Saitama was going on instinct, and his instincts were rarely wrong about this kind of thing.
But instinct or not, Jordan had brought the Asura Minotaur back for both of them. Saitama knew that. King had been a good host this past week, and in Saitama's personal code of conduct—unwritten, uncomplicated, consistently applied—you shared with friends. You didn't take the whole thing.
He'd leave enough for King's turn.
"Okay, Saitama." King nodded with genuine grace. "You go first."
The King Engine wound down as his fighting spirit shifted into a patient register. He could wait. He was, at this moment, very much looking forward to waiting and then not waiting.
The Asura Minotaur strained against its mask with muffled, incoherent fury. The force field seal didn't acknowledge the effort.
"Take it to the open field." Jordan pointed to the clear ground beyond the manor's tree line. "Plenty of room. Don't damage the training base."
Saitama was already a blur heading in that direction, Normal Run reducing him to a dust signature.
Jordan stepped onto the Asura Minotaur's head with measured weight and looked down at the scarlet eyes tracking him with a combination of fury and something new—wariness.
"Listen carefully." His voice was conversational. "Behave, and you might live through this. Cause trouble, try to run—" he let the pause carry the rest— "and I'll take apart whatever's left of your soul personally. We clear?"
The mountain of muscle beneath his foot shuddered. Steam blasted from the masked nostrils in short, pressurized bursts.
An acknowledgment, of sorts.
Jordan stepped off, satisfied. The Asura Minotaur's eyes immediately cut sideways—locating Saitama's position in the distant field, calculating, and finding the calculation it wanted.
Using me as a stepping stone. Treating me like a training dummy.
I'll tear that half-bald human in half.
Jordan hadn't moved to stop it.
That was all the Asura Minotaur needed. It hauled itself upright, stomped the ground twice like a sprinter in starting blocks, and charged.
The collision hit like a localized geological event.
The shockwave peeled a ring of earth outward from the impact point, overturning soil and scrubgrass in a perfect expanding circle before the sound caught up. Distant booming rolled across the suburban hills in irregular intervals as the two figures traded momentum back and forth.
F-boy, moving with the quiet efficiency of someone who had done this many times, produced a gazebo from his card inventory. Two beach chairs unfolded. A picnic basket materialized, stocked with melon seeds, chilled soda, fruit, and the particular assortment of snacks best suited to watching someone else's training session.
Jordan settled into a chair and bit into a white-red peach. The juice hit clean and sweet.
He gestured at the second chair. "King. Come sit—fruit's excellent this time. Saitama knows exactly how much to leave. You'll get your round."
King sat, acknowledged the peach passed to him, and looked out at the battlefield with an expression calibrated to calm.
Beneath it: Dragon-level. An actual Dragon-level monster. The kind I've been accidentally credited with defeating for years.
I want to fight it properly.
The thought moved through him like a current, which was appropriate, because it immediately became one. Cell by cell, friction generating charge, the energy building without him consciously directing it—his body responding to the anticipation the way a instrument responds to the right conditions. Blue arcs crawled across his forearms. The King Engine began its slow, preparatory percussion.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Jordan glanced at him with quiet satisfaction.
Good call on the coach.
The Mind Network registered the anomaly before Jordan consciously processed it—a biomagnetic signal at the edge of the passive detection range, twenty kilometers out and closing fast. Not a monster. Not quite a person either.
Something in between. Human-architecture with machine-architecture layered over it, interwoven rather than separate, moving at a velocity that would reach them inside two minutes.
Jordan focused the network on the signal.
Thrusters on the feet and back. Blond, windswept. Young. The whole body—
A face assembled itself from the electromagnetic impression, and Jordan's eyebrows rose slightly.
He looked at the explosion-scarred training field. He looked back at the approaching signal.
Of course. Teachers and students, apparently, operated on some kind of gravitational principle.
Ten minutes earlier.
Genos had arrived in M City with the specific focused attention of someone who has one purpose and reorganizes all available information around it.
He was seventeen, though he read older—the full-body combat prosthetics tended to do that. Except for the brain, everything had been rebuilt by Dr. Kuseno after the incident two years ago. The incident that had left Genos the only living person in a town that had existed that morning. The mad cyborg had come without announcement or reason, and everything that Genos had been before that day had ended with it.
What Dr. Kuseno had built from what remained was different. Purpose-built. The cold electronic eyes that swept M City's streets processed everything they saw with the systematic thoroughness of someone who had made a specific promise and intended to keep it.
The Hero Association emergency broadcast reached him mid-search. He processed the coordinates, cut his inspection routine, and hit maximum thrust.
He arrived to find the rescue teams already on scene.
The western district looked like a controlled demolition had gotten creative—rubble in organized waves, dust still settling, no monster visible anywhere. Not even a body. The structural damage was severe but oddly shaped, as though something had been very precisely contained.
The civilians he checked told him the same story in different words. Blue force fields. People lifted clear of collapsed buildings. A healing light that had stabilized the serious injuries before the ambulances arrived. And S-Class Rank Two—"Super Cop"—somewhere above it all, running the operation with the detached efficiency of someone doing something considerably easier than it appeared.