In the Z-City branch operations center, Lanny was already several paces down the corridor, and the thought completing itself in her mind was comfortable enough that she was close to smiling.
Lord Evans was nearby, the no-man's-land was empty of civilians, and the only person who had just disassembled two blocks of commercial architecture was someone whose power the Hero Association had stopped classifying as a disaster event approximately eighteen months ago — because classifying it as one required dispatching heroes, which required heroes to show up, and heroes who showed up at a Tatsumaki incident that Jordan Evans was already at had a habit of standing around, assessing the situation, and then going home.
She can cause whatever trouble she wants. Nothing major will come of it.
She reached for her phone.
The city was on fire.
Not all of it — the no-man's-land had been evacuated years ago, and there was nothing alive on these commercial blocks except buildings that had outlived their purpose. But Tatsumaki's "Shut up" had touched off a gas line somewhere in the subsurface infrastructure, and the result was the kind of backdrop that usually precedes a very specific category of fictional scene: orange-red flames, thick smoke catching the morning light, dark shapes moving against the glow.
Tatsumaki's face in the firelight was doing something that couldn't quite be called a smile.
"Whether something is trash or not," she said, with the particular tone of someone who has decided to do something and is narrating it for her own satisfaction, "is not for me to say."
She paused.
"So I'll give them a chance to prove it."
The Fubuki Group, from the ground, received this announcement with the collective stillness of people who are trying very hard to identify whether they are being offered a reprieve or an execution.
"I'll use that move on you." Tatsumaki's expression was utterly casual. "The one that wasn't technically an attack. If you can withstand it, I'll consider letting you keep following Fubuki."
The group looked at each other.
Not technically an attack — the phrase hung in the smoke-filled air and refused to mean anything reassuring. Tatsumaki's power had instantly taken apart Dragon-level monsters, plural, multiple times, in the past year alone. This was publicly documented. What, exactly, did she consider an actual attack?
What kind of hellish joke is this—
"Sister, stop—" Fubuki was still suspended in the telekinetic field and could not move, but the urgency in her voice was doing her best work for her. "My sister's telekinesis can kill Dragon-level monsters instantly. How are they supposed to—mmmph—"
Tatsumaki moved one finger.
The telekinetic field wrapped around Fubuki's lower face in the specific configuration of someone who has decided that their younger sister does not get to finish that sentence.
"My silly little sister." The tone shifted to something that was almost fond, if fond had been soaked in exasperation and wrung out. "What exactly do you get out of spending all your time with people like this?" She shook her head. "I'm doing you a favor. I'll leave them in a state where they can't perform heroic activities but won't die. That's very generous of me."
Fubuki, muffled: —mmmm—!!
The Fubuki Group: frozen. Several of them were experiencing the specific cognitive phenomenon of watching your own fate be announced with complete matter-of-fact neutrality by someone who could absolutely execute on it, which tends to produce a brief period of complete neurological stillness before the brain catches up.
Green light gathered on Tatsumaki's small hand.
It gathered unhurriedly, in the manner of power that has nowhere it needs to be and nothing it needs to prove.
A hand closed around Tatsumaki's wrist.
The light went out.
"That's enough." Jordan's voice was completely level. "Look how frightened everyone is."
The hand was familiar. Tatsumaki's body registered this before her mind caught up — the instinctive counter-surge of telekinetic energy that always answered an unexpected physical contact pulled back and stood down before it had fully formed, because the touch was known, and the response to known was different from the response to threat.
She looked up.
Jordan looked the way he always looked when he was professionally managing a situation he found mildly amusing but was choosing not to visibly enjoy.
From the ground, the Fubuki Group processed the arrival of Super Cop, S-Class Rank #2, the Z-City resident hero who had materialized in the sky several meters up with no apparent mechanism and was currently holding the Tornado of Terror's wrist like this was an ordinary thing that an ordinary person might do.
Several of them opened their mouths.
None of them produced words.
Fubuki, released from the face-covering portion of her telekinetic restraint, immediately exhaled like a woman who has been holding her breath during an unexploded-ordinance assessment. She didn't say anything. She didn't need to. Every muscle in her body visibly reclassified "imminent catastrophe" as "not currently imminent," and the relief was doing all of her communicating.
Jordan pulled Tatsumaki toward him — a slight, unhurried motion that she allowed — and her posture rearranged itself against his side with the specificity of something habitual.
"Why are you here?" he asked, the tone settling into something warmer and more private. "I was about to come get you."
"If I hadn't arrived when I did—" Tatsumaki began, and then reconsidered, and redirected. "—they started it. Following Fubuki around, letting her put herself in danger—"
"They're part of the operation."
"That's not—"
"After this is done," Jordan said, with the particular patience of someone who has learned exactly which approach works on which internal architecture, "they'll be some of its most important non-S-Class contributors." He glanced at the group below. "Fubuki needs people who can keep up with her. This is how that happens."
He reached up and applied a slow, careful pressure to the top of Tatsumaki's head.
The argument in her expression ran its course and then, somewhat involuntarily, stopped.
Her eyes narrowed. She turned her head away.
"...Fine. If they actually have what it takes to protect Fubuki, I won't stand in the way."
That was remarkably fast, said nothing in the space around them.
Jordan looked down at the assembled Fubuki Group, whose collective expression had cycled from existential dread to faint hope to something approaching bewildered relief.
"After this operation concludes," he said, carrying clearly to the street below, "report as a group to the second S-Class training session. All of you. Understood?"
The silence that followed lasted approximately two seconds.
It was the silence of people recalculating the difference between we were about to be non-lethally incapacitated by the Tornado of Terror and we just got invited to the S-Class training program.
The sound that replaced it was unanimous.
"Yes, Super Cop!!"
Tatsumaki looked at the enthusiastic shouting from below with an expression suggesting she found the entire species mildly tiresome. "Hmph. Whatever."
Jordan turned to Fubuki, who was floating nearby in the remnant of the telekinetic field, still processing everything that had just happened at a speed that her face couldn't quite keep up with.
"That goes for you too." He held her gaze. "You're the group's leader. You don't want your own members outpacing you, do you?"
Fubuki's face went very slightly pink.
In her internal architecture, a voice was saying something quite specific about brother-in-law and what kind of question that counted as, and she was not repeating it.
"...Fine," she said, with great dignity. "Understood."
From somewhere in the firelight below, the sound of an argument.
It had been going on continuously for a while now — two voices, neither willing to cede ground, their rhythm suggesting a disagreement that had transcended any specific subject and become a principle.
The two figures that emerged from the burning commercial district were, on first glance, an unlikely pair: a spare, blond man in a pink suit with a ninja sword at his waist, and a slightly-below-average-height, partially-balding man in yellow and red who was jogging at a pace that the first man was keeping up with by not quite trying.
Flashy Flash and Saitama had not, during their 10-kilometer argument, paid close attention to their surroundings. This had resulted in them covering considerably more than 10 kilometers at a speed that, in Flash's case, still left him with certain observations he hadn't finished processing.
He had sped up on the return trip, once the explosion had oriented them correctly. An S-Class hero's top speed was typically a fixed variable — something you tested once, filed, and referenced when necessary. Flash had tested a great many S-Class heroes in this manner. The result was usually informative and occasionally surprising and had never produced this.
No matter how much he accelerated, when he looked back, the hairy, half-bald man was there.
Grinning, typically, which was not ideal.
Am I slowing down without realizing it? Is he actually faster than he looks?
He had not solved this question by the time they arrived. He had, however, revised his assessment of Saitama from slightly irritating eccentric with adequate mental composure to something he wasn't quite ready to articulate.
Appearance: shabby. Manners: nonexistent. Hair situation: unfortunate. But the underlying qualities, if you set all of that aside...
He looked at the figure descending from the sky — Jordan, with Tatsumaki's arm, Fubuki floating nearby, the whole scene lit orange by burning buildings — and then looked at Saitama, who had already cupped his hands around his mouth.
"Jordan!" Saitama's voice cut across the no-man's-land with the volume of a man who had not located a megaphone but had decided to perform as though he had. "What happened over there?!"