A brief technical note on the Flying Sword technique:
The difference between Atomic Samurai's version and his disciples' had always been one of quality rather than quantity. The sword energy itself—its density, its purity, the precision with which it carried his intent across the distance—was the gap. The size had always been roughly comparable; what made his version categorically different was what it was made of.
Which meant that the crescent arc currently descending on Bang was operating at a level of sword-technique craftsmanship that the wider martial arts world produced perhaps two or three examples of per generation.
Comparable, in principle, to a top-tier swordsman from any world where strength and speed reach those scales, the situation noted. And those things happen when a practitioner hits a certain threshold. The physics doesn't particularly care which world you're in.
Bang, standing directly in its path, did not move.
His eyes carried an unusual quality—recognition, specifically, the kind that arrives when you see something you've been waiting to see.
"Atom." His voice was conversational. "You've broken through that barrier as well, haven't you?"
Something in his expression shifted in the direction of memory: Jordan's specific ability to locate a person's potential and invite it out. He'd felt it himself. He'd watched what it did.
His muscles began to move.
Not in the way of action or preparation—in the way of something waking up. Each one engaging with independent purpose, the aggregate of them reorganizing around a center point that hadn't been active in a very long time. The pale blue energy that always attended his Water Stream technique was still there, but something else was rising through it, staining it—dark, almost black, with the particular density of power that has been compressed rather than cultivated.
The stance changed.
Where Bang had been an upright, measured presence—the posture of an elderly man who moves like water—he became something the shape of a younger man's choice. Not his current self. His former self, the one that had existed before he decided that the Water Stream Rock Smashing Fist was the answer to the question he'd been asking. The one that had asked a different question.
The air exploded away from him in a series of sharp percussive compressions—not an attack, just the overflow of what was channeling through his body—and the temperature around him spiked. His skin began to vent white steam, the heat of boiling blood pushing through pores, a physical warning label in vapor form.
The starlight in the immediate vicinity seemed to dim.
Demon god, something in the gathered crowd thought, without quite deciding to think it.
Bang took a step forward.
The lawn rippled outward from his foot, not from the impact but from the displacement—the change in local gravity that accompanies a certain concentration of force in motion. His body extended into the punch with the quality of a singular thing rather than coordinated parts: arm, shoulder, hip, foot, intention, the entire column of it unified behind one point.
The punch was ordinary.
In the same way that Saitama's punches were ordinary.
The crescent arc and the fist met in a space between them that wasn't quite either of their locations.
The collision didn't make a sound immediately—it registered first as a visual event, the sword energy holding its shape for exactly one second before the structure of it resolved into something simpler: scattered light, brilliant and silver-white, distributing itself across the lawn in a pattern that lit the night sky for a moment like an unscheduled dawn.
Atomic Samurai had landed.
The chill that ran through him from the base of his spine to the crown of his skull was the specific kind that the body sends when it has detected something and needs the mind to be paying attention. He was already moving—both hands on the grip, body dropping into a blocking stance—before the conscious decision to do so had been formed.
The curved blade caught it.
Good, part of him noted. Intuition was correct.
The rest of him was occupied with the force of the rebound, which was considerably more than the force he'd put into the Flying Sword and was now expressing its opinion through his hands, his wrists, and the several meters of backward movement he was currently being compelled to cover.
The crack of a sharp explosion, and Bang was no longer where he'd been.
He was somewhere else—the speed of his transition blurring the space between positions into nothing—and he was throwing punches. Not one punch. A series of them, each one carrying the same quality as the one that had shattered the crescent arc, the dark energy wreathing his form as he moved with the frantic efficiency of someone who has stopped managing their power output.
Dangdang. Dangdang.
The lawn stated its objections and was overruled.
The combat that erupted between them in the following sixty seconds was the kind that requires distance to observe safely, and even at distance it was primarily experienced as sound, wind, and the occasional visual artifact of displaced air going somewhere it hadn't been. The weaker trainees at the perimeter had the experience of watching two extremely fast things they could not quite resolve into shapes, which produced a specific kind of cognitive gap.
Iaian, Bushidrill, and Okamaitachi—who had the most invested in being able to see this—had precisely the same problem.
"It's—" Iaian's eyes were moving rapidly across an event horizon that wasn't resolving into images. "I can't—they're moving too—"
"We can't see it," Bushidrill said, with the flat delivery of someone confirming a hypothesis. "We cannot see what's happening."
Okamaitachi said nothing. He had stopped trying to track the fight and was just watching the general area with the expression of someone memorizing the outline of something they'll need to understand later.
The wind from the combat swept across the training ground, through the martial arts hall, continued past the instructors' dormitory, and found the administrative office on the far side of the compound before dissipating.
What it left behind in the training area was more crater than lawn.
Jordan was looking at it with his hand over his face.
These are my buildings, he thought. These are all my buildings.
...Two Minutes Later...
The wind stopped.
Atomic Samurai stood with both hands on his sword, breathing. Not catching his breath—he was past that, the breathing was just a rhythm he was maintaining while the rest of him processed what had happened. His sword, which had been a fine blade before this match, now had a distributed network of hairline fractures along its length. The fact that it was still in one piece was a function of his improved capability; in his former state, the stresses of the evening would have ended it definitively.
Bang stood across from him with his white hair in disarray and his expression entirely composed.
The pitch-black energy that had attended the fight had dissipated. What remained was the quiet, present quality of an old man who has spent considerable energy doing something he used to do and finds he still can. His skin was cooling; the steam had stopped. He looked, overall, like someone who has just completed a satisfying morning workout.
Except for the eyes, which were still carrying something.
Atomic Samurai looked at him for a long moment.
"Silver Fang." He let the silence have a shape before putting words in it. "What was that technique? The black energy."
Bang exhaled. The steam that came with it was a single clean blade of white. His demeanor completed its return to park-stroll normalcy.
"Just something from when I was younger," he said. "Rough around the edges. You're being too kind by asking about it."
The technique—if Atomic Samurai had to describe it from the receiving end—was two contradictory things occupying the same space. The Water Stream's defensive nature, which turned force aside and used it, and something else underneath it that his younger self had built: pure, brutal, aggressive, the kind of striking that didn't redirect but erased. Two incompatible philosophies of combat fused into something that shouldn't have worked and demonstrably did.
Nothing like Garou's approach—Garou had assembled a God of Fist from every style he encountered, a synthesis that aimed at completion. This was simpler and stranger: Bang's two selves, the patient old man and the violent young one, operating together in a contradiction that resolved into power.
He destroyed the Crescent Moon Slash, Atomic Samurai thought. My best technique. With a single ordinary punch.
He tucked his hands—both of them still carrying the bone-deep resonance of the blocking impact—into his sleeves, and bowed.
"Thank you for the instruction."
His tone was level. His meaning was not ambiguous. He had lost, completely, and he was at peace with it in the way of someone who has just learned something significant.
"Atomic, please." Bang picked up the shirt he'd discarded before the match and pulled it back on. "I learned more from sparring with you than I could have from a month of solo practice. Come visit my dojo when the camp ends. We'll go again."
The two of them walked toward the crowd, exchanging the measured compliments of people who have established mutual respect through mutual damage, and the crowd parted for them with the body language of people who have witnessed something that recalibrated several of their assumptions simultaneously.
Jordan raised his hand.
Snapped his fingers.
The red light that came from his fingertips was brief and total—a wash of illumination that passed through the damaged training ground, the cratered lawn, the cracked walls, the structural casualties of the combat that had needed to happen somewhere—and the damage rewound. Not repaired. Undone. The lawn regrew its turf. The walls found their prior configuration. The venue reassembled itself from the moment before the first impact, whole and unmarked.
The onlookers stared.
King, who had been standing quietly at the edge of the crowd with the composed expression of someone who is running continuous background observations, was not as quiet as usual.
"His control over that particular ability is significantly greater than it was even a few weeks ago," he said. Not to anyone specifically. Just as a statement of fact, delivered by someone whose sensitivity to the underlying forces was precise enough to be worth reporting.
Saitama, standing next to Jordan, reached over and tugged at his sleeve.
"Hey. Coach." He waited until Jordan looked at him. "Can I learn that? The fix-it thing." He looked at his suit with the expression of someone performing a cost-benefit analysis in real time. "If I can do that, I don't have to patch the suit every time something happens to it."
Jordan looked at Saitama.
Saitama looked back with the sincere, deadpan blankness of his default expression—the flat, clear, dead-fish eyes of a man who means what he says entirely and sees no reason to package it differently.
Jordan's lips moved slightly without producing words.
"...You shouldn't," he said, after a moment. "That particular power and your particular punches would produce outcomes that I'd rather not calculate. I'll get you an indestructible suit instead. After a while."
Saitama's expression didn't change, but something in it shifted toward satisfied.
"For real? Thanks, Jordan."
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