Saitama was still somewhere between asleep and awake, staring at Jordan with the unfocused quality of someone whose eyes had opened before his brain had committed to the decision.
"Oh." A pause. "Jordan. When did you get back?"
Jordan poured himself a cup of hot water from the pot on the low table and drank it straight down. He poured a second cup and held it out. "Just now. You're up?"
"Ah~..." Saitama accepted the cup, yawned with the full structural commitment of someone who'd been sleeping hard, and rubbed his eyes. "By the way, where's Genos?"
"After I brought you back, I sent him to find Master Bang. They should be training in the back mountain by now."
Saitama processed this with the mild expression of a man assembling information. Jordan reached down and pulled him up from the tatami mat.
"Your disciple's out there working." Jordan released his arm once he was vertical. "Is it really alright for the teacher to be this relaxed about it?"
"Oops." Saitama scratched his head with the hand that wasn't holding his water cup. "I just drank a little too much at lunch."
"A little."
"Hey, let's not make a big thing of it."
He put down the cup, pulled on a loudly colored beach shirt with the efficient energy of someone who was now fully decided about the day, and said, "Right, let's go see Genos then!"
"Let's."
The back mountain opened beyond the flowing water dojo's rear courtyard: a wide expanse that had once been forest, cleared at some point into natural open-air training grounds. Old trees marked the edges; the cleared center was broad enough for serious work.
At the moment, it was almost empty.
The sun was at its highest and the air had the specific quality of an afternoon that discouraged outdoor activity for anyone who had an indoor alternative. A few of the more committed disciples were visible at the edges, training in the shade. Most had made the entirely reasonable choice to be elsewhere.
Bang had never been the kind of dojo master who compelled attendance. He taught those who showed up; he didn't chase those who didn't. The Flowing Water Rock Smashing Fist existed to be learned by anyone willing to learn it, which necessarily meant not demanding that everyone be equally willing.
Garou trained when he wanted to train, which was apparently always, but that was a separate issue.
Saitama squinted at the training ground and frowned—not deeply, but with the specific quality of a man who has noticed something is wrong and is running inventory on what it might be.
He slapped his thigh. "Jordan. Why does this place look like a meteor hit it?"
He wasn't wrong. The open ground was marked with craters at irregular intervals—deep, circular, the kind of scarring that remained long after whatever had caused it was finished. The terrain had character, in the sense that terrain that has been subjected to a private session of extremely powerful special training tends to develop character.
Jordan cleared his throat.
"Don't worry about the details."
He was aware that he was the reason the training ground looked like this. He was also aware that a significant amount of time had passed since those sessions, and Bang had apparently not assigned anyone to repair it. Jordan had complex feelings about this, primarily in the direction of: every single disciple here has two hands and access to dirt. This could have been resolved.
He changed the subject before Saitama could ask anything else. "Look—Genos and the others are right there."
Saitama shaded his eyes and looked. His expression immediately shifted from mild confusion to recognition. "Oh, I see him! Genos—"
Across the training ground, Genos had been standing in the basic stance of Flowing Water Rock Smashing Fist—feet placed correctly, weight distribution precise, arms in the opening position—while Bang made small corrections. At the sound of his name carried across the distance, he turned and waved with the full enthusiasm of someone who had been hoping this would happen.
"Saitama-sensei! Over here!"
"Here I come!"
Saitama put his head down and jogged across the crater-marked ground with the particular efficiency of someone who does ten kilometers every morning and finds this distance unremarkable. The dust he kicked up rose in a low cloud behind him, drifting across the width of the training ground.
Atomic Samurai had been sitting in quiet meditation some distance from Bang and Genos, legs folded, eyes closed, the picture of a man collecting himself after a long journey and a longer lunch.
He opened his eyes when Jordan approached.
Something was different. He couldn't name it immediately—it was the kind of thing that landed before the analysis arrived—but when he looked at Jordan this time, something in his swordsman's instinct registered a flag that hadn't been there before. A quality. The specific quality of someone who had recently spent serious time with a blade.
He didn't show any of this the first time we sparred. Atomic Samurai ran the memory quickly. No swordsmanship signature, no edge-awareness, nothing I'd have called sword talent—just raw force. But now...
He was still working through this when the cloud of dust arrived and resolved itself into Saitama—sparse hair, beach shirt, the face of a man from a comedy manga who had somehow wandered into a serious training session.
Genos stopped mid-stance and bowed immediately. "Sensei!"
"Ah! Genos, Master Bang—" Saitama's gaze swept the assembled group with genuine warmth— "and you training folks, and that samurai uncle over there." He found a wooden practice stake near Atomic Samurai and sat down on it. "Don't mind me. I'm just watching. Carry on."
Atomic Samurai stared at the man now seated slightly above him on a wooden stake.
Uncle.
"..."
He called me uncle again. After the drinking contest. With that expression. The eye twitch was back.
Genos's eyes were already back on Bang, bright with apology. "I'm sorry, Master Bang—I lost my stance when sensei arrived. I'll practice that form a thousand extra times after we're done today."
"No, no." Bang waved this off with genuine kindness. "Your posture is solid. It's just a matter of finding the key points. Don't add extra—work on understanding what you're already doing."
He'd been teaching Genos for an hour. Enough time to form a reasonable assessment: good strength, good coordination, better foundational aptitude than he'd expected from a mechanical body. The learning chip was real—he could see it in the way small corrections landed immediately and didn't need to be given twice.
The one thing that gave him pause was the intensity.
This young man is going to hurt himself trying to be perfect, Bang thought, not for the first time. He would address it gently. Over time.
He looked between Genos and Saitama and found himself genuinely moved by something he couldn't quite articulate. "You two get along remarkably well. It's good to see."
Saitama opened his mouth, looking slightly embarrassed—he'd clearly been about to say something honest about the actual nature of their relationship.
"It is because of Saitama-sensei's constant guidance and care," Genos announced from his stance, with the conviction of someone reporting verified fact, "that I have learned so much."
Saitama closed his mouth.
When? his expression said, very clearly.
That's a question for another time, Bang's expression answered, as he turned back to Genos. "Let's continue."
At the rear entrance to the dojo, Jordan had been about to follow Saitama across the training ground when something in his Mind Network caught.
He stopped.
The signal was in the forest—the dense stand of trees that ran along the mountain's upper slope, well past the cleared training area. A lean figure moving through it with the specific quality of someone who had chosen the forest deliberately, not as a route but as a location.
White hair, the two strands forking upward like bull horns. Indifferent eyes. The kind of focused isolation that announced itself even through surveillance.
Garou. Training alone in the mountain wilderness, at the hour when everyone else had gone inside.
Jordan watched the signal move through his Mind Network—the precise rhythm of it, the footwork pattern, the way it paused and restarted—and found himself very still.