Genos descended through the smoke column from the adjacent block, thrusters cycling down in the last meter, and landed with the composed posture of someone who has resolved a problem and is filing the result.
"Saitama-sensei. The monster causing damage to the residential area has been eliminated."
He clocked the blond kid still gesturing at the building situation, catalogued him as non-threatening and irrelevant, and returned his attention to his teacher.
Saitama, one arm still extended into the building's midsection, grinned over his shoulder. "Good work."
The physics of what Saitama was doing should not have been possible, in the way that several things Saitama did should not have been possible. The force concentrated in a palm-sized contact point against a structure of that mass, at the angle required to correct its drift toward non-vertical, should have generated torque differentials that turned the whole thing into a geometry problem with a tragic answer. Reinforced concrete had opinions about being held up from one corner by a man in a vest.
The building's opinions were not consulted.
Saitama simply wanted it to stand up, and the well-trained body that contained whatever Saitama was did the thing he wanted. The broken section rose slightly, tracking his arm movement, and then settled into the ground as if it had decided the original position was where it wanted to be. The plume of displaced dust climbed into the morning air.
The building stood there.
It was, if you had the frame of reference to appreciate it, quite something.
Genos fell into step beside Saitama as they turned toward Z-City, the mission complete, the morning continuing. Behind them, the blond kid was experiencing the dust cloud at close range and forming opinions about this.
"Cough— cough— this is—" He surfaced from the particulate with the fury of someone who had been building a complaint for several minutes and was finally able to deliver it. "I'm filing a formal report! Your dust just compromised my air quality! My computer is going to need a cleaning! Baldy!"
Saitama and Genos walked away.
The gap between them and the shouting expanded at the comfortable pace of two people who have collectively decided that some audio is background rather than signal.
Z-City Hero Association Branch. Operations Office.
Lanny set down the communicator as the packaged file arrived through the system backend—the standard intelligence collection format, hundreds of video files and network-sourced clips, all of them tagged D-City, S-class combat, recent.
The main subjects were the two newest S-class additions to the Z-City roster.
She'd been expecting this. Saitama and Genos had apparently been doing hero work in D-City and the surrounding districts since before their formal registration—the kind of informal territory that unaffiliated heroes occupy when they're responding to actual disasters rather than waiting for official assignments. Now that they were in the system, the intelligence division had packaged everything they could locate.
She sped through the files with the practiced navigation of someone who had been managing Z-City's S-class contingent for long enough to have a calibrated internal standard.
The footage was clear: Demon Cyborg as primary offensive force, his attacks flowing from first contact into sustained pressure, the kind of fluid engagement that pushed monsters away from population areas before they could do secondary damage. Caped Baldy operating in parallel, not fighting the monster directly—moving through the disaster zone at speeds the camera struggled to follow, extracting civilians from the structural damage the monster was generating as a side effect.
It was, Lanny noted, the correct division of labor. Genos's firepower handled the threat. Saitama's combination of speed and strength handled the consequence of the threat. Both working simultaneously rather than sequentially meant the casualty numbers from the D-City incident were substantially lower than the disaster level would have suggested.
She updated the achievement records for both of them. Demon-level, resolved. Contribution split: equal.
The filing reminded her of the administrative workload she'd developed when Jordan and Bang had both been at the Z-City branch without any habit of reporting their own results—results she'd had to reconstruct through the same patchwork of surveillance footage, civilian reports, and social media aggregation. She had built her career, in part, out of the gap between what S-class heroes actually did and what the Association knew about it.
Which was why, when the subordinate's call came through and she pressed the response button, she was already positioned to be surprised by what she heard.
"The public relations division has flagged a spike in negative public opinion," her subordinate said, with the care of someone reporting something they expect will not be received well. "It's still developing, but the algorithms are projecting a significant escalation."
"For which hero?"
A brief pause. "Caped Baldy, Minister Lanny."
She set down the file she'd been reviewing. "Explain."
"Multiple threads. The primary one is the strength question—public uncertainty about whether his performance actually meets S-class thresholds, given the—" The subordinate was clearly organizing this carefully. "—the visual presentation discrepancy. There's also a secondary narrative building that he's been operating in proximity to Demon Cyborg specifically to absorb credit from his more visually demonstrable achievements. And then there's a third thread that's harder to characterize, but it involves some commentary about the name assignment from headquarters and whether it represents an appropriate—"
"I understand," Lanny said.
She looked at the screen, which was displaying a building being held up by one arm.
She thought about the boxing machine that had gone dark. The shot put that had become a skylight problem. The 1500-meter race. The weightlifting event and Super Alloy Darkshine's training weight, lifted one-handed with the expression of someone checking a bag's contents.
The strength question, she thought, was going to answer itself eventually. The question was what happened between now and eventually.
"Send me the full public opinion analysis. Current distribution, projected trajectory, source cluster breakdown." She reached for her communicator. "And loop in the PR director—I want to talk through the options this afternoon."
"Yes, Minister Lanny."
She pressed the button. Looked at the footage still playing on her secondary screen—Saitama catching a falling civilian with the casual precision of someone who had done the math before the building decided to move.
The limits of humanity as trash, she thought, which was an unusual phrase but accurate in the way that accurate phrases sometimes were.
She had only ever seen that particular quality in one other person before.
The afternoon meeting was going to be interesting.
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