The pumpkin meat smelled, now that Saitama was paying attention, genuinely good.
But Genos had mentioned, this morning over breakfast, that he was planning a special-occasion dinner: full Wagyu beef and seafood sukiyaki, made from scratch, using the instructor cafeteria's premium ingredients. The kind of meal that required commitment on both ends—the person making it and the person eating it.
Saitama weighed the pumpkin haul against the sukiyaki.
"If I bring this back," he said, to no one in particular, "there's no way we finish the sukiyaki."
He turned the chunk of pumpkin monster meat over in his hands. Heavy. Dense. The sweet vegetable smell of it was somehow stronger now that he was considering not eating it.
He set it down.
Stood there for a second.
"...Yeah, forget it."
He walked away, leaving the pumpkin haul where it was.
The sun had reached the particular angle where everything turns orange-gold and the world looks briefly like a painting. The commercial street of N City still had the structural outline of a place that had been on fire recently, but the fire was out, the monster was gone, and the city was in the process of remembering how to breathe normally again.
"Getting late," Saitama noted.
He stripped off his gloves and shook something colorless and faintly unpleasant off them, then looked back at the scattered pumpkin flesh on the ground, which had developed a smell in the cooling air that was aggressively sweet and almost edible. His stomach registered a small observation.
He thought about the sukiyaki.
Alright, he decided, stretching his arms above his head until something in his shoulders clicked. That's enough B-Class work for one day.
Behind him, a crowd had formed—the post-monster gathering that always materialized once the immediate danger was gone, part celebration, part collective exhale, part crowd of tabloid reporters jockeying for position. He didn't look back. He set his direction toward Z-City, adjusted his stride for distance, and headed into the sunset at a pace that covered ground considerably faster than it looked like it should.
In three seconds, he was gone.
Camera pans to the professor's dormitory.
Saitama was sitting cross-legged on his bed, frowning.
It was a specific kind of frown: not frustration, not confusion, but the expression of someone who has just done arithmetic and gotten an answer that shouldn't be possible. He stared at his own hands for a moment.
Clean gloves. Unchanged clothes. The exact state everything had been in when he got up this morning.
His memories of the day were intact. He remembered the commercial street, the fire, the Pumpkin Lantern Monster and the extremely valid observation about its lack of hands, the ordinary breath that had turned it into a bouncy ball, the pumpkin meat, the decision about sukiyaki. He remembered all of it. Clear as anything.
But here he was. Back in the dorm. Like he'd never left.
This isn't normal.
The best analogy he could come up with was waking up from a particularly satisfying morning experience, flushing, and finding the toilet in immaculate condition—cleaner, somehow, than a brand-new one. The thing that was supposed to have happened had clearly happened, in the sense that he remembered it happening, but the evidence said otherwise.
Did the Labrador take the walk, or not?
This is a paranormal event.
He considered the possibilities. The monster had gotten fluid on his gloves. Could that cause... something? Hallucinations, maybe? His digestive system was well-trained, his body's resistance to contaminants was genuinely not normal—but you couldn't rule out low-probability events.
Except he hadn't eaten any of it.
He hadn't eaten a single piece of the pumpkin monster. He'd picked it up. Then put it down and walked away. If contact with monster byproducts through work gloves was enough to cause a full-day hallucination with no other symptoms—
"That's ridiculous."
He shook his head.
"What happened?"
He sat on the bed in the quiet of the dormitory for a long time, going through it again from the beginning, and arrived at the same impossible answer each time: he had gone out, he had done hero work, he had come back, and there was no evidence that any of it had occurred.
"...Was I dreaming?" He scratched the back of his head. "Did I just not go out at all today?"
Outskirts of Z-City
Through the Mind Network—distributed across the Earth's magnetic field like an invisible communication infrastructure—Jordan heard every word.
He was still positioned at the lake, still running his billions of simultaneous exploratory threads through the interdimensional chaos, still finding nothing. The mechanical tedium of it was, at this point, a texture he'd learned to work around rather than against. Saitama's bewildered muttering arrived like a radio signal through the background noise.
Jordan listened, and then grinned.
"He can already sense it," he said. "The timeline shifts—he's actually noticing them." He stroked his chin with genuine appreciation. "The original Saitama was nowhere near this level. His growth has completely outpaced what the baseline timeline was supposed to produce."
The math was interesting. Saitama could perceive the change after the fact—he couldn't preempt it, couldn't immunize himself against it the way Jordan could with infinite power acting as a buffer. But the fact that he could perceive it at all required a specific minimum of power that, a year ago, hadn't been there.
If one had to express it in units—and Jordan felt that one should—Saitama was currently operating at approximately 0.8 Dormammu.
Not the same type of power. Dormammu's strength was dimensional authority, accumulated darkness, the leverage of an entire dimension behind every action. Saitama's was something more fundamental: the undifferentiated brute capacity that had always existed in him, now no longer held back by whatever mysterious internal limiter had been governing its release. But 0.8 as a scaling coefficient was not nothing. At his current rate, the gap would close.
One-Punch Man is still a superhero.
"And frankly," Jordan added, to the lake, "this is my contribution. I've been a catalyst the entire time. His development is accelerating partly because of the environment I've created."
He clicked his tongue, satisfied.
"As expected of me."
He put his hands on his hips for a moment of well-earned appreciation, then returned to the tedious signal-docking work.
As for Saitama's current distress—
Jordan was aware that he had, through no intentional malice, accidentally damaged his best friend. The time reversals were affecting everyone in the world, and as one of perhaps two beings on the planet capable of perceiving them, Saitama was getting the unfiltered experience of a day that kept resetting without explanation.
Can't be helped. They couldn't suffer the good life together right now. They could at least suffer the inconvenient life together in parallel.
Saitama sneezed.
Jordan's eye twitched.
Hmm. Someone's speaking ill of me.
He paused the dimensional search for exactly three seconds, then resumed it.
Right. The apology. Sukiyaki. He had good ingredients in the card deck—premium Wagyu, fresh seafood, quality broth base. He'd make it up to Saitama properly.
If one meal isn't enough, two meals will do. Plan approved.
98th time rewind.
With over 1.4 billion attempts still ahead of him, Jordan was not particularly concerned about pace.
Saitama was.
Ninety-eight cycles. Ninety-eight times waking up in the dormitory with a complete set of memories that the world insisted hadn't happened. Ninety-eight times having to work through the paranormal-event arithmetic and arrive at no useful conclusion. He was one of only two beings in the world capable of perceiving the fluctuations, which meant no one he could ask, no reference point, no frame of comparison.
Just the loop.
"AAAAAAAAAAHHH—what the HELL is going on?!"
The wail echoed through the professor's dormitory. Saitama sat up in bed—the same bed, the same dormitory, the same morning-clean state of everything—and his fist was clenched with a kind of structural conviction that had been building for approximately ninety-eight iterations.
"Who is doing this to my day?!"
He stared at the ceiling.
"I just wanted the sukiyaki. That's all. Genos made me sukiyaki and I have not been able to eat it a single time—"
He was off the bed and dressed in under a second. Ninety-eight repetitions had taken what had been a practiced routine and refined it past the need for conscious input. He could probably do it backwards.
He hit the dormitory balcony at speed and launched off the railing.
Three floors below, on the training ground, Genos had just completed his combat lesson for the afternoon. He was in the process of reviewing the class's performance in his internal log when something—a specific quality of energy, a particular movement signature—crossed the edge of his sensor range.
He stopped.
Turned.
"Saitama-sensei?"
The jetpacks ignited before he'd consciously decided to use them—a scorching column of orange-yellow flame erupting from his back as he broke from the group and accelerated skyward, chasing the rapidly diminishing signature across the Z-City skyline.
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