The thing about Tatsumaki was that she looked the way she looked, which had historically caused people to miscalibrate their assessments of her.
This was no longer anyone's mistake to make.
Months of Jordan's training had done to her basic attributes what several years of her own training had been unable to: it had pushed them past the ceiling she'd been approaching since her powers first manifested, into territory the Hero Association's measurement categories weren't designed to accommodate. The telekinetic field that had always surrounded her now operated at a different order of magnitude. Her defenses, which had always been exceptional, were now—
Durability... well. Defensive capabilities. Significantly enhanced.
The Herrscher of the Void, against the Herrscher of Infinity, had not prevailed today. But that was one day's accounting, and Tatsumaki's position on multi-day rematches was extremely clear:
We fight again.
Jordan's response to this position, delivered while she was still composing her expression of defiance, was a candlelit dinner.
She had not, prior to Jordan, experienced candlelit dinners. This was a gap in her biographical record that she had not previously identified as a gap, because you don't identify the absence of things you've never had. She was thirty-one years old and she had spent most of those years being the most powerful psychic in the world, which left a particular kind of imprint on your social experience.
The 1982 red wine was semi-sweet and very good. Half a glass into the evening, she had lost the thread of whatever she'd been planning to be defiant about. By the end of the meal, the defiance itself had gone somewhere and she wasn't sure she wanted to retrieve it.
She came back to herself asleep in Jordan's arms.
The specific quality of mortification that this produced translated directly into velocity. Tatsumaki was airborne before she'd finished processing it, her face approximately the color of the wine, announcing at speed that she had eaten too much and needed physical activity to compensate.
She activated the Void Law authority she'd spent the last three months developing—the spatial aspect of her telekinesis, refined now into something that could interact with dimensional fabric rather than just matter—and vanished. Not teleported: dissolved, like a soap bubble that has decided to be air instead of film.
Jordan watched the space she'd occupied for a moment.
...Easily managed, he thought, with the contentment of a man whose evening has gone as planned.
He schooled his expression into something more suitable for a performance he'd been rehearsing, and spoke to the air.
"You shouldn't have come."
Darkseid, standing behind him in his black robe with the red cloud pattern, looked at him.
"But I'm still here," Jordan continued.
"..."
"What are you here for?"
"I came... didn't you ask me to come?"
Jordan paused. "Ahem." He turned around. "I got into character. My apologies."
The shadow clone's expression—Jordan's face wearing the quality of someone who has chosen to be deeply unimpressed—communicated several things. Chief among them: I thought my theatrical tendencies were already at the ceiling. I was mistaken about where the ceiling was.
"Noted," Jordan said. "I can receive your commentary through the Mind Network without you having to express it with your entire face."
The experiment had worked.
After the initial successful connection at the lake, the subsequent testing had confirmed what the theory predicted: the quantum entanglement between Darkseid and Jordan's main body—both being constructs of the same infinite power origin—maintained signal integrity across the dimensional barrier between the Marvel multiverse and the OPM world.
The crossing itself had been, from Darkseid's perspective, eventful.
The vast difference in dimensional scale meant his direct authority over the Dark Dimension dropped to approximately zero the moment he stepped through. The OPM world's rules did not recognize the Dark Dimension's sovereignty or its lord's prerogatives. What they did recognize was the extraordinarily dense concentration of dark energy that arrived with him—and they had opinions about it.
The dark power, no longer organized under dimensional authority it couldn't access from here, had done what dark power in the OPM world apparently instinctively does:
It had tried to become a god-level monster.
Hehehehehehe—
Darkseid had reached into his coat, produced a katana assembled from the Ordinary Series—the same conceptual lineage as Ordinary Punch and Ordinary Breath, applied to a blade—and knocked the would-be monster firmly back into its component parts. The incipient divine beast had reverted, somewhat sulkily, to being dense ink-black fabric, rearranging itself into the red-cloud pattern on his robe.
Dormammu's fault, Darkseid concluded. Whatever this world's relationship with darkness is, it was cultivated under His tenure. I'm inheriting the behavior pattern.
The behavior pattern could be corrected. That was secondary.
The primary conclusion was what mattered: the connection held. Cross-universe, cross-dimension, through the chaotic turbulence of interdimensional spacetime—the entanglement between shadow clone and original body did not break. The Mind Network base stations distributed across the OPM world's magnetic field served as relay infrastructure, amplifying the signal enough to maintain stable contact.
Quantum mechanics, Jordan thought, with the satisfaction of a confirmed theory. Certified eternal GOAT.
The next morning.
"One hundred push-ups," Saitama said. "One hundred sit-ups. One hundred squats. Ten-kilometer run. Every day. One set."
He looked out at the assembled trainees with the mild expression of a man conveying information he considers self-evident.
"Three meals. Non-negotiable. Banana in the morning works if that's what you have." A pause. "Also: no air conditioning. Doesn't matter if it's summer. Doesn't matter if it's winter. Part of the training is building the willpower to not touch the thermostat."
The trainees looked at him.
The trainees looked at each other.
This was a battle lesson, and Saitama had been invited as a specialist instructor, which carried certain implicit promises about content depth. He was an S-Class hero. He had done things to monsters that were still being described in Hero Association incident reports with language like cause of death undetermined.
And the lesson so far was: push-ups. Sit-ups. Squats. Run. Banana.
...That's it?
The thought moved through the audience in waves.
That's actually it.
N times.
Saitama didn't appear to notice the reaction. He didn't appear to need their belief in order to continue.
"It's simple," he said. "You just train until you think you're going to die. Then you keep going. After enough time, you stop feeling like you're going to die. That's when you know it's working."
Genos's notebook had been emitting a faint smell of warm paper since approximately the third sentence. He was writing with the focused intensity of someone transcribing a document whose importance he understood even if the people around him did not. The pencil moved at a rate that suggested the notebook's carbon structure was beginning to have concerns.
Teacher is sharing the foundational secrets of transcendent growth, he thought, with total earnestness, while the people on either side of him exchanged looks that communicated a different interpretation. The mediocre will filter themselves out. That is their function in this process.
The lesson's primary instructor, observing from the side of the training ground, assessed the room.
The energy was uncertain. The content was real—entirely, genuinely real—but the delivery lacked a visceral element that the audience clearly required before it could update its priors.
Jordan snapped his fingers.
The sound that followed was not a sound so much as a statement: a deep, ground-traveling concussion that arrived through the feet before it reached the ears. A blue boulder—three stories tall, the dimensions of a small building—dropped from wherever Jordan had been holding it and sank into the training ground with an impact that sent a wave of displaced earth and grass smell rolling outward in every direction.
The trainees found their balance again.
"Jordan." Saitama had turned to look at him with the expression of a man examining fresh mud on a recently cleaned garment, which was exactly what was happening. "What was that?"
"My apologies. I misjudged the descent force slightly." Jordan raised one hand and ran a brief cleaning effect over the uniform, and the mud splatters dissolved. "The boulder is a demonstration tool. You can punch it. You won't break anything that matters."
Saitama looked at his clean uniform.
His mood made a complete reversal in approximately the time it takes to blink.
"Oh," he said. "In that case."
He turned to face the boulder, which was approximately three times his height and had sunk into the ground far enough that it wasn't going anywhere.
"Okay. Watch this. This is what a trained body actually looks like."
He pulled his arm back.
The punch was a straight right. No preparation, no charging, no visible release of energy—just a fist traveling from point A to point B at Saitama speeds.
The shockwave of displaced air hit the front row before the sound did.
The boulder—three stories, dense, the kind of stone geological surveys describe as resistant to standard excavation equipment—became powder. Not rubble. Not fragments. Powder, a cloud of fine gray-white particles falling in a curtain that looked, for a moment, almost like snow.
When it cleared, there was a depression where the boulder had been, and Saitama was shaking out his fist casually.
The trainees stood in the clearing air and did not speak.
The silence had a specific texture—the texture of an audience that has just revised a very confident prior position all the way to its foundations, in under three seconds.
Green—who had been skeptical, internally, loudly—lowered his hands from where they'd instinctively come up to shield his face, and stared at the depression.
"With just a training routine like that," he said, in a voice doing its best to sound composed, "he got that strong? A person can actually do that?"
"I don't know," someone beside him said. "But he did."
The majority of the trainees were somewhere inside the experience of deep, personal recalibration.
At the edge of the group, Captain Mizuki was looking at Saitama with the specific brightness of someone who has just had a revelation, and who is currently experiencing the physical sensations that accompany it.
X-ray vision, the expression said. I see it now.