Chapter 78: Two Suns |
'The perfect hero who stood by your side turns out to be an absolute villain; it’s one of the most hackneyed and predictable plots out there...'
King, who by this point had already managed to lead Saman to safety, stroked his chin and spoke thoughtfully as he watched the live broadcast from the battlefield.
But the Hero Association staff present in the room certainly could not remain so calm and composed.
"There’s absolutely nothing predictable about this, Mr. King!!"
"We are in massive trouble!!!"
The Monster King and the Thunder God had been in league this whole time, or perhaps they were even the same being from the very beginning!
It was difficult to imagine a more horrific situation!
The hero that the association had actively promoted and made the face of their organization turned out to be a monster...
Setting aside the negative impact this incident would have on public opinion for a moment, what was far more important was that... perhaps no one could stop him!
The strongest monster.
It was hard to even fathom how powerful a being that combined both those forces would be!
"I don’t think so," King said musingly. "If the Thunder God were truly an enemy of humanity, he would have killed off the strong heroes one by one long ago, but he didn't. I don't think the Earth will be destroyed. At worst, he’ll become the ruler... probably."
A Hero Association staff member standing near King waved his hands frantically and shouted in distress, "Mr. King! How can you give up in a situation like this?! You have to join forces with Mr. Saitama! This is your moment!!"
King calmly stepped aside, paying no attention to the staff member's cries. "My appearance wouldn't change anything now. Anyway, I’m going to go get some rest."
On the other side.
The S-Class heroes, who had previously been thrown back and wounded by Pain's impulse, had by now been transported by the association's rescue teams to a temporary camp set up in City Z.
They had already received first aid and gathered together to watch the live broadcast of the battlefield.
The bandaged S-Class heroes dropped their jaws in stunned silence when Yeruashi completely absorbed Pain’s body.
Absolute silence fell over the tent.
None of the heroes present said a word, but their faces equally displayed shock and disbelief.
As of today, the Thunder God was essentially the true number one S-Class hero, given that Blast had effectively retired.
Furthermore.
The Thunder God was already considered the strongest of all heroes.
But...
The strongest hero turned out to be the strongest monster as well!
Child Emperor, Tanktop Master, Puri-Puri Prisoner, and all the other S-Class heroes—with the exception of a slightly calmer Genos—fell into a complete stupor.
About a day before the operation began, Genos had speculated that the Thunder God might turn out to be a villain, but the probability of that being true seemed less than one percent. Therefore, he hadn't risked making any loud proclamations, instead choosing to focus on observing Yeruashi's actions.
In the end...
That suspicion had been correct!
'Master...'
Genos looked at Saitama, tightly clenching his damaged fists.
If anyone could handle Yeruashi now, it was only his master, Saitama!
...
"Even my eyes are stinging."
Saitama raised a hand, shielding his eyes from the brilliant, blinding glare that resembled a literal sun.
This incredibly bright radiance emanating from Yeruashi's body first began to melt, and then completely incinerate the ground beneath his feet.
Tatsumaki, hovering in the sky just a few kilometers away from Yeruashi, struggled to withstand the wave of heat that washed over her entire body.
The heat radiating from Yeruashi's body at that moment was so intense that Tatsumaki felt as though she had come into contact with the surface of the sun itself.
"Ah..."
Tatsumaki released her psychokinetic power to its limit in an attempt to protect her body, but the heat was too overwhelming—so much so that even her telekinesis almost instantly reached its breaking point.
Previously, Yeruashi's strength had reached a level where a swing of his sword could cleave not just the Earth, but even the largest planet in the solar system, Jupiter. The energy contained within his body already exceeded that of Jupiter.
The fusion of Pain and Yeruashi was like the collision of two Jupiters.
At that moment, the energy in Yeruashi's body seethed and underwent explosive growth, approaching the level of a star!
A planet and a star are two completely different types of celestial bodies.
The energy of even the smallest star is an order of magnitude greater than that of the largest planet, so the transition from one to the other could be considered an incredible leap.
Yeruashi's evolution had only just begun.
Tatsumaki being about a couple of kilometers away from Yeruashi did nothing to help her resist the massive waves of terrifying heat that naturally radiated from his body.
Tatsumaki attempted to retreat, but her speed could not match the speed at which the heat was spreading.
By now, the heat had seeped through Tatsumaki’s psychokinetic shield and partially scorched her black dress.
Just as Tatsumaki thought she could no longer continue to resist the heat, a small black sphere suddenly appeared before her and took the form of a thin shield.
It was a Truth-Seeking Ball.
The power at the core of the Truth-Seeking Balls stands even higher than nuclear fusion because it is capable of completely disintegrating almost any matter. However, a Truth-Seeking Ball cannot compare to a star in terms of the volume of energy it contains; this applied even to the expanding variety.
The Truth-Seeking Ball was able to withstand the dissipated heat coming from the star by virtue of its superior energy quality.
"Hah... hah..."
With the appearance of the shield formed from the Truth-Seeking Ball, more than ninety percent of the incoming heat was blocked, and her telekinetic shield took care of the rest.
Tatsumaki could sense Lilith’s presence nearby, despite the absolute darkness inside the enclosed spherical shield. "Why did you save me?"
Lilith replied calmly, "Father did not wish to see you perish."
There was no need for further explanation; Tatsumaki herself was capable of understanding that all this time, Yeruashi had not only been the strongest hero but also the leader of the Monster Association.
Tatsumaki remembered how she had jokingly called Yeruashi the ultimate villain, and he had confirmed it, but at the time, she never would have imagined he was answering seriously.
Tatsumaki turned to Lilith, tightly clenching her small fists. "But why... you're monsters, after all..."
"Do not ever dare use such labels to define my father’s person again."
Lilith replied irritably, "When we first arrived in this world, our power went out of control due to the influence of local laws. Father put a great deal of effort into controlling his own strength to prevent people from dying, but how did you respond to his generosity? You decided to attack him!"
Tatsumaki fell into a daze and began to recall the first incident involving the appearance of the ten-tails monster.
Back then, many S-Class heroes had attacked the ten-tails to hold it in place and prevent further destruction, but if she thought about it now, it was clear that of all the heroes who showed up, only Saitama possessed enough strength to contain it.
Yeruashi could have sowed destruction until Saitama arrived, but he had remained calmly in place, which had kept the total damage down to approximately a demon-level catastrophe.
It seemed the Hero Association really had acted too hastily in that situation...
Tatsumaki tried to refute this, but she couldn't find any sufficiently convincing arguments. If things were any different, Lilith wouldn't have protected her at all, and Yeruashi would have already destroyed the Earth.
"Then why did you create something like the Monster Association?"
"Father simply defeated the Monster King of that time and became the new leader to dispel his boredom; he didn't create the association. Since the Hero Association branded us as enemies of all humanity, we had no reason to help you destroy the Monster Association!"
Simply put, the actions of the Monster Association led by Yeruashi could be seen as a kind of reaction to the Hero Association's hostile actions back then. But in the end, Yeruashi had destroyed all the dragon-level monsters, and there hadn't been a single casualty among the heroes.
Tatsumaki murmured softly, "So that’s how you decided... to get back at the heroes for that time?"
At that moment, she didn't feel any anger or anything of the sort, because if she thought about it, Yeruashi's reaction was quite logical.
But...
'How dare you play me for a fool, you damn bastard?!'
Tatsumaki ground her teeth, feeling an overwhelming urge to beat Yeruashi up. However, she soon remembered that scorching heat and dejectedly lowered her head, realizing she could never hope to win.
...
Below.
Yeruashi himself felt his entire body, including his very soul, undergoing very strange changes.
Instead of absorbing massive amounts of energy from the outside, Yeruashi’s body was generating it on its own!
Almost all the changes that had occurred to Yeruashi’s body throughout his journeys in the worlds of One Piece and Naruto could be explained by the law of conservation of energy—perhaps with the sole exception of the Illusory Clock.
The growth of his power had meant the absorption of a corresponding amount of external energy.
Even Armament Haki and his sword mastery were not formed from nothingness, but were merely more efficient methods of controlling the energy already present in his body at the time.
But now...
That principle was being violated.
Absorbing Pain should have increased his total energy volume by about twofold, but at the moment, it had already increased by... five or even six times!
This energy didn't come from Pain and wasn't absorbed from outside in any other way; it was simply born within his body!
But Yeruashi wasn't surprised, because he had long ago realized what exactly this so-called "limiter" was.
The Limiter is the boundary between illusion and reality.
A perfectly ordinary person can simply merge with a perfectly ordinary costume and become a costume-type monster of demon or even dragon level, capable of destroying entire cities.
Such a thing defies all logic from the perspective of the law of conservation of energy.
The same applied to Saitama.
A completely ordinary man went bald and gained power that allowed him to smash the earth with a single punch like a common watermelon, simply by training hard for a few years... releasing such a volume of energy is simply impossible, even if a normal human body were completely decomposed into fundamental particles.
Even Yeruashi himself couldn't understand or perceive exactly where these massive volumes of energy were coming from as they continued to fill his body.
He only understood that this energy was stimulating his evolution.
'This is getting to be too much...'
'At this rate, I might burn the entire Earth...'
Yeruashi sighed and tried to open a spatial portal using Yomotsu Hirasaka when he couldn't detect any signs of the energy influx stopping.
But nothing happened.
He failed to open a spatial passage.
Yeruashi couldn't use the abilities of the Rinne Tenseigan in his current state of non-stop evolution. Having reached this conclusion, he immediately abandoned the idea of leaving Earth via a spatial portal and soared straight into the sky.
Whoosh!!
A brilliant radiance flashed in the sky and left the limits of Earth's atmosphere. It didn't stop there, but flew straight toward the sun.
As Yeruashi approached the sun, the bright white glow that had enveloped the entire Earth began to gradually fade. After a while, the brilliance weakened to the point where people could slowly begin to open their eyes.
Tatsumaki cautiously opened her eyes and looked up at the sky, her mouth immediately falling open in astonishment.
Two roughly similar light sources were shining in the middle of the sky. One was, of course, the sun, and the second was...
Previously, Tatsumaki had thought she was already tired of being surprised by Yeruashi's power, but at that moment, she felt an intense shock once again.
She thought that she wouldn't be able to generate such a radiance, comparable to the sun's glare, even if the power of her telekinesis increased a hundred or a thousandfold.
"He..."
"He became a sun..."
The minds of Child Emperor, Superalloy Darkshine, and the rest of the S-Class heroes simply went blank as soon as they realized what was happening.
This level of power was no longer within their grasp of understanding; it was the kind of thing one only saw in anime...
Soon Yeruashi came to a halt near the Sun, and the energy in his body continued to intensify until his glowing figure became indistinguishable from a small star.
The Earth would have inevitably been completely scorched by the heat being released from Yeruashi's body if he hadn't immediately decided to head into space, but even now, after approaching the sun, he continued to have a very large influence on the planet.
If even Yamamoto Genryusai couldn’t release his Bankai—which possessed the temperature of the sun's core—within the Soul Society without consequences, then what could be said about a perfectly ordinary material planet, which couldn't compare to the Soul Society in terms of stability.
At the moment, Yeruashi's energy was about one-fifth that of the Sun, and the volume of heat released was less than one-tenth of the Sun's heat.
But such a change was quite enough to destroy the atmosphere and turn the Earth into a scorched, lifeless planet like Venus.
Fortunately, Lilith was on Earth.
Lilith couldn't compare to someone like Saitama in terms of pure strength, but she possessed a wide variety of special abilities.
For example, Hyoton, which could be used to cool the Earth's atmosphere.
Yeruashi had given Lilith instructions to protect the Earth beforehand, so she used Hyoton without delay to stabilize the planet's temperature, then took several other measures to normalize the environment, including the recreation of the Moon using Six Paths Chibaku Tensei.
One day...
Two days...
Three days...
Gradually, humanity recovered from the shock caused by the sudden appearance of a second sun and returned to normal life.
The Hero Association couldn't classify Lilith as a monster, since her destruction would mean the destruction of all humanity as well. Of course, that could have been avoided by destroying Yeruashi along with Lilith, but that was obviously impossible.
The only one who could even reach the sun was Saitama, but he didn't feel a shred of hostility toward them.
From Saitama's perspective, Lilith and Yeruashi weren't monsters at all.
One month...
Two months...
Three months...
Time flows like water.
Monsters continued to appear on Earth, and heroes continued to stubbornly destroy them. Lilith made her presence known to the world less and record, and the name of the Thunder God was removed from the Hero Association's registry—though not from people's memories, for they all saw two suns in the sky every day.
"Is he ever planning to come back?"
Tatsumaki, hovering amidst the clouds high in the sky, looked at the smaller sun and whispered.
At that moment, Lilith’s calm voice suddenly rang in her ears, "Father is continuing to adapt to his new power."
"..."
She took another look at the bright sun and flew down in disappointment.
Tatsumaki was, of course, very angry with Yeruashi for all this deception, but when her emotions gradually settled after a while, she still couldn't get that fraud out of her head.
But that was perfectly normal, wasn't it?
How could she forget that trickster when she saw two suns in the sky every single day?!
One year...
Two years...
Three years...
Imperceptibly, three years had flown by since the day Yeruashi became the second sun.