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.
With good guys like this, who needs enemies?
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!
As Saitama had speculated, another hero had defeated it… unfortunately, that hero was Blast.
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.
It's key to note that if it'd waited much longer, it'd have been shackled and be unable to act as it pleased.
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.
Just whose heart is being monitored here? I really don't like how obviously this stinks of a trap -- and yet, Genos is too angry not to step into it.
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.
Incidentally, if you try going to those coordinates IRL, you're in for a cold swim in the Sea of Japan.
And with that, Saitama is off! The Hero Association building is left far in the background before anyone can blink.
And he's off!
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.
I'm wishing that Saitama had been Saitama four years ago, so he could have told the words he scolded Phoenixman with to Dr Kuseno. Don't burden children with your problems!
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.
This makes it sound like summoning Blast is a double-edged sword that draws blood from wielder and enemy alike. Probably right.
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.
This is the sort of background we really could have used in the webcomic. You can choose your actions, but the consequences are not under your control.
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].
You're right about the culprit but not about who is behind it, little detective.
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.
I don't blame Fubuki for not getting it -- the intricacies of gift-giving take decades to learn.
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.
It's always been about how the two of them have struggled together to remain human.
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.
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Same hair, which is receding for Dr. Bofoi and short for him and Bang, same hairline for both Blast and Bang, same large nose for Kuseno, Bofoi and Bomb but the downward angularity and nose bridge is more prominent in Bang, Garou and Blast. Same mustache for Bang and Blast and same short bangs in the front (hehe geddit) and Bofoi, Bang, Garou and Blast all share the wild eyebrows while Kuseno and Bomb's eyebrows are less wild. Same high cheekbones are visible for Bofoi, Kuseno, Bomb and Bang and Blast and Bang share the same chin too. Bonus points for Bang having the same hair colour as Blast and Garou getting a similarly coloured hair as Blast once he got into spiral Garou form. Young Bomb also has the same goatee as Blast but managed to get different flowing hair, unlike everyone else's spiky hair.
Bonus image for more obvious hairdo comparison:
Inb4 Blast is actually Bang's illegitimate grandson and this whole fight was a family feud type of deal. Bang's actual heir versus the person Bang wanted to make into his heir.
And that would make Garou Blue's cousin or something if Garou's parent is related to Blast.
Idk the family tree might be frikken wild. I'm gonna take a wild guess it's not all natural genetic relations. Bonus points if Genos is related to Genus and there's been a lot of gene manipulation thrown around.
I sense a certain arc is going to be a blast. If this family tree is gonna get super messy.
Well, I'm going to skimp on summarising the chapter in favour of meta. If you're not up-to-date with the webcomic, or it's been a minute since ONE's release schedule is so inconsistent, you may want to wind back to chapter 139 and read from there: there are a ton of details you will need.
If you're a manga-only reader, please go away unless the year is 2027+ and these events are sorta current.
If you are an anime-only, go away. Nothing to see here. I dare not guess what or how this will be revised for the manga, let alone how it's adapted for the anime.
Everyone else, see you below the cut!
The Situation (In a Nutshell)
So, the cyborg Dr. Bofoi (presumably he wasn't always called Bofoi, but I digress) used to work with, or more likely for, the human Dr. Kuseno. At least, he did so until at some point he became convinced that Dr Kuseno was a bad sort of guy working to destroy the world. Since then, he's been in hiding as he builds an army of robots to counter the wave of evil ones sure to sweep the world at an opportune moment and has offered his services to the Hero Association (for a price, of course; he's not a charity). He's been watching bits of his technology get stolen for said evil purposes and has permitted it to stand in the hopes that it'll eventually lead him to the nexus of evil so he can destroy it once and for all. Unfortunately, one of those weapons of his has been his perfected AI, which has been turned against him. Fortunately, it can't hurt people...
Now that's a spicy accusation if ever there was one.
At least, that's the story he's told Child Emperor and Genos. Genos has him fingered as the very cyborg who destroyed his town, to which Bofoi has scoffed, calling him a misled victim. He has claimed that not only is Kuseno behind all of this, but that the man is not dead and is eavesdropping at this very moment. Genos has freaked out and has left abruptly without first killing Bofoi and Isamu as he originally intended. Whether to confront Saitama or try to verify that his old man is really safely buried (or BOTH! Genos: Saitama sensei, what did you do with Kuseno Hakase's body?), we have to wait for the next one or two chapters.
Anyway, coming back to Bofoi's stolen AI, to Bofoi's infinite disgruntlement, his enemy has outsmarted him and has figured a way around the no-hurt-people lock. Drive Knight is determined to destroy the Hero Association in the name of justice, but shatters on the rock known as Saitama. So it goes.
Nothing deals a genius damage like having to acknowledge another is smarter. Heh.
If you see a cyborg, then you've seen a cyborg
Very early on in the story, we saw Genos desperately searching for a cyborg and being surprised to find one in the form of Armored Gorilla. It made it seem that cyborgs were really thin on the ground.
Now there's a sight you don't see every day.
Actually, there are lots of cyborgs in One-Punch Man. They just don't necessarily look as you'd expect.
Trash-talking comes so naturally to this old guy.
If you see a cyborg, then you've seen a cyborg: that's a thing I've been saying for years now regarding how cyborgs are portrayed in One-Punch Man. All knowing that someone is a cyborg tells you is that some aspect of their body function depends on some artificial device that relies on feedback. Yes, technically, cyborgs very much exist here and now. It tells you nothing about who they are, what they look like, what they do, or how they live. Which ought to be obvious as a cyborg is just a person on very intimate terms with machinery, but you'd be forgiven for seeing little of this understanding in popular imagination.
Jet Nice Guy, Koko, Webigaza, Genos, Mr Fuzzy, and Bofoi are all cyborgs, but the differences between them are stark -- the only thing they share is the great determination and commitment it takes to modify your body and make it work for you. And all of them are different from Infelsinave, Zaedats, and Koko after Eririn and Destro got done with them, turning them into animated husks of themselves. It isn't the percentage of one's body that is flesh-and-blood that has anything to do with your humanity.
Something we've learned is that you don't need to have modified your body to be controlled: with the flick of a switch, every Neo Hero without a customised body suit found themselves unable to act independently until forcibly freed.
However strong you are, however you resist, your body is moved as someone else sees fit.
If anything, being a cyborg appears to be protective against being told what to do, as we saw Webigaza just shut off the kill commands.
Who knew that choosing to redesign the way your body works gives you unusual control over what you listen to?
And certainly, if someone has tried to make Genos kill Bofoi, that's failed as he's gone to do something else first.
Nothing is as scary as a human being
I can't help but note the near sorrow with which Saitama finally destroyed Drive Knight. Sure, DK was a robot, but still, for Saitama, anything able to make up its mind deserved a chance to do so. He smacked DK around the head, flicking him away, and kept trying to get through to him that being a hero did not involve destroying the Hero Association. Only when it was clear that the machine was beyond saving, having overclocked itself destructively, did he administer the coup-de-grace.
Mercy killing is sometimes a duty.
Saitama is pissed. Not about Drive Knight, but about the person who was responsible for so corrupting this machine's understanding of the world as to lead to this outcome. Someone's going to get punched with extra venom over this.
Let's jump back to chapter 148, when Child Emperor was hypothesising that the culprit behind the robot attack was an AI that Bofoi had unleashed into the world.
Even if that's right and the Organization and the Neo Heroes are creations of an artificial intelligence run amok, ultimately, there is still a human mind at the root of it. There IS a person responsible for all the lives lost and property destroyed.
Someone out there really is that cruel. Someone out there doesn't care how many millions get killed, has no problem undermining the very idea of organised heroes, captures and modifies monsters to unleash on the world and manipulate the public perception of honest heroes, undermines the Hero Association by offering heroes ostensibly better working conditions, only to rob them of their wills and use them as pawns. Has modified the bodies of some people, raised them to positions of power in society, and benefits from their efforts in overseeing his will.
Even Psykos at her worst (this doesn't change if you look at the manga version) couldn't sink to this level of callousness. It'd be lovely to call this person a monster, but even actual monsters are mere victims of this mind. This person is human. If the human mind has no limit to its imagination, then there's no cruelty that cannot be imagined. Or enacted, given the right tools.
As Reigen likes to say, nothing is as scary as a human being.
The only question we truly have is who and maybe why. Dr Bofoi is convinced it's Kuseno, but it merits a deeper look.
The blind men and the elephant
ONE, in one of his early interviews on One-Punch Man, spoke of it as a story that he envisaged as being told through viewpoints rather than a central narrative. I have written before on the metaphor of the six blind men and the elephant, in which every person has a distinctly different, true, and yet partial understanding of the situation. OPM is full of people who have expertise in their distinctive fields (thank you, ONE, for caring) that give them important insights and capabilities, and yet that limit them in other ways, like in how they understand what they see.
When it comes to different viewpoints on one person, how Bofoi and Genos see Kuseno couldn't be more different:
Is he an evildoer so depraved that he would fake his own death to ensure that his charge murdered an enemy without fail?
Or is he a kindly fellow seeker of justice who came to regret ever setting out for revenge?
It's very possible that they're both telling the truth as they see it. We don't know much about Dr. Kuseno, but even sticking strictly to the webcomic, he used to be a very angry man. Minimally, he was a man angry enough to rope in a teenager who had lost everything, and then take everything that a person has when they have nothing: his name, his body, his talents, his future, in order to make him the weapon to strike his enemies with. That's an extremely fucked-up thing to do.
Good questions to ask: revenge against who? For what?
If this is Kuseno grown soft in his dotage, then he probably was quite a piece of work when he was younger. Bofoi may be paranoid, but sometimes they really are out to get you.
I personally don't think Kuseno is evil currently, and not just because Saitama, who is good at seeing through people, likes and trusts him. ONE understands the wheel of control wonderfully -- you see how he uses it explicitly in the way that the Village ninjas were indoctrinated, and more subtly in the way the Neo Hero rank-and-file were conditioned -- and one thing a controller cannot afford is letting someone else influence their victim. Not only has Kuseno not tried to discourage Genos from running around with Saitama, he hasn't even tried to poison Genos's mind against the bald guy, which would be easy. Irresistibly easy[1].
I wouldn't be surprised if Kuseno is a recovering supervillian. Not an easy thing: your former allies want you dead, and your current allies would want you dead if they knew. Oh, and your doomsday plan is ticking away, with or without you. The Organization's plan is so vast and intricate that it's well beyond the ability of Kuseno to be both running it and be as available as we see him being for Genos.
And there's more trouble coming. If and when Genos makes it to Kuseno's grave, instead of finding the old man buried in his own backyard with all the decorum accorded to a dog, he'll find an empty grave and it will look like Bofoi was right after all. Neither he nor Bofoi know about the cyborgization strategy of the Neo Heroes.
This arc is almost certainly going to get darker.
Asides
[1] The manga goes further here: when Genos came back after Saitama told him off for street-fighting Sonic, Kuseno appears to have backed him up, and we see Genos being very butt-hurt about it. And when Kuseno comes to pay a visit, he looks around and praises Genos for surrounding himself with so many good people, not even adding a caveat. That is anti-control -- we know control freaks and abusers try to isolate their victims, not encourage them to form connections.
Hey, you there, One-Punch Man fan who isn't reading the webcomic. I say this for your own benefit that you're best off going elsewhere.
So, Genos has finally met his nemesis and it looks like terrible battle is about to be enjoined. The way things look, it would seem that things must end up with either the Mad Cyborg or Genos dead, Saitama's help optional. Maybe even both of them dead, though that would be sad.
I have been thinking for a while and I think that there's possibly a third option that doesn't involve death, which I'll explore with varying degrees of speculation. See under the cut.
The core idea is that Genos takes control of the Mad Cyborg and forces it to do his bidding. Sound crazy I'll take you through it.
A: Using Only What is Established
Let us assume that what we know to date is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. That is to say that everything we have been told is true; this truth is complete and there are no further secrets or revelations to come that will change our understanding of the situation; and that none of the interested parties have told half-truths or skewed the truth in any way. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to judge how likely this scenario is, but we're going with it.
Under such circumstances, it makes perfect sense for Genos to take control. One of the big challenges is that the Mad Cyborg has distributed copies of itself widely through a network and has control of a vast array of robots, multiple depots full of resources, and many people unwittingly working for it as proxies. Merely destroying the avatar currently goading Genos into some unfortunate action will solve nothing. If he can take control of said Mad Cyborg and its network, then several things happen:
It solves his resource problem
With that, Genos goes from a twice-abandoned waif with cripplingly complex (and costly) needs to someone who can meet his own needs independently. Just as pertinently, he becomes a powerful agent whose demands will have to be taken seriously. All may be equal before the law, but there's an incredible amount of nuance and latitude in its interpretation when the guy you're dealing with has the power to cause mass devastation. Furthermore, at this point in the story, just about anyone who could still mess with him knows that Saitama is his guardian, and really does not want to catch the Baldie's fists. The only powerful character who doesn't know better at this point is Blast, but it'd be bizarre for him to interest himself.
2. It allows him to set things right
Being that Genos is a good person, who from the start has wanted to set things right, using those vast resources to repair and restore as much of the damage done by the robots as possible would be a natural progression. With Saitama as a moral compass, there's little reason to fear that the power would go to his head. Also, it gives him something positive to do, which is much needed given how unexpectedly things have turned out for him. Otherwise, he'd likely sink into a morass of grief, betrayal, and anger with no guiding purpose.
3. Poetic Justice
The Mad Cyborg, AKA Dr. Kuseno, has hated humanity so much that he has long since digitised his brain, cutting every link with his original humanity. He has regarded humans as things to be manipulated, controlled, and eliminated according to whim. Ultimately, it seems he was aiming either for a human-free world, or one in which free humans no longer existed.
For such a person, no punishment would be more fitting or painful than being forced to use that considerable mind of his for the good of Mankind, and by none other than the waif whose name he considered too unimportant to remember.
B: With Some Scepticism
I won't belabour it, but I have grave doubt that we know the whole truth. In particular, I find it far more likely that the Mad Cyborg is not Dr. Kuseno, but rather an AI copy of the man that 'got away' -- as Bofoi and Isamu feared a powerful AI might do. I won't et into why I think this, let me refer you to the meta of this post.
In that case, Outcomes 1 and 2 are unchanged. However, 3 becomes interesting. It is no longer a punishment of a terrible person, but rather a correction of an inorganic consciousness gone astray in the absence of a recognised master. Not only would it be better for all that the rogue AI is serving humanity, but it'd complete Kuseno's true work in a fitting way.
Genos can't undo the lives lost nor restore all the places burned but he can ensure that this powerful invention serves its true purpose going forward. That'd be most poignant.
C: But Why Might ONE Go This Way?
Answer -- he might not! After all, his usual solution to dire problems in OPM is to have Saitama punch the problem away. It's an approach he cheerfully accepts limits the sort of story he can tell as most problems can't be punched. It might well be that the Mad Cyborg is lying about having multiple copies widely distributed and so being sent flying with a punch ends things.
However, I have my doubts here. Minimally, successfully punching out the Mad Cyborg still leaves behind a trail of devastation far more extensive than anything previously seen in this world, and a pile of money, weapons, militarised hardware, computing centres, and communications devices that various organisations will fight each other viciously for rather than allow to be used for any kind of restitution. ONE has not been afraid to allude to civil conflict, so going there is something he would have no problem with, doubly so with the Hero Association now greatly weakened. Having someone take control -- particularly someone who has as much right to do so as Genos does -- would stop a dangerous power vacuum from forming.
But it's deeper than that. The tragedy of a robot uprising is going to happen again on current headings because Metal Knight and others are doing the Exact. Same. Shit. Bofoi thinks that he's gotten the idea of an evil-fighting AI right because he's got ethical locks on it… and we've been shown that his ethical locks can and have been defeated before. Isamu may personally be cool on the idea, but his Cram School buddies are busy practising how to rule the world and make it peaceful, rehearsing perfectly the hubris that Kuseno and Bofoi alike suffer from.
To stop this shit needs a Reigen lecturing Claw moment. Between Saitama and his insistence on people being allowed to decide their actions for themselves, and Genos, who would be unique among people controlling an AI in knowing first-hand just how dangerous letting one decide is, they could. It's a simple message: a computer can analyse. It can advise. It can implement. But it can never, ever be allowed to decide. But it's an incredibly important message, one that both stubborn old men with vested interests and arrogant young ones who've never considered the unintended consequences of their actions, both need to have rammed home.
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Let's go round and interview a few scientists in OPM, shall we?
Us: Dr. Bofoi, we can't help but notice the extraordinary speed with which you cleared City A and erected a new headquarters, all at a small fraction of the cost that would have been expected. Beyond that, we notice that your capacity to build at scale is unparalleled. With so many people losing their homes to monster attacks and other disasters, why don't you take the next step and cure homelessness?
Dr. Bofoi: I don't want to cure homelessness. I want to bill the Hero Association for every Yen I can get. I assure you, it's going to a far more important cause. Actually, more importantly, how did you get in here?
____
Us: Dr. Kuseno, your endeavours in supporting the hero Demon Cyborg are truly extraordinary. Once people thought the dream of near-infinite clean energy from nuclear power to be a pipe dream, yet you appear to have solved this problem in an incredibly compact and robust way. Why don't you use your technology to cure energy shortage and usher in a new industrial revolution?
Dr Kuseno: Lol, I fear you may have mistaken me for someone with lofty ideals. I don't aspire to anything as grand as a new industrial revolution. I don't mind doing the odd good deed, but my aims are far more simple: I want to develop a killer cyborg through whom I can pour out the fullness of my burning rage against my enemies.
___
Us: Dr. Genus, you have not only understood the rules of life far better than any person but have rewritten them entirely. With your army of you, there are few fields that you do not have a purview of. Perhaps the most amazing thing you could do would be to harness your ability to clone flesh indefinitely to cure world hunger and stop the depredation of the natural world to feed humanity. How about it?
Dr. Genus: Starving is about all the unimproved mass of humanity deserves. I have no interest in curing world hunger. I just want somebody intelligent enough to talk to. Pause Which you most certainly aren't.
This is reference to an earlier meta I did a few weeks ago, pondering that Genos’s break from hunting for the cyborg to be Saitama’s disciple would come to an end sooner or later: ‘Summer is almost over’. I hoped that with the introduction of many cyborgs last year, this year would give us some insight into the mystery of the ‘mad’ cyborg. Ho ho ho...
This is long. There is blood. I will not apologise.
ONE’s ability to portray a terrifying obsessiveness can’t go unremarked on.
An explosive accusation
I’m skipping on a blow-by-blow account of the story: unusually for a ONE chapter, it stays on just one scene, that of Genos and Drive Knight talking. I’m glad that it’s Genos who has taken the initiative to find Drive Knight and ask the latter for whatever he knows about Dr Bofoi. This is a follow on from chapter 134, when Blue suggests to Genos that Dr Bofoi might be behind the modified monster attacks.
Drive Knight never does anything without carefully-calculated gain. And his choosing to show his tactical transformations to Genos is no exception. He is just as keen to talk to Genos, for his own reasons.
And what he has had to say is blood-curdling: first that Bofoi is systematically trying to take over the world by infiltrating key security systems and creating crises that weaken heroes and emergency services so he can swoop in with a robot army at the opportune moment.
And second, that like Genos, he Drive Knight is in pursuit of the rampaging cyborg who has destroyed many towns and villages before lying low, sheltered by Dr Bofoi.
Well, if Genos has seemed less ‘with it’ of late, HE’S WIDE AWAKE NOW.
Terrifying implications
Borg world is not a nice place: for people who have supposedly discarded their humanity, their existence is testimony to extreme human ingenuity, determination, and will to survive. In ‘borg world, as we’ve seen, whatever can be copied will. Only what you can defend you keep. And those who cannot defend themselves will be killed and eaten. Literally.
no love lost -- copyright Don Gutoski
Genos is no stranger to taking parts he finds useful and repurposing them for his own benefit. And now, he’s got the most extensively battle-tested set of parts we know of. Even if Drive Knight is crooked, he's absolutely truthful about Genos being worth a lot to the right people. Although, given how ruthlessly Drive Knight claims to have stripped many for their parts, I’m not comfortable with how keenly he’s been eyeing Genos up. Watch your back, Genos-kun.
for once, ONE has bothered to portray Genos as his handsome self -- one wrong step and he’ll be gutted like a fox
I can totally understand both why Dr. Kuseno has told Genos that he’s been hunting that cyborg for longer than Genos has and why it is absolutely imperative that Genos report back to him and not try fighting that cyborg alone. I don’t know exactly what the truth of what Drive Knight is saying is, but that this is a crazy-dangerous adversary is very true.
The idea that the rampaging cyborg is an associate of Bofoi's... that's a scary thought. It's possible. After all, a cyborg is first and foremost a human being. Even if Drive Knight’s supposition that the ‘mad’ cyborg is actively collaborating with Dr. Bofoi to take over the world is wrong, there is unquestionably a cyborg-based organization measuring up mankind and exploiting humans for its own purposes.
And neither can we forget whatever it is that is going on in the Neo Heroes, where an army of compliant meat-puppets is being created out of the unwilling bodies of strong people under the supervision of two very smug cyborgs of unknown provenance.
dance, meat-puppet, dance!
Yes, too, Bofoi has been using Hero Association funds to accumulate an army of robots and autonomous vehicles the limits of which no one knows. How are all these guys related? Are they really all coordinated by Dr Bofoi or are they separate actors? Are they even enemies?
WE NEED MORE CHAPTERS! C’mon ONE, don’t keep us hanging!
Also: attacking Dr Bofoi is suicide. `At the very least, Dr Bofoi is a very powerful, very trusted individual with the Hero Association whom the HA cannot afford to piss off and Genos is a newcomer the HA regards with suspicion. Even if the Dr is 100% innocent, it's not going to look good if Genos attacks him. If the Doctor is evil... then he has a lot of other powerful people in cahoots with him and it will really go badly if Genos attacks him.
Genos. Please report to Dr Kuseno before you go haring off to beard Dr Bofoi in his den and do battle with the ‘mad’ cyborg. Please at least say goodbye to Saitama before you disappear.
And whatever you do, Genos, this time wipe your own ass.
Btw, this isn’t to say that I trust Drive Knight. I trust that he’s not lying about what he understands to be true. He may be wrong, but he’s not misrepresenting what he thinks he knows. But by his own words, he’s a survivor who will exploit anything and anyone to survive.
What’s good for him might well not be what’s good for Genos.
