Captain Mizuki had a reputation in the training camp for a specific orientation of taste. She had opinions about muscle. She had opinions about training. She had opinions about the relationship between effort and physical form, and she held those opinions with the conviction of someone who had done the empirical work to back them up.
Which was why the moment she looked past Saitama's unremarkable uniform and actually looked at what was underneath it, her entire operating system briefly went offline.
"I completely missed it before." She said this at a volume that carried. "I can't believe I missed it. His muscles are—"
Hiss.
The collective intake of breath from the trainees around her had its own acoustic texture.
What in the world is happening.
Genos closed his notebook with a measured click and slid it into his pocket. He appreciated Captain Mizuki's discernment. He appreciated it in the abstract, philosophical way of someone who has already categorized the appreciator as a potential competitive threat and is monitoring the situation accordingly.
"Sensei," Genos said, with the calm of bedrock, "is the strongest."
Jordan, three meters away, turned to look at him.
The look contained several things, most of them unspoken. Among them: I provided the bioengineered android framework that is currently running your entire body. I sourced the vibranium for your new suit from first principles. I am the one who is directly responsible for your continued upgrade trajectory, and you are out here placing Saitama above me in the rankings like you think I can't hear you.
Genos, for reasons he would have attributed to the general weirdness of the afternoon, felt a sudden involuntary chill run from the base of his spine to the top of his head.
He considered this for a moment.
Am I not a cyborg, he thought, with genuine puzzlement. Do I have a spine? Why do I have chills?
"That's everything I've got," Saitama said from the front of the training ground, scratching the back of his head with the expression of a man who has delivered his complete curriculum. He glanced sideways. "Jordan, what's next?"
Jordan stood up and clapped his hands once. "Free sparring. Open challenge format. If anyone wants a match, you can request one with me or Saitama-sensei. Go."
The sentence was still resolving in the air when Genos's hand went up.
It went up before Captain Mizuki's. She had been reaching—she had been in the process of raising her arm with the urgency of someone who had just decided something—but Genos was simply faster.
She stared at the side of his head with an expression that could have wilted a greenhouse.
"Teacher," Genos said, with the focused attention of someone who has the teacher's complete time and intends to use all of it. "I require a match."
That's fine, Jordan noted internally. Next time, maybe ask a little less immediately.
The weeks accumulated.
The first batch of S-Class Training Camp students had arrived with their existing capabilities—varied, in some cases substantial, in most cases limited by whatever ceiling their native talent and prior training had imposed on them. The combined curriculum had addressed those ceilings from multiple angles simultaneously: Bang's Water Stream Rock Smashing Fist, Saitama's physical capability demonstrations, Atomic Samurai's blade work, and the general structural effect of training alongside people who were all operating at the upper edge of their ability.
Then Tatsumaki started showing up.
She came by irregularly, at whatever point in the schedule happened to coincide with her not being busy elsewhere. She would look at the assembled trainees with the expression of someone assessing the gap between what they currently were and what they should be, and then she would set up a gravity field.
Customized, per student. She did this casually, which was the terrifying part—the same offhand quality as adjusting a chair that's at the wrong height. The gravity fields that resulted were tuned to each individual's existing tolerances and then calibrated to exceed them significantly.
The training class, which had been characterized by honest effort and a generally positive atmosphere, began to produce sounds that were different in quality from regular training sounds.
"I'm not doing this because I enjoy hearing it," Tatsumaki said, to no one who had accused her of enjoying it. "I'm doing this because it works."
Jordan, for his part, had not asked her to explain her methodology. The weighted gravity training she'd independently developed was, if he was being accurate, essentially the same principle that had produced some of DBZ's most impressive powerscaling arcs. The fact that she'd arrived at it on her own from first principles was either a testament to her intelligence or a natural consequence of being the world's most powerful psychic with an interest in results.
Either way, it worked. He kept an eye on the students' condition and applied Ordinary Healing when anyone pushed into territory that required intervention. The improvement curves were steep enough to be startling.
If the Hero Association saw these numbers, he thought, they'd be having structural conversations about the entire professional hero ranking system.
Nearly halfway through the course, Jordan called a half-day.
The teaching staff stayed. The agenda: outdoor barbecue, joint preparation, an evening that was functionally a celebration of what had been built so far. These things, in Jordan's experience, worked better when everyone made the food together—the prep was half the event.
Tatsumaki had been mid-Dragon-level incident when the message reached her. Jordan collected her via portal, which she accepted with the dignified composure of someone who has decided not to comment on the logistics.
As the only woman present—and the officially designated course authority, a fact she took seriously—she was exempt from food processing. This was a designation she embraced without apparent guilt.
By the time the prep had organized itself, she was on the rooftop of the professors' dormitory, which had a pool. She was on a sun lounger beside it in her school swimsuit, sunglasses in place, a drink in one hand, a snack bag in the other. The late afternoon sun was hitting the water at the right angle.
She wasn't smiling exactly. But the corner of her mouth, behind the sunglasses, was doing something adjacent to it.
This, it said, is acceptable.
Below, the food preparation had sorted itself into natural departments.
Genos and Iaian handled cleaning—fresh vegetables, proteins, anything that required washing and initial processing. Both of them approached this with the thoroughness you'd expect from people who had been trained by some of the most detail-oriented martial artists alive. The cleaned ingredients moved to the cutting station.
Atomic Samurai was at the cutting station.
He had a boning knife.
Whatever came to him—meat, vegetables, root vegetables, aromatics—was analyzed, positioned, and reduced to uniform portions in the specific time it takes to decide to do something and do it. The plates filled at a rate that was slightly hypnotic to watch. Every piece was the same size. Not approximately the same size. The same size. The kind of precision that accumulated across decades of sword training and simply couldn't be turned off.
Jordan, Bang, and Saitama were at the marinating station, working through the skewer prep.
"His knife work is even better than last week," Bang observed, watching Atomic Samurai's hands move across a tray of vegetables. It wasn't quite envy—the old man's relationship with Atomic Samurai's progress was more complicated than envy—but it had edges.
"I've been keeping my head down since I arrived." Atomic Samurai didn't look up from the cutting board. The extra-long toothpick that was his perpetual accessory shifted slightly in the corner of his mouth when he grinned. "And I've been picking Jordan's brain after hours. Turns out there's a lot in there." The grin widened. "After dinner—how about a stretch? You and me?"
Bang looked at Jordan with mild surprise. "You've been taking on sparring partners? I didn't think you had the time."
Jordan shrugged, his hands still working the marinade. "Quality time with my brothers and keeping up at home—those are non-negotiable. But I have shadow clones. They don't have anywhere else to be."
The boning knife rang against Atomic Samurai's knuckles—a brief excited sound, the blade catching the light as it turned between his fingers in a lazy arc before settling back into his grip.
"Even better," he said. "I wasn't going to hold back with a clone anyway."
The truth was that Atomic Samurai's improvement this week had been of a type he hadn't expected and couldn't fully account for by hours practiced.
He had hit his ceiling years ago. Every serious practitioner at his level knew where their ceiling was—had spent enough time pressed against it to develop an intimate familiarity with its texture. The limiter was real. It was not a mental barrier or a question of effort or discipline. It was a structural feature of the body, and the body had an opinion about it that training alone could not override.
Jordan had used something called Potential Guidance on him.
He hadn't made much of it at the time. It had felt like nothing—a hand on his shoulder, a brief instruction to run through his Atomic Slash at whatever speed felt natural. And then he'd done it, and the speed he was moving at was not the speed he'd been moving at before, and everything past that point had been a process of discovering exactly how far the ceiling had moved.
Far.
Ten of my former selves, he thought, watching the knife move through a block of marinating meat with a precision that had become effortless. I could take all ten of them. That's not arrogance. That's just math now.
His gaze traveled across the people assembled around the prep station and the grill setup.
Bang, first. The obvious test. After dinner, before any further sparring, he wanted to know where the delta was between them now. That conversation would be educational for both parties.
Then his eyes arrived at Jordan, and stayed there for a moment.
He knew exactly who to credit for the improvement. He'd seen what Jordan was capable of—had been close enough to the event where Jordan had punched through time and space to have a very clear understanding of the kind of thing that existed above the ceiling he'd been pressing against.
The hands are itchy, he thought.
The skin is not.
He moved his attention to the next person.
Jordan, massaging a fresh batch of beef with marinade, sensed the assessment arriving and departing, and permitted himself a small, crooked smile.
Smart old man, he thought. Knows exactly what's good for him.
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