One Punch Man · Chat

When the sirens blared from the direction of City C's central commercial street, most people still thought it was a fire drill. At 9:40 AM, the sky suddenly went dark. It was a darkness pressed down by something heavier and stickier than dark clouds. Pedestrians instinctively looked up to see a massive, flesh-colored, featureless... thing. It tore through the clouds, its volume so large it defied classification—like a living mountain falling from the sky. On the second floor of the commercial street, an office worker in a shirt stood by the floor-to-ceiling window with a coffee, watching the thing crash onto the roof of the department store opposite. Glass shattered into millions of shards, looking like a reverse meteor shower in the sunlight. Before he could react, the entire building began to tilt. A kilometer away, the sky over City Z was still blue. A bald man in a yellow T-shirt crouched at the supermarket entrance, looking at today's special offer flyer. The headline read "Limited-time Egg Sale." He scratched the back of his smooth head, folded the flyer twice, stuffed it into his pocket, and walked into the supermarket, muttering under his breath, "I hope they aren't sold out yet..." No one noticed him. Meanwhile, in the center of the ruins of the destroyed commercial street in City C, that flesh-colored "Vaccine Man" was speaking to a surviving camera in a voice that was human yet not human: "I have been sent to purge the filth of humanity." All around were fleeing shadows, collapsed steel beams, and broken water pipes bursting from underground. Water columns shot up over ten meters high, splashing onto his grotesquely swollen, inhuman body, reflecting an eerie rainbow light. Not far away, a cyclist who had just been thrown off was shielding a child as they crawled out from under the rubble, blood trickling from his forehead. He looked up at the Vaccine Man, then down at the child in his arms, his lips moving. "Run." He gave the child a push towards safety, then turned around himself, clenching his fists to face that moving mountain of flesh. In the supermarket a few blocks away, the bald man stood in front of the egg shelf, seriously comparing the price difference between two brands—the one on the left was thirty cents cheaper, while the one on the right looked a bit fresher. He rubbed his chin, thought for about three seconds, and reached out. The sirens drew closer.