Chapter 3: The Devastation Tour
The silence after the end of the world was a tangible thing, thick and humming in Saitama’s ears. It wasn’t true silence; beneath it lay the groan of settling girders, the distant pop of superheated concrete cooling, the hiss of broken mains spewing water into streets turned to canyons. And the sirens. They were a thin, desperate chorus on the wind, miles away now, circling the edges of the nothing he had made.
He knelt in a landscape of gray dust and glittering glass teeth. The asphalt beneath his hands and knees was warm, cracked into a spiderweb pattern that radiated out from the point where his first casual punch had landed. His bare skin was coated in a fine, powder-white ash, streaked where sweat had traced paths through it. Smears of something darker, a rusty brown, marked his cheeks and chin. He didn’t move. He was a boulder in a stream of ruin.
Do-S shifted her weight on his back, the leather of her boots creaking softly. She sat sidesaddle on the plains of his shoulders, one leg hooked over his arm for balance. Her whip was coiled loosely in her lap, its tip occasionally tracing the whorls of his ear or the smooth dome of his head.
“You know,” she said, her voice bright and conversational against the backdrop of desolation, “I thought it would be louder. More… fireworks.”
She leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, to look down at his face. His expression was placid. Empty. But the eyes that looked up at her held a focused, dog-like expectation. Waiting for her verdict.
“But this…” she gestured with the whip handle, taking in the miles of flattened cityscape, the jagged silhouettes of half-melted skyscrapers leaning against each other like drunken giants, “this is efficient. I appreciate that.”
She watched a small, dirty plume of smoke spiral up from a crater a few blocks over. Something was still burning down there. The air tasted of ozone, concrete dust, and a coppery hint that might have been blood or vaporized wiring. It was the best perfume she’d ever known.
With a sigh of deep contentment, she swung her other leg over, now straddling his neck. She ground her hips down against the base of his skull, a slow, possessive motion. He didn’t react to the stimulus. He reacted to the pressure, the ownership it conveyed. A soft, almost inaudible sigh escaped him.
“You did exactly as I asked,” she purred, stroking his head. “Every last shiny light, gone. Poof.” She blew a puff of air, disturbing a flurry of ash from his shoulder. “My good dog.”
The words sent a visible tremor through him. A shiver of pure validation. The crimson stripes on his back, barely visible beneath the grime, seemed to burn anew.
In the distance, a new sound intruded: the mechanical thump-thump-thump of helicopter blades. Several of them. News choppers, brave or stupid, venturing into the dead zone.
Do-S’s eyes lit up. She twisted, looking toward the sound, a wide, predatory smile spreading across her face. “Oh, look. An audience.”
She nudged his ribs with her heel. “Stand up. Let them see us.”
He rose in one fluid, effortless motion, her perched effortlessly on his shoulders as if he were no more than a piece of living furniture. He was terrifyingly steady. The helicopters—three of them, painted with garish news station logos—hovered at a safe distance, their cameras no doubt zooming in on the bizarre pair standing unscathed in the epicenter.
Do-S waved, a cheerful, girlish flick of her fingers. Then she leaned down, her lips close to Saitama’s ear. Her voice dropped, not out of fear of being overheard, but for intimacy.
“They’re probably wondering what happened. Who did this. Let’s give them a show, okay? Just a little one.”
She pointed with her whip toward the nearest half-standing structure, a forty-story office building sheared in half diagonally. Its upper floors hung precariously, a waterfall of shattered windows and twisted steel.
“See that? I think it’s an eyesore. Don’t you?”
Saitama looked at the building. He saw a structure. He saw an order.
He bent his knees slightly, bracing. Then he leapt.
It wasn’t the planet-rending jump he was capable of. It was controlled. Precise. But it still carried them hundreds of meters in a heartbeat, landing with a crunch on a swaying, exposed I-beam on the building’s torn flank. Do-S whooped, the wind tearing at her hair. Below, the helicopters swiveled wildly, trying to keep them in frame.
From this new vantage point, the scale of the destruction was even more absurd. It wasn’t a battlefield. It was a petri dish after the experiment had gone catastrophically wrong.
One of the choppers, bolder than the rest, edged closer. The downdraft from its rotors whipped up a mini-cyclone of debris around them. Do-S scowled, shielding her eyes.
“Rude,” she muttered. Then she patted Saitama’s head. “Knock it away. Gently. I want them to film the crash.”
Saitama plucked a single, fist-sized chunk of concrete from the beam beside his foot. He glanced at the hovering machine, a massive thing of metal and spinning blades. He flicked his wrist.
The concrete chunk vanished. A fraction of a second later, the helicopter’s entire rotor assembly folded inward with a deafening screech of shearing metal. It didn’t explode. It simply became a dead weight, falling in a lumbering, diagonal spiral until it impacted a pile of rubble a kilometer away with a dull, final whump. The fireball that followed was a cheerful orange flower against the gray.
The other two helicopters scrambled backward, putting miles between them instantly.
Do-S threw her head back and laughed, the sound echoing weirdly over the ruins. “Perfect! They’ll show that on every screen in the world.” She squeezed his neck with her thighs. “They’ll know it was me. They’ll know my pet did it for me.”
She was breathing heavily now, flushed with a heady cocktail of power and arousal. This was better than she’d ever dreamed. The ultimate weapon, utterly devoted, with the attention of the entire planet now riveted on her display.
“Let’s go home,” she said, suddenly wanting the dark, pulsing comfort of her throne room. She wanted to sit on her obsidian throne with him at her feet and watch the world panic on huge, stolen video screens. “We’ve made our point for today.”
Saitama nodded. “Okay.”
He leaped again, not toward the ground, but in a great, soaring arc that took them over the scarred earth, heading for the hidden entrance to the underworld. Do-S clung to him, her cheek pressed against his head, her eyes closed in ecstasy.
As the ruined city fell away beneath them, she whispered into the rushing air, words meant only for herself. “Tomorrow… tomorrow we’ll break a mountain. Just to see the look on their faces.”