My Fate Is My Own, Not Heaven's!

Hawk didn't know how other Saints trained.

After all, the Saints in his memory were from an anime.

This was reality.

As everyone knows.

Stories need logic; reality doesn't.

So...

Having thrown ten thousand consecutive punches every day for a full thousand days, Hawk could already be said to have mastered this simple fist technique to perfection.

There's a saying, isn't there?

If someone can draw and sheathe a blade a hundred thousand times, they can master the Heaven-Slashing Sword Art.

He had withdrawn and thrown punches far more than a hundred thousand times, and after completing his Cosmo Cultivation and activating the mission, this fist technique of his finally underwent a qualitative change.

Sonic Fist!

A technique that could accelerate his punch speed to the sonic level, and after burning his Cosmo, might even break the sound barrier.

What was a Sonic Fist?

It meant that when his fist slammed into you, you'd feel the pain first, then hear the sound of his punch.

That was a Sonic Fist.

Boom!

With the explosion of the aircraft above the street, the Chitauri Captain, who had leaped from the craft to escape at the last moment, heard the thunderous punch sound ringing in his ears. He pulled from behind a weapon that also glowed with a faint green light—not a gun, but a spear-like implement—and stared at Hawk, who stood bare-chested with a physique as sculpted as a statue.

No help for it.

Under the Chitauri's blanket bombardment just now, Hawk hadn't been injured, but the T-shirt he'd worn for years had finally met its end under the flying debris.

But no matter.

Stripping off the shredded T-shirt, Hawk, now only in a pair of gray casual pants and old sneakers, felt himself grow a bit stronger.

And this wasn't an illusion.

As everyone knows.

Shirtless equals boosted combat power!

"Human!"

The Chitauri Captain gripped the spear glowing with faint green light, his rather large, bean-like eyes fixed on Hawk from beneath his faceplate.

On the display inside the Chitauri mothership beyond the wormhole, Hawk's image also appeared.

Hawk looked at the Chitauri Captain holding the faint green spear and tilted his head with a smile.

The next second.

He extended his right hand toward the Chitauri Captain, palm open, fingers together, and crooked them in a beckoning gesture.

No wasted words.

"Come!"

"Face your death!"

The Chitauri Captain, seeing Hawk's indifferent expression and nearly insulting gesture, showed no emotion. With a bang, his foot crushed the ground, and he shot through the air like a blur, rapidly closing in on Hawk while the tip of his spear flared with faint green light, releasing beam after beam of energy.

Hawk also pushed off the ground, the surface cracking and sinking beneath him as he turned into a golden streak that tore across the vision, rushing toward the Chitauri Captain.

In his memory, once a person awakened their Cosmo, gained the recognition of their constellation, and donned the Cloth of that constellation, Bronze Saints became terrifying beings.

Their physical defenses became astonishing, their punch speed and movements reached sonic levels.

Even their lifespans far surpassed ordinary humans.

Though Hawk had only awakened his Cosmo, not yet lit his constellation, and didn't even have a shadow of a Cloth, that didn't change the fact that he was no longer an ordinary person in a certain sense.

So...

"Ptoo!"

The Chitauri Captain, who had been speeding toward Hawk, trying to disrupt him with ranged attacks before closing in to kill him, suddenly had his expression shift violently. The next moment, he spat out a mouthful of the same faint green blood.

The force of the spurting green blood was so great that it blasted the metal faceplate off the Chitauri Captain's face, revealing a hideous visage beneath that looked more like an insect's than a human's.

Then.

The punch sound arrived, exploding in the Chitauri Captain's ears.

"Boom!"

Dazed, the Chitauri Captain looked down at the arm that had pierced through his sturdy armor and was buried in his chest.

He let out an incomprehensible or meaningless roar, trying to lift his increasingly heavy head for one last look at the human who had killed him with a single blow.

But...

He had no time left. As he raised his head halfway, the arm withdrew from his chest, and boundless darkness surged in instantly.

Boom!

Without Hawk's arm to support it, the Chitauri Captain, shrouded in boundless darkness, pitched forward toward the ground like a dead bug.

As the Chitauri Captain toppled earthward, Hawk hooked his right hand and snatched the Energy Lance from the alien's grip.

A dark green liquid-like substance filled the lance's interior; as energy flowed, the weapon glowed with an eerie green light.

Hawk weighed the Energy Lance in his hand.

He suddenly thought of a question.

Say, if he sold this Energy Lance and the few weapons he'd just looted from the slain Chitauri soldiers on the black market, how much could he get?

Alien weapons...

Should be worth a lot, right.

Hawk mused, instinctively glancing toward a corner of the apartment ruins.

When he'd been arranging the bodies earlier, he'd tossed the four Energy Guns he'd picked up into a big pit.

Just then.

The corner of Hawk's eye caught a brilliant blue light suddenly blooming over Manhattan.

He snapped back to attention.

He gazed up toward the sky above Manhattan.

What he saw.

The towering blue pillar of light that had seemed to exist between heaven and earth was gone, and at the same time, the rift torn in the sky above Earth was visibly beginning to close.

"That's it?"

"It's over?"

"The Chitauri invasion of Earth dungeon is done?"

"Feels like..."

Hawk blinked.

He wanted to say that if he'd known the Chitauri invasion would be so pathetic, he wouldn't have been so scared.

But...

Hawk withdrew his gaze, looking at the street that had been reduced to utter chaos—a post-war ruin littered with broken limbs and severed arms—and swallowed the words.

It wasn't that the Chitauri soldiers were too weak.

It was that he had grown stronger.

"If I hadn't awakened my Cosmo right at this moment, some of those broken limbs might have been mine."

Hawk's eyes fell on the visible severed arms and legs, and as he thought this, he steeled his resolve.

He had to get stronger.

Keep getting stronger.

Not for anything else, but to earn the right to say one thing.

My fate is mine.

Not heaven's!

But for now, Hawk had something urgent to do.

That was...

Find a safe place to stash the five alien weapons he'd worked hard to farm, then figure out how to sell them for cash to improve his life.