The Hill of Delayed Rain had become a picnic ground.
Gone was the desperate, life-or-death scramble of the original timeline. With the Horse King's threat neutralized by a being they still couldn't fully comprehend, Toriko's team found themselves with a luxury they'd never dreamed of: leisure. They lounged on a broad, flat rock, the AIR tree looming above like a patient green god.
"Try this!" Komatsu announced, beaming as he presented a platter of golden, flaky pies. They steamed gently, releasing an aroma that made even the dense, slow air seem to quicken with appetite.
"This is my Quartet Pie," he explained, his voice hushed with pride. "Layers of Konpeito sugar, Thorny Zucchini, Satsuma Imo Snail, and Air Tree Fruit. Each layer builds on the last, a crescendo of flavor that culminates in a… a symphony on the palate!"
Saitama, whose stomach operated on a separate, more demanding clock, didn't wait. He snatched a pie and took a monumental bite.
His eyes widened.
Mmm…! The sound he made was less a moan and more a tectonic plate shifting in pleasure.
Then—BOOM!
An invisible shockwave of pure, unadulterated gustatory ecstasy erupted from him. It wasn't energy or force in the conventional sense; it was the physical manifestation of taste-bud nirvana given form. His clothes, always the first casualty of any intense experience, atomized into threads. The picnic rock shattered. And everyone else—Komatsu, Toriko, Coco, Sunny, Zebra—was launched like ragdolls, tumbling dozens of miles through the slowed air before skidding to confused, dusty halts.
Coco picked himself up, leaves in his hair, his poison-sense reeling. "The… the flavor did that?!"
"My hair!" Sunny wailed, patting his perfectly coiffed locks now in disarray. "The audacity of that deliciousness!"
"WHAT IN THE SEVEN GOURMET HELLS WAS THAT?!" Zebra roared, spitting out dirt. "Did he just food-gasmic shockwave us?!"
They hurried back, only to find the scene even more absurd.
"PFFT—HAHAHAHA!" Garou was doubled over, pointing a trembling finger at Saitama, who stood gloriously, defiantly naked, his face a brilliant shade of crimson. "BALDY! YOU ATE YOURSELF NAKED! AGAIN!"
"SHUT UUUUP!" Saitama shrieked, mortification overriding all else. He swung a furious hand-chop at Garou's shoulder.
THWACK.
To the utter, jaw-dropping astonishment of Coco, Sunny, and Zebra, the terrifying being who had just manipulated time and flattened them without effort… went cross-eyed. His knees buckled, and he folded to the ground, sinking into a deep, instant, and profoundly childlike slumber, a soft snore escaping his lips.
"..."
The three Heavenly Kings turned as one to Toriko, their faces a canvas of utter, lost confusion.
Toriko just rubbed the back of his neck, a weary, knowing smile on his face. "You… get used to it."
Before they could process that, Komatsu, cradled in Toriko's arm, suddenly went rigid. "Wait! It's time! [AIR] is about to detach!"
All eyes shot upward. The colossal jade fruit at the tree's crown was pulsing with an inner light, like a heart of emerald. The ancient branch holding it groaned, a sound of final surrender.
"Garou! Wake him! NOW! Only he can do it!" Komatsu yelled, already scrambling for his knives.
Without ceremony, Saitama reached down, grabbed Garou by the ankle, and yanked him out of the dirt like a weed. He cocked his arm back.
Serious Series: Wake-Up Slap.
SLAP!
The sound echoed like a gunshot across the hill, so sharp it seemed to briefly clear the sluggish clouds, revealing a slice of starry sky. Garou's left cheek instantly inflated to the size of a ripe melon.
"Mmmph… whozit… whur…?" Garou slurred, blinking at the blurry, angry bald orb above him. "Ugly… lightbulb…?"
Saitama's eye twitched. "Still dreaming."
SLAP! (Right cheek. For symmetry.)
"OW! OKAY, OKAY! I'M AWAKE! I'M AWAKE!" Garou scrambled up, clutching his symmetrically throbbing face, shooting daggers at Saitama. Definitely payback.
CR-R-R-ACK…!
The sound from above was the universe holding its breath. The 500-meter-wide emerald fruit began its ponderous, inevitable descent, breaking free from the branch.
"GAROU!" Komatsu screamed, already in his pristine, ceremonial white chef's uniform, a red sash of honor tied firmly around his waist.
"I HEARD you!" Garou snarled, but his body was already moving. He fell into the familiar, esoteric stance, crossing his arms.
Fist of All Life Eradication: Time-Lag Vortex!
An invisible field of distorted chronology snapped into place. The falling fruit didn't stop—it entered a state of absolute stasis, hanging in the air as if painted onto the canvas of reality. Not a single molecule within its sphere of influence dared move.
"Incredible…" Komatsu breathed, his chef's soul trembling with reverence as he gazed up at the suspended culinary deity.
He raised his Dragon King's Fang, its edge humming with anticipation. "Observe, everyone," he said, his voice steady with profound focus. "Within the fruit of [AIR] is contained approximately… five quadrillion tons of perfected, delicious atmosphere."
The moment of truth, of perfect, impossible cooking, had arrived. And for once, they had all the time in the world.
"The old ways… they say to slowly bleed the air, to cool the fruit and preserve the flavor," Komatsu declared, his voice ringing with conviction in the frozen moment. His knife hovered over the jade-green skin. "But that's a compromise. You lose thirty percent of the soul of the ingredient!"
He took a steadying breath, his gaze locked on the single, perfect incision point he'd visualized. "True perfection… is to keep the form whole at the moment of natural fall, and release all of it. Instantly. Through one channel. Not only does it preserve one hundred percent of the deliciousness… the rapid, violent decompression will crystallize the very essence of flavor itself!"
In Garou's Time-Lag Vortex, where microseconds stretched into hours, Komatsu had the luxury of a sculptor. He worked with divine precision, his blade tracing a flawless, sealing arc around the "exit" he was creating. There was no rush, no fear of the cataclysmic pressure within.
Finally, he stepped back, landing softly on the ground. He gave Garou a sharp, confident nod. "Now!"
Garou's eyes blazed. His crossed arms snapped apart.
WHOOSH—!!!
Time, for the Food King AIR, resumed its furious flow.
The effect was instantaneous and apocalyptic.
The world didn't just regain color—it was drowned in a new one: pure, blinding, delicious white.
Five quadrillion tons of hyper-compressed, flavor-saturated atmosphere—the distilled breath of a planetary ecosystem—exploded from the single, surgically precise vent. It was the roar of creation in reverse, the birth-scream of a flavor-universe. The sound was beyond hearing; it was a pressure that flattened the senses.
The clouds over the entire Eighth Continent were not merely dispersed; they were unmade. The famous delayed rain of the hill vanished, every drop flash-vaporized by the sheer velocity of escaping deliciousness.
Toriko, acting on pure instinct, threw himself over Komatsu. Coco, Sunny, Zebra—they were all plucked from the ground like leaves in a super-hurricane. The world vanished into a howling, taste-filled maelstrom of white. Vision, sound, thought—all were scoured away by the torrent.
It felt like an eternity. A century buried in flavor.
Slowly, the world's deafening roar faded to a whimper. The blinding white haze thinned, settling as a fine, sparkling dust of crystallized aroma. The wind died to a stunned whisper.
Cough… cough, cough…!
Toriko was the first to move, pushing himself up from the rubble. He looked down at the trembling but miraculously intact Komatsu beneath him. "Alive?"
Komatsu nodded, dazed but grinning wildly. The cook had survived his masterpiece's birth.
Then Toriko looked to where the AIR fruit had been.
Nothing.
The spot was empty. A perfect, fruit-shaped void in the shattered landscape. Not a shard of rind, not a drop of juice. Just clean, scraped earth.
"WHERE IS IT?!" Toriko's bellow was raw, his eyes instantly bloodshot. Desperation clawed at his throat. After all of that—the Horse King, the taming, the time-stopping, the perfect cut—the prize was just… gone?
Coco's body rippled, his Poison Membrane snapping over him in a defensive shell, his senses screaming on high alert. "It was just here! An instant ago!"
Sunny's Hair Net exploded outward, a thousand sensory filaments probing every cubic inch of air, every grain of dirt. "Nothing!" he hissed, disbelief warring with fury. "Not a molecular trace! It didn't just vanish—it was erased!"
Zebra didn't bother with subtlety. Rage, pure and simple, detonated within him. "WHO TOOK IT?! WHICH SNIVELING, THIEVING, COWARDLY PIECE OF FILTH STOLE OUR FOOD?!" His voice became a physical weapon, Sound Wave Bombs blasting craters indiscriminately across the hill in a paroxysm of frustrated power. "GET OUT HERE AND FACE ME, YOU BASTARD!!!"
The hill, already ravaged, shook under his sonic onslaught. The triumph had curdled into catastrophe in the space of a breath. The Food King was not just missing; it had been taken from under their noses, in the heart of their victory, by an entity unseen and unfathomably swift. A new, cold kind of terror settled over them—the kind that comes not from a mighty foe, but from a perfect, insulting theft.
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