The battle resumed, but the dynamic had irrevocably shifted. Saitama and the Cosmic Garou now operating in "Saitama Mode" moved with a terrifying, instinctive synergy. Their attacks came not in sequence, but in a seamless, overlapping wave, forcing King to split his focus perfectly.
BOOM!
King's fist met Saitama's head-on. The collision didn't produce sound—it produced silence, a sphere of canceled physics that then rebounded as a shockwave that finally did what all previous abuse could not: it shattered the satellite's structural integrity. The small world cracked apart like a marble.
In that microsecond of aftermath, Cosmic Garou—his movements now bearing Saitama's terrifyingly efficient simplicity—struck from King's blind spot, a fist aimed with lethal precision.
"Cheap shot, brat!" King barked, his instincts flaring. He twisted, a whip-fast side kick intercepting the blow before it could connect with its intended, delicate target. The impact sent Garou spinning away, but the monster recovered with a fluid, grounded grace that was new, landing on a spinning fragment of planetary debris. His power wasn't just holding—it was climbing, a parabolic curve of escalation.
Saitama's own growth was a mirror, a silent, exponential surge. King could feel it. The pressure was no longer just to win, but to keep up. His own focus sharpened to a razor's edge. The vast, roiling ocean of his new power, which had once leaked instability, was now a still, deep sea—every movement deliberate, every ounce of force perfectly channeled.
The three became streaks of light faster than physics allowed, a dizzying dance of annihilation through the expanding debris field of the dead moon. The 'two-on-one' had dissolved into a primordial, three-way melee where alliances were nanoseconds long.
From their dimensional pocket, Blast's team watched, sensors useless, relying on pure psychic sight.
"A… stalemate?" Sif whispered, the concept alien to her.
"No," Karnok breathed, his single eye wide. "Look at the bald one. His line… it's not leveling off. It's still going up."
As if summoned by the observation, Saitama's form materialized between King and Garou. No flourish, no shout. Just a simple, straight punch thrown from the waist.
"Serious Series · Super · Serious Punch."
The name was almost mundane. The effect was not.
King's instincts screamed. This was different. This was a qualitative leap. Beside him, Cosmic Garou's stolen face contorted in identical shock—How is he outpacing my copied evolution?!
There was no time for strategy. Only instinct. King and Garou, in rare unison, threw everything they had into a simultaneous, desperate counter-punch.
BOOM——————————————————!!!
The explosion was a small, contained big bang. The remaining satellite fragments didn't just shatter; they were reduced to their constituent quantum particles, erased from local reality.
Blast didn't hesitate. "Breach! Now!" He tore a temporary rift, shoving his team through just as the annihilating wave washed over their previous location.
In the sudden, absolute quiet of the cosmic aftermath, three figures floated amidst the dissipating energy haze.
King's Emperor Armor was webbed with hairline fractures, glowing with pent-up energy, but his stance was firm, his gaze blazing.
Cosmic Garou's stardust form flickered, the mimicked 'Saitama Mode' forcibly dispelled. He had reached his current zenith, and it had not been enough.
Saitama… stood there. His costume was tattered, but his skin was unmarked. He looked… pleasantly surprised.
"Hahaha! Now this is getting good!" Saitama laughed, a sound of pure, unadulterated joy. The aura around him, which had already broken all conceivable scales, twisted and surged again, illogically, impossibly. "That was just the warm-up, King. Now… I'm gonna get serious."
King and Cosmic Garou froze.
"You… YOU WEREN'T SERIOUS BEFORE?!" Garou's cosmic roar was a symphony of disbelief and rage.
Inside, King's mind was a perfect, static-filled blank of incredulity. He was playing? This whole time, he was just… playing?
Saitama's power swelled, breaching some final, invisible threshold of the narrative itself. The universe seemed to hold its breath.
And then…
"Ah—ah—"
Saitama's nose wrinkled.
"—CHOO!"
It wasn't a sneeze. It was a cosmic event.
A blast of pure, unconceptualized force, the involuntary expulsion of energy from a body that had just decided to stop holding back anything, erupted from him.
There was no defending. No reacting.
King and Cosmic Garou were simply gone, blasted away like dust motes in a typhoon.
Garou became a screaming, streaking comet of starlight. He cut a burning path through the entire debris field and slammed into the nearby gas giant. The impact seemed to create only a small, dark pockmark on the swirling red surface.
For a single, quiet second, nothing happened.
Then—
RRRRUUUUMMMMBBBBLLLE——————————!!!!
The gas giant exploded. Not from the inside out, but from the point of impact outward, as if a god had flicked it. Thousands of kilometers of dense atmospheric layers were violently, instantly stripped away and hurled into space. The planet's solid core, a ball of metallic hydrogen and rock, was laid completely bare, glowing with furious heat.
Embedded in that newly exposed core, in a perfect, crater-shaped silhouette of a man, was Cosmic Garou. His stardust body was cracked, his energy guttering. The look on his remaining, half-shattered face wasn't pain, or anger.
It was pure, unadulterated awe.
King, meanwhile, had been hurled in the opposite direction, tumbling through the void until he crashed through a series of small, icy planetoids on the outer edge of the star system, finally skidding to a halt on the frozen surface of one. He lay there for a moment, staring up at the distant, glowing aftermath of the gas giant's destruction.
He slowly sat up, pieces of his cracked armor falling away. He looked at his hands, then back toward the distant, glowing core where Garou was embedded, and finally toward the tiny, distant figure of Saitama, who was now casually floating in space, scratching his head and looking around as if wondering where everyone went.
A slow, incredulous smile spread across King's face, followed by a low, rumbling chuckle that built into full-bellied laughter that shook the ice beneath him.
"Unbelievable," he muttered to the uncaring stars, his eyes alight with a fierce, newfound respect and a blazing, competitive fire. "Absolutely unbelievable."
"A… a sneeze? You've got to be kidding me…"
Cosmic Garou's consciousness flickered, embedded in the glowing planetary core. He was out of the fight, a spectator to his own defeat.
King was faring only slightly better. He was a human cannonball through the cosmos, caroming off asteroid belts, each impact pulverizing mountains of rock and ice. His trajectory was inevitable—a fiery plunge into the heart of Proxima Centauri, the system's small, orange-red star.
For a being who had shattered his first limiter, the star's embrace was not death. It was a baptism. The millions of degrees of plasma were a searing, revitalizing bath.
"As expected of you, Saitama!" King's voice was a roar of laughter within the stellar furnace, his body knitting itself back together at a phenomenal rate. "Even a sneeze carries the weight of a supernova! If this is the game… then let's play for keeps!"
EMPEROR ENGINE—OVERCLOCK! HEART SOURCE CREATION—MAXIMUM OUTPUT!!!
A vibration, deeper than gravity, pulsed from his core. It wasn't force. It was Command. The highest order of creative will.
The million-kilometer-wide ball of fusing plasma that was Proxima Centauri obeyed.
It defied physics, hydrostatic equilibrium, and entropy. In the span of a few heartbeats, it reshaped itself.
A Lava Colossus was born in the void. Its head dwarfed gas giants. Its arms could snuff out solar systems. A single clenched fist contained the mass of a hundred Earths. At its molten heart, enthroned in a chamber of solidified stellar matter, sat King. His consciousness was the giant's. His will, its law.
But it wasn't enough. To face the illogical abyss of Saitama's power, he needed more than scale. He needed conceptual density.
Obsidian Armament Haki, blacker than the void, flowed over the giant's form, hardening stellar plasma into a shell of absolute defense.
Haoshoku Haki that bent space-time itself wreathed its right fist in a shimmering, reality-rending corona.
Kenbunshoku Haki was pushed to its absolute limit, not to predict, but to compress—to squeeze the entire future lifespan of the star, billions of years of fusion energy, into a single, imminent moment.
The Colossus drew back its continent-sized fist. Space itself screamed along the trajectory, warping, fraying, threatening to tear a permanent scar in the cosmos.
This was not a punch. It was the execution of a star. A testament forged in plasma and will, aimed at the one man who could receive it.
"COME AND GET IT!" King's challenge thundered through the psychic fabric of the system.
For the first time, Saitama's eyes lost all trace of boredom. They held a focus so pure, so intense, it was terrifying. He planted his feet on nothing, as if standing on the fabric of reality itself. His right fist drew back, a motion so simple it held the finality of a universal constant.
"KILLER MOVE SERIES—"
Blast and his team chose that exact, catastrophic moment to re-emerge from their dimensional refuge, searching for a safe vantage point.
Their minds simply broke.
One side of their vision: a god of fire and stone, a stolen star given fist and fury, spanning astronomical units.
The other side: a tiny, yellow-speckled figure, insignificant against the cosmic backdrop.
Yet the impending collision of their fists made every atom in their bodies weep with pre-emptive annihilation.
"MOVE! NOW!" Blast's scream was pure instinct, bypassing all thought. His hands tore at reality, ripping a desperate escape route into another dimension. As an afterthought, driven by a hero's ingrained duty, he blinked to the exposed planetary core, grabbed the semi-conscious, crater-shaped Cosmic Garou, and hauled him into the rift just as—
The two forces met.
There was no sound.
There was only redefinition.