Three poles past noon, the apartment was quiet.
The phone rang.
Jordan's arm moved from under the covers without the rest of him fully committing to consciousness. The electromagnetic field found the phone on the sofa—a nudge of control, silent, the ringtone cut before the second iteration completed. Tatsumaki, curled on her side with the specific stillness of someone who has been deeply asleep for several hours, made a small sound of complaint at the ghost of the noise and then subsided back into breathing.
He extracted his arm with the careful precision of a man who has learned that waking Tatsumaki up abruptly is its own category of problem. A thread of blue psychic light cushioned the transition—her weight distributed to the air for the half-second it took to clear—and then she was settled again, the blanket adjusted, the room undisturbed.
He floated out to the corridor and answered.
"This is Jordan."
"Good morning, boss!" The voice was mechanical in the way that voices are mechanical when they belong to something that started with organic components and has been progressively upgraded since. "It's—"
Jordan's processing caught up with his ears. "Armored Gorilla?"
A beat. "Yes, boss!"
At the House of Evolution, approximately three hundred kilometers away, an alloy-armored gorilla experienced a sudden drop in body temperature that had nothing to do with the thermostat.
He was quite certain—quite certain—that he had memorized the script. He had practiced it. He had his opening line.
The phone clattered against something. Muffled sounds of internal reorganization.
"Private Marseille, boss!" The Armored Gorilla spoke at the speed of something that has just remembered where the exit is. "The Doctor asked me to relay—the first batch of experimental results from the Human Superpower Factor Completion Project is ready for review. He'd appreciate your assessment when you have time. If you have time. At your convenience. There's no urgency—"
"I'll come by when I can."
"Yes, boss. Thank you. Sorry for bothering you."
In the House of Evolution's communications room, a gorilla in full alloy armor pressed its back against the wall and remained there, breathing through its nose, thinking about how many things could theoretically go wrong from the left foot stepping out of a lab first and whether that was actually a documented risk or something someone had made up.
Being a weirdo, the Armored Gorilla reflected, is a lot of administrative stress.
Jordan stretched into the morning air on the balcony—neck, shoulders, the long muscles down his back finding their range—and noticed Saitama looking at him with the expression of a man who has just remembered a principle.
"Good morning."
"Morning." Saitama, who had been halfway through hanging laundry, regarded him with the solemnity of someone about to deliver a correction. "We should probably wear clothes when we go outside. Even without close neighbors."
Jordan looked down at his pajama pants. Looked at the considerable collection of incidents he could cite involving Saitama and the absence of clothing at various stages of various events. Decided against.
"Noted."
"I'm just saying—"
The explosion interrupted the conversation with the social efficiency of explosions.
Orange-red. A streak of it, rising through the Z-City skyline two kilometers east. The kind of bloom that had a specific character—not the flat orange of a gas fire or the dirty grey of infrastructure damage, but something deliberate, concentrated, the controlled energy output of a system built to produce exactly that result.
Saitama shaded his eyes. "That looks like Genos's technique."
"It's the Incineration Cannon." Jordan was already floating. "Something found him on his grocery run."
Saitama dropped the laundry basket on the balcony railing—half the clothes immediately achieving their natural state of being half-dry—and said: "Let's go."
Z-City center. Street level.
"We are the awakened Crazy Motorcycle Tribe! Humans are not worthy to ride us! The road belongs to motorcycles! The age of human tyranny ends today!"
The chorus of this declaration was delivered by several hundred motorcycles, which had the distinguishing feature of having grown human arms and legs at some point in their recent past. They had a collective disaster level of Demon, which reflected the structural damage being applied to the surrounding three blocks. Shopping malls were learning about their ground-floor vulnerability. Vehicles had made involuntary contact with each other and with the road surface. The slogans continued regardless.
"The motorcycle is alive!"
"I'm being chased by motorcycles!"
"This weirdo is literally a motorcycle!"
Genos descended through the smoke column from the initial explosion with the calm precision of someone who has assessed the situation, identified the correct action, and begun executing it before landing. His entrance was a single knee on the asphalt, woven shopping basket clutched in one hand.
The nearest motorcycle-monster had approximately one second to register this development.
Genos's fist resolved the situation.
The Tiger-peak chassis, which had been engineered by whatever process had produced this particular variety of awakened vehicle, found that Genos's alloy construction had a different relationship with force than it had expected. The fuel tank met the sparks from the impact and made the natural decision. The explosion was contained. The Incineration Cannon came through the center of it—hotter, denser, the concentrated output of a nuclear-core system that had been calibrated for exactly this application—and moved down the street.
The charred remnants of the grocery basket hit the ground.
Several edamame pods and what had been a head of cabbage distributed themselves across the asphalt.
Genos stood in the aftermath, looking at the scattered ingredients, his eyes going through a temperature change that was visible even through the optical sensors.
"You destroyed the teacher's lunch."
The words arrived slowly. Precisely. The killing intent that accompanied them was, for a cyborg, unusually biological in its quality.
"Unforgivable."
The street exploded again as he launched, the Iron Fist driving through the next cluster of motorcycle-monsters with the energy of someone who has converted a grievance into a work objective.
Saitama materialized beside Jordan at the edge of the disaster zone, having arrived via spatial transport in the vest-and-shorts-and-flip-flops configuration of a man who left before the clothing conversation fully concluded.
He watched Genos move through the monsters—Iron Fist into Incineration Cannon, the two techniques integrating at the mechanical level, each exchange precise and total.
"Not bad," Saitama said, with the genuine appreciation of a teacher who has been paying attention.
Jordan's Mind Network was already extending through the surrounding buildings—the passive scan picking up heat signatures, movement patterns, the stragglers from the initial herd that had peeled off into storefronts and side streets. "There are still some that got into the buildings nearby." He tapped Saitama's shoulder. "We split up."
He teleported.
Saitama, no longer in contact with Jordan's spatial field, remembered gravity, and began the relationship with it that the absence of any flight capability produces. He oriented himself—five stories up, street below, a clear line of descent.
On the sidewalk, a motorcycle-monster had cornered a woman against a shopfront. It had the stance of something that had learned human body language from watching it at speed—the outstretched handlebars, the upright posture, the general impression of something that knew what it wanted and had decided the correct next move was to announce this.
"Hehe. A human mount. Not bad looking—"
The shadow arrived before the sound did.
The motorcycle-monster raised what would have been its head, if motorcycles had heads, and looked up.
"...What's that?"