Innocence

When Baicang emerged from the stairwell, Genos was locked in a fierce battle with Gorilla, who wore mechanical battle armor.

Genos dodged Gorilla's hammer blow, noticed Baicang standing nearby, and shouted, "Baicang, senior brother! Don't worry about me. Go to Master Saitama! He's trapped!"

"Both of you will die!" Gorilla's voice had a slightly robotic inflection. He was about to attack Baicang when Genos rushed forward to stop him.

"Damn you! I am the pinnacle of the House of Evolution's intellect, its third-ranked elite..."

Was this delusional gorilla seriously sick in the head?

Watching the armored Gorilla give a detailed account of his background while fighting, Baicang was left rather speechless.

Ignoring the explosions behind him, he left things to Genos without a worry, knowing how the story would unfold, and turned toward Saitama.

At that moment, Saitama's entire body was buried underground, leaving only his gleaming bald head exposed. Before his head stood a muscular humanoid lion over three meters tall, with a smaller Mole Monster beside him.

"Another one? Earth Dragon, go kill that white-haired fellow."

The lion monster merely swept his blood-red eyes over Baicang. Seeing a pretty boy with no aura of strength, whose name wasn't on the doctor's list, he casually ordered his companion to dispose of this bystander.

"Leave him to me." The Mole Monster burrowed underground with a sinister laugh.

"Oh, is that you, Baicang? Are you behind me?" Saitama twisted from side to side, trying to turn around and locate Baicang.

"Enough! Just give up. To make sure you can't resist, I'll destroy your eyes right now. Beast King shows no mercy to any opponent!"

The lion monster crouched low over the ground and extended his enormous, silver-gleaming claws, pointing them straight at Saitama's vacant eyes as he threatened him.

"That's enough joking around." Saitama simply walked out of the ground, leaving the lion monster visibly exasperated.

"There's still time for you guys to apologize. You smashed my ceiling to pieces. How are you going to pay for it?"

Saitama looked a little angry as he stared at the lion monster calling himself Beast King. Ever since Baicang had given him the house, he had treasured it dearly, and now these inexplicable strangers had gone and wrecked it.

They were going to answer for this today!

Not far away, Baicang was getting ready to pull out his phone and record a video, waiting for Master Saitama to cap off his busy day by making some hand-pounded lion meatballs.

But a vibration beneath his feet interrupted him.

Baicang immediately leaped onto a roadside flower bed. The ground where he had been standing suddenly caved in, revealing a pitch-black tunnel, and Earth Dragon, the Mole Monster who had burrowed underground earlier, emerged from its opening.

"Tch, you've got pretty quick reflexes." Seeing that his ambush had failed, Earth Dragon burrowed back into the tunnel to prepare his next attack.

Baicang watched Earth Dragon disappear with some curiosity. This monster developed by the House of Evolution looked very similar to the Mole Monster that had attacked Fubuki and the others, yet he was a little different, and much smaller.

Were they the same species? But I haven't seen two monsters with identical features yet.

Besides, the big Mole Monster came from a mutation, while this Earth Dragon was artificially created. They should be different, right?

While Baicang's thoughts wandered, another attack came.

Bulges appeared one after another beneath the concrete road, launching chunks of stone toward Baicang. He hurriedly dodged, and countless stones blasted the flower bed behind him to pieces.

The sight surprised Baicang a little. He had never seen this move in the anime.

It seemed the monsters sent to capture Saitama did have some fighting ability. Earth Dragon had simply been terrified when Saitama casually killed Beast King in one hit, and had chosen to flee without even daring to fight.

Another attack came. Unable to locate Earth Dragon underground, Baicang could only keep dodging, while his eyes tracked the direction the stones came from.

Noticing that both the number of stones and the frequency of the attacks were steadily decreasing, he realized this assault couldn't last much longer.

Looking over toward Saitama, Baicang said slowly, "Aren't you going to help? Beast King's in danger, you know."

Bang! The ground over thirty meters away from Baicang suddenly broke open into a tunnel. Earth Dragon poked his head out and looked toward Beast King's battlefield in confusion.

After Baicang had dodged his attacks repeatedly, Earth Dragon had realized he couldn't deal with this fellow. He had only hoped to stall until Beast King subdued the target, so they could finish Baicang off together.

With Beast King's tremendous strength, subduing that bald man should have been easy. Why hadn't he come to help yet?

Hearing Baicang's words, he thought something unexpected had happened. He hurriedly put a safe distance between them and surfaced to check on Beast King.

The confusion in Earth Dragon's eyes lasted only a few seconds.

Then he saw Beast King unleash his ultimate move, Lion Slash Flowing Force Group, only to be blown apart by a single punch from Saitama. Terror rooted him to the spot.

"Hey, where are you looking?"

Before Earth Dragon could turn around, a laser shot through his head. With terror still on his face, his corpse slumped limply against the edge of the tunnel.

"Whew." Baicang disdainfully blew the nonexistent gunsmoke from his fingertip.

That move was a technique he had cooked up in his spare time: turning a small part of his body into light, then firing a laser. After all, he was a man who had watched One Piece.

The drawback was that the laser became much weaker, and controlling the energy took additional effort.

Controlling that energy was also extremely difficult. If he lost control, he risked ending up stark naked in the street.

Suddenly, Baicang noticed a shadow beneath his feet and hurriedly stepped back.

Splat! A fresh, steaming section of large intestine fell from the sky.

Baicang looked up as more chunks of flesh rained down, then turned speechlessly toward Saitama, who wore an innocent expression nearby. "Could you be a little more civilized? When you beat someone into this state, you make it really hard for the sanitation ladies to clean up, you know."

He pointed at Beast King, whose body lay on the ground with only half of it remaining, and at the chunks of meat and bloodstains scattered everywhere.

"Haha, I'll be more careful next time."

Saitama rubbed his bald head, looking a little embarrassed. He had never bothered with such things before. He always killed monsters with one punch and then left.

Baicang had only made an offhand comment. He picked up one of Beast King's severed fingers from the ground and headed toward Genos with Saitama.

The street and road were ravaged, and the trees had been completely carbonized.

Between Genos and the monster, they had utterly destroyed the surroundings.

Looking at the armored Gorilla slumped against a wall, all his mechanical limbs torn off and no longer able to fight, Genos raised his arm expressionlessly. The cannon in his palm began to glow faintly.

"Answer my questions or be erased here. Choose."

The defeated armored Gorilla wore an icy expression, completely ignoring Genos's threat. If not for the blood continuously streaming from his nostrils, he would have looked rather heroic.

"You're the one who's going to disappear, fool. With your abilities, you could never defeat the second-ranked Beast King. Sit there and wait to die."

Even now, the armored Gorilla maintained his robotic inflection, waiting confidently for Beast King to rescue him.

But when Saitama and Baicang arrived, and he saw the piece of Beast King in Baicang's hand, his icy expression instantly turned innocent.

"I'm sorry! Please don't kill me!"