The built-in database query returned results in under a second. A tall, sharp-featured man materialized as a holographic overlay in Genos's field of vision—S-Class Rank Two, "Super Cop," confirmed active in the region.
He'd seen Hero Association coverage on news broadcasts before. Footage, press releases, the occasional dramatic incident report. But seeing the aftermath up close—a disaster zone where the casualty figures should have been catastrophic and somehow weren't—made the data feel different.
To contain it completely before I even arrived. The power differential is significant.
Genos let the data close and refocused on his search pattern. The mad cyborg was still out there. Every day it wasn't found was another town that could become what his hometown had become.
His detectors spiked.
High-energy reaction. Tens of kilometers southwest, outside the city proper. The signature was massive—Dragon-level output parameters, ongoing, and escalating.
Another monster. Not in the city.
The relief was immediate, followed without pause by the calculation. A disaster that starts outside a city doesn't stay there. The trajectory of unchecked threats was something Genos understood in his bones, in the parts of him that were still bone.
He ignited his thrusters and banked southwest.
He landed on a hillside five minutes later, trailing orange-red particle flame, and did not immediately rush in.
Genos pressed himself behind a large rock and looked.
His electronic eyes contracted.
The ground below wasn't ground anymore in any meaningful sense. It was a surface being continuously renegotiated—rock and soil launched skyward in cascading waves, crashing back down as irregular rain, the whole landscape reshaping itself at high speed around two points of impact that moved too fast to track cleanly.
Saitama and the Asura Minotaur were somewhere in the middle of it, though "in the middle" was a generous description for something with this much radius.
Then the minotaur hit Asura Mode.
It was hard to miss. Five meters became ten in the span of a breath—the monster's frame expanding outward like something pressurized from inside, gray skin flushing deep crimson, spiral claws erupting from hands and feet, the shackle mask somehow still holding while the rest of the body doubled in every dimension.
Saitama, perched on a fallen boulder in the middle of the destruction, watched the transformation with two seconds of genuine consideration.
Then his face changed. Not dramatically—just a shift in quality, something behind the eyes engaging fully for the first time.
"Serious Series—Part One."
He dropped into the monster's path.
"Serious Headbutt."
The impact arrived as shockwave first, then sound. Saitama had converted himself into a projectile aimed at ten tons of berserk Dragon-level monster, and the collision didn't split the difference between them—it just moved the problem backward at significant velocity, carving a trench through the hillside as the Asura Minotaur discovered what it felt like to be on the wrong end of genuine effort.
The monster hit the ground, bounced, roared with its masked mouth producing muffled thunder, and threw a punch that sent Saitama skyward.
Then it charged upward after him.
The battlefield migrated back into the air.
Genos watched.
His power core was running hot—not from exertion, but from the processing demand of trying to analyze what he was seeing. The combat chip was working at capacity, arriving at numbers that didn't resolve into actionable intelligence.
Each individual exchange exceeds the destructive potential of my full self-destruct sequence.
He had run this calculation three times because the first two results seemed wrong. They weren't wrong.
Even the incineration cannon—
He didn't finish the thought.
He understood, in the specific way you understand things that rearrange your internal architecture, that the distance between himself and what he was watching was not a matter of working harder for a few more months. It was a different category of gap. The kind you don't close by pushing the same approach further.
He needed new power. A different approach to becoming strong.
He took out his notebook. He began taking notes.
Down the hill at the manor, Jordan swept sunflower seed shells off his lap and stood.
"At this rate, they'll be going for a week."
King looked up from his beach chair with the expression of someone recalculating timelines. "What do we do?"
"Obviously it's time for—" Jordan paused for effect— "Captain Dragonfly, who never acts rashly, to go referee."
King squinted at the ongoing destruction on the hillside. "...That sounds like a line from a children's anime."
"It's a cool line."
"It really isn't."
Jordan turned back to look at him, affecting injury. Dead fish eyes met dead fish eyes. "King. You've changed."
"Private Marseille."
Jordan coughed once and teleported.
He materialized at the center of the battlefield, crossed both arms in front of his chest, and caught two fists simultaneously—one from Saitama, one from the berserk Asura Minotaur—as they converged on the space he'd occupied for approximately half a second.
The shockwave rolled outward past him. His hoodie rattled loudly in the pressure wave. His hair didn't move.
The Asura Minotaur, even deep in Asura Mode with its higher reasoning largely offline, produced a full-body fear response the moment it registered who had caught its fist.
This human.
A ring of blue psychic energy expanded from Jordan's palm and wrapped around the monster in a single smooth motion, hardening into something like amber—crystal-clear, deep blue, absolute. The Asura Minotaur hung suspended in the air, fully immobilized mid-rampage, expression locked somewhere between fury and the dawning awareness that fury wasn't going to accomplish anything.
Jordan turned to his other side.
Saitama was standing on empty air. Not flying—standing, with the mild curiosity of someone discovering an unexpected feature. Jordan had built a force field platform under his feet the moment he arrived, having learned from previous experience that lifting Saitama telekinetically produced complicated results.
Saitama tested the surface by shifting his weight. Polygonal ripples spread from his feet across the invisible platform, catching the light.
"Superpowers really are convenient," he observed.
Jordan laughed. "How are you feeling? Any sweat?"
Saitama raised his hand and checked. There was, in fact, a thin film of moisture across his forehead. He looked at it with something between satisfaction and mild surprise.
"Yeah. His punches have real weight behind them."
"Take a break then. King's been waiting."
Saitama nodded agreeably and stepped off the force field platform with the ease of someone stepping off a curb.
Jordan turned to the amber-encased Dragon-level disaster and studied it.
"Asura Mode."
The psychic field shifted. Its density climbed as Jordan fed more output into it—volume decreasing, pressure increasing, the containment compressing inward from all sides with steady, mounting force.
Let's see what you can do against real pressure.
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