Central Park was the city’s great back garden, the place its citizens came to steal leisure out of the middle of their busy lives, all deep green woods and orderly rows of landscape trees, with the wide open-air theater standing as its landmark.
Today, the carnival had taken the whole place over.
The park surged with people.
Streamers in every color spun through the air, balloons hung overhead in drifting fleets, and costumed mascots worked the walkways, the single most popular costume by an enormous margin being New York’s newest rising star: Spider-Man.
Children mobbed every one of them.
The adults laughed along behind, a row of singers on the main stage threw everything they had into the music, and the noise of it all rolled across the park in waves.
“Gali.
It’s too loud here.” Trist’s brow folded the moment he stepped out of the taxi, because chaos like this genuinely did not suit him; given the choice he’d rather have been home drawing.
His last life had been spent as a manga assistant, and seeking out quiet was practically an instinct by now.
Gali heard the tone, instantly assembled her most pitiful face, and started swinging on his arm.
“Nooo!
No no no!
Just a little while!
Please?” “Fine, fine.
A little while.” The words had barely left him before Gali released his arm and vanished into the crowd like a bird returning to the forest, off, presumably, to hunt down the food stalls.
As for whether she’d be safe out there, honestly, if *she* didn’t start anything, the carnival could count itself lucky.
Trist scanned the sea of people and spotted Peter Parker in the middle distance, camera up, working the crowd, and the whole bearing of him had changed: confident, bright, visibly enjoying his own life.
So the Spider-Man business agreed with him, then.
*I do wonder how he squares it with the definition of a hero these days.* Because society, under Saitama’s influence, had begun warming to the idea of heroes who did it simply because they wanted to, and Peter was a genuine One-Punch Man fan, and that idea ran exactly opposite to the creed Uncle Ben had left him: with great power comes great responsibility.
Trist was just starting toward him when a hand tapped his shoulder, and a bright, pleasant voice arrived from behind.
“Trist!
You’re here too?
Peter dragged you out, didn’t he.” He turned.
The girl standing there was blonde and blue-eyed, wearing an easy, confident smile like it had been tailored for her: Gwen Stacy.
She was the same year as Peter and Harry, but unlike either of them, she’d worked hard enough on top of a good family that she’d been admitted to college a year early, which made her, as of this semester, Trist’s classmate.
The first time Trist had ever laid eyes on Gwen, the relevant memories had all surfaced at once, and a thin line of cold sweat had gone down his back.
*That is far too much coincidence for one lifetime.* “I didn’t expect the carnival to be quite this loud,” he said mildly.
“Peter loves roping people into things.” A few degrees of amusement crossed her fair face, and then the curiosity got the better of her.
“Hey, Peter says One-Punch Man is *yours*.
That’s amazing.
So tell me: can Saitama actually beat the Subterranean King?
And how did he train to get like that?” *Well, well.
A devoted reader.* Here was a small trade secret: Trist had made one light edit to the Subterranean King chapter, moving the final stretch, the part where reality reasserts itself, into the *next* issue.
Which meant that as far as every fan in America knew, the two of them were currently locked in a blood-pumping battle of gods.
The purpose was pure provocation: imagine waiting a full week, cracking open the new issue, and discovering the whole fight had been a dream.
Readers were going to detonate.
And the angrier they got, the harder they’d read.
Trist felt that being a little wicked, now and then, suited him.
Faced with a fan at arm’s length, he naturally gave away nothing.
“You’ll know when you know.
Next issue ships tomorrow.
Along with two brand-new comics.” “Yours too?
What are they?” Her face lit up.
“I’d advise you not to read them.
They’re extremely violent.
Bloody, even.” “Don’t underestimate me!” The protest came with a swat, her hand smacking his shoulder in pure indignation, and it stopped Trist cold.
*…Hold on.
What was that?* *That posture.
That exact little smack.
That’s the move a girl in love uses on a boyfriend who’s annoyed her.* *Since when were the two of us on those terms?* *Wait.
Don’t tell me.
Has Gwen quietly caught feelings?* He looked at her with new and layered interest, and Gwen, having finished the swat, pulled her hand back fast, apparently realizing in real time that the gesture had overstepped, and under his steady gaze her head dipped a little, and a wash of cherry pink crossed her face and was gone.
Trist had lived two lives and was slow about exactly nothing.
Reading that expression, he put the odds at eight or nine parts out of ten, and a pleasant sort of headache arrived.
Because the current standings, as he understood them, ran like this: Harry had already won Mary Jane.
Peter could only watch his goddess settle into his best friend’s arms and nurse the bruise in private.
And Gwen and Peter had never been anything but classmates.
Trist smiled to himself.
*If the lady is willing, why on earth would the gentleman be heartless?* He was not going to stand aside and yield this one to Peter.
That road, as he remembered it, ended with the girl falling, and a jade like this shattering was a genuine waste.
Gwen, meanwhile, was suffering.
Head down, face burning, she had never once in her life been moved like this, and the fact that her body had acted on it *by itself* was mortifying beyond words.
She pulled in a long breath, leveled herself off, and attempted an explanation.
“Um.
That.
That was, I got a little worked up just now.” “It’s fine, it’s fine.
Only human.” What else was he going to say?
The corner of his mouth curved into something frankly charming, and the look he sent with it carried open, warm teasing.
And that was when Gwen finally noticed what had actually changed about him.
It wasn’t the face; the face had always been handsome.
Before, the handsomeness had come wrapped in a kind of listless chill, a boy keeping the world at a distance.
The person in front of her now stood entirely at his ease, unhurried, sure of himself, taking up exactly as much of the world as he pleased.
The two of them were still looking at each other when the sky ripped open with a shrieking, broken laugh.
“HAHAHA!
HAPPY CARNIVAL!”