One moment there was a three-meter silver robot hanging in mid-air. The next, there wasn't.
Sitch blinked. He hadn't tracked what happened in between. Just a blur at the edge of his vision, and then—nothing. Empty air where several tons of advanced military hardware used to be.
He took a breath and filed it away. After years as a senior Hero Association cadre, the bar for "outrageous" had been raised considerably. And with the organization's two most powerful individuals standing ten feet away, the absence of outrageous occurrences would have been the more surprising outcome.
F-boy, his task complete, dissolved back into nothing with the same quiet indifference he'd arrived with.
Tatsumaki watched the spot where the purple figure had been. She'd caught Sitch's expression throughout the whole sequence—or rather, the complete absence of one. Either he already knew about the Stand and had simply decided not to react, or he'd had absolutely no idea what he was looking at.
She leaned toward the latter. The pure spiritual energy signature she'd sensed from the figure—clean, non-psychic, something fundamentally different from anything she'd encountered—suggested it operated outside normal perception entirely. Invisible to anyone not sensitive enough to feel it.
She didn't let doubts fester.
"Hey." She looked at Jordan. "Was that one of your superpowers? That figure just now."
"Yes." Matter-of-fact, no hesitation. "It's called a Stand. My unique ability."
"Then why haven't I seen you use it before? Either of the last two times."
Jordan looked at her with the expression of someone who had been asked why they don't bring an umbrella when it isn't raining. "It's a support-type Stand. Ordinary battles don't require it."
Tatsumaki went very still.
Ordinary battles.
Somewhere in the architecture of her pride, something made a small cracking sound.
Support-type. So I'm ordinary combat.
From somewhere in the vicinity of Jordan's personal space, a pale purple hand materialized just long enough to extend one finger in a very specific direction, aimed with equal precision at both of them, before vanishing again.
Jordan blinked. Tatsumaki blinked.
He'd managed to insult both of them simultaneously without appearing to try. Jordan hadn't even noticed he'd set it up.
"Don't worry about it," he said, attempting to move on with a laugh. "It's nothing."
But Tatsumaki's attention had already snagged on the gesture—on the fact that the gesture had happened at all. The dead-fish eyes sharpened into something considerably more alert.
"It has its own consciousness." Not a question. "Release it again. I want to get a better look."
"No."
"Why not?"
"I'm not that easy."
Tatsumaki's eyes narrowed. "—What did you just imply about me?"
Sitch watched the two of them with the expression of a man whose predictions had all come in. He was not surprised. He had stopped being surprised some time ago. He did, however, find himself wondering what a "Stand" was, and whether it was terminology specific to superpowered individuals, and whether it would be appropriate to ask.
He decided it would not.
"How long," Tatsumaki said, with dangerous precision, "are you planning to keep holding my hand?"
Jordan glanced down.
Her forearm was still in his grip—fair skin, cool to the touch, unexpectedly soft. He'd forgotten he was still holding it.
"That," he said, without releasing it, "was a necessary precautionary measure. Certain heroes with insufficient impulse control were displaying warning signs of property destruction."
"I was not—"
"Think carefully." He drew her forward in one smooth motion, closing the distance, until they were looking directly at each other. "Are you certain?"
The question landed and Tatsumaki opened her mouth to answer it.
Then she caught the scent.
It wasn't anything she could have named or catalogued. Something clean and faintly warm, close enough now that it registered before she could decide whether to let it. The response was immediate and entirely involuntary—heat flooding into her face, her whole body going rigid, every carefully maintained system of distance and armor seizing up at once.
Here we go again.
This feeling—
What kind of bizarre superpower is this?!
Her heart was doing something inconvenient. And underneath the wall of resistance she was throwing at it—brick by frantic brick—was a splinter of something she refused to examine. Something that might, in poor lighting, be mistaken for anticipation.
She had not trusted anyone since escaping that organization. Not properly. Not without armor. Even with Fubuki, she performed strength—kept the walls high, kept the distance, pushed others away so nothing could reach her sister through the gap. It was a system. It worked.
So why was it that every time she ended up in front of this particular infuriating person, the system crashed?
It was definitely not because he was fractionally stronger than every other opponent she'd faced. Definitely not.
"...Has it crashed?"
Jordan was looking at her with what appeared to be genuine scientific curiosity. Then he reached up and patted her head.
The touch snapped her back.
"Stop doing that!"
She wrenched her arm free, took two steps back, crossed both arms hard against her chest. Her face was radiating heat she had no explanation for. She shook out her hand as though it had been burned.
"Explain yourself clearly." She reset her expression to something appropriately hostile. "What exactly constitutes a 'dangerous act' worthy of that kind of intervention?"
She glanced sideways. "Sitch. You agree with me, don't you."
Sitch looked like a man who had just been handed a grenade with the pin already pulled.
Why me. Why is it always me.
"Miss Tornado, this is—"
"I'll handle this one."
Jordan stepped in with the unhurried competence of someone who had watched Sitch suffer enough for one afternoon. Sitch exhaled with his entire body.
Jordan turned to Tatsumaki, and his expression was, for once, completely straight.
"When you use your abilities without restraint, the collateral damage spreads well beyond the target." He said it simply, without heat. "Even fighting monsters—it makes things harder for the people you're supposed to be protecting."
"That's—" She started the rebuttal automatically, and then something snagged.
She stopped.
Thought about it.
The Hero Association handled all the damage assessments and financial compensation afterward. That buffer had always made it easier to not calculate the cost of her methods. She'd never had to sit with the number.
The reflection was real, and it lasted for approximately four seconds before old habits reasserted themselves.
"Hmph." Arms tighter. Chin higher. "So what? As long as the monster is eliminated and people are saved, that's what counts."
"You have the power to do it without making everyone afraid of you," Jordan said. "Why don't you?"
The sentence hit like a dropped weight.
She felt it land. Felt the exact shape of what it had struck—something she kept far below the surface, under several layers of deliberate inaccessibility. The memory of being small. The decision she'd made, somewhere in those years, that fear was safer than love because fear couldn't be taken from you. That if the whole world was afraid of her power, nothing could touch what she was protecting.
It wasn't something she'd ever said out loud.
Her pupils contracted. "You—" Her voice came out smaller than she intended. "Did you just read my thoughts?"
"Not right now. Possibly in the future." Jordan was already moving—a subtle shift in the air around her, the Mind Network extending like a tide, rich with psychic current. But where it touched the field of energy coiled around Tatsumaki, it sparked. Actual visible sparks, crackling at her temples, the two power systems meeting and refusing to harmonize.
"See?" he said. "I wasn't lying."
Tatsumaki stared at the faint light still fading near her face.
This man had a superpower that could read minds. She'd just been looking right at evidence of it trying to work on her and shorting out instead.
Frustrated.jpg.
"...Fine. You're already very good at it." Dead fish eyes at maximum deployment.
"That's the first genuinely kind thing you've said to me."
"Don't push it—"
Something warm settled on top of her head. Familiar, by now, in the way that irritating recurring things become familiar.
Her neck tucked instinctively, the way a cat will lean into a hand before remembering it has dignity. She didn't pull away completely.
"It's rare," Jordan said, "that we got through an entire meeting without a fight. That's progress."
Tatsumaki said nothing.
The tips of her ears were red, which was entirely the fault of the weather.