The silence that followed Vargos's question was heavy enough to crack the pavement.
For three seconds, the only sound in the Saitama street was the hum of a passing electric bus and the distant chime of a convenience store door.
Then, the explosion came.
"Excuse me?!" Mei Saito's voice hit a pitch that could have shattered industrial glass.
Her face went from a stunned pale to a violent, pulsating red that nearly matched her hair.
"A brothel? Did you seriously just ask me if I work at a damn brothel?"
Vargos tilted his head, his expression one of genuine, lazy curiosity. He didn't flinch at her volume.
"The logic seemed sound. You are standing on a public street corner, displaying a significant portion of your internal anatomy to every passing stranger. In my experience, that is a business strategy, not a fashion choice."
"You… you absolute, colossal asshole!"
Mei screamed, her hands balling into fists.
A faint, flickering orange aura began to shimmer around her skin—the tell-tale sign of a mage's mana responding to emotional distress.
"Do you have any idea who you're talking to? I am a B-Tier licensed mage under the GMMC! I have more rights in this city than you have cells in your brain! I could have you arrested in ten seconds. Better yet, I could report you for magical harassment, and the enforcement squads would have you in a damp cell before the sun goes down. You can enjoy your jail time, you misogynistic freak!"
Vargos looked at her with the same detached interest one might show an particularly loud insect. GMMC. B-Tier. Enforcement squads.
The words were new, but the stench of bureaucracy was universal.
He felt a pang of nostalgia for the days when a person's status was determined by the length of their sword or the depth of their soul, not a letter of the alphabet assigned by a committee.
"B-Tier," Vargos repeated, the corner of his mouth twitching into a shadow of a smirk. "Is that meant to be impressive? It sounds like a grade for mediocre produce."
Mei looked like she was about to suffer a stroke. "Mediocre?! There are only eight thousand B-Tiers in the entire country! I'm in the top five percent of the population!"
Vargos sighed, a long, weary sound.
He stepped closer, and despite her fury, Mei instinctively took a half-step back.
His shadow swallowed her entirely. Up close, his eyes weren't just red; they were crystalline, ancient, and terrifyingly calm.
"Listen to me, little bird," Vargos said, his voice dropping into a low, honeyed vibration that sent an involuntary shiver down Mei's spine—one that wasn't entirely caused by anger.
"Instead of squandering your breath on threats you lack the power to execute, perhaps you should invest your efforts into finding a tailor. Walking around with your midriff exposed to the winds isn't just a lapse in modesty; it's a tactical error. Any low-level shadow could disembowel you before you even finished your first insult."
Mei was speechless. No one spoke to a B-Tier like this.
No one. Especially not a man who looked like he'd crawled out of a high-fashion runway from hell.
"Mei! Hey, Mei! What's going on?"
A man came jogging through the crowd, dodging a group of students.
He was average in every sense of the word—five-foot-eight, wearing a wrinkled charcoal suit, and sporting the frantic expression of someone who spent his life apologizing for things.
"Masaru!" Mei turned, her voice reaching a new level of indignation.
"This guy! This... this psycho! He just called me a prostitute because of my clothes! He's harassing me!"
Kobayashi Masaru stopped, panting slightly, and looked up at Vargos.
He blinked. Then he blinked again. Even to a mundane human, the difference between them was staggering.
Vargos stood like a monument of dark marble, while Masaru looked like a wet paper bag.
Masaru tried to puff out his chest, stepping between Mei and the tall stranger.
"Look here, pal. I don't know who you think you are, but being tall and handsome doesn't give you a free pass to go around insulting women on the street. You need to apologize to Miss Saito right now, or I'm calling the GMMC patrol."
Vargos felt a familiar, sharp itch behind his eyes.
It was a sensation he hadn't felt in fourteen centuries: genuine annoyance.
He had sacrificed his entire existence to ensure these "apes" could live in a world without being eaten by cosmic horrors, and within five minutes of his return, he was being lectured by a man who looked like he'd be defeated by a moderately steep flight of stairs.
Patience, Vargos, he told himself. You wanted peace. Peace is boring. Boring people are annoying.
But the annoyance was a physical thing, a spark of heat in his core.
Without him even intending to, a tiny, microscopic fragment of his mana slipped through the cracks of his control—a mere drop from an ocean that had once drowned gods.
The effect was instantaneous.
The air in a ten-foot radius around Vargos suddenly grew heavy, as if the oxygen had been replaced by liquid lead.
The temperature dropped ten degrees in a heartbeat.
Crack.
The sound was sharp, like a small bone snapping.
Both Mei and Masaru gasped, clutching their left wrists.
Fastened there were sleek, metallic bands with glowing blue displays—GMMC-issued Mana Meters, designed to detect and rank the power levels of nearby entities.
The glass screens on both devices had spiderwebbed.
The blue light flickered violently before turning a frantic, bleeding red.
Mei's knees buckled. She didn't fall, but she had to grab Masaru's arm to stay upright.
Her breath came in ragged hitches.
The "orange aura" she had been so proud of didn't just vanish; it felt like it had been crushed into nothingness by the sheer weight of the presence standing before her.
Masaru's face went the color of curdled milk.
He looked down at his shattered meter, then back up at Vargos.
The "tall handsome guy" didn't look like a guy anymore. He looked like an abyss disguised in a human skin.
"I... I..." Masaru stammered, his bravado evaporating so fast it left his head spinning.
"Are you... are you a High-Ranker? Are you with the Central Branch? I didn't know... I'm so sorry, sir! We didn't realize you were a registered—"
Vargos let the mana snap back into his core.
The pressure vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
He looked at the two of them—the shaking "B-Tier" and the trembling office worker—and felt a wave of profound, lazy disgust.
"You're lucky," Vargos said, his voice cold and terrifyingly smooth.
"You're lucky that I've spent the last millennium being a relatively decent person. If I had woken up on the wrong side of the void, I might have wiped out your entire species based solely on the first impression provided by you two monkeys."
He didn't wait for a response.
He didn't care about their apologies or their ranking system.
He simply turned on his heel, his dark tunic swaying with his stride, and began walking down the crowded Saitama sidewalk.
People instinctively parted for him, moving out of his way without even knowing why, a primal survival instinct screaming in the back of their minds to clear a path for the predator.
Mei Saito stayed frozen, her hand still clutching her shattered Mana Meter.
Her heart was hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.
"Mei?" Masaru whispered, his voice trembling.
"What was that? What is he? My meter... it didn't just cap out. It broke. It's rated for up to A-Tier output. It shouldn't have broken."
Mei didn't answer.
She was watching the back of the black-haired man as he disappeared into the crowd.
Her mind was racing.
The sensation she had felt wasn't just "strength."
It wasn't like the A-Tier instructors at the academy or even the S-Tier celebrities she saw on the news.
The mana she had felt for that split second was cold, ancient, and endless.
It didn't feel like a mage. It felt like a world.
"A-Tier?" Mei whispered, her voice finally returning, though it was barely more than a breath. "No. Not A. Not even S."
She looked at her ruined wristband, the red light finally dying out.
"What the fuck was that?"