"It's fine," Jordan called back, his voice carrying easily across the no-man's-land. "It's been handled."
He raised his free hand in a wave. The other arm was occupied.
Saitama, still grinning with the particular relief of someone who had processed Jordan arrived, therefore problem no longer exists and settled on that comfortably, gave a thumbs up and reversed direction, returning to his run.
From where he stood, Flashy Flash watched this exchange and updated several internal files simultaneously.
The first: Saitama, S-Class Rank 18, had responded to the arrival of S-Class Rank 2 with the ease of someone greeting a friend, and had accepted the resolution of a catastrophic-scale psychic event with the equanimity of someone who had been told the weather report was acceptable.
The second: S-Class Ranks 2 and 3 were, apparently, not colleagues in the usual sense of the word.
Useful information, Flashy Flash noted, and filed it carefully, and maintained his cool expression, and said nothing.
With Tatsumaki at his side — composure restored, battle suit settling, emerald energy back at its resting-state ambient level — Jordan opened a spatial portal and the two of them stepped through. The fire behind them continued doing what fire does when it's not being supervised, which was to gradually become a structural problem for nobody in particular, since the buildings involved had been abandoned for several years.
Fubuki watched them go with an expression she had curated specifically to convey nothing, and then turned back to her group, who were in the process of recovering from a morning that had significantly exceeded their planning estimates.
By afternoon, the final S-Class hero arrived.
Pig God stepped off the transport plane onto the no-man's-land tarmac and was greeted by the assembled force with the particular quality of reception that very large people receive in spaces that weren't designed for them — not unwelcoming, just recalibrating. He acknowledged the various greetings with the good-natured patience of someone accustomed to this, accepted a late lunch that one of the support staff had apparently been keeping warm for two hours, and took his place among the assembled S-Class contingent.
Eleven S-Class heroes. The remaining eight were distributed across their respective cities as a skeletal defense network — because the Hero Association's operational calculus was correct in its concern that a coordinated monster response elsewhere while the S-Class were occupied underground would represent a significant problem, even if Jordan's own internal accounting of the situation was considerably more relaxed.
The War God shadow clone was not registered with the Hero Association. The Mind Network's electromagnetic shielding rendered it invisible to all modern detection instruments. There was, as far as the official operational record was concerned, no reason to account for it.
Some things, Jordan had found, worked better when the paperwork didn't know about them.
In the aggregate, the human side had assembled more than enough to address what was underground — and that was before accounting for Jordan and Saitama, who occupied a tier of the calculation that the Monster Association's leadership had no complete intelligence on.
Jordan allowed himself a quiet moment of satisfaction at the overall picture, and then raised one eyebrow.
A kilometer away, behind the window of an abandoned high-rise building on the fourth floor, there was a pink eye.
It was very small. It was very carefully positioned. It was surrounded by enough rubble and darkness that the reflection coefficient off the iris would have made it effectively invisible to any standard optical or electronic surveillance system.
Jordan smiled slightly.
"What do you think," he said, conversationally, to approximately nobody in his immediate vicinity, "those ubiquitous little eyes?"
One thousand five hundred meters underground, Psykos pulled her hand away from her left eye and breathed.
The backlash had been sharp — sharper than the theoretical analysis predicted. Losing a reconnaissance eye through normal exposure shouldn't produce this kind of feedback. The neural connection was designed with circuit-breaker architecture specifically to prevent exactly this.
Which meant the cause hadn't been the eye exploding.
The cause had been the glance.
She breathed steadily until the residual pain receded, then worked through the analysis with the methodical patience of someone who had spent the better part of three years building something very carefully and had a great deal of practice at processing unwelcome information without losing composure.
The "Little Eyes" were cultivation products — bio-drones grown from monster cells, capable of operating remotely beyond the range of electronic detection. She could see through them, communicate through them, self-destruct them if capture was imminent. The architecture was solid. She had used them for months without incident.
Jordan Evans had looked in the right direction and the eye had ceased to function.
Not by any visible mechanism. Not by any technique she could identify or categorize from the observable data. Simply: he had looked, and the distance between them — a kilometer of no-man's-land, a flight of abandoned stairs, a window frame — had been irrelevant.
She filed this information where she filed all information about the man above her: in the category labeled significantly beyond current response capability.
The file had been growing for two years.
She had known from the beginning that Jordan Evans was exceptional. That was why she'd chosen Z-City's no-man's-land for the base — because proximity to strong people created problems, but proximity to the strongest people in the world created a very specific kind of deterrence that even other monsters respected. You didn't raid the territory of something at the apex of its food chain. It was, paradoxically, one of the safer addresses available.
What she had miscalculated was the growth rate.
At the time of the Monster Association's founding, Jordan's recorded capabilities had been extraordinary but bounded. She had built her operational timeline around a version of him that had since become outdated. By the time she recognized the gap between her model and the reality, the compound was built, the hierarchy was established, and relocating was not a practical option.
If I had known, she thought, without particular bitterness — bitterness was an inefficient use of cognitive resources — I would never have chosen Z-City.
Every time the hot pot group gathered in the neighborhood above her — three, four, five of the most dangerous individuals in the world, sitting in a kitchen, eating and talking — her heart rate elevated well above resting baseline. She had installed additional monitoring on those evenings. She had kept her own activity to absolute minimum. She had, more than once, rehearsed the contingency protocols for scenarios in which Jordan decided to look down rather than around.
The thought that she might have been operating directly beneath his daily range of perception for two years, and that he had been aware of the Monster Association's existence and simply choosing his moment—
Don't spiral, she told herself. Analysis only.
The single productive outcome of this morning's reconnaissance failure was information: Jordan's spatial perception was not bounded by normal line-of-sight, distance, or optical concealment. She updated the model.
What had kept the Monster Association alive this long was not strength — she was clear-eyed enough to know that — but patience and the Orochi project.
The artificial Dragon-peak entity currently on her experimental table was not complete. The iridescent compound required more time, more refinement; the serpentine-haired subject on the table was enduring the process with the particular resilience of something that had been engineered to survive what would destroy anything else. But its current state — half-finished, imperfect, not yet the absolute weapon she intended — already gave it the output to suppress every Dragon-level executive in the association's roster by raw power alone.
Orochi — she had named it quietly, privately, in the part of her mind where she allowed herself the luxury of things that weren't strictly analytical — is not ready. But the people above are not going to wait much longer.
She sat back in her chair and looked at the ceiling, which was rock, which was the floor of the world above her.
The Hero Association was mobilizing. Jordan had called it a "team-building activity," which she had found quietly maddening — the most deliberate understatement possible from a man who understood exactly what he was doing — but the operational outcome was the same regardless of the framing.
They were coming.
Then we meet them as prepared as we are, she decided, and we find out which of us has been more accurate about the other.
She turned back to her work.
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