"That said," Saitama continued, his voice dropping into the register of a man raising a genuine grievance with a trusted colleague, "Genos sneaking around at night is still a problem."
He looked at Jordan with more sincerity than the subject might have warranted. "What would you do? If it were you?"
"It's not me," Jordan said. "I don't have disciples. Don't ask me."
He spread his hands with the unbothered ease of someone sidestepping a conversation they had no stake in. "I'd spoil my own. But this is your situation."
Saitama opened his mouth, closed it, and looked briefly at the ceiling.
What a completely unhelpful answer.
The disaster channel on the television shifted to a breaking report—a roving bounty hunter operating somewhere in Z-City, current threat level unconfirmed. Saitama watched the footage for approximately four seconds, then stood up.
"Genos."
"Yes, teacher?"
"We're going out."
He framed it as heroic activities. Aid digestion after dinner. Definitely not the bounty money, which was substantial and which Saitama had absolutely not calculated in his head during those four seconds of footage. And the secondary benefit—running a cyborg hard enough that he might actually need to rest afterward—was entirely incidental.
The logic had one flaw, which Saitama only registered after they'd left: cyborgs are not huskies. A husky runs until it collapses and then sleeps for twelve hours. Genos would run until dawn and come home wanting to take notes.
Genos (serious face): I already told you, teacher.
Jordan, for his part, had no interest in inserting himself into a master-disciple field exercise. He gave them a thumbs-up from the doorway as they headed down the stairs.
"Keep it up, Genos." He caught the cyborg boy's eye. "Make your teacher look at you differently."
Genos stopped on the landing. Something in the encouragement—simple, direct, offered without any angle—went straight through whatever professional composure he was maintaining and hit something else entirely.
"Thank you, Mr. Jordan." He straightened to full attention. "I will give everything I have!!"
Three floors below, Saitama felt a chill run up his spine that had nothing to do with the stairwell temperature.
This trip is going to be a lot, he thought, and kept walking.
The apartment settled into quiet.
Jordan moved back inside, listened to the building's sounds for a moment, then sat down on the sofa. On the low table, a faint shimmer—pale purple at the edges of visible light—resolved into F-boy's familiar form, stepping out from the space Jordan occupied the way a shadow detaches from a wall.
The two of them looked at each other.
Meeting time.
First item: Limiter Fragments.
Jordan didn't need to say it aloud. F-boy already had the accounting ready—the Stand's perception of these things was continuous, passive, and significantly more precise than Jordan's own.
Thanks to Saitama's recent rate of physical advancement—hair loss was accelerating, which meant the limiter was actively fracturing, which meant the fragment density around him had increased proportionally—the collection rate had improved considerably. Fragments were dropping in clusters now, where before it had been singles.
Current progress: approximately seventy percent toward the next Limiter Break.
Jordan ran the numbers. At this pace, before the end of the month. Maybe with room to spare.
Good. He filed that away.
Second item: the Asura Kabuto.
Jordan reached into the card space without ceremony and withdrew a card. The SSR border caught the apartment's light. On its face, the Asura Kabuto's expression was one of pure, undiluted terror.
No sound came out. Its opinion on the matter was not solicited.
The creature had been useful. Genuinely, substantially useful and the breakthrough to Magnetic Field Rotation wouldn't have happened on the same timeline without that sustained pressure. That was its greatest contribution, and Jordan acknowledged it without sentiment.
But King didn't need it anymore. And the Asura Kabuto, for its part, had never once stopped planning its escape. Every rebirth, same instinct: slaughter the humans, destroy the world, find the exit. Only the presence of two catastrophically overpowered anomalies had kept those plans theoretical.
Keeping it as a pet was not a reasonable option. Keeping a ticking SSR catastrophe in the card library on the basis of nostalgia was worse.
Jordan nodded to F-boy.
F-boy took the card.
One push—clean, practiced, final. The gold card shattered into cascading light, and a wave of attribute energy rolled through Jordan's body like a warm current finding the path of least resistance.
The readout arrived in sequence:
Strength +1, +1, +1...
Constitution +1, +1, +1...
Speed +1, +1, +1...
He felt it the way you feel the tide come in—present, real, incrementally meaningful. At his current baseline, an SSR card's worth of attributes moved the needle rather than spiking it. Roughly equivalent to a tenth of what Homelander's complete power package had delivered. Not a transformation. An improvement.
He accepted it with the equanimity of a man who had stopped being surprised by his own numbers.
Rest well, Asura Kabuto.
Third item: King's situation.
The phone call had come that morning. King's voice, steady and slightly formal in the way it always was when he was relaying information he considered important: the M-City Hero Association branch had contacted him. The S-Class recommendation plan—the one that had been sitting in committee—was being moved forward.
The context was straightforward enough. The S-Class roster had been seeing new additions: Metal Knight's formal induction was confirmed. Child Emperor—the prodigy who had apparently impressed enough evaluators to skip several ranks—was in. Pig God, whose qualifying ability could charitably be described as applied gluttony at a scale that constituted a threat response, had also been cleared.
New S-Class heroes meant new public attention. New public attention meant M-City's existing plans suddenly felt like they were falling behind. The branch executives, apparently unwilling to lose their city's chosen representative to the general announcement wave, had accelerated the timeline.
King—who had been training for less than two and a half months—was going to debut as an S-Class hero very shortly.
Jordan sat with that for a moment. Two and a half months. He remembered the man who had barely completed fifty squats on a park bench. Who had vomited twice at his first hot pot dinner and called it a near-death experience.
That's not nothing, he thought. That's actually something.
Fourth item: the draws.
Jordan looked at the draw count. Forty-five Fate Draws, accumulated since the last time he'd spent them.
The number sat there, visible and slightly accusatory.
Forty-five. In the abstract it sounded like a lot. In practice, he remembered the last batch of draws with the vivid specificity of trauma. That particular flavor of gacha suffering had a way of staying with you.
He rolled his neck. Looked at the ceiling. Looked back at F-boy, who was watching him with the calm, aloof patience of a Stand that had developed opinions but expressed them mostly through posture.
"We haven't had a major incident since coming back," Jordan said, thinking aloud. "Monsters I've encountered all went straight to enhancement materials. Peaceful month."
F-boy offered no editorial comment. This was accurate.
Jordan thought about the Dimensional Travel cooldown. A few more days, and a new world would be available. Which meant the current window—the quiet one, the domestic one, the one where the biggest event of the week was Genos reorganizing the refrigerator—was finite.
So.
He looked at the forty-five draws. He looked at F-boy.
"I'm going back to the random pool."
F-boy's expression shifted approximately one millimeter. This communicated: that is a choice you are making.
Jordan was already reaching for the cards.
Last time he'd used a targeted pool. Strategically sound, better odds on specific card types, resulted in exactly zero SSR draws and one moment of profound emptiness as the final pull resolved. The targeted approach had been efficient. It had also been deeply unsatisfying in a way that lingered.
Fate Draw had built this entire operation from the ground up. The first card, pulled on day one with no context and no plan, had been the beginning of everything. There was something philosophically consistent about returning to it—no targeting, no hedging, just pure probability and whatever the system decided you deserved.
What if.
Jordan sat forward. The draw count hovered at forty-five, waiting.
"My turn," he said. "Draw a card."
F-boy stepped back half a pace, arms folded.
I'm not stopping you, the posture communicated. But for the record: we still don't have a pity system.
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