"Hoo… so hot… so good…"
His muffled praise came out between noisy slurps of noodles. He'd much rather be eating real hotpot, of course, but with hunger as a bonus seasoning, this half-price cup of instant noodles was… barely acceptable.
The piping hot broth slid down his esophagus, instantly washing away some of the fatigue in his body and the evening chill in the air.
On the bridge above, rescue and chaos were still ongoing, but all that noise felt as if it had been sealed off by an invisible barrier. What remained here was only Saitama's focused noodle-slurping—
"Slurp… slurp… oh? These little beef cubes… the fake ones actually taste kinda real…"
Meanwhile, several dozen kilometers away, in a secluded warehouse by a private yacht dock along the Long Island shoreline—
A heavy alloy isolation door slid open and shut without a sound. Dim emergency lights lit up the interior, revealing a space saturated with high-tech atmosphere—
A gigantic floating screen covered an entire wall, and complex wiring, like black serpents, snaked across the floor. This was a safe house Tony had temporarily activated, with security clearance above even S.H.I.E.L.D.'s top level.
Tony had stripped off the ruined pieces of his Mark VII armor and now sat at the console wearing only his damp undershirt. Sweat had soaked his hair, plastering it messily to his forehead.
His eyes looked exhausted, but deep inside them burned something bordering on pathological excitement and intense confusion. On the huge floating screen, lines of blindingly dense code and numbers streamed past at high speed. In the center of it all, an ultra-high-definition video clip was being zoomed in and slowed down again and again:
On the Brooklyn approach bridge, that red-clad figure facing Black Dwarf's massive chain hammer, casually throwing out ten punches.
No flashes of light, no special effects—aside from sheer speed, there were only pure, simple physical trajectories. The only glow was the faint glimmer produced when air, under extreme compression and friction, flickered across the white gloves.
"Replay! Advance the frame count! 0.01-second intervals! Focus on the contact point! Track the air-particle trajectories!" Tony rasped, barking orders as his fingers pounded furiously across the virtual keyboard, leaving afterimages.
On the screen, the footage was split into dozens of small sections, each undergoing ultra-slow-motion analysis.
0.006 seconds: Black Dwarf's giant hammer comes down. The chain hammer's head scrapes the air, generating a red plasma glow.
0.008 seconds: The white glove moves into position directly beneath the hammerhead.
0.009 seconds: Contact. The armor on the thickest part of Black Dwarf's forearm instantly "collapses" inward, forming a clear, smoothly edged, fist-shaped depression.
0.0095 seconds: The collapse of the fist imprint reaches its limit. The armor material is subjected to what might as well be billions of tons of point-pressure. Its molecular structure shatters in an instant—not pierced through, but crushed completely from within at the atomic level. That crushing force explodes backward in a cone-shaped shockwave, like a miniature supernova.
0.01 seconds: Black Dwarf's massive, rocklike body starts to disintegrate from the point of contact—first the hand and forearm, then the shoulder, then the torso… as if an invisible colossal hammer were smashing him apart from the inside out.
His dark-gray, rocklike skin and muscle fibers are instantly covered with countless fine, white cracks, like porcelain smashed against the floor.
0.0105 seconds: The shockwave punches through. Fragments of "rock," shattered pieces of metal arm-guards, broken chains and hammer components—all of it is swept up by that force which exceeds the physical world's tolerance limit, becoming a gray-black torrent of destruction mixed with bright red-gold shards of metal, fanning out behind him.
0.0105 seconds (extended): The destructive torrent tears through the fire and smoke above the Brooklyn Bridge and slams, with precision, along the same vertical axis through several warehouse buildings hundreds of meters away.
0.012 seconds: Contact ends.
All that remains in the frame is the red-caped bald man, lowering his hand.
(End of Chapter)
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