A/N: Merry Christmas to everyone! i didn't upload a chapter yesterday because of Christmas Eve sooo yeah. enjoy the chapter!.
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The room that had witnessed the end of the Five Grief Tyrant was now a tomb of settling dust and fading heat. King stood amidst the wreckage, the colossal 555,000 BP counter in his system interface a silent testament to the battle fought. Yet, the number felt distant. The immediate, visceral understanding of his own power—the precognitive flicker, the density of his armor, the world-shaking force in his fists—was the true prize. He had sought a test, and he had been granted one writ in the blood and sorrow of a Dragon-level.
The communicator's earlier message anchored him back to the broader mission. Atomic Samurai. A second child. A multiplying black monster.
With a final glance at the remains of the Tyrant, King turned and moved deeper into the labyrinthine complex, his path now guided by a new objective. His King's Eyes, still humming with the afterglow of the battle and the Level 5 enhancement, scanned not for threats, but for a specific signature: small, warm, terrified, and human.
He moved through secondary tunnels, bypassing the main arterial routes where the cacophony of the larger assault—the shearing shink of metal, the occasional muffled crump of collapsing architecture—still echoed. This was a forgotten duct, a service corridor reeked of stale mildew and rust. And there, at the very edge of his enhanced perception, he found it.
A tiny, flickering spark of life. Not the hard, malicious burn of a monster, nor the powerful, disciplined aura of a hero. This was the faint, wavering candle-flame of a child's spirit, nearly smothered by overwhelming fear.
King followed the signature to its source: a dead-end alcove piled with collapsed machinery. Crouched behind a broken gear assembly, knees pulled to his chest, was a small boy. He was covered in a fine gray dust that stuck to the tracks of his tears, his clothes torn, his body trembling with silent, hiccupping sobs he was too afraid to voice fully.
King's approach was silent, but the boy sensed the shift in the air, the immense presence filling the mouth of the alcove. He flinched, squeezing his eyes shut tighter, as if hoping the danger would pass by.
"It's alright," King said, his voice a deliberate contrast to the battle-rumble it had used minutes before. He modulated it, lowering the frequency, stripping away the intimidation of the King Engine until it was just a deep, reassuring baritone. "You are safe now."
The boy's eyes, wide and red-rimmed, slowly opened. They traveled up from the heavy boots, past the battle-stained trousers and the faintly glowing, armored torso, to finally rest on King's face. The terror in them didn't vanish, but it was joined by a dawning, disbelieving recognition. The stern, scarred visage of the Strongest Man on Earth was plastered on newsstands and television screens across the world. It was a face synonymous with absolute security.
"K… King…?" the boy whispered, his voice a cracked, dry thing.
"Yes," King replied, kneeling on one knee to bring himself closer to the boy's eye level. The gesture made him seem less like an impassive monument and more like a protector. "The monsters won't harm you. I will keep you safe. What is your name?"
The simple question, the offer of normalcy, broke the last dam. Fresh tears welled up, but these were of relief, not pure horror. He wiped at them with a grimy sleeve. "T-Tareo. My name is Tareo, sir."
"Tareo," King repeated, the name solidifying the child from a mission objective into a person. "Can you walk?"
Tareo nodded shakily and pushed himself to his feet, wincing as a scraped knee protested. King observed the minor injuries—superficial cuts, bruises, shock, and dehydration. Nothing his passive healing couldn't stabilize if needed, but the priority was extraction.
"Stay close behind me," King instructed, rising and turning back toward the corridor. "We are leaving this place."
The journey out of the deep ducts was slow and cautious. King's senses remained on high alert, his King's Eyes painting the path ahead in gold, but he consciously slowed his Royal Acceleration to a pace Tareo could match. The boy stayed so close King could feel the slight tug on the fabric of his pants when Tareo needed to scramble over a pile of rubble.
"Mister King?" Tareo's small voice ventured after a few minutes of silent trekking.
"Hm?"
"Is… is Uncle Garou going to be okay?"
The question gave King pause. He knew the name—the Human Monster, the rogue martial artist who had terrorized heroes. The boy's concern wasn't fearful; it was genuine, personal. It complicated the simple hero-monster narrative. "I do not know," King answered truthfully, his tone neutral. "This is a dangerous place for everyone."
Tareo just nodded, absorbing this with a soberness beyond his years.
They were navigating a wider, upward-sloping tunnel when the world turned inside out.
It began not as a sound, but as a sensation—a deep, subsonic thrum that vibrated up from the planet's core, through the rock, and into the marrow of their bones. Then came the sound, a catastrophic CRRRUUUNCH-BOOM from somewhere far above, as if a god had decided to rearrange the continental plates. The labyrinth screamed in protest. The tunnel around them convulsed. Massive stress fractures lightning-cracked across the ceiling, and house-sized chunks of bedrock began to shear away, plummeting downward in a deafening avalanche.
Instinct took over. In the micro-second between the first shudder and the collapse, King's King's Eyes mapped the falling debris trajectories. His left arm swept back, snatching Tareo from the ground and tucking the boy securely against his armored chest. "Hold on!" he commanded, his voice the only stable point in the universe.
Royal Acceleration ignited at its maximum. He became a blur as he ran through the disintegrating space. A falling pillar was there, then he was past it, the air cracking in his wake. A sheet of ceiling collapsed where he had just been standing. He wove through the apocalyptic rain, his body a guided missile aimed at the only stable ground his enhanced perception could find—a reinforced archway leading to a side passage.
He slammed into the relative safety of the arch, turning his body to shield Tareo as a final cascade of dust and rubble sealed the main tunnel behind them with a final, definitive roar. Silence descended, thick and choked with particulate matter.
In the sudden quiet, pressed against the nigh-impervious King's Armor, Tareo was trembling, but not crying. He was in a state of stunned, breathless awe. King set him down gently, his own systems analyzing the seismic event. The scale, the sheer, casual annihilating force… it was familiar.
Saitama.
It had to be. A clash of such magnitude that it made the labyrinth itself groan in protest. A bizarre, profound reassurance settled over King. His friend was here.
The immediate danger past, the priority reasserted itself. He pulled the compact communicator from his pocket, the green 'active' light a tiny beacon in the dusty gloom. He pressed the transmit button.
"This is King," he said, his voice calm and clear, carrying the absolute authority of a field report. "The second hostage is located. Name: Tareo. He is with me and is under my protection. We are moving toward the surface."
He released the button. The message was sent. The responsibility for the child was formally, and irrevocably, his. He looked down at Tareo, who was staring up at him, the hero-worship in his eyes now mixed with the firsthand understanding of what that title truly meant in motion.
"Come," King said, his tone leaving no room for argument. "The way out is this direction. Stay in my shadow."
With the boy close behind, King, began the long climb out of the underworld. The mission parameters had shifted once more: from hunter, to test-subject, to rescuer. And he would see this last, most human duty through to the end.
The climb upward through the shuddering, wounded labyrinth was a tense, silent journey. Tareo stayed glued to King's shadow, his small hand occasionally gripping a fold of King's stained pants for stability. King moved with a protective, deliberate slowness, his King's Eyes scanning ahead for the safest path through the chaos. The distant, earth-rending booms had ceased, replaced by an eerie, settling quiet that felt more ominous than the noise. The very structure of the Monster Association's lair seemed to be holding its breath.
Then, the world turned green.
It was not an attack. There was no malice in the energy that suddenly shimmered into existence around them. One moment they were in a dusty tunnel; the next, they were encased in a perfect, translucent sphere of brilliant emerald light. Tareo yelped in surprise, and King's armor flared instinctively, but the energy was gentle, merely holding them in place.
"W-what's happening?" Tareo cried, pressing closer.
Before King could answer, the sphere moved. Not along a tunnel, but up. With a sickening lurch of inertia that even King's enhanced senses felt, the sphere tore through layers of shattered rock and reinforced monster-architecture as if they were tissue paper. It was a ruthless, incomprehensibly powerful extraction. King saw strata of earth, mangled metal supports, and the pulped remains of hidden monsters flash by in a green-tinted blur. The sensation was not of flying, but of the entire world around them being forcibly peeled away.
Telekinetic lift. On a scale that redefines the term. King's mind, ever analytical, discarded all other possibilities. There was only one being in the Hero Association capable of such a casual, continental feat. Tatsumaki.
The sphere slowed and then dissipated as suddenly as it had formed, depositing them onto a stable, if uneven, surface. They stood in what appeared to be a broad, ruined plaza, but the architecture was all wrong—twisted, organic spires of black stone and rib-like buttresses surrounded them, open to a sky choked with dust and the fading afterglow of psychic energy. The air, once stale and subterranean, now carried the sharp, cold bite of the surface world.
King's instincts screamed. The spatial orientation was off. The labyrinth had been a three-dimensional maze; this felt like a diorama ripped from its context and placed on a table. He strode to the nearest wall—a curving, scaled surface that pulsed faintly with dying bioluminescence. Without ceremony, he drove his fist into it.
CRUNCH.
The Dragon-Level Physique turned the organic stone to powder. Daylight, gray and harsh, flooded through the hole. Not the filtered light of a fissure or a cave mouth, but the full, unobstructed light of late afternoon over a ruined city.
King looked out, and the scale of Tatsumaki's intervention became horrifyingly clear.
He wasn't looking up at the surface from a hole. He was looking out across it. The entire, monstrous edifice of the Monster Association's hidden capital—a subterranean city the size of a downtown district—had been cleanly, violently excised from the earth and now sat atop the shattered landscape of Z-City like a grotesque crown. Below, the ground was a spiderweb of colossal fissures, some hundreds of meters deep, radiating out from the point of extraction. Buildings for blocks around had been toppled or half-swallowed by the seismic trauma. It was an act of geological violence so absolute it bordered on the divine.
Tareo peeked out from behind him, his breath catching. "The… the whole city…"
"The Tornado of Terror's work," King stated. It was an answer to the unasked question. The green energy had been a signature. This cataclysm was her methodology: overwhelming, indiscriminate, and final. His communicator was likely useless now; any coordinated extraction plan had been rendered irrelevant by this tectonic reshuffling of the battlefield.
A new sound reached his ears—a wet, squelching, multi-voiced groaning. From holes and cracks in the fleshy "ground" of their plaza, masses of pallid, fibrous tissue began to extrude. The tissue formed into crude faces, their mouths gaping voids, their eyes pits of mindless hunger. It was a defensive mechanism of the lair itself, a final, dying immune response
One particularly large mass of face-flesh surged toward Tareo, tendrils snaking out. King didn't activate a technique. He simply stepped forward and punched.
The air compacted. The shockwave alone vaporized the leading tendrils. His fist connected with the central "face," and the entire blob—several tons of regenerative monster matter—detonated into a fine, wet mist. No system chime followed. This was not a distinct entity, just refuse.
"A shortcut," King rumbled. He scooped Tareo back into the secure crook of his arm. The most direct path off this risen abomination was down. He located a wide fissure where the ripped-underworld met the broken city and jumped.
The wind whipped past them as they fell three stories, landing with a ground-cracking impact that King absorbed effortlessly through his legs. He set Tareo down on the more familiar, if devastated, asphalt of Z-City's ruins. The contrast was jarring: to their left, the impossibly uprooted monster hive blotted out the sky; to their right, the familiar, skeletal skyline of the quarantine zone.
A voice, synthesized and urgent, cut through the settling dust. "King!"
Genos descended from a scorched vantage point, his new upgraded body gleaming even in the dull light. His optical sensors immediately scanned Tareo, registering him as a non-threat, before locking onto King. "You secured the secondary hostage. Good work. Have you seen Saitama-sensei? My scanners cannot locate his unique energy signature amidst this… psychic interference."
King met the cyborg's burning gaze. "He's here," King stated, with the absolute certainty of one who understood Saitama's relationship with cataclysmic events. "Somewhere. He wouldn't miss this." His gesture encompassed the upended lair, the shattered city. It was the biggest "monster fuss" in recent history.
Before Genos could respond, the ground around them—the true city ground—began to writhe. More of Orochi's sentient flesh, perhaps sensing concentrated life forces, erupted from a dozen cracks, a wave of screaming, hungry biomass intent on drowning them.
King moved to interpose himself, but Genos was already in motion. "Do not waste your energy, King. Allow me."
The cyborg's chest panel slid open. The core within glowed a blinding, solar white. "Incinerate."
multiple beams of pure, calibrated devastation lanced out, not like wild blast but a surgical sweep. It touched the advancing flesh. Where it passed, the biomass didn't burn; it ceased to exist, atomized into nothingness with a sound like tearing reality. In a second, the clearing was sterile, the edges of the asphalt glowing molten red.
Genos turned back, his chest panel sealing. "The parasitic biomass is widespread. We should—"
He stopped, following King's gaze. King was no longer looking at the immediate threats. He was taking in the full, horrific panorama.
Z-City was gone. In its place was a titanic, raw wound in the earth. The fissures from Tatsumaki's extraction ran for miles, dividing the landscape into broken islands. The Monster Association's lair, that festering underground empire, now sat exposed at the epicenter like the corpse of a god on an altar of ruin. The sky was a bruised palette of dust, psychic afterglow, and the first hints of smoke from a hundred new fires. It was a vista of absolute ending.
King's King Engine beat a slow, solemn rhythm against his ribs, a drum for the day of wrath. The tactical game was over. The careful exploration, the BP grind, the rescue mission—all of it had been rendered secondary by this single, psychic tantrum. They were no longer in a labyrinth. They were on a stage, a desolate, god-smashed stage, and the final actors were taking their positions.
He looked from the apocalyptic landscape to the determined cyborg, then down to the terrified child clinging to his leg. The paths had converged.
"Stay close," King said, his voice the only solid thing left in the broken world.
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The devastation of Z-City was not a static scene; it was a canvas upon which greater and greater acts of violence were being painted. King's King's Eyes, attuned to the flow of monstrous and psychic energy, snapped upward almost against his will, drawn by a pressure that dwarfed even the geological trauma below.
High above the upended monster lair, the sky was no longer just dusty. It was partitioned. One hemisphere swirled with a maelstrom of virulent, psychic green—a typhoon of pure will that ripped the very atmosphere into spiraling currents. Within it, a small, furious silhouette floated, her hair fanned out like the corona of an enraged star. Tatsumaki.
The opposing hemisphere was a vision of apocalyptic biology. A colossal, draconic entity, a fusion of flesh, scale, and raw psychic amplification, hovered with wings that blotted out the light. Its energy signature was a cancerous amalgamation King's system struggled to parse: [Psykos-Orochi Fusion. Threat Level: Dragon (Above). Cataclysmic.] Its very presence warped the air, bending reality into a lens of distorted malice.
Their clash was not an exchange of blows. It was the rewriting of local physics.
A sphere of compressed green energy, large enough to swallow a skyscraper, materialized around the fusion monster and imploded with force that would have crushed a mountain range to dust. The monster's form merely rippled, dispersing the energy into a thousand cracking veins of light across its hide. In retaliation, the monster's maw opened. Not to roar, but to condense.
The very light from the bruised sky seemed to bend and pour into its gullet. The air for miles grew deathly still, then screamed inward. King saw it with his future-sight—a micro-flash of the entire city-block-sized area around Tatsumaki being erased from existence.
Then, the monster fired.
It was not a beam. It was a lane of obliteration, a river of condensed, multi-hued energy that tore through the sky with the sound of the world ending. It struck the barrier of Tatsumaki's concentrated telekinesis. The impact was silent for a half-second as light and force compacted into a singular, blinding point. Then, the shockwave descended. It wasn't air being pushed; it was a dome of pure pressure that slammed into the risen monster lair below, flattening spires and pulverizing the fleshy landscape into a fine paste. The roar that followed was the death cry of the atmosphere.
Beside King, Genos's systems whirred into a frantic, overloaded pitch. His optical sensors blazed, attempting and failing to quantify the energy readings. "The scale… it exceeds all known parameters. The entity output is geometrically increasing. It is drawing power from the leylines, from the life force of the lair itself. This… this is not a just battle anymore."
King's gaze remained fixed on the cataclysm above. He saw Tatsumaki, a speck of defiant green, holding the river of annihilation at bay with a dome of psychic force that visibly strained. She was holding, but the collateral damage was apocalyptic. A stray tendril of the energy beam sheared off a quarter-mile chunk of the upended lair, which vaporized before it could even fall.
"We do not intervene," King stated, his voice cutting through the supernatural din and Genos's analytical panic. "That is her fight. Interference would be fatal and futile."
He turned from the spectacle, the strategic part of his mind compartmentalizing the psychic duel. It was a distraction from his primary objective. Tareo, the boy he had sworn to protect, was trembling violently, his eyes wide as saucers, fixated on the sky-gods trying to murder each other. This environment was not safe. It was the epicenter of an extinction-level event.
"Genos, secure the perimeter here. Clear any emerging threats," King commanded, his tone brooking no argument. He then knelt before Tareo. The boy's gaze slowly pulled away from the heavens to meet King's glowing golden eyes. "The battlefield is shifting. I am moving you to a more stable position. You must hold on tightly. Do not let go, no matter what you see or hear. Do you understand?"
Tareo, beyond words, managed a jerky nod.
King turned, presenting his broad, armored back. The boy scrambled up, small arms locking around King's neck, legs clinging to his sides. King secured him with one powerful arm, ensuring the grip was firm. "Keep your head down."
With Tareo secured, King became a golden comet streaking across the hellscape. He wasn't running from the battle above, but through its fallout. He leaped over newly opened crevasses that glowed with geothermal heat. He blasted through walls of fallen, semi-sentient rubble with focused Kinetic Blasts, never breaking stride. He moved not as a hero seeking glory, but as a guardian executing an extraction under fire. Each earth-shaking boom from above, each new rain of superheated debris, underscored the terrible urgency. This isn't just about winning a fight anymore, he thought, weaving between the impacts. Tatsumaki is fighting to destroy a monster. But that fight itself is becoming the disaster.
A massive chunk of psychic shrapnel, sheared from the clash above, slammed into the ground fifty meters to his left. The explosion was nuclear in miniature, carving a new crater and sending a wave of liquefied stone and force toward them. King didn't dodge. He planted his feet, and King's Armor flared into its ultimate density. The golden shield before him met the wave head-on. The sound was a deafening gong, and the ground beneath him sank two feet, but the shield held. Behind him, Tareo let out a muffled cry but held fast.
As the wave dissipated, King resumed his sprint. The near-miss crystallized his thinking. He had 555,000 BP. He had Dragon-level strength, future sight, and unparalleled defenses. But against the scale of annihilation now on display—where a stray shot could erase a city district—it all felt… tactical. He needed a strategic weapon. A guarantee. A final argument that could meet world-ending power with world-ending resolution.
While his body moved with preternatural speed and his eyes scanned for the next threat, a part of his consciousness plunged inward. The blue grid of the Legend Shop materialized in his mind's eye. He didn't browse. He went directly to the entry that had been his white whale, his impossible dream, the mountain he'd been grinding toward since the beginning.
[Ultimate Hellfire Burst Wave Motion Cannon]
Cost: 250,000 BP.
Description: The pinnacle of concentrated aura projection. Channels, amplifies, and unleashes the totality of the user's King Engine and Aura in a single, cataclysmic beam of golden annihilation. Output scales directly with user's Aura Level and Physical Constitution.
The price was still astronomical. It would consume nearly half of his amassed fortune in an instant. The warnings were dire. But as another sky-rending flash from the Psykos-Orochi fusion lit the world in monochrome death, the calculation became simple. He was buying it for this. For the moment when the heroes failed, when the chaos peaked, when the unthinkable threatened to become the final.
There was no more doubt. No more hesitation. The time for incremental growth was over. The era of having an ultimate sanction had begun.
Confirm purchase: Ultimate Hellfire Burst Wave Motion Cannon for 250,000 BP? [Y/N]
In the space between heartbeats, as he vaulted over a river of molten rock, King made his choice.
Yes.
[BP: -250,000. Remaining: 305,000.]
[SYSTEM: Ultimate Technique Acquired. Integration Complete. Aura Conduits Primed.]
There was no sudden surge of power, no new muscle memory. The knowledge of it simply existed within him, a complex, terrifying formula etched into his soul. He knew the stance, the breathing pattern, the precise method to focus his entire legend—every ounce of fear, respect, and belief he'd ever inspired—into a single, focal point of destruction. The potential of it hummed in his bones, a silent, sleeping dragon tied to the beat of the King Engine.
He found a relatively stable shelf of bedrock on the far edge of the main destruction zone, shielded by the natural curve of a colossal fissure. He set Tareo down. "Stay here. Do not move from this spot. I will return."
The boy nodded, shell-shocked but trusting.
King turned and looked back at the center of the maelstrom, where green light and multi-hued annihilation continued their dance of mutual destruction. He had his power. He had his charge in a safe place. And now, he had the ultimate card to play.
The King Engine beat a slow, heavy, and ready rhythm. He had purchased his peace of mind. Now, he had to hope he wouldn't need to invoice the world for its use.