Saitama let out a small, relieved puff of air seeing King's ability to crack a joke. The tension in his shoulders eased a fraction.
"King, you rest up. I'm gonna go have a… talk with that brat." His expression darkened again as he turned. "A spar's a spar. Trying to blow up the planet? Not cool."
He began marching toward Cosmic Garou, rolling his shoulders with an ominous, casual air.
Across the battered plain, Garou reacted instantly, sinking into a low, cosmic-flow stance. The pressure radiating from the bald man was immense, formless, and absolute. Yet, instead of crushing his will, it ignited a frantic, supernova-like fighting spirit. The power he'd stolen from God… he wouldn't be defeated here!
"Come on then… Baldy!" Garou's challenge vibrated with defiant resolve.
"Bal… dy?"
Saitama's eyes flattened into two dark, dangerous slits. The air around him seemed to solidify.
Serious Series—Consecutive Serious Punches.
…
King, meanwhile, only allotted a sliver of his consciousness to the one-sided pummeling about to commence. The vast majority of his focus was turned inward, upon the shimmering system panel only he could see.
'System. Convert all Deterrence Points into levels.'
The Points were of diminishing use for skill refinement now. Their final, greatest utility was this—raw, quantitative advancement.
[ Deterrence Points - 37,456,210! ]
[ Level Up! Lv.2 → Lv.3! ]
[ Level Up! Lv.3 → Lv.4! ]
…
The notifications cascaded, a torrent of escalating power. The numbers flew until, finally, they settled.
[ Level Up! Lv.57 → Lv.58! ]
[ Free Attribute Points: 580 ]
Perfect. Without a moment's hesitation, King began to allocate. Points poured into Strength.
[ Strength +1 ]
[ Strength +1 ]
…
The moment the attribute pierced the 200 mark, his body underwent a silent, fundamental revolution. Every muscle fiber, every strand of tissue, underwent quantum-level recombination. Each cell became a dense, gravity-warping nexus of potential, capable of channeling force on a stellar scale. He could feel it—the power to crack a planet now resided in his fist with trivial ease.
Then, the "+" sign next to Strength grayed out, becoming inert.
"As I thought," King mused inwardly. "Shattering the first layer of the limiter only raises the cap for a single attribute to 200."
He proceeded without pause, flooding Agility and Spirit with points until they, too, hit their new zeniths.
As Agility breached 200, his perception of reality underwent a phase shift. The blistering, reality-sundering exchange between Saitama and Garou—punches that moved faster than physics should allow—now appeared to him as a languid, almost static dance. He could track the individual paths of photons, see the slow ripples of distorted spacetime. His neural impulses now operated on a timescale that laughed at Planck's constant, achieving near-instantaneous, quantum-entangled reaction.
When Spirit touched 200, his consciousness expanded. With a thought, his mental grasp enveloped the entire Solar System—the lazy orbit of Pluto, the solar winds, the silent drift of asteroids. His mind became a quantum supercomputer of infinite parallel processing and near-limitless memory. He could run predictive models of the future, simulations branching into billions of possibilities, though the further they stretched, the more they blurred into probabilistic noise.
With all three attributes maxed at their new thresholds, King slowly opened his eyes.
The simple act caused the space around him to fracture. Fine, spider-web cracks of pure black—ruptures in the very fabric of dimension—spidered out from his form, unable to bear the passive pressure of his existence.
He immediately shut his eyes again, focusing inward on immense control, forcing the rampant, universe-bending power to settle, to be contained within the vessel of his will.
At the center of the lunar apocalypse, Saitama's "discussion" with Cosmic Garou had reached a fever pitch.
THUD-CRACK-BOOM!
It was less a fight and more a catastrophic reshaping of the moon. Each of Saitama's Serious Punches sent Garou cratering through miles of bedrock, only for the cosmic entity to reform and surge back, his own star-shattering blows meeting Saitama's impassive face with world-killing force—to utterly no effect. The lunar surface was no longer a landscape but a churning sea of molten rock and silver dust, heaving in continent-sized waves with every impact. The very satellite groaned under stresses it was never meant to bear.
Saitama's fists fell like a meteor shower, a relentless barrage that hammered Cosmic Garou's stardust form into constant, shimmering disintegration. Against that bland, overwhelming force, the cosmic entity seemed diminished—a defiant but futile spark against a tidal wave.
WHAM!
Another piston-driven blow sent Garou cratering kilometers deep into the lunar mantle. He clawed his way back up, the swirling constellations of his face flaring with unstable, furious light.
"Damn you… you bald freak!"
Garou suddenly crossed his arms over his chest in an oddly formal, preparatory stance.
Saitama paused, tilting his head. "Huh? Got an itch or something?"
"An ITCH?!" Garou's voice spiked with cosmic static. "You imbecile! All your techniques… I've seen through them! In martial arts, there exists a supreme principle—to borrow the forms and powers of all living things! 'Borrowing Force'!"
His voice swelled with dramatic fervor. "And to give it a worthy name… I call it—Mode!"
As the word echoed, the starlight of Garou's face morphed. Saitama's own placid, unremarkable features materialized upon the cosmic void, creating a jarring, surreal visage.
"Wah!" Saitama jumped back half a step, pointing accusingly. "Hey! That's… that's not right! I'm not that bland! If you're gonna copy me, at least add a little handsomeness!"
"SILENCE!" Garou roared, the Saitama-face twisting in humiliation. "Now witness true power! Serious Series—"
He mimicked Saitama's posture exactly, fists pulling back to his waist.
"—SERIOUS PUNCH!""
A galaxy of fist-shadows erupted from him, a torrent of imitated annihilation aimed to drown the original.
"Oh?" A flicker of genuine interest finally lit Saitama's eyes. "Not bad!"
He settled into his own stance, his fists becoming a blur. "Consecutive Serious Punches!"
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM—!!!
Two walls of absolute force—one original, one a perfected mimicry—collided. The space between them screamed. Each collision birthed spatial quakes. Shockwave rings vaporized everything in expanding spheres. A titanic mushroom cloud of molten moon rock and plasma bloomed upward.
The lunar surface beneath them shattered in a web of continent-sized fissures. The cracks raced across the face of the Moon, deeper than its crust, reaching the mantle in seconds.
CRRRRRACK—!!!
With a sound that defied the vacuum, a massive portion of the lunar surface collapsed, plummeting into the molten depths. Both figures vanished into the abyss, swallowed by the moonfall.
But the impacts didn't stop. Muffled, world-ending THUDS echoed from the heart of the Moon, each one making the entire satellite shudder like a gong.
Inside the Emperor Maru Kai, alarms shrieked. Child Emperor's monitors flashed catastrophic red.
"The lunar core pressure!" he yelled, voice thin with panic. "It's spiking past all containment models! If this continues—the Moon will undergo a catastrophic gravitational collapse! The debris field…"
Superalloy Darkshine's face was ashen. "The fragments… they'd rain down on Earth. It would be an extinction-level event."
"We have to stop them!" Atomic Samurai's hand was white on his sword hilt, but he was utterly powerless.
Every eye turned to the viewscreen, to the lone figure of King sitting cross-legged on the ravaged surface, his eyes closed. Unstable, terrifying ripples of power—like space itself was boiling—emanated from him.
"King-sama's condition…" Bang murmured, his warrior's instinct screaming. "He's at a critical juncture. A breakthrough."
As if on cue, the space directly above the crumbling Moon warped. Reality folded, twisted, and then tore.
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