His fist shot out.
No light, no sound, not even the rush of displaced air.
Saitama's right fist was aimed neither at Salas nor at the swarm of mosquitoes filling the air. He drove it into the granite beneath his feet.
Boom.
A muffled thud.
It wasn't an explosion. It was a deeper, more complete tremor. Cracks spread like a spiderweb from his fist across the hard granite arena. They raced outward, covering the entire surface in an instant, while invisible shock waves surged from every fissure.
The shock waves spread upward from the ground in a ring, like an inverted bowl of compressed air closing in from every direction.
The mosquitoes flew into that wall of air.
Not one or two. All of them.
But they didn't break.
A moment before the wall reached them, the dark-green Nen mosquitoes scattered upward together. They had dodged. This wasn't ordinary evasion, but an almost instinctive response that anticipated the path of the shock wave. Each mosquito found the one safe route through the gaps in the airflow, like a dark cloud torn by a gale but never dispersed.
Blood still stained the corner of Salas's mouth, but he was smiling.
"Useless..."
His voice was hoarse, edged with near-maniacal triumph.
"My Nen ability isn't ordinary Manipulation Type Nen. Absolute Evasion awakened when I felt the killing intent in your punch, at the height of my terror. As long as I'm afraid, as long as I don't want to die, you'll never touch them!"
Saitama stood in the center of the arena and looked up at the mosquitoes weaving through the gaps in the shock waves.
They flew even faster now. An eerie glow shimmered over their dark-green shells—not the glow of Nen, but fear itself burning. Salas's pupils shrank to pinpoints. He trembled all over, cold sweat soaking his back. The more afraid he became, the nimbler the mosquitoes grew; the nimbler they grew, the more certain he was that he could survive.
It was a perpetual cycle of evasion fueled by fear.
Saitama tilted his head.
"Oh."
He glanced at his fist, then at the cracks spreading beneath his feet.
Then he took a step forward.
One step.
The cracks spread from beneath his foot, wider and deeper than before. The ring of shock waves no longer surged from a single fissure. It erupted from the entire foundation of the arena at once. The ground collapsed, granite crumbled into powder, and walls of air pressed inward from every angle, through every inch of space.
There were no gaps left.
No predictable paths through the airflow.
The entire arena had become a sealed chamber filled with absolute pressure.
The mosquitoes kept dodging, trying to find that one route to safety. This time, it didn't exist. The walls of air crushed in from above, below, left, right, front, and back. Their dark-green Nen shells shattered like bubbles under the relentless shock. Wings tore into dust finer than ash; bodies broke apart and vanished, leaving countless flecks of black-gray powder.
But this time, the mosquitoes weren't the only things that broke.
Salas's smile froze.
He looked down at his hands—the hands controlling his Nen. His fingertips trembled, not from fear, but because his Nen was being forcibly stripped from his body. He felt the tremor rising through the ground. It wasn't aimed at him. It covered the entire arena, including every inch beneath his feet.
The shock wave touched the soles of his shoes.
Just for an instant.
A tiny aftershock escaped through a crack in the ground and brushed his ankle.
But his Nen cycle collapsed.
Absolute Evasion was rooted in fear—the fear that being touched meant death. And now he had been touched. Not by the fist itself, only by the edge of its shock wave. But it was enough. The cycle of fear broke, the foundation of his Nen fell away, and the aura in his body poured out like air from a punctured balloon.
"No... Impossible..."
Salas's pupils contracted sharply, blood vessels spreading across the whites of his eyes. He tried to gather his Nen again, tried to summon even one mosquito from the air, but there was nothing left inside him. His Nen hadn't merely been disrupted. It was gone. The Nen that had awakened in his deepest terror, the Nen behind Absolute Evasion, had destroyed itself the instant his fear came true.
His legs gave way, and he dropped to his knees in the arena.
Dark-red blood sprayed across the white tiles, leaving a glaring splatter.
"My Nen ability..."
His voice shook, thick with tears.
"My Nen... My Nen is gone..."
Saitama slowly straightened.
He stood amid the falling black ash, a few specks of dust on his yellow T-shirt, his hair a mess. He looked at his right fist. It was clean—no blood, no slime, only a thin layer of ash. Then he raised his head and looked around.
Black ash drifted down all around him like snow falling in reverse.
"Oh," he muttered flatly. "Got them."
He seemed like a different man from the one who had been frantic moments ago, slapping himself hard on the nose.
Salas knelt on the ground, trembling, his forehead pressed against the cold tiles.
He didn't dare look up.
He was afraid he would see that bald man standing over him, looking down with eyes that had been red with frustration moments ago but were now as still as dead water. That calm was more frightening than anger. Anger meant emotion. Calm meant... Saitama had never considered him an opponent worth taking seriously.
"You lost."
Saitama's voice came from above.
It wasn't a question, just a statement, delivered in exactly the same tone he had used to talk about discounted eggs at the supermarket.
Salas opened his mouth, but blood rose in his throat, and all that came out was a hoarse gurgle. He struggled to raise his head and saw Saitama holding the bottle of barbecue sauce, wiping dust from it with his sleeve.
He had spent all that time using millions of mosquitoes to harass, toy with, and enrage an invincible man. He had thought he was playing with Saitama, proving that speed could overcome strength.
But the real reason Saitama had been furious had never been that he couldn't hit Salas. He had been worried the mosquitoes would hit the barbecue sauce bottle.
More bitterly still, his prized Absolute Evasion hadn't been broken in a head-on clash. A stray aftershock from Saitama punching the ground had brushed his ankle, and the whole ability had collapsed.
"So that's it..."
Salas suddenly laughed.
It was a laugh uglier than crying. Tears mixed with blood dripped from his chin.
"My Absolute Evasion... wasn't dodging your fist... It was dodging fear itself..."
He lowered his head until his forehead touched the tiles again. His voice rasped like sandpaper.
"Once something touched me... there was nothing left..."
Salas lay sprawled on the ground, gasping for breath.
Saitama's footsteps fell one after another, each one landing on his shattered heart.
He slowly closed his eyes and let the battles, glory, and ambition of his past burn to ash before him.
He had spent his life chasing the title of strongest, only for it to end like this.
His mouth twitched. His voice was barely louder than a sigh.
"So I'm going to die after all."
Before you continue