The whistling had a direction.
Jordan locked on it in the same moment Dr. Genus turned his head—except Jordan had fixed the exact bearing before the sound finished its first echo, and was already looking when the figure crossed the half-kilometer mark.
Time slowed.
Spider-Time didn't engage fully, but the reflex was there: the world dialing down a fraction, just enough for Jordan's visual processing to catch a silhouette moving in thirty-meter bounds, eating ground with the rhythm of something that had been built specifically to do this. The figure's eyes were tracking forward. Then they shifted.
They found Jordan's eyes.
Across roughly eight hundred meters of underground corridor, with engineering drones still working the ceiling overhead, two pairs of eyes locked.
The contact lasted one second.
For the speedster, Jordan would later estimate, it probably felt considerably longer.
The figure's stride broke its rhythm. Not a stumble—a recalibration. Voluntary deceleration, initiated at around five hundred meters out, the kind of controlled slowdown that someone with good instincts performs when they realize that running at full speed toward something is no longer the correct tactical approach.
He came to a stop in front of the group with a gust of displaced air and pushed his goggles up.
"Boss." He straightened, tucking the goggles against his forehead. "I'm Number 7. Superpower Experiment Group."
Jordan looked him over.
The face was unmistakably Dr. Genus—the same refined geometry, the same underlying structure. But the variables had been adjusted. Number 7's hair was cropped to a tight buzz cut, presumably in the name of aerodynamic efficiency. The body underneath the sharkskin sprint suit was built differently than the doctor's: thicker through the legs and hips, the lower half of him developed in a way that made sense for someone who'd spent his entire conscious existence running very fast. Angular muscle groups, nothing wasted.
If you stood him next to Dr. Genus, you wouldn't confuse them. The academic and the athlete had used the same starting material and arrived somewhere completely different.
The will of 7 endures across dimensional boundaries, Jordan thought, with the specific private amusement of someone who had spent time in a universe where seven was a loaded number. Dr. Genus has recreated the starting lineup.
He kept this observation to himself.
"Seven in the first batch?" he asked.
Dr. Genus joined them, smoothing his lab coat. "Seven successful subjects, yes. Number 7 has the most stable gene sequence of the group, which is why his performance is currently the most reliable. The others are at various stages—some in active ability training, some still in gene-completion cycles. But all seven have achieved stable superpower expression."
He turned to Number 7.
"Go collect the others. Training area."
Number 7 nodded once at Jordan—a clean, professional acknowledgment—then took three brisk steps, hit his stride, and vanished in a crack of displaced air that rolled down the corridor like a small thunderclap.
A clone near the wall quietly stabilized his glasses against the pressure wave.
"Well," Jordan said.
"Yes," Dr. Genus agreed.
Number 42 brought the vehicle around, and they rode through the rest of the new base before stopping at the training area—Jordan cataloguing the layout as they went, noting the scale, the infrastructure, the way the residential sections had been built with space for a population that didn't exist yet.
He's not building a laboratory, Jordan thought. He's building a city that contains a laboratory.
The training area occupied a space three times the size of a football field, with high ceilings to match. Support infrastructure ran along the walls: rack systems, observation platforms, what appeared to be a force-measurement array along the east side. The floor was reinforced composite material with impact-absorbing substrate. Somebody had thought carefully about what kind of loads this room would need to handle.
Standing in a line across the center, seven figures waited.
Jordan raised a hand as he walked in.
"Hello, everyone."
The greeting landed somewhere between formal and genuine, and he meant it that way. The seven figures returned it—some with nods, some with brief verbal responses, one near the left end with a small wave that was quickly retracted and replaced with a more dignified posture.
He scanned them as Dr. Genus began the overview.
Each one shared the foundation—the underlying Dr. Genus template was visible in every face if you knew what to look for—but the divergence was real. Different gene sequences inserted at the culture stage, plus whatever individual development had happened since awakening. Number 7 stood on the left in his sprint suit, still breathing normally after his collection run. The others ranged across the line: different builds, different stances, different ways of carrying themselves.
Jordan activated the Mind Network quietly.
No announcements. No visible effect. Just the gentle expansion of his electromagnetic field, feeling for the signature of consciousness, reading the surface impressions of seven different minds simultaneously without any of them knowing it was happening.
Mental resilience was higher than he'd expected from new experimental subjects. The civilian baseline was somewhere around paper, and these seven ranged from cardboard to actual material. Number 3, third from the right, registered the highest—a quality of mental density that Jordan clocked at roughly twice Fubuki's level, which was not an insignificant data point.
He read through all seven sets of surface thoughts and underlying values in about four seconds.
No ideological contamination. No arrogance seeds. No concealed drives toward personal power or resentment of authority. They were curious about him—that was the dominant texture in most of them—and underneath the curiosity was something that read as genuine investment in the work. Which was consistent with having been built from a man who, whatever his other qualities, had devoted eight decades to a single scientific purpose.
Jordan quietly withdrew.
Good to go.
"Alright," he said, as Dr. Genus finished his overview. "Let's see what everyone can do."
Number 1 stepped forward first.
He was over two meters tall. Not the lean two meters of a trained athlete—the dense kind, where every centimeter carried weight that made the total feel larger than the measurement. Black sports vest, shorts, the kind of skin-tight material that had nowhere to hide what was underneath it. Block-cut muscle from collar to ankle, the body of someone who had been configured from the cell level for one specific application: moving very heavy objects by force of will.
He walked with that particular economy of motion that very large, very strong things develop—nothing extra, because extra gets tiring—and the floor registered each step with a faint resonance that said the substrate is doing its job, barely.
"Number 1," he said, voice low and flat and deliberate. He sounded like a man who didn't waste words because he'd calculated that words were less efficient than the available alternatives.
Jordan looked at him with undisguised satisfaction.
Number 1's aura sat at the same baseline as Carnage Kabuto in its normal, non-berserk state. Which meant that whatever Dr. Genus had done with the gene modulation, he'd managed to get a Dragon-level floor on a human experimental subject. Not a biological weapon. Not a monster. A superhuman.
"Super strength?" Jordan asked.
"Single-hand lift ceiling: approximately ninety to a hundred tons," Dr. Genus said from behind him, with the quiet pride of a man presenting a paper he's particularly pleased with. "The upper limit is still being calibrated. His gene sequence for force output continues to show incremental improvement week over week."
Jordan did the math involuntarily.
Spider-Man's comfortable ceiling is ten tons. His hard ceiling on a good day with full adrenaline is somewhere around twenty.
Number 1 could give Peter Parker a very educational afternoon.
With one hand. Before breakfast.
He kept this observation to himself as well, but allowed himself the thought. There was something specifically satisfying about watching power scaling work correctly—about seeing the gap between impressive and categorically different rendered in physical form.
"Good," Jordan said.
Number 1 received this with a single nod. He had the energy of a man who knew exactly how strong he was and found it sufficient. No performance. No posturing. Just the quiet confidence of something that has been tested and knows its own data.
Six more to go.