The psychic force hit Saitama like a compressed wall of air—targeted, surgical, carrying enough power to send most things through the nearest structural surface.
Everything within three meters of Saitama remained completely undisturbed. Fubuki's tea didn't ripple. The hot pot kept boiling. Bang's chopsticks stayed exactly where he'd set them.
Tatsumaki's control, even furious, was precise enough to thread a needle at a hundred meters.
Saitama stopped walking.
He looked down at himself with the expression of someone who has noticed something mildly unusual. His arm—the one holding the shochu bottle—was emanating a rich, shimmering green. The light spread as he watched, moving up his shoulder and across his chest until his entire body glowed like something being handed out at a festival.
He moved his arm experimentally. The glow moved with him. He rolled his shoulder.
"...Huh. What is this?"
Across the table, Tatsumaki had gone absolutely still.
Her telekinesis was still there—she could feel it, wrapped completely around him, engaged with full purchase. The energy had made contact. It had enveloped him entirely.
He hadn't moved.
Not shifted his weight. Not stumbled. Not even registered it as resistance. The feedback traveling back through her psychic field wasn't the sensation of a person bracing against being lifted. It was the sensation of having wrapped her power around something that wasn't paying attention.
Like trying to move a planet.
—Telekinesis. Failed.
The word arrived in her mind with the quality of something that didn't make sense in the language she was reading it in.
She'd experienced this once before—one person, one specific signature that had sent her psychic force back with a repulsion that rewrote her sense of what was possible. And now this ordinary-looking man with thinning hair, standing in a dojo holding a bottle of shochu, was generating the same feedback. The same absolute quality. The same unconcerned immovability.
This person—could he actually be—
Her worldview didn't shudder. It tilted. Slowly, significantly, with the particular quality of something substantial shifting on its foundations.
"How is this possible?" Her voice came out quieter than she intended. "He looks nothing like Jordan or Blast—how could he—"
Saitama had located the source of the green light. He was looking at her now, frowning with the mild inconvenience of someone whose evening has developed a minor complication.
"Did you do this?" He extended his still-glowing hand toward her. "You should stop whatever you're trying—I was going to go find someone to drink with, and walking around looking like a glow stick is really weird."
He finished speaking.
Tatsumaki said nothing.
Jordan, sitting closest to her, turned to look. Her face had disappeared behind her bangs—completely, deliberately, hidden in shadow.
He pressed his palm against his forehead.
Oh no.
The green light didn't stop.
It intensified.
Tatsumaki rose into the air. Her dress, caught in the concentrated psychic energy spiraling around her, moved with perfect stillness—the eye of something that was about to have very significant weather. The aura of an S-Class hero at genuine limit emerged from her like a physical force, not directed, simply present, filling the room the way extreme cold fills a room—completely, without gaps.
The dojo went quiet.
Not socially quiet. Physically quiet—the kind of silence produced when the air itself becomes too heavy for casual sound. The disciples in the overnight quarters felt it through the walls. The boiling broth in the hot pot smoothed and stilled under the pressure, the surface going flat and glassy despite the heat below.
Garou's hand had stopped moving.
He was staring at Tatsumaki with his eyes showing something he almost never showed—not combat alertness, not tactical assessment. Something more fundamental. His chest had tightened.
There was a figure almost visible behind her. Tall. Singular. The memory of a single glance that had once made breathing feel optional.
That feeling. I haven't felt that from anyone except—
Bang set down his cup very carefully. His voice, when it came, was barely above conversational. "It seems my dojo may be about to become a historical site."
Fubuki had dropped a piece of meat back into her bowl without noticing. "What happened? She was fine a moment ago—who—"
King had gone very still. Through the Magnetic Field Rotation, he could read the shape of what Tatsumaki was generating—and beneath it, threaded through it, something that resonated with a signature he knew. The quality of it. The weight.
Fubuki-san's sister. Of course. Almost the same as Jordan.
Only Saitama remained genuinely puzzled. The green light around him had intensified to the point of being uncomfortable to look at directly, and he raised his free hand to shield his eyes, squinting.
"Hey—why is it getting brighter? This is actually kind of blinding—"
The psychic force shifted from pressure to vibration. A sustained, high-frequency tremor that found Saitama's mass and moved through it—his face blurring at the edges, his voice suddenly crackling with interference as his body registered the input without being affected by it.
"That's strange—I'm moving but I didn't tell myself to move—" He lifted a finger with the expression of someone making a helpful connection. "Oh! I know what this is! It's like King's thing—the drumbeat—what's it called—King Engine!"
In the spiritual dimension, something snapped.
The windows of the dojo rattled in their frames. Outside, the mountain answered—a vast green storm erupting from the peak's vicinity, spiraling outward with the organized fury of something that has been given direction. The mountain range, stretching for hundreds of miles in either direction, trembled. Not violently. Just enough.
Every bird in the forest left simultaneously.
The wild animals were already gone.
"Alright." Jordan stood up.
He looked at Saitama with the direct communication of someone who needs exactly one thing from another person right now. "Saitama. Stop talking. Go drink."
Saitama took this in. "Oh. Okay." He turned and walked back toward the table with the cooperative ease of a man who has no particular attachment to his current position.
Jordan breathed out once.
One down.
"Trying to run—" Tatsumaki's voice was very quiet. Her eyes, lowered, carried a green light that was steady in the particular way that pressure is steady before it finds a release. Her arms had begun to open. "Where exactly do you think—"
A hand settled on her shoulder.
Warm. Unhurried. Just weight.
The hot pot started bubbling again.
The pressure that had been pressing down on every person in the room lifted—not gradually, but completely, as though a switch had been thrown. Fubuki felt her shoulders drop. Genos's optical sensors returned to standard mode. Garou exhaled without deciding to.
Outside the dojo, the green storm dissolved into ordinary mountain wind.
The space where Jordan and Tatsumaki had been was empty. Both of them were simply no longer there.
Bang picked up a cloth from the table and pressed it briefly to his forehead.
"Jordan-kun." He looked at the empty space with the expression of genuine relief. "Once again, the dojo stands."
Across the table, the hot pot resumed its patient boiling, indifferent to the last sixty seconds.
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