The largest pure-white room in the Fourth-Dimensional Apartment was so quiet it grated on the nerves.
Far behind Saitama, a pale-blue dimensional passage had just torn open. Hurried footsteps poured through, carrying the tension and panic left over from the battlefield outside. Snatches of voices, ragged breaths, and taut surges of Nen rose and fell in the deathly stillness.
But Saitama never looked back.
Those sounds were too small, no more than gnats on a summer afternoon. They could not distract him.
His attention rested entirely on the enormous beast before him—the thing that kept coming back, that he could neither scatter nor wear down.
The Four Calamities Fusion froze.
Its mountain-sized body remained poised in a diving lunge, foreclaws suspended in midair, spine arched into an impossibly twisted curve. Every one of its countless scarlet pupils widened to the limit, reflecting the figure in yellow. Deep within them, the same emotion was frozen: primal fear that had come too late for it to react.
The churning black mist of calamity around it, the flesh and bone spurs constantly reshaping themselves, the dark tentacles just emerging from its wounds—all stopped on the brink of eruption. It was like a meat grinder suddenly unplugged: its gears remained interlocked, but they could not turn another fraction.
These past few dozen seconds had been irritating.
One punch smashed it apart, and it pulled itself back together. Another scattered it, and it gathered again. Broken spurs regrew, shattered flesh reformed, and dispersed black mist returned. It was like a clump of mud he could not shake off, or a fly he could never quite swat dead.
Endless revival. Endless fighting. Endless stalling.
It left him stifled and sluggish, unable even to breathe easy.
Saitama lowered his shoulder slightly.
There was no dramatic windup, no