The faint echo of that light footfall still seemed to linger in the sky above the eerily empty battlefield.
Saitama lowered his right foot, casually patted at the nonexistent dust on his boot, and looked around.
A colossal hemispherical crater stretched out in all directions, its edges smooth as if some gigantic ball of molten lava had rolled over everything—wiping out Stark Tower, the surrounding blocks, the battlefield, and every last piece of unsightly alien junk.
Up in the sky, the massive spatial wormhole that had depended on the Tesseract's energy was reluctantly flickering with its final ghostly blue light. It trembled like a torn scrap of cloth in a gale, let out a last crackling whine, and finally collapsed in on itself and vanished—revealing the early-evening New York sky that should have been there all along, a clear blue that now felt strangely unfamiliar.
The view was absurdly open. Aside from the lone bald man standing at the very center of the crater, there was nothing. The setting sun traced a blinding golden rim around his shiny head and his cheap, bright-red cape.
"Yeah. That's much quieter," Saitama nodded, his tone that of someone mildly satisfied after finishing a bit of household tidying.
He completely ignored the man-made doomsday scene behind him. His gaze locked, with unshakable determination, onto one thing standing stubbornly at the rim of the crater: a little hotpot restaurant whose neon sign reading "Fragrant Pot Hotpot" now hung at a crooked forty-five-degree angle.
Hotpot.
That single thought instantly drowned out everything else.
He set off at an easy pace, stepping up the crater's mirror-smooth slope one step at a time, as leisurely as an ordinary guy out for an after-dinner walk, heading straight toward Fragrant Pot Hotpot. The crater wall was steep and slick, but it didn't hinder his steady footsteps in the slightest.
The entire battlefield was dead silent.
The Avengers stood frozen, like they'd all been hit with a mass petrification spell.
Tony Stark was hovering in midair. Behind his alloy faceplate, JARVIS was frantically cycling through page after page of data—collapse shockwave peak values, crater volume, energy conversion rates… every single metric blew past its computational limits, red error boxes piling over one another in dense layers. For the first time, his AI butler was genuinely "lagging."
Tony's own gaze was locked on that enormous crater below, where wisps of dust still curled lazily upward.
Gone.
His tower—his blood, sweat, and sleepless nights—the cathedral of cutting-edge technology, the symbol of his billions… All of it had been erased completely by that bald guy's offhanded little stomp. Not even a scrap of wreckage remained. Just that terrifyingly smooth crater wall, like a gigantic, silent mouth frozen in mockery.
"M-my… tower…"
The hoarse words squeezed out from under Iron Man's mask, thick with dazed emptiness and the suffocating pain of having his very soul hollowed out.
Billionaire? Superhero?
In front of this being, he felt like a kid who'd just finished building a castle out of toy blocks, only to have some random passerby walk by and casually crush it underfoot. Even his frustration felt absurd and powerless.
Steve Rogers was down on one knee on the shattered ground at the crater's edge. The cracked earth barely supported his faintly trembling body. His fingers dug deep into the rim of his vibranium shield, and even the cold metal couldn't dispel the surging chill and helpless absurdity in his heart.
He looked up toward the bottom of the crater. The red-clad figure walking there seemed so small, yet at the same time so vast that it eclipsed his entire worldview.
Protection? Just a moment ago, they had been fighting, bleeding, struggling to protect New York. To protect civilians. To protect the Earth.
But in front of this man, that alien army—Loki, the space wormhole, all of it—felt like nothing more than irrelevant background noise. All he'd had to do was take a single step. Just one step, and the entire battlefield went "quiet"… and Stark Tower vanished on the spot along with it.
The morality and justice that Captain America had spent his whole life upholding had been run over by absolute power, leaving behind nothing but rubble and a single bottomless crater.
What had they really been fighting against?
(End of Chapter)
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