Chronos looked like a character ripped straight out of a sci-fi time-travel movie.
His figure flickered in and out, splitting into countless versions of himself.
Those figures were clearly afterimages, yet they pressed on everyone with a suffocating sense of reality.
Professor Martin stared. "N-No, those aren't illusions. Those are real… people!"
Jefferson nodded. "Yeah, they're real. They only look like afterimages because he's moving too fast!"
Right in front of everyone's eyes, all of Chronos' afterimages raised their guns at the Saitama hanging in the sky… and fired in unison.
Boom.
A torrent of annihilating light roared out, a super-beam that almost drowned out the sun itself as it crashed down toward Saitama.
At that moment, Saitama finally pulled out his peak strength.
Serious Punch.
In an instant, a power so great it made the earth itself tremble erupted from his body.
Saitama's whole demeanor turned ice-cold.
Rip Hunter gasped. "Dear god… what kind of power is that?!"
Professor Martin whispered, "That's not something a human being should possess!"
Jefferson said, "Even if I fused with the old man, there's no way we could stand up to that!"
Captain Cold's tone turned utterly serious. "That really is a power that makes you want to submit. I'd say he absolutely has what it takes to be the boss."
Mick grunted, "I agree."
Sara Lance's feelings were the most complicated of all.
"Does power like that really exist in this world…?"
Even the first time she'd witnessed Barry Allen's Speed Force, she hadn't been this shocked.
Meanwhile, somewhere else—
Barry Allen had already broken through to faster-than-light speed.
Inside the particle accelerator at S.T.A.R. Labs, he split off a temporal duplicate of himself. The two Barry Allens worked together to fling his true body into the timestream.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh—
Barry ran through the river of time.
All of a sudden, he felt an overwhelming force.
The next second, that power slammed him right out of the time stream.
"Wait—this is 1975? This isn't where I was aiming for!" Barry was about to jump back into the timestream when he suddenly felt that terrifying energy raging in the sky. "Hold on… that's Saitama?!"
The moment he laid eyes on Saitama, Barry was shaken.
"Oh man… I thought I'd made huge progress, that I might actually be able to stand on the same level as him now. So how is it that the gap between us looks even bigger than before?"
Up above, Chronos and Saitama both noticed that a certain speedster had wandered into the wrong scene.
But neither of them could spare the attention.
Once their battle in the sky had begun, there was no way either of them could afford to stop.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh—
The heavens were crisscrossed with shattering beams of light.
Chunks of stone and earth whirled across the ground.
Inside the area protected by the Waverider's barrier, the fight pushed deeper and deeper into the earth. Before long, groundwater from eight hundred meters below the surface was blasted into the air by the shockwaves of their battle.
A faint rainbow even arced across the sky.
And still, the fight continued.
United States military intelligence.
"Reporting, sir—our satellite radar just picked up two flying individuals over Saint Stein University!"
"Flying people? You've been watching too many sci-fi movies, you idiot!"
The intel chief shot the report down immediately, refusing to believe it.
Because of that little interlude, the U.S. military never moved on the site that day—which meant fewer casualties in this era.
Before long, the battle between Saitama and Chronos changed form.
The two of them dropped from the sky to beneath the earth.
They started fighting in the cramped space underground.
Boom.
Boom.
Their fighting style shifted into pure hand-to-hand.
With future tech boosting him, every punch Chronos threw showcased the deadliness of tomorrow's science.
Gideon's defensive barrier could no longer keep up.
At the very instant Gideon's shield reached its limit and was on the verge of shattering under the strain—
Saitama and Chronos clashed fists one more time.
Boom!
A thousand meters underground, both of them blew out massive caverns of stone and soil… and then launched themselves at each other again.
Saitama's face didn't so much as twitch. He just put on the same expression he'd had back in his own world when he was beating up alien invaders and swung at Chronos.
Chronos, on the other hand, was blasted away by a single punch, his body punching through what felt like half the state of Stein.
"Ding~ Mission complete: PK with time hunter Chronos!"
"Reward: Serious Punch power increased!"
"Base attributes increased!"
"Reward: DC Hero Emblem x1!"
Saitama glanced at the new rewards listed in his system and suddenly felt like all of this had been worth it.
He'd gotten stronger again.
The only question was: what had happened to Chronos, who'd been punched thousands of miles away?
Saitama didn't know.
So he set off to find out—to see if Chronos had died from that blow.
And if he hadn't, Saitama could always give him another punch.
But when Saitama arrived above the giant hollow blasted out from underground, he found that Chronos was gone.
Only a Flash in burning-red colors—Barry Allen—stood there.
"Sa-Saitama," Barry said, "he's gone!"
"Gone?"
Barry quickly explained everything he'd seen the moment he'd arrived.
Only then did Saitama understand.
After Chronos had crashed into this spot, Barry had reached the scene as fast as he could—only to find that under Chronos' mask was a face identical to Heat Wave Mick's.
Barry had been about to ask what the hell had happened when Chronos suddenly bit down on a capsule hidden in his teeth. His body convulsed twice… and then vanished from the timestream.
"Did he say anything?" Saitama asked.
Barry nodded. "He… he said he'll be back."
Saitama smiled faintly at that. "Oh? He's coming back? Then I'll be waiting."
He understood now: the so-called Time Council was just a bunch of people sitting on future tech, jumping around to different points in history, finding key players, and "assisting" them as they pleased.
Now, in his very first clash with them, he'd already beaten one of their heavyweight enforcers—Chronos.
And in that battle, he'd powered up yet again.
So he felt no fear at all toward whatever opponent might come next.
"When you show up again," Saitama thought, "I'll just beat you again."
Then he shifted his gaze to Barry Allen.
"Man, Barry," he said, "I really didn't expect you to improve this fast. You've already learned how to run through time. Got any interest in having a little spar with me sometime?"
(End of Chapter)
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