Use your invincible superpowers and think of something!!
Jordan Evans caught Sitch's panicked inner voice through the Mind Network and resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Barely.
Metal Knight provoked Tatsumaki into going nuclear. What exactly does that have to do with me?
Still—Sitch was a decent man, and decent men in genuine distress were hard to ignore. Jordan had done this kind of thing dozens of times in the Boys' world. By now it was almost reflexive.
Blue psychic energy flowed down through his feet, silent and invisible, spreading outward through the foundation of the building and into the surrounding streets. The force field settled like a second skeleton over the entire headquarters complex—concrete and steel reinforced at a structural level, load-bearing capacity spiking.
Stopping a nuclear warhead would be a stretch. But the conventional munitions packed into that silver chassis? Even if Metal Knight remote-detonated every last one simultaneously, they wouldn't scratch a floor tile.
Tatsumaki, being Tatsumaki, noticed immediately.
She was still furious. She spared it exactly one sidelong glance—a brief, dismissive acknowledgment—then returned her full attention to the robot, which continued to exist in blissful ignorance of how badly it had miscalculated.
"You dare to fight back?"
The missiles hung motionless in the air.
Hundreds of them, suspended mid-flight, swallowed whole by churning green psychic energy. Their tail-flames still burned. Their momentum still screamed forward. And none of it mattered. They were frozen in place as completely as flies in amber, utterly unable to advance regardless of how hard their engines pushed.
During the Boros invasion—a God-level disaster—Tatsumaki had caught the Dark Matter Pirates' orbital bombardment mid-flight and hurled it back at them. Compared to that, Metal Knight's full-force salvo was a stern letter of complaint.
Dr. Bofoy, watching through his remote feed, assessed the situation in about two seconds. Then he pressed a different button.
Every shell detonated at once.
The simultaneous explosion rocked the training grounds, a wall of heat and pressure that even made Tatsumaki blink. For just a moment, genuine surprise crossed her face.
Then her expression settled back into something cold and absolute.
She pressed her outstretched hand downward.
Time stopped. Or that was how it looked—the shrapnel, the casing fragments, the blooming curtains of fire all frozen at the precise instant of detonation, suspended in the air like a photograph of destruction. Blazing fireworks, perfectly still, filling the empty training field in a modern abstract painting of violence interrupted.
"Bring on whatever tricks you have."
She stood at the center of it all, arms crossed, green fire haloing her silhouette. Untouched. Unimpressed. Every inch of her radiating the absolute certainty that nothing in this field was capable of threatening her.
Below her, Jordan Evans looked up and, for just a moment, got it.
—What a waste. She really did wear it today.
Beside him, Sitch stared with his mouth slightly open.
...That's it? That's all she did?
This was the same Tornado who routinely demolished half a city block whenever she got sufficiently motivated? She'd contained a multi-hundred-missile simultaneous detonation and the worst the headquarters had suffered was a rattled flagpole.
What Sitch didn't know—couldn't know—was that Tatsumaki genuinely hadn't been holding back for the building's sake. She'd simply been angry, not invested. The robot hadn't pushed her hard enough to justify real effort.
And the force field Jordan had quietly laid beneath everything had absorbed the residual shockwave so completely that the surrounding streets hadn't registered so much as a tremor.
From the speaker mounted in the robot's chassis, Dr. Bofoy's voice emerged—measured, clinical, entirely unrattled.
"A miscalculation. I originally intended to collect combat data on the world's number one superpowered individual, but it seems a different subject provided the sample. No matter—data from a fellow top-tier psychic is functionally equivalent." A brief pause. "Today's assessment is concluded. If either of you would like to keep this unit as a sparring dummy, feel free to do with it as you like."
The engines wound down.
The robot landed, locked into stillness, and went dark.
"—Did he just mock me?!"
Tatsumaki stared at the silent machine, her aura spiking. "Hey! Are you listening?! Answer me!"
The robot said nothing. It was a robot.
Nearby, Jordan Evans had taken Sitch by the hand. Sitch looked up to find Jordan's expression one of profound, genuine relief.
Thank goodness you were here.
Sitch blinked, momentarily moved by the apparent gratitude. He was not entirely sure what he had contributed to today's events, but he was willing to accept the acknowledgment.
Tatsumaki's cheeks puffed out.
Neither of them was paying any attention to her.
"Fine," she announced, to no one in particular. "I'll just destroy it then."
She raised one hand. Her index finger curved upward in a single beckoning gesture.
The silver robot lifted from the ground, green light coiling around its chassis. An invisible telekinetic grip closed around the steel shell, and the metal began to creak—slow at first, then with increasing urgency, the frame buckling inward under pressure that had no visible source.
"Wait a moment."
Jordan's hand closed around her forearm—warm, unhurried, matter-of-fact.
Tatsumaki turned.
She was in full powerful-figure mode, aura blazing, expression set to lethal. It was, by any reasonable metric, a deeply intimidating combination. Something flickered in the depths of her eyes—not quite alarm, but adjacent to it—and she buried it immediately under another layer of ferocity.
"What are you doing."
"You're not stopping me over something this small, are you?" Her voice climbed slightly. "Or are you starting a fight again? Because I'm not—"
—I'm not afraid of you.
She coiled the thought tight, braced, and waited.
"Relax." Jordan's tone was easy. Annoyingly easy. The tone of someone talking a five-year-old away from something breakable. "Stop fooling around. This thing is still useful."
Tatsumaki stared at him.
The vein at her temple made its presence known.
What is with that voice.
Sitch, watching from a safe distance, felt something close to awe settle over him. Tatsumaki had not exploded. Tatsumaki, who had once leveled a district because she found the architecture offensive, was standing here looking caught off guard rather than homicidal.
As expected of Lord Evans.
"Speaking of which, Mr. Sitch—"
Under Jordan's grip, Tatsumaki found herself half-turned toward the senior cadre, who immediately snapped to attention.
"Yes! Please, go ahead!"
"Based on what Metal Knight just said, the machine has been released into our custody. Correct? He explicitly stated he didn't care what happened to it."
Sitch considered it for approximately two seconds. Dr. Bofoy was hardly going to miss one test unit. "Given 'Metal Knight's' exact words—yes. Lord Evans and Miss Tatsumaki may do with it as they see fit."
Jordan nodded. "Then I'll reluctantly take this unwanted hardware off his hands."
"What?" Tatsumaki's eyes narrowed. "In the end, you were going to do the same thing I—"
The complaint died on her lips.
Because something was emerging from Jordan Evans's body.
A figure—tall, powerfully built, every muscle carved with exaggerated precision—stepped out through his torso as if passing through a membrane. Pale purple and translucent, wreathed in slow-burning blue flames. The face was Jordan's face, sharpened and abstracted, wearing an expression of composed indifference. Skirt armor of layered cards hung from its waist, shifting with each movement.
Tatsumaki's mouth opened slightly.
F-boy and the S-Class hero regarded each other. For a long moment, neither moved.
This was, Jordan noted distantly, the first time he had deliberately released the Stand in front of someone who wasn't already in his confidence. And the first time anyone outside his inner circle had been able to see F-boy at all.
[A pleasure.]
F-boy inclined his head—a single, precise nod—then drifted past Tatsumaki toward the dormant robot without further ceremony.
The Stand's ability activated.
Reality blurred around the machine. Its physical form lost coherence, edges softening, the hard lines of steel and tungsten dissolving into something less certain. The process was slow enough to watch and strange enough to make the eye want to look away—the silver chassis flattening, condensing, collapsing inward until it was no longer a robot at all.
A blank card rested in F-boy's palm.
He slid it into the skirt armor with the unhurried efficiency of someone filing paperwork, and the green psychic energy that had been holding the robot aloft dispersed—untethered, purposeless—fading into the air like breath on a cold day.
Tatsumaki stood very still.
The turbulence in her expression was doing several things at once, none of them easy to name.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Writing takes time, coffee, and a lot of love.If you'd like to support my work, join me at [email protected]/GoldenGaruda
You'll get early access to over 50 chapters, selection on new series, and the satisfaction of knowing your support directly fuels more stories.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~