King's proud shout echoed across the shattered moon, a challenge flung at the cosmos itself. "Come!"
He understood, with crystal clarity, the terrifying nature of Saitama's latent potential—a growth curve that defied all logic. If there was ever a time to assert absolute superiority, it was now, before that boundless well of power could be fully tapped.
His figure didn't move in the conventional sense. It flickered, violating causality. In the same impossible instant, he was present in two places at once.
Before Saitama, who was still brushing dust from his shoulders, a fist bloomed like a supernova.
Before Cosmic Garou, who was hauling himself from a lake of magma, an identical fist materialized.
Cosmic Starburst Fist · Twin Starfall!
It wasn't an afterimage. It was a paradox given form—the same King, the same technique, applied with full, devastating force in two spatially separated points simultaneously. Space-time itself groaned in protest at the duplication of a singular, supreme will.
Two miniature stars, one gold-red, one deep cobalt, ignited at the points of impact. They didn't explode outward; they imploded, drawing in light, matter, and sound before collapsing into silent, absolute points of release.
BOOM. BOOM.
Two detonations, perfectly synchronized, erupted. The satellite, already hanging by a thread, let out a final, planetary-scale shriek. A web of glowing fissures, brighter than the local star, raced across its entire surface, connecting the two impact sites in a network of imminent doom.
Saitama took the hit square in the chest. For the first time in a very, very long while, his feet left the ground not by choice. He was hurled backwards, a human-shaped projectile carving a smooth, glassy trench through mountain ranges and across continents before skidding to a halt at the very edge of the moon, one hand gripping the crumbling lip of the world.
Cosmic Garou fared worse. The starfield of his body scattered, blown apart like dandelion seeds in a hurricane. For a terrifying moment, he was disincorporated, a cloud of screaming stardust, before his will clawed the fragments back together, reassembling his form kilometers away, flickering and unstable.
From their vantage point in space, Blast and his team watched the twin, continent-sized fireballs bloom and then the ominous, glowing cracks swallow the moon's face.
"He's… he's going to break it," Shiv whispered, her scientific awe momentarily overriding her other interests. "He's going to shatter the entire moon."
"He's not just fighting them," Blast said, his voice low with a veteran's understanding. "He's testing himself. And using them as the anvil."
On the surface, King floated above the apocalypse he'd just authored, the playful smirk gone, replaced by a look of focused intensity. The Twin Starfall had been a statement, a flex of his newly consolidated power on a cosmic scale.
He looked at Saitama, who was pulling himself back from the brink, a wide, unshakable grin spreading across his face. He looked at Garou, whose flickering form burned with a hatred so profound it was reforging him.
King cracked his knuckles. The sound was like boulders grinding in the heart of a star.
"Good," he said, and the word carried the weight of a coming storm. "You're both still standing. Let's see how much more you can take."
The twin supernova fists slammed home, unleashing a wave of pure obliteration that scoured the satellite's face. The crust didn't just crack—it vitrified, transforming into a single, continent-spanning sheet of obsidian under the impossible heat and pressure.
"Fall back! Again!" Blast barked, as the visual distortion from the shockwave itself threatened to tear their orbital observation post apart. They shot further into the void, the gas giant below now seeming like a precarious shield.
"Is this… biology? Or a walking cosmic event?" Karnok muttered, his warlike pride utterly shattered by the spectacle.
"It's perfection," Sif breathed, her sensors drinking in the data, her body trembling with a mixture of terror and desire. "A perfect, adaptive weapon-system contained in flesh!"
"The moon," Ryan growled, his lion's instincts screaming of imminent collapse. "It's dying."
On the glassy plain, Saitama and Cosmic Garou skidded to a halt, having been punched clean around the small world. Garou coughed, spitting luminescent, star-flecked ichor that sizzled on the glass.
"This… won't work," he rasped, the cosmic certainty in his voice fractured. He turned his cracked, Saitama-faced visage toward the bald hero. "Hey! Baldy! A temporary truce."
Saitama rubbed a spot on his chest that actually felt tender—a novel sensation. He regarded Garou with a rare, appraising seriousness. "Fine. But don't get in my way."
"The feeling is mutual," Garou sneered. Then, he crossed his arms again, but this time, the motion was different. Deeper. His stardust body didn't just shift—it convulsed, as if being rewritten from the inside out.
"Whole Life Form Origin Fist · Saitama Mode—Complete Imprint!"
The stolen face on his void-like head didn't just reappear—it solidified, capturing not just the features but the essence, the profound, empty depth of Saitama's limitless potential. His aura didn't climb; it skyrocketed, breaking through previous ceilings with the sound of shattering dimensional glass.
Saitama's eyes widened a fraction. "Oh? He can get stronger."
A wide, genuine grin split Saitama's face. The last vestiges of boredom burned away, replaced by a focus so sharp it could cut fate itself. "Alright then. My turn."
He didn't adopt a stance. He simply… released.
"Serious Mode · Unrestricted."
No flashy light, no earth-shaking roar. The air around him simply ceased to be. A sphere of perfect, silent void expanded from him for a meter before snapping back. His aura became an invisible, crushing weight—the sheer, unadorned fact of his limitless strength made manifest. The glass beneath his feet disintegrated into subatomic particles, not from force, but from the unbearable reality of his presence.
In space, Blast's team watched their sensors go haywire before dying completely.
"He… he was holding back?!" Sif's scientific composure broke into a shriek.
Karnok's single eye was wide with a terror that bordered on religious awe. "They're not climbing… they're transcending! The scales… there are no scales for this!"
Ryan's golden mane was fully erect, a primal response to an existential threat. "We need to leave. Now."
Blast, the man who battled gods in dimensional rifts, felt his mouth go dry. A lifetime of discipline kept him from full-blown panic, but a coarse, heartfelt curse escaped him: "I thought I was the goddamn outlier for Earth… Turns out the planet's got three other sons of bitches who make me look like a toddler."
At the epicenter, King felt it. The qualitative shift. The air grew thick with potential, then thin with annihilation. The two 'sandbags' before him had stopped being mere opponents. They had become standards—living benchmarks of the impossible.
A fierce joy ignited in King's chest. This was it. The perfect pressure.
The Emperor Engine revved within him, not with a roar, but with a deep, universe-spanning THRUM that vibrated through the fabric of the satellite. A corona of crimson-gold energy, dense as a neutron star's shell, erupted around him.
"Good!" King's voice was a clarion call that shook the glassy continent. "Show me everything! And in return…"
He brought his fists up, space warping into helical patterns around them.
"…I'll show you what lies beyond the limit you've just broken!"
He wasn't just fighting to win. He was fighting to understand—to use their escalating, boundless power as the forge and hammer to perfectly temper his own newly ascended strength. With a thought, he dimmed the system's internal warnings. The adaptation was over. Now came the mastery. And for that, he needed a storm—and he had just summoned two hurricanes.
Patreon Rene_chan , 30 advanced chapters... Kindly support