The lab coat dissolved in a quiet flash of Dragon Clan light when Jordan removed it—neat, no residue, the kind of small demonstration that Dr. Kuseno had stopped actively reacting to about forty minutes ago and had started simply filing as a data point.
"I have a contact in bioengineering if you need technical support on the biological integration," Jordan said. "Dr. Genus. Genetics specialist. He's done good work."
Dr. Kuseno shook his head, though not dismissively. "I appreciate it. But this concerns Genos specifically—the core architecture of what makes him him." He picked up his tea, which had long since gone cold and which he appeared to be drinking on principle. "I'd prefer to see it through myself."
Jordan looked at the man—the posture of someone who had never stopped learning, the specific humility of someone who had learned enough to know how much remained. Physics, materials science, mechanical engineering, energy systems, and now apparently biological sciences added to the list.
Hidden polymath, Jordan noted, with genuine appreciation. The quiet kind.
"Understood entirely," he said. "The materials are yours. The rest is your work."
They shook hands at the gate—Dr. Kuseno's grip firm, his expression carrying the specific warmth of someone who has had a conversation they'll be thinking about for a long time—and Jordan stepped back into the forest, pressed two fingers to his brow, and went to find a monitoring room.
Z-City. Hero Association Branch. Control Room.
The surveillance feed for Examination Venue No. 6 was currently occupying most of the large screen, and most of the large screen was currently occupied by the results of Saitama attempting the lateral jump test.
The room had gone fairly quiet.
"He's performing well," Lanny said, with the professional composure of a woman who had decided she was going to advocate for this candidate with a straight face regardless of what that required. She zoomed in on the relevant camera. "Impressively, even."
Jordan picked up his cappuccino—Lanny's staff had produced it within two minutes of his arrival, which he appreciated—and watched the screen.
The venue below held upward of two thousand examinees, which was standard for Venue No. 6's capacity. The crowd had the texture of any large selection process: people in various states of preparation, ranging from genuinely formidable to optimistically overconfident, the whole spectrum that the Hero Association's popularity generated every year without fail. Physical fitness test, written exam, practical assessment—the machinery of institutional evaluation running on schedule.
Saitama was in the lateral jump queue.
He had arrived for his assessment wearing the expression he wore when doing something he'd decided to take seriously, which was an expression that sat in the same general region as his relaxed expression and his sleeping expression, but with slightly more eyebrow involvement. He was in a dark blue compression outfit that left his physique comprehensively visible. His hair—the specific architecture of it, sparse in certain areas, committed in others, defying easy categorization—was, in the entire crowd of two thousand, absolutely singular.
The people around him had opinions about this. He was filtering them out with the efficiency of someone who had long since learned to run that particular process in the background.
The referee called the event. Saitama's expression shifted one degree.
The cement floor provided a small amount of resistance to Saitama's initial positioning, and then stopped providing it, two footprint-shaped impressions now present where previously flat surface had been.
The lateral jumps began.
The referee's counting function lasted approximately three iterations before the counting system encountered a threshold problem. Saitama's figure was moving between the two points faster than the air cleared from his previous position—the sound of his movement arrived after he had already reversed direction, the wind generated by each crossing briefly displacing the referee's paperwork and then the referee's hat. The afterimages stacked.
"I—" The referee looked at his counter. Looked at the screen. Made a notation that communicated that a notation was being made without specifying what it noted.
In the crowd: Can't see anything. That man is fast. Is he with Super Cop? Balding at that age, what a shame. Don't judge a book—
Jordan set down his cappuccino.
"Of course he is," he said, to Lanny's remark about Saitama's performance, with the tone of someone who has invested significant professional credibility in a position and is receiving early confirmation.
Lanny pressed a knuckle to her cheek and said nothing. The polite sweat on her brow suggested that the confirmation, while welcome, had arrived in a form she hadn't fully prepared for.
City A. Hero Association Headquarters. Third Disaster Monitoring Room.
Sitch had been in meetings all morning and had arrived at the monitoring room at a pace that his staff described, later and among themselves, as purposeful. He had the recommendation form in his folder, which he had reviewed three times since receiving it.
On the main screen: a multi-panel display, live surveillance from Venue No. 6.
Three panels were currently running on continuous loop. His staff had set this up without being asked, which meant they'd reached the same conclusion he had about where to point the cameras.
All three subjects were from Venue No. 6. All three had, to this point in the assessment, produced perfect scores across every physical evaluation they'd attempted.
The left panel: Genos. Metal chassis, power core reading off the charts, every assessment item completed at a level that the equipment had been built to measure exceptional people against and was now simply verifying was exceptional. Clear. Legible. Impressive in the way that excellent engineering is impressive.
The right panel: a white-haired young man with the bearing of someone who was treating a hero assessment the way a chess grandmaster treats a casual game—engaged, technically precise, the performance of someone operating well below their ceiling by choice. Several of the assessment officers had stopped doing other things to watch him. Garou. Under Bang's accompaniment, which was a diplomatic way of describing the sequence of events that had apparently resulted in this registration.
The center panel: Saitama.
The shot put had gone through the ceiling. The first time.
The second time, he had accidentally demonstrated that his skull was load-bearing in a different sense than the structural engineers had intended.
The whack-a-mole machine had simply ceased to function—not broken in any specific way, just done, the mechanism having encountered a speed differential it lacked the vocabulary to process.
The boxing machine's readout had displayed a number, reconsidered, and gone dark.
The 1500-meter race had ended with Saitama lapping the field three times, reaching the finish line, and then standing there for the duration with an expression that suggested he was thinking about something else.
In the weightlifting event, the standard maximum assessment weight had been brought out—the S-Class benchmark, the load that Super Alloy Darkshine was currently using for serious training at headquarters—and Saitama had picked it up one-handed with the specific motion of someone checking whether a bag is too heavy to carry, then set it back down.
Every score was perfect, in the sense that perfect meant the measurement system reached its limit.
The cadres standing behind Sitch were doing something he recognized: trying to find the framework that would make what they were watching make sense. They were cycling through athletic records, known S-Class benchmarks, documented anomalies from previous assessment history. None of it was landing.
Sitch watched the center panel. Saitama was waiting for his next event, hands in his pockets, looking around with the mild interest of someone at a fair who has already been on all the rides.
It's as if—
The thought formed itself in the back of the room from several directions simultaneously, unspoken, unanimous.
It's as if something is living inside this person that has simply never been asked to try.
Sitch adjusted his folder and said, to the room and to no one, "Get me the assessment supervisors on the phone. I want to be present for the written portion."
His staff moved.
On the screen, Saitama yawned—covering his mouth with the back of his hand, politely, the yawn of a man who had been up since early and was waiting for the next item on a list—and the cadres who saw it experienced a very specific collective feeling that none of them were going to put in a report.
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