My friend always used to tell me I was a curmudgeonly motherfucker. Said it like he was proud of finding a word with that many syllables.
I told him as much, that no one under eighty should be using words like that out loud, but he just laughed and said, "You're proving my point, man."
He always had the terrible habit of trying to sound smarter than he was, though he wasn't wrong. I'd been hearing some version of the same for as long as I could remember.
Grumpy. Hard-headed. "Set in your ways," my high school guidance counselor once put it — right before I told her she was full of it.
My mother had a saying for it, too. "Boy, you're as stubborn as freeze-dried hardtack"
The point is, I'm stubborn. Always have been. And the thing about stubborn people is; we don't scare easy.
Not because we're braver than everybody else, but because we refuse to admit when we're scared.
Even to ourselves, pride does the talking, and fear takes the back seat.
That being said, there's one thing I'll openly admit to being terrified of and that's tight spaces.
Claustrophobia. If you want the fancy term for what it is:
Common sense. Who in their right mind wouldn't be terrified of tight spaces? People die all the time doing stupid stuff in caves or maintenance shafts, and my first thought is always the same: why would any sane person ever even do that?
You've got darkness pressing in, air running out, walls moving in, and somehow someone looks at that and says, "Yeah, this seems fun." No. No it doesn't.
There is no great tragedy behind my fear . No story about getting trapped in a well or locked in a closet as a kid. I just hate it.
Hate the air pressing in, hate not being able to move, hate the thought that there's nowhere to go if something goes wrong.
I'd rather walk through fire than crawl through a vent.
So when I woke up to total sensory deprivation — no light, no sound, no feeling in my entire body — I didn't need to think. I knew where I was.
Hell.
Not the biblical kind with fire and pitchforks — I'd have preferred that, honestly.
At least that's got a floor plan.
No, this was the kind of personal hell personally tailored to torture me.
Did I die in my sleep?
I tried to move, but nothing answered. Tried to breathe, to scream, to do anything, but it was like I didn't even have a body. Just darkness. Thick and absolute.
No sense of direction, no feeling, no sound, no air—nothing. My mind went straight to the one fear I never shook: being trapped. Pinned. Buried. Locked somewhere tight with no way out.
Except this wasn't tight. This was empty. A void.
I couldn't feel my chest rise. I couldn't feel my hands. I couldn't even tell if I was upright or upside down. For all I knew, there wasn't even a floor beneath me.
There was only black and the rising pressure inside my skull as panic clawed up my throat—except I couldn't swallow, couldn't thrash, couldn't even twitch.
My thoughts had nowhere to go, so they slammed around inside my head like they were trying to break out of my skull.
Fuck, somebody help me!
It didn't echo. It didn't vibrate. It wasn't even spoken. It just existed in the dark with me, loud and useless.
Every instinct screamed at me to move, to fight, to push against something, anything—but there was nothing to push against.
No limbs that responded. No breath to steady myself with. No guarantee I was even alive.
Time didn't pass normally. It stretched. Warped. Could've been seconds, could've been an hour. All I had was fear—raw, blinding, rising fast—until the first red letters finally sliced through the void.
[ BOOT SEQUENCE INITIATED ]
[ PRIMARY CORE: ONLINE ]
A quiet pulse ran through me, a thrum of energy and weight.
I didn't know what triggered it. One second there was nothing — no body, no air, no sense of where I ended — and the next something deep inside me lit up. There was no feeling to it.
No texture. No pressure. Just pure power flooding outward from a point I couldn't identify.
Energy spread through me in a straight, mechanical path, but I didn't feel it on my skin because I didn't feel anything. No limbs. No chest. No heartbeat. Just the awareness of temperature rising somewhere inside a shape I couldn't sense.
Another surge kicked in. Stronger. Faster. Lines of current shot through me, lighting up sections of myself I didn't know I had.
Every pulse told me something had activated, but none of it came with normal sensation. It was like feeling a machine start up from the inside while being strapped into it with no control.
All I could do was register each surge as it hit, lighting up systems I didn't understand, waking up a structure I couldn't touch, move, or even sense.
[ OPTIC SYSTEMS ONLINE ]
My vision flickered on. Static. Grey noise. A field of interference that washed everything in grainy patterns.
For a second, all I saw were broken lines and shapes that didn't make sense, the whole image shifting like a bad connection.
Then it started to clear.
Bits of detail pushed through the static — jagged metal edges, plastic shards, rusted pipes, crushed appliances stacked at every angle.
Shredded cables hung over me, thin and limp, swaying from whatever was moving above. Every shape was tinted red by a HUD overlay like my eyes had their own filter I couldn't shut off.
I tried to blink. Or I thought I did. Something clicked behind my eyes, and the image steadied a little.
That's when I understood what I was looking at.
Trash. Not a few pieces. Not a pile. A full mountain pressing down on me from all sides.
Layers of scrap and junk stacked so tight there was barely any room for light to get through.
But some light did.
Thin beams of moonlight slipped through cracks in the trash above, cutting across the static in straight lines.
Each beam caught on floating dust, making faint silver streaks that flickered off and on as debris shifted overhead.
The light wasn't strong enough to brighten anything, but it was enough to show movement — slow, grinding movement from the machinery outside as the whole mass around me kept reshuffling.
The moonlight hit pieces of broken metal like cold reflections, sharp and brief, bright enough to make my vision spike with more static before settling again.
Everytime something overhead shifted, a new gap opened, a new beam cut through, and another section of the trash pile became visible.
It was like the entire mound was breathing over me, revealing and hiding pieces of itself with every heavy mechanical grind.
I wasn't just buried. I was sealed into the middle of a shifting metal tomb lit by scraps of moonlight fighting to reach me.
Great. Perfect. Exactly what my brain needed. Nothing like waking up buried alive in a pile of sharp objects, with letters running through your fucking eyes.
My breathing kicked up out of habit, but nothing actually moved in my chest. That somehow made it worse.
Okay. Don't panic.
Too late.
Try anyway.
My mind started racing: How deep am I? How much is on top of me? Can this stuff crush me? Am I going to be stuck here until sunrise? Or forever? Do I even breathe anymore? Why can't I feel anything? Why can't I MOVE!?
I tried to swallow. No response. Tried again. Still nothing. My throat didn't even twitch.
Fantastic. Just fantastic. locked in syndrome with an, entire city's garbage collection sitting on me, and the only thing working at full capacity was the part of my brain shouting that I was going to die in a trash pile.
Another chunk of debris slid down the heap, sending fresh static across my vision.
I tried to yell again
I couldn't.
All I could do was lie there, stuck in a body I didn't understand, watching moonlight stab through cracks in a mountain of junk while my brain told me this was how I went out.
Buried.
Paralyzed.
In the middle of some industrial nightmare.
[ AUDITORY SYSTEMS ONLINE ]
Sound crashed in next. Loud. Harsh. A constant mechanical roar. Heavy grinders chewing through metal. Conveyors rattling under weight.
Pistons hammering in steady rhythms. Alarms beeping somewhere far off. Chains dragging. Engines coughing on old fuel.
Every few seconds something massive slammed against something else — the kind of impact that made the whole pile over me shift by a few centimeters.
I could hear debris being scooped, crushed, dropped, and dragged across concrete.
Machinery thumped through cycles, stopping and starting without pattern, like a tired system forcing itself to keep moving.
Mixed in with all that were faint city sounds: distant traffic, muffled honking, the hum of power lines, and the pop of something electrical blowing out in the distance.
It was all layered together into one long industrial grind.
[ TACTILE SYSTEMS ONLINE ]
Feeling hit all at once.
Cold metal under my back. Sharp edges digging into places I didn't have names for anymore.
Weight across my chest that kept rising and shifting with every mechanical rumble above.
Pressure on my ribs — or the frame acting as ribs — pinning me from all sides like a vise slowly tightening.
It wasn't pain. I almost wished it was pain. Pain makes sense. Pain tells you you're alive.
This was something else.
This was being held down by the world itself.
I couldn't move. Not even a twitch. My body was locked in place, frozen under layers of junk stacked tight enough that every breath would've been shallow if I were breathing at all.
How did it just get worse.
Trash shifted above me, grinding against itself. A cascade of debris slid down across my torso — bottles, wiring, jagged plastic edges — and I felt each thing as a separate point of contact, clear and precise, like I had sensors instead of skin recording every impact with perfect accuracy.
Being buried alive in a human body is panic.
Being buried alive in this body was precision panic.
I knew exactly how much weight was on me. I knew exactly where it pressed.
I could feel the mass above me adjust whenever a machine moved in the distance, the whole pile settling a few millimeters tighter.
Each shift made the space around me smaller.
Each vibration made the trash close in more.
Each rumble overhead reminded me the pile could collapse further without warning.
I couldn't tell how deep I was. I couldn't tell how much more was above me. I couldn't even guess how long the structure would hold.
All I knew was that the pressure was everywhere — on my legs, on my arms, on my chest, across my face — constant and unbroken.
I wasn't lying under a pile.
The pile was on me.
Holding me down. Compressing me. Wrapping around me so tightly I could feel the outline of every piece pinning me inside it.
And I couldn't do a damn thing about it.
[ OLFACTORY SYSTEMS ONLINE ]
A rush of scent hit me.
Burnt plastic first — sharp and dry, the kind that sticks in your sinuses and makes everything else taste like melted wiring.
Then oil — heavy, slick, metallic, like old engines left out in the sun too long.
Rot followed right behind it, wet and sour, the unmistakable smell of organic junk left to stew in its own heat until it stopped pretending to be food.
Under all that was a mix of chemical fumes I couldn't identify at first. Harsh, synthetic, industrial.
The sort of stuff that would make your eyes water if you were human… except mine didn't. My
system just flagged them, logged them, and kept feeding me more data whether I wanted it or not.
New readouts blinked across a corner of my vision:
A sharp, biting scent. Nail polish remover on steroids.
[ CHEMICAL COMPOUND DETECTED: ACETONE ] [ CONCENTRATION: MODERATE ]
Sweet, heavy, and nauseating in a way I could sense but not feel.
[ CHEMICAL COMPOUND DETECTED: TOLUENE ] [ CONCENTRATION: HIGH ]
Cleaners, broken down into fumes that burned without heat.
[ CHEMICAL COMPOUND DETECTED: AMMONIA ] [ CONCENTRATION: TRACE ]
Every piece of junk above me had its own smell, and the system cataloged all of them like it was building a library of garbage.
I didn't have lungs, but somehow I was getting the full experience. Every scent. Every chemical. Every contaminant.
And the worst part? Nothing in my body so much as flinched.
Every breathless second filled me with more layers of it — damp cardboard, rust, spilled coolant, mold, solvent, and whatever else people tossed out when they didn't care where it landed.
It wasn't one smell.
It was fifty at once, stacked on top of each other, each fighting to be the worst.
[ MOTOR SYSTEMS ONLINE ]
[ CALIBRATING… ]
My fingers twitched. The joints clicked. My arm jerked a few centimeters before metal above me stopped it.
My leg spasmed against crushed cans. My spine trembled like a cable under strain.
Everything felt stiff, slow, and wrong.
The weight shifts. I hear the scrape of metal. There's a beam across my chest — rusted, heavy. I push — servos whine.
Then the warnings started:
[MOTOR RESPONSE — DELAYED 0.8s]
[STRUCTURAL DAMAGE — LEFT ARM 62%]
[ WARNING: LIMB FUNCTION AT 23% ]
[ WARNING: THRUSTERS AT 15% ]
[ WARNING: WEAPON SYSTEMS OFFLINE ]
[ WARNING: COOLANT LEVEL CRITICAL ]
[ ERROR: COMBAT MODULES NOT DETECTED ]
[ ERROR: SIGNATURE NETWORK NOT FOUND ]
[ SYSTEM DIAGNOSTIC: BEGIN ]
My vision dimmed as the scan ran.
Lines of red text streamed down the HUD—fast, sharp, relentless.
And with every single one, something bled into my head.
Not memories. Not thoughts. Information.
Raw data forcing itself into place, like someone loading files into a brain.
Each error log came with a tiny jolt of recognition I couldn't explain—an image, a diagram, a sense of shape and function I shouldn't have understood.
[SYSTEM STATUS — CRITICAL]
[CORE TEMPERATURE — 103°C AND RISING]
[POWER OUTPUT — 41%]
My core — the energy sphere in my chest, the reactor that powers me — was dangerously hot.
[OPTICAL SENSOR A-02 — 38% FUNCTIONAL]
[HYPER SENSOR ARRAY — PARTIAL CALIBRATION]
[SEARCH EYE MODULE — OFFLINE]
[OPTICAL SENSOR A-02 — 38% FUNCTIONAL]
[HYPER SENSOR ARRAY — PARTIAL CALIBRATION]
[SEARCH EYE MODULE — OFFLINE]
My vision was fragmented. Advanced sensors that should detect living organisms, energy signatures, and moving objects were only partially working.
[LIMB CONTROL MODULE — DEGRADED]
[ARM ACTUATORS — 22% FUNCTIONAL]
[LEG ACTUATORS — 27% FUNCTIONAL]
Movement was barely possible — both arms and legs were mostly offline or nonresponsive. My body was a shell, not a fighting machine.
[BOOSTER SYSTEMS — CRITICAL]
[SHOULDER/ELBOW BOOSTERS — THRUST OUTPUT: 9%]
The data hit my mind before I could even react.
I saw it—like an internal blueprint flickering behind my eyes.
Small, compact rocket units built into the shoulders and elbows.
Systems meant for short bursts of flight and sudden acceleration.
Tools for closing distance, dodging, striking.
Except right now they were barely alive.
The HUD clarified:
[WARNING: PROPELLANT RESERVES — MINIMAL]
[AVAILABLE THRUST: ONE EMERGENCY BURST REMAINING]
[RISK OF SYSTEM FAILURE: HIGH]
So not dead, but close enough it didn't feel like a victory.
One good thrust. Maybe two if I didn't care about what happened to the joints afterward. After that, they were nothing but dead weight: metal housings full of burnt fuel lines and prayer.
I didn't know how I knew any of this. I just… did. The system fed me the information, and my brain accepted it like it was always meant to be there.
Boosters damaged. Almost empty. One shot left.
And I was buried under a mountain of trash.
Perfect.
[INCINERATION CANNON SYSTEM — OFFLINE]
[BEAM EMITTERS — MALFUNCTION]
[FLAME OUTPUT — ZERO]
My palm cannons — the ones built for heat and plasma blasts — weren't working. I couldn't fire. No fire. No plasma. Nothing.
[ARM BLADES — ACTIVE]
[TEMPORAL RETRACTION PROTOCOL — PARTIAL FAILURE]
The information slotted into my mind automatically—another piece of the internal blueprint forcing itself into focus.
Arm blades. Integrated cutting weapons housed in the forearms.
Designed to deploy and retract in a fraction of a second for close‑quarters engagements.
Except right now? They were stuck halfway between "ready" and "jammed."
The HUD elaborated:
[BLADE HOUSING — STRUCTURAL WARPING DETECTED]
[DEPLOYMENT SPEED — 42%]
[RETRACTION — UNRELIABLE]
[RISK OF SELF‑DAMAGE IF FORCED]
So the hardware was a mess.
But then—new lines of data flickered in. Blue, not red.
[COMBAT SUITE — ONLINE]
[PATTERN ANALYSIS SOFTWARE — FUNCTIONAL]
[THREAT PREDICTION ALGORITHM — 97% ACCURACY]
[REACTION TIME ENHANCEMENT — NOMINAL]
I felt that, too. Not as pain. Not as some emotional reaction.
More like— a mental switch flipping on. Suddenly I could feel the capability sitting there in my head: Movement trajectories.
Optimal counters. Distance calculations. Attack patterns forming the moment I imagined a threat.
It was instinctive. Automatic.
Even if half my body was trash-compacted, the combat software was still online, still humming, still waiting—cold and confident—like it didn't care if the rest of me was falling apart.
Hardware broken. Weapons jammed.
But my mind? My combat instincts? Those were razor-sharp. Ready.
And that was almost more unsettling than the errors.
[MEMORY CORE — PARTIAL CORRUPTION]
[UNKNOWN DATA FRAGMENTS DETECTED]
Piece by piece, the picture formed in my mind:
A cyborg. A heavily augmented combat chassis. Damaged, dented, sparking.
And impossibly — I recognized it. Why the fuck am I Genos? How the fuck am I Genos?
My last memory was falling asleep in my bed, and I sure as hell hadn't been made of metal back then.
But the HUD didn't care what I thought.
It just kept feeding me more. More errors. More systems. More pieces of a body I couldn't deny.
With every red line, the image sharpened in my mind—and the impossible truth solidified:
I wasn't just in a machine. I was one.
[ERROR LOG — MULTIPLE UNRESOLVED]
[STANDBY MODE — NOT AVAILABLE]
[INITIATING SELF‑REPAIR PROTOCOL…]
[ANALYZING REQUIRED MATERIALS…]
[SELF‑REPAIR PROTOCOL — FAILED]
[ERROR: INSUFFICIENT MATERIALS FOR COMPONENT RECONSTRUCTION]
[ERROR: NANITE CACHE — EMPTY]
[ERROR: SPARE-PART RESERVOIR — 0%]
The repair attempt died instantly.
It didn't even struggle.
For a second my HUD stayed still, like the system was thinking.
Then—
[INITIATING CONTACT WITH PRIMARY TECHNICIAN…]
[EXTERNAL LINK: ATTEMPTING CONNECTION]
[PRIMARY CONTACT: DR. KUSENO]
[STATUS: NOT FOUND]
[RECONNECTING...]
[RECONNECTING...]
[ERROR // SIGNAL LOST]
[CONNECTION FAILED]
[NO RESPONSE FROM TECHNICIAN]
[NETWORK LINK — NOT FOUND]
Silence returned.
Heavy.
Final.
But the system wasn't done.
Lines of yellow text scrolled in.
[ADVISORY: SIGNAL OUTPUT TOO LOW FOR LONG-RANGE CONTACT]
[RECOMMENDATION: ACCESS ELEVATED COMMUNICATION STRUCTURE]
[OBJECTIVE: LOCATE TOWER OR ANTENNA TO BOOST TRANSMISSION]
For a second—just one—I tried to rationalize it. Maybe this was a dream.
Some insane lucid nightmare cooked up by an overworked brain and too much late‑night junk TV. People dream weird things all the time, right?
Bodies that aren't theirs, places that don't exist, sensations that feel real until they don't. It'd be a neat explanation. Except it fell apart immediately.
I'm not that creative.
Not even close. I couldn't invent any of this—the weight, the pressure, the cold metal against my back, the static crawling across my vision, the smell of burning plastic baked into the air.
No dream had ever felt like this. Dreams go soft around the edges.
They stutter. They bend. This didn't. This was crisp. Sharp. Precise.
Every sensation—every error message—felt too real to be anything but real.
And that thought chilled me more than the trash heap ever could. Because if this wasn't a dream…
If this body was mine…
If all these systems and weapons and failures were real…Then that meant something impossible. I wasn't just in Genos' body. I was Genos.
Which meant I wasn't in my world anymore.
I was in his. The world of One Punch Man. A world full of monsters that could split cities, psychos who could bench‑press mountains, and gods who treated planets like stress balls.
A world where Genos—me, apparently—gets blown up so often it might as well count as cardio. And the moment that realization hit? One clear, honest thought rose above the panic:
I am so unbelievably screwed.
"Okay, existential dread later. First I gotta get the hell out of here."
It sounded braver out loud. It wasn't.
Before I could even think of a next step, the HUD lit up again—this time on its own, like my body was tired of waiting for me to stop freaking out.
[ENVIRONMENTAL SCAN — INITIATED] A pulse spread outward—some kind of spatial mapping ping.
I felt it ripple through the trash around me, like the world briefly became a wireframe grid.
More text appeared:
[ANALYZING STRUCTURAL WEAK POINTS…] [EXIT VECTOR IDENTIFIED]
[DIRECTION: UP]
[LOAD‑BEARING MASS: UNSTABLE] [RECOMMENDED ACTION: FORCE DISPLACEMENT]
So… up. Through several tons of garbage and scrap metal.
Great.
A blinking marker appeared in my vision, highlighting a warped slab of metal above my right arm—a spot where the structure sagged, just enough to break, unstable enough to collapse.
Perfect. Or terrible. Hard to tell.
I grit my teeth and move my arm.
For a second, nothing happened. Just the familiar crushing pressure.
Then — A tiny twitch. A whine of stressed servos. My right arm shifted maybe an inch under the weight.
Not enough to be useful, but just enough to confirm that it could move.
Barely. I forced more strength into it.
The motors strained. Hydraulics groaned like they were trying to lift a building. Debris slid across my chest, pieces rolling down the slopes of the trash mound. But the slab above me didn't give.
It didn't even wobble.
I could feel my arm mechanisms straining, the HUD already warning me:
[WARNING: HYDRAULIC PRESSURE SPIKE]
[WARNING: JOINT STRAIN — 72%]
"C'mon… c'mon…"
I tried again, pushing harder, my arm shaking under the load.
Nothing.
Just the humiliating reality that even with a cyborg body, I was still pinned like a bug under a boot.
Great start. Fantastic. Ten out of ten.
I'm gonna fucking die in here,
My arm wasn't going to cut it. It was like trying to bench-press a car with a noodle.
Then it hit me. The boosters.
The HUD had said I had one good burst left.
One emergency shot.
My eyes locked onto the weak point again—the sagging piece of metal overhead, the highlighted crack in the structure.
"Okay… okay, genius idea time," I muttered.
I braced both arms against the underside of the panel, elbows locked as best as they could be in the cramped angle.
The system immediately threw warnings at me, like it already knew I was about to do something stupid.
[WARNING: JOINT INTEGRITY — CRITICAL]
[WARNING: FRACTURE RISK — MODERATE]
[BOOST ACTIVATION MAY RESULT IN SYSTEM DAMAGE]
"Yeah, well, if I have to spend another second in here," I growled through rising panic, "I'm gonna blow myself the fuck up anyway."
The boosters spun up. I felt it—tiny vibrations shivering through my arms as fuel lines coughed to life. Heat climbed from my shoulders down to my elbows.
Pressure built in a tight, dangerous hum that made every sensor flare.
My HUD flared blue:
[THRUST BUILDING — 9% → 25% → 41%]
[OVERRIDE?]
"Yes," I hissed. "Override. Do it." The system obeyed. For a fraction of a second, the darkness brightened— a white-hot bloom of light as the shoulder and elbow boosters erupted.
THRUST: 100% — EMERGENCY BURST ACTIVATED
The world exploded upward. The slab tore free instantly, shattering outward as the blast burned through the garbage around me.
Trash erupted in every direction—shards of plastic, ripped metal, clouds of dust blasting into the air.
The night above—dark sky, broken moonlight—flashed open like someone ripping a hole in reality. For the first time since waking up, I had space to move.
Air. Light.
Then my body shot upward, launched by the boosters' dying scream, punching through the mountain of debris like a fired shell.
Behind me, the boosters sputtered, choked, and died—but not before one last burst threw me clear of the collapsing mound.
I burst out of the trash heap in a shower of debris, spinning through cold night air—breached, free, alive. And absolutely not prepared for whatever waited outside.