The air changed.
It became incredibly hot and dry.
In the middle of the already devastated battlefield, a hot wind suddenly began to blow.
That wind carried the scent of death.
Vaccine Man’s body was undergoing an extremely bizarre transformation.
His originally purple-black skin was now turning bright red, like a red-hot branding iron.
Beneath the skin…
Countless surges of violent energy could be clearly seen racing around, as if thousands of fire snakes were fighting inside his veins.
His body began to expand irregularly.
He looked like a balloon that was about to burst.
“I will turn this land into a purgatory!” Vaccine Man roared toward the sky.
His voice carried a madness intent on mutual destruction.
He truly intended to stop playing and just flip the table.
With his current energy reserves, if he were to fully detonate…
The power would likely be no less than a high-yield nuclear bomb detonating at close range in the city center.
Never mind this block.
The entirety of City A, along with the surrounding cities…
Would likely turn into the dust of history under this explosion.
Radiation, shockwaves, and high temperatures…
Would ensure that not a single blade of grass grows here for the next hundred years.
“Run!!!” “He’s going to self-destruct!!!” The faces of the distant A-Class Heroes instantly turned pale.
Though they were battle-hardened, they had never seen such a lunatic.
This was true mutual destruction!
That sense of despair rising from the bottom of their hearts once again enveloped everyone.
Faced with this kind of wide-scale destructive strike…
Escape?
Where could they escape to?
There was simply no time!
However…
Facing this madman who wanted to drag the world down with him…
Sage’s face still showed no expression of panic.
Not only was there no panic…
He even seemed a bit…
speechless.
“No way, right?” “Self-destructing just because you can’t win?” “Is the psychological resilience of Monsters these days really this poor?” Sage sighed.
He shook his head somewhat helplessly.
If he let this guy blow up here, things would get really out of hand.
City A being gone was a small matter.
But if the shockwave collapsed Tatsumaki’s luxury villa…
How was he supposed to keep living off her then?
Besides, if that high-maintenance woman came back and saw her home gone, wouldn’t she go berserk and tear the Earth apart?
For the sake of his stable life…
This guy…
Must die here.
And he had to die quietly.
“The farce should come to an end.” Sage’s voice was very soft, yet in the noisy battlefield, it clearly entered everyone’s ears.
It carried an inexplicable sense of reassurance.
In the next second…
His body instantly disintegrated, turning into golden points of light that filled the sky.
He didn’t attack directly.
Instead, he flew toward the high sky.
He flew to a position even higher than Vaccine Man.
“Yata Mirror: Radiant Cage.” With a thought from Sage…
Countless golden points of light rapidly arranged and combined in the air.
Around Vaccine Man…
Above, below, left, right—in all directions.
In an instant, eight massive “mirrors” composed entirely of high-concentration photons appeared out of thin air.
These mirrors were ridiculously large; each one was like a city wall, tightly surrounding the expanding Vaccine Man in the center.
These weren’t for looking at reflections.
They were for—refraction.
“What are you doing?!
Do you think you can trap me?!
It’s useless!!!” Vaccine Man roared hysterically as he looked at the light walls that had suddenly appeared around him.
“No one can stop me from exploding!!!” Sage’s figure appeared upon one of the light mirrors.
“Stop you?” “No, no, no, you’ve misunderstood.” “I just want you to die…
a bit more artistically.” After saying that…
Sage’s figure vanished once again.
Immediately following…
A golden light, blinding to the extreme, shot out from the first mirror.
“Swoosh!” The light hit the opposite mirror.
It refracted instantly.
“Swoosh swoosh swoosh swoosh swoosh—!!!” The golden light began to bounce frantically between the eight mirrors.
The speed became faster and faster.
With every refraction, it accumulated a bit more kinetic energy.
Sage was like a photon marble bouncing madly inside a sealed jar.
In just one short second…
He had refracted tens of thousands of times within that narrow space!
Seen from a distance…
That cage seemed already filled with liquid light.
It had become a radiant “miniature sun.” Vaccine Man hadn’t even reacted to what was happening.
He only saw light everywhere.
A suffocating kind of light.
His self-detonation energy had only just finished charging halfway.
“Accept your baptism.” “Ultimate Flash: Light Speed Divine Punishment!” All the light rays…
In that instant…
Completely stopped refracting.
Then they converged into one.
It was truly a divine punishment in every sense.
A golden pillar of light, dozens of meters thick, descended from the sky.
Carrying the terrifying kinetic energy accumulated after tens of thousands of accelerations.
Precisely…
Without any deviation…
It directly pierced through the crown of Vaccine Man’s head!
There was no sound.
Because sound could no longer keep up with this speed.
Vaccine Man’s massive body, which was still expanding frantically…
Before this pillar of light…
Was like a pencil drawing being erased by an eraser.
It instantly dissolved.