Jordan opened his palm.
A card materialized in the air above it—gold-bordered, radiating a deep amber light that caught the afternoon sun and threw it back in warm geometric patterns. On its face, a beetle-shaped monster frozen mid-thrash, every detail of its desperate struggle captured in perfect stillness.
[Fantasy Card: Carnage Kabuto (SSR)]
Saitama leaned in.
He'd seen Jordan do things with psychic energy, seen the force fields and the floating groceries and the casual evacuation of entire city blocks. But a physical card, manifesting out of nothing, glowing in his hand like something out of a game he'd never played—that was new.
"What is that?"
King's eyes had gone to the card as well. His senses, sharpened by weeks of current-threading exercises, reached toward it—and found nothing he could properly grasp. The magnetic field perception that would let him read the world's deeper signals wasn't there yet. Saitama's expression made clear that he was seeing something. King couldn't.
My training still isn't enough.
He didn't say it out loud. He filed it away as motivation and found, to his own mild surprise, that the prospect of the "special training instructor" Jordan had mentioned was suddenly considerably more interesting.
"Don't overthink it—superpowers." Jordan flicked the card with one finger.
It spun through the air and sank into the minotaur's body like a stone into still water, gold ripples spreading outward from the point of contact. The monster's finger twitched. Then its whole arm. The energy radiating from it shifted register—rising in pitch, thickening, taking on a quality that hadn't been there before.
The head injury that should have kept the minotaur unconscious for hours was knitting itself closed under a surge of Dragon-level vitality. Bone reset. Tissue rebuilt. The aura climbing steadily, as though something larger and considerably more irritable than a Tiger-class disaster was waking up inside a body it hadn't chosen.
"It's actually getting stronger." Saitama's eyebrows went up. He glanced at King. King glanced back. Both of them had the look of people whose interest had just sharpened into something genuine.
A Tiger-level obstacle you can solve with a loose punch is training equipment, not a training partner. What was rising in front of them now was something else entirely.
"What's happening..." The voice that came from the minotaur's mouth was wrong—too articulate, too sharp, carrying the specific irritation of someone who had woken up in unfamiliar accommodations and found the amenities inadequate. "My head. This body is pathetic."
"Moo moo moo—"
(Who are you?! Why are you inside my—)
"Idiot." The voice cut across the bovine protest with contemptuous efficiency. "What do you mean 'your' body? It's mine now."
Moo...
The Red-Eyed Minotaur had officially been upgraded.
Disaster Level—Asura Minotaur.
The original occupant's voice disappeared. Its soul compressed inward, squeezed into the deepest stratum of its own consciousness by a personality with considerably stronger opinions about who was in charge.
The Asura Kabuto— drew breath for the roar it had been denied since its death. That damned Dr. Genus. That despicable human with the golden beams. One day, it would—
It opened its eyes.
Three humans stood in front of it.
Two were unfamiliar. The third—the one in the center, watching with an expression of polite curiosity—made every nerve in its new body stand on end simultaneously. The recognition hit like a physical impact: this was the one. The human who had hit it with two beams like compressed suns and ended everything in under a second.
Danger. Danger. Danger.
Dragon-level strength or not, every survival instinct the Rhinoceros Beetle possessed pointed in the same direction.
Up. Away. Distance. Now.
Its legs drove into the earth and launched it skyward.
A deep blue expanse materialized above it—solid, geometric, refracting light in complex polygonal patterns.
The bull horns, sharp enough to pierce structural steel, hit the AT Field and stopped completely. The force distributed into rippling interference patterns. The Asura Minotaur had just launched itself into a barrier at full Dragon-level acceleration.
It came down faster than it had gone up.
The impact raised a significant dust cloud. Before it could process what had happened, pressure arrived from above—steady, total, and entirely impossible to resist. It was pinned to the ground with the thorough finality of something that would wait as long as necessary.
"All this dust." Saitama rubbed his eyes, cheeks puffed.
He exhaled once, normally, in the direction of the cloud.
The air swept clean in a single casual gust.
"I can't—" The Asura Minotaur strained against the pressure, every muscle the minotaur's body owned working in full. Nothing moved. "—I can't move anything!"
The disparity was worse than dying. Dying had been quick.
Jordan snapped his fingers.
The force field refracted, restructured, and compressed itself into solid geometry—iron shackles closing around neck and limbs, an iron mask rising from the collar to seal the enormous jaw with a resonant clang that echoed across the empty suburban grounds.
Silence.
Jordan clapped his hands and dusted them off. "Better."
He turned to Saitama and King with the air of someone making introductions at a dinner party.
"Dragon-level. I'll release the suppression shortly. For this afternoon's special training—" he gestured at the shackled minotaur— "who wants to go first?"
Saitama had no particular framework for what Dragon-level meant in formal classification terms. King had an extremely precise framework, honed by years of being accidentally credited with defeating things that fell into it.
The King Engine started.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
It didn't build gradually. It arrived at full volume immediately—the deep resonant percussion of King's heartbeat amplified by whatever mechanism the universe had decided to give him, filling the space with the sound of something that had no rational explanation.
The Asura Minotaur, pinned and masked and theoretically safe from all external threats, felt its own powerful monster heart stutter and slam into an uncomfortable competing rhythm. Its vision swam. Its chest hurt.
How.
This weak-looking human.
How.
"Let me go first, King."
Saitama rolled his shoulders, and something settled in his expression—a specific quality of attention he didn't deploy very often. Like a thread connecting him to the masked creature in front of him that he couldn't quite explain.
A premonition. The particular feeling that this one was his.
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