The complaints didn't stop until after they'd teleported.
One moment Saitama was mid-sentence in the apartment doorway. The next moment there was mountain wind in his face and a three-hundred-meter drop on all sides.
He looked down at the edge. Then at the sky. Then at Jordan.
"...Where are we?"
"Mountain," Jordan said helpfully.
It had, at some point in the geological past, been a proper peak. Something had since removed the top with what appeared to be a very large, very flat cutting implement, leaving a mirror-smooth plateau roughly the size of a tennis court. The wind up here was committed—cold, constant, and personal.
It was also, Saitama now noticed, extremely crowded.
They had been up here since sometime around midnight.
One hundred and seventeen men of varying ages, united by their shared skill set—keyboard operation, screenshot distribution, and the construction of elaborate theories about heroes they'd never met—were now discovering what cold wind and no food does to a person over an eighteen-hour period.
Most of them were sitting. Some were huddled. Three were engaged in a heated dispute over a coat that had already been claimed, re-claimed, and counter-claimed twice.
"Put it on already!"
"Get your hands off it—those are my clothes—"
Their collective condition bore the unmistakable marks of a recent educational experience: visible impact evidence across various surfaces, expressions carrying the specific blankness of men who had been made to understand something thoroughly. Tattered jackets. A notable absence of prior confidence.
One of them looked up.
He grabbed the arm of the man next to him.
Then the coat argument stopped. And the shivering stopped, at least temporarily. And the hundred and seventeen men on the mountaintop went very, very quiet, because there were now two figures floating in the air above them, and one of them had blond hair and red eyes, and the other was wearing a yellow battle suit with a white cape snapping in the wind.
The silence spread like a held breath.
That man is here.
Both of them.
After eighteen hours of hunger, cold, and collective reconsideration, not a single person on that mountain was inclined to do anything except make themselves look as small as possible. The three men fighting over the coat released it simultaneously and assumed neutral positions.
Jordan surveyed the scene from above with the expression of a man reviewing a project he'd managed correctly.
"You're not going to cause trouble anymore?" He glanced at the crowd, then waved a hand. "Could continue, if you want."
Nobody moved.
Saitama was staring down with mild confusion. He'd thought they were going to King's place.
"These are all of them," Jordan said, turning to Saitama. "Since you became a hero, this group has been running coordinated smear campaigns online—fabricated accusations, manufactured evidence, the whole package. I've had them sitting up here reflecting on their choices since last night." He paused. "You decide what to do with them."
"Ah." Saitama looked at the crowd below with mild, slightly tired eyes. "So that's what this was."
Then he grinned—the simple, completely unguarded grin of a man who finds something genuinely funny.
"Jordan." He scratched the back of his head. "I didn't become a hero because of what these guys think. I became a hero because I wanted to." He shrugged. "So honestly, who cares?"
Jordan pressed his lips together.
I care, he thought. Some of us have standards.
"Fine," he said. "You don't have to care. But I found out about it, which means I'm already involved." He looked down at the crowd—at the few faces that still had the residual instinct to look defiant. His eyes moved across them like a blade. "Besides. There's a principle here."
The defiant faces found other things to look at.
Jordan turned back to the crowd, his voice dropping to the register that made structural materials reconsider their load-bearing assumptions.
"Anyway. Hundred-some keyboard warriors is a lot of useless mouths to feed. What's the most humane way to handle this—"
A stone into a still lake.
The mountaintop erupted.
"PLEASE NO—Super Cop, I know I was wrong, I was completely wrong—"
"I haven't eaten since yesterday! I want to go home, I want my mom—"
"I don't want to die on a mountain—"
Several of them were crying. Real tears, not performed ones. A grown man in a business-casual blazer had both hands pressed together in front of his face and was making promises to multiple deities simultaneously.
Saitama looked at the spectacle with his arms crossed.
Not with sympathy. More like a man watching a television program that was slightly louder than he wanted.
"Hey." His voice cut through the wailing without effort—flat and clear and carrying something underneath it that made the noise die down fast. "Listen."
They listened.
Saitama stood there in the mountain wind, cape moving, face calm with the unhurried certainty of someone who had nothing to prove to anyone on this mountain.
"Hate me all you want," he said. "I'm not going to stop being a hero because of your opinions. That's not why I do it."
The sunlight was at his back. His face, half in shadow, had the specific expressionlessness of a man who was telling the absolute truth and found the truth completely ordinary.
The crowd stared up at him.
Some of them had the look of people who had started the day yesterday absolutely certain about something and were now less certain.
Then someone in the back, sensing the mood shifting toward something redemptive, made a strategic decision.
"We're sorry! Please forgive us, Bald Cape Man!"
"Yes—spare us, Hair-Loss Hero!"
"We'll never do it again, Hairless Cloak Person!"
"Cape Baldie, please—"
A vein appeared.
On Saitama's temple. Very distinctly.
"I know I'm losing my hair." His voice was extremely controlled. "But—" The control slipped, precisely one millimeter. "SHUT UP, YOU PACK OF IDIOTS."
The hundred and seventeen men on the mountain shut up.
Complete silence. Wind only.
Jordan pinched the bridge of his nose.
Who, he thought, in the Hero Association, looked at this man and thought 'Caped Baldy' was the right call?
The answer was probably a committee. Committees were like that.
It's descriptively accurate. I'll give them that. It's just also—
He exhaled.
—not ideal in a crowd situation.
Once Saitama had taken a breath and returned to baseline, Jordan caught his eye.
"So. What do we do with them?"
Saitama clicked his tongue. Looked at the crowd below—still frozen, very much not breathing. He thought about it for approximately two seconds.
"Already got the point across," he said. "Let them go."
Below, the mood shifted from terrified to cautiously not-dead with tremendous speed. Several people visibly deflated with relief. Someone may have briefly passed out.
One man made the error of starting to rise before he received permission.
Jordan's gaze hit him like a wall.
"Kneel. Who told you to move?"
He knelt. Everyone who had started to shift knelt. Those already kneeling became somehow more kneeling.
The mountain was quiet again.
Jordan let the silence sit for a moment. Then he looked across all of them—slow, methodical, a gaze that communicated clearly that every face had been catalogued, every address was filed, and none of this was forgettable.
"Death sentence suspended," he said. "Punishment remains." His knuckles cracked, one deliberate pop. "Every post gets deleted. Every false claim gets a public retraction. You'll do it today—not tomorrow, not 'when you feel like it.' Today." He paused. "Your names, ages, home addresses, and social connections are all documented. If I find a single account operating this way again—yours or anyone you recruited—I will show up in person."
Again, implied the room.
Silence. Then, from the crowd, a tentative:
"...Um."
Jordan's eyes moved to the source.
"You have something to add?"
"N—no. No. Understood. Completely understood."
"Good." Jordan looked them all over one final time. "Anything else unclear?"
The hundred and seventeen men shook their heads in perfect unison, like a field of grass in the same wind.
Jordan nodded.
"Then bow properly." He tilted his head toward Saitama. "And thank Saitama for you still being alive."
They didn't need to be told twice.
A hundred and seventeen people pressed their foreheads toward the mountain surface.
"THANK YOU, SAITAMA-NII!!"
The sound rolled out across the mountain range and echoed off three different peaks.
A flock of birds exploded from a treeline half a kilometer away.
Saitama received this with the mild expression of a man who had been thanked for a bus seat and wasn't entirely sure what to do with it. He gave a small, slightly awkward wave.
Jordan watched the crowd with quiet satisfaction.
And that's how you fix an online reputation problem.