Genos stopped mid-step.
The energy analysis system in his optical sensors had caught something in the black smoke—a reading that had not been there a second ago, which was now climbing with the specific speed of a system that had been accumulating rather than generating, waiting for the right moment to express itself.
He started to turn.
The fist came through the smoke before the turn was complete.
It was a thing assembled from a hundred component pieces—engine plates, chassis fragments, metal bars driven through muscle and fat at the kind of angles that suggested the whole structure had decided on its own architecture—and it arrived with the combined mass of everything that had been drawn together in that street over the last ten minutes.
The air compressed ahead of it. Genos's hair went flat in the surge. His reflex system was reading the threat, but the gap between reading and responding was a fraction too long—
His collar caught.
Not gently. With the force of someone who has made a single rapid calculation and committed to its result, Genos's considerable metal body was redirected sideways, the hand at his collar providing enough lateral motion that the enormous fist passed through the space where his chest had been. He landed—was landed—several meters clear.
In the new position, he saw who had moved him.
Saitama. In the flip-flops. The two furrows his feet had carved into the asphalt to stop himself were each several centimeters deep.
He'd caught the fist with one hand.
His other hand was at his side. He was 1.75 meters. The thing he'd stopped was roughly as tall as the building behind it.
He turned his head, found Genos over his shoulder, and showed him the specific profile of a man who is doing a completely straightforward thing and is at peace with it.
"Genos." He actually sounded apologetic. "During a fight, you can't let your attention—oops."
The second fist came through the smoke while he was talking.
Jordan caught Genos as Saitama went past them in the opposite direction, attached to a glass curtain wall at approximately the third floor, his outline forming the kind of silhouette that engineers do not account for when designing facades. He descended with the specific sound of polished glass reconsidering its relationship with friction, touched down at street level, and sat there for a moment.
Genos stood beside Jordan, very still.
Jordan pressed his fingers to his forehead and breathed out through his nose. "Your teacher was also distracted," he said.
Genos considered this. Reached into a compartment somewhere in his chassis. Produced a notebook. Opened it to the relevant page with the seriousness of a scholar accessing a primary source.
He wrote, and read aloud as he wrote: "Saitama-sensei's principle—distraction in battle is completely unacceptable."
He nodded once, satisfied with the documentation.
Behind them, the black smoke resolved.
Not dissipated—resolved, the way smoke resolves when something is moving through it that is large enough to be its own weather. The sound arrived first: a roar that was not one sound but many, the compressed voices of everything that had been a motorcycle in this district over the last fifteen minutes, merged and amplified and given a single large mouth to come out of.
Then the Crazy Motorcycle King came out of the smoke.
It occupied the visual space that a five-story building occupies when the building is made of flesh and chassis components and is currently walking toward you. The torso was humanoid in the general sense—bilateral symmetry, approximately vertical orientation—but the head was absent, replaced at chest height by two hundred car headlights arranged in the compound-eye pattern of something that had seen the concept of a face and interpreted it loosely. The mouth was in the abdomen, a lateral tear in the flesh leaking something that smelled like burned oil and was not quite that. The arms were where the weight was: each forearm larger than the torso in diameter, each fist dragging on the street as it moved, the mass of them communicating something very specific about the kind of impact they could generate.
"I am the Crazy Motorcycle King!"
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere in the way that voices do when the face that should contain them is not present.
"Humans—are nothing—but mounts!"
Disaster level: Dragon.
Saitama somersaulted back to his original position with the ease of a man adjusting his footing. "Also was careless," he noted, apparently about himself, with the honest equanimity of a practitioner reviewing their own form.
"Sensei!" Genos's warning carried the urgency of someone who has done the threat calculation and does not like the result. "The monster—"
"I know, Genos."
The shadow of the descending fist covered most of the street.
Saitama looked up at it.
Something about his face changed—not dramatically, not with any announcement. One expression concluded and another took its place. The particular quality that made him look like a mild-mannered individual with an unfortunate hair situation became something else entirely: the face of a man who has made a decision about the next half-second and is completely at peace with it.
It was, if you looked at it without the hair loss, a genuinely striking face.
He didn't dodge backward. He drifted—the faint, minimal motion of someone adjusting their weight—and the road-roller mass of the fist met empty air and kept going, the impact it made with the ground registering as a structural event in buildings three blocks away.
"A hero," Saitama said, into the brief silence that followed, "shouldn't fall the same way twice."
His right hand came back. His body drew into the preparation—every muscle organized around a single point, the whole structure of him becoming a delivery system for one specific outcome. It was, technically, unremarkable. No ki flare. No audible charge. No signature that any measuring device in the Hero Association's inventory would have caught in advance.
Just a man, a fist, and the decision to extend one toward the other.
Normal Punch.
The air between Saitama's knuckles and the Crazy Motorcycle King's assembled bulk became an engineering problem for approximately zero seconds. The shockwave that followed was not a side effect—it was the event. The compression wave moved through Z-City's center at the velocity of something that had been prevented from moving for the duration of the punch and was now released all at once.
Glass curtain walls on both sides of the street became powder. Citizens a kilometer away experienced a pressure event. Car alarms that had survived the initial motorcycle incursion did not survive this.
The Crazy Motorcycle King stood in the aftermath of the punch for the specific duration it takes for a signal to travel from one end of a Dragon-level monster's body to the other and find that there is no longer any infrastructure to receive it.
Then the crisscross lines appeared—the failure propagating outward from the impact point in every direction simultaneously—and the monster found out what it had become.
The rain of blood and chassis parts that followed created, in the semicircle of street and building face ahead of Saitama's final position, a fan-shaped color study in dark red.
Saitama stood in the pose for a moment. Lowered his fist. Sniffed.
Sniffed again.
Looked at his fist. Brought it closer to his nose.
His expression completed a journey.
"Ugh. That smells horrible."
His legs became a blur.
The wind generated by his passing at speed hit Jordan and Genos simultaneously—trouser legs, jacket—and carried with it, fading rapidly into the middle distance, the sound of a man with complaints about odor management and extremely strong feelings about personal hygiene:
"This stinks. Jordan, Genos, I'm going home to shower!!"
The dust trail he left behind was a white line from the center of Z-City to the residential edge, straight as a thought and gone almost as fast.
Genos looked after him.
The moment extended for a while—the cyborg boy's optical sensors tracking the point where Saitama's silhouette had last been visible, which was now just empty air and a settling of disturbed dust. Something in his expression that was not quite wonder and not quite longing occupied the same space that both of those things did.
"Teacher's strength is still—" He stopped. Started again, softly: "When will I reach that level?"
"You will." Jordan put his arm around Genos's shoulders—the same easy gesture he'd used this morning with Saitama, the weight of it deliberately unceremonious. "Not tomorrow. Not next year. But the day is coming." He looked at Genos—at the genuine seriousness of the boy, the absolute lack of performance in any part of his investment in this question. "Keep going."