The Dragon Ball world had been, among other things, extremely generous with his time.
One year and change. Long enough for training arcs, dimensional politics, a brief civil war, and one very uncomfortable conversation with a man who could destroy planets. Jordan had stayed busy.
The Fate Draw counter had stayed busier.
Five hundred days. Five hundred daily draws, each one accumulating in the queue while F-boy processed, sorted, catalogued, and occasionally expressed opinions about the management of the system via middle finger. The ninety-odd draws already banked before departure brought the running total up past the six-hundred mark. The monster hunting after his return—the Crazy Motorcycle Tribe, the ambient Wolf-level incidents, the various Dragon-level events that kept inserting themselves into his schedule—had pushed it further.
F-boy, whose mobility constraints had been fully resolved post-evolution, had moved from passive collection to something resembling enthusiastic initiative. Jordan was fairly certain that at some point the line between "automated harvest" and "F-boy personally reaching into Saitama's aura and extracting fragments by hand" had blurred considerably. The results were not being questioned.
Jordan scrolled to the current total and stopped.
[Current Fate Draw Accumulation: 998]
He stared at that number for a moment.
Nine. Hundred. And ninety-eight.
"Beautiful," he said aloud.
Across the room, F-boy paused his work beside Saitama's sleeping form, looked up, and received a thumbs-up.
F-boy turned back to the task without comment. The Limiter Fragment counter incremented.
Jordan switched off his phone, pulled the blanket to his chin, and was asleep in approximately forty-five seconds.
In the corner, golden indicator lights flickered on behind Genos's eyes as his systems cycled into standby monitoring mode.
He did a quiet scan of the room.
Normal readings across all occupants. King: rest state, nominal. Jordan: sleep, nominal. Saitama: rest—
Anomalous reading.
Faint. Localized. Some kind of energy reaction in the immediate vicinity of the teacher's position, cycling at irregular intervals. Not biological. Not mechanical. Not matching any known emission signature in his database.
Genos ran the reading a second time.
The same faint trace. Then gone.
...Most likely sensor interference, he concluded. The teacher's raw output creates feedback artifacts. This happens sometimes.
His eyes dimmed. He filed the observation and stopped thinking.
Some questions were best left until morning.
The mountains on the outskirts of Z-City were the same as he remembered: green, steep, the air carrying that specific quality that suggested both clean living and very few witnesses.
What was not the same was the absence of the House of Evolution's above-ground structure.
Jordan materialized above the site and looked down at what remained of the surface building—which was to say, a clean concrete foundation plate and absolutely nothing else. The kind of thorough absence that, combined with scorch patterns visible even from altitude, suggested a high-powered incineration cannon had stopped by and made a point.
Genos, Jordan thought. Even in timelines where that man doesn't show up to do something, he somehow still does it.
He activated the Heart Web—his electromagnetic perception spreading outward and downward through the rock—and followed it into the mountain.
The underground facility was very much still there.
More than that: it had expanded. Corridors that hadn't existed in his last visit, reinforced chambers, expanded culture floors. Dr. Genus had not been idle.
The single alloy door on the surface—a discreet square set into the foundation, incongruous but functional—had a doorbell mounted beside it.
Jordan looked at the doorbell.
F-boy stepped out of his body, walked to it, and pressed it.
The speaker mounted next to the frame crackled.
"Welcome, Boss!" The voice was clearly a clone—measured, professional, carrying the specific energy of someone who had been sitting at a monitoring station waiting for exactly this. "I'm Clone 42, on duty today. Opening the surface passage now!"
The alloy doors split apart with a mechanical exhale, retracting to both sides. A high-speed elevator rose from below at a pace that suggested someone had pressed the button before the doors were fully open.
They saw me coming. Jordan stepped in. And they moved fast.
He remembered the old entrance—a spiral staircase going downhill, the kind of functional-but-uninspired design that suggested an organization focused entirely on the work and not at all on the experience. They had clearly addressed this.
The elevator dropped. The floor dropped out from under him with a smooth, serious commitment to velocity, and then—
Two concussive bangs.
Ribbons. A cascade of glittering confetti. A shower of gold and silver sequins descending through the air in a corridor that had been thoroughly prepared for this moment.
A reception line of clones stood along both walls, and in the center, holding a banner that read WARM WELCOME in large, enthusiastic lettering, was the Armored Gorilla: two and a half meters of reinforced silverback, full military alloy plating, cheeks pushed wide by a grin he had apparently been saving for this specific occasion.
Jordan stepped out of the elevator and took in the scene.
Which clone, he wondered with genuine curiosity, came up with a confetti cannon greeting?
Then the reception line parted, and the Greeter stepped forward.
She was tall, slender, and wearing a black-and-white lace maid uniform with an apron that snapped precisely at the waist. Her face—genuinely pretty, the kind that would have stopped traffic in most contexts—was crinkled with a warm, practiced smile. She held a bouquet of flowers in both hands, which she offered with a small bow.
If you disregarded the compound eyes and the sharp horns, she looked entirely professional.
Jordan accepted the bouquet.
The room applauded.
She's been drilled on this, Jordan thought, watching how she moved—already reaching to brush the remaining confetti from his shoulder with two fingers, efficient and unobtrusive. Someone gave her hospitality training.
"Boss." Her voice was clear and musical, carrying a warmth that suggested genuine practice. She drew back and made a small heart shape with her fingers—a gesture that had clearly been included in the briefing. "I'm Mosquito Girl. Please feel free to give me any orders~"
She held the expression for precisely the right amount of time, then broke into a normal smile and went back to removing sequins from his sleeve.
Absolutely professional.
Jordan handed the bouquet back to her—there was nowhere to put it and he didn't need it—and addressed the room.
"Thank you for the reception." He looked at the banner. At the confetti still settling. At the Armored Gorilla, which had not put the banner down yet. "Let's skip the ceremony going forward."
A clone in the third row raised his hand. "Boss, with respect—you came all this way. It felt appropriate to mark the occasion properly."
"I appreciate the thought," Jordan said. "But no."
The clones nodded with unanimous sincerity.
"Understood! We'll make sure the next welcome is even more subdued!"
Jordan considered that response.
...Close enough.
Mosquito Girl fell into step slightly behind and to his left as he moved forward—the precise position of someone who'd been told what escort protocol looked like and had taken the information seriously. As Jordan walked, she glanced up at him with her compound eyes half-lidded.
"Boss," she said, still smiling, "where would you like to begin today's inspection?"
Right, Jordan thought. Professionals.
"Take me to the laboratory first."
"Of course." She turned on her heel and led the way without hesitation, wings folded flat under the maid apron with the neat competence of someone who had fully committed to the bit.
Ahead, the facility hummed with the activity of an organization that had been running at full capacity in anticipation of exactly this visit.
The Armored Gorilla fell in at the rear of the procession, still holding the banner.
No one had told it to put the banner down.
It had decided, independently, that this was fine.