The blaring klaxon and flashing red lights of the self-destruct sequence lent a certain urgency to Saitama's noodle hunt. Panicked lab technicians in white coats and grim-faced security guards in black armor scrambled past him, fleeing in the opposite direction towards designated evacuation points, their faces masks of terror. They gave the cloaked, jogging figure a wide, fearful berth, not wanting to do anything that might provoke the anomaly who had apparently caused this entire catastrophe.
"Excuse me! Pardon me! Coming through!" Saitama called out cheerfully as he jogged against the tide of fleeing personnel. "Hey, anyone seen Vault 7? Big sign, probably says 'Top Secret Bio-Weapons' or 'Really Good Snacks' on it?"
Most just shrieked and ran faster. One guard, in a moment of sheer panic, raised his pulse rifle, but a nearby technician slapped it down, hissing, "Are you insane?! Don't shoot at it! It might shoot back!"
**
"Okay, nine minutes. Plenty of time," Saitama muttered to himself. He followed the signs for the 'Cryo-Containment Wing,' figuring that's where they'd keep the really good, fresh stuff. Or at least, things that needed to be kept cold, like ice cream.
He turned a corner and skidded to a halt. The corridor ahead was blocked by another massive blast door, this one even thicker than the one to the Chimera's vault. A series of thick, adamantium-laced bars had slammed down, sealing it tight.
"Aw, come on! More locked doors?" Saitama grumbled. "This place has terrible customer flow." He was about to deliver a "Polite Door-Opening Tap" when he heard noises from the other side – a series of wet, guttural snarls and the frantic, terrified screams of someone who was clearly not having a good day.
"Help! Someone, help me! Get it off! Aaaargh!"
Saitama blinked. "Huh. Sounds like someone's in trouble." His hero instincts, long dormant under layers of boredom and snack-related quests, flickered to life. "And they're on the other side of the door. The side with the potential noodles." He sighed. "Guess I gotta go help."
He didn't bother with the door itself this time. He just punched the wall beside it.
Whump.
A perfectly circular, man-sized hole appeared in the reinforced metallic wall with a soft, almost apologetic sound. Saitama stepped through it into the chamber beyond.
The room was a cryo-stasis lab, filled with large, frosted containment pods, pipes venting cold mist, and computer terminals flashing red alerts. In the center of the room, a terrified lab technician was being pinned to the floor by three horrifying creatures. They looked like a cross between giant, albino lizards and emaciated humans, their skin a sickly, translucent white, their limbs long and spindly, ending in razor-sharp claws. Their heads were featureless, save for a single, massive, unblinking red eye that glowed with a predatory light. These were "Stalkers," failed experiments in psychic stealth predation, now just feral, hungry beasts.
The Stalkers, distracted by the sudden appearance of a new hole in their wall and the arrival of a cloaked figure, turned their heads in unison, their single red eyes fixing on Saitama. They hissed, a sound like steam escaping a cracked boiler.
The pinned technician saw his chance. "Help me, stranger!" he shrieked. "They broke out of their pods when the lockdown failed!"
Saitama looked at the technician, then at the hissing Stalkers. "Okay, okay, I got it." He looked at the creatures. "Alright, you guys. Let the nice science man go. It's not polite to sit on people without asking first."
The Stalkers, operating on pure predatory instinct, hissed again and lunged at Saitama.
Saitama sighed. "Guess you guys don't understand 'polite'."
He moved. A blur of grey cloak.
Bop. Bop. Bop.
Three soft, almost gentle sounds. Saitama delivered a quick, open-palmed bop to the top of each Stalker's featureless head. The creatures froze mid-lunge, their glowing red eyes flickered, then went dark. They collapsed into three neat, unconscious piles.
Saitama looked down at them. "Nighty-night."
The lab technician stared, his mouth agape, from his position on the floor. He had been seconds from being torn to shreds by three of the lab's most vicious failures, and the cloaked stranger had just… bopped them to sleep.
"Uh… th-thank you," the technician stammered, scrambling to his feet. "You… you saved my life! Who are you?!"
"Just a hero passing through," Saitama said, his voice slightly muffled by his mask. "Looking for the noodle vault. You seen it?"
The technician blinked, his mind struggling to reconcile the life-or-death situation with a sudden inquiry about snack foods. "The… the what? Noodle vault? There's no… we don't have…" He then saw the determined look in the eye-holes of Saitama's hood and thought better of arguing. "Uh… maybe… maybe it's deeper in? Through that door?" He pointed a trembling finger towards another, even larger, reinforced door at the far end of the cryo-lab. "That's the… Specimen Omega containment area."
**
"Specimen Omega, huh? Sounds important. Thanks, science guy!" Saitama said cheerfully. "You should probably get out of here. Big boom coming, apparently." He gave the technician a friendly pat on the shoulder.
The pat, even with Saitama holding back 99.999% of his strength, sent the poor technician stumbling several feet, his bones vibrating as if struck by lightning. "Oof!" he gasped.
"Oops. Sorry," Saitama said. He then jogged towards the Specimen Omega door, leaving the technician to stare after him, his mind completely broken.
The Specimen Omega door was, if possible, even more formidable than the others. It was inscribed with dire warnings in multiple languages, both ancient and modern, and a series of biohazard symbols that universally meant "you will die in horrible, screaming agony if you open this."
Saitama just ripped it off its hinges.
He stepped inside. The chamber beyond was vast, dark, and cold. The only light came from a single, massive stasis pod at the center, its surface covered in a thick layer of frost. Inside, suspended in glowing blue cryo-fluid, was a silhouette. It was vaguely humanoid, but tall, slender, and possessing a strange, almost elegant grace, even in its stillness. Tubes and wires snaked from its body, connecting to a vast array of humming machinery.
**
"Specimen Omega, huh?" Saitama said, walking closer to the pod. "You don't look like a noodle." He peered through the frosted glass. The silhouette was hard to make out, but he could see long limbs, a slender torso, and what looked like… wings? Folded tightly against its back.
As he got closer, the machinery connected to the pod began to spark and hiss. The klaxon blared louder. The flashing red lights seemed to intensify. The self-destruct sequence, or perhaps Saitama's mere proximity, was causing the containment field to fail catastrophically.
The glowing blue fluid inside the pod began to drain rapidly. The frost on the glass cracked and melted. With a loud hiss of depressurizing gas, the front of the stasis pod swung open.
The figure inside slumped forward, falling to its knees on the cold metal floor, before slowly, unsteadily, rising to its full height.
It was… a woman. Or at least, a being that looked like one. She was tall, unnaturally so, with skin the color of pale moonlight and long, flowing silver hair that seemed to float in an unfelt breeze. Her features were sharp, perfect, almost too perfect, exuding an aura of otherworldly beauty and profound, ancient sadness. Two large, feathery wings, the color of twilight, were furled behind her back. Her eyes, as they slowly opened, were a piercing, luminous silver, and they held no malice, no rage, only a deep, bottomless confusion and a weariness that seemed to span millennia. She wore a simple, tattered white shift, the remains of whatever she had been wearing when she was captured.
She looked at her hands, then at the ruined stasis pod, then at Saitama, who was standing there, his head tilted.
"Uh… hi," Saitama said. "You okay? You were sleeping in a giant freezer. Must be really cold."
The silver-eyed woman looked at him, her gaze distant, as if looking through him, through time itself. Her lips parted, and she spoke, her voice a soft, melodic whisper that seemed to echo with forgotten memories. "Where… am I? The stars… they feel… wrong."
**
"Stars?" Saitama looked up. "Nah, we're underground. In a secret evil lab that's about to explode." He pointed towards the exit. "We should probably get going. Big boom, you know."
The woman looked around the chamber, a flicker of something – memory? recognition? – in her silver eyes. "Lab… yes… I remember… the capture… the stillness… for so long…" She then looked back at Saitama, her gaze finally focusing on him. She seemed to see, for the first time, not just a cloaked figure, but the baffling, quiet presence at his core. "You… you are not one of them. Your soul… it does not sing the song of this world."
Saitama shrugged. "I just sing the theme song from 'Dog-Man Danger.' It's pretty catchy." He took a step closer. "Look, lady, we really gotta go. The countdown is counting down. It's kinda what they do."
The woman, however, seemed lost in her own thoughts. "The balance is broken," she whispered, mostly to herself. "The seals are undone. He is free…" A look of genuine fear, the first real emotion she had displayed, crossed her beautiful face. "He must not be allowed to…"
**
Saitama was getting impatient. "Okay, look, Angel Lady, you can have your existential crisis outside. Right now, we need to run!"
He didn't wait for her to agree. He strode forward, scooped her up effortlessly in his arms – she was surprisingly light, like she was made of starlight and memory – and then turned and jogged back the way he came, carrying her bridal style.
The woman let out a small, surprised gasp, her silver eyes widening as she was suddenly lifted. "What… what are you doing?!"
"Saving you, duh!" Saitama grunted, picking up speed. "It's what heroes do! Also, you're in the way of the noodle vault, which is probably around here somewhere, and I'm running out of time!"
He ran through the cryo-lab, past the unconscious Stalkers, through the hole he'd made in the wall, and back into the main corridor, all while the klaxon wailed and the dispassionate voice counted down the seconds to oblivion.
**
"Almost there!" Saitama muttered, his eyes scanning the corridor signs. He saw one: "Logistics and Storage - Sector Theta."
"Storage!" he exclaimed. "That's where they'd keep the noodles!"
He made a sharp turn, heading down the new corridor, still carrying the bewildered, silver-eyed, winged woman, who was now staring at the back of his hooded head with an expression of utter, profound confusion. She had woken from an eons-long slumber, expecting a world of gods and monsters, and had instead been rescued by a strange, impossibly strong man who smelled faintly of cheap soup and was obsessed with finding a snack before a thermonuclear detonation.
Her re-entry into the world was proving to be… very, very strange. The countdown continued.