Boom!
Proxima Midnight's spear grazed right past Natasha's back and slammed into the chest of a mutant that had just leapt toward her, its whole body oozing black liquid.
The thing didn't even have time to scream.
A hollow, translucent hole of ghostly blue instantly blossomed in its chest. In the next moment, its entire body detonated like it had been filled with liquid nitrogen.
Frozen black shards and ice crystals sprayed out in all directions.
The icy shockwave blasted Natasha and the surrounding mutants off their feet.
"Ugh!"
Natasha tumbled, rolling to bleed off the force. Even so, several razor-sharp ice splinters scraped across her back, drawing beads of blood. The bone-deep chill made her shiver. The mutants tossed into the air with her temporarily lost their targets.
In that razor-thin instant where killing intent crisscrossed the battlefield—
Saitama, who had just walked up to the mouth of the side tunnel and was about to keep going, "moved" too.
But his movement had absolutely nothing to do with responding to an attack.
He was simply distracted by the spear Proxima Midnight had thrown, by the piercing sound of it cleaving through the air. Completely unguarded, he turned his head toward the source of the noise on instinct—toward where Natasha was being ambushed.
At the same time, his left foot, which had been stepping forward, happened to catch on a small bump in the ground.
His body naturally tilted, just a little, to the back-right.
Pa.
It was like he had casually brushed a bit of dust off himself.
But that almost imperceptible adjustment—a shift of less than ten centimeters—
And more importantly, that shift being a pure, unconscious twist of his body with zero fighting intent behind it, made purely because of the sound—
Ding.
A tiny, mosquito-soft ring of metal on metal echoed in the air, eerie and crisp.
General Deathblade's kill strike—
Extinction's tip, sharp enough to pierce the thickest alloy armor, packed with every ounce of his cursed power—
Passed by Saitama's neck, missing the skin on the left side of that bald head by mere fractions of a millimeter.
It scraped through nothing.
Deathblade felt an indescribable, unstoppable force slam into his warblade.
It was like stabbing with all his might into the edge of a tornado spinning at impossible speed.
The feedback coming through the blade wasn't the solid resistance of flesh. It was… slip. A wild, uncontrollable slide.
"What?!"
Behind his mask, Deathblade's pupils shrank to pinpoints in sheer disbelief.
His all-out, do-or-die attack had just… grazed past?
He hadn't felt any obstruction at all.
It was like he had stabbed an afterimage made of air—
But the other man's body was still right there. He could even feel the faint warmth of the bald man's skin.
How was that possible?
The massive inertia from his charge sent Deathblade's body lunging forward, out of control. He felt like a man who had sprinted toward the edge of a cliff only to suddenly step into thin air.
And that bald man didn't even seem to realize that a weapon capable of killing him had just whispered past his throat.
His eyes were still curiously fixed on the direction where Proxima Midnight's spear had detonated.
A cold chill surged up Deathblade's spine from his tailbone straight to the crown of his head.
He wrenched his waist, forcing himself to twist, trying to flow into a horizontal slash.
No matter what, he had to launch a second attack before this target reacted.
But he had underestimated how badly his balance had been wrecked by having his full-speed lunge "slipped aside."
He had underestimated even more the almost absolute physical law contained in that seemingly small body.
At the exact moment when Deathblade forced the change in his strike and shifted his center of gravity to its most precarious point—
—
(End of Chapter)
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