In any other era of hero rankings, Eyelashes and Mountain Ape would have occupied the top two positions in B-Class behind their leader. They were that strong. The kind of strong that made the top of a competitive rank feel like a natural home rather than a lucky accident.
The problem was that this was not any other era.
Jordan's arrangement with the House of Evolution had, over the past several months, produced a steady stream of superhumanly capable individuals with clean track records and carefully managed public profiles who had filtered into the B-Class and C-Class rankings like water finding its own level. They weren't pushing aggressively — that was the design — but you didn't need to push aggressively when your baseline physical capabilities cleared the A-Class combat threshold on a bad day. The natural result was that the top of B-Class had been quietly reconfigured, and two of the Fubuki Group's most capable members now found themselves holding positions at the upper end of the rank rather than the literal top of it.
This was a source of ongoing frustration that neither of them discussed directly, partly because the House of Evolution heroes were colleagues in a technical sense, and partly because complaining about being displaced by people who were objectively stronger did not reflect especially well on the complainer.
The argument about directions, therefore, was filling a role.
"I'm not questioning Lady Fubuki's judgment," Eyelashes said, for what was becoming a recurring clarification.
"That's what questioning sounds like," Mountain Ape said.
"I'm questioning the street layout—"
"Those are the same thing—"
"How are those—"
"Both of you."
The voice was sharp but not large — belonging to the only girl in the group's core, a fierce-faced young woman whose sky-blue hair and pure white lily decorations created an aesthetic that did not quite match the flat, unimpressed look she was currently directing at both of them. Nunchuck Lily, B-Class rank 86, one of the few female professional heroes at any rank, wielded her chosen weapon with enough skill and mid-range precision that the absurdity of the weapon itself stopped mattering after the first thirty seconds of watching her use it.
"Lady Fubuki knows where she's going," Lily said, with the certainty of someone who has committed to a position fully and intends to hold it. "If you have a problem with that, take it up with the address."
Eyelashes and Mountain Ape exchanged a look.
...We're the ones having an argument, and somehow we're both losing it.
Lily had already turned her attention forward again, her gaze fixed on Fubuki's back with an expression that could most charitably be described as devoted and most accurately as completely gone.
Eyelashes & Mountain Ape: We stand corrected. The real enthusiasts among us are apparently in a different category entirely.
At the front of the group, Fubuki heard none of this.
That wasn't quite accurate — she heard all of it, because the Fubuki Group was not quiet — but she wasn't attending to it. After this long, the texture of their bickering was as familiar as background music. It had its own rhythm and its own reliable endpoints, and none of those endpoints required her to intervene.
She didn't dislike it.
That was the part she sometimes forgot to acknowledge to herself. She didn't dislike any of it — the argument, the loyalty, the way Lily had just cut off two B-Class veterans to defend her on general principle. The warmth of being surrounded by people who had chosen to follow you not because you were S-Class or because you were someone's sister, but because they had decided, each of them individually, that this was where they wanted to be.
She had never had that before the Fubuki Group. Not in any other form.
Her sister, who had grown up alongside her in every circumstance that had shaped her—
She has someone now, though.
Fubuki brushed a strand of hair back behind her ear and kept walking.
The city around them was doing its usual no-man's-land impression: commercial district frozen in the moment it had been evacuated, storefronts shut, streets empty, the specific quality of a place that had stopped being a place and become a boundary condition. The coordinates from the Hero Association's invitation were pulling her northeast, toward an area where she could already feel, at the outermost edge of her psychic range, something that could only be described as weather that was also a person.
"We're nearly there," she said, without turning. "And I can already sense my sister's aura."
The words had barely left her mouth when the sky confirmed them.
The explosion was percussive and large, the kind of sound that reaches the body before it reaches the ears. The members of the Fubuki Group hit the ground instinctively or raised arms against the wind that followed — a wall of pressure moving through the street hard enough to scatter loose debris and make several people stagger.
When it passed and they looked up, the sky to the northeast had a large green suggestion of itself where a mushroom cloud was clearing.
And descending from that clearing, unhurried, lit from behind by the morning sun, was a figure that most of the Fubuki Group had never seen at this proximity.
At just under a hundred and fifty centimeters, Tatsumaki should not have filled the sky the way she did. She did anyway. The battle suit's slit skirt moved with the air currents around her, emerald psychic energy drifting from her in slow pulses, her pale hands folded in front of her chest. The sunlight caught her outline and haloed it, and the effect was genuinely unearthly — not beautiful exactly, but weighted, the visual impression of something that the world arranged itself around rather than the other way.
She looked down at the Fubuki Group members on the street below, most of whom were picking themselves up from various positions of involuntary collapse, and her expression moved from impatient to something deeper and worse: disappointment.
"Go home, Fubuki." The voice was completely level. No inflection for warmth, no inflection for anger. Just the absolute authority of someone who has never questioned her right to give this instruction. "This isn't a place for you."
Several Fubuki Group members froze, already suppressed, the weight of her aura pressing down on the street like weather.
Her gaze moved across the group with the quality of an inspection that expected to find nothing worth its time.
"Fubuki." The disappointment sharpened slightly, directed inward now, toward the actual object of her concern. "Why haven't the people around you improved. At all. Since the last time I saw them."
It wasn't quite a question. It wasn't quite a statement. It landed somewhere in the space between them, which was the space where Tatsumaki's verdicts tended to live.
"Any hero who can't withstand a fraction of my aura without falling over—" she didn't finish the sentence, because finishing it would have been redundant— "what kind of difference can they make out there?"
The Fubuki Group absorbed this. The absorption process was not comfortable. Eyelashes looked at a point somewhere past the roofline. Mountain Ape's jaw had a quality that suggested he was having a conversation with himself about whether or not the queen of psychic ability had a point, and concluding against his preferences that she might. Lily had gone very still, her usual fierce expression replaced by something that was working very hard to stay composed.
They were weak. Against S-Class standards, even combined, the entire B-Class hero tier contributed less than a rounding error. Tatsumaki was simply saying what the numbers said.
But—
"Sister."
Fubuki's voice came out louder than she'd planned. Not a shout exactly, but something her body had produced before her composure could catch up to it — sharp and clear and carrying the particular quality of something that had been held for a while and was choosing now to stop.
She stood with her head down, fists at her sides, hair falling forward. She didn't raise her eyes. She didn't need to.
"It's not like that." The words came out steadily, one after the other, the way words do when you've been thinking them for a long time and finally stopped reconsidering them. "They're all working hard to get better. Every one of them. That's not visible from where you're standing, and I understand why you'd think—"
She looked up.
"—but they are not trash." Her voice was completely even. "They are my people. Every single one of them. And they matter."