Corvus Glaive had just been drawn toward the louder explosion on the other side of the tunnel where the mutants had gone off like living bombs. Without thinking, he scraped his boot against the slick, filthy ground, trying to flick off a bit of mud that had splashed onto his pant leg, and leaned his upper body back ever so slightly.
Bang!
A dull impact rang out.
It wasn't heavy at all—at least, not by Saitama's standards. To him, it felt no different from accidentally bumping his shoulder into a fire hydrant while walking down the street.
Unfortunately, the "fire hydrant" he bumped into… was Corvus Glaive, who had just been shifting his weight and preparing to attack again.
Corvus only felt a force slam into his side—a force he had absolutely no way to resist, let alone comprehend. That power… had no destructive aura. There wasn't even a hint of killing intent in it. It was just a pure, physical, utterly unreasonable transfer of momentum.
His body shot out like a pebble hit head-on by a high-speed train.
Whoosh—boom!
Corvus Glaive turned into a blurred black shadow, spinning as he flew, trailing afterimages as he was hurled straight into the pile of massive concrete blocks that had been frozen over with blue ice along the tunnel wall.
Puff! Crack!
The reinforced concrete, packed with steel rebar and layers of that blue mystic ice, collapsed like a sandcastle struck by a sledgehammer. It exploded apart in an instant. Corvus' body was driven a third of the way into the shattered rubble, buried under stone and ice, only his armored, dark-gold legs left sticking out. It was impossible to tell if he was dead or alive. His greatblade, Annihilation, went spinning away and stabbed into the rock wall nearby, sinking half a meter into the stone, the blade still humming faintly.
Proxima Midnight had just recalled her Dark Night Spear, the weapon snapping back into her hand… only to see Corvus get sent flying like a garbage bag by a "casual bump" from that bald man and end up half-buried in rubble.
For a heartbeat, all the blood in her body seemed to freeze.
Terror surged up so violently she almost dropped her weapon. Without a second thought, she triggered the highest speed boost in her battle suit. Her body blurred, leaving only a streaked afterimage behind as she bolted deeper into the tunnel, plunging into the more tangled, lightless depths ahead. Forget the scepter. Forget the mission. She had to live. She didn't even dare look back at the bald man.
"Huh?" Saitama finally noticed something seemed off around him. He turned his head, glanced in confusion at the figure wedged into the rubble on his right, only two armored legs sticking out, then looked over to his left, into the darkness where a shadowy silhouette was sprinting away at ridiculous speed.
"Why's she running that fast? Did something cave in over there?" Saitama scratched his head, totally unaware of the catastrophic damage he'd just caused. His attention was already drifting back to the bigger commotion at the other end of the tunnel—the tight-suited pretty woman who'd just been blown away seemed to have fallen, and there were a few weird-looking people closing in on her in a way that did not look friendly at all…
That side looked like trouble.
Saitama hesitated for a moment. He was in a hurry to get moving again, but if that tight-suited lady was hurt, or if those people really were bad guys…
Forget it. He'd just take a quick look.
He lifted his foot, ready to walk a few steps toward Natasha and see what was going on.
But before his foot could fully come down—
Rumble rumble rumble!!!
A roar and tremor far more violent than anything he'd expected erupted beneath him without the slightest warning!
Saitama's foot… didn't even make it all the way to the spot he'd been about to step on.
It was pure coincidence—just as his attention had been snagged by Proxima Midnight's sneak attack on Natasha and he'd turned his head, his right foot, raised mid-stride, just so happened to come down on a section of seemingly solid, flat concrete… that, in reality, had long since been hollowed out from below by underground water, repeatedly eroded and weakened by the scepter's energy radiation, until it was as fragile as a sheet of paper.
(End of Chapter)
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