Jordan thanked Bang, lifted the cup, and drank the scalding tea in one swallow.
The heat traveled the full length of his throat and kept going—spreading outward from his chest in a wave that was almost meditative. It was good tea. Properly bitter in the first moment, the astringency giving way to something complex underneath, then a lingering sweetness that arrived after the fact like an afterthought that turned out to be the point. He closed his eyes without quite deciding to.
This limiter breakthrough.
The third one. The one on Titan that had locked infinite Stone-power inside his body and settled it there like a permanent fact of physics. It had pushed him past the category of "mortal with exceptional abilities" into something that required different vocabulary. "God among men" came close. Even that was underselling it slightly.
The cultivators of the internal arts had always understood something that modern power systems often missed: the breakthrough was the easy part. What came after—the stabilization, the gradual integration of a new level into the self, the careful work of making the power yours rather than something you were borrowing and hoping not to drop—that was the actual training. Get that wrong and the regression came for you. Get it badly wrong and you never came back from it at all.
Jordan had been reminding himself, since Titan, that he was human. Mortal. Ordinary in the ways that mattered.
His body had been politely ignoring this.
Not defiance—more like the honest behavior of something that had absorbed too much divinity to pretend otherwise. The Herrscher of Infinity breakthrough, the Lord of Darkness card loaded on top of it—both of those had left a residue that his conscious framing couldn't simply argue away. The infinite authority carried something that kept floating him slightly above the ordinary register of existence, a gravitational miscalibration that he couldn't notice until he was already off the ground.
Sitting across a tea table from Bang in a quiet training hall in Z-City, drinking tea that tasted exactly like tea, listening to the rhythm of sixty professional heroes putting in honest work twenty meters away—
This is what the old days felt like.
Bang, across a very different kind of table, controllers in hand, the particular mutual focus of two people playing the same game at the same level. The simplicity of it. Incredibly naive, in the best sense—the purity of something uncomplicated.
Jordan sat with that feeling and let it do its work.
The divinity settled.
Quietly, without ceremony, the residue of the Herrscher of Infinity breakthrough and the Lord of Darkness integration finished their absorption and went still. The infinite power remained—it wasn't going anywhere—but the quality it had been broadcasting, that unmistakable not-quite-human frequency, faded back to baseline.
I've become human again, Dio.
The JoJo reference arrived in his internal monologue with full accompanying visuals—Araki profile, stone mask aesthetic—and departed just as quickly. Jordan took another sip of tea.
Bang had noticed.
He'd noticed the moment Jordan walked through the door, actually—had felt it the way martial arts masters feel things, in the body before the mind catches up. Some register below conscious analysis had flagged Jordan's presence as significant in a way that had nothing to do with hostility. Pure scale. The aura of something that had grown past the categories Bang used to measure people.
He'd set it aside. Jordan made some kind of breakthrough every few days. Had an epiphany on a roughly biweekly schedule. His development curve was so steep it had stopped correlating with anything in Bang's experience, and somewhere in the last several months the old man had quietly made peace with the fact that he simply couldn't track it.
But the change he was observing now wasn't a new peak. It was the reverse—something pulling back toward ordinary, landing there, going still. Like watching a river find its level.
Bang sipped his tea and looked at the man across from him.
With such talent, he thought, not for the first time and with the same mixture of admiration and genuine grief—with that, applied seriously to martial arts, there was no ceiling the old man could imagine. He would have been extraordinary. He would have been the kind of practitioner that Bang told his students about in tones reserved for historical examples.
What a waste, the old man thought, tears not quite forming but threatening to. What a magnificent, infuriating waste.
Why on earth won't he just dedicate himself to the art?
Jordan didn't reach for the Mind Network. He simply watched the old man's expression move through what appeared to be three or four separate emotional states in succession and concluded that something complicated was happening in there.
He's past eighty, Jordan thought charitably. Complicated internal weather is understandable at that age. Though come to think of it—
Oh no.
Could this be early-stage—
Bang set down his cup with a small precise click. "My brain," he said, with great dignity, "is perfectly fine."
Jordan blinked. He hadn't said anything out loud.
Martial arts intuition. He'd have to remember that.
Several cups later, with the afternoon sun having shifted another degree across the training hall floor, Jordan turned to watch the class at work. The rhythm of it had a pleasant quality—sixty people who had chosen to be here, pushing through something difficult, the sounds of effort filling the space without filling it up.
"How are you finding them?" he asked. "After running the class—are you satisfied?"
The question traveled clearly across the hall. Several trainees in the near range absorbed it without breaking form, though certain backs straightened by a barely perceptible degree. A few others found additional reserves of focus. The professional reflex of people who have just been reminded they're being assessed.
Genos and Mumen Rider didn't register it at all. Both of them were already somewhere past the point where external input had meaningful effect on their attention. The training had them completely.
Bang looked at his students for a moment before answering.
"I didn't interact much with heroes outside my own circle before this," he said finally, with an honesty that wasn't false modesty. "I'm finding that there are quite a few genuinely promising ones here."
An involuntary thought arrived—Garou. His eldest disciple, who had taken everything Bang could offer and turned it into something Bang hadn't intended, a talent that had grown sideways into something he'd had to grieve.
He pushed the thought down and said what he actually believed: "This is the best group of students I've ever taken in. All of them."
Across the hall, heroes who had been pretending not to listen stopped pretending to listen and simply felt the compliment land.
"I had planned," Bang continued, his gaze drifting toward the open gate and the sky beyond it, "to eventually step back from hero work entirely. Return to the dojo. Focus on what's actually mine to give—the art, the teaching. I thought that was years away yet." He paused. "You pulled that future forward. Thank you for that, Jordan."
Jordan refilled his cup.
"Master, you're being too generous. It was just a coincidence that things fell into place."
The conversation moved in the comfortable way of an afternoon that has no particular agenda. Bang relaxed by visible degrees, the silver hair catching the light, the lines of his face settling into something younger than his age.
"One thing I've been curious about," he said, gesturing vaguely at Jordan's hair. "This morning, during the opening ceremony, you were blonde. Now you're black again. How do you manage that in a few hours? Bleach back?"
"Oh—that." Jordan raised a hand to smooth through the jet-black hair, which had not yielded to any cutting implement he'd tested it against since the Titan breakthrough. "Let me show you. It's not dye."
He shifted modes.
Super Saiyan.
The black went gold—not the artificial yellow of commercial bleach but the living gold of lightning held still, the hair lifting slightly with its own energy before settling in the new color.
Bang's eyebrow went up.
Eight Gates — Gate of Life: open.Super Green.
The gold shifted to a vivid electric green, a shade that had no business existing in nature, accompanied by the specific quality of heat that the Gate of Life produced—not burning, but present.
The eyebrow went higher.
Eight Gates — Gate of Shock: open.Super Blue.
The green gave way to blue—deep, cold, the compressed blue of a star's core rather than the sky. The air around Jordan's chair dropped approximately five degrees.
Bang set down his cup.
Eight Gates — Gate of Death: open.Super Saiyan God.
The blue became red. Not the warm red of fire but the ancient red of something older than fire—the particular crimson that the Super Saiyan God transformation had always produced, carrying the weight of divine power in every wavelength of it.
And then Jordan didn't stop there.
The colors started cycling.
Black to gold to green to blue to red and back again, accelerating, the transitions becoming faster until they stopped being discrete colors and became something closer to the full spectrum moving in sequence—a living, breathing, completely unhinged chromatic loop powered by infinite power running through hair that couldn't be cut and apparently couldn't be bound to any single wavelength either.
The martial arts hall became a disco.
There was no other word for it. The rotating spectrum of Jordan's transformation modes bounced off the white walls, the polished floor, the pristine uniforms of sixty professional heroes, and turned the entire space into something that belonged in a club at two in the morning rather than an afternoon martial arts class. Rainbow light swept across Bang's face in slow rotation, illuminating the old man's expression through approximately six sequential reactions.
Call me, Jordan thought, with genuine satisfaction, the strongest lighting technician in One-Punch Man.
Across the hall, sixty professional heroes were performing the specific physical feat of maintaining perfect martial arts form while their entire visual field rotated through the color wheel. The ones closer to the front were sweating in ways that had nothing to do with the training.
Is this the S-rank assessment? several of them were thinking simultaneously. We absolutely cannot get distracted.
"Jordan." Bang's voice arrived at a register slightly above his usual measured tone. "Jordan. That's enough. I can't—stop. Stop. I'm going to go blind."
Jordan dropped every transformation simultaneously.
The disco ended.
The hall returned to ordinary afternoon light in the span of a breath. Jordan's hair settled back to black—the unremarkable, low-key black it defaulted to, the color that contained all the others without showing any of them.
Several trainees quietly exhaled.
After another while of watching the class with Bang, Jordan stood and straightened his jacket.
"Master—don't forget to keep track of standout performances. The credit system from the planning meeting applies here: notable students get marked, and those points carry through to final grades and graduation rewards."
Bang nodded, the smile back in place, the silver hair still catching the light.
"Yes," he said. "I understand."