Chapter 2: The Puppet's First Performance
The journey from the rain-slicked alley to the heart of Do-S’s domain was a blur of descending staircases and thickening shadow. Saitama followed, the coil of her whip loose around his neck like a leash. He didn’t see the moss-grown steps or feel the chill of the deepening air. His world was the rhythmic click of her heels ahead of him and the warm imprint of her claim on his skin.
Then, the space opened up, and even his numb perception staggered.
The throne room was a cavity in the world. Vast, echoing, dark. The air didn’t feel still; it pulsed, a slow, deep heartbeat that vibrated in his teeth. Chunks of masonry and strange, crystalline formations hung suspended in mid-air, drifting lazily as if through water. Gravity itself was a suggestion here, not a law. And at the far end, carved from a single, mountainous shard of obsidian, was the throne. Veins of something that glowed with cold, starry light cracked through it, illuminating the walls where shadows twisted into shapes that suggested faces, mouths open in silent.
“Home sweet home,” Do-S said, her voice amplified by the chamber’s acoustics into something grand and terrifying.
A crowd was already assembled. Monsters of every grotesque configuration lined the broad avenue leading to the dais: multi-limbed brutes, insectoid creatures clacking mandibles, things that oozed and hissed. Their eyes, hundreds of them, fixed on the bald man trailing behind their mistress. A low murmur of confusion and skepticism rippled through them. This? This unremarkable human was the prize?
Do-S ascended the dais, her posture regal. She didn’t sit. She turned, letting her gaze wash over her followers, then looked down at Saitama, who had stopped at the bottom of the steps.
“They don’t believe,” she said to him, her tone conversational, almost playful. “They look at you and see a hollow man. A pet.” She stepped down one step, bringing her face closer to his. “We need to show them, don’t we? We need to make them understand what I have.”
Her fingers went to the collar of his zip-up hoodie. He stood, passive, as she undid it. She pushed the garment off his shoulders. It fell to the dusty floor with a soft whump. Then his t-shirt, then his sweatpants. Soon he stood naked in the fractured light, exposed before the leering, incredulous assembly. His body was ordinary. Unremarkable. The ultimate power hidden beneath a bland surface.
Do-S paced around him, a sculptor assessing her material. “You see,” she announced to the chamber, “true power isn’t in the muscle. It’s in the will. And his will…” she stopped behind him, “…is mine.”
The whip, still in her hand, lashed out.
It wasn’t the casual coiling of the alley. This was a strike. It cut through the air with a sound like tearing silk and landed across his back with a crack that echoed off the obsidian.
A red line bloomed on his skin. A sting. A burn. It was the most sensation he’d felt in years that wasn’t his own fist impacting an indestructible foe. His breath hissed in, sharp and real.
The crowd murmured, leaning forward.
Again. Another stripe, parallel to the first. The pain was bright, clear, a definitive signal in the void of his feeling. He didn’t flinch. He welcomed it. Each mark was a word written on the blank page of him, a story where she was the author.
“Kneel,” she commanded, her voice dropping into a intimate register that somehow filled the vast space.
He sank to his knees on the cold stone. She came to stand before him, looking down, her expression one of cool ownership. With the tip of her whip, she tilted his chin up. The audience was silent now, a collective held breath.
“They need a demonstration,” she said, just to him. “Show them how a god serves.”
Her meaning unfolded in his mind, not as a shock, but as the next logical step in his surrender. The burning stripes on his back pulsed in time with the chamber’s heart-like thrum. This was the depth he had sought. This was the feeling.
He leaned forward.
Her hand came to rest on the back of his shaved head, not guiding, just present. A point of contact. His world narrowed to the scent of her, the texture of the leather against his face, the faint, involuntary tremor in her thigh. The watching monsters, the pulsing room, the floating debris—all of it melted away into a white noise of pure submission. He was an instrument, being played. And for the first time, the music was something other than boredom.
A low, guttural sound escaped Do-S’s throat. Her fingers tightened in his short hair. Her other hand, holding the whip, trembled slightly. The control was absolute, but the sheer power of his abject devotion, the complete erasure of his legendary will, was a drug stronger than any she’d known. She threw her head back, a silent laugh at the cosmos, as the monster army erupted.
They weren’t murmuring now. They were roaring. A cacophony of shrieks, howls, and clattering appendages filled the throne room. They saw it now. The invincible hero, the one their kind whispered about in fear, was on his knees, bound not by chains but by his own shattered psyche, serving their mistress. It was the ultimate victory.
When it was done, she gently pushed him back. He knelt, looking up at her, his expression utterly vacant save for a desperate, needy light in his eyes. The crimson stripes stood out luridly on his skin. She ran a thumb over one, making him shudder.
“Good,” she breathed, the word carrying to the edges of the room. “So good.”
She turned to her army, her face alight with triumph. “You see?” she screamed over the din. “Nothing is beyond me! Not even this!” She gestured dismissively at Saitama. “With him as my weapon, the world above isn’t a target. It’s already ashes waiting for the wind!”
The roar intensified. Do-S let it wash over her, basking in it. She looked back down at Saitama. He was waiting. For his next order. For his next pain. For his next taste of purpose.
She crouched, bringing her face level with his. Her voice was a whisper again, a secret for him alone amid the chaos. “You want to make me happy?”
He nodded, a quick, jerky movement.
“I need you to break a city for me. Just one, to start. Can you do that?”
The question was absurd. He could break the planet. But framed as a service to her, it became everything. He nodded again, more firmly.
“Which one?” he asked, his voice rough, unused.
Do-S smiled, standing up. She pulled a sleek, dark phone from a compartment on her thigh. She tapped the screen, pulled up a map, and held it out for him to see. She zoomed in on a sprawling metropolis by the sea. “This one. I don’t like the way it shines. Make it stop.”
He looked at the map. He looked back up at her. “Okay.”
As he rose to his feet, the crowd’s roar shifted, taking on a new, bloodthirsty dimension. Do-S watched him, a queen surveying her ultimate general. Her phone buzzed in her hand. She glanced at the screen. A notification from the surface world’s news networks, already bleating about “unexplained seismic activity” near City Z.
She silenced it, her smile deepening. The game had just gotten much, much more interesting.