"Here we go again…" he sighed, as if he'd already gotten used to this kind of inexplicable attack.
Facing a steel storm powerful enough to wipe a small city off the map, Saitama didn't dodge, and he didn't even take a defensive stance. He simply lifted his right hand casually and gave the raging metal tide in front of him a light wave.
The motion was as relaxed as shooing away an annoying fly.
But it was that light wave that caused an invisible, formless force to instantly blanket the entire airspace!
The roaring steel torrent, infused with Magneto's mighty magnetic power, slammed into something like an absolutely unbreakable wall dozens of meters away from Saitama—and stopped dead!
Then something even more unbelievable happened
Every steel component flying through the air let out a teeth-grinding "Grrrrk" at the exact same moment.
As if they'd been thrown into a colossal hydraulic press, they were brutally squeezed and warped by terrifying pressure from all directions! In just one or two seconds, tens of thousands of tons of steel, in all sorts of shapes, were forcibly compressed into countless pieces with uniform thickness and neat edges…
Metal slices? Or maybe… iron pucks?
Having lost all momentum, the ultra-compressed metal pieces clattered down in front of Saitama onto the bridge deck, piling up into a tidy "mountain of metal slices" that gleamed with cold metallic light. And yet, the bridge's main structure somehow maintained its balance in an eerie way, without collapsing.
Up in the air, Magneto's vicious grin froze. In its place came absolute shock and terror. He realized he'd lost control of all the metal!
No—he hadn't lost control…
It was that, the instant the other man waved his hand, the metal's physical structure had been completely altered and compacted by some kind of force, so thoroughly that it could no longer respond to his magnetism at all! He tried to manipulate those metal slices, but his magnetic power felt like mud sinking into the sea—swallowed up without a trace.
What terrified him even more was that the helmet on his head made a faint "crack" sound. A tiny fracture appeared across it.
It wasn't even a direct attack—just a negligible aftershock from that invisible force spreading outward?
Hovering in midair, Magneto felt a bone-deep chill for the first time… and an absurdity he couldn't comprehend.
What in the world was that power?!
Far away in New York, Professor X "saw" everything through Cerebro. His wheelchair slowly spun in place from the violent turbulence in his mind. He was just as shaken.
Not only could he not read this man's thoughts, but the bald man could also dismantle Magneto's full-power attack so effortlessly, in a way that completely defied physics…
Just what kind of existence was this bald man…?
Saitama looked at the mountain of metal slices in front of him, then raised his head to look at the old man in the air, wearing a helmet with a crack down it. He tilted his head.
"Pay me for my road."
After saying that, he ignored Magneto. With a light hop, he jumped over the pile of metal slices and continued along the incomplete, half-ruined bridge toward downtown San Francisco, like he'd only just casually cleared some trash off the road.
Magneto stared at Saitama's receding back, then at the heap of metal slices, and at the cracked helmet.
He didn't move for a long time.
A conflict born from misunderstanding ended in a way one side simply couldn't understand.
And for Saitama…
He just felt that getting into the city had become a little harder to walk.
(End of Chapter)
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