Just Then.
The Wild Boar's head snapped upward, its massive, raised claw freezing mid-swing. Its porcine brain—awash in bloodlust and gluttony—nevertheless registered the weight of the gaze boring down from above. A Dragon-level upper-tier abomination didn't survive by ignoring its instincts.
Its beady green eyes met the figure's.
—...A human?
—The kind I just crushed tens of thousands of with a single stomp?
"ROAR—!!"
The very idea that it had flinched—that it had paused for an ant—sent molten rage surging through the beast's veins. It slammed its foreleg down, and the resulting shockwave pulverized surrounding debris into fine dust, clearing a kilometer-wide arena for its fury.
Every quill on its back—tens of thousands of diamond-hard projectiles—stood on end. Then, with a thunderous release, they launched skyward.
A metallic storm. A curtain of death that blotted out the sun.
Each quill punched through the sound barrier with a sharp, tearing whistle. Each carried enough kinetic energy to core an aircraft carrier's deck like tissue paper. They converged on Jack from every angle—a flawless, inescapable barrage.
Jack didn't move.
He didn't flinch.
His expression remained placid, almost contemplative, as the rain of annihilation descended upon him.
This is a good test, he thought. Let's see how fragile this body really is.
(The crushed Sea People Monsters, somewhere in the afterlife: "But we were here first?")
He raised his hand.
Space hummed—a subtle, subsonic vibration that made the air itself feel denser. A thin, pale-blue barrier unfurled before him, deceptively fragile.
Imagination Power.
The moment the quills touched the barrier, they ceased to be physical. No explosion. No deflection. Just a silent, seamless transition from solid matter into pure concept—swallowed whole into the Imaginary Domain connected to Jack's psychokinetic field.
The shrieking wind fell silent.
The sky cleared.
Below, the Wild Boar's cruel grin widened. That insolent gnat must be atomized by now.
Then the smoke parted.
Jack hovered in place, utterly untouched. Not a thread of his clothing was out of place. He looked down at the beast, a faint, almost bored smirk tugging at his lips.
He snapped his fingers.
"Return to sender."
*Snap. *
A crisp, crystalline note rang across the ruined cityscape.
Around Jack, the pale-blue barrier ignited with thousands of deep, starry-black vortices—each one a portal back to reality. They spun lazily beneath the cloudless sky, beautiful and ominous.
Then they opened.
*Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom—!! *
The absorbed quills erupted from every vortex simultaneously, a synchronized Katyusha salvo of biblical proportions. Amplified by Jack's psychokinesis, their velocity had more than doubled.
The black rain descended upon the Wild Boar—a mirror image of its own attack, turned 180 degrees against it.
The beast's pupils contracted to pinpricks.
"Roar…?!!"
It tried to burrow. Too slow.
*Psh! Psh! Psh—!! *
The sickening percussion of flesh being perforated merged into a single, sustained roar. The Dragon-level monster's vaunted defense crumpled like wet cardboard. Quills punched through hide, shattered bone, erupted from the other side in geysers of hot, foul-smelling blood.
"AWOOOOOO—!!!"
Its scream became a physical force—a sonic boom that shattered every surviving pane of glass within a three-kilometer radius. Its massive body thrashed, kicking up debris and dust, but the quills embedded in its flesh began to glow with a faint blue light.
An invisible force field cage snapped into existence.
The beast was pinned. Immobilized. Helpless.
Blood poured from its wounds like a breached dam, pooling into a crimson lake beneath its shuddering frame.
Meanwhile.
Tornado's flight abruptly stalled.
"...Eh?"
Her emerald eyes blinked, confusion flickering across her doll-like features. "That sound... that monster is screaming?"
A sense of déjà vu crept up her spine—a nagging, unwelcome intuition that something had gone terribly off-script.
Her cute face twisted.
"No way... No way?! "
The emerald aura around her petite body flared. She shot forward, a green blur against the grey sky.
When she arrived above K City, she froze.
High above the carnage, Jack hovered like a descending god. His left hand crackled with violently leaping blue lightning; his right burned with platinum-gold flames that seemed to purify the very air around them. Pale-blue wind currents and deep psychokinetic light intertwined around his 1.95-meter frame, each energy distinct, each perfectly harmonized.
He looked like a prism given form.
Then he moved.
One instant he was suspended in the heavens. The next, he was a streak of nine-colored light, plunging toward the pinned beast below with the weight of a falling star.
Nine colors of sublimation converged at his fist—
Ultimate Enhanced Normal Punch.
*BOOM. *
Silence, first.
Then light—so brilliant and absolute that it swallowed every shadow, every contour, every last trace of the Dragon-level monster. The beast's head, and the ground beneath it, simply ceased to exist. Vaporized. Annihilated. Erased from the physical world.
The shockwave arrived a heartbeat later.
The earth heaved—a solid surface turned liquid, rippling outward in concentric waves hundreds of meters high. Debris—concrete, rebar, shattered asphalt—erupted in all directions, a tidal wave of destruction that reshaped the landscape.
When the dust settled, all that remained was a crater.
And Jack, standing at its center, brushing a fleck of dust from his shoulder.