Bomb looked Genos over with the quiet appraisal of a man who has seen most things but not quite this, eyes moving from the mechanical arms to the reinforced chassis to the incinerators where a young man's hands should have been. He processed this information without visible alarm.
"Hello, Genos." A small nod. "Good to meet you."
With introductions complete, Bang's expression shifted into something sheepish — an expression that didn't sit naturally on the face of one of the most dangerous martial artists alive, and perhaps that was precisely why it was disarming.
"I have to apologize, Onii-chan. Hero work has been relentless, and on top of that I've had a particularly stubborn student to keep from setting himself on fire." He paused, searching for the right diplomatic framing. "I've neglected your invitation far longer than I should have. I'm sorry."
"Hey." Bomb waved a hand, the gesture carrying more warmth than most people packed into a full sentence. He was already looking at his brother with the patient fondness of someone who has learned not to take long absences personally. "You came all this way. That's enough."
A beat passed.
"Though I do have to ask." Bomb tilted his head with the practiced neutrality of an older brother who knows exactly what he's doing. "Is this a social visit? Or did something finally get too big for you to handle on your own?"
"Heh." Bang wasn't offended in the slightest. "I haven't needed you to clean up my messes in a long time, Brother. I came to show you something good."
Bomb's expression did not change.
A 'superpower,' Bang had said, after he'd explained. A technique that draws out the full potential sleeping inside a person's body. I've seen what it does. I want you to have it too.
As a martial artist who had spent his entire life trusting only what his own fists could build and confirm, Bomb's first instinct was immediate and categorical.
Superpowers. Heretical practices. External intervention in what should be earned.
He did not say this aloud. He picked up his hands.
Bang hit him ninety-eight times before Bomb stopped counting.
Each time, the mountainside stone accepted the impact with a deep, resonant groan, and the human-shaped impression embedded in it grew incrementally more defined. Bomb extracted himself, reassessed, reoriented, came at his brother from a different angle, and encountered the same result.
Whirlwind Iron Fist was not slow. It was not crude. It was sixty years of refinement distilled into a technique that had once made the martial arts world leave forwarding addresses.
It missed every time.
Bang moved through the strikes the way water moves around a stone — not by blocking, not by deflecting, but by simply being somewhere else when the force arrived. And then his response came, and Bomb was in the rock again.
Impossible, Bomb thought, staring up at the sky from inside another stone impression, powder drifting around him. Absolutely impossible.
"Heh." Bang looked down at his brother with a smile that contained a very specific and carefully concealed strand of satisfaction. He was, if pressed, going to attribute this to a dormant streak of brotherly mischief that had been suppressed for decades and was only now getting proper exercise.
—An old grandmaster of martial arts, feeling smug about embarrassing his older brother. Surely that said something unflattering about him.
He decided not to examine it too closely.
On the other side of the clearing, Genos sat in meditation on a flat outcropping near the cliff's edge, attending to internal diagnostics with his eyes closed, professionally uninvested in the proceedings.
The proceedings were not, objectively, close.
When Bomb finally brushed the stone dust from his uniform and sat down, his face held the expression of a man updating a large number of assumptions in rapid succession.
In just over a year.
In just over a year, the boy he had beaten until he couldn't lift his arms in their childhood training had grown into something he could not touch. And it wasn't even that Bang had outpaced him — it was the specific quality of the distance. The same skills, refined to the same level through the same decades. But Bang had added something, and that something had made all the difference.
"Is this..." Bomb's voice came out measured, because he was a man who controlled his expressions. "Is your current strength really from that superpower you described?"
"Why would I lie to you, Brother?"
Bang stood across from him without a speck of dust on him. Not from arrogance — just from the practical reality that nothing had made contact.
Bomb looked at his hands, then at his brother.
At their level, a single step forward cost years. That was the iron law of the martial arts — the higher you climbed, the thinner the air became, and the more each additional meter of altitude demanded. People who misunderstood this thought the masters stopped growing because they lost motivation. The people who understood it knew that a man like Bomb, or Bang, had simply reached a ceiling where further ascent required something beyond what the body could generate on its own.
And Bang had, apparently, found an elevator.
Superpowers, Bomb thought again, but the word had lost some of its dismissive edge. Heretical.
He looked at his younger brother — the younger brother who had spent a year fighting monsters and training disciples and apparently finding time to become functionally undefeatable — and thought about what was sitting underground beneath a city called Z-City, organizing itself into something that humanity would need to answer.
It's not that I want new power, he told himself, with complete sincerity. It's that defeating the Monster Association is the obligation of every martial artist who has dedicated their life to protecting this world.
He straightened his collar.
"All right." He met Bang's eyes. "How does it work?"
Bang smiled with satisfaction.
He found Genos still at the cliff's edge, and the young cyborg rose before he'd finished crossing the distance — standing, attentive, already reading the situation from Bang's expression.
"Genos. My brother has agreed to come back with us." Bang gestured toward the trail down. "We'll have to impose on you for the journey."
"Of course, Master Bang. No trouble at all."
Genos reached into the storage compartment built into his forearm and removed a capsule — silver, compact, the size of a walnut. He turned it over once, found the switch, and pressed.
White vapor bloomed outward. From within it, material poured out and began moving.
Bomb watched with visible interest as silvery-white panels assembled themselves, the process rapid and oddly geometric, each component finding its position and locking in while omnidirectional engine mounts distributed across every available surface. The engines were already firing gentle positioning bursts, holding the growing structure level above the stone.
In the center of it all, Genos was absorbed, the machinery reading him as its core and building outward from him in all directions, integrating him into the frame with the smooth efficiency of a system that had done this before.
What emerged was a fighter jet in the general configuration of a falcon — clean lines, swept profile, engines positioned for maximum thrust-to-weight, the whole construction gleaming in the late afternoon light.
From somewhere within the cockpit, Genos's voice: "Masters. I'm ready to depart whenever you are."
Bomb looked at the machine. He looked at Bang.
Bang held out a pair of goggles.
The sonic boom rolled across the mountains a few seconds after the silver shape was already gone.
Down in the valley, somewhere, birds scattered from trees. A waterfall's surface shuddered. The echoes bounced from peak to peak and faded slowly into distance.
Bomb sat in the front cockpit, goggles on, watching the horizon approach and recede at a speed that had no equivalent in sixty years of mountain living. The wind that should have hit him was deflected by the airframe. The g-forces of the acceleration were managed by systems he had no framework to understand.
Modern technology, he was discovering, had its own kind of mastery.
In less than a day, news of the operation had spread to every branch in the Hero Association's network.
By the following morning, the assembly had begun.
S-Class heroes were, as an institutional category, difficult to locate and harder to herd. The Association had accepted this. The broader task force — drawn from A-Class, B-Class, and C-Class ranks — was considerably more manageable.
By dawn, an elite composite force of professional heroes stood assembled on the upper floor of Hero Association headquarters. The logic behind their selection was sound: the S-Class would engage the Dragon-level executives buried deepest in the Monster Association's hierarchy. Those fights would be singular, total, and devastatingly concentrated. What the rest of the force provided was everything around those fights — reconnaissance, perimeter control, extraction, medical support, and the systematic elimination of the lower-tier threats that would otherwise swarm the flanks.
In a military engagement, someone has to hold the line while the generals fight. That was the theory.
In practice, the theory contained an assumption about the gap between the lower-tier monsters and the heroes assigned to handle them — an assumption that had been calibrated to normal operations, normal threat levels, and a Monster Association that was, by any reasonable assessment, not a normal situation.
The intelligence reports had emphasized the Dragon-level executives at the top. What the intelligence reports had been somewhat quieter about was the composition of the mass below that tier.
The first A-Class hero encountered the first cluster of Demon-level monsters assigned to the "lower-tier clearance" zone.
Somewhere distant, a very fast sword moved.
"Atomic Slash—"
Somewhere even more distant, another.
"—Atomic Slash—"
And another.
"—ATOMIC SLASH!"
The morning was only just beginning.
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