Genos had stopped waiting for a better moment.
The energy nodes across the cannon base lit in sequence, the mechanical hum building as each one confirmed ready status and handed off to the next. The muzzle tracked Elder Centipede's head with the deliberate patience of a targeting system that had been given one shot and intended to use it correctly.
The energy core in Genos's chest — the miniaturized nuclear technology that functioned like something out of a Stark Industries schematic, a compact system producing continuous massive power output — was currently being redirected from sustain to peak discharge. This was the distinction that mattered: under normal operational load, the core could power Genos through extended intense combat without approaching dangerous parameters. Routed through the cannon, it could fire once. After that, the core would be running in red-temperature overload, and anything that required energy beyond that point carried the risk of cascade failure — the self-destruction that Genos had never deployed because he'd met Jordan and Saitama early enough to have reasons not to.
One shot. The calculation had to be right.
Real-time targeting variables scrolled through his visual processors. Atmospheric dispersion, the centipede's current velocity, King's attack angle and the predicted recoil vector, the precise entry point that would direct the beam through existing structural damage rather than against intact shell.
"Mr. King!" The shout was operationally necessary rather than an expression of urgency. "I'm firing! Cover yourself!"
King had already registered Genos's assembly through the Mind Network — the floating cannon fortress had been difficult to miss even without the network's passive coverage, and he had privately thought that the chance to operate that weapon would be interesting to explore later. He drove a plasma-charged uppercut into Elder Centipede's head that sent it deflecting upward, bought the clearance angle he needed, and called back: "Understood, Genos-kun! Don't worry about me!"
The core discharged.
The muzzle went from dark to blinding in under a second.
"Super Spiral Rail-Accelerated Incineration Cannon!"
The projectile was not a projectile in the conventional sense — it was plasma, compressed and accelerated by the cannon's magnetic field into a coherent beam that covered the distance between Genos and Elder Centipede's open maw in the time it took for the sound of the firing to start traveling. The spiral of the acceleration gave it a rotational component that the entry wound would confirm was not decorative.
The beam entered through the gaping mouth.
From the inside, it did what beams of heated plasma do to biological tissue.
Elder Centipede's roar changed register — from the sound of a creature expressing dominance to the sound of a creature that has encountered something genuinely unwelcome in a location it considered protected. Flames erupted from the gaps between its carapace segments along the full length of its visible body, burning outward in gouts as the heat found its way through.
Jordan watched without moving. His vision registered the internal process clearly: the tissue scorched, blackened, began to necrotize — and then the regrowth started before the burning had finished. New cellular material generating from the edges of the damage zone, claiming the space the destruction was vacating, filling it with working tissue at a rate that operated on a fundamentally different timeline from the destruction being applied.
The flames died.
The carapace segments that had been forced apart by the heat began to close. Elder Centipede rolled, once, and the scorched outer layer shook free in flakes, leaving underneath a surface that had already rebuilt itself to the familiar purple sheen. A sound emerged from somewhere inside the creature that may have been a burp. Heat radiated from the shell in visible waves.
Otherwise, it looked approximately as it had before the firing.
Genos extracted himself from the cannon assembly — which had absorbed enough heat from the discharge to qualify as scrap metal — and remained airborne, barely. The overload parameters were present and accurate. He could hold altitude. He could not, at this moment, fight.
He looked at the creature below.
"This is—" His voice had the quality of a combat system encountering a result it had no protocol for. "This is insane."
Below, the heroes who had been watching the combined King-Genos assault with mounting hope were processing the same information from a different angle.
"Its vitality — even S-Class attacks can't—"
"Can we actually win against something like this?"
"If this continues—"
The logic was audible in the tone even when the words were left incomplete: King was not losing, but King was also not winning. Genos was out of his primary offensive option. The stalemate that existed right now was not sustainable — a creature with effectively unlimited regeneration against a team with finite energy reserves had only one long-term outcome.
Jordan looked from the assembled heroes to Saitama, who had been warming up with the distracted focus of someone who has heard that there's a fight ahead and is running through stretches while he waits for the appropriate moment to be introduced to it.
"Gentlemen." Jordan raised his voice slightly to carry over the ambient noise of the ongoing combat above. "There's more than one centipede in the city." He gestured toward the surrounding ruins. "The senior instructors will handle that one. The rest of us will clear what's in the streets. Questions?"
No questions.
Bang rolled his shoulder joint, listening to it settle. He had been assessing the Elder Centipede for the last few minutes with the part of his mind that spent its time understanding how things moved and where they were vulnerable, and had arrived at an honest conclusion: the Flowing Water Fist as currently configured was not the answer to this particular problem. The creature's size placed most of its structure outside the range where his techniques could be applied efficiently, and the regeneration eliminated the marginal approaches.
For this, you would want someone who could apply continuous force at a scale that disrupted the regeneration faster than it operated. You would want his brother.
"I'll go along with the trainees," he said. "Keep an eye on things."
"Perfect," Jordan said, with the warmth of someone who had just had a problem neatly resolved. "Having you there is ideal."
Bang nodded, already walking.
Behind his composed expression, his thoughts had moved approximately forty steps ahead, to the letter he needed to write. His brother had been in the mountains for long enough. Z-City had become the kind of place where interesting things happened to people with the right foundation — Jordan's influence made sure of that. If he asked Jordan to spend a session with his brother the way he'd spent sessions with the trainees—
The expression that came from imagining his older brother's face during a Potential Guidance session was one Bang kept to himself, but it was very good.
I'll write tonight, he decided, following the group at an easy pace.
Thirty meters underground, in what had been S-City's western sewage network, two creatures paused.
They had been feeding on the infrastructure with the unhurried thoroughness of things that had been doing this for long enough to have preferences — the older municipal lines had certain qualities that the newer sections lacked — and the sudden cessation of surface sounds that should have been present was registered as information.
The human faces fused to their heads went still.
Then the eyes lit.
Scarlet, specific, rotating tomoe visible in the irises at the center of the glow — the pattern moving with the steady precision of something controlled rather than natural.
Above.
Two bodies oriented upward and launched.
The ground opened in two places simultaneously, and what came out of each hole was not the Elder Centipede's scale.
The first was compact, its shell rounded and dense, the color of cooked shellfish — red-orange, the hard kind. Standing height of a few stories. It oriented on the nearest human presence and showed its mandibles.
Centipede Junior. Tiger-level.
The second was longer, bluer, its carapace edges sharper and more distinct than the younger one's curves. It uncoiled as it emerged, length sufficient to encircle the street block it had surfaced in, and it was still moving when the end of its body cleared the ground.
Senior Centipede. Ghost-level.
The collective exhale from the assembled trainees was audible and genuine.
"This—"
"Okay. This is a size we can work with."
"My confidence is completely restored!"
The reversal in posture was immediate — people who had been watching Elder Centipede with the dawning awareness that their skill set might not be relevant had found, in the two smaller creatures orienting on them, something that existed in a comprehensible frame of reference. Tiger-level and Ghost-level. Numbers with known values attached. The equations were ones they'd been trained to solve.
Captain Mizuki had already reached into her shorts pocket. What she produced was a baton — compact, unremarkable-looking until you understood what it was: a multi-mode weapon specifically configured for her combat style, capable of extending into pole vault configuration, javelin mode, hammer-chain mode, and several other variants that would only make sense to someone who had spent their career treating track and field as a martial art. She looked at Centipede Junior's many legs, assessed the geometry of the situation, and made an honest face.
"I genuinely do not like this type of monster," she said, with the candor of someone who had decided at some point to be honest about her preferences. "I'll maintain range support."
From behind her, a set of headphones was adjusted upward by two small hands. Forte, her music turned up to the level she used for fights she was committing to rather than evaluating, stepped through the gap that Mizuki's step back had created.
"Bugs are fine," she said, already moving forward. "We've got these two."