"I wasn't following you," Flashy Flash said, with the particular dignity of a man reconstructing his composure from first principles. "I simply happened to be going in the same direction."
Saitama glanced back at him. The dead-fish eyes conducted a brief, thorough assessment of this claim against the available evidence — namely, the fact that Flash had been two steps behind him since the intersection.
"Sure you were." He squinted. The insight arrived cleanly, the way obvious things sometimes do when you stop being polite about them. "You got lost, didn't you."
Flash's eye twitched.
"That's a serious accusation to level at someone without—"
"You got lost."
"—without any kind of evidentiary foundation for—"
"You got lost."
"It's my first time in this city," Flash said, with great precision, each word placed like a legal document. "I'm not familiar with the road layout. That's an entirely different thing from being lost."
Saitama considered this distinction for approximately half a second. "Weakling."
"Stop—"
Flash breathed. Slow, controlled. The composure that had briefly departed his face returned to it, settling back into the cool, handsome arrangement that was its default state, and he looked straight ahead at the road with the expression of a man who has decided that this conversation is beneath him but is going to continue having it anyway.
"You're a hero too," he said, in the tone of someone changing the subject with surgical precision. "While maintaining a training schedule is admirable, gathering for operations takes priority."
This person is being incredibly nosy, Saitama thought, continuing to run. His oval face maintained its uncomplicated expression. Mind your own business, Auntie Bangs.
He did not say this aloud. He was, occasionally, capable of restraint.
Flashy Flash glanced sideways at the sparse but determined hair situation on Saitama's head, and delivered his final word on the matter with the practiced ease of someone who knows exactly where to aim.
"In any case," he said, "overtraining has been documented to accelerate hair loss."
The silence that followed had texture.
Saitama ran.
The sound reached the assembly area before the helicopter did — the heavy pulse of rotors cutting through the morning air, growing louder across the open no-man's-land. The assembled heroes turned their faces upward.
Strong wind followed, the kind that makes eyes water and loose papers airborne. Heroes throughout the crowd raised hands to shield their faces and squinted against the gale.
In the middle of the group, Mecha-Esper rose without fuss, pressed his right hand to his temple, and the mechanical mask covering his face released a pulse of blue light.
"Psychodynamic Shield — activate."
A transparent film materialized in the air above him, pale blue and faintly luminescent, expanding outward in both directions until it curved overhead and locked into a dome shape that covered the assembled heroes in its entirety. The wind hit the barrier and stopped.
Around him, the reaction was immediate and undisguised.
"Is this... superpower?"
"It's a bit like what Lady Fubuki does. Or Lady Tornado."
"Wait — isn't he C-Class? That output feels like at least B-rank."
The whispers spread through the crowd with the quality of something that people were trying to say quietly and failing to.
Mecha-Esper kept the shield in place with the effortless focus of someone performing a task that had long since become automatic. His attention was on the helicopter descending to the lawn, not on the conversation happening around him.
Beside him, Food Butler — a C-Class hero whose particular ability involved converting food into stored fat for attribute enhancement, which was a more functional powerset than it sounded and considerably less glamorous than it looked — had stopped eating his bun halfway through. He was staring at the shield above them. He was staring at Mecha-Esper. He was running some kind of internal calculation that appeared to be producing unfavorable results.
He swallowed what was in his mouth.
"Mecha-Esper," he said, carefully. "When exactly did you get this good?"
The two of them had been on teams together before — back when Mecha-Esper had ranked below him in Class C, somewhere far outside the top hundred, a guy you teamed up with because he was reliable and available, not because he was going to turn the tide of anything.
That version of events now required significant revision.
Mecha-Esper turned his head. His expression, as much as could be read through the mechanical mask, was genuinely modest.
"Compared to everyone I trained alongside?" He shook his head. "My progress is nothing special. I still have a long way to go."
He meant this.
That was the thing about the S-Class training program — the graduates who came out of it didn't talk about it the way people talk about an experience that made them exceptional. They talked about it the way people talk about an experience that permanently recalibrated what exceptional meant. Once you'd trained in an environment where a single punch from the faculty could rearrange your understanding of threat scales, the concept of "I've improved significantly" became very difficult to feel smug about. Every ceiling revealed another ceiling.
No one who'd watched Saitama's Serious Punch erase Elder Centipede from existence had come away thinking their current best was enough.
Food Butler absorbed this. He looked at the shield above him, still perfectly maintained. He looked at his half-eaten bun.
Do you think... if I asked nicely... Super Cop might have room for one more in the next session?
At the front of the assembled force, Sekingar was doing something more structured with the same information: taking notes.
The rumors had been persistent enough and consistent enough that he'd flagged them in his operational planning — claims that training program graduates showed disproportionate improvement — but intelligence about hero capability was exactly the kind of thing that required first-hand confirmation before you bet an operation on it. What he'd just seen Mecha-Esper do, casually, as a weather precaution, while ranked C-Class—
The intelligence on individual combat capacity is going to need to be substantially revised before I can finalize the deployment plan.
He added a line to his notes.
Training program graduates: reassess across the board.
The helicopter settled onto the lawn with the smooth authority of a vehicle piloted by someone whose time was expensive.
The figure that stepped out of it was exactly as advertised — pink suit, black undershirt, short blue hair, a face that had been the subject of magazine covers and concert posters and what was currently the highest-grossing biographical film in the country's box office history.
Perfect Idol had done twenty billion in its first week.
Amai Mask looked at the assembled heroes with his usual expression, which was the expression of someone assessing whether the people in front of him met the standard he'd set for the world, and usually finding the answer complex.
A murmur ran through the crowd.
"That's Amai Mask, isn't it."
"He actually came. The concert tour is still running."
"What — you think someone like Super Cop doesn't have the pull to get Amai Mask to show up for something?"
"I didn't say that—!"
"You kind of implied—"
"I didn't imply anything—!"
Amai Mask did not acknowledge any of this. His gaze moved across the assembled force with careful attention, cataloguing something, making a calculation that his face gave no indication of.
He already knew what was underground.
He had already decided what he intended to do about it.