Fubuki recovered surprisingly quickly. I had only just stepped off the porch of my rented house when she had already leaped back to her feet, and with an expression of cold fury on her face, shrugged the fur coat off her shoulders.
"So you dared to go against me?!" — simultaneously with her words and her hands raised to chest level, unnaturally powerful gusts of wind began forming around the girl, picking up dust, pebbles, and other debris from the ground. The telekinesis she was now using was the fundamental power of any esper... "You'll regret this, do you hear me? You'll regret it!" — as the whirlwind around her grew increasingly powerful, Fubuki screamed, raising her hands above her head. "I'll beat you half to death! Hellish Storm!"
Streams of wind and assorted debris concentrated into one powerful surge and slammed straight into me like a battering ram. However, the force of this attack was clearly insufficient to knock me off my feet or cause serious damage to my body with chunks of asphalt and concrete. The most dangerous fragments I deflected with my hands or simply dodged. But for my opponent, this was only the beginning.
Rising several meters above the ground, she sharply spread her arms to either side. A tornado the height of a five-story building materialized directly in front of her — which wouldn't have been much of a problem either, if the esper hadn't packed it to the absolute brim with her own power. In simpler terms: having tested a preliminary attack on me and achieved no result, Blizzard decided to get serious.
In the next instant, the wildly spinning tornado hurled itself straight at me...
Yeah... when I told the old man I wanted to test my strength against serious opponents, I clearly had something entirely different in mind.
Smirking to myself, I immediately focused and took my stance. Steady breathing, complete concentration, sharpened senses, and just one good strike... come on — there's no fundamental difference between deflecting someone's fist and an esper attack like this. In both cases it's just a matter of force and energy, and how and where they're directed. So...
A fraction of a second before the tornado reached me and fulfilled its purpose, I drove my body forward. The strike from my left hand caught the very edge of the lower funnel of the vortex, sharply accelerated its rotation and forced it to slightly alter its trajectory. But the second blow — which I delivered with my right hand from a pivot, putting into it not only my own strength but also the portion of energy that had transferred to me at the moment of collision with Fubuki's tornado — caused the whirl of air and esper energy not merely to veer off course, but to completely reverse its trajectory. And nearly instantly return to the very point where it had been created, and then a little beyond...
"Phew, that was a bit harder than I thought." — watching the stunned Fubuki get swallowed and thrown backward by her own tornado, I involuntarily glanced down at my barely noticeably trembling hands. "Still, deflecting an esper's attacks requires far more practice. Which, who would have thought, I've never had... but if I do something like that one or two more times... yes, I think next time it'll be considerably easier..."
Grinning with satisfaction, I clasped my hands together, loosened my wrists with a few movements, and... abruptly jumped upward, just in time to avoid being crushed from both sides by the asphalt that had suddenly risen around me.
"And who's going to pay the city for all this damage you're causing?" — landing about ten meters to the left, I directed my questioning gaze at Fubuki, who was staring wide-eyed at the spot where I had just been standing. "Seriously, what is wrong with you?" — this I said having already crossed the distance between us in several bursts and appeared behind the girl. "Do you really think your little hero gang serves any purpose whatsoever? Although, does it even deserve to be called a hero gang? You look more like villains. Or was it created solely to feed your own sense of power and importance? You know..."
"Shut up!" — finally snapping back, Blizzard spun around to face me and, practically with tears in her eyes, threw her body backward, obviously trying to put distance between us. "I won't give you the rank I worked so hard for!"
"I'm not even trying to—"
Not letting me finish again, Fubuki sharply raised her hands overhead, then just as quickly brought them back down, hurling a fresh volley of rocks and other debris at me — saturated and controlled by her own power.
As before, deflecting this attack posed no problem for me. Unlike the tornado, which had been largely pure force with wind and other elements mixed in, rocks were just rocks. Perhaps far more durable and capable of changing trajectory, but still just rocks. Dodging and deflecting some of them, I surged forward again. Using a special movement technique — moving quickly yet deceptively fluidly, as if flowing — I reached the retreating Fubuki and put her back on the ground with a light jab to the stomach.
Judging by the reduced speed at which the rocks came flying at me again, Fubuki's strength was at its limit. And yet, she managed to surprise me. Because the moment I landed beside her — lying on the ground, breathing heavily — Hellish Blizzard not only leaped back to her feet but lunged at me with... a box cutter in her hand.
It was so absurd and unexpected that for a second I even froze, and instead of simply deflecting such a ridiculous attack, I stepped backward to avoid the trajectory of her strike.
And it was precisely because of that I noticed that the box cutter was not Fubuki's only weapon. Along with it, she was deploying a secret feminine weapon that had caused the downfall of far more men than any other — tears.
Now everything fell into place. The knife attack was a sign of desperation, wasn't it? Well, I'm afraid even such an underhanded move will work on me.
"Water Stream Rock Smashing Fist — Gender Stereotype Crusher!"
Executing the technique I had just invented on the spot, I not only deflected another swing of the metal blade but with one precise strike put the final period on our clash — after which Fubuki collapsed onto the asphalt, unconscious.
Smiling with satisfaction, I quickly looked around and, finding no witnesses to our little scuffle, swiftly dragged the girl inside the house. Dropped her on the sofa and went back outside to find the equally unconscious bodies of her lackeys. Not because I'm such a good person — those geniuses got off very lightly for showing up at my home with entirely obvious intentions.
The problem was simply that try explaining any of that to an outside observer. And especially try explaining it to Tatsumaki — the number two hero and the world's most powerful esper — if she decided to drop in on her little sister Fubuki. I definitely didn't want to cross paths with that legal loli just yet. Right now any comparison of our power levels would be laughable. So I'd have to keep the conflict with Fubuki quiet and handle her re-education myself, under the radar. Maybe she'd understand that she'd been wasting her time with all this nonsense? In canon even Saitama more or less managed it — so what makes me any worse?
Having found the men lying nearby fairly quickly, I dragged them inside the house and was just thinking about dousing all three of them — Fubuki included — with cold water to help them come around faster, when my ordinary, entirely non-"hero" phone unexpectedly began emitting a loud beeping.
"Yes?" — taking it from the table and raising it to my face, I heard an agitated voice that sounded suspiciously like one of the men who had been on the admission committee when I became a hero.
"Garou, thank goodness you answered — this is Yamada from the Hero Association administration." — the voice immediately confirmed my suspicion. "Forgive me for calling you outside the system, but the situation is an emergency!"
"I'm listening." — I gave a quiet sigh, realizing that something was clearly intent on disrupting my plans for the evening.
"A Demon-level monster has been rampaging in the eastern part of City Z for nearly an hour now! Its rank was initially assessed incorrectly, and as a result many of the heroes sent against it were defeated and forced to retreat into one of the shelters along with civilians... right now the city doesn't have the required number of A-Class heroes, and all S-Class heroes are in other cities — it will take them a minimum of several hours to get here. According to internal protocol, in a situation like this the Association cannot dispatch B-Class heroes to the scene through the official communication channel, we can only inform them of the danger and—"
"Understood. Send the address to this same number, I'll handle it."
"Thank you so much! Believe me, your assistance will not be forgotten — as a member of administration, I will personally—"
Hanging up before the man could finish showering me with promises, I turned my head toward the sofa on which my three recent opponents were sleeping soundly and shook my finger at them with a smile.
"Don't go anywhere — I'll be right back!"
After which I immediately left the house and began moving toward the location whose coordinates had arrived by text message. It was no short distance, so I tried to maintain sufficient speed while simultaneously not expending too much energy. Who knows — what if the monster actually turned out to be strong? On top of everything else, I couldn't help but wonder why my teacher wasn't in the city. The S-Class hero ranked third in the hero rankings rarely left his dojo. So there was really only one explanation — today of all days, Bang had decided to visit his older brother Bomb: a martial arts master in his own right and founder of his own dojo. Incidentally, I was planning to visit that even older old man sooner or later myself. His fighting style — Whirlwind Iron Cutting Fist — held considerable interest for me, being the complete antithesis of mine, focused entirely on destruction and cleaving through everything in its path. Having offensive techniques like that in my arsenal would be enormously useful. And if I were to combine Whirlwind Iron Cutting Fist and Water Stream Rock Smashing Fist into a single hybrid style... the very thought of such power was almost frightening.
Lost in my own thoughts, I was nonetheless closing the distance to my destination fairly quickly. The dome of Shelter No. 7 was already visible in the distance — which meant the monster, described to me as a huge insect-like creature, had to be somewhere nearby... oh, there it is!
First sensing it, then seeing it with my own eyes, I immediately set course toward the creature — which looked like a gigantic cicada, taller than a four-story building, with a child's face in the center of its head. The monster noticed me too and, without much hesitation, passed straight through a concrete building — demolishing it completely in the process — and charged toward the rooftop where I was preparing to receive it.
Only the creature never reached me. Suddenly, something below caught both its attention and mine simultaneously. Lowering my gaze, I realized I was looking at a man running down the street — directly between me and the monster — who appeared to be around twenty-three years old. With black hair, an entirely unremarkable appearance, and equally ordinary clothing, he was sprinting forward, seemingly completely oblivious to the cicada already looming almost directly above him.
The child's face — which apparently served as the monster's actual face — let out a terrible shriek, and the gigantic body reached toward the guy with one of its legs... and in the very next moment was driven clean through by a sweeping blow and sent flying somewhere in the distance, in an entirely non-viable condition.
"Out of the way!" — without slowing down or even turning his head, the unremarkable young man — actively losing his black hair even as he ran — sprinted on down the street. "McDonald's is right there! And they definitely have a bathroom!"
"Well... so I've finally met the strongest — and still not yet bald — being in this world." — involuntarily watching Saitama's retreating back, I shook my head and looked at the twitching body of the monster he had just defeated. "Though he didn't finish it off. Better wrap this up properly..."