Garou's body went rigid. A wave of cold, absolute negation swept through him, starting at his feet. His flesh didn't decay—it desiccated, crystallizing into pure, white salt at a visible rate, creeping up his calves.
"What's happening?!" Blast was on his feet in an instant.
Garou, however, was eerily calm. A bitter smile touched his lips. "Seems He doesn't approve of my career change." He looked down at his salt-encrusted legs, now petrified past the knees, and shrugged at Blast. "Guess I'm flaking out on that team invite."
Saitama, curious, plucked a floating salt crystal from the air and popped it in his mouth. "Ptooey! So salty! It's real!"
"Hey, King." Garou turned, his upper body still human, his eyes burning with undimmed defiance. "Fighting you was the best. In the next life, I'll—"
"Shut your trap!" King's hand came down on Garou's remaining good shoulder. "Next life? I'm not done beating on you in this one." He caught Saitama's eye and gave a sharp nod.
Understanding flashed in Saitama's bored gaze. He placed his own hand on Garou's other shoulder.
"You two—?!"
Before Garou could finish, his consciousness was yanked sideways, out of his salting body and into a formless, directionless void. At its center loomed a grotesque, shifting silhouette woven from countless scars and screaming faces—a projection of God's will. Before it, Garou felt like a single grain of sand before the entire desert, tiny and doomed.
Just as primal terror threatened to swallow him, two bored, conversational voices cut through the psychic silence.
"Huh. So this is the salesman?" King mused, examining the scarred giant with a critic's eye.
"Looks really… punchable," Saitama observed, already rolling his shoulder.
They glanced at each other. Twin, predatory smirks appeared.
"Get lost, ugly."
In perfect, devastating unison, their fists—not physical, but projections of absolute, rebellious will—smashed into the head of God's manifestation.
"NO—!" The projection's shriek was pure, impotent fury as it shattered into dissolving fragments of malign intent.
Back in the real space, the salting stopped instantly. The crystallized parts of Garou's body flaked away, fresh flesh and muscle regenerating beneath at a miraculous pace.
"This… is impossible!" Blast stammered, his veteran composure shattered. "You severed the link! You permanently stole His power!"
King took a leisurely sip of his drink. "Tuesday."
Sif's entire body trembled with euphoric shock. "This is monumental! The implications for—"
Her words were swallowed by a tremor that shook not the platform, but the universe itself. A roar, vast and mind-breaking, echoed in the soul of every being present.
BOOM——————————————————!!!
The distant void ripped. A galaxy-sized eye peeled open in the fabric of reality, its pupil a seething mass of void-worms and infinite malice. It fixed its gaze directly on King, Saitama, and Garou.
"GOD… HIS TRUE GAZE!" Blast and his team recoiled as one, their voices raw with a terror born of twenty years of hopeless war.
King felt it too—a visceral, life-form-level nausea. The sheer scale of that attention was an insurmountable wall. He fought down a shiver. "Yo, Blast! I thought you said you had Him locked out! This isn't a lock, it's a screen door!"
"The 'lock'… is a game!" Blast cried, his voice shaking. "We're the mice, He's the cat! We just run and hide! He was playing! But you—you didn't just bite the hand, you broke the finger and kept it! He's not playing anymore!"
Ryan, the lion-man, growled, his mane standing on end. "The child is angry. The anthill that housed the biting ant… must be dug up and obliterated."
As if to confirm it, the pupil of the cosmic eye contracted. At its center, a point of light began to coalesce—a beam of pure, narrative-ending destruction.
"GO! NOW!" Blast screamed, tearing a rift in space with frantic hands.
They tumbled through just as the beam lanced out. From the closing rift, they witnessed the entire sector of space that had contained the Proxima Centauri system… vanish. Not explode. Not implode. Erased, like a mistake corrected by a bored, omnipotent child.
The extradimensional space was chaos given form—a swirling, non-Euclidean limbo where colors had sound and gravity was a suggestion.
"We're… shielded here. For now," Blast panted, leaning against a solid-looking patch of non-space. "His sight can't easily pierce these layers."
Garou stared at his own hands, then into the twisting void, his earlier bravado replaced by shell-shocked awe. "That… was His eye?"
"No," Blast said, his voice hollow. "He has no true form. He manifests as your mind can comprehend Him. To you, to all of us in that moment… He was an Eye. An angry, all-seeing Eye."
An Outer God, King thought, the comparison to ancient terrors surfacing in his mind. A concept given wrath.
Saitama, meanwhile, was looking around the psychedelic, store-less emptiness with profound dismay. He scratched his bald head. "Uh… so. Can we go home now?"
"GO HOME?!" Blast's composure shattered again. He whirled on Saitama. "You three are marked! The moment you step back into the material universe, His attention will snap to you like a beacon! And the second He finds you, He won't just erase you! He'll erase the entire Solar System to make sure the 'anthill' is gone!" He made the same, final erasing gesture.
Saitama's face fell. His shoulders slumped. The dead-fish eyes filled with a depth of despair no monster had ever inspired. "Forever? Here?" He gazed despondently at the swirling, intangible chaos. "There's not even a convenience store… No Sunday sales…" It was, for Saitama, a fate truly worse than death.
King's expression darkened. His mind was a rapid-fire montage of everything he'd be leaving behind: Tornado's tsundere scowl and floating emerald curls, Fubuki's composed elegance and… considerable assets, Mosquito Girl's dangerously alluring silhouette… and the vast, untapped potential of the Association's roster. To be exiled here was, in essence, a cosmic form of castration.
"There has to be another way," King ground out, his voice low.
Blast stroked his chin, the gears turning behind his weary eyes. After a moment, a spark of desperate hope flickered in them. "There… is one other option. It's not a solution. It's a gambit."
All eyes locked onto him.
"My power," Blast said, raising a hand where spatial energies faintly crackled. "I can't send you home. But I might be able to open a rift… not to our universe, but sideways."
"Sideways?" Garou echoed, intrigued despite himself.
"To a Parallel Universe," Blast confirmed. "A reality with its own timeline, its own versions of Earth, its own… rules. God's influence, as vast as it is in our cosmos, may not yet extend across the dimensional walls between universes. There, you could grow. Train. Develop your power without immediately drawing His annihilating gaze. And when you're strong enough… you might find a way back. To fight."
The idea hung in the chaotic non-space. A door, not home, but to another battlefield.
Saitama's eyes, which had been pools of discount-less despair, suddenly ignited. "Other universes?" He leaned forward, a terrifying intensity in his normally blank gaze. "Do they have supermarkets? When are their sale days?"
Blast stared, his moment of dramatic revelation utterly derailed. "I… I have no idea. Their cyclical economic models would be subject to entirely different—"
King buried his face in his palm. Of course. Of all the existential, multiversal implications… his first concern is the damn grocery bargains.
The sheer, sublime absurdity of it cut through the dread. King looked from Saitama's earnestly inquiring face, to Garou's calculating scowl, to Blast's bewildered expression.
A slow, fierce grin spread across King's own face. It wasn't a happy smile. It was the grin of a gambler shoving all his chips into the pot.
"Alright," King said, standing up. The chaotic energies of the dimensional gap swirled around him, but his voice was steady. "A new universe. New challenges. New… opportunities." His mind already raced with possibilities. Other versions of people? Other rules to exploit? Other… well, everything.
He looked at Blast. "Open the door. Send us through." He then glanced at Saitama. "And for the record, if the other universe's discount day is worse, we're holding you responsible."
Saitama nodded, utterly serious. "Understood. That's a priority."
Garou cracked his neck, the earlier terror replaced by a hungry anticipation. "A whole new world to test my fists against? To find new limits to break? Let's go."
Blast exchanged a look with his teammates—Sif looking wistful, Karnok looking relieved, Ryan looking wary. He then focused, crossing his arms. The air around him began to hum with a deeper, more complex frequency than before. Runes of gold and sapphire light, far more intricate than those for the Stargate, spiraled out from his body, weaving a shimmering, unstable portal in the fabric of the limbo. Through it, they could catch fleeting glimpses—a flash of an alien sky, the silhouette of a strange city, the pulse of unfamiliar energies.
"The rift is unstable! It will only hold for a few seconds! Go!" Blast shouted, the strain evident on his face.
Without another word, King stepped forward, followed closely by Saitama and Garou. They paused for a moment at the threshold, three figures backlit by the madness of the dimensional gap and the uncertain light of a new world.
"See you," King said, not looking back. "Save our seats."
And then, they were gone. The portal snapped shut behind them with a sound like a sigh.
In the sudden quiet of the extradimensional chaos, Blast lowered his arms, breathing heavily. Sif floated to his side, her eyes still fixed on the spot where King had vanished.
"Do you think they'll be okay?" she asked quietly.
Blast stared into the swirling void. "Those three?" He let out a short, incredulous laugh. "I don't know if that universe will be okay."
Elsewhere, in a reality not their own, three figures tumbled from a crack in the sky above a sprawling, neon-drenched metropolis, landing in a heap in a cluttered alley next to an overflowing dumpster.
King was the first to untangle himself, brushing off bits of… something unidentifiable. He looked up. The sky was a perpetual twilight, streaked with the trails of flying vehicles he didn't recognize. The air smelled of ozone, exotic spices, and decay.
Saitama sat up, immediately scanning the alley for signage. "Huh. No '50% Off' posters. This is a bad start."
Garou rose to his feet, his senses expanding, drinking in the strange, potent energy of this new world. A wild, eager light was in his eyes. "The flow of power here… it's different. Thicker."
From the mouth of the alley, a group of hulking figures with cybernetic enhancements and glowing weapons peered in, their expressions shifting from curiosity to predatory interest.
"Well, well," one growled, his voice synthesized. "Look what the dimension dumped out. Fresh meat."
King cracked his knuckles, the sound echoing in the confined space. He looked at his two companions, a new kind of smile—one of pure, unadulterated opportunity—spreading across his face.
"Looks like the welcome wagon's here," he said. "Let's introduce ourselves."
The story of the Strongest Man on Earth was over. The legend of the Multiversal Sovereign had just begun.
Patreon Rene_chan , 30 advanced chapters