Number 6 pressed his palms into the grass and the green light pulsed outward.
Jordan, watching from the observation line, shook his head.
"He's already lost."
Dr. Genus glanced at him with the expression of a man who had been in enough unusual situations to understand that Jordan occasionally said things that required follow-up questions. "Oh? How do you figure?"
"He didn't clap his hands together before activating the ability."
The test subjects in the observation area exchanged looks.
Number 7 mouthed something to Number 4. Number 4 gave a small shrug. Number 3 maintained the expression of someone who had decided to wait for more data before forming an opinion.
Is this some kind of superpower etiquette? the general atmosphere communicated. A handshake protocol we haven't been briefed on?
Dr. Genus, who had been confidently playing the commentator role up until this moment, found himself briefly deprived of a response. The ability in question was a genetic construct developed in his own laboratory. He was not certain it had any relationship to hand placement.
Jordan noticed the room's confusion and, after a moment's consideration, decided that a demonstration was the appropriate response.
He straightened slightly. His aura shifted—not dramatically, but in the way that a change in air pressure shifts: felt before it's understood, pressing outward from him in a slow, warm pulse that made the nearest observers unconsciously improve their posture and take a marginally deeper breath.
Then he brought his palms together in front of his chest.
The sound of the clap echoed in the training area.
And behind him—for just a moment, visible to everyone watching—something enormous manifested in outline. Not a physical form, not light exactly, but presence: the silhouette of a figure that dwarfed him, broad-shouldered, radiating the specific quality of something that had once grown forests in an afternoon and reshaped geography as a defensive measure. Long hair. Absolute calm. The kind of stillness that comes from having nothing left to prove.
It lasted two seconds. Then it was gone.
Jordan straightened, rolled one shoulder, and shrugged.
"That," he said, "is the difference."
The observation area was quiet.
Then, as one, the entire observation group straightened their spines and began contemplating the relationship between hand placement and superpower activation with a sincerity that bordered on religious conviction.
Got it. We'll start learning immediately.
Jordan decided not to explain further.
On the field, Number 6 had not witnessed any of this.
He was busy.
The grass responded to his touch the way it had in every training session: immediate, generous, eager. Vines erupted from the lawn's surface in a simultaneous burst—dozens of them, thick and thorned, rising and reaching outward like a net cast from below. Against most opponents at or below A-Class, this opening was enough. Control the ground, restrict movement, apply pressure from range before the target could close distance.
Number 2 looked at this from fifteen meters of altitude and did not move.
He extended his fist downward and hit the air.
The flames around his knuckles expanded on impact with nothing—a shockwave of concentrated heat rolling outward from the point of impact, orange-red and spreading, catching every vine tip it touched. The grass didn't burn so much as exhale, each vine crisping from its end inward in a rapid sequence that ran like a fuse in reverse.
Vine Whip.
Fire Punch.
Jordan nodded once at the clean exchange.
Number 6 called the first wave back immediately—hands flicking the control signal, letting the burned vines drop and collapse onto the field. The soil of the grass terrain moved in response, burying the embers in a smooth automatic motion, cutting off the oxygen before the scattered ash could develop into a sustained fire.
"Hm," Jordan said, his assessment of Number 6 upgrading by a meaningful increment.
He's not panicking. He's reading.
Losing the first exchange to a hard type counter, to an opponent with both offensive power advantage and altitude advantage, and Number 6's response had been immediate triage: accept the loss, contain the secondary damage, reset. That was not raw talent. That was someone who had been studying his own limitations and building contingency responses around them.
The second wave came faster.
The grass terrain convulsed. From its surface, sharp wooden spikes erupted at an upward angle—not the gradual vine-reach of the first wave, but a compressed, directed barrage, each spike aimed on a trajectory converging on Number 2's position in the air.
Even Number 7, watching from the line, raised an eyebrow.
"That's quick."
Number 2's fire-form expression—difficult to read in the best circumstances, given that his face was currently made of flames—sharpened by a fraction. He spread his arms, and the fire around him spiraled outward into a rotating vortex, intercepting the incoming spike-rain at the perimeter and incinerating each piece before it crossed two-thirds of the distance.
The vortex expanded.
The heat front hit the terrain like a breath. Grass doesn't last long against a sustained wave of fire at that temperature—the soil can bury scattered ash, but it cannot insulate against a temperature differential that doesn't stop. The lawn surface caught, the edge of the terrain field became a line of fire, and the fire moved.
This was not a situation Number 6's toolkit was designed to reverse.
He appeared to recognize this at roughly the same moment Jordan did.
The resolute fighting spirit in his posture—the squared shoulders, the focused forward lean—vanished. Replaced, instantly, with the absolute commitment of a man who had made one specific decision and was executing it without hesitation.
He ran.
Not retreating. Not withdrawing. Ran. Full sprint, directly off the field, navy robe flapping, eyes forward, no looking back, no slowing down, no concern whatsoever for what this looked like to the observation line.
Number 7 watched the blur pass the edge of the combat field.
"...That was fast."
The Grass-type terrain behind Number 6 erupted in a curtain of flame and smoke, burning itself down to charcoal in roughly four seconds. Number 2 descended through the clearing smoke and landed on the blackened floor with the expression of a man who had expected somewhat more than two exchanges.
Number 6 came back at a considerably more dignified pace, expression occupied by the particular mixture of embarrassment and quiet self-assessment that follows a decision made correctly for uncomfortable reasons.
Dr. Genus's gaze, from the observation line, carried the specific quality of a scientist watching a result that deviated from target specifications and calculating whether to recalibrate or redesign.
Number 6 looked at Jordan.
Jordan nodded.
"You did well." He meant it plainly. "Two clean exchanges, good terrain usage, correct call at the end. That was a hard matchup."
Something in Number 6's posture settled. He let out a breath that had been held since the moment he'd been assigned the match.
"Thank you, Boss."
Dr. Genus's expression softened—not quickly, but measurably. The numbers in front of him had produced something more useful than raw output data.
The remaining three demonstrations ran in quick sequence.
Jordan's label as a psychic-type user had preceded him, so Number 3 offered a single demonstration for form's sake—an object lifted, held, released—with the slightly deflated energy of a talented person who has been told their specialty has already been covered by the person grading them.
Number 3 stood in the observation line afterward with an expression that communicated several pages of internal commentary without actually saying any of them.
Number 4 caught a cannonball.
He caught it the way a person catches a thrown ball: adjustment step, hands up, absorbed the impact without visibly straining. The cannonball was approximately forty centimeters in diameter. The demonstration team, who had fired it, appeared to have expected a different outcome and were recalibrating.
Number 5 went last, stepped into the center of the floor, and disappeared.
Not quickly. Not by moving. By not being there—the light bending around the space he occupied until he was, definitively, not visible. And then, because he apparently felt a silent disappearance was insufficient for a proper demonstration, he reappeared, took a step, vanished again, reappeared at a different position, and concluded by standing directly beside Number 4, who startled despite knowing it was coming.
It was good work.
What Jordan also noticed, without commenting: every single one of the seven—Numbers 3, 4, and 5 in sequence, and now that he reviewed the observation line, Numbers 1 and 7 as well—had placed their palms together in a quiet clap before initiating their ability demonstration.
Number 7 had been visibly puzzled while doing it.
He'd done it anyway.
Jordan looked at the seven of them and experienced a specific, warm satisfaction at the quality of the personnel Dr. Genus had assembled. Capable, adaptive, and apparently willing to incorporate corrections they didn't fully understand on the reasonable working theory that the person who'd mentioned them knew something they didn't.
That last quality, in Jordan's experience, was the one that mattered most.
"Here's the next phase," Jordan said, as they walked back from the training area. He spoke to Dr. Genus directly, the conversation settling into the practical register of two people who had worked together long enough to skip the preamble. "Build them complete social identities—documentation, financial history, everything. Then place them in the Hero Association in batches."
Dr. Genus already had a notepad. The pen was moving.