at the center of the clearing.
Standing right on the rim of the crater with his back to the terrified raid team was the battered teenager, wearing nothing but bloodied bandages wrapped tightly around his torso and torn martial arts pants.
His clothes were completely ruined and his hair was matted a demonic, deep red from the fresh blood streaming down his face, yet his stance was entirely flawless as his sharp, feral silver eyes locked onto Tsuyoshi first before drifting down to glare at the giant beast rising from the dirt.
The three of them locked eyes in a tense, freezing triangle, warily measuring the threat of the sudden, silent wildcard who had just appeared out of nowhere.
"Who are you?!!!!!"The demand left Tsuyoshi's throat alongside a chorus of grave, shaken voices from the surviving hunters.
Garou did not answer.
He stood at the edge of the crater, his silver eyes staring past them as his mind raced with fractured, chaotic questions.
Who or what are these people? Heroes?
It was the first conclusion his brain reached, but he could not remember a single hero in the Association who dressed in polished medieval armor or carried ornate staves.
Had a new faction of heroes with bizarre teleportation abilities ambushed him?
It didn't make sense. They looked like they were already locked in a desperate, bloody war with the giant beast in the pit.
The confusion threatened to overwhelm him, and a singular, impossible thought began to form in his mind—
The thought was instantly cut short.
The Tiger King, utterly enraged by the battered intruder who had dared to stall its kill, threw its massive head back.
It let out a roar so immense, so violently loud, that the sound waves physically warped the humid air, making the entire dungeon tremble as the ground rolled in a localized earthquake.
ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAR!!!
The sound wasn't just noise; it was a weaponized shockwave of raw, unfiltered mana.
Except for Tsuyoshi and the A-rank mage, every single remaining hunter in the clearing—including the heavily armored A-rank tanks—instantly clutched their heads between their hands.
Blood erupted from their mouths, eyes, and ears as their eardrums shattered under the psychic and acoustic pressure.
A split-second later—
POP!!! POP!!! POP!!!
Their heads detonated like overripe watermelons under pressure.
Brains and skull fragments sprayed into the damp mud as their headless torsos plummeted forward into the dirt, entirely lifeless.
Tsuyoshi fell to his knees, clamping his hands over his ears as a thin trickle of crimson leaked from the corner of his lips.
Driven by sheer survival, he let out a guttural roar of his own, his golden mana exploding outward in a violent, defensive aura that forced his heart to keep pumping.
He stood up slowly, breathing heavily, his eyes wide with horror as he looked at the carnage.
This wasn't an A-rank boss.
This beast was dragging its paws across the very ceiling of S-rank territory, having annihilated the remnants of his elite raid team with a single breath.
Glancing to his side, Tsuyoshi saw his A-rank mage lying unconscious, his high passive mana pool having barely saved his life, though he was face-covered in blood.
Then, his eyes shifted to the newcomer. Garou was down on one knee, clutching his skull with a single clawed hand, his teeth bared in a silent snarl as he forced his battered body to stand right back up.
There was no time for questions. Trusting a stranger who literally spawned out of a spatial rift was an insane gamble, but Tsuyoshi was entirely out of options.
"I don't know who the hell you are or how you got here!" Tsuyoshi shouted over the ringing in his ears, his golden spear trembling in his grip.
"But it doesn't matter! This thing is a monster! If we don't kill it together, we die here! Join forces with me!"
Garou glared at him, his jaw tightening as he prepared to spit back a venomous refusal. He didn't take orders from heroes.
But the Tiger King didn't care about their dialogue.
Shifting its ice-blue gaze away from the spearman, the apex predator locked its eyes onto Garou, instinctively recognizing the martial artist as the far more dangerous threat.
Even as Garou stared directly at the beast, it vanished from thin air.
Garou's silver eyes widened. He whipped his head left, right, and behind him, but the beast's presence had completely evaporated from the horizontal plane.
Suddenly, Tsuyoshi blurred forward, his armor clanking violently as he screamed at the top of his lungs: "ABOVE YOU!!!"
Garou snapped his gaze toward the canopy.Miles up in the humid air, the Tiger King was suspended against the darkened sky, its colossal fist cocked back behind its shoulder.
As it swung downward, it displace the air; unleashing a massive, concentrated torrent of raw, crimson mana.
The magical energy materialized in the sky as a translucent, glowing fist so monstrously vast it looked like an inverted mountain descending from the heavens, completely blocking out the remaining light and casting a shadow of absolute doom over the entire clearing.
To Tsuyoshi's hyper-accelerated perception, the falling mountain of energy looked slow, a cinematic descent of pure destructive mass.
But in reality, it crossed the distance in a fraction of a second.
Before the energy fist even touched the ground, the immense atmospheric pressure and radiating mana caused the ancient, towering jungle trees to snap like toothpicks.
The bedrock cracked, and the mud boiled away into nothingness.
Garou stood directly in the center of the impact zone.
Thick purple veins bulged violently across his forehead and arms.
The horrific wounds left by Bang, Bomb, and Genos ripped wide open, spraying fresh crimson across his bloodied bandages.
He didn't run and he couldn't.
With a feral screech that tore his throat, Garou threw both hands into the motion of the Water Stream Rock Smashing Fist.
A sickening, internal crack echoed from his collarbone as his fractured skeletal structure screamed under the strain, but he forced his hands to trace the fluid, defensive arcs of his martial arts, capturing the dense, physical mass of the incoming mana fist.
The mountain of glowing energy slammed into his upturned palms.Using the ultimate redirection technique, Garou didn't try to halt the descending attack.
He caught the leading edge of the crushing magical structure, twisted his torso with a brutal, ground-shattering pivot, and guided the entire catastrophic energy mass off to his right side.
BOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!
The world tore itself apart.The sheer back-pressure of the deflected shockwave sent Tsuyoshi flying through the air.
He managed to catch the limp, unconscious body of his A-rank mage mid-flight, digging his boots deep into the earth as he slammed back down.
He channeled every ounce of his remaining golden mana into his legs, dragging a deep, trench-like trace into the ground for several meters before he finally ground to a halt.
To their left, the landscape was permanently rewritten.
The dense jungle vegetation, the massive ancient trees, and the structural stone ruins were completely erased from existence, vaporized by the deflected fist energy.
In their place lay a catastrophic, smoking canyon—a perfectly smooth, hollowed-out gorge, as if a god had taken a colossal spoon and scooped a massive chunk out of the earth.
The Tiger King dropped from the sky, landing heavily on one knee in the center of the newly carved ruin.
The beast was panting heavily, steam rising from its orange-and-black fur as it forced itself back onto its two legs, its blue eyes scanning the destruction to find its target.
At the edge of the canyon, Garou was face-down in the dirt.
His arms were entirely shredded, coated in a thick layer of his own dark blood, and his body was leaking crimson from a dozen reopened gashes.
He looked entirely like a corpse.Then, the fingers of his right hand twitched.
Gritting his teeth so hard they threatened to shatter, his mouth completely overflowing with metallic-tasting blood, Garou planted a single palm into the mud.
Slowly, agonizingly, he pushed his broken frame upward, forcing his trembling legs to lock into place.
He stood on the brink of death, a rabid animal refusing to stop breathing, glaring at the monster through a veil of red hair.
"Heroes... Monsters... all of them will learn to fear me! I am the Monster, Garou!"
His roar was a jagged, bloody thing that tore through the ruined clearing.
His silver eyes fixed onto the massive predator as he forced his trembling limbs back into the fluid stance of the Water Stream Rock Smashing Fist.
"There is no way in hell an oversized cat is going to kill me!"
Matsubara Tsuyoshi stared at the bloodied teenager, his own body trembling from a mixture of awe and exhaustion.
The sheer, terrifying willpower of this stranger—refusing to yield even when the evolutionary gap between him and the monster was as wide as a mountain—was nothing short of insane.
Tsuyoshi shifted his gaze back to the Tiger King. The beast was panting heavily, steam curling off its matted, orange-and-black fur.
He used a catastrophic amount of mana for that energy fist, Tsuyoshi analyzed, his knuckles turning white as he gripped his golden spear. He's weaker than he was a minute ago, but it doesn't matter. Even like this, I don't see a single opening to kill him.
Defying the grim odds, Tsuyoshi brandished his spear, the crimson markings along the shaft humming with the last of his golden aura.
He prepared himself for a brutal, final clash—a fight he knew, with terrifying certainty, he would likely not survive.
Then, the entire dungeon violently convulsed.
RUMMMMBLE!!!
A sudden, catastrophic earthquake rolled across the dense jungle terrain. Ancient stone ruins shattered into dust and towering trees groaned under a sudden, suffocating pressure that descended from the heavens.
The Tiger King immediately whipped its head around, its ice-blue eyes locking onto the distant tree line toward the dungeon's entrance.
The blue portal was miles away, yet the sheer, suffocating weight of the incoming mana was already crushing the air out of their lungs.
Tsuyoshi felt the pressure hit his chest and a sudden, ecstatic realization washed over his face. He knew this suffocating, mountain-splitting weight.
There was only one human being in all of Japan who possessed a presence this dominant.
"Guildmaster?!!!!!" Tsuyoshi shouted, his voice cracking with pure relief.
A few minutes prior, outside the steel-barricaded street in the afternoon light, Kono Misaki stood with her arms crossed, staring intently at the softly pulsing blue veil of the A-rank gate.
A sharp frown tugged at her lips.According to the early magical readings and the standard evaluation of the Japanese Hunters Association, this specific dungeon was supposed to be on the lower end of the A-rank spectrum.
It should have been a straightforward environment populated by lower-tier beasts and a standard A-rank boss.
It was the perfect ecosystem for her elite raid team to conquer without her direct intervention.But too much time had passed.
They should have cleared the perimeter by now.An ominous premonition began to twist in her gut, but she forced herself to remain stationary, trusting the team she had personally drilled.
Riiiiiiing!
Misaki pulled her phone from her pocket and snapped it open.
"Allo.""Guildmaster, are you still waiting at the dungeon site?" the voice of Shiro, her head of guild operations and one the two other S rank of the guild apart from herself, echoed through the receiver.
"Shiro, I'm just making sure everything goes smoothly," Misaki replied, her sharp red eyes tracking the stable blue light of the gate.
"It's their first major raid without me leading the frontline. I'm just a little anxious."
"I know how much you care about them, especially since they are the very first raid team you trained entirely by yourself," Shiro said, his tone warm and reassuring over the line.
"But have a little more confidence in them, Guildmaster. After all, they were trained by the undisputed strongest S-rank in all of Japan."
"Cut the flattery, Shiro," Misaki corrected with a faint smirk. "Goto Ryuji is officially recognized as the strongest."
"That is only because the public doesn't know the true extent of your capabilities, Guild Master. I am entirely certain that if the two of you ever fight, you would dismantle him with ease."
"Stop joking, Shiro," Misaki said, her smile softening slightly. "But you're right. I should have more faith in—"
SWOOOOOOOOOSH!!!
An immense, violent spike of magical energy radiated outward from the blue veil, hitting the surrounding real-world street like a physical shockwave.
Misaki's smile vanished instantly. Her red eyes narrowed into lethal slits as she glared at the portal.
"Guildmaster? Is there a problem?" Shiro's voice suddenly turned urgent as the silence stretched. "Guildmaster, what is happening over there?!"
Without answering, Misaki clicked the phone shut, cutting off the call entirely.
"Guildmaster!"A panicked shout echoed from behind the barricades.
A young female guild administrator, dressed in a sleek white button-up shirt and a tailored black business suit, came sprinting toward the gate, her cascading brown hair flying wildly behind her.
"What is it?!!!!!" Misaki demanded.The urgency in her voice caused a fraction of her S-rank aura to leak into the air, making the administrative worker freeze in her tracks, her entire frame trembling under the passive weight.
"Guild... Master..." the woman stammered, holding up a digital monitor with a shaking hand.
"The energy readings... the Mana meter for this gate just spiked into an impossible threshold! The core density has completely rewritten itself... this isn't a low-tier gate! It's a peak A-rank dungeon bordering on an S-rank catastrophe!"
SWOOOOOOOOOSH!!!
A second, vastly more terrifying pulse of crimson mana detonated from the gate, shattering the concrete beneath Misaki's combat boots.
Without uttering another word, Misaki let her phone slip from her fingers, the device smashing against the asphalt as her physical form instantly vanished from the real world, tearing into the blue veil of the dungeon.
Inside the ruined jungle clearing, Tsuyoshi let his legs give out, collapsing backward into the mud with a manic, breathless laugh as the crushing fear evaporated from his chest.
"Hahahaha! You are dead, you damn monster! The Guildmaster is here!"
He quickly glanced to his left to check on the stranger. Garou was still locked in his martial arts stance, his silver eyes wide open and staring blankly ahead.
Yet, his body was completely rigid, frozen mid-motion, entirely unresponsive to the immense, crushing pressure rolling through the jungle from the distant entrance.
Is he dead? Tsuyoshi thought, panic rising for a brief second before he noticed the shallow, rhythmic rise and fall of the teenager's bloodied chest bandages. No... he's just unconscious. His mind completely shut down from exhaustion, but his muscle memory is keeping him standing.
The Tiger King looked at the laughing human, and the primal instincts of the apex predator screamed a single word: Death.
It could feel the monstrous, god-like entity closing the distance from the edge of the dungeon at an impossible velocity.
Glaring down at the two vulnerable humans, the beast decided to butcher them before the true monster arrived.
"Grrrrr... grrrr!"The beast opened its massive jaws, letting out a low, guttural sequence of snarls that carried a dark, untranslatable promise of execution. You will be dead before that human ever reaches this clearing.
Seeing the beast's ice-blue eyes flash with homicidal intent, Tsuyoshi forced his exhausted body back onto his feet, raising his spear in a desperate defensive arc.
He refused to die on his very first raid as leader.
But in the next microsecond, the three-meter-tall beast completely vanished from his sight.
He's still this fast?!!! Tsuyoshi's mind screamed.
WHOOSH!
The Tiger King materialized directly in front of his face, its blackened steel hooks raised to cleave Tsuyoshi's head clean off his shoulders.
Tsuyoshi braced his spear shaft, preparing for the bone-shattering impact.
But the claws never touched his metal armor.
The suffocating S-rank aura that had been miles away just a second ago materialized instantly in the center of the clearing.
Kono Misaki appeared out of thin air as if she had bypassed the laws of space entirely, her long blonde hair whipping violently through the humid air and her red eyes glowing with an incandescent, lethal light.
With a fluid, terrifying rotation of her torso, she slammed her closed fist into her open palm, driving her driving elbow straight into the center of the monster's spine.
BOOOOOOOOOOM!!!
The shockwave of the physical strike blew the remaining mud away from the bedrock.
The three-meter-tall Tiger King didn't just fly backward; its massive body became a blurred projectile that dragged a deep, violent trench into the earth before smashing into an ancient, massive tree.
The trunk exploded into a million wooden splinters upon impact.
The monster King slid down the ruined bark, sprawling limply in the dirt at the base of the shattered tree.
Its ice-blue eyes were wide with a blank, uncomprehending shock.
Directly in the center of its massive, hyper-muscled back was a clean, hollowed-out crater—a gaping hole punched entirely through its torso, allowing Tsuyoshi to see the ruined jungle vegetation straight through the beast's chest.
With a final, weak tremor of its banded tail, the borderline S-rank calamity slumped forward, dead before it could even realize what had hit it.