Saitama tilted his head.
Floating at roughly shoulder height beside him, idly turning over a gold-bordered SSR card with one hand and a small fan of white-bordered N cards with the other, F-boy returned the look with the cooperative ease of an entity that had long since stopped finding anything about this situation unusual.
Good morning, Saitama-san.
The greeting was polite and direct. Saitama accepted it with a small nod.
He'd been confused about F-boy, initially — the spectral companion that Jordan apparently carried everywhere, sometimes visible, sometimes not, always doing something obscure with cards. Jordan had explained it. After that, Saitama's approach to F-boy's appearances had settled into the pragmatic accommodation he applied to most things that were unusual but unthreatening: acknowledge it, move on, don't overthink it.
It's Jordan's Stand, he'd concluded. It can't really affect me. Probably.
The encounter passed as encounters with F-boy tended to pass — briefly, without incident, and without any record of it in the perception of most people nearby.
Except King.
The burly man with three scars had stopped walking. His gaze was fixed on the empty air where F-boy had been before the cards shifted and the presence moved on, and his expression was the specific expression of someone whose newly developed supernatural perception has just provided data that contradicts the observable consensus around them.
King had crossed into genuine top-tier territory over the past months — his magnetic field enhancement pushing his physique and spiritual awareness past the thresholds where ordinary human perception applied. This had a consequence: he could now occasionally see things that other people couldn't. F-boy fell into this category.
Something purple-tinged just... went past. Right there. Didn't anyone else—
He looked around. Nobody had reacted. Saitama was already continuing forward. Jordan hadn't broken stride.
...I'm seeing things, probably. Or I'm not seeing things, but it wasn't an anime girl, so I'll let it go.
He resumed walking.
"You've been working toward greater power this whole time," Saitama said, to Genos. He said it with the unhurried directness of someone stating something they'd noticed, not delivering a lesson. "Haven't you?"
Genos went still.
For a combat chip running continuous processing, stillness meant something — it meant the processing had found something worth stopping for. The question sat in his attention and something happened with it that was different from analysis. Simpler. The kind of recognition that arrives not as data but as orientation: yes. That's the thing. That's what I've been doing.
"...Ah." The response came up from somewhere below his usual register. "Thank you, Saitama-sensei."
His frame straightened. The previous internal weather — the frustration and the distance and the mad cyborg at the end of the road that kept not getting closer — had not been answered. But something else had been answered, something about the direction itself rather than the destination, and it was enough to reset his posture.
Why does this child get so affected for such simple reasons, the observation drifted through the general mind-reading capacity in the vicinity, without being attached to anyone specific.
"Saitama, Genos, King, Atomic Samurai—" Jordan's voice carried across the ruins. He was standing with Bang at the edge of what had been the main impact zone, one arm raised in a beckoning wave. "Time to move!"
The group converged. Fell into a loose formation heading back toward the portal site.
Genos walked with the composure of someone who has recently been told something useful by the right person. It was a quiet composure but visible from the right angle — a straightness in his posture, a settled quality in his forward motion, that read as satisfaction.
Atomic Samurai, falling into step a few paces behind, observed this with the expression of a man writing a private editorial.
Anyone watching from outside would think you personally killed the Dragon-level monster, he did not say. You fired one cannon shot and then spent the rest of the fight in recovery mode. I cut off a quarter of its body length single-handedly. He reconsidered. Though I suppose I didn't actually finish it either. And his teacher— he looked toward the back of Saitama's head — is someone I am content, on reflection, to have never personally challenged.
He kept this assessment private and kept walking.
Behind them, in the streets the heroes were still clearing, the last exchanges of the secondary engagement were wrapping up.
The two centipede monsters that Jordan had surfaced — brought up from the sewage network with a precise, contained application of the Rinne Sharingan that gave them direction without giving them coordination — had served their purpose as training targets and had been killed by their purpose. Senior Centipede's regeneration had been an interesting problem for approximately three minutes before the accumulated pressure of a full graduating class overwhelmed it. Neither monster had made it out of the block.
Jordan had tabulated the outcome before the dust settled.
"The credit results for today's engagement," he said, addressing the assembled heroes, "have been calculated."
The noise in the group changed quality — the post-combat settling giving way to the focused attention that the credit system reliably produced.
He laid out the framework: Wolf-level threats at one credit each, a baseline that worked as a consolation for trainees who needed the number but not the challenge. Tiger and Ghost level at ten and thirty respectively for this engagement. The two centipede monsters alone, across the participating heroes, averaged sixty credits each — more than two weeks of steady camp accumulation, in a single afternoon's work.
For several heroes, this put a second redemption within reach.
For Mumen Rider, it was already there.
The celebration that followed had the specific character of people who have done actual work and are now receiving actual results for it — louder than polite, less organized than professional, exactly as justified as it felt.
"The graduation party is back on," Jordan confirmed. "Better, in fact."
On the top floor of one of the few buildings in S-City's outlying district that had survived Elder Centipede's pass untouched, a muscular figure stood at the parapet.
Black uniform. Baseball cap, worn low. He watched the group of heroes in the ruins below begin their portal transit, the blue gate opening and admitting them one by one, and said, to the open air: "Finally."
He turned.
Snapped his fingers.
The energy that left the snap was invisible to most people — not a physical force, not sound, but something that moved through the city anyway, registering in the perceptions of those sensitive enough to detect it. Saitama, stepping through the portal's edge, turned sharply and scanned the skyline. The rooftop was empty. The parapet held no weight, no presence, no residual signature beyond the fact that something had just been there and was now elsewhere.
Jordan's hand settled briefly on Saitama's shoulder.
"Big meal waiting. Royal Manor. Let's go."
Saitama faced forward. His stride noticeably changed tempo.
Whatever had been on that rooftop, it wasn't a monster. He'd felt the difference often enough to know. Beyond that, it wasn't his jurisdiction.
The portal closed behind the last of them.
The Royal Manor Hotel occupied a stretch of landscaped property on D-City's outskirts that had been designed by someone who believed that luxury and access were not in conflict. The open-air lawn stretched from the main building to a hedged perimeter that someone had trimmed with serious intent, and the buffet tables, which the hotel's management had been instructed to replenish without limit, held the kind of spread that required a committee to assemble.
The heroes reached it at a pace that the waiting waitstaff described privately, later, as very fast.
Jordan flagged the hotel manager — portly, small mustache, the bearing of someone who ran a premium operation with genuine investment in its reputation. The man arrived with the efficient warmth of someone who both understood service and enjoyed providing it.
"Unlimited replenishment on everything. Food, wine, everything you have. We'll settle whatever the number comes to."
The manager's eyes creased with the full-body satisfaction of a hospitality professional receiving the instruction he was built to receive, and he went to execute it with the enthusiasm of his profession.
Jordan watched him go and recalled, from the reconnaissance he'd done before booking, that the man was technically registered as an S-class hero — a fact that sat in his memory as mildly interesting. The hotel work appeared to be genuine. The manner contained nothing of the specific flavor Jordan had been half-expecting: no awareness of rank differential, no assessment of the visitors' hero status, no calculation happening behind the warmth.
Just a man who ran a good hotel and was glad to have the business.
Oddly refreshing, Jordan decided. And slightly anticlimactic.
In S-City, the work the War God shadow clone had been holding in reserve completed itself.
Seven-colored infinite power swept through the empty city in a single comprehensive wave — finding every person who had been relocated underground or into protective displacement, following the thread of each soul back to the coordinates it belonged to, and returning them. Not deposited — returned, each person arriving at the precise location they had been when the shadow clone had moved them, as though no gap had occurred.
For the fraction of a second the return took, the Rinne Sharingan's pattern appeared in every set of eyes simultaneously — a brief ghost of crimson and rotating marks, present and then not present, leaving no conscious trace behind.
The citizens of S-City became aware of themselves standing in their homes, on their streets, at the edges of the destruction that had come to them while they apparently — according to what they could reconstruct — had been somewhere safe.
They looked at the ruins.
They looked at the places where buildings had been and were no longer buildings. They looked at the parallel furrows in the asphalt and the embedded sections of purple shell that stood at intervals like grotesque monuments to what had passed through.
The crying started in several places at once.
No one had died. In the context of what Elder Centipede at its previous rate of progress would have produced, this was a fact so statistically improbable that it would, in time, prompt investigation from people who studied disaster outcomes. For now, it was simply a fact, and the citizens received it the way people receive facts that are better than they deserve — with grief for what was lost, and the beginnings of the particular gratitude that comes from having been protected by something you didn't know was there.
Their memories had been edited with the lightest possible touch. The broad shape was intact: a monstrous centipede had emerged and destroyed a significant portion of their city. Heroes had arrived and dealt with it. The specific sequence — the time freeze, the evacuation, the physics of what the final punch had done — were compressed into the version that made narrative sense: a group had come, led by the hero in the battered yellow jumpsuit.
He'd punched the giant centipede once.
That had been enough.
The name that circulated through S-City in the hours that followed, passing from person to person, combining witness accounts and security footage fragments and the three seconds of footage from a traffic camera that had survived to capture something moving very fast: The Balding Cape Hero. Unremarkable uniform. Unremarkable demeanor. Punched a 10,000-meter Dragon-level monster out of existence and then apparently wandered off looking for dinner.
The Hero Association would not know what to do with the report.
The people of S-City, for their part, seemed to feel they'd gotten a fair trade.
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