Jordan patted Genos on the shoulder—the stiff, alloy-reinforced shoulder of a cyborg who was still in firing stance and showed no intention of moving from it.
"Good work. Get some rest when you're done."
"Yes, Jordan. I understand."
Genos did not lower his arms.
The dojo slept through the small hours, and Jordan moved through the corridors as dawn began to feel like a real thing again rather than a concept.
He was halfway to the courtyard when the door ahead of him opened and two figures came through it at speed—shoes in hand, socks on the floor, operating with the coordinated urgency of people who have a schedule and have remembered it suddenly.
Both of them hit the brakes simultaneously when they registered him.
Jordan took a step back as Saitama's biologically engineered running shoes passed close enough to feel the air displacement. "What's happening? Where are you two going at this hour?"
"Supermarket sale." Saitama was already pacing in place, the motion generating a faint scorching smell from the corridor floor. "Saturday. Weekly. But the coupons are at the apartment so we have to run back first."
Jordan remembered this. Yesterday, in the dojo courtyard, when Saitama had explained why they couldn't stay much longer. It had been less than twenty-four hours ago.
Time does move.
"You coming?" Saitama asked. "We were going to run."
Jordan glanced at Genos behind him—high-kicking in careful synchronization with his teacher, expression set to determined, clearly prepared to run however many kilometers it took—and made the executive decision not to interrupt whatever this training dynamic was.
"I've got things to sort out here. You two go."
Saitama accepted this with the equanimity of a man who has already mentally allocated the car ride he was apparently not getting. He turned to Genos. "No taxi today. We run. Z-City. Let's go."
"Yes, Teacher!"
They launched.
The sonic boom was immediate. Jordan threw up a force field without thinking, deflecting the pressure wave and the subsequent dust column before it could take out the corridor wall. By the time the displaced air settled, the master and student were gone—not even footprints visible, just the fading echo of the detonation.
Jordan stood in the empty corridor.
He wanted the teleportation. The shape of it was obvious now—the careful inquiry, the disappointed acceptance, the determined pivot to running thirty-plus kilometers as the alternative. He's already got his eye on it as a mode of transport.
From whom did he learn to treat people as convenient infrastructure?
Jordan thought about this for a moment.
He decided not to examine it further.
King came to say goodbye mid-morning, having received a call from the M-City branch. Jordan took him back in the time it took to confirm the destination. Then breakfast. Then the dojo settling into its Saturday pace—morning training for the resident disciples, the smell of tea drifting from the inner rooms.
Bang was waiting for him in the courtyard with two cups already poured.
They drank in the comfortable silence of people who don't need to fill time with sound. The courtyard was good in the morning light—the mountain behind it, the clean air, the sound of training from somewhere in the back slope.
"You're heading out soon?" Jordan asked, when Bang mentioned his plans.
"We'd already arranged to go down the mountain for patrol and hero work." Bang set his cup down carefully. "Now I'm simply adding one more item to the agenda." His eyes moved toward the back mountain—the direction where the sounds of training had been coming from since before sunrise. "I can't know about Garou's situation and do nothing. He's my disciple. Whatever path he's on, that responsibility sits with me."
"You couldn't have known," Jordan said. "He worked hard to make sure of that."
"That's true." Bang's mouth curved without humor. "Which means he's been doing it long enough to develop the habit of concealment. That alone tells me how long I wasn't paying the right kind of attention." He picked up his cup. "Starting now, that changes."
Jordan refilled both cups from the pot. "So. Specifics?"
Bang held his tea in both hands and looked at Jordan with the calm of a man who has thought this through completely and is not asking for input—just sharing a plan as a courtesy.
"I'm going to have Garou join the Hero Association."
The tea went sideways.
Jordan's reflexes were very good. He caught most of the rotation in time and redirected his head, so the mouthful of hot tea became a spray that hit the courtyard plants rather than Bang. The plants accepted this without complaint.
"Hero—" His voice had an unfamiliar quality. "Garou."
"Starting at the grassroots level. The Z-City branch can be arranged without difficulty." Bang watched Jordan locate a cloth and apply it to his face. "Rank isn't the point. The point is that he finds something in the actual work of helping people—before the abstraction of 'becoming the strongest monster' hardens into something I can't reach."
Jordan was quiet for a moment.
He was thinking about a specific memory: a child in a hero role-play, assigned to play the monster because nobody chose him for any other part. The systematic, patient humiliation of a playground hierarchy that had decided where he belonged before he had any say in it. The way that kind of thing shapes something in a person if it sits long enough.
Garou's relationship with heroes wasn't theoretical. It was built on something real and old and deeply personal. Forcing him into a hero classification wouldn't redirect it—it would detonate it.
"There's a real possibility," Jordan said, picking his words carefully, "that putting him in a hero uniform makes everything worse. His whole self-conception is built in opposition to that frame. If you push him into it, the pushback might be severe enough that you lose the ground you have."
A series of precise, measured cracks rang out from across the table—the sound of large knuckles being worked through their range of motion, one joint at a time.
Bang's eyes had changed.
Not the warm, weathered ease of the dojo master. Not the quiet authority of the old teacher. Something older than either—the compressed, patient force that had once moved through the martial arts world like weather and left everything altered in its wake. It was not turned on Jordan. It was simply present, the way a mountain is present.
"Then I'll use my fists to bring him back to himself," Bang said.
The words were calm. The killing intent that accompanied them was not.
It passed through the courtyard like the leading edge of a cold front—bone-level, ancient, completely without malice toward anyone present and therefore somehow more serious than anger would have been. Jordan felt it move through him and noted that he'd let himself get comfortable with the silver-haired dojo master to the point of nearly forgetting what was underneath the gentleness.
Blood Wind. Exploding Heart Release Fist. He remembered the names now with appropriate weight attached to them. Right. This man swept through the entire martial arts world. The gentle part is real—but it's the surface.
Jordan composed his expression.
"You're right, of course," he said, with the diplomatic smoothness of someone who has just updated their risk assessment. "If Garou understood your intentions clearly, I'm sure he'd take the lesson to heart."
Bang set his knuckles down. The killing intent folded away as cleanly as it had appeared, replaced by the familiar warmth of a man in a courtyard having morning tea. He picked up his cup.
"That's what I think as well." He gestured toward Jordan's cup. "Drink before it cools."
Their eyes met across the table.
Both of them were smiling. The smiles were different and arrived from different directions, but the shape of the mutual understanding underneath was the same.
Jordan drank his tea.
Back mountain. Flowing Water Dojo.
The forest had been absorbing the sounds of training since before midnight—the rhythmic percussion of strikes against wood and stone, the controlled breathing of someone who has no interest in stopping just because the sun went down.
Garou had been meditating since the first grey light of pre-dawn filtered through the canopy, sitting absolutely still with the focused inwardness of someone doing serious internal work.
He sneezed.