Saitama sighed as he brushed aside a rain of bullets with lazy taps of his fingers. Boring—but if he wanted to keep attention off the Pentagon team, he had to put on a show.
He punted a parked car. The vehicle arced into the air; before it could fall, he kicked again and sent it hurtling farther, smashing straight through the fourth floor of a distant building.
Several guards on the perimeter went pale and shaky-fingered.
"Requesting immediate backup! It's a mutant! A mutant—we can't handle this!"
"Get the word out—now!"
"We can't hold—!"
Saitama strolled down the street, helplessly bored. He wasn't actually doing anything. Just walking. Yet the guards scattered like mice.
"Hey, Saitama—status?" Charles's voice crackled in his ear.
"Uh… fine, I guess. They're all pretty scared."
He was starting to see the difference between this world and his own. Back home, if a monster made a scene like this, a hero would show up—same for most places in Marvel, too. Here? No one. Not a single caped do-gooder.
No wonder people feared mutants this much.
The longer it went, the heavier the response. Light security gave way to armored cars and tanks. Some units even rolled out strange laser-type weapons.
Saitama scratched his head; shells were already inbound. He slipped between explosions by habit—then heard Charles gasp over comms. "Damn—"
Boom.
Something bad had happened inside the Pentagon.
Saitama's face tightened. He sprinted for the entrance. The outer cordon panicked.
"Alert! The mutant is heading inside! Intercept!"
A squad braced in front of the doors—then blinked as Saitama blurred past.
Crack!
He hit the closing doors shoulder-first. They exploded inward.
"What happened, Charles?!"
"B—be careful…" Things were ugly below. They had just reached Erik—only for Sentinels to swarm the corridor.
Sentinels.
None of them had expected those things to already exist in this era.
"Where are you?" Saitama's tone went flat. Playtime was over.
"Sublevel ninety-five. Beast is badly hurt," Charles said. Beast lay sprawled on the floor, a gash across his abdomen deep enough to glimpse organs. A Sentinel had Magneto pinned—special alloys, clearly; Erik couldn't affect them at all.
As for Charles… his telepathy was hard to leverage against machines like these. Trapped on all sides, they had only one hope left: Saitama.
Could they last until he got there?
Quicksilver was still harrying the Sentinels, but there was a problem—he had almost no stopping power. That was the real headache.
"Ninety-five levels deep, huh…" Saitama frowned.
"Hey, Charles—how tall is a floor?"
Caught off guard, Charles glanced at the ceiling. "If my eye's right… just under three meters."
Boom!
Before he finished the sentence, Quicksilver went spinning into a wall. He wasn't at his peak yet; four Sentinels in a chain assault finally forced an opening and put him down.
Charles opened his mouth to shout run—then another voice cut in on comms.
"All right. I'm coming."
The building shook. Not the floor—the entire Pentagon. In the instant the words fell, a colossal force slammed down from above.
Kra-koom!
The ceiling over their heads disintegrated. A yellow-clad figure dropped through the hole and landed without a wobble.
Saitama, bored expression and all. "You guys okay?"
Charles stared, slack-jawed. Then it clicked—Saitama had asked about the floor height to calculate how hard he needed to punch from ground level to drill through ninety-five stories in one go.
That had indeed been the plan. In practice, Saitama realized the math was annoying, so he went with… luck.
This time, luck was good. He happened to blast the exact spot above Sublevel 95. If it hadn't been—no, if their luck hadn't been—Charles grimly suspected they'd be pancake paste.
He didn't have time to process the brush with death. "Saitama, watch out! Their strength—"
Before he could finish, the Sentinels didn't attack Saitama at all. Instead, they scooped the others up.
"Hey—hey—!" A Sentinel lifted Charles in a neat princess-carry, thrusters igniting as it prepared to jet away. He froze, baffled. How could the machines find them so precisely and yet ignore Saitama?
While Charles gaped, Saitama finally moved.
(End of Chapter)
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