Lanny's expression had been darkening by degrees for the past three minutes.
Her subordinate watched the process with the quiet dread of a man standing next to a volcano and checking his watch. He kept reporting anyway. The job demanded it.
"...Some accounts are even claiming that the Caped Baldy's documented achievements must have been fabricated. That the Hero Association invented them for publicity."
Silence.
Lanny pressed two fingers against her temple. The vein above her right eye made its presence known.
These absolute...
She was a professional. A senior official. The Z-City Operations Director did not lose her composure over keyboard warriors on the Justice League Forum.
I cannot stand this. Do these people not have eyes?!
The combat footage was public record. The Hero Association had released it themselves. You could watch it. Saitama catching a collapsing building on his back while civilians sprinted out beneath him. Genos's incineration cannon turning a Dragon-level monster into ash and steam. The whole sequence, timestamped, verified, available on three different platforms.
And yet.
Lanny straightened in her chair, shoulders back, chin level. If there was one thing fifteen years in institutional management had taught her, it was how to deliver consequences with a pleasant expression.
"Identify the highest-traffic keywords. Contact every major platform for takedown compliance—posts, reposts, derivative content, all of it." Her fingers tapped the desk in a slow, measured rhythm. "Anyone amplifying fabricated information gets a lawyer's letter from our legal department. I want their team working tonight if necessary. Anything causing serious public damage, we escalate directly."
"Yes, Director!"
She was already reaching for her desk phone when she paused, as if remembering something.
"Before you go." Her voice stayed level. "Compile a list. The accounts spreading the worst of it. Real-name verification where available. Send it to me personally."
The subordinate left at speed.
Lanny dialed. The contact was saved in position one.
"Lord Evans. I apologize for the interruption—there's a situation I think you should be aware of..."
Three kilometers away, in a rented room that had not been cleaned since the previous administration, a man with unwashed blond hair was winning the internet.
The room was a monument to commitment. Ten square meters total, toilet included. The floor was a stratigraphy of cigarette butts, instant noodle containers, and good intentions that had never quite materialized. A family of flies had moved in sometime around spring and now operated with full territorial confidence.
None of this mattered to the blond man, who was currently hunched over a secondhand keyboard at approximately 29 keystrokes per second, conducting what he privately considered the most important work of his generation.
"The S-Class 'Caped Baldy' is a fraud—prove me wrong if you dare."
"Hero Association Achievement Fabrication: A Comprehensive Case Study Featuring One Bald Scammer."
"Saitama of Z-City: Opportunist, Credit Thief, Menace to Legitimate Heroes."
"I urge Genos (Demon Cyborg) to immediately reconsider his professional association with this individual!!"
He had been at this for six hours. His back ached. His eyes burned. The soda he'd been meaning to drink had gone flat an hour ago. But the body was irrelevant. The cause was everything.
Anyone could hold up a collapsing building, right? That's just physics. Nothing special about it.
Those monster eliminations? Weak monsters. Staged. I'm telling you.
If it was me teaming up with the Demon Cyborg? We'd be untouchable. Better than any S-Class. Easy.
He paused to review his work. The forum threads glowed beautifully in the dark. The like counts were climbing. The replies were pouring in.
The notification chime rang out in a sweet, girlish voice—his custom setting—and the blond man perked up like a dog hearing a treat bag.
Let's see which brave soul wants to challenge the master today...
He clicked through to the latest reply on his flagship thread. A single line, posted maybe thirty seconds ago by a user he didn't recognize.
"If you did anything even remotely, you wouldn't do nothing at all."
He stared at it.
Read it again.
Something had been said. Or possibly nothing. It was genuinely unclear.
The blond man's left eye twitched.
"HOW DARE YOU," he announced to the empty room, and grabbed the keyboard with both hands. "You're filth, you hear me?! You come onto my thread talking that nonsense?!"
The flames of the reply chain ignited. Notification chimes cascaded. The post count climbed past a hundred in under a minute as the thread devolved into the kind of beautiful, catastrophic argument that only the internet could produce.
Then a new reply appeared.
"Big online, small offline. I could take ten of you in real life and not break a sweat."
The blond man went very still.
Then he started laughing.
Oh, that's good. That's PERFECT.
He typed back with the serene confidence of a man who had never once been touched:
"Oh yeah? What are you gonna do about it? Come through the screen and hit me? HAHAHA—what, you think you can reach me through the INTERNET?"
He leaned back and waited.
No reply came.
Crushed it. Absolute victory.
He stood to retrieve his flat soda, the grin of a man who had conquered something. The bottle was still cold enough. He pried off the cap, tilted it toward his mouth—
The room went wrong.
It was subtle, for half a second. The shadows in the corner shifted in a way shadows didn't usually shift. Then two points of crimson light blinked open in the darkness—calm, unhurried, and deeply uninterested in the blond man's continued wellbeing.
The figure that stepped forward was tall. That was the first thing. Then the shoulders. Then the gold hair catching the monitor's glow. Then the eyes, red as two embers, looking down at him with the patient expression of someone who had already decided how this was going to go.
The soda bottle slipped from the blond man's fingers. Glass and carbonation exploded across the floor.
The blond man's legs executed a joint resignation from his body's service.
He sat down. Hard. On the floor.
"So," Jordan Evans said, looking around the room with the mild distaste of someone evaluating a landfill. His gaze swept the cigarette mountains, the fly kingdom, the glorious forum threads still glowing on the monitor. "You had a lot to say."
The blond man's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
"You—" His voice came out four octaves higher than intended. "You're—you're Evans_WC?!"
Jordan's expression didn't change. "That's me."
"YOU CAN'T BE HERE—"
A hand like a hydraulic clamp closed around his collar and lifted. The floor departed. The blond man dangled in midair, eye level with a pair of red eyes that contained absolutely no trace of humor.
Jordan turned him to face his own monitor, where the threads burned bright.
"Let's review," Jordan said pleasantly. "You told the world that a man who caught a collapsing building on his spine was faking it. You told thousands of people that verified combat footage was staged. You encouraged strangers to spread that story." He paused. "Are you aware of that?"
"I—I'm sorry, I—"
"Sorry comes after understanding. Do you understand?"
"I UNDERSTAND—"
"Good."
WHAM.
Jordan's open palm connected with the back of his head—not a punch, exactly. More of a strong emphasis. The blond man's skull met his keyboard with enough force to imprint six rows of keys simultaneously.
"SUPER HEALING" ACTIVATED!!
The blond man lifted his head. A string of QWEASDZXCV ran across his forehead in reverse. His ears were ringing. His vision had developed a kaleidoscope effect.
Did I just get hit? Or did—did something—
"You like spreading rumors about good people."
Jordan's voice arrived from somewhere to his left.
SLAP.
Not the dramatic kind. Just a normal, measured, absolutely committed flat-handed slap, delivered with the same casual energy a carpenter uses to test whether a board is level.
"And you like hiding behind a screen to say things you'd never say to anyone's face."
BOOM.
The wall received the blond man. Then returned him. Then received him again.
"AAAAAHHHH—"
The landlord on the top floor had survived three actual earthquakes and one near-miss with a Tiger-level monster during the Z-City incident two years back.
He had never once hidden under his bed.
He was currently under his bed.
The shaking had started about ten minutes ago and showed absolutely no sign of stopping. Low frequency. Rhythmic. Structural. The kind of tremor that made ceiling plaster nervous.
What kind of earthquake IS this?
His phone said no seismic activity in the area.
His phone was wrong, obviously.
Ten minutes. Still going. Who gets a ten-minute earthquake—
BOOM.
The light fixture swayed.
The landlord pulled his blanket under the bed with him and waited for the world to make sense again.