The crowd felt it before they understood it.
Mumen Rider had taken a direct hit from a rotating Tiger-level monster and was still standing—barely, visibly struggling, the soles of his shoes leaving shallow scorched marks in the pavement from the friction of being pushed backward. The crowd went quiet for the half-second it took to understand what they were seeing, and then broke into something louder than before.
"Don't give up—!"
"Mumen Rider!!"
In Jordan's perception, the faint luminescence he'd noted earlier was no longer faint.
It built with the crowd's energy, or perhaps the crowd's energy built with it—impossible to separate the two. Mumen Rider's body was, by any measurable standard, outmatched. No special genes. No chakra. No psychic enhancement. A C-Class hero going fist-to-mass with something ten times his weight and moving at speed.
And yet the energy was there.
Not chakra—nothing so structured. Not psychic force. Something that condensed specifically from absolute conviction, from the place in a person that decided regardless of outcome and meant it without reservation. A world rule. One of the OPM universe's particular properties, baked into its physics: that will, genuine and unqualified, had weight.
It happened to an ordinary person. Someone who has never touched the extraordinary.
Jordan filed it under real, confirmed, interesting.
Mumen Rider lasted 0.1 seconds against the Dessert Chariot's full impact.
That was, objectively, 0.1 seconds longer than physics said he should have.
Then the physics won. The rotating mass overwhelmed the resistance, the energy faded as suddenly as it had appeared, and Mumen Rider was launched—not thrown, not knocked aside, but properly launched—into the roadside tree at the edge of the cleared space. He hit it back-first and slid down, leaving a smear against the bark.
The crowd's noise cut off.
The cake monster straightened, dusted chocolate from its hands, and produced a sound of contempt.
"Trash hero."
Mumen Rider was on the ground. Face down, one arm under him, the other braced against the roots of the tree. The pavement around him was wet. His breathing, even from Jordan's distance, was audible—ragged, working hard, the sound of a chest that had taken serious structural damage and was continuing to function out of stubbornness rather than comfort.
Three ribs, Jordan estimated. At least.
Mumen Rider's hand pressed flat against the pavement.
He pushed.
"Oh—" someone in the crowd said.
He got one knee up. Then the other. The process was not graceful, and he didn't pretend it was—face bloodied, suit torn at the shoulder, moving with the absolute deliberateness of someone who is managing significant pain and has decided this isn't the relevant consideration right now.
He stood.
The crowd made a sound that had no clean English equivalent—something between a gasp and a cheer and the specific noise people make when they see something that shouldn't be possible and is happening anyway.
Mumen Rider's forehead was beaded with cold sweat. He looked at the monster. He set his stance.
"I haven't lost yet."
There was, Jordan thought, an argument to be made that this moment was objectively more impressive than anything he'd done in the last several chapters. The math was wrong in every direction—wrong size, wrong power level, wrong survival probability—and the man was standing in it anyway like the math was someone else's problem.
He couldn't help it. There was something genuinely affecting about it, the way certain things were affecting regardless of how much context you had.
Saitama would approve, he thought. This is exactly the kind of fight Saitama would watch.
"My all-out attack!!"
Mumen Rider leaped.
"Fist of Justice!"
He hit the monster with everything he had, and everything he had was a precisely calibrated nothing in terms of the physics involved. The impacts landed. They produced sounds. The monster didn't move.
What the monster did was reach out, almost lazily, and swat.
The sound of it was flat and final.
Mumen Rider crossed the cleared space again, faster than the first time, and came to rest against the same tree—harder this time, sliding further before stopping. The red on the pavement was more visible now.
The crowd went very quiet.
The cake monster rolled its neck, looking considerably less engaged than before. It had treated the whole sequence as an inconvenience—a minor irritant between its original purpose and whatever came next. Its eyes were already moving to the crowd.
Jordan's hand had come up instinctively. He stopped it.
Not yet. Something else is coming.
The crowd was pressing back now, genuine fear replacing the shocked paralysis of a moment ago. The calculation had shifted: C-Class hero down, monster still standing, and they were the next available targets.
"Excuse me—"
"Pardon me, coming through—"
"Could everyone please make way?"
The voice was patient, polite, and coming from a direction that suggested the speaker was significantly larger than the people they were asking to move. The crowd on the east side of the street parted—first in confusion, then rapidly in response to what was emerging through the gap.
An enormous figure stepped forward into the cleared space.
He was taller than most of the surrounding buildings' ground-floor frontage. His build occupied the category of broad in the same way that weather systems occupy categories—a fact of the landscape rather than a description of a person. He moved with the unhurried certainty of something that had never once been in a hurry and found no reason to start.
"Who is—"
"Pig God!" Multiple voices, recognition immediate. "It's Pig God—the S-Class Hero!"
"S-Class—do we have to run anymore?!"
The cake monster's dramatic recuperation halted.
It looked up at the approaching figure. Something moved through its expression—the specific animal intuition that recognizes a category mismatch. Not this is dangerous. More fundamental than that. This is wrong. This is in a different drawer.
"W—wait—" The cake monster took a half-step backward. "Hold on just a—"
Pig God walked up to it without breaking stride.
He reached out.
He picked up the cake monster—several tons of animated chocolate and mousse—and put it in his mouth.
He chewed once, as a formality.
He swallowed.
Tiger-level monster: Black Forest Mousse Cake Monster — defeated.
The street was very quiet for a moment.
"He just..." someone started.
"He ate it."
"He ate it whole."
"That was at least two meters—"
"Is that not—does no one else—"
A voice from the back, with the cadence of someone who had thought about this carefully: "I mean, it did look quite good."
"It's a monster! The stuff growing on monsters—only an idiot would—"
"I'm just saying the chocolate looked real—"
Pig God stood at the center of the cleared space, already fielding the first microphone from a reporter who had materialized from somewhere. He answered questions with the patient thoroughness of someone who had done this many times and took the media obligation seriously, occasionally lifting a hand to redirect the camera angles that were getting too close.
"—more importantly, the injured hero over there—yes, call an ambulance first—"
He turned to look at the tree.
The tree had a blood smear on it and nothing else.
"...Where did he go?"
Three blocks away, a figure with bandages being assembled around his torso by a very startled attending physician was declining, quietly and without self-pity, the suggestion that he go somewhere with better imaging equipment.
"I've had worse," Mumen Rider said. This was probably true. "Please just wrap the ribs and I'll be out of your way."
The physician did not look convinced but began wrapping.
Fifteen minutes later, Mumen Rider walked out of the clinic into the afternoon light. His arms and upper body were wrapped with the thoroughness of a medical professional who had expressed their concerns through the quality of their bandaging. He had paid the bill, thanked the staff twice, and declined the offered painkiller prescription on the grounds that he preferred to know where he actually was.
At the curb, his bicycle waited.
The front axle had taken significant damage—the toss by the cake monster had been casual in the way that structural failures often were, a half-second of careless handling producing a wheel alignment that no amount of roadside adjustment was going to fix. He'd pushed it here on the rim. He crouched down now, assessing the damage with the particular expression of someone evaluating a friend's injury rather than equipment wear.
"Your turn," he said quietly. He patted the worn leather of the seat. "We'll find somewhere to get you fixed up properly."
He stood, took the handlebars, and found that a shadow had fallen across the pavement in front of him.
He looked up.
The afternoon sun was behind the figure standing there—blond hair catching the light at the edges, the baseball cap brim throwing the face into partial shadow. Tall. Relaxed posture, hands in pockets. The kind of presence that didn't announce itself but was immediately noticeable anyway.
Mumen Rider blinked.
The figure looked at him with an expression that held a number of things at once—assessment, something warmer than curiosity, and the particular attentiveness of someone who had been watching for a while and had formed some conclusions.
He didn't say anything immediately.
Neither did Mumen Rider.