The trainees practicing nearest to the tea table had caught every word of the conversation.
Graduation rewards.
The phrase moved through the hall at the speed of information that changes your immediate situation, and the effect was immediate: forms that had been clean became slightly approximate, footwork that had been rhythmic developed small hesitations, punches that had been landing with conviction arrived at slightly the wrong angle.
Sixty professional heroes stared inward at the words graduation rewards and experienced a collective failure of concentration.
Not all of them.
The class committee members were, without exception, exactly where they'd been before—eyes forward, forms intact, occupying the specific plane of focus that rendered the outside world temporarily irrelevant. Every single one of them.
Though one, it must be said, had adjusted the angle of his focus slightly.
Okamaitachi, with great internal dignity: It is I.
Among the remaining trainees, two figures held completely still.
Side by side, white gi, short black hair—the same uniform as everyone else, the same stance, but with a quality of settlement in their posture that made them look different from the people around them. One wore a green helmet, the rounded shape of it distinctive; the other wore square-rimmed black glasses. Mumen Rider and Glasses, both holding the same punching form they'd been in when Jordan walked through the door, both now working through the specific corrections Bang had given them regarding weight transfer and power generation.
They understood, in a way that required no conversation, what this class meant.
Not for someone with a natural gift for the art. For someone like them—a C-Class rider whose body was the only weapon he'd ever had, a B-Class hero whose power wasn't the kind that ended fights in seconds—Bang's teaching was a different category of resource. It was the kind of thing you didn't get distracted from.
Their eyes met once, briefly. A nod, the smallest possible acknowledgment. Then both of them returned to their own work.
That's a person who gets it, each of them thought, and let it go at that.
The rest of the class was fighting a losing battle with their curiosity, and losing more ground by the second.
Death quota system one minute, graduation rewards the next, several of them were thinking simultaneously. How many systems does this training camp actually have?
Bang's ears, which had not missed a sound in that hall for the last several decades, registered the shift before anyone spoke. The wind of exertion—that particular rushing sound of sixty people moving in disciplined sequence—had gone soft at the edges. Ragged. The unmistakable acoustic signature of a group whose minds were partially elsewhere.
He didn't turn his head. He set down his teacup.
"Cough."
One precise sound. Not loud. Not emphatic. The kind of sound that didn't need to be either.
The training hall went quiet in the way that training halls go quiet when the person who made the sound has forty years of S-Class standing and a technique named after the thing that happens when you compress water until it can cut stone.
"Concentrate," Bang said, still not looking at them, "on yourselves."
Sixty spines straightened simultaneously. Sixty sets of eyes re-focused. The wind of exertion rebuilt itself, and if anything it built louder than before—because professional heroes, when reminded that they're being observed by people whose opinions have weight, have a specific response to that information.
Involution, Jordan thought, watching the recalibration from the tea table. Turns out it's a multiverse constant. Show up wherever there are sentient beings competing for limited resources.
He finished his tea.
Jordan said his farewells to Bang, accepted the old man's brief nod of the kind that meant come back, and stepped through a personal gate that was open and closed before anyone in the hall had time to process that he'd moved.
He reappeared outside the city.
W-City, outskirts. Dense forest pressing in on three sides of a research compound that had been built, clearly, by someone who wanted maximum distance between their work and the general public's tendency to have opinions about it. The gate was substantial. The access control system was well-designed. Jordan stood in front of it with his hands in his pockets.
He reached through the Mind Network, found the access control mechanism's circuitry, and pressed the right combination without lifting a finger. Then he leaned toward the camera mounted above the gate and waved.
"Dr. Kuseno. It's Jordan. Door, please."
Inside the main building, Dr. Kuseno—whose haircut had always, charitably, resembled a watermelon's upper hemisphere—looked up from his workbench at the monitor in the lobby. A tall, dark-haired young man was waving cheerfully at the gate camera with both hands.
He set down what he was working on and went to the door himself.
"Jordan," he said, opening it, already moving aside to let him in. "In person—is something wrong with the capsule houses? There hasn't been a structural issue, has there?"
"Nothing at all with the capsule houses." Jordan stepped through, glancing around the front hall with the expression of someone taking casual inventory. "Different business today, Doctor."
Dr. Kuseno walked alongside him toward the main lab and was quiet for a moment in the specific way of someone who is accessing a memory.
He stopped.
Looked at Jordan.
"You're not," he said slowly, "here to give me more technology, are you."
Not a question. The tone of a man who has been visited by this particular young man enough times to have developed pattern recognition.
Jordan stared at him for a full two seconds.
Is this what a scientist's sixth sense looks like?
Dr. Kuseno's smile was the patient, slightly exasperated smile of someone who knows a person well enough to read them before they speak. "Don't look at me like that. I know you."
"There have," Jordan admitted, "been some new discoveries."
He asked the doctor for a laptop and received one. Then he started typing.
Dr. Kuseno watched this for approximately four seconds before the watching became something closer to staring. Jordan's hands moved at a pace that didn't correspond to any typing speed the doctor had seen outside of video playback. Document after document completed in the time it took to read their headers—frameworks, technical specifications, theoretical foundations—each one appearing fully formed, named, filed, and stored in the doctor's database before the previous one had finished loading.
The laptop's keyboard was, notably, made of ordinary plastic.
It was not smoking.
It was not hot.
Dr. Kuseno looked at the keyboard, then at Jordan's hands, then at the keyboard again.
"That's not," he said, "scientifically consistent with the forces being applied."
"Biotic Field," Jordan said, without slowing. "Applied to the keyboard. Basically a force field. Distributes the impact load."
"That's—" Dr. Kuseno started, then reconsidered. "Alright."
Two folders materialized in the database directory. Jordan pointed to them, and the doctor leaned in to read the names.
"An Overview of Modular Multifunctional Nanosuits." He moved to the second. "The Theory and Practice of the 'Regenerative Cradle.'" He straightened. "The first I can follow—nanotechnology is adjacent to my field. The second title is—"
"Two technologies," Jordan said. "The nanosuit framework is armor. Nanometal that reconfigures based on the user's intent—modular, adaptive, deployable from a resting state in seconds. The second one is biotech." He slid the laptop toward the doctor so he could read from the actual documentation while Jordan talked. "Think of it as artificial stem cells, but with a more elegant delivery mechanism. Given sufficient energy supply, it can build molecular bridges between engineered biological tissue and the existing human body—complete integration, no immune response."
He watched the doctor's expression move through the stages of comprehension.
"The long-term application I'm thinking about," Jordan continued, "is Genos. His combat style is mature now—it's found its shape. But the hardware limits what it can become. If a bio-engineered body could generate and retract mechanical components on demand—materialize a weapon, use it, absorb it back—that's a different category of capability than what he has now."
Genos, many kilometers away, in the middle of his fiftieth consecutive correct repetition of Water Stream Rock Smashing Fist's basic form:
He really is—
I'm going to cry.
Dr. Kuseno read for a moment in silence, scrolling through the Regenerative Cradle documentation with the focused expression of someone who has stopped processing individual words and started processing the space between them—the implications, the downstream applications, the things the technology made possible that hadn't been possible before.
"The cyborg field has come a long way," he said finally. "I wouldn't have said there were significant gaps left in the foundational science. And yet."
He looked up.
"You mentioned—in the nanosuit specifications—a material called vibranium. The substrate that allows perfect coexistence between the metallic components and biological tissue. I'm not familiar with it." He paused. "I'm not familiar with it in the sense that I've never encountered it, and I'm familiar with most things in materials science."
"That's because it doesn't exist on Earth," Jordan said, already standing. "It's extraterrestrial in origin." He looked around. "Where's your materials storage? Take me there."
"The warehouse is—" Dr. Kuseno started.
"I'll make you some."
The doctor stopped walking.
He looked at Jordan.
Jordan looked back at him with the expression of someone who has just said a perfectly normal thing.
"You'll," Dr. Kuseno said carefully, "make some."
"Big batch. Shouldn't take long."
After mastering infinite power, Jordan's capacity for creation had undergone what the system would have described, with typical understatement, as a normal-level upgrade.
It was not, in practice, normal.
The Law of Reason—Honkai cosmology's foundational creative principle, which Jordan had accessed through the Herrscher of Infinity breakthrough—could construct any material it fully understood using Honkai energy as the raw substrate. Infinite power worked on the same principle, with the additional advantage that its scope was unlimited. If you knew what something was, at every level—molecular structure, atomic composition, the precise arrangement of its properties—you could make it. The way Steve in Creative Mode can place any block by knowing what block it is. The way Infinity Ultron, before his enthusiastic retirement, could determine the birth and death of stars with a thought.
Jordan had dismantled several Infinity Stones inside his own body.
He had a reasonably thorough understanding of vibranium.
Ha, he thought, following Dr. Kuseno toward the materials warehouse. Just some mere vibranium.