Saitama walked down the street of City Z, his cape fluttering in the cool night air. It was a quiet night, save for the distant sirens that always seemed to be wailing somewhere. But the quiet around Saitama felt different. It wasn't peaceful. It was the kind of heavy, suffocating silence that happens right before a typhoon hits.
He wasn't running. He wasn't flying. he was just walking. Each step was deliberate, the clomp of his boots echoing off the pavement.
Behind him, Fubuki struggled to keep up in her heels, checking her phone frantically. "Saitama! Wait! You can't just walk into Neo Heroes HQ! They have private security armies! Legal teams! Media drones!"
"Let 'em sue me," Saitama said without looking back.
"It's not about lawsuits! It's about optics!" She jogged to catch up, grabbing his arm. "If you attack them unprovoked, you become the villain. That's exactly what they want! They hacked Genos to make him attack you so they could film it and say your disciple went rogue. If you retaliate now, you play right into their narrative."
Saitama stopped. He looked at Fubuki. His face was still that impassive mask, but his eyes—usually so blank—were sharp. Focused.
"Genos tried to kill me," he said. "My friend tried to kill me. Because some guy in a suit pressed a button." He gently removed her hand from his arm. "I don't care about narratives. I'm going to find the button. And I'm going to break it."
He turned and kept walking.
Zombieman stepped out of an alleyway, lighting a cigarette. He fell into step beside Fubuki. "Let him go," he rasped, smoke curling from his lips.
"But the strategy—" Fubuki started.
"Forget strategy," Zombieman interrupted. He watched Saitama's receding back. "There are two forces you don't try to strategize against. Forces of nature, and him. Besides," he took a drag, his regenerating eye finally looking normal again. "I owe those Neo guys a receipt for the headache they just gave me. I'm going with him."
Fubuki looked from the unkillable detective to the walking bald apocalypse. She let out a groan that was very unladylike. "Fine! Fine. But we do it my way when we get inside. We find evidence first. Then you can smash things."
Saitama kept walking. "I'm gonna smash the door first."
The Neo Heroes headquarters in City A was a monument to arrogance. A sixty-story tower of black glass and steel, shaped like a jagged sword thrust into the sky. Security was tighter than the Hero Association's. Laser grids, biometric scanners, and armed private guards patrolled the perimeter.
At the front desk, a security guard looked up from his monitor to see a man in a yellow jumpsuit and a red cape standing in the revolving door. The man looked lost.
"Sir," the guard said, stepping out. "This is private property. Delivery entrance is around back."
Saitama looked at the guard. "Is Mr. McCoy here?"
"Executive McCoy?" The guard scoffed. "He's in the penthouse. Do you have an appointment?"
"Yeah," Saitama said. "I'm here to return a virus."
He didn't punch the guard. He just walked past him. The guard reached out to grab his shoulder. "Hey! You can't—"
Saitama kept walking. The guard pulled, straining with all his might, his boots skidding on the polished marble floor. It was like trying to stop a moving mountain. Saitama dragged the flailing guard three feet before the man gave up and let go, panting.
"Code Red in the lobby!" the guard yelled into his radio. "Intruder! It's… it's Caped Baldy!"
Sirens blared. Blast shutters descended over the elevators. A dozen heavily armed Neo Security troopers burst from side doors, leveling high-tech rifles at Saitama.
"Halt!" the lead trooper shouted. "Get on the ground! Hands behind your head!"
Saitama looked at the blocked elevators. "You guys lock the elevators? That's a fire hazard."
"Fire!" the trooper commanded.
Twelve rifles unleashed a barrage of electrified stun rounds. They hit Saitama's chest, sparking and exploding. Smoke filled the lobby.
"Target neutralized," the trooper reported. "Secure him and—"
The smoke cleared. Saitama was brushing ash off his suit. "Man, dry cleaning is getting expensive."
He walked toward the blast doors covering the elevator. The metal was three inches of reinforced titanium alloy, designed to withstand a tank shell.
Saitama knocked. Knock-knock.
The doors dented inward.
"Hey, open up."
He grabbed the seam of the blast doors with his fingers. The metal groaned, screeching like a dying beast. With a casual tearing motion, he ripped the doors apart like a bag of chips.
He stepped into the empty elevator shaft and looked up. "Sixty floors? Ugh. Stairs are healthier, I guess."
He bent his knees and jumped.
BOOM.
The shockwave in the lobby shattered every window on the ground floor. The security guards were knocked off their feet.
Saitama rocketed up the shaft, smashing through the elevator car that was waiting on the 30th floor without even slowing down, and crashed through the ceiling of the 60th floor.
Executive McCoy was enjoying a late-night espresso, watching the city lights and waiting for the report on Genos's rampage. He expected to hear that Saitama was dead, or at least forced to destroy his own disciple in a heartbreaking public spectacle.
The floor exploded.
Concrete chunks and expensive carpet flew everywhere. McCoy spilled his espresso all over his Italian silk suit.
Standing in the dust cloud was Saitama. He didn't look like a hero. He looked annoyed.
"Which one of you is the computer guy?" Saitama asked the room at large.
The technician from earlier, still monitoring Genos's offline status, froze.
McCoy, to his credit, recovered quickly. He slammed his hand on a panic button under his desk. "Webigaza! Deploy!"
The glass wall of the office shattered inwards. A woman with long, purple hair and skin that shimmered with robotic implants landed between Saitama and McCoy. Webigaza. Rank 5 of the Neo Heroes. A cyborg idol with more processing power than a supercomputer and enough firepower to level a city block.
"Intruder identified," she chimed, her voice autotuned perfectly. "Saitama. Preparing elimination protocol."
She raised her hands, and thousands of micro-filaments shot out, weaving a net of razor-sharp monofilament wire around Saitama. "My Shining Web cuts through molecular bonds! You cannot escape!"
Saitama looked at the glowing web tightening around him. "String?"
He poked it. The "unbreakable" wire snapped with a pathetic twang.
Webigaza's eyes widened. "Error. Retracting—"
Saitama walked through the web, snapping strands as he went. He gently moved Webigaza aside. "Excuse me. Not here for you."
He stopped in front of the technician's desk. The tech was trembling so hard his glasses were rattling on his face.
"Y-y-you can't be here," the tech squeaked. "This is a secure server room!"
"My toaster," Saitama said.
"What?"
"You put a virus in my friend. He's basically a toaster. A really advanced, chatty toaster." Saitama leaned down, his face inches from the tech's. "Un-put it."
"I... I can't! The worm executes and deletes its source code! It's a one-way trip! The damage to his logic core is permanent unless..."
"Unless what?"
"Unless you have the encryption key! It's on the main server!" He pointed frantically to a massive black monolith of a computer against the wall.
Saitama stood up and walked to the server.
"Wait!" McCoy shouted. "That server contains terabytes of proprietary data! Our funding sources, our recruit profiles, our black ops records! You can't just—"
"Key," Saitama said.
He punched the server.
He didn't punch the drive slot. He didn't punch the keyboard. He punched the entire unit.
The massive black box disintegrated. Metal, silicon, and plastic were reduced to sparkling dust. But floating in the center of the debris, miraculously unharmed, was a single, glowing hard drive.
Saitama plucked it from the air. "This looks like a key."
Fubuki and Zombieman burst into the room from the stairwell, panting heavily. Fubuki had telekinetically flown them up the elevator shaft Saitama had cleared.
"Saitama!" Fubuki yelled. "Don't destroy the—oh." She looked at the pile of dust. "You destroyed it."
"Got the key though," Saitama said, holding up the drive.
McCoy was pale. "You idiot," he whispered. "You didn't just take the key. You destroyed our backup of the original worm. We can't verify... our backers will kill us."
Saitama turned to him. "Your backers?"
He walked over to McCoy. The executive shrank back, terrified. Saitama reached out and tapped him on the shoulder.
"Tell your backers," Saitama said, "that if they touch my friends again, I'm going to punch them too."
He turned to Fubuki. "Can you fix Genos with this?" He tossed her the drive.
Fubuki caught it, scanning it with a pocket device. Her eyes widened. "This... this isn't just the key. It's their entire database. Saitama, you didn't destroy their records. You literally punched the hard drive out of the server before the rest of it exploded."
"Oh. Lucky." Saitama shrugged.
"Lucky?" Zombieman laughed, a dry, raspy sound. "This drive has proof of their monster experiments. Their coercion tactics. Their funding trails. This ends the Neo Heroes."
Saitama started walking towards the hole in the floor he'd made. "Cool. Does that mean the hot pot party is back on?"
Fubuki stared at him. He had just dismantled a rival global superpower because they interrupted his sleep and messed with his roommate. And he didn't even care about the victory.
"Yes," she said softly, clutching the drive. "The party is back on."
McCoy slumped in his chair, defeated. Webigaza stood motionless, her programming unable to reconcile the data of her defeat.
As Saitama jumped back down the sixty-story hole, his voice drifted up.
"Hey, does this building have insurance? 'Cause I'm not paying for the elevator."
Later that night, in the ruins of Saitama's apartment.
Dr. Kuseno, alerted by Zombieman, had arrived with a mobile repair lab. He plugged the stolen hard drive into Genos's port.
"Amazing," the old doctor muttered. "The code is unwinding itself. It's reversing the corruption perfectly."
Genos's eyes flickered. The red faded, replaced by his standard yellow. His fans spun down to a gentle hum.
"Sensei?" he croaked.
Saitama was sitting on a crate, eating a banana. "Hey. You awake?"
"I... I have a fragmented memory log," Genos said, looking at his hands. "I attacked you. I designated you a threat." He looked up, shame burning in his sensors. "I am defective. I failed as a disciple."
"Nah," Saitama said, tossing the peel into a bin. "You just had a glitch. Like when my phone freezes."
"But I fired my core at you!"
"Yeah, it was warm. Thanks. It's cold with no windows."
Genos stared at him. He couldn't compute the forgiveness. It wasn't logical. It wasn't efficient.
"Also," Saitama added, pointing to the hard drive. "Fubuki says we can sell that drive to the Hero Association for a reward. Since you got hacked, you did most of the work getting us there. So, split it 50-50?"
Genos didn't need to weep. His gratitude was a digital ocean.
"Sensei," he vowed, standing up. "I will use my share to reinforce this entire city block. No virus will ever breach this sanctuary again!"
"Or we could just buy more beef," Saitama suggested. "Let's start with beef."
Outside, watching from a rooftop, Tatsumaki hovered in the dark. She had watched him tear through the Neo Heroes tower. She had seen him spare the executive. She had seen the loyalty in his eyes when he defended the cyborg.
"He's... annoying," she whispered to herself. But her hand drifted to her chest, feeling a strange tightness there. "Really, really annoying."
She flew off into the night, but for the first time, she wasn't flying away from him. She was just giving him space. For now.