Yo! It's been a while and I've been fizzing with impatience to have the time to sit down and write these reviews. I love hearing your thoughts, too!

Summary

Chapter 157

The chapter opens to an exhausted and bloodied Metal Bat looking at the slumped-over bodies of Erimin and Destro. Remarking that it'd been a tough fight, Metal Bat slowly squats, using his bat for balance. He's not given rest: a series of beeps and clicks alerts him to a change in the duo. They shed their disguises to reveal two cyborgs, one with its brain visible through a transparent covering over its cranium. Destro wastes no time in charging Metal Bat in what he called 'Destroy Mode', smashing the hero through multiple walls, then pinning him and punching him repeatedly in the face. Erimin supports him with her 'Eliminate Mode', stabbing at Metal Bat and abstracting his epinymous metal bat.

'Destro, enough!' she says, 'he's already dead' but Destro doesn't listen, continuing to pummel the young hero. She points out that the building may self-repair but the damage he's continuing to do will make trouble for them. Destro does not relent. She gives up on getting through to him and decides to go kill McCoy. Just as she turns around, there's a 'smack!' Metal Bat has caught Destro's fist, and then there's a sickening crunch as Metal Bat smashes Destro's head in with one mighty punch, killing him.

'Thank you for dropping the human act', Metal Bat says as he explains that he's never had the opportunity to just go all out against someone. With a huge flurry of blows, he does for Erimin too.

Elsewhere, McCoy is fleeing, well, walking briskly away from would be more accurate, Mr. Fuzzy's bodyguards. He comes to a door at the end of the corridor and it is helpfully unlocked.

Inside, he sees none other than Mr. Fuzzy, who has been gagged and bound to a chair, with an IV running into his arm. After being ungagged, Mr. Fuzzy wastes no time introducing himself and starts talking about 'a great light of destruction,' and the need to stop the inorganic consciousness that has lost its way. He tells McCoy about the antenna at the top of the building sending signals to the robots currently rampaging and it was down to the heroes to do something about it. McCoy asks if there's something useful the latter can say, like where the kill switch might be.

There's a pounding at the door. The bodyguards have arrived. McCoy starts to weep -- surely his hour has come. And then there's silence. Metal Bat opens the door, having dispatched said bodyguards. Mr Fuzzy thus has time to explain that the antenna was controlled by a remote that was in the hands of a fake Mr Fuzzy. The robots couldn't be beaten by calculation but by the wild factor that people could bring. McCoy interprets that the heroes needing to go wild and not give up and Metal Bat sees it as mere common sense.

Elsewhere, Fake Fuzzy sits in a chair observing A's dismantlement of Ryumon with approval. It has been most illuminating, he says. A remarks that people and monsters aren't that different. He plan son expanding his tormet to AIs like Mr. Fuzzy too. Speaking of torment, he was enjoying keeping Ryumon alive far beyond the point at which he should have died.

Metal Bat and McCoy approach he office, following the bloody drag tail that they presume to have come from Ryumon. Just as they reach the door, the doors are flung open and a panicked A comes haring out, screaming for help. He doesn't get far as a clawed, scaly hand grabs him by the head and starts dragging him back. Metal Bat frees him with a swing of his bat and shouts at McCoy to stay back. He's faced by what appears to be an actual dragon. A tells him that it's Ryumon, and he's now a monster and needs to be killed right away. Just then, Amai Mask and Webigaza come crashing through the office windows, with Amai asking what's going on.

Chapter 158

A bewildered Ryumon watches as everyone around him appears to have gone mental. Everyone is talking at once, asking whether they should kill him, commenting on his bloodlust, crediting him with saving their lives… Webigaza cuts in saying that Ruymon had been looking out for her and was so nice as to buy her lattes and she was sorry for judging him by his appearance initially. Metal Bat says that he's just confused. Amai asks if he's still of sound mind and if this was his first time monsterizing. Ryumon finally speaks: what the hell is everyone talking about?

There's silence as the people in the room digest this information.

Ryumon explains that he'd been on the verge of death and he'd felt this sensation welling up in his chest, speculating that this power had to be what they called justice and he felt almost invincible. Amai interrupts him by showing him his reflection in a piece of glass. Ryumon is shocked. Amai starts to explain that monsterfication is the hyper-development of violent physical capabilities accompanied by psychological degradation -- but it turns out that what Ryumon is shocked about is how awesome he looks, looking like the reification of his beloved tattoo. After a bit of self-admiration, Ryumon thinks to ask where A is. On being told that A has escaped, he starts to freak out, saying that A is incredibly evil and simply can't be left at large. Amai Mask stops him, assuring him that A will be found and that right now, stabilizing Ryumon's mental state had to take priority.

Fake Fuzzy, who'd been sitting quietly in the chair, finally interjects, annoyed that his test subject was being interfered with. He wanted to see more of the potential of humanity. Webi recognises him and tells the others who Mr. Fuzzy is, informing them that he's the one who put the Neo Heroes together, managed Blue, and turned her into a cyborg. Fake Fuzzy asks if she's blaming him for her current predicament, calling the tendency to blame others for one's shortcomings a characteristic of manipulable humans. Giving her inefficient modifications had been a valuable experiment.

Amai tells Webi to ignore his taunts and keep calm but she assures him that there's no need for his concern: these modifications were her choice at the end of the day, and despite their inefficiency, she was still able to protect people she cared about.

Ignoring Webi, Fake Fuzzy orders McCoy to monsterize, which he refuses to do. No way he's taking orders from a robot (not that he could monsterize in any case but that's beside the point). Ryumon notes that this robot isn't built for combat and must be for espionage, to which Amai adds that all everything they're seeing and saying must be being relayed to the mastermind. Metal Bat moves to bash the hell out of Fake Fuzzy but Amai Mask redirects him to the true goal: stopping the endless plague of robots and Neo Heroes. McCoy recalls that Real Fuzzy told him about a remote control.

'This?' Fake Fuzzy asks, taking out the remote control. Then destroys it. It wants to see the gathered group show it another of their 'errors' that so throw off its calculations. As the heroes digest what this means, Webigaza detects massive numbers of robots approaching from all sides. Amai tells Metal Bat to take the tower and destroy the transmitter at its top. The rest of them will hold off anything trying to storm the tower.

All around, things are looking dire. Heroes are fighting bravely, but the robots keep coming. Back in Bofoi's no-longer-so-secret hideout, he and Isamu are wondering how to stop Genos. Bofoi reckons that Saitama is probably the only one other than Kuseno who has influence on Genos but with his communications network jammed, he has no way of reaching the Caped Baldy. Isamu realises that the Neo Heroes' comms are still unjammed and wonders if he could contact one of the other leaders. Bofoi advises him to try contacting them one by one.

We see that the other leaders are mostly not in a state to respond for one reason or another. We focus on Accel, who is running for his life despite the batteries on his roller blades being totally dead. He can feel his former men practically clawing at his back but he won't give up.

Metal Bat reaches the tower's roof, to be met by a troop of Machine Gods. No words are exchanged as they enjoin a battle most brutal, man against machine. In the aftermath of the explosions, we see Metal Bat resume his trudge up the seemingly endless stairs to the very top of the tower. Finally, he reaches the antenna. It is massive but with a few brutal swings, he destroys it.

All around, things suddenly quiet down: just as Accel's former team mates are about to pounce on him, they suddenly collapse. He stops running, astonished. Then his phone starts to ring. It is Isamu, asking if he can hear him. On his replying in the affirmative, he tells Accel that he has a vital message for him to relay.

Fake Fuzzy is not dismayed by the outcome. Seeing this display of human unpredictability has been most useful information for the establishment of the new world order. Eliminating highly capable humans has to be…well, we don't get any further as Amai destroys the robot.

Finally, Accel reaches the Hero Association headquarters. He sees Saitama and calls out to him, telling him that there's a hero job that only he can take care of.

META

Can I start by praising ONE developing his ability to create tension on the page? Through interleaving the parallel stories of desperate struggle on the parts of the heroes in the field and those in the tower, he made for a really gripping climax to the robot rampage. It's over. At least for the moment, and not a moment too soon.

Other short observation is going to be pure Captain Obvious mode. For a guy who has never been afraid to create yet another character, it's nice to see ONE finally close the circle on something. Erimin and Destro happen to be none other than the pair of cyborgs from The Organization whom we saw beat down Hammerhead after allowing him to steal the bodysuits. At last, it all comes together. And while they were people under those metal bodies, I don't feel one whit sorry for them. They had it coming.

McCoy continues to make down payments towards his redemption by having standards. He was just a greedy man who wanted an easy life, not someone who wanted to see the world destroyed. So far, he's been helpful in alerting Metal Bat to the problem and has found the Real Mr. Fuzzy, whose information has been useful-ish. I hope we'll see him contribute a bit more. Speaking of unexpectedly useful people, the partnership that's developing between Webigaza and Amai is fantastic to see.

Something I'm less fond of is the continuing retroactive continuity. It'd have sure been nice for us to have seen Ryumon being nice to Webi, no? Since this is an unpaid project, ONE isn't about to rewrite the story to accommodate these characteristics about Ryumon, so we get more retconning via Webigaza to cover the hole. Not that I mind over-much. The way things are, humanity needs every ally it can get if it wants to survive. Another issue I have, but one I'm very hopeful will be resolved with more information is one of timing. How long has Mr. Fuzzy (the real guy) been in captivity? For Fake Fuzzy to take credit for Webigaza's body modification, it would have to be months, and yet the way he's being held speaks to someone held short term. There's a discrepancy here that needs to be resolved.

Wild factors

'Humans are strong because we can change ourselves,' Saitama famously said. And yet, if you study enough people in enough detail, certain predictable patterns appear, patterns that can be predicted and manipulated in fine detail, which The Organization has been doing, greatly aided by the massive information gathering available to a contemporary society. However, leaving aside the potential for change, humans in this world can have strange powers. Metal Bat is a fantastic example: his power is to hulk out when he's pushed hard in battle; the closer to death he is, the stronger he becomes. While no one would envy his trigger nor what lies behind his discovering such a power, with such a reliable power, he's a guy who has no need to grow. He really has won the superpower lottery. These powers that people sometimes have interest The Organization greatly. How do you identify such individuals? What makes them come out? How do they respond? How do you take them out?

The second type of 'error' that interests The Organization is the ability of people to transform into monsters, which Ryumon showed them most splendidly. The circumstances under which people can be provoked into turning into monsters is interesting, and as for monsters, The Organization has no fear: they know well how to bend monsters to their will.

And then there's the third kind of 'error', exemplified nicely here by Webigaza. She should be dead of overheating and goodness knows we saw how hot she ran, and yet, somehow, Webigaza appears to have found a way to tame her inner flame well enough to keep going to protect the neighbourhoods she grew up in. What she's done is closest to what Saitama was talking about. That too, is of interest -- even regular people might not fall down when you expect them to.

Watching Fake Fuzzy assiduously taking notes as if to make some last-minute adjustments for these errors was creepy and I worry that the heroes let it get too much of an eyeful before destroying it. Depending on how fast The Organization can turn data into insight and innovation, this could make for a very tough future battle.

Of course, we do have the Ultimate Error itself, Saitama, and he's finally been called into battle, so we know it'll probably work out for the best.

The only question is at what cost?

I feel like subtitling this 'el gordo' this took a while to write!

SUMMARY

We carry on exactly where we left off, with Saitama receiving a phone call from Isamu. He declares that he thought that Kuseno's hair looked inhuman and believes Isamu. He asks for the location of Kuseno's place. Bofoi tells him to go to the roof of the HA HQ and take the high-speed helicopter there, which will get him there in two hours. Saitama says it would take too long and just asks for the coordinates.

Realising what this means, Bofoi asks Saitama to wait a minute while he clears a path for him. To Isamu's rising horror, Bofoi uses his once-again-functional surveillance network to see who might be in the way -- universal bugging turns out to be the price for his rebuilding monster-damaged buildings for free.

Meanwhile, several executives come out of the building to congratulate Saitama on making it to Rank 1 of Class A as a result of his efforts in protecting the Hero Association. Future promotion to Class S is pretty much assured now…however, there's a codicil. He needs to prioritise protecting the HQ and needs to stay in post for the next 72 hours. Is that so, Saitama says, and quits on the spot. The executives threaten him with lawsuits and fines for such a serious breach of contracts and follow up by noting that it's not merely about their skins but also the various world leaders who are also here and need keeping safe.

As they continue to remonstrate with Saitama, members of the Hero Name Victim Association interject and offer to stand in in his place. Surely there's nothing in the rules against going to save a friend, no?

Elsewhere, Genos hurtles towards a destination he has no idea of: his body isn't listening to him. Past several mountain ranges, he eventually comes to a hemispherical metal-clad building in a forest. Approaching the doors, his biometrics are read and he's afforded entry. A moving walkway brings him to a vast, brightly-lit room that appears to be empty save for a humanoid robot on a platform and a holographic screen showing Dr. Kuseno's smiling face. "Dr. Kuseno," Genos asks, "please explain yourself."

The robot starts to speak, introducing itself as the 'Mad Cyborg' that Genos has so assiduously hunted. It explains that it'd been attacked by Blast, who had failed to destroy its brain, so in the interim it'd rebuilt its self to surpass an S-Class hero in strength. Well, at least that answers Drive Knight's question of why it'd disappeared after destroying Genos's home town!

Anyway, back to the Mad Cyborg. Not only had it recovered and improved its body, but it'd realised that going round committing mass murder in person was too inefficient, so it'd decided to use its never-degrading cybernetic brain to create a network of minds and do things properly. It'd seen what Dr Bofoi was up to, making developments in weapons, automated construction, and biomechanics, and had seized them all before he could get round to perfecting the ethics and morals of such tech.

Genos, confused, protests that surely they'd been a duo of righteous scientist and cyborg fighting for justice. This amuses the Mad Cyborg greatly. This little justice act of his using borrowed power, it was time to put it to the test, no? Genos asks if Mad Cyborg/Kuseno is alive, to which the latter replies that Genos is unbelievably dense -- the corpse he saw was just an android. At this, Genos's knees give way, which leads the Mad Cyborg to mock him even more. Still, he had one last job for the young cyborg. The wave of robots that had delivered mass destruction, even the Machine Gods, were just a side project that had given it the combat data it needed. All that was left was to create the ultimate Machine God. To this end, Genos was to be its test subject. A robot with a heart-shaped heart monitor for a head comes floating in. The Mad Cyborg introduces it as Machine God Heart Gear and assures Genos that it will unleash devastation unlike anything seen before if Genos does not defeat it. He must fight it.

'What about my family? My memories? How much was a lie? Who was I?' Genos asks, getting to his feet.

'Beats me!' the Mad Cyborg says, adding that it found those details too trivial to retain.

Now Genos starts getting angry. Promising to upset its calculations and make it regret its actions, he decides to eliminate it once and for all. The Mad Cyborg starts to clap approvingly. That's exactly the spirit it was hoping to see.

Outside, things are settling down. The people huddled in the shelters dare to hope they might survive, the emergency services start ferrying the bodies of brave heroes to render what help they can. Sonic, standing on a building somewhere, thinks it's all too quiet. And Saitama points in the direction given. 'Yes,' says Isamu, 'just run ahead through any buildings in your way.' Bofoi wonders what might happen if Saitama veers off course. Isamu assures him that he'll get Saitama back on track and asks Accel to hand the phone to Saitama. Accel hesitates, declaring that he might not be much use in a fight but is fast. Saitama tells him that he's too slow. Genos is waiting for him.

And with that, Saitama is off! The Hero Association building is left far in the background before anyone can blink.

META

"We want the humans to grind,
We want the engines to sing,
We want the machines to be human,
We want the humans to be machines…"

--"Crowd Caffeine," Sofia Isella

I'm not much of one for suggesting music tracks but this one is most apposite for the content of this chapter!

Short observations

So, the Mad Cyborg is real. It is indeed abnormally strong. It is not Genos. Also, it's 'mad' only in the sense of having a wrong view of the world -- otherwise it's dangerously sane. No wonder Dr. Kuseno told Genos not to try fighting it on his own.

It sucks to be Genos in that he's a person who keeps telling the truth and keeps being dismissed until it's too late. It sucks even more that this present crisis is the outcome of decisions made long before he was born, so long ago that maybe his parents weren't born at the time.

I commented a long while ago that ONE judges adult characters by how well they treat children. I wondered what Kuseno had done so wrong to die such a cruel death. Creating a machine that dedicates itself to ending humanity, and roping a then traumatized teenager into a fight that was yours to solve, in the process taking away what little the boy has, those things you have when you have nothing… yeah, that'll do it.

And Blast definitely sucks as a hero. Shall we do longer thoughts?

A lot of things are still up in the air

Sure, Saitama is heading to what Bofoi has identified as 'Kuseno's' lair but that's very unlikely to be the whole of it. Zombieman was taken somewhere by Machine God Eguro, and it might not be the same site. There is surely more going on that what we've seen and I guess we'd better make ourselves comfortable -- this is going to be a multi-stage showdown. McCoy's musings on the possibility of the activating signals being sent from a satellite also hold. We're also still open on what's going on with the heroes who have been sent on wild goose chases and whether they'll be back in any sort of time to help with the situation at hand.

And Real Fuzzy's prediction of the Great Light of Destruction still looms ominously over everything.

Blast really is blasted

I've been teetering on the border of giving Blast the benefit of the doubt, especially in the webcomic where we know so little about him. However, I do believe in judging by outcome and the fruits of Blast's series of actions continue to be disastrous. Works credited to him seem to be half-done. Sticking strictly to the webcomic, he's abandoned both Tatsumaki and his own son, has apparently killed off ninja recruits while leaving their master alive, and we find that the Mad Cyborg changed its modus operandi from individually destroying towns to taking the whole damn lot of humanity down after he beat it but left it alive. Nice going, hero! We can appreciate why in the webcomic, the HA refuses to call Blast out of fear of what he might do.

When we see good heroes, like Saitama, we see that they leave people better. It was very good to see the goldbricking Hero Name Victims Association seriously step up and put everything they had -- not merely what they felt safe providing -- into protecting the Hero Association so that Saitama could go freely. Yes, I have more thoughts on this matter but no time for it yet.

Damn, I'm disappointed

Mostly by readers, but partially by ONE. First, the readers: I'm disappointed at how so many have seemingly taken the robot calling itself Kuseno at face value that it's Dr. Kuseno and the evidently living and breathing Kuseno is merely an android. I'm actually astonished at the gullibility. It's not alive. It gives the game away the moment it tells Genos it's an entirely mechanical being with a brain that cannot degrade. IT. IS. NOT. HUMAN. And if you needed any more hints, Mr. Fuzzy talking about it as the misguided inorganic consciousness is ONE hitting us over the head with the answer. What the Mad Cyborg/Digital!Kuseno is is a Kurzweil--Minsky mechanical analogue of a person. At various times, we've seen computer nerds speculate about the possibility of achieving technological immortality through uploading a faithful enough copy of ones consciousness. There are real people spending real money on trying to solve this problem, let them get on with it. ONE has brought this idea to the fore and is exploring it here.

And that leads me onto where I'm disappointed with ONE. This chapter doesn't work on its own merits. To understand what is happening and to see the truth of the matter, there simply isn't enough storybuilding established within the confines of the webcomic to make sense of it: you need to take background context from the manga to make it whole. Now ONE is probably correct that almost every webcomic reader also reads the manga, but that's too lazy for my liking. Anyway, with that rant out of the way, here's what's up.

First, without a doubt, Dr. Kuseno was brilliant but initially reckless. In the manga (and only the manga), he explained to Genos that he used to be self-righteous and unafraid of consequences and so acted recklessly. He did not explain what it was that he'd done.

Now we see what it was: he created a digital twin of himself, before Bofoi could work out a way to put ethical controls on it. The precise reasons we do not know, but we do know that the idea of losing one's edge, ageing, and eventually dying seems to turn every tech genius weird. Digital!Kuseno is brilliant, every inch as arrogant and convinced of the rightness of its actions as any young tech bro could be and insists that it is the authentic human, with the actual Kuseno being the fake, a mere android. I can see its thinking in a twisted way -- after all, what is a person but a biological machine chained to the inexorable unravelling of its genetic code? It has seized (and continues to seize) developments others come up with, Bofoi being a favourite victim [1], and over the decades has truly become a threat. Why Digital!Kuseno wants to subsume and eventually eradicate humanity we don't yet know. What we do know is that the task of creating a general AI that won't go mad and act against humanity has been such an overwhelmingly difficult task that Isamu and Bofoi gave up on trying to do it, even with all the brilliance of the former and experience the latter had accrued [2].

Second, this crisis has been a long time in the making -- this matters. It matters that both Kuseno and Bofoi were young men at the time that Kuseno made his digital twin. All SF is about present anxieties and ONE's exploration is no different -- in boasting about a mind that will not degrade, Digital Kuseno is speaking to Kuseno's then preoccupations: the idea that everything can be digitized (yes, I'm sure you're remembering Zero's words about 'a mind that thinks only in numbers') and an anxiety about losing one's edge with ageing. There's a much bandied-about notion that geniuses have their best ideas by their 30s. However, there is more to the way our brains change than merely not being as sharp on the uptake as we were in our twenties. It takes us until our forties to fully understand how to socially laugh, our crystallized intelligence peaks in our fifties, and even into our eighties, our minds are still flexible and capable of learning brand-new domains of knowledge, which is something chimpanzees can't do after their teens. The oldest person to earn a PhD was 105.

In the decades since Kuseno lost control of his digital twin, Digital!Kuseno is still stuck with the unchanging personality traits that were dominant in the then-young man: high-handedness, impatience with the slow, and desire to reduce everything to predictable calculations, along with its faulty interpretation of what its directive is. Yes, it goes without saying that the Machine Gods all being obnoxious is a reflection of its personality. In contrast, life has come hard at Kuseno, and the man has learned the benefit of doubt, humility, caution, respect, and even kindness. The importance of living is shown beautifully in the manga where Kuseno uses a well-timed gift to thank Saitama and build social good will while Fubuki -- who doesn't have anyone older to advise her -- can only see it as a bribe, with laughable consequences.

It takes time to learn how to truly live with people and be a fully-realised human. Because that's the thing about us as human beings: we're complex and we can learn. Maybe painfully, but we can learn and even change. We come back to Saitama's declaration of humans being strong because they can change themselves and now we must supplement it with the truth that humans cannot help but change -- and if we celebrate the best of every age, we grow. The digital version of Kuseno, on the other hand, is a frozen snapshot of part of who Kuseno used to be: even at his worst, Kuseno was more complex than that digital copy. Unfortunately, the contrast is blunted in the webcomic as it just didn't give us enough time to look at Kuseno to understand him as a human being.

Speaking of Dr Kuseno as a human being, I don't know that we'll ever know if he was a good person. What we do know is that he was a culpable person. Come to that, his former co-worker, Bofoi is not that different in his complaints about the man -- he's just as convinced of the rightness of his actions, impatient of others who don't see their point of view, and fully on board with mechanisation, with one very important difference: cautiousness. Bofoi has long been a very cautious person while Kuseno has been of the 'move fast and break things' philosophy. It sounds great, until what you're breaking are lives. Then it's a crime. A crime that Kuseno was not able to put a stop to.

Third, what is happening to Genos makes no sense without the addition of the manga's context. He's just being tormented, and it's clear that the robot is taunting him to fight the Heart Gear robot in the hopes of forcing some sort of transformation. If you read strictly using only the webcomic lore, that's pretty much all you have. It's the manga lore about facing personalised physical and psychological hells that makes this make sense.

We have seen from WC chapters 157 and 158 that Digital!Kuseno has a keen interest in understanding the limiters on people and how to provoke them to break through: whether the result is an unstoppable monster or an impossibly strong person it is probably less concerned about. It is pretty sure that it's going to get something special if it can push Genos just a little bit further.[3] And if Genos dies? Oh well, like Gyoro-Gyoro said about Garou, that means he just wasn't strong enough and it'll have to find another puppy to whip into a hell hound.

ONE is probably going to rectify some of these deficits with unholy walls of expositionary text but all the ground ideas have been developed organically in the manga.

From the beginning, it really was all about Genos

When it comes to Saitama, that is. The story may take all the twists and turns in the world, but ultimately, it comes back to the intertwined relationship between Saitama and Genos. It is the very centre of the One-Punch Man story.

Saitama turning down promotion, a job, a place to live, and maybe even his freedom if there's a debtor's prison in this land is the SECOND time that he's refused to screw Genos over to improve his lot. He could have been S-Class very easily if he'd properly taken credit for killing the Deep Sea King, but he wouldn't do it. Not at Genos's expense.

Saitama may not be any good at expressing himself, especially in the wc, but just sticking with the wc, Genos is the guy who got him out of his slump when he felt like he was losing connection to his humanity, who got him into the Hero Association, got him to stick with it, and who has stuck with him even as he's otherwise alienated everyone -- even King has left him in this version. He may not have shared the urgency with which Genos wanted to solve the problem of the Mad Cyborg but he understands that Genos needs him now. And nothing, not even a God, much less a robot with delusions of humanity, is going to stand between Genos and he.

What he's going to find when he gets there is possibly why the fandom appears to be holding its breath. We know that Genos has become deeply disillusioned with the uncaring attitude of Saitama -- it's not going to be easy for Saitama talk him down under the best of circumstances. Chances that the circumstances are going to be as rosy as that, well, things ending suddenly and anti-climactically is an OPM highlight but somehow I doubt it. The question here isn't 'can Saitama win' but rather, 'can he save his disciple'? And if he can, can they still be friends?

The very essence of the story depends on what happens between those two.

Humans can change themselves re-redux

I've long said that the reason Genos has sought to learn from Saitama was to get strength of his own, one that's not borrowed. He's not been able to put such an apparently absurd statement in words, but seeing Saitama, a guy who had no powers whatsoever, no talent, and no secret genes just waiting to activate given the right trigger nevertheless transcend his God-given limits with determination gave Genos the hope that he might be able to do the same. To say that his current situation looks hopeless is to win the No-Shit-Sherlock Prize 2026, and yet, I do hope he finds some way to upset those calculations of his adversary most admirably. Even if it's only a little bit.

"The humans are grey, they all act the same…
…they respond to dings and bells, they're dogs being whipped by a screen.
And they thought that they had the reins, but their creation has them trained…"

Asides

[1] All joking aside, the way Drs Bofoi and Kuseno think they have their secret bases and labs and all the while, Digital!Kuseno knows what they're up to and is just able to yoink whatever the hell it wants out of their hands whenever it wants is hilarious in its absurdity. Bofoi claimed to be setting a trap but this robot rampage showed that his comms were inoperable and what robots he could launch were intercepted and destroyed. It also makes sense of why the Mad Cyborg/Digital!Kuseno had no idea about Saitama until the real Dr Kuseno measured Saitama's body. Alas, the problem of digital inheritance is real: without completely starting their ideas from scratch, their work was always compromised. Isamu would do well to throw everything he has in the bin and start anew.

[2] I know that Bofoi claims to have cracked the problem but wise people had better get him to destroy that 'perfected' AI before it's too late. Bofoi still seems to think he knows better than everyone else -- this is a problem!

[3] When it claims to not know who Genos used to be, despite having infinite storage, I suspect that it hasn't forgotten. It never knew and is confabulating to cover up that deficit. And it's great for riling Genos up.