Saitama's new fan club had not been his idea.
It hadn't been anyone's idea, exactly. It had simply evolved—the way certain organisms do when exposed to the right conditions, pressure, and a shared enemy. The hundred-and-seventeen men who had climbed down from that mountain with deleted forum posts and bruised dignity had, somewhere between the descent and their apartment buildings, concluded that if you couldn't beat them, you joined them.
Professional keyboard warriors, it turned out, were remarkably good at being professional keyboard warriors in the opposite direction.
The organizational structure assembled itself within forty-eight hours. Division of labor emerged organically: some for intelligence and monitoring, some for infiltration, some for counter-narrative deployment, some for the morally satisfying work of occupying high ground and pointing at others. A hacker contingent—seasoned, experienced, holding genuine skills they had previously wasted—discovered new purpose in forcibly installing Saitama fan content onto the devices of confirmed smear accounts. Autoplay. Loop. No uninstall option.
New recruits who hadn't yet met Jordan personally were referred upward for what the veterans delicately called orientation.
Jordan, sprawled on King's living room sofa late that night, would absolutely not confirm that he was the silent senior consultant to this operation.
That was between him and the data.
King's Apartment. Afternoon.
The apartment was exactly as Jordan remembered it: clean, organized, every surface carrying the particular dignity of a space occupied by someone who treated their belongings with respect. Tall shelves of games. Controllers arranged with geometric precision. A kettle that was always, somehow, at the exact right temperature.
King himself was on the floor with a thermos of hot water and the unhurried posture of someone who had made peace with being very good at something.
Saitama had made no such peace.
"WHAT—how does that even work—"
On screen, Saitama's chosen character—a thick-necked brawler who had been doing fine three seconds ago—collided with King's bunny girl at precisely the moment she had one sliver of health remaining, and proceeded to receive a fifteen-hit perfect-block counter into a ninety-nine-hit combo that left the word STUNNED floating on screen for longer than seemed necessary.
King's face showed nothing. His hand moved at a pace that suggested he was thinking about something else entirely.
Round over.
Saitama stared at the screen.
"That's not a mechanic," he said. "That's witchcraft."
"It's not cheating," King said, taking a sip from his thermos. "The game allows it. Practice long enough and you can do it too."
He seemed to realize this might not have landed as encouragement.
"Genuinely," he added. "It just takes repetition."
"Only a genius could do that—"
The controller met the floor with the conviction of a man who meant it. The floor, for its part, accepted the full argument. Plastic fractured cleanly into three pieces and a cloud of analog stick.
Silence.
King looked at the remains. Put down his thermos. Stood up.
"It's fine, I keep spares." He raised his hand—a quiet pulse of golden electromagnetic force swept the fragments off the floor and deposited them in the trash can with the efficiency of someone who had done this before. "Give me a second."
"Jordan." Saitama turned around. "Can you—"
Jordan was on the sofa with a cup of tea and a bag of watermelon seeds, in conversation with Genos about something unrelated to the crisis. He looked up, assessed the situation, and set down the seeds.
A thread of golden light arced lazily across the room.
A controller materialized in front of Saitama. Fully intact. Bluetooth indicator flashing twice, then holding steady—connected and ready.
"There you go."
Saitama picked it up and turned it over in his hands with the expression of a man examining a miracle.
"You are incredibly useful," he announced.
"King." He waved at his opponent across the room. "Come back, no need to get the spare!"
King turned around in the hallway, looked at the controller in Saitama's hands, and looked at Jordan.
How?
Jordan met his eyes. A faint lift of one corner of his mouth. King held that for half a second, then looked back at Saitama with the expression of someone recalibrating.
Saitama was bouncing the new controller on his palm, confidence fully restored, the last three minutes of defeat apparently processed and filed under temporary setbacks.
"Alright." He cracked his knuckles with absolute certainty. "This time I'm not losing."
King settled back down across from him. His expression remained neutral.
Jordan caught his eye one more time. A barely perceptible nod between them—the kind that crossed at 7,200 inputs per minute.
Go hard.
King picked up his controller.
By midnight, King's apartment contained four people at varying stages of horizontal.
King had retired to his room at a reasonable hour, as a man with standards should. Saitama was distributed across a makeshift bed in the living room—sprawled in the specific boneless geometry of someone whose body had stopped caring—and snoring with the consistency of industrial equipment. Genos occupied a corner of the room with a cross-legged posture so precise he looked like he'd been installed there, a modern sculpture in steel and synthetic muscle, completely motionless.
Whether he was asleep was a matter of ongoing philosophical debate. Jordan had stopped trying to figure it out.
Jordan himself was on the sofa, phone screen casting a soft rectangle of light across his face, covered to the chest with the air-conditioning blanket from King's linen closet.
Beside Saitama's unconscious form, a figure in a sharp CEO suit was crouched at a slight angle, watching the man's sleeping face with the focused attention of a professional engaged in professional work.
[Limiter Fragment +1.]
F-boy straightened, turned, and—upon finding Jordan looking at him—gave a single slow squint.
Back to it. Stop watching.
Jordan mimed a salute. Outstanding work, sir. Carry on.
F-boy returned to the task with the dignity of someone who had signed a contract under duress and was honoring its terms anyway.
It was the inventory that kept Jordan awake.
Not anxiety. More like the particular alertness of someone who has been running at full capacity for a long time and has only now found a quiet hour to count what they're carrying.
He pulled up his mental ledger and started at the top.
Dragon God's Power — the crown jewel. Three wishes from the Lesser Grail, sitting in his card deck like a polite nuclear option. Certain limitations applied, but in practical terms: if placed in Fuyuki City, every Servant in recorded history would have gone to war over this card inside forty-eight hours. He had it. He would use it wisely, or he would use it entertainingly, and ideally both.
Below that tier: the abilities that had come back from the Dragon Ball world fully formed and immediately useful. Potential Guidance—already deployed on Bang, Tatsumaki, Goku, Piccolo, Vegeta. A tool that multiplied what was already there, no ceiling applied. Namekian Magic—surgical restoration, targeted healing, the ability to undo physical damage down to the molecular level. Super Healing and Super Regeneration—the combination that had allowed tonight's educational session with the troll and would allow any future sessions without paperwork. The Super Saiyan transformation—which had, as a side effect, permanently changed his hair color and occasionally startled civilians who remembered him as the other one.
The Senzu Beans warranted their own entry. A full jar, counted, viable. Once Dr. Genus finished processing them through the House of Evolution research pipeline, the survival mathematics for ordinary citizens in a disaster scenario changed substantially. That was a meeting he needed to have soon.
The Dragon Ball technology package—delivered to Bulma, handed to Dr. Kuseno, now actively being developed. The Genos upgrade was a separate matter, timeline pending. But the groundwork was down.
And at the base of the list: the combat techniques. Kamehameha, Destructo Disc, Special Beam Cannon—the classic toolkit of the Z Fighters, copied across the dimensional boundary one by one.
Though, Jordan reflected, copied was generous. He'd picked most of them up in an afternoon. The underlying principle was ki manipulation, and ki manipulation was just energy control by another name—the same mechanic his own system ran on, wearing a different skin. Looking at most of those techniques had felt less like learning and more like recognizing.
The prince had needed one glance.
What he hadn't been able to copy was the thing that made Saitama what he was.
He'd run the full Element Pickup suite on him after returning to the OPM world. Normal Punch, Consecutive Normal Punches, Serious Punch—he'd examined all of them, looking for the mechanism, the multiplier, the coefficient that transformed a physical motion into a continent-reshaping event.
There wasn't one.
The techniques weren't techniques. They were descriptions. Saitama hit things the way people described hitting things to someone who had never seen it before: and then I punched it. No ki flare, no stance modifier, no activation sequence. Just the decision to hit, and then the hit, and then whatever used to be there wasn't anymore.
The gap between a Normal Punch and a Serious Punch was the gap between not paying attention and paying attention.
That was it.
What power boost? he could almost hear Saitama saying, in the tone of someone who genuinely didn't understand the question. Can't anyone do that?
Jordan glanced over at the snoring lump on the makeshift bed.
The Limiter Fragments had been accumulating steadily over the past week—F-boy's increasingly proactive harvesting had pushed the count past a hundred again. Including the carryover from before, the total sat at a number that was interesting.
He filed that thought for the morning.
The phone screen dimmed. Jordan set it face-down on the armrest.
Outside, Z-City was quiet in the particular way it got after midnight—not peaceful, exactly, but resting. The kind of quiet that held its breath and waited to see what the next day would need.
Jordan pulled the blanket up and closed his eyes.
Tomorrow he had a visit to make.