"Understood, Saitama-sensei!"
Genos lowered his hand and straightened his back. "The ingredients I ordered this afternoon have been delivered downstairs. With your permission, I'll retrieve them now. For tonight's banquet."
"Banquet."
Saitama repeated the word slowly, and it conjured exactly what it sounded like: a hall full of guests he didn't know, long tables weighted down with food he couldn't name, waiters in fitted black jackets who expected him to use the correct fork. He shook the image loose.
"It's just dinner with friends," he said. "Nothing as formal as—" He stopped. Reconsidered. Looked at Genos, who was sitting perfectly upright with a notebook already in hand and an expression of complete attentive sincerity.
Saitama sighed. "...Never mind. Thank you, Genos."
Genos stood in a single fluid motion, bowed crisply to all three men in the room, and said "Yes, I'll go now" with the energy of someone who had been waiting for permission to do exactly this for the past forty minutes.
The balcony curtains billowed inward on a sudden gust of wind.
By the time they settled, Genos was gone.
Saitama walked to the balcony.
Down on the street, a red-and-black refrigerated delivery truck sat at the curb with its rear doors open. The driver stood beside it with a clipboard, staring at the spectacle unfolding before him with the expression of a man who had seen many strange things in his career and had never expected to see one this strange.
Genos moved through the stack of boxes with methodical, inhuman precision—lifting, sorting, stacking at a speed that left afterimages. The boxes didn't bang against each other. Nothing was dropped. Each package went to exactly the right place in a sequence that somehow accounted for contents, weight distribution, and the structural integrity of the resulting pile without any visible calculation.
The whole delivery—what should have been a twenty-minute process—was done before the driver could think of what to say to make it stop.
Saitama's eye twitched.
"He's very..." He searched for the word. "Decisive."
"You don't get it." Jordan stepped up beside him, leaned against the railing, and patted his shoulder with the easy wisdom of a man dispensing advice he hadn't earned. "That's just what youth looks like."
Saitama turned to face him with extreme patience. "Jordan. I'm twenty-three."
Jordan's gaze drifted very deliberately to Saitama's head. He didn't say anything.
He didn't need to.
"+999 Saitama Rage Accumulated," the silence communicated efficiently.
Saitama turned back to the street before he did something about it.
That was the beginning of the Genos Cohabitation Era, which Saitama would later refer to in his internal monologue as "the period."
The immediate upside: the apartment had never been cleaner.
Genos had colonized every domestic task with the same focused intensity he brought to combat. The distinction between "asking permission" and "informing you of what I'm already doing" remained permanently blurred.
"Teacher! Don't move the bowls—I'll carry them!"
"Teacher! Kitchen and bathroom floors are wet. Please wait five minutes."
"Teacher! Your gym clothes have been repaired. Please inspect them at your earliest convenience."
"Teacher! Your shoes are washed. Please hold—I'll dry them with the incineration cannon!"
F-boy, for his part, had been quietly ceding territory all week. Jordan's attributes had been improving steadily, which meant the Limiter Fragment density in Saitama's vicinity had increased, which meant F-boy's real priorities were now external—tracking, collecting, doing the constant low-level work of card maintenance that Jordan barely noticed. The housework he'd previously handled with calm, floating-apron professionalism was, mostly, no longer his problem.
Genos had absorbed it entirely without being asked.
The result was that Saitama's apartment had achieved a level of cleanliness that made him feel vaguely guilty for existing in it. This was not the upside Saitama had been hoping for.
The downside was everything else.
The most immediate problem was spatial. Saitama had been used to a certain amount of room. Not a lot of room, but his room. Now there was a 1.8-meter cyborg in it who required essentially no sleep and had apparently decided that the optimal use of the nighttime hours was data collection.
"Would you please," Saitama said one morning, standing in the kitchen doorway in yesterday's tracksuit with two spectacular dark circles under his eyes, voice at a register that suggested he had been rehearsing this sentence for several days, "stop appearing in my room at night."
"Yes, Saitama-sensei." Genos looked up from his notebook and bowed formally. "I apologize. I'll ensure my next observations are less disruptive."
Next. The word was doing a lot of work there.
Saitama stared at him. "Do cyborgs need sleep?"
"No." Genos considered this factually. "The design preserves all standard human habits, but the brain achieves complete rest without it. The sleep schedule is technically optional."
I didn't ask if it was optional, Saitama thought. I asked because I was hoping you'd say yes and then I'd have grounds to tell you to go to sleep like a normal person.
He did not say this aloud. It was too early for a whole argument about cyborg physiology.
Jordan came in through the balcony, landed with his usual lightness, swapped into his slippers without breaking stride, and snapped his fingers.
The Stand ability activated quietly. Two large paper shopping bags materialized from a fantasy card—floating, stable, the plastic handles of several grocery bags visible inside. The smell of fresh produce and something from the bakery section drifted into the room.
"Supermarket had a sale today," Jordan said, heading for the kitchen. "Bought plenty."
The words arrived in Saitama's brain approximately half a second before their full meaning.
"—What."
His arm shot out toward the wall calendar. His eyes moved across the grid with increasing desperation. He found the date, found the annotation in his own handwriting—SALE DAY—circled in pen a week ago.
Today.
It was today.
He had been preparing for this for a week. He had thought about it on Monday. He had made a mental note on Tuesday. He had actually written it down on Wednesday, which was apparently the last time he'd looked at the calendar, because Thursday through today had gone by in a blur of Dragon-level training and cyborg monitoring and—
Saitama's legs gave out. He went down slowly and lay on the tatami in the boneless, horizontal posture of a man whose will to stand had been completely excavated.
"I forgot it again."
Across the room, Genos's pupils contracted. His combat chip ran rapid calculations. Teacher is in a state of acute distress. The sale ends at—current time is—transit to nearest participating supermarket would take—feasible window: four minutes, thirty seconds if I run.
He was already turning toward the door when Jordan glanced at him.
"Don't, Genos. It's fine."
Genos stopped. "...Truly, Mr. Jordan?"
"I bought enough for everyone." Jordan set the bags down on the counter and looked over his shoulder at the horizontal figure on the tatami. "Genos, I'll need you to handle the prep."
The cloud over Genos visibly lifted. He was already untying his apron from wherever he'd had it stored—on his person, apparently—and retying it with the efficiency of someone who had been waiting for this exact assignment.
"Understood. Leave it to me entirely." He collected both bags from the counter, conducted a swift visual inventory, nodded once, and disappeared into the kitchen.
Jordan sat down on the sofa and turned on the television.
The disaster news channel filled the screen—anchors cycling through incident reports from various cities, satellite footage of impact zones, the usual ticker at the bottom. He watched it with his chin in his hand and the unhurried attention of someone checking the weather.
Wolf-level at most. Maybe a Tiger-level incident in E-City, but nothing serious. Peaceful week overall.
From the floor, Saitama extended one arm in the general direction of the ceiling and released a profound sigh. "He's great. He's genuinely great. In every single way."
A pause.
"Except the thing where his thought process is broken."
He draped the arm back over his face. "If this keeps up, I'm going to need treatment for neurasthenia."
"I'd advise against it," Jordan said, without looking away from the television. "That specialty is expensive. Very expensive."
Saitama went still.
He thought about this for exactly two seconds.
Then he sat up, executed a neat backward roll, and came to his feet looking entirely reinvigorated.
"You're right. I don't need treatment."
All symptoms: resolved. The cure, as it turned out, was a sufficiently alarming estimate of the cost of professional help.
Saitama cracked his neck and headed for the kitchen to see if there was anything left to do that Genos hadn't already handled.
There wasn't.