"Why the rush?"
Everyone froze.
W'Kabi jerked around toward the voice. In the drifting smoke at ground zero, a figure was climbing slowly out of the crater.
White cape. Red gloves. Skin-tight suit. A gleaming boiled-egg scalp flashing under the sun.
Saitama dusted himself off and clambered out at an unhurried pace. Getting grit out of the belt… what a hassle. He even shook out a bit of sand from inside the waistband.
W'Kabi: "..."
T'Challa: "..."
Okoye: "..."
Every face on the cliffs went slack, as if they'd seen a ghost.
"He… he isn't dead?"
"Impossible! Those were Wakandan warships—steel would've melted! How could a man survive that?!"
"Am I dreaming? Monster!!"
"Hiss—terrifying!"
Even W'Kabi's battle-hardened fighters faltered a step, instinctively recoiling.
T'Challa's mouth twitched. Even wearing the Panther habit that absorbed energy, under that kind of bombardment he'd be flayed if not outright killed—the influx would push the suit past its limits.
And yet…
The man called the strongest on Earth stood without a scratch. Not even a paper cut.
"Whew. That was close. Next time, maybe don't—"
Saitama muttered as he finished straightening his outfit.
"Fire! Fire!! Kill that monster!!"
W'Kabi was already howling, eyes bulging, hatred and fear twisting his face.
His stunned troops snapped awake—Wakanda's warriors did not lack execution. The sky rumbled. Beams slashed down even more violently than before. Area-denial warheads detonated in sheets, heedless of what royals might be caught in the blast.
"Madman!!" T'Challa shouted, sprinting to cover the Queen Mother and Shuri as clans scattered in panic.
High above, W'Kabi laughed like a thing unhinged. The crown was in reach; the bald interloper was the only wrinkle. Kill him, and no one would dare resist. Then claim the Panther's power and become the most fearsome Black Panther in Wakandan history—
—perfect. The peak of life!
Bzzzz—
A strange hum rippled outward.
The world seemed to slip into bullet time. The rain of lances crawled like snails, a dense forest of light converging on the bald man at the center.
An eerie tableau.
The beams were too slow. Space itself felt like thickened tar.
Spatial… drag.
A small exercise of spatial force. Saitama compressed the density of the ten meters around him to a brutal threshold. The energy pillars could no longer cleave through cleanly; motion smeared and stalled into grotesque slow-mo.
Under that invisible grip, every bolt of light warped inward to a single point. The glare welded into a cluster—no, ten clusters—each a seething sphere that shed waves of savage power.
"What is he doing? At that magnitude… it could erase this whole place!!"
"Hiss—run!"
"Not good—it's going to explode!! Run!!"
Realization hit like ice water. The crowd broke apart in blind terror, stampeding for any direction that wasn't center stage.
(End of Chapter)
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