Genos's fist hit the earth.
Not a combat strike. Just frustration, expressed the only way a cyborg knew how—blunt, unambiguous, leaving a neat indentation in the cracked ground. He stared at it for a moment, then sat back on his heels and exhaled a long, slow breath through his chassis vents.
The gap was real. He'd confirmed it through direct contact. Confirmation was supposed to be the first step toward closing a gap, but knowing the distance and knowing how to cross it were different problems entirely.
"You don't need to be that hard on yourself, Genos."
Saitama was watching him with an expression that fell somewhere between concern and mild headache. His cyborg disciple had, over the course of a single afternoon, lost one eye, developed a spectacular afro, sustained partial combustion to his outer plating, and achieved a dent in the earth via sheer despondency. It was a lot to take in.
"You're seventeen, right? That's what you said."
Genos straightened immediately, the frustration locked away behind attentiveness. "Yes, Saitama-sensei."
He looked ridiculous. The scorched chassis, the hole where his left eye used to be, the magnificent afro framing a face that was doing its absolute best to appear composed. None of that changed the fact that when Saitama spoke, Genos listened like there was nothing else in the world worth hearing.
Saitama scratched the back of his head. "Seventeen. That's..." He trailed off for a moment, running the numbers. "I'm twenty-three this year. And I've been training for over a year."
The air shifted slightly. Genos's remaining eye locked onto Saitama with the focus of a targeting system that had found its priority signal.
He's sharing his experience, Genos realized. This is a teaching moment. This is rare. Pay attention.
He closed his mouth and stopped breathing—unnecessary for a cyborg, but the instinct to be absolutely still and absolutely quiet felt right.
Saitama, completely unaware that anything significant was happening, kept going.
"I don't know much about robots, honestly. Or—" he caught himself "—cyborgs. But in my experience, getting stronger always takes time. When I started, I could barely finish a day's training. Wasn't even close. But I just... kept going."
Daily training, Genos thought. At what volume? What regimen? What did the progression look like?
Behind his eyes, the combat chip spun up its imagination protocols. Saitama on a mountain face, a boulder the size of a house strapped to his back. Saitama driving his fists into bedrock until the bedrock gave. Saitama in conditions that would kill a normal human, day after day after day, alone, before dawn, because that was simply what was required.
The image clarified something.
"So," Saitama concluded, folding his arms with the expression of a man who had just said something simple and true, "it's not impossible for someone as young as you to catch up in a year or two. Maybe less."
The silence held for exactly one second.
"Really?"
Even Genos's voice cracked slightly on the word. Something in Saitama's plain, unadorned statement had hit differently than any technical analysis or power-scaling calculation—not because it was complex, but because it wasn't. It was just a man who had done the work, telling him it was possible.
The truth of it arrived quietly and then expanded to fill everything.
"Yes, Saitama-sensei!" Genos took a breath. His voice came out louder than intended, loud enough to startle a bird from a distant tree. "I will never forget what you've told me today. I'll be patient. I'll keep working. I'll catch up to you—that's my commitment to you, teacher!"
Saitama physically recoiled. "—Eh?!" He stared at the suddenly electrified cyborg boy. Did I say something? I feel like I said very basic things. Normal things.
"Yes! I understand!" Genos's one remaining eye was bright enough to light a room. "Patience. Continued effort. Time. I understand now, Saitama-sensei!"
...Okay. Saitama recovered, slowly. He was really depressed five minutes ago. Now he's like this. "Sure. Good. That's... good, Genos."
He let the moment stand without poking at it. His student seemed significantly less like a cyborg who had been hit by a bus. That counted as successful mentorship. Probably.
Across the ruined training field, King's battle had entered a different atmosphere entirely.
The Asura Crocodile Monster was Dragon-level. Its Asura Mode boosted every physical parameter by an order of magnitude. Over the course of a week of rotation, King had learned to trade blows with it, read its patterns, find the rhythm of its attacks. He'd been matching it.
Now he wanted to end it.
He remembered something Jordan had mentioned in passing, buried in a longer conversation about magnetic field applications. A technique. A ceiling King hadn't tried to reach yet because he hadn't been sure the foundation was solid enough.
Let's find out.
He breathed out slowly. The Emperor Engine settled into a low, patient thunder somewhere in his chest—not the aggressive drumbeat of combat escalation, but something deeper. More deliberate. An engine at idle before it opens up.
The magnetic field began to rotate.
Not the omnidirectional awareness he'd been using all week to read biomagnetic signatures and redirect strikes. Something different. He drew on the iron particles suspended in the soil, the charged matter in the air, everything within range that had electromagnetic mass, and pulled it toward him. The induction heating happened automatically—metal particles entering the magnetic field's rotation path reached plasma state before they ever touched him.
The air around King began to glow.
The Asura Crocodile Monster had just hauled itself upright from the last exchange. It looked toward King. And stopped.
The figure in the middle distance was no longer just a man. The golden lightning that had been King's signature all week had expanded, spread, intensified—not arcs and crackles but a sustained corona, waves of golden energy oscillating outward from his chest where the power was concentrating. His hair moved in a wind that wasn't there.
In the Asura Crocodile Monster's limited but practical threat-assessment brain, something rang very loud.
Same category. Same as the nightmare with the golden heat.
"Asura Mode—NOW!"
It didn't decide to activate its strongest form. The survival instinct bypassed the decision entirely. Scales burst outward from the pressure of rapid expansion, its already massive body surging toward the proportions of something prehistoric—a silhouette from a world before humans existed, when size was the only law that mattered.
It was still charging its transformation when King spoke.
His voice was quiet. The Emperor Engine underneath it was not.
"Magnetic Field Rotation, 50,000 Horsepower — Hellfire Unparalleled Explosive Wave Cannon."
The light arrived first.
Not a flash. A replacement—the entire visible spectrum between King and the horizon simply becoming gold-white for a fraction of a second, bright enough to punch through closed eyelids, the kind of light that registers not as sight but as pressure on the optic nerve.
Then the sound. A detonation that wasn't a single sharp crack but a sustained rolling boom, three, four, five overlapping concussions as the energy discharged in sequence, the shockwave rippling outward in a visible ring of distorted air.
Then the ground moved.
Saitama felt it through his feet first—a deep tremor, the kind that meant something very large had transferred energy into the earth. Then the surface in the middle distance behaved like a tablecloth being yanked from underneath a meal. Concrete slabs, topsoil, the foundation stones of the training villa—all of it lifted and turned and became airborne in a cascade of upward debris.
He grabbed Genos.
The jump carried them clear of the worst of it, thirty meters up in a single bound, and Saitama looked down at the expanding crater where the manor had been with an expression that moved through several stages.
"Saitama-sensei?" Genos, tucked under his arm, looked up. "What's wrong?"
The debris was still settling. Somewhere in the cloud of displaced earth, golden light continued to pulse.
"The training base." Saitama's voice had gone very flat. "There was a full refrigerator in there."
Genos processed this. His combat chip cross-referenced the phrasing against known priority signals. High-end ingredients. Full refrigerator. Destroyed. The chip flagged this immediately as a critical logistical failure in the teacher's quality-of-life metrics.
"Saitama-sensei." Genos's tone shifted to the register he used for formal commitments. "Once Dr. Kuseno has completed my repairs, I will personally restock the refrigerator. Full inventory. Current quantities. I'll handle it."
Saitama looked at him—this battered, afro'd, one-eyed cyborg dangling under his arm at thirty meters altitude—with genuine surprise. "You can do that?"
"Yes."
The answer was immediate and completely certain.
Saitama considered this for a moment, then nodded with the solemn gravity of a man accepting terms of a treaty. "...Then I'll leave it to you."
"Leave it to me," Genos confirmed.
They descended slowly through the settling dust.
That evening, King's apartment.
The space was smaller than the villa had been—or the villa that used to be—but it was familiar, and after a week of Dragon-level training it felt like a reasonable place to decompress. Saitama had already claimed a spot on the floor. Genos sat upright behind him with the posture of a student who had not yet been told class was dismissed.
King sat across from Jordan with the particular expression of a man who had rehearsed an apology and wasn't sure how it would land.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Jordan." He folded his hands on the table. "I lost control of the output for a moment. The manor—that's on me."
Jordan waved it off. "Don't worry about it. It was a temporary structure anyway. Rebuilding won't be complicated."
He'd already been out to the site that afternoon, called in by Saitama's message—the real priority had been the souls. The Asura Kabuto and the Crocodile Monster's, both recovered before they dissipated. Given what those souls represented in terms of future training cycles, a demolished villa was an acceptable exchange rate.
"And honestly?" Jordan leaned back slightly, a small smile forming. "This is worth celebrating."
Saitama looked up. "How so?"
"King just defeated a Dragon-level monster on his own. Unassisted. That's the benchmark we set at the start of the week." Jordan looked between them. "One week of focused training. That's the result. Tell me that's not a good thing."
Saitama sat with this for approximately one second, then slapped both palms together with a sharp crack. "He's right! That absolutely counts as a victory. Barbecue tonight?"
"Barbecue," Jordan agreed.
King's expression moved through shy and arrived at something more genuine. He turned to Jordan. "I have to thank you. Really. All of you. This week—"
"Stop there." Jordan's tone was light but firm. "You did the work. We provided the conditions. There's a difference."
King opened his mouth. Closed it. Considered arguing. Decided, given the source of the statement, that this was not an argument he would win.
Behind Saitama, a hand went up.
Saitama turned his head slowly. Genos was sitting with one arm fully raised, elbow straight, palm forward, with the patience of a student who had been waiting to be called on and intended to wait as long as it took.
Saitama stared at him for a long moment.
"Genos."
"Yes, teacher?"
"We're not in a classroom."
A beat.
"You don't have to raise your hand."
Genos lowered his arm. Adjusted his posture. Opened his mouth to speak.
"So just say what you want to say."
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