Saitama was almost completely bald now.
Not quite there—a few stubborn patches still clung on—but close enough that the difference between almost invincible and actually invincible had become largely academic. The practical distinction was subtle: monsters that a single casual punch used to erase now occasionally required two. Sometimes a serious one.
The training that used to make him scream through gritted teeth each morning had stopped hurting somewhere along the way. He still did it. Every day, without exception—rain, heat, whatever the sky decided to produce. The routine had become something closer to breathing than exercise.
As the old saying goes: When the Good Lord decides to put a man in charge, He first maxes out his credit cards, wrecks his knees, and snatches his hairline.
King had suffered through the early weeks of Saitama's regimen considerably. But suffering, applied consistently, produces a foundation. He had one now—built on good habits and the kind of bone-deep discipline that doesn't announce itself. Combined with his naturally impossible luck, even the most genuinely dangerous training scenarios had a way of resolving without catastrophic incident. Monsters that should have ended him found their footing slip at the wrong moment, or got distracted, or simply miscalculated.
What was genuinely impressive was that he could spar with Saitama at all—even a Saitama holding back with evident care. That said something real.
"Saitama, keep watching. I'll go help with dinner."
Jordan Evans handed off the half-eaten orange and stood up.
"Oh, thanks." Saitama accepted the plate, snapped off a segment, and his eyebrows went up. "This is really sweet."
Jordan rolled his sleeves back as he walked into the kitchen. King turned from the counter. "It's fine, I can manage—"
"We eat faster if there are more hands. And I'm getting hungry."
King considered this. "Then could you wash the vegetables, please?"
Jordan grabbed a handful of carrots and ran them under the tap, calling for F-boy with a thought. The kitchen, to any observer, contained two people. The actual number was three—a third pair of hands, perfectly efficient, operating without commentary. Prep time collapsed.
Saitama, in the living room, remained absorbed in the television and completely unaware that the purple apparition he'd been half-convinced was haunting him was currently chopping spring onions six feet away.
"King." Jordan rinsed a bundle of greens. "Has the Hero Association reached out to you? This S-Class recruitment push is everywhere."
"They did contact me." King arranged ingredients with unhurried precision. "They said this round is large—possibly three or four new S-Class heroes joining at once. They suggested I wait for the others to be announced first, then apply formally afterward. Less chance of getting lost in the noise."
"Mm." Jordan nodded. "Sounds like the M City operations manager has a specific plan in mind."
He glanced toward the living room.
"Saitama—any interest in becoming a professional hero?"
The television volume dropped. "What was that, Jordan Evans?"
"Professional hero. The kind they're recruiting on the news right now. Hero Association."
"Oh." A pause. "That organization ranks everyone, right?"
"They do."
"I became a hero because I wanted to. For fun." Saitama's voice carried the particular flatness of someone who has thought about something and arrived at a simple conclusion. "If I join something with rankings and superiors giving orders, that sounds like a lot of hassle."
Jordan turned it over in his mind while he worked.
Saitama's raw power was absolutely S-Class—probably beyond any calibrated measurement the Association used. The problem wasn't strength. The problem was the Mediterranean situation developing at the top of his head. The A-to-S promotion pipeline had a final stage: Amai Mask's image review. Amai Mask, who had made a career out of the idea that heroism and aesthetic presentation were inseparable.
A half-bald man with a face like a regular person's would not pass that gate. Not in the current state. The hair had to go fully—completely, cleanly, definitively—before the look stopped reading as tragic office worker and started reading as something intentional.
Jordan was used to it. He'd stopped noticing. The rest of the world, pointedly, had not.
"Then let's wait a while longer." Jordan carried a bowl out to the counter. "When you're fully ready—" —meaning bald, meaning actually bald— "—I'll put in a recommendation for direct S-Class entry. No ranking process. No superior-subordinate structure. You handle whatever you want, whenever you want, and the salary and bonuses are substantial."
Saitama sat up slightly on the sofa. Something in his expression shifted—not quite suspicion, but adjacent to it. "That sounds pretty good, but... Jordan, you're..."
Dead fish eyes from the kitchen doorway.
"You're being too sensitive," Jordan said.
The crashes came in sequence.
Not one impact—a row of them, rolling westward through the commercial district like a slow-motion demolition, storefronts collapsing in succession, dust and smoke climbing in columns above the M City skyline.
The Hero Association emergency broadcast cut across every speaker in the vicinity before the last building finished falling.
"Tiger-level disaster, western district of M City. Nearest heroes are being dispatched. Residents are advised to evacuate immediately to designated shelters. To reiterate—"
In the fast food restaurant two blocks south, three men in civilian clothes exchanged a look across a table of half-finished meals.
"Let's move."
They were out the door before the broadcast looped.
King hit the pavement and electricity surged through his legs—a precise controlled burst that launched him upward. He cleared the roofline and landed on the roof opposite, footprints scorched into the concrete at takeoff. From the height, the disaster site was visible: a dust cloud, debris, something moving at the center of it.
Saitama landed beside him a half-second later. Pure leg strength, no special technique, just physics applied with characteristic simplicity.
Jordan was already in the air above them both, teleported to altitude. His eyes swept the scene with the enhanced perception of the Mind Network spreading outward—mapping movement, identifying civilians, tracking the threat.
"Jordan." King had spotted it too, his vision pushed by an electric current thread running through his optic nerve. "There are people caught in the collapse zone."
"I see them." Jordan's gaze was already moving between positions—three pinned under rubble, one trapped in a vehicle, a cluster sheltering in a building the monster was moving toward. "I'll handle the rescue. You two take the monster."
The three of them were in agreement in under three seconds.
Blue light flashed once, and Jordan was gone.
Saitama and King looked at each other. Then simultaneously off the rooftop.
King's movement had developed its own style over the past weeks—superhuman jump carrying him to distance, controlled electricity bursting from his palms mid-arc to redirect trajectory, a sprint-burst on landing that chained into the next leap. It wasn't flight. But it wasn't far off.
Saitama, meanwhile, jumped.
Landed.
Pumped his arms in the entirely standard motion of someone jogging to catch a bus.
Which would have been unremarkable—except that with each stride, the ground fractured slightly, and the buildings on either side blurred, and the gap between him and the disaster site collapsed at a rate that had nothing to do with normal human locomotion.
The preparation was completely ordinary.
What happened next was not.