That sickening pulse of power—laden with a twisted will—kept pouring out from the depths below, like an invisible source of contamination.
"The source is down there."
Saitama came to a conclusion.
He had to deal with that source.
Otherwise, these monsters would never stop coming, and his teammates wouldn't last much longer under this kind of pressure.
"Hey, Cap," Saitama called out to Steve, who was straining to block the blows of a berserk rock giant. "I'm going down to take a look. Can you guys hold up here?"
Steve braced his shield and forced the giant's fist back, breathing hard but eyes resolute.
"No problem! Leave it to us! Just be careful down there!"
"Mm."
Saitama nodded once. He didn't hesitate any further.
He stomped down, and the rock beneath his feet shattered instantly.
His whole body shot forward like an arrow loosed from the string, ignoring every monster that tried to intercept him along the way as he headed straight for that ominous fissure in the ground.
In the blink of an eye, his figure disappeared into the darkness.
The moment he entered the crack, the deafening clash of battle and the roars of monsters from the surface were cut off at once.
In their place came a suffocating silence and a cold that seeped all the way into the bones.
The interior of the fissure wasn't like a naturally formed cave at all.
It looked more as if some colossal force had torn the earth open by brute strength.
The rock walls were scorched black in places, streaked with dried, foul-smelling slime.
Saitama dropped fast, but when he landed, his feet touched down as lightly as a feather—without so much as a sound.
He now stood at the entrance of a surprisingly wide, sloping passage that led deeper underground.
From somewhere far down that tunnel, a strange, dim purple light seeped outward.
It didn't illuminate anything—instead, it made the surrounding shadows feel thicker, more unreal.
That oppressive, mysterious energy was radiating from the source of that light, pulsing like a heartbeat and tugging at Saitama's senses.
"Right this way, then."
Without the slightest hesitation, Saitama stepped into the passage.
It was anything but a smooth road.
The ground was slick with moss and the bones of who-knew-what kinds of creatures.
The air was filled with visible motes of spore-like dust, each speck carrying a corrosive sting.
From the rock walls to the stalactites overhead, poisoned bone spikes would suddenly shoot out without warning, or tooth-lined trap maws would snap open wide enough to swallow a person whole.
Tiny monsters the size of a human palm—shaped like spiders but with bat-like wings—darted out of cracks and holes like fragments of shadow, trying to sink their claws and fangs into the intruder.
But all these traps and ambushes—enough to kill elite agents ten times over—were meaningless before Saitama.
The bone spikes shattered and bounced away as though they'd hit an invisible barrier when they were still a few centimeters from his body.
Jets of poison and clouds of corrosive gas couldn't even eat into the fibers of his tracksuit.
As for the small flying monsters that hurled themselves at him, he didn't even bother to raise a hand.
He simply picked up his walking pace a little.
The wind pressure trailing in his wake blew them away like dust, smashing them into the rock walls and leaving them as nothing more than smeared patches of gore.
His way of advancing was simple and crude—
A straight line.
If a boulder blocked his path, he smashed it with one punch.
If there was a bottomless-looking chasm, he just jumped straight over it.
Whenever there was a fork in the tunnel, he simply chose the direction where that ominous pulse felt the strongest.
Before his absolute strength, any obstacle seemed laughably fragile.
As he went deeper, the passage gradually widened, until it finally opened into an enormous underground cavern.
Here, the purple glow was even thicker, almost tangible as it slowly flowed through the air.
At the center of the cavern yawned a massive, bottomless pit.
The source of that evil power lay in its deepest depths, like the slumbering heart of a demon—radiating lethal temptation and overwhelming danger.
(End of Chapter)
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