One Punch

Saitama crouched at the edge of a stone slab and looked down at the pitted ground below. Then he paused—not because of Silva's attack, but because he had remembered something.

"The supermarket. Today's Wednesday—no, wait, what day is it? Anyway, there's a sale today. That old lady with the short hair, the one in red, always gets there before me."

Silva's elbow struck the back of his head. Saitama didn't budge. He kept talking to himself.

"She's really good with a shopping cart. The wheels never pull to one side. The one I got last time veered left, and I hit the shelves three times. She said you have to lift it a little before you push—right, her. She took the last carton of discounted eggs."

Silva drove a knee into his back. Saitama stumbled half a step forward—not from the blow, but because the more he thought about the supermarket, the angrier he got.

"I waited forty minutes for those eggs. Forty minutes. She got there before me by—I don't even know when she showed up. She's always there before me. Every time I reach the supermarket, her cart's already half full. Genos said she might live nearby. I said no way. She's got some kind of sale-tip network I don't know about."

Silva seized the opening. He drew a deep breath and pulled all the Nen he had projected outward back to the surface of his body. The density of his Ken surged, and the Nen Pressure shoved aside every piece of rubble still tumbling around him. Then he concentrated all that Nen in his right fist. It was Ryu, shifting nearly all his power from defense to attack. For that instant, his body was almost defenseless. The Nen around his fist swelled violently, silver-white light spilling between his fingers.

"Everything into this. One last strike."

He slammed his right fist into Saitama's chest.

The punch drove Saitama into the ground like a cannonball, straight into the center of the ruined training ground. The earth collapsed again, a deeper round hole opening at the center of the hundred-meter crater. Rubble and dust blasted skyward, blotting out the moonlight.

Silva didn't stop. He dove after Saitama, firing Nen Bullets from both hands in rapid succession. Every shot struck precisely where Saitama had landed. Stone burst apart, and shockwaves kept rolling as the crater sank several meters deeper. Farther away, Mike flattened himself against the ground, all three tails tucked beneath his belly. At the Forest Sea training ground, Gon looked up. The flashes from the mountain behind them went dark, then lit up again. A rain of rubble fell for a long time without stopping.

Silva landed at the crater's edge, breathing hard. Sweat ran from his forehead past his brow. His Nen was nearly spent, and the silver-white glow of his Ken had faded until it was barely visible. Wutong stood at the edge of the wreckage, still holding the timer, though its numbers had stopped long ago.

The dust slowly cleared. At the bottom of the deeper hole in the center of the crater, one stone slab remained where it had been.

Saitama stood on it. His yellow T-shirt was covered in dust, its collar twisted all the way down below his shoulder. He looked down at his shirt, then around at the utterly destroyed training ground.

"I really can't wash this shirt again. It'll fall apart. Genos offered to buy me a new one last time, and I said I didn't need it. Kind of regret that now. He also said pure cotton shrinks after three washes. I've washed this one way more than three times. I don't know if it's shrunk, but the collar keeps getting looser. I should get a cotton blend next time."

Silva stood at the crater's edge, still trying to catch his breath, and stared at the bald man below complaining about T-shirt fabric. He looked down at the knuckle on his right hand, injured by the force of the impact rebounding through it. For a long time, no one spoke. The training ground no longer existed. The stone gate that had flown away earlier was still embedded in the rubble at the foot of the mountain, while the training ground had become a hundred-meter crater, wider and deeper than the gate's entire flight path. Zeno stood at the edge of the wreckage and glanced at the broken stones by his feet. They had once been bricks in the training ground's outer wall. Now they were scattered everywhere.

Silva's breathing gradually steadied. Then he turned to Saitama, let his hands fall to his sides, and bowed solemnly.

"Mr. Saitama. I'd like you to throw one real punch. Let me see how far apart we are."

Saitama looked at him. Silva was a professional assassin who had just unleashed a full chain of assassination techniques and nearly exhausted his Nen. Now he was bowing to him. Saitama rolled his neck, and his vertebrae cracked twice.

"Then get ready."

Saitama flexed his wrist. Slowly, he spread his fingers, made a fist, then opened his hand again. He drew back into a punching stance.

The air went still.

Rubble at the edge of the hundred-meter crater began to roll back. The wind wasn't pushing it. Something was pulling it in, then holding it suspended in midair. It wasn't floating; some invisible force had locked it in place. The timer in Wutong's hand suddenly seemed weightless, as though something were lifting it. Mike lay in the distance and let out a low whine, all three tails clamping tight. At the Forest Sea training ground, Gon stopped running. He wasn't tired. The air had suddenly grown so heavy that he could hear his heartbeat pounding several times louder against his eardrums.

Silva didn't retreat. He crossed his arms before him, bent his knees slightly, lowered his center of gravity, and tensed every muscle in his body. It was the defensive stance that came most instinctively to him as head of the Zoldyck family.

Saitama vanished.

He appeared in front of Silva the next instant. His fist stopped one fist's length from Silva's forehead. It never touched him, but the pressure of the air blew Silva's silver hair straight back. His cloak of Nen shook violently in the shockwave, its silver-white flecks of light scattering before gathering again.

Silva stood his ground. He neither stepped back nor closed his eyes. The instant the fist stopped, his pupils shrank to pinpoints. His body was already braced to defend, but something he had never experienced flashed through his eyes—

Death.

Not fear. Something more primal than fear. What prey felt before a predator, with fangs about to pierce its throat. He had been an assassin for decades and had never known what it was like to stand in the prey's place. He had killed countless people, and each had worn that expression at the end. He had thought it was fear. Now he knew better. Fear was the emotion of being killed. Death was knowing, before the killing blow came, that there was no chance of survival.

The fist remained suspended in the air. Its wind pressure lingered. Silva's heart was still beating, though he couldn't quite remember whether it had raced fastest when Saitama vanished or seemed to stop for those few beats after the pressure from that fist reached the space between his brows.

Saitama drew back his fist. The wind pressure vanished at once, and the suspended rubble fell to the ground all at the same time. The timer regained its weight in Wutong's hand. Mike's tails slowly loosened and began sweeping lightly across the rubble. Silva remained where he was and slowly straightened.

"That Big Orb you used earlier—the angle was right. Shift the point where you apply force half a palm farther back, and the Nen Bullet will spin twice as fast. You don't have much use for it against monsters now, but since you've already practiced it, you might as well fix it."

He kicked aside the one remaining stone slab and walked back along the edge of the ruined training ground. The collar of his yellow T-shirt had slipped completely below his shoulder, and his back was covered in dust. He tried brushing it off as he walked, but after two swipes only made it worse, he stopped.

"Have someone clean up your backyard later. It's full of broken stone. Even the dog won't come back."

Silva watched him go without a word. Zeno handed Silva his coat, and Silva draped it over his shoulders.

"We'll fix the gate tomorrow. Rebuild the training ground while we're at it," Zeno said. He looked down at the wreckage beneath his feet. The place had last been rebuilt decades ago, and Silva had completed the final trial of his coming-of-age ceremony here afterward. Now even the gateframe had been ground to powder. But the Zoldyck family had no need to move the training ground. Anyone who could destroy this place was worth rebuilding it for. "We learned something today."

Silva nodded and turned toward Saitama. "Mr. Saitama. About the hot pot—the Zoldyck family keeps its word."

"Good." Without looking back, Saitama raised his right hand and waved as he kept walking.

Netero sat at the edge of the wreckage in the only chair still intact, holding a cup of tea that had gone cold. He watched Saitama pass, brushing dust from his T-shirt, then paused. "There's actually a spare gate to the left of the main one." Saitama didn't turn around. "That's the spare. It doesn't count as a proper gate."

At the edge of the Forest Sea training ground, Gon stood on the rubble, still dragging his weighted rings. The fragments of stone from the training ground had finished falling. Only a few wisps of fine dust drifted through the moonlight.

He gazed toward the mountain behind them, at the wreckage that stretched wider than the Forest Sea's canopy. After the rumbling stopped, he heard one last faint slide of rubble from that direction. It was quiet and brief, as though someone high above had stopped a punch. He asked Kurapika if that had been Saitama.

Kurapika looked toward the mountain for a moment but didn't answer. Behind them, Leorio panted and said that anyone who could reduce an entire training ground to rubble could probably get Killua out too.

Gon said nothing. He kept looking toward the mountain, then started running again.