"Ah." Bang took in the information with the measured calm of a man who was seldom genuinely surprised. He waved Mukuro off toward the kitchen—go make yourself useful, there's cooking to be done—and turned to the corridor. "He mentioned he'd be passing through Z-City with his disciples. A training journey. I didn't expect him to arrive the same day as you."
"We crossed paths before," Jordan said. "The seafood market incident in E-City."
Bang processed this. Then he leaned in, voice dropping to the specific register of a man sharing a concern he found slightly embarrassing to voice. "Did that arrogant old peacock say anything about challenging you? A competition? A sparring match?"
Well read, old man.
"He brought it up. I declined."
Bang exhaled. It was a long exhale, carrying the particular relief of someone who had run a quick calculation and did not like where it had been heading. "Good. That's good."
He knew what Jordan was capable of. That wasn't the concern. The concern was the three days of insufferable sulking that tended to follow whenever Atomic Samurai encountered someone who answered his challenges in ways he hadn't budgeted for.
Kamikaze, you really shouldn't go looking for that kind of trouble.
From the courtyard came the sound of easy footsteps on stone, and then a voice—warm, magnetic, carrying the relaxed authority of someone who had never once entered a room quietly on purpose.
"Yo, Silver Fang! Came to see you as promised!"
Bang walked forward to meet him, smiling. "You must be tired from the journey, Atomic Sam—"
"It's so good to finally—wait."
The sentence stopped. The warmth in Atomic Samurai's voice stopped with it. His gaze had found the figure standing behind Bang—Tall, Strong, Dark hair, the specific quality of presence that felt like the air pressure changing—and something in his expression locked.
Jordan raised one hand in a brief, friendly wave.
Their eyes met.
The silence that followed was the kind that had mass. In the middle of the small courtyard, something happened that wasn't quite audible—less a sound than the sensation of one, the way lightning registers in the body before the thunder catches up.
Saitama squinted up at clear sky. "Is it going to rain? That was weird. There aren't even any clouds."
Beside him, Genos was also looking skyward, expression thoughtful, stylus already hovering over his mental notepad. Monitor atmospheric conditions for potential effect on combat viability—wait, I'm still holding the gifts. Record later.
The situation in Atomic Samurai's group was less serene.
"Master. Master."
Iaian had materialized at his teacher's elbow with the particular urgency of a disciple who has learned to read certain kinds of silence. Cold sweat on the inside of his helmet. He could feel Okamaitachi and Bushidrill behind him, both having discovered something very interesting to look at on the far wall.
He was on his own.
"This is Master Silver Fang's dojo," he said, low and rapid. "You always taught us—in the presence of the strong, we show respect."
A beat.
"...You did say that."
Atomic Samurai's toothpick moved from one side of his mouth to the other. The pressure in his expression shifted by a few degrees. He turned to Iaian. "The tea. Where's the tea I told you to bring?"
Iaian produced two presentation boxes from somewhere and held them out with both hands and a short bow. "For you, Lord Silver Fang. A small token. Please accept."
"Thank you." Bang took both boxes with genuine warmth—and then stopped.
He looked at them. Then at the gift box Genos was holding, the one Jordan's group had brought. Then back at Atomic Samurai's gift.
The same brand. The same elegant presentation style. The same ribbon design.
Different tier. Visibly, unmistakably, from-across-the-courtyard different tier.
Ah.
The silence that followed was different from the previous one. Quieter and, somehow, louder.
Jordan's expression remained entirely neutral. He did not look at Atomic Samurai's gift. He did not look at Atomic Samurai. He appeared to be examining the middle distance with great interest.
The corner of Atomic Samurai's eye twitched.
Did I just lose a gift competition. His toothpick had gone very still. He predicted what Iaian was going to bring and deliberately—that's—using abilities to anticipate a gift purchase is completely—
Master. Please. Stay calm.
Okamaitachi, positioned behind both of her fellow disciples and therefore the safest from immediate consequences, was running her own assessment of the situation across the courtyard. Specifically: the tall one, the bald one, and the mechanical one, in that order. Then reverse order. Then forward again.
More than one. That makes it difficult.
Bushidrill, noting the specific angle of his master's jaw, quietly calculated how many steps to the nearest doorway.
"I've had the kitchen start on a proper meal," Bang said, with the sociable authority of a host who has decided that everyone is eating together and that this is simply what is happening now. "Come, make yourselves at home."
What had started as a modest hot pot gathering became, through the simple mechanism of more people arriving with bottles, a dinner party.
Bang's logistics disciples produced dishes. The table expanded. Sake appeared, as sake tends to when professional heroes are involved, and the gathering reached that comfortable altitude where nobody was counting cups anymore.
Heroes, it turned out, were just as equal in front of alcohol as everyone else.
Saitama wandered over to Atomic Samurai's end of the table with a bottle under his arm and the expression of someone who had decided to be sociable about it. Atomic Samurai's gaze—slightly unfocused around the edges, still sharp in the middle—tracked him with the instinctive assessment of a man who evaluated everything that came toward him.
"Hey. Drink with me?"
Atomic Samurai looked at the stack of empty bottles already colonizing Saitama's section of the table. His eyes narrowed. "I only drink with people worth drinking with. You look like an ordinary kid."
He looked at the bottles again.
"...But that's a respectable pile." He leaned forward, sake cup in hand. "Fine. Consider this a test of your capacity."
Saitama processed this. "That strange old man just said a bunch of things I didn't follow?"
"Don't call me uncle!" The veins on Atomic Samurai's forehead made a brief appearance. "I'm thirty-five! But since you walked over here—" he thrust his cup forward— "you're committed now. Drink."
Saitama immediately became cheerful again. "Either way we're drinking! What's the fuss about?"
Their cups knocked together.
On the other side of the table, Jordan had just registered movement in his peripheral vision.
Okamaitachi was approaching with the purposeful energy of someone who had made a decision and was acting on it. She had a cup in one hand and a slightly sheepish angle to her expression, which was at war with the directness of her actual approach.
"Super Cop." She planted herself across from him. "I'm a fan. Can I offer you a toast?"
Jordan raised his glass with the careful grace of a man navigating unfamiliar terrain.
The intelligence gathered during today's operation had not fully prepared him for Okamaitachi at close range. At the gate she'd been charming and easy-going. At the dinner table she was somehow different—a blade that had switched hands. The confidence was the same, but the direction it was pointed had changed.
He met her eyes, found them very direct, and completed a rapid reassessment of the situation.
Right. Atomic Samurai's disciple. A-Class Rank 3. He let the information settle his instincts. Completely professional. This is fine.
"Thank you for the kind words," he said, tipping his cup toward hers with measured courtesy. "After you."