The silence in King's apartment was a palpable thing, thick with the weight of the news broadcast and the looming specter of war. The number 92,250 BP glowed in his mind's eye, a fortune earned through blood, fear, and sheer, relentless will. It was a tool, the finest he had ever possessed, and the time had come to wield it.
With a thought, he summoned the [LEGEND SHOP]. The blue interface bloomed before him, a constellation of potential paths to power. He scrolled past the dazzling, high-cost abilities that promised apocalyptic firepower or reality-bending tricks—the Ultimate Hellfire Burst Wave Motion Cannon still sat at its monumental price, a distant dream. Those were the weapons of a finished product, a final form. He was not that yet. He was a foundation, and a foundation needed to be unshakable.
His analytical mind, sharpened by High Combat Instincts, dissected his recent battles. The fight with the Behemoth-Cyclops had been a lesson in fragility. His King's Armor had held, but his body had been rattled, his bones screaming in protest. Against the Jumping Spider, his speed and perception had saved him, but it was a victory of finesse over a clumsy foe. The coordinated monster attack had proven his efficiency, but it had also highlighted a potential ceiling.
He had range, defense, perception, and mobility. But his raw, physical power—the kind that could crush a Demon-level monster's skull with a single punch, the kind that would allow him to trade blows with the titans he knew inhabited the Monster Association—was still lacking. He was a master craftsman with the finest tools, but he was swinging them with a mortal's arm.
His scrolling stopped. There it was, not flashy, not esoteric, but fundamental. The next logical step on the path he had begun with High Super Human Condition.
[Demonic Super Human Condition]
Pushes the user's physical body to the absolute peak of terrestrial biology, granting strength, durability, and regenerative capabilities on par with a high-tier Demon-level threat. A necessary evolution for those who would contend with calamities.
Cost: 50,000 BP
The description was blunt. "On par with a high-tier Demon-level threat." This wasn't just an upgrade; it was a transformation. It was the key to turning his body from a vessel that channeled power into a weapon that was power.
"The foundation," King rumbled to the silent room, his voice a low decree. "Without this, any greater ability would break me to wield. My speed would outpace my strength, my attacks would shatter my own bones. This is not an option. It is a necessity."
He didn't hesitate.
"Purchase."
The command was absolute. The system chimed, the cost staggering.
[Total BP: 92,250 -> 42,250]
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, a sensation so profound it defied description erupted from his core. It was not the warm, pervasive flow of his healing factor, nor the electric potential of Royal Acceleration. This was violence. A tectonic upheaval within his very cells.
His muscles didn't just grow; they reforged themselves. He could feel the fibers twisting, compacting, layering upon themselves into a density that should have been impossible. His bones hummed, the marrow singing with new, potent life as their structure crystallized into something akin to Adamantium. A wave of intense heat washed over him, sweat beading and instantly evaporating from his skin as his metabolism skyrocketed. He clenched his fists, and the sound was not of knuckles cracking, but of continental plates grinding together. The air in the room felt thin, insubstantial, as if he himself had become more real, more solid, than the world around him.
He stood up, and the floorboards groaned in protest under a weight that had not changed in pounds, but in fundamental mass and presence. He looked at his hands. They were the same scarred hands, but he knew that within them now resided the power to punch through a battleship's hull. This was not the borrowed strength of King's Armor; this was his. Permanently. Irrevocably.
A slow, deep breath filled lungs that felt like they could weather a vacuum. The King Engine gave a single, testing THUMP, and the vibration that ran through the room was deeper, more resonant, as if his heart now beat in harmony with the planet's own pulse.
He was rounded now. A true S-Class hero, not by reputation or system-assisted trickery, but by the raw, demonic power thrumming in his veins. The sword had been sharpened, the shield hardened. Now, he needed to learn how to swing them without breaking the world.
He would not spend the remaining 42,250 BP. Not yet. He needed to understand the new dimensions of his strength first. To find its limits, its nuances. The shop would still be there when he had mastered this new form.
Without another word, he walked to his door. The simple act of turning the knob required a feather-light touch he had to consciously muster, lest he tear it from its housing. He stepped out into the city, but his destination was not its bustling heart. He turned his gaze towards the skeletal skyline of Z-City.
The ruins called to him. Not as a hunting ground for points, but as a proving ground for a demon's physique. It was time to resume the grind. Not for BP, but for mastery. The war was coming, and King would meet it not as a man pretending to be a legend, but as a legend who had forged himself into a demon.
-
The familiar desolation of Z-City's core welcomed him like a grim old acquaintance. King moved with purpose, the newly forged power in his limbs making the ruins feel smaller, less threatening. He deliberately passed the scorched and scarred battlefield where he had nearly died to the Behemoth-Cyclops. Where once the memory would have been a cold stone of fear in his gut, now it was merely a data point. A before. He was now the after. With his Demonic Super Human Condition, he was certain he could stand toe-to-toe with a Demon-level threat and prevail.
Activating Royal Acceleration, he became a golden streak, a predator scanning his territory. His King's Eyes cast their net, searching for the red blips of prey to test his new strength against. He found one quickly—a faint, Wolf-level signal, stationary and small. He slowed, his boots crunching on gravel as he approached a clearing.
There, standing perfectly still, was a monster so bizarre it gave him pause. It was a humanoid figure, pure white and utterly featureless, like a mannequin carved from bleached bone or a blank sheet of paper given form. It had no eyes, no nose, no mouth, no hair. It was a void, an absence.
Cautiously, King approached. The thing did not move, offering no aggression. His system had identified it as a minor threat, but his instincts, the ones that had granted him phantom visions, hummed with a low, dissonant frequency. Something was wrong.
He was ten feet away when the blank face turned towards him. Though it had no eyes, he felt an impossible, piercing scrutiny, as if it were looking not at his body, but through it, into the very core of his being—his system, his memories, his legend.
Then, it began to change.
The pristine white surface rippled like liquid clay. Color bled into it, a tan hue matching his own skin. Scars, perfect in every detail, etched themselves across its face and the backs of its hands. His own intense, stern brow formed. His blonde hair grew from its scalp, falling into the exact same style. His clothes—the high collar, the pants—seemed to weave themselves from the monster's substance until it was his perfect duplicate. The only thing missing was the light of his King's Eyes, its gaze remaining dark and empty.
A system notification, cold and clinical, flashed in his vision, overwriting the previous one.
[Threat Designation: ??? - UPDATED]
[Threat Level: DEMON]
[Designation: King]
His own name. The system had named it King.
Before the sheer, existential horror of the situation could fully register, his King's Eyes flared a desperate warning. He threw himself to the side, Royal Acceleration kicking in for a microsecond.
BOOM!
The air where his head had been exploded. The mimic had moved with speed that perfectly mirrored his own, its fist cutting through the space with a shockwave that tore a furrow in the ground behind him. The strength behind it… it was identical. The same Demonic Super Human Condition he had just purchased.
King landed in a low crouch, his heart hammering, not just with adrenaline, but with a chilling realization. This wasn't a monster he could overpower with a new ability or outmaneuver with a clever tactic. It was a mirror. It had copied his physical form, his speed, and his strength. The King Engine roared to life in his chest, a sound of pure, primal defiance.
And from the mimic, a perfect, identical DOOM... DOOM... DOOM... echoed back, a mocking, hollow replication.
It wasn't just copying his body. It was copying his aura
The blank-faced King stared back at him, a perfect, empty vessel filled with his own stolen power. a new test had arrived, and the enemy was himself.
The hollow echo of the King Engine from the mimic was a psychological weapon far more effective than any physical blow. For a moment, King was paralyzed, not by fear, but by a profound, existential dissonance. The sound that was the bedrock of his legend, the drumbeat of his very soul, was being used against him as a cheap imitation.
The mimic didn't wait. It lunged, a golden blur of Royal Acceleration that was a perfect mirror of his own. King met the charge, their bodies colliding in the center of the clearing with a CRACK that shook the very foundations of the surrounding ruins. It was like slamming into a mountain that had learned to hit back. Fists wrapped in the shimmering gold of King's Armor hammered into each other in a storm of concussive impacts. They were evenly matched, blow for blow, the new Demonic Super Human Condition in both their bodies turning the fight into a localized earthquake.
King created an inch of space and thrust his palm forward. "Kinetic Blast!"
FWOOM!
The invisible ripple shot forth. In the same instant, the mimic mirrored the gesture perfectly. Two identical blasts met mid-air, canceling each other out in a silent, violent eruption of distorted space that tore a crater between them.
Gritting his teeth, King changed tactics. He planted his feet, drew upon his will, and brought his hands together in a devastating Seismic Clap.
KA-BOOM!
The concussive wave roared forth. And across from him, the mimic's hands came together in the exact same motion. A second, identical wave erupted. The two forces met, and the resulting shockwave was cataclysmic. The ground for fifty yards in every direction was scoured clean, pulverized into dust. The air itself became a solid wall of sound that hurled both of them backward, tumbling head over heels through the rubble.
King slammed into the husk of a car, the metal crumpling around him. He pushed himself out, his mind racing, analyzing the data stream of the fight. It was a perfect stalemate. Every ability he used was instantly countered by an identical one. The mimic was a flawless reflector.
But as he watched the blank-faced doppelgänger rise from the debris, its movements a precise, soulless replication of his own, a crucial insight clicked into place. His High Combat Instincts, fed by the torrent of combat data, presented him with the answer.
It copies what it sees. It learns as I fight. But it doesn't think. It only reacts.
The mimic was a perfect database of his abilities, but it had no programmer. No creativity. No soul. It could use Royal Acceleration, but it couldn't decide where to go based on strategy, only on his movement. It could throw a Kinetic Blast, but it couldn't choose when to fire for maximum effect, only in response to his own. It was a puppet, and he was holding all the strings.
A new, grim strategy formed in his mind. He would give it nothing new to copy.
He deactivated his King's Armor. The golden light around him faded. He settled into a simple, grounded fighting stance, one he had practiced ten thousand times in the valley, long before he had a system. The King Engine still beat, but now it was a drum for a different kind of war.
The mimic stared, its blank face somehow conveying confusion. It mirrored his stance exactly, but its body remained bare, awaiting a command.
King exploded forward, but not with Royal Acceleration. He used only the raw, explosive power of his Demonic Super Human Condition, his muscles screaming with newfound, terrifying force. He didn't fire blasts. He threw a punch. A simple, straightforward right cross.
The mimic, programmed to mirror, threw an identical right cross.
But King wasn't there. His King's Eyes, which required no activation, only focus, had read the telegraph of the mimic's own strike. He slipped inside the punch, his left hand coming up to block while his right drove a devastating uppercut into the mimic's jaw.
CRUNCH.
The sound was sickeningly solid. The mimic's head snapped back, a web of cracks appearing across its featureless face like fractured porcelain. It was the first clean hit, and it was born not from system-granted power, but from fundamental skill.
The mimic staggered, its programming scrambling. It tried to replicate the block and counter, but its movement was a half-second too slow, a clumsy imitation without understanding. King pressed the advantage. He became a whirlwind of pure, physical violence. Hooks, jabs, knees, and elbows—a brutal symphony of close-quarters combat that he had never needed to use before, because he had always had a power to rely on.
He was no longer fighting a mirror of his abilities. He was fighting a student of his form, and he was the master. The mimic could copy the movements, but it couldn't copy the hours of instinct, the adaptive flow, the feints and setups that High Combat Proficiency granted him.
He feinted a low kick, and when the mimic dropped its guard, he switched to a crushing elbow to its temple. He grabbed its arm as it tried to mimic a grapple, using its own momentum to spin and hurl it through the wall of a nearby building.
The mimic was strong. It was durable. It was, physically, his equal. But it was losing. Badly. Without new, flashy abilities to copy, it was reduced to a crude, predictable fighter, while King was a artist whose canvas was the battlefield itself.
As the dust settled, King stood over the broken form of his copy. Its body was cracked and crumbling, the white material chipping away to reveal nothing but hollow darkness beneath. It tried to rise, its limbs moving in a jerky, uncoordinated parody of his fighting stance.
King looked down at his own scarred, bleeding knuckles. This victory felt different. It wasn't clean or efficient. It was brutal, personal, and earned not by the system, but by the man. He had faced himself, and he had won not by being more powerful, but by being smarter. By being more human.
The King Engine beat a single, final, triumphant note. The hollow echo from the mimic had fallen silent.
The silence that followed the mimic's defeat was profound. King stood panting, his knuckles raw and throbbing, the King Engine a frantic drum against his ribs slowly settling into a wary, steady rhythm. He waited, his King's Eyes fixed on the crumbling, fractured form of his doppelgänger, expecting the familiar, satisfying chime of the system. The BP for a Demon-level threat, especially one so bizarre and dangerous, would be substantial.
The chime never came.
A cold knot of apprehension tightened in his gut. He had dissolved Tiger-level threats with a thought and pulverized Demons with concentrated force. They always yielded points. This… this thing was different. It had not come from the usual festering well of human obsession or natural mutation. It felt alien.
As he watched, the shattered pieces of the mimic, which had begun to dissolve into the usual ethereal dust, stopped. Instead of fading, they quivered. Then, defying all known logic, they slid back together. A crack sealed here, a chip of white material reattached there, the process silent and unnervingly organic. It was reconstructing itself, not through regeneration, but through reversal, like a video played in rewind.
And then he felt it. A presence, cold and utterly alien, brushed against the edges of his consciousness. It wasn't a physical touch, but a violation—a sensation of eyes, vast and incomprehensible, taking a fleeting, curious peek into the vault of his mind. It wasn't searching for strategies or memories of combat forms. It was skimming the surface of his soul, looking for a concept, a template of power.
His own face, scarred and stern, looked back at him from the reformed mimic for a single, horrifying moment. Then, it began to change again.
This transformation was slower, more deliberate, as if the thing was carefully assembling a puzzle based on a blueprint it had just stolen. The blonde hair receded, vanishing completely. The intense, golden glow of his eyes faded into vacant, dark sockets. The scarred, rugged features smoothed over into a perfectly bland, pale canvas. A simple, yellow jumpsuit and a white cape materialized from its substance, hanging with a familiar, cheap drape.
The mimic had looked into his memories, into the very core of his being, and found the single most powerful entity it could conceptualize. It had copied Saitama.
A wave of pure, unadulterated terror, the likes of which he had not felt since his days as a helpless fraud, crashed over King. This was no longer a fight. This was an execution. His system notification flickered violently, the text glitching, unable to process what it was sensing.
[Threat Designation: ??? - UPDATED]
[Threat Level: GOD]
The word hung in his vision, burning with finality. A God-level threat. An danger threatening the extinction of all humanity. And it was wearing his best friend's face.
But then, the system glitched again, the text scrambling into incoherent symbols before resolving into something even more terrifying in its ambiguity.
[Threat Level: ???]
It was beyond the system's ability to quantify. The mimic stood before him, a perfect, blank-faced replica of Saitama. It did not speak. It did not breathe. It simply existed, a monument of stolen power.
It settled into Saitama's casual, almost slouching stance. There was no King Engine echo this time. There was only a silence so absolute it felt like the universe itself was holding its breath. Then, it pulled its arm back, preparing to throw a punch. Not a technique, not an ability. Just Saitama's casual, reality-rewriting punch.
King's mind blanked. Every strategy, every ability, every ounce of his hard-earned power was rendered meaningless. There was no dodging this. There was no blocking it. His King's Eyes showed him nothing because there was no future to see beyond the utter annihilation that was coming. He was a statue, trapped in the amber of his own doom, forced to watch the end of the world wear the face of the one person he considered a friend.
The mimic threw the punch.
And the universe said, "No."
It wasn't a sound, but a fundamental law of physics objecting. The moment the mimic's muscles contracted to unleash the imitated, infinite force, its body could not comply. The form it had stolen was a lie, a conceptual paradox it could not physically contain.
A spiderweb of cracks erupted across its entire being. Not just on the surface, but through the very core of its existence. Light, not golden or white, but a void-black nothingness, bled from the fractures. The Saitama-form froze mid-punch, a perfect, terrible sculpture. Then, with a sound like a dying star—a silent, light-swallowing implosion—it collapsed inward on itself and vanished. Not into dust, not into energy, but into absolute nonexistence. It had been erased, not by an external force, but by the sheer, unbearable weight of the power it had tried to mimic.
The silence returned, heavier than before.
King remained frozen for a full minute, his body refusing to believe the threat was gone. Slowly, shakily, he unclenched fists he didn't remember making. The system chime, when it finally came, was almost an affront.
[???-Level Threat: Blank Sheet of God - DEFEATED]
[BP Awarded: +62,000]
[Total BP: 104,250]
The number was astronomical. It was more than he had earned from the entire multi-city invasion. But he couldn't bring himself to care. His eyes were locked on the empty space where the thing had been, his mind echoing with the system's final, chilling designation.
Blank Sheet of God.
The name was a poem of terror. A blank sheet, waiting to be filled. A entity that copied, learned, and evolved, capable of becoming anything, even a god. And it had looked into his mind to find its ultimate template.
His gaze lifted from the ground, looking past the ruins of Z-City, towards the sky, as if he could see the architect of such a horror lurking amongst the stars.
"Who... is God...?" The question left his lips as a barely audible whisper, but it carried the weight of a shattered worldview.
The grind for power, the Hero Association, the Monster Association—it all suddenly felt like children squabbling in a sandbox. There was something else out there. Something that used monsters like this as its brushes, painting on the canvas of reality. And it now knew his name.