The peace in Midgar, bought with pancakes and secured by a strategically managed training schedule, was a beautiful, fragile thing. For a full year, the kingdom experienced an unprecedented era of prosperity and security. The Cult of Diablos seemed to have vanished, its remnants either eradicated or gone to ground. The alliance with the Oriana Kingdom flourished, based on a shared, profound, and unspoken terror of their mutual ally. Saitama's presence, once a source of constant panic, had become a strange, almost comforting, part of the background radiation of daily life in the capital. He was their "pet god," a baffling but benign force who was content as long as his noodle supply was uninterrupted and he had sufficiently durable training dummies to punch into dust.
Saitama himself had settled into a routine that was, if not exciting, at least… tolerable. His role as "Grandmaster" of the Royal Vanguard provided a steady, if completely one-sided, outlet for his need to punch things. He had become a surprisingly effective, if unorthodox, teacher. His lessons were simple: "Try to hit harder," "Dodge faster," and "Don't forget to eat a balanced breakfast." While technically useless, the sheer impossibility of his demonstrations had a profound effect, pushing the knights and mages of the Vanguard to break their own perceived limits in a desperate, futile attempt to get even a fraction of a percent closer to his level. Midgar's military strength had never been greater.
He had even, in moments of extreme boredom, deigned to read parts of the Tome of Aethel with Lyraelle and Iris. He'd mostly just complained about the lack of pictures and the long, boring sentences, but he had absorbed the core concept: a big, super-sneaky, incorporeal bad guy named 'The Silence' was gone, but "Shadow," the chuunibyou from the desert, had warned that other, bigger things might be coming. Saitama filed this away under "potential future fun" and mostly went back to worrying about his training-slash-sparring schedule.
The quiet, however, was the deep, deceptive calm of the ocean before a tsunami. The echoes of his power were still traveling through the cosmos, and the things that had heard them were finally beginning to arrive.
The first tremor came not as an invasion or a direct attack, but as a subtle, terrifying wrongness in the sky. One clear, cloudless afternoon, the sun… flickered. For a single, heart-stopping moment, the brilliant midday sun blinked out, plunging the world into a disorienting, absolute darkness, before blinking back on again. The entire event lasted less than a second, but it was witnessed across the entire continent. Panic erupted. Astrologers and Magi frantically consulted their charts and scrying orbs, finding no natural explanation, only a faint, lingering trace of an immense, utterly alien, energy signature that had passed briefly between their world and its star.
Saitama, who had been in the middle of demonstrating a "Serious Sidestep" to a group of knights (which mostly involved him just standing still while they tried fruitlessly to hit him), felt it too. It wasn't a physical sensation. It was a faint, almost imperceptible lurch in the fabric of reality. He looked up at the sun, his usually bored eyes narrowing slightly. "Huh," he said, mostly to himself. "That was weird. Almost felt like… something big just flew by."
The flicker was followed by other, equally unsettling, phenomena. Strange, aurora-like lights, in colors that seemed to hurt the eyes, appeared in the night sky, moving in complex, geometric patterns that defied all known principles of astronomy. Faint, dissonant, musical chimes were heard on the wind in high, lonely places, sounds that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. The kingdom's psychics and seers were driven to madness or catatonia, their minds shattered by glimpses of "impossible geometries" and "the gaze of a billion unblinking eyes."
Archmagus Theron's new, world-spanning arcane sensors were screaming, their crystals cracking under the strain, reporting the arrival of… something. A massive, non-physical, yet undeniably present, entity had just entered their solar system. It wasn't a ship. It wasn't a being of matter. It was… a thought. A vast, predatory, cosmic intellect that was now casting its shadow over their entire world.
King Olric convened an emergency council. The room was thick with a new, colder fear than any the Cult had ever inspired.
"It has begun," Lyraelle stated, her voice a low, solemn whisper, her silver eyes filled with an ancient, familiar dread. "The echoes have been answered. The first of the greater leviathans has arrived."
"What is it?" Lord Valerius demanded, his hand gripping the hilt of his sword as if he could somehow fight a wrongness in the sky.
"We… do not know," Archmagus Theron admitted, his face pale, his usual scholarly confidence gone. "Our senses cannot get a lock on it. It is… everywhere and nowhere. It observes. It… tastes. It is, for lack of a better term, a cosmic scout. A predator, sniffing the air, assessing the viability of new prey."
It was then that Saitama, who had been summoned to the meeting and was mostly just trying to see if he could subtly balance a spoon on Sir Kaelan's helmet without him noticing, spoke up. "Oh, you mean the big, floaty eye-guy?" he said casually.
The entire council froze, turning to stare at him.
"You… you can see it, Saitama?" Iris asked, her voice trembling.
"Yeah, sure," Saitama said, shrugging, abandoning his spoon experiment. "It's right out there." He pointed a finger towards the seemingly empty blue sky outside the window. "Looks kinda like a giant, invisible jellyfish made of TV static. With, like, a million eyes. And it keeps… humming. It's really annoying. It's making it hard for me to concentrate on my nap schedule."
The council stared at him, then at the empty sky, then back at him. He could see it. He could perceive a being that was so far beyond their own dimensional reality that their most powerful Magi could only detect its shadow. Once again, he was operating on a level of reality they couldn't even begin to access.
"Can you… can you fight it?" King Olric asked, the question hanging in the air, heavy with the fate of their world.
Saitama frowned. "Fight it? I dunno. It's not really… here. It's more like… a really big, spooky projection. Like a movie. Can you punch a movie? Probably not." He thought for a moment. "It's more annoying than it is scary. It keeps whispering stuff. Something about… 'evaluating caloric content' and 'potential soul-spices'. Sounds creepy. And also kinda gross."
It was at that moment that the 'spooky projection' decided to make a more direct statement.
In the center of the Royal Capital's main plaza, the very air began to tear. Not with a violent rip, but with a silent, graceful incision, as if a divine scalpel were cutting through the world. A perfect, circular gateway of shimmering, multi-colored light appeared, hovering five feet off the ground.
From the gateway, a single being emerged. It was beautiful, and it was utterly horrifying. It was a being of crystalline logic, its body a complex, ever-shifting lattice of what looked like white gold and living diamond. It had a vaguely humanoid form, but its limbs were too long, its movements too precise, its face a smooth, featureless ovoid that shimmered with an internal, calculating light. It held in its hands not a weapon, but a single, perfectly tuned, crystalline rod that hummed with a pure, piercing frequency. This was a "Tuner," a Herald of the cosmic entity, sent to "harmonize" the new world, to make it ready for consumption.
The Tuner floated silently into the center of the plaza. It raised its rod. And it began its work.
The humming from the rod intensified, a single, pure, unbearably high-pitched note that swept through the city. It was not a destructive force; it was a resonance. A frequency that was designed to unmake the "impure" and "chaotic" vibrations of organic life.
People in the plaza screamed, not from pain, but from a terrifying, soul-deep wrongness. The humming resonated with the very water in their bodies, the very iron in their blood, threatening to shake their molecular structure apart. Stone began to crack. Glass shattered. The very song of the world, as Lyraelle had called it, was being tuned to a frequency of perfect, crystalline, lifeless silence.
In the palace, the windows of the council chamber exploded inwards. The King and his advisors were thrown to the floor, clutching their ears, the resonant hum an agony in their very bones.
Saitama, however, just stood there, a look of profound annoyance on his face. "Okay," he said, his voice cutting easily through the deafening hum. "Now it's just getting really loud. I hate loud."
He turned to the window. He saw the crystalline being floating in the plaza, the source of the intolerable noise.
"Alright," he said, cracking his knuckles. "Movie time's over."
He didn't leap from the balcony. He didn't run. He just… walked out of the council chamber, through the corridors of panicked guards and terrified nobles, and out the main doors of the palace. He walked down the grand staircase, his steps calm, measured, his expression no longer bored, but not angry either. It was the simple, focused look of a man who was about to go deal with a noisy neighbor.
He walked out into the plaza. The remaining citizens had all fled, leaving only the crystalline Tuner floating at its center, its world-unmaking symphony reaching a crescendo. The creature's featureless face turned towards Saitama, its internal light flickering, registering him as the only being in the city who was not only unaffected by the harmonization frequency, but was actually walking towards it.
Saitama stopped a hundred feet away. He looked at the beautiful, terrifying, reality-warping alien being.
"Hey, you!" he shouted over the hum. "Knock it off! I'm trying to have a very important, very boring meeting in here! And you are being super rude!"
The Tuner, perhaps out of curiosity, or perhaps out of an arrogance born of cosmic superiority, did not stop. It merely tilted its head, a gesture of silent, clinical inquiry.
"Okay," Saitama sighed. "Guess I gotta turn down the volume myself."
He took a deep breath. And then, he cupped his hands around his mouth, and he shouted.
He didn't shout a word of power. He didn't shout a battle cry. He just shouted, a single, sustained, impossibly powerful, sound-wave-generating:
"HEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
The sound that erupted from his lungs was not a mere shout. It was a solid wall of pure, unadulterated, concussive force. It was a vocal "Normal Punch."
The unbearable, world-harmonizing hum of the Tuner's rod was not just drowned out; it was met by a counter-frequency of such raw, chaotic, simple power that the crystalline rod instantly shattered into a billion glittering motes of dust.
The Tuner itself, the being of perfect, crystalline logic, was struck by the soundwave. Its intricate, lattice-like body vibrated violently, a resonance cascade tearing through its form. The silent, controlled purity of its being was overwhelmed by the sheer, noisy, undeniable reality of Saitama's shout.
Its featureless face flickered with what could only be described as a static-filled error message. Then, its entire, beautiful, horrifying form simply… de-rezzed. It didn't explode; it dissolved into a shower of harmless, fading light particles, its connection to this dimension severed, its mission an absolute, catastrophic failure.
The plaza fell silent. The oppressive hum was gone. The tremors stopped.
Saitama lowered his hands from his mouth. "There," he said with satisfaction. "Much quieter."
He then turned and began to walk back to the palace. He had a boring meeting to finish. And he was pretty sure it was almost lunchtime.
The first cosmic tremor had been felt. The first herald had been sent. And it had been defeated. Not with a punch, not with a kick. But with a single, annoyed, very, very loud shout. The universe was starting to learn that in Midgar, there were new, very strange, noise ordinances in effect.