My Castle had visitors.
Two of them—but one was a hanger-on, so I flushed him into the sewer and cleaned house.
Which leaves the other one.
A trim, muscular man on whom a shaved head, thick brows, and sharp upturned eyes all sat rather well. A black combat suit. A fight-loving man of a warrior race.
This gentleman, whose entire purpose in visiting was to fight me, is today's main event.
"I am [The Omniscient, Omnipotent, Strongest, Invincible, Absolutely Superior One]. Do you still want to fight?"
"'Course I do. That's what I came for. I wanna fight strong folks and get stronger. And then I wanna pass every strong 'un there is and be the strongest."
The man is a fighting maniac through and through.
He had already been a thoroughbred of a warrior race before reincarnating; afterward, with the Goddess's Gift, [The Power to Have Any One Wish Granted], he became [An Undying One Who Possesses Super-Regeneration and Grows Without Limit].
"Very well. I should like a little entertainment myself, so I shall let you fight my pet. Beat it and I shall face you personally."
"Now that sounds good. Much obliged."
I tossed the Mofu curled up in my lap out in front of me and applied an enhancement to it.
The Mofu grew enormous.
Its arms and legs stretched and thickened, and it became a shaggy monstrosity.
Standing on two legs, the Mofu spread both arms like a bear and let out a roar that shook the hall.
With that white coat, it looked rather like a polar bear.
"Here I come!"
The warrior-race man raised his fists and bounced twice on his toes.
An instant later he was on the Mofu, driving three punches into its white belly.
He backflipped clear at once, and as he went the Mofu's claws grazed his stomach and tore open the combat suit.
"I see—that fluffy fur's softening my punches. And the counter's fast. High defense, plus speed and offense on top of it. This one's a handful."
The combat suit was made of nanomachines; it repaired itself, drawing material from elsewhere to patch the tear.
"But how about this!"
The warrior-race man closed on the Mofu again.
Tracing a circle with both hands, he snapped out a straight punch and froze there with his fist buried in the Mofu's belly.
The Mofu did not counter.
When he sprang back and away, the Mofu dropped to its knees and pitched forward.
"That's the Piercing Impact Fist. You put every ounce of force into a single punch, and deliver the whole of the shock a little way past where the fist lands."
"You will be continuing with the Mofu a while longer. Each time it is beaten, it recovers and evolves."
The mound of white fur got up ponderously, turned its face upward, and roared.
Then the white fur shot inward all at once, leaving cream-colored bare skin exposed.
Fluid secreted from every pore and coated the skin, and thus the Mofu remade itself into a glistening muscle monster.
"Whoa! It's like a bodybuilder from a giant species. But I ain't losing!"
The fur that had been the linchpin of its defense was gone, but having evolved, the Mofu was necessarily stronger than before.
So the warrior-race man skipped the feeling-out and went straight to the Piercing Impact Fist.
"Hyah!"
The Mofu's belly caught the fist, and a sound like struck metal rang out. However hard the surface, the Piercing Impact Fist generates its shock inside the target.
But the Mofu's body channeled the shock out through itself and into the floor.
"Grgaaah!"
The Mofu let out a growl and threw a punch.
The Piercing Impact Fist locks the user up after it lands, so the warrior-race man could not evade.
It hit him square in the face and crushed his head.
The force put him flat on his back, but his head reinflated like a balloon and the warrior-race man woke up.
He is undying, so he does not die, and his super-regeneration returned the crushed head to its original state.
"You got me. But I'm stronger than I was a minute ago, so next round's mine!"
The warrior-race man rushed the Mofu again.
Slipping past the incoming fist and inside the Mofu's guard, he twisted his hips for leverage and kicked its stomach straight up.
The Mofu shunted the shock into the floor, but the force carried through and lifted it off the ground.
And there the warrior-race man's upward Piercing Impact Fist went in.
"Gk—"
With no contact with the floor, the Mofu had nowhere to shunt the shock.
Atop the fist thrust up at the heavens, the Mofu gave out. Both arms and both legs hung limp.
A strange hissing began to come from its body, and the warrior-race man reflexively hurled it away from him.
The Mofu's body rolled across the floor, giving off white smoke and shrinking. A few seconds later the change stopped.
The Mofu stood and took a stance: slim now, lean, the glistening coating gone and the cream-colored bare skin exposed.
"Round four, huh. Bring it on!"
Seeing the Mofu's third form, the warrior-race man guessed roughly how its fighting style had shifted and changed his own movements accordingly.
This is where a warrior race shows its quality.
He inched toward the Mofu, and the instant he was in range he unleashed a high-speed barrage with his honed arms and legs.
The Mofu evaded all of it. Then it countered.
The warrior-race man dodged deftly in turn. Fists and kicks traded at speeds no ordinary eye could follow. Neither of them tired.
But as each adjusted to the other's movements, their attacks began to graze, and finally to land clean.
Each individual blow in a barrage carries little weight, but the damage accumulated without fail.
"Hraaah!"
"Grgaaah!"
And then the two threw fully committed punches at the same moment.
The warrior-race man's fist into the Mofu's solar plexus, the Mofu's fist into the warrior-race man's cheek—both landed square.
He went over backward; the Mofu pitched forward as though folding in on itself.
In time both got up.
The warrior-race man looked no different, but infinite growth had reinforced his muscle, his stamina, and every other element of him.
White smoke rose from the Mofu's body again.
When the smoke cleared, what stood there was a liquefied bipedal creature.
"Whoops—round five's gonna be rough!"
The warrior-race man grows substantially whenever he takes damage that ought to be fatal, but he is also growing constantly, at all times, simply by being alive.
And when he faces a strong opponent and steels himself, the growth is substantial.
Steam began to rise from the whole of the warrior-race man's body.
Much like the Mofu's evolution—except that his carried heat, enough to raise a shimmer in the air.
The warrior-race man closed the distance slowly.
And against a Mofu his strikes would plainly no longer work on, he threw a punch as though to gouge the space out of the world.
"Full-Power Critical Fist!"
The Mofu's judgment lagged for an instant, and all it managed was a single step back.
It took the warrior-race man's finishing blow full in the belly. From roughly the point below the navel, a tsunami of shock propagated through its entire body, and the Mofu's liquid form burst apart and was gone.
"Hah… hah… I won."
Spent to the last, the warrior-race man dropped where he stood.
After a while super-regeneration brought him back and he got to his feet. That recovery had taken longer than any before it.
"Very well. I shall be your opponent."
I revived the Mofu in its original adorable form and set it beside the throne.
"So the reigning strongest finally steps up. I'm gonna beat you and be the true strongest!"
The warrior-race man is a battle junkie; fighting the strong is more fun than he can stand.
Being strong himself, he had never met anyone that infinite growth would not let him catch up to before long.
But with my appearance, his luck had run out.
Judging me stronger than the Mofu, he came in with maximum caution, his footwork leaving no opening.
Then he threw a single high-speed jab to test me.
I flicked the fist descending from that high angle aside with a fingertip, and not merely the fist but the whole of him burst apart, leaving dark red stains on the ceiling and the walls.
He regenerated even from that. Cells ground finer than dust drew together like iron filings to a magnet and reassembled. It did take him a considerable while, admittedly.
"Yikes! You're something else! But I ain't giving up!"
The warrior-race man was more mentally exhausted than he had ever been, and still the thrill of getting to fight someone strong seeped out through his expression.
"No matter how hard you try, you cannot beat me."
"That ain't true! I'm undying and I grow without limit, so long as I keep coming at you I'll get there sooner or later!"
Well, that is the ordinary way to think about it.
So, on a whim, I did the ordinary-brained fellow the kindness of telling him the facts.
"I have reached the summit, so there is no further growth for me. You, meanwhile, keep getting stronger without limit—but so long as you keep getting stronger, there is a margin of growth. And that this continues infinitely means you will never, ever arrive at where I stand. Do you follow?"
"I can grow forever, so sooner or later I'll pass you, seeing as you stopped growing."
"No, no. Don't put the two of us on separate rails. It is the same rail. I am at a height you will never reach no matter how long you go on growing. And I did not stop growing. I have been at the summit from the very beginning. There was never any growth to speak of."
Given time, his strength can become infinite—and I am on the far side of that. I am the concept of strongest, and its definition besides. Only one single existence can ever be the strongest.
Incidentally, since Absolutely Superior is attached, a second strongest tied for the position is likewise an absolute impossibility. I am the true strongest.
"Too much muscle, not enough brain to follow. Well—I knew it would go that way too."
The warrior-race man stepped forward to launch his next attack. In that instant he stopped.
Infinite growth had honed his sense of danger, and he intuited that the next step would kill him again. Fear was born; he came close to breaking.
But infinite growth grows the spirit as well.
Memories were racing through the warrior-race man's head.
He had grown strong, and still there were things he had failed to protect. If only he had been stronger, back then.
What he had wished to make stronger was not only his fighting power but his heart.
Here he grew again, a substantial reinforcement that might fairly be called an awakening.
"I'm not losing anyone else! Wooooooaaaaargh!"
My answer to that:
"That's just dependency. Stand on your own two feet!"
My palm strike caught the warrior-race man's cheek.
That palm strike was also an erasing strike. Every cell in his body decomposed at high speed into molecules, then into atoms, and finally the very existence of those atoms was annihilated.
"Whew. Done and done."
That was fairly satisfying. And fairly enjoyable.
By way of an after-party, I dropped onto Nation Z—the country the warrior-race man had been reincarnated into—a monolith, a twenty-kilometer black object cut to the shape of the country.