Lightning Max stared at the point in the sky where Genos had been until it ceased being a point and became simply sky.
"S-Class is something else," he said, which was both an observation and a statement of personal defeat. He looked down at his custom-built shoes—gunpowder-infused, reactive propulsion, the product of two years of iterative design and a genuinely significant amount of money. Then he looked back at where Genos had been.
There's no comparison. There's simply no comparison at all.
Several lessons into the camp, the trainees had stopped being a collection of strangers and started being a group with opinions. The conversations that formed between drills and demonstrations had begun to acquire the comfortable shorthand of people who had survived something together.
Captain Mizuki stretched her arms above her head—the full extension of a woman whose training had produced functional muscle at every point along its distribution, her sports vest doing the honest architectural work of containing it. "Technology and superpowers are both legitimate," she said. "But I don't think trained bodies are far behind."
Battery Man, adjusting his helmet, nodded with the weight of recent experience. "I almost ended up as monster food last month because I had a power failure at exactly the wrong moment." He paused. "Heroes with obvious weaknesses don't last. Muscles don't run out of battery."
"Oh?" Captain Mizuki laced her fingers and pressed them skyward with a satisfying crack of knuckles. "Look at you, having realizations."
"It's just logic."
"Sometimes the old-fashioned approach is the reliable one."
Mecha-Esper, whose mechanical mask made his expression unreadable but whose tone carried genuine feeling, added from the edge of the group: "And even among superpowers, there are levels." He shook his head. "If I could reach one percent—one percent—of what 'Super Cop' does, or Miss Tornado, I'd consider myself ahead of schedule."
"Well," someone pointed out, "both of them are instructors here. This is probably your best chance to close that gap."
"Trust me," Mecha-Esper said, with total sincerity, "I know."
Slightly apart from the main group, two figures who had been working in close proximity since the first day had arrived at the natural next step.
Glasses—twenty-something, the fresh-graduate quality of someone who showed up prepared and slightly nervous—turned to the hero next to him and smiled, somewhat shyly. "My hero name is Glasses. For the next combat class—would you want to train together?"
Mumen rider looked at him for a moment, then nodded. No particular ceremony to it.
"Of course. I'm Mumen Rider. Good to meet you."
Two hands met.
Neither of them knew—couldn't have known—that this was the beginning of something that would eventually produce two of the Hero Association's most significant combat assets. But that was the nature of significant things: they tend to start quietly.
The students were still processing the abrupt departure of their class leader when Iaian stepped in, glancing at the diminishing speck that was Genos's exhaust flame somewhere in the upper distance.
"Swordsmanship next," he said, unhurried. "This way."
Atomic Samurai has probably been ready since before we arrived, he added, internally. Let's not test his patience.
Genos had found his ceiling and then pushed through it.
The sonic booms he left behind were conical, compact, the acoustic signature of acceleration that had stopped bothering with intermediate speeds. He covered the distance in a sustained burst that would have looked, to anyone watching from the ground, like a small comet crossing the city.
He pulled alongside Saitama mid-leap.
"Saitama-sensei." He matched the trajectory without apparent effort. "You left very suddenly. Is something wrong? Is there anything—anything at all—I can do?"
Saitama covered another three hundred meters in a single leap, feeling the familiar wind signature of Genos keeping pace behind him. He didn't need to look.
Thinking about Genos made him think about the sukiyaki.
His throat moved involuntarily.
I'm angrier now.
This wasn't Genos's fault. Saitama had established this firmly, across approximately ninety-eight separate occasions today, and it remained true on the ninety-ninth. The situation was inexplicable, genuinely strange, and not caused by his disciple.
He exhaled, turned mid-air, and said, with the complete external calm of a man who has accepted a situation he hasn't accepted: "Nothing's wrong, Genos. Go back and train."
"...Understood, teacher."
Genos decelerated. His exhaust flame guttered, then held at a hover, and he remained in the air watching Saitama's form shrink against the city skyline, expression unreadable.
Back to morning.
The S-Class Training Camp's opening day had come with free room and board, which meant Saitama had packed his things, said goodbye to the apartment, and moved into the instructor's dormitory.
Genos had come with him in the capacity of what was functionally a humanoid self-propelled luggage system. By the time Saitama had finished inspecting the dormitory room—which was spacious, well-furnished, and contained better mattresses than any place he had lived in previously—Genos had already unpacked everything, organized it, and had the toiletries arranged by category.
Genos's current model had universal capsule storage integration—a full suite of modules capable of compressing physical objects for transport. This was, in principle, useful. In practice, it had led to a situation where Genos had briefly, and entirely seriously, considered capsulizing the entire old apartment—which had been reinforced to safe-house specifications some months prior—and bringing it to the training camp. That way, Saitama could sleep in his actual home every night.
Jordan had needed to intervene personally.
"There is absolutely no need for that."
"But if teacher prefers his existing sleep environment—"
"Genos."
It had taken a while.
And so Saitama had enjoyed a thoroughly pleasant morning, followed by an afternoon of escalating existential horror.
The thing about the time-loop problem was that Saitama was not, by nature, a person who accepted mysteries lying down. He was a man who punched things until they resolved. He had applied this methodology to problems across every scale he'd encountered, and it had worked every time.
He applied it now.
Ninety-eight resets. Ninety-eight opportunities to search.
He was systematic about it, which was, in its own way, impressive. Snow-capped mountains got checked. Coastlines along four different climate zones got checked. Grasslands, wilderness zones, two abandoned nuclear power plants, the recycling districts on the edges of several cities. He checked places that made sense and places that didn't, because the problem itself didn't make sense and limiting the search to sensible locations seemed like potentially the wrong approach.
He encountered stray cats and dogs at various points. He stopped to investigate each one—a light tap, a quick assessment—and then moved on. They were fine. They were cats and dogs.
It was the Z-City outskirts, finally, that he hadn't checked yet.
He dropped into the forest at the edge of the city as the afternoon light was beginning to go horizontal and gold through the trees. Dense forest. Quiet. The kind of quiet that makes sounds matter more.
A beam of blue light was rising from somewhere ahead—winding upward through the canopy, shifting in patterns that resembled an aurora, too deliberate-looking to be natural. He'd almost missed it in the ambient light. What he hadn't missed was what got mixed into it, partway up: a dark thread, deep and dense in a specific way that he recognized from professional experience.
Dark energy. The kind that doesn't come from local sources. Dragon-level minimum, probably.
Found you.
The voice that said it with him—simultaneously, from somewhere near the light source—was a second register over his own.
Both of them said it at the same time.
Saitama rubbed his hands together with the focused energy of someone who has been building toward a confrontation for ninety-eight cycles, and walked toward the source.
The lake appeared through the trees.
Still water, afternoon light on the surface, the kind of setting that belonged in a landscape painting. The blue aurora of the portal rose from its edge. And standing at the shoreline, hands not particularly doing anything dramatic, was Jordan Evans.
Saitama stopped.
His shoulder dropped. His cloak, which had been billowing with the momentum of his approach, settled and went flat.
"...It's you."
He looked at the portal—the deep blue opening that connected to something dark and boundless beyond. He looked at Jordan. He looked at the portal again.
"What is this?"
Jordan considered the question for a moment.
"A small experiment," he said. "Slightly unscientific."