Deep Space. Coordinates: Beyond Plot Relevance.
Silence usually reigns here. But today, the void whimpers.
Typhon, the Father of Monsters, drifts.
His body is a wreck. The "High Five" shattered his skeletal structure. His magma blood has frozen into jagged obsidian shards in the vacuum.
He floats past the wreckage of Boros's ship. He floats past a frozen Tesla Roadster.
"Un... fair..." Typhon's thought-waves echo weakly. "I am... catastrophe... I am... physics..."
He drifts into a region where the stars are dim. The fabric of the universe here is thin. Scratched.
Like a DVD that has been played too many times.
A rift opens.
Not a dimension gate. A data breach.
From the tear oozes a substance that isn't matter. It is static. White noise given form. It resembles the "Erasure" the Editor used, but corrupted. Angry.
It wraps around the frozen titan.
It invades the obsidian wounds.
Typhon's eyes snap open. They don't glow red anymore.
They glow with the static of a television tuned to a dead channel.
[HOST ACQUIRED.]
[OPTIMIZING FOR GENRE SHIFT.]
[TARGET: THE ANOMALY.]
Typhon stops drifting. He turns.
He doesn't use propulsion. He glitches forward. Teleporting through space in jerky, frame-skipping motions.
Back to the source.
Back to Valhalla.
Earth. Z-City. Saitama's Apartment.
10:00 AM.
The phone rings.
Saitama stares at it. It is his mobile phone. He rarely gets calls. Usually, it's Genos (who is standing right next to him) or the Hero Association (who send texts).
"Master," Genos says, looking up from his chores. "Analysis suggests a 94% probability of this being a spam call regarding extended vehicle warranties."
"But what if it's a prize?" Saitama whispers, sweating. "What if I won that raffle for the year's supply of udon?"
He picks up.
"Hello?"
"Greetings!" A cheery, synthetic voice responds. "We have been trying to reach you about your Hero License insurance! Did you know that property damage deductibles are rising?"
Saitama's face falls. The shadows descend.
"I don't have a car," he says flatly. "And I don't have insurance."
"That sounds risky! Let us connect you to—"
"I'm hanging up," Saitama warns.
"Wait! Don't you want to save money?"
"Save?"
Saitama pauses. The thumb hovering over the 'End Call' button freezes.
"How much?"
"Up to 15 percent!"
Saitama sits down. He looks serious.
"I'm listening."
Genos pulls out a notebook. "Master is engaging in financial combat. I must record his negotiation tactics."
Valhalla. The High Council Chamber.
The reconstruction is nearly complete. The marble is fresh. The gold is shiny.
A new table has been set.
Zeus (still wearing sunglasses to hide his fear-eyes) sits at the head.
Odin is to his right.
Shiva is to his left.
And across from them sits a new figure.
A woman glowing with light so intense it bleaches the shadows from the room. She wears traditional Japanese robes woven from sunbeams.
Amaterasu. The Goddess of the Sun.
"I have heard the stories," Amaterasu speaks. Her voice is like a choir of bells. "A bald mortal. A cyborg. A single punch. It sounds like mass hysteria."
"It was not hysteria," Odin grumbles, nursing his tea. "It was trauma."
"You Western gods have grown soft," Amaterasu chides, sipping her tea delicately. "You rely on brute force. You forget the subtlety of spirit. If this 'Saitama' were to face the rising sun, he would burn before he could swing."
Thor, leaning against a pillar, snorts.
"He ate my hammer," Thor mutters. "Not literally. But spiritually. He treated Mjolnir like a toy. Do not underestimate him, Sun Goddess."
Amaterasu waves a fan. "Irrelevant. He is gone. The human realm is sealed. We have peace."
The Glitch.
A siren wails.
Not the Gjallarhorn.
A digital, distorted screeching sound that pierces the eardrums.
The sky above the Council Chamber turns... pixelated.
Blocks of reality turn into low-resolution squares. The blue sky flashes green, then black, then static.
"What sorcery is this?" Amaterasu stands, her light flaring. "An illusion?"
"No," Beelzebub steps out from the shadows, checking a tablet. "My readings are failing. The laws of physics aren't being broken... they're being corrupted."
CRASH.
A figure slams into the courtyard.
It stands fifty stories tall.
It has the silhouette of Typhon. But the texture is wrong.
Its scales are made of scrolling binary code. Its heads are missing faces, replaced by error messages. [404 NOT FOUND] floats above a missing neck.
"Z-Z-ZEUS..." The voice sounds like a skipping CD. "THE... SCRIPT... IS... BROKEN..."
"Typhon?" Zeus stands, trembling. "He returned from space?"
"He looks terrible," Shiva comments. "Like a bad video game render."
"UPDATE REQUIRED," Glitch-Typhon roars.
He swings a claw.
The claw passes through the palace wall.
The wall doesn't crumble. It de-rezes.
The marble turns into wireframe, then vanishes into deleted data.
A group of guards scream as the corruption touches them. They elongate, stretch into infinite lines of color, and disappear.
"It deletes!" Hermes screams. "Run!"
"I will not run!" Amaterasu steps forward. "I am the light that cleanses all!"
Technique: Yata no Kagami (Divine Mirror).
She raises her hands. A beam of pure, concentrated sunlight—hotter than a supernova—blasts toward the monster.
The light hits the Glitch.
[ABSORBING DATA.]
The light beam freezes. It turns grey.
It shatters into pixels.
Amaterasu gasps. "My light... became geometry?"
Glitch-Typhon raises a hand.
[EXECUTE: FORMAT C:]
A wave of static rushes toward the Sun Goddess.
She tries to shield herself. The static eats her shield. It eats her robes.
It touches her skin.
She screams as her divinity is rewritten. Her arm flickers, turning into a blocky, 8-bit version of an arm.
"NO!" Thor lunges. "Get back!"
He throws Mjolnir.
The hammer hits the Glitch.
BOING.
It bounces off with a comical sound effect. The damage number "0" floats in the air.
"It... has immunity?" Thor catches his hammer. "Physical attacks register as zero damage?"
[ADMIN ACCESS REQUESTED.]
The monster ignores the gods. It looks around. Its sensor sweeps the realm.
[TARGET: SAITAMA. LOCATION: BLOCKED.]
[REROUTING.]
[SEARCHING FOR: CONNECTION.]
The Glitch pauses. The static heads converge.
They scream a name.
"KIIIING..."
Zeus freezes.
"It wants the Engine?"
"KING... ENGINE... SOURCE... OF... LOGIC..."
The monster lifts a hand. It punches the air.
Not a punch of force. A punch of code.
It tears a hole in reality.
Through the static, the gods can see a blurry image.
An apartment building. Z-City.
"He's opening a gateway!" Brunhilde draws her sword, though she knows it's useless. "He's leading that thing straight to the Humans!"
Earth. The Phone Call.
"Wait," Saitama says into the phone. "So if I pay 3000 yen a month, I get coverage for 'Acts of God'? Does that include giant feet?"
"Absolutely!" the telemarketer says. "Acts of God, Kaiju events, and accidental atmospheric ejection!"
"Wow." Saitama nods. "Sounds perfect. Okay, sign me u—"
RIIIIIIIP.
The ceiling of the apartment dissolves.
Not breaks. Dissolves. It turns into green binary code and floats away.
Sunlight streams in. But the sun is square.
The sky looks like a corrupted texture file.
"My ceiling," Saitama says, looking up. "Again."
Above him, Glitch-Typhon looms.
The monster looks down through the hole.
[TARGET ACQUIRED: PROXIMITY TO KING.]
King, who was napping on the couch, wakes up.
He sees the giant glitch monster.
He hears the garbled static roar.
DOOM-DOOM-DOOM.
The Engine starts.
"KING!" The monster reaches down. Its hand is a mass of wireframes.
Saitama sighs. He puts the phone back to his ear.
"Hey, sorry, hold on. Does the insurance cover 'Pixelation'?"
"Excuse me?"
"My roof just turned into Tetris blocks. Is that covered?"
"Sir, I think you're making this up."
Click.
The telemarketer hangs up.
Saitama stares at the phone.
"He hung up."
He looks up at the monster destroying reality.
The boredom on his face vanishes. Replaced by the irritation of a customer service interaction gone wrong.
"You made me lose the discount," Saitama says to the Glitch.
He bends his knees.
He jumps through the missing ceiling.
[THREAT DETECTED.] The Glitch analyzes Saitama.
[POWER LEVEL: ERROR.]
[APPLYING NERF PATCH 1.02.]
The monster fires a beam of "Nerf Energy"—designed to lower stats, reduce speed, and cap damage.
The beam hits Saitama.
Saitama punches the beam.
The beam shatters into ones and zeros.
Saitama lands on the monster's glitchy shoulder.
"Your graphics suck," Saitama says.
Normal Punch: Debug.
He punches the monster's core.
The fist connects with the corrupted code.
Impact.
The logic of the punch overwrites the logic of the corruption.
Saitama's absolute physical reality forces the abstract glitch to become physical again just so it can be broken.
CRACK.
The Glitch screams. It turns solid. The scales return. The magma returns.
And then they explode.
Typhon (again) disintegrates. This time, there is no body left to float in space. The punch uninstalls him from the universe.
[FATAL ERROR.]
[SYSTEM CRASH.]
The sky returns to normal. The square sun becomes round.
Saitama falls back down, landing on his living room floor.
He looks at his phone.
"Hello? Hello?"
Dead line.
"Genos," Saitama says, tossing the phone onto the couch. "We missed the insurance deal."
Genos stares at the sky where a conceptual virus was just rebooted out of existence.
"Master. That entity appeared to be a manifestation of data corruption. You effectively performed a 'hard reset' on a biological organism."
"I don't know computer stuff," Saitama says.
He looks at the missing ceiling.
He looks at the rainclouds gathering.
"King," Saitama says.
King is frozen on the couch, controller in hand. "Y-yeah?"
"You're good with electronics, right? Can you fix a ceiling that got deleted?"
King looks at the gaping hole.
"I... I think you need a carpenter, Saitama. Not a gamer."
Valhalla.
The static clears.
Amaterasu looks at her arm. It is normal again.
The wall reappears.
The Glitch is gone.
The gods stand in stunned silence.
"He punched..." Amaterasu whispers, shaking. "...the glitches away? He fixed the simulation by hitting it?"
"Classic fix," Shiva nods wisely. "Like hitting an old TV. Works every time."
Odin stands up. He looks tired.
"He saved us. Again. Without even knowing we were in danger."
Zeus puts a grape in his mouth.
"Hermes."
"Yes, Father?"
"Send him a fruit basket. Anonymous. And make sure it has coupons."
"Understood."
Shadows.
Far away, the "Black Ink" that spawned the Glitch retreats. It failed. The physical vessel (Typhon) couldn't handle the update.
"Data collection complete," the Void whispers.
"Physicality defeats abstraction. Note taken."
"Next Attempt: Do not use Monsters. Use Emotions."
The Void shifts its gaze.
Away from monsters. Away from gods.
Toward a small, angry psychic woman who feels overshadowed.
Toward Tatsumaki.
"Target Acquired."