"From now on," Tatsumaki said, addressing the middle distance rather than Fubuki directly, her aura receding to its standard operating levels, "your decisions are your own."
The threat arrived wrapped in something that was almost generosity.
"But if I find out you were injured because of those people—" Her eyes moved to her sister, and the smile that appeared was not quite friendly, "—I will not be making decisions about how I respond to that. Are we clear?"
Fubuki opened her mouth.
Jordan caught her eye and made a very small movement with his head.
She closed her mouth. The Blizzard Group, she did not say, is perfectly capable of handling its own safety, and my injuries are not my team members' fault by any causal chain I'm aware of.
"Clear," she said instead.
City A's commercial district was, it turned out, excellent at not recognizing people who didn't want to be recognized. Fubuki's sunglasses were large enough to reframe Tatsumaki's face entirely, and the borrowed jacket over a different skirt combination disrupted the silhouette that usually preceded crowd formation.
They made it through the afternoon without incident.
Jordan returned to Z-City after dark, landed on the balcony of Saitama's apartment, and found Genos in the process of hanging laundry with the systematic attention he brought to all tasks regardless of their scale.
"Jordan." Genos bowed slightly, a hanger in each hand. "Welcome back."
"Evening." Jordan changed into his slippers and looked at the shirt Genos was carefully attaching to the line—a beach print, with a small patch stitched near the hem in thread that nearly matched the surrounding fabric. Nearly. "Did something happen today? There's a patch on that."
Genos looked at the shirt, then at Jordan, with the brief expression of someone recalibrating their estimate of another person's observational capability.
"Yes," he said, and described the day with the methodical clarity he brought to all combat reports.
Supermarket. Saturday sale. The discounted ingredients Saitama had been anticipating since the previous morning. A monster called the Frozen Mane King—Tiger-level, cold-air projection, not particularly powerful in Jordan's framework, but apparently possessing a very specific talent for destroying exactly the things that mattered most on a given day.
"The low-temperature warehouse," Genos said. "All the discounted stock. The monster destroyed it thoroughly before Sensei engaged." A pause. "Master was—quite displeased."
Jordan could construct the scene without additional information. Saitama, confronted with the annihilation of the discounted beef he'd been mentally preparing to cook since yesterday morning, experiencing the specific flavor of frustration that arises when something small but significant has been ruined—and then the expression that followed, which was the last expression anyone needed to be on the receiving end of.
"He destroyed the monster?"
"And the remainder of the warehouse, yes. In a single strike." Genos's camera eye registered the memory with something adjacent to reverence. "I recorded the complete sequence with the high-speed module. I cannot determine from any frame precisely how the monster ceased to exist. The recording simply shows it being present, and then not present."
Jordan said, "Broken down to component parts, probably."
Genos's eyes lit up with the specific warmth of someone whose independent conclusion has been validated. "That was my assessment as well! Jordan—could you describe what that looks like when—"
"What did this one look like? The monster."
"Wielded a butcher's knife," Genos said. "Pre-mutation race was likely pig."
Jordan was quiet for a moment.
Frozen Mane King. He turned the name over. A monster with cold-air projection, a butcher's knife, and a porcine origin, who had appeared in a supermarket cold storage facility on discount day.
Frozen pork. In cold storage. Something went wrong with the storage conditions and the meat—
You debut on supermarket discount day and pick the cold storage as your target. That's just bad luck. Or karma. Possibly both.
"Thank you, Genos." Jordan patted his shoulder. "Good work today."
"Not at all." Genos bowed. "It's what I should do."
Inside, Saitama had constructed a small fortress of consolation on the coffee table—high-end snacks arranged around a halved watermelon with a straw in it, the kind of spread that Genos assembled whenever his assessment indicated emotional weather. Saitama was lying on the cushion watching television with the specific energy of a man who has had a bad day and is processing it through inertia.
"Jordan. You're back."
"For a bit, yes." Jordan dropped onto the couch, reached across, and opened one of the snack bags. "Heard about the supermarket."
Saitama's head turned toward the balcony where Genos was still working. "...He told you."
"He did." Jordan ate a cracker. "I have a question."
"What."
"You destroyed the monster and the warehouse. Did the supermarket bill you for the warehouse?"
The silence that followed had a texture.
Saitama sat up slowly. His expression moved through several stages—the brief flash of strong mode that arrived automatically at any implication of threat, followed by the deflation of someone who has been confronted with a practical problem they hadn't fully considered.
He scratched the back of his head. "Do heroes pay compensation for defeating monsters? That doesn't seem right."
"The monster didn't build the warehouse," Jordan said. "The warehouse was there before the monster."
Saitama worked through this. His watermelon straw went untouched.
"How much," he said eventually, "would that be."
"Cold storage facility. Commercial scale. Labor, site, refrigeration equipment, contents." Jordan tilted his head. "Several hundred million yen isn't unreasonable."
The watermelon, when Saitama finally sipped it, tasted like financial anxiety.
"What do I do."
He looked genuinely troubled—the specific trouble of someone who doesn't have several hundred million yen and has just been made aware that they might need it. Genos was still on the balcony. The debt collectors existed in his imagination as a vivid and impending presence.
Jordan leaned forward.
"It's actually simple," he said. "And the timing is right."
"What timing."
"Join the Hero Association." Jordan's eyes had the quality of someone who has been waiting for this conversation for a while. "Register properly. Become a hero. When a registered hero defeats a monster, any collateral damage is covered under Association liability protocol—it's built into the operational framework specifically because monsters don't stay in convenient empty spaces."
Saitama frowned.
"It sounds like..." He turned the concept over, finding the edges of it uncomfortable. "Like turning a hobby into a job. And jobs have supervisors. And supervisors give orders." He set the watermelon straw down. "That sounds like a lot of trouble."