The silence in the corridor stretched, thick and heavy with the dust of the disintegrated Kaiju.
Kafka was the first to snap out of it. His training, his instinct for survival, kicked in. "We have to go!" he hissed, grabbing Saitama's hoodie. "The whole base is going to be on top of us in seconds!"
Saitama, looking more confused than concerned, allowed himself to be dragged away. "Hey, what about him?" he asked, pointing back at the still-frozen Soshiro Hoshina. "He looks pretty broken."
"He's the least of our problems right now!" Kafka insisted, pulling him down a side passage just as the first alarms began to blare, their sound echoing through the lower levels.
They left Hoshina standing alone in the corridor. A lone figure in a monument to his own shattered worldview. He didn't react to the alarms. He didn't hear the approaching footsteps of his own squad. He was adrift in an internal sea of broken concepts.
The scalp... a defensive weapon... a slap... an offensive tool... speed is irrelevant... power is absolute... my blades are... meaningless.
The thoughts cycled, each one a hammer blow to the foundations of his identity. He had chased the truth, and the truth had broken him. He felt a profound, bottomless despair. He was a relic. A fossil. He had spent his entire life mastering a dead art.
Then, a new thought, cold and sharp as a shard of ice, pierced through the fog.
He replayed the moment in his mind. Not Saitama's slap. But Kafka's punch.
The raw, explosive power. The fusion of human tactical thought—aiming for the weak point—and monstrous, overwhelming force. It was brutal. It was unrefined. But it was effective.
And then he remembered Saitama's casual durability. His complete imperviousness.
He had been trying to emulate Saitama, a goal he now understood was as foolish as a single-celled organism trying to emulate the sun. It was the wrong path. He could never be a god.
But Kafka... Kafka was different. He was a monster, yes, but he was a mortal monster. He could be hurt. He could be threatened. He had weaknesses. His power, while immense, was still grounded in a biology that could, perhaps, be understood. It was a power Hoshina could see.
His despair began to recede, replaced by a new, terrifyingly focused idea.
I have been asking the wrong question.
The question wasn't "How do I fight a god?"
The new question was "How do you give a human the power of a monster?"
The blades he held, once symbols of his mastery, now felt clumsy and primitive. Steel was the past. Flesh and bone... adaptable, regenerative, powerful flesh and bone... that was the future. Not just the cyborg's path of replacing humanity, but enhancing it, merging it with the very source of their enemies' strength.
He looked down at his own body. A vessel of peak, but ultimately fragile, human potential. What if he could break that limit? What if he could push his own biology, his own flesh, to replicate a fraction of what he had just seen in Kafka?
His tactical meltdown was over. His spiritual crisis was over. Something new was being born from the ashes: a darker, more dangerous, and far more radical obsession. He no longer wanted to just surpass his limits. He wanted to rewrite them.
His squad finally arrived, finding him standing amidst the dust. "Vice-Captain! Are you alright? What happened here?"
Soshiro Hoshina finally moved. He slowly sheathed his blades. He turned to face his men, and the look in his eyes was one they had never seen before. The focused intensity of the warrior was gone, replaced by the cold, unsettling calm of a mad scientist who had just had a breakthrough.
"The threat has been neutralized," he said, his voice a low, chilling monotone. "But the war has just changed. Report to the Director General. Tell him... tell him Project Chimera is obsolete. We need something more. We need to go further."
He had found a new path. It was no longer a quest to remain relevant against a god. It was a quest to become a new kind of monster himself. And Kafka Hibino, the boy with the secret, was no longer just his adjutant or his lab rat.
He was now his prototype.
In the VIP box, the chaos below was just a distant tremor on the security monitors. Kikoru was watching the main event—a brutal, but staged, fight between two squadron leaders. But her attention was fractured. She had seen the security alerts for the lower levels. She knew Hoshina's squad had engaged a threat. And she knew Kafka was with him.
A prickle of something she refused to name—worry—distracted her.
"What is taking so long?" she muttered, more to herself than anyone. The "Final Challenge" with her secret sparring partner was meant to be the climax of the event. But he had just... wandered off.
Suddenly, her private comm unit buzzed. It was a priority-one channel, direct from her father. "Kikoru," the Director General's voice said, cold and hard. "Report to Sub-Level C4. Immediately. You are to take command of the scene."
"Father? What about the tournament? The final match?"
"The tournament is over," he stated. "We have what we came for."
The line went dead. Kikoru stared at the comm unit, a sense of deep unease washing over her. The "show" was finished. The real event had happened without her. And Kafka was at the center of it. She stood, her playful demeanor gone, replaced by the cold focus of a soldier. Something had gone terribly wrong. Or terribly right. She didn't know which was worse. She began to run, her suit's servos whining as she pushed it to its limits.
In a dark, forgotten maintenance tunnel, Kafka finally stopped running, gasping for breath, his back pressed against a cold pipe.
Saitama, not even slightly winded, stood nearby, looking at the two thousand-yen notes Kafka had tried to give him, which he'd apparently picked up during the chaos.
"You dropped this," he said, holding them out.
Kafka just stared at him. "You saw," he whispered, his voice trembling. "Hoshina saw. They all know."
"Yep," Saitama said, with a distinct lack of concern. "Looks that way. Pretty messy."
"Messy?! It's a catastrophe!" Kafka panicked. "They're going to lock me up, dissect me... My life is over!"
"Probably," Saitama agreed easily. "So, what are you gonna do about it?"
The simple, direct question cut through Kafka's panic. What was he going to do? He could run. He could try to hide. But where could you hide from the Defense Force? From a world that saw him as a monster?
"I... I don't know," he admitted, his voice full of despair.
Saitama looked at Kafka, at his torn uniform, at the terrified, hunted look in his eyes. He saw a guy whose life had just been irrevocably, completely ruined. It was a level of shared misery even Saitama could recognize as significant.
He sighed, the familiar sound of a man being saddled with yet another problem he didn't ask for.
He pocketed the two thousand yen. "Alright," he said. "Don't have a meltdown. You're a monster who saves people. He's a sword guy who's weirdly obsessed with you. You've got a bossy girl who likes to kick you. It's a weird team. But I guess you're my problem now, Leek Guy."
It wasn't a promise of salvation. It wasn't a declaration of alliance. It was a simple, reluctant acceptance of a new, incredibly annoying status quo. Saitama, the hero for fun, had just accidentally acquired his first, very problematic, sidekick. And he was already regretting it.