Atomic Samurai's gaze moved on from Jordan with great efficiency.
Hair Loss Cape Hero was next in the sweep, and Saitama noticed—he had the peripheral awareness of someone who has been looked at assessingly by enough opponents to recognize the quality of attention.
"What are you looking at?"
That profile, Atomic Samurai thought, because he was honest with himself about aesthetics. That is genuinely a handsome profile. Unfortunately—
The memory of the punch arrived with its usual clarity. The one that had sent him traveling through distances that punches don't send people traveling. He still couldn't work out whether he'd have been able to catch it, avoid it, or detect it fast enough to try either. He'd run the simulation many times.
Conclusion: uncertain. Moving on.
Saitama gave him a look that communicated I have been to the market many times and I recognize this particular type of examination.
Excuse me, Atomic Samurai thought, already moving the sweep along. Next.
Genos was S-Class—that had to be acknowledged. But Genos was also Saitama's disciple, which put him in the same generational category as Atomic Samurai's own three apprentices, and there was something uncomfortable about the optics in either direction. And beyond the optics: Genos could fly. The Flying Sword technique needed a ground plane to work with, and a target committed to sustained altitude with long-range firepower turned a swordsmanship match into something with ambiguous outcome conditions.
Not ideal. Next.
His eyes found the place where "the strongest" was not yet standing, and filed it under pending.
That one, he thought, I'm genuinely not sure about. But that's exactly what makes it worth doing. After Bang, if he's here by then—
A sound arrived from the sky. Not thunder exactly—too clean, too deliberate. More like a confirmation: something significant has chosen to land here.
The golden plasma effect resolved into a figure.
Every head turned.
"Oh!" Saitama's expression went from mildly curious to actively relieved. He laughed and waved. "It's King! Great. I was worried that was a rain cloud—I've got laundry on the balcony that I completely forgot about."
Is this the entrance of a great master come to test the worthy, Atomic Samurai thought, watching the crowd's reaction, or is Saitama genuinely talking about laundry?
Both, apparently. Simultaneously.
King, who had recently added Mind Network sensitivity to his existing abilities via Jordan's instruction, caught the edge of Atomic Samurai's attention as he landed and processed it with the slight confusion of someone who cannot identify why they're being waited for.
Does Atomic Samurai know me? We haven't spoken much. Why does he look like that?
King, as was his practice, did not visibly react to the confusion. He walked toward the gathering with the bearing that had been inspiring involuntary reverence in people who didn't know him for his entire hero career, and said, "Apologies for the delay—ran into some strange people on the way over."
"Perfect timing," Jordan said, not looking up from the skewers he was brushing with sauce. He distributed a precise shake of cumin over the row in front of him. "We haven't even started yet." He did look up at the boxes King was carrying, and his expression brightened. "You brought a gift? King, you're always so thoughtful."
"Just some seafood. Seemed appropriate."
Genos materialized at King's elbow with the readiness of someone who has already identified the task and is executing it. He took both boxes. King washed his hands at the nearby station and joined the preparation team without being asked, finding his role in the general assembly with the ease of someone who has spent a lot of time being useful in low-key ways while the attention was elsewhere.
Several hours later.
The table had that particular quality of a meal that had been properly attended to: plates in productive disarray, the remnants of things that had been good, cups in varying states of completion. The air smelled of grilled meat and cumin and the specific warmth of an outdoor evening that has lasted exactly as long as it should.
Tatsumaki, somewhere between her third drink and having strong opinions about Atomic Samurai's sword, had been gently intercepted by Jordan before she could act on either. He'd talked her down to calm with the practiced patience of extended experience, and she'd been asleep before she'd quite finished deciding whether she was going along with it.
He walked her back to her apartment, dealt with the change of clothes with the efficiency of someone who knows the logistics of the situation, and was back at the training ground before anyone had quite organized the chairs for the sparring.
The lawn had been cleared.
The crowd had organized itself with snacks, sunflower seeds, and the seating priority of people who understood that what was about to happen was worth watching properly. Jordan found the front-row spot Saitama had held for him and settled in.
At the center of the cleared lawn, ten meters of space between them, Atomic Samurai and Bang faced each other.
Atomic Samurai had his sword. The set of him was the set of a weapon that has been loaded: muscles drawn tight, weight distributed forward, the blade angled with the geometry of someone who has done this specific calculation ten thousand times and arrived at the optimal starting position. His fighting spirit was a visible thing—the particular focused intensity of a man who expects a great deal from the next several minutes.
"Silver Fang." A slight bow of the head. Formal, sincere. "Let's make it a good one."
Bang had taken off his shirt. He was working through the joint prep—neck, shoulders, wrists—with the systematic thoroughness of someone who doesn't rush this part, each crack and pop released into the evening air. He looked at Atomic Samurai with the expression of a man who sees something different from what he expected.
Different in the right direction.
"Let's stop at the right point," he said. And then he nodded. "Begin."
Atomic Samurai moved before the word finished landing.
The wooden geta left two clear gouge marks in the turf—the snap of departure translated directly into the ground—and he crossed the ten meters between them in a duration that the eye couldn't segment into individual moments. The vertical slash came down toward Bang's head with the speed of someone who had calculated the margin and found it acceptable.
If the old man can't quite get there in time, he thought, mid-motion, I pull the blade. No shame in that. He keeps his face, the sparring continues, we learn something either way.
A streak of blue appeared in his peripheral vision.
Bang hadn't moved his feet.
He raised one hand and flicked it—a gesture so small it looked like something you'd use to remove lint from a coat—and the flowing energy from his fingertips arrived at the blade with a precision that turned the sword's momentum against itself. The recoil hit Atomic Samurai's grip like a solid punch. The web of his hand went immediately, specifically numb.
He landed three steps back, looking at his hand, then at Bang.
He took the slash directly, Atomic Samurai processed. Didn't step back. Didn't move. Just redirected it. And the counter had more force in it than the strike.
"Not bad, Silver Fang." He allowed himself the compliment. "That was the probe."
The sword came back around in a backslash that didn't give the redirected momentum anywhere to go except back into motion—continuous, the recovery folding into the next attack without a break between them. Sword shadows began to multiply in the available space, each one real, each one a potential line of threat, the aggregate of them building into the specific visual density of—
"Atomic Slash!"
A thousand cuts in the time it takes to say so.
Bang went forward.
This was the answer to a thousand cuts: not away from them, but into them, because the geometry of a thousand simultaneous attacks has gaps in it, and the gaps move, and if your reading of where they are is accurate enough then you can walk through them. The sky-blue energy in Bang's hands was doing something that was both offense and defense simultaneously, the Water Stream technique's flowing quality finding the angle of each incoming blade and turning it somewhere else. Sparks populated the air between them in rapid succession, a strobe of deflected energy, each one the result of a strike that had arrived at exactly the right angle to meet the exact counter it would receive.
The onlookers felt it in the air before they saw it. A pressure, distributed across the atmosphere, a sense that the available space was being worked.
Atomic Samurai felt the accumulated recoil reaching his wrist through the grip—not any single impact but the sum of all of them, layered, the way persistent water reshapes stone. He went into a backflip, used the distance to reset, flicked his wrist as he turned.
The sword energy that left the blade was a different category of attack entirely.
It built as it traveled—crescent-shaped, silver-white, the curvature of it making the air it passed through audible before it arrived. The radius of the arc was over a hundred meters. It rose from the blade and descended from above simultaneously, the geometry of it suggesting that the available evasion angles had been considered and most of them had been closed.
The trainees at the perimeter felt it on their skin. A cutting sensation, not quite contact, the pressure wave of the Flying Sword technique passing through the space they occupied and continuing beyond.
Several of them ran rapid internal calculations about whether they could survive taking that directly.
Most of the answers were provisional.
In the viewing area, three figures sat slightly straighter than everyone around them.
Iaian's eyes had not moved from his master since the first exchange. "This is what he has when he's fully engaged," he said, to no one in particular. "I didn't—he's never—" The sentence didn't resolve. He watched the arc of the Flying Sword technique climbing into the night sky and felt the gap between where he was and where that was map itself out in real time.
Beside him, Bushidrill sat with his arms crossed and his jaw set, the expression of a man who is arriving at a decision while watching something that clarifies it. "The blade carries the style," he said. "We have a responsibility to what this represents. We need to be better."
On Iaian's other side, Okamaitachi was staring at the crescent arc in the sky with the wide-eyed quality of someone who has just seen their reflection in an unfamiliar mirror. "My Flying Sword," he said, in a voice considerably smaller than his usual register. "It's—mine is so—" He stopped. Started again. "There's still so far to go."
The arc reached its peak.
And descended.