Jordan turned to the assembled trainees, clapped his hands once, and redirected every pair of eyes that had been locked on Mumen Rider's suit toward himself.
"I think everyone's gotten a reasonable sense of what the Type-Zero can do," he said, observing the expressions in the crowd, which ranged from naked envy to barely contained calculation. "As Dr. Kuseno—our Equipment Division Head—explained, what you just saw is the baseline model. Custom modules can be developed around individual combat styles and personal needs. The platform scales."
He paused to let that land.
"Since there's currently only one student in the class with over one hundred credits—that's our Mumen Rider, sitting at a hundred and eleven from course completion and assessments combined—I'm officially announcing that the first Type-Zero nanosuit is being awarded to him as a graduation reward."
The crowd processed this for approximately one second.
"It's free?!"
"This is—they're just giving it away?!"
Why didn't I push harder for the extra credits—
A hundred credits. A hundred credits. That's actually achievable. How much do I have right now—
The energy in the room shifted from the mild post-barbecue comfortable into something with more current running through it. Which was, of course, the point.
Jordan let the recalculation happen around him and continued: "A suit like this—one that integrates seamlessly with your existing hero uniform, carries everywhere, and provides comprehensive boosts to offense, defense, mobility, and endurance—is exactly what it looks like. For heroes who've been operating on self-made gear since day one, this isn't a minor upgrade. It's a category shift."
He was thinking, privately, about the original timeline.
In that version of events, a competing organization called NEO HEROES had eventually disrupted the entire professional hero ecosystem by doing something similar—providing ordinary people with enough armor and cyborg augmentation to fight at Demon-level, and backing it up with enough infrastructure to look credible doing it. The fact that the "resurrected" heroes in that model weren't always quite the same person who'd gone in was, as far as the public was concerned, not their problem. People believe what they see.
Jordan had the technology. He had the teachers. He had the framework.
How do you compete with that?
As a transmigrator with a reasonably comprehensive understanding of how progression systems work—attributes, equipment, skill slots, jewelry, affixes, holy marks, the works—he had long since identified the fundamental mistake that most people made about reaching a ceiling: they thought it was the end. It wasn't. Reaching the maximum level was when the actual game began.
I've set up the teachers and I'm preparing the gear. Your move.
"Super Cop."
Mumen Rider's voice was a little quiet. Jordan turned to find him standing slightly apart from the crowd, holding the suit in both hands with the specific carefulness of something he wasn't entirely sure he was allowed to have.
"Is this... actually for me?"
He was a composed person, generally. Jordan had watched him face monsters that would have sent most B-Class heroes in the opposite direction, and he'd done it with steadiness. But this was apparently a different kind of thing.
Jordan noticed the fluctuation in his bearing and nodded. Straightforwardly, without ceremony.
"It's yours."
"Thank—" Mumen Rider stopped. Tried again. "Thank you."
"Don't thank me yet," Jordan said, keeping his tone light. "This is the base model. Customization modules come later, and those are also in the credit system. Keep your pace up."
Mumen Rider straightened. The quiet intensity of someone who has received something and immediately started thinking about what it obligates them to.
"Yes. I will."
The announcement had been a press conference in miniature—Jordan addressing the class, the class responding with the productive anxiety of people who have just had their goals clarified—and what it left behind was an atmosphere in which the training courses, which had been demanding and occasionally miserable, had acquired a new interpretive frame.
These are credits.
Every drill. Every assessment. Every additional hour of Bang's technique corrections or Atomic Samurai's sword critiques or Saitama's apparently simple but apparently real training method. All of it was denominated now in a currency with a specific exchange rate and a catalogue of things available for purchase.
The S-Class instructors, who had been treated with appropriate respect before, were now also being looked at as ambulatory credit dispensers. The trainees only thought about this. No one actually said it or acted on it. The training camp's general atmosphere made certain calculations obvious without anyone needing to spell them out.
The memory of the head of student affairs' enrollment speech—the one that had made several trainees briefly reconsider their life choices—had not faded.
This was not a school in the conventional sense. Every instructor in the building could and would win a physical confrontation with the entire class simultaneously, and they all knew it.
The thinking remained thinking.
Jordan, reviewing the larger plan privately, was satisfied with where it was going.
The pilot S-Class program was proof of concept. The next phase was extension—rolling the credit framework out across the full Hero Association membership, establishing it as a formal system rather than an experiment. Any professional hero whose profile was flagged through the Mind Network could access the full suite: learning resources, equipment track, one-on-one S-Class instruction when available, Potential Guidance sessions when the individual met the threshold for benefit.
Instructors who couldn't teach in person would leave materials. The House of Evolution's reformed population—several hundred enhanced individuals who had been redirected from their previous objectives—provided more than enough manpower for the operational side.
Join once, Jordan thought. Improve for life. Or don't graduate. Both options are available.
...Two Days Later...
The second student to clear one hundred credits was Glasses.
He came to the credit exchange session wearing his green training gear with the slightly nervous energy of someone who has rehearsed what they're going to say. B-Class. Bespectacled. The particular build and general aesthetic of someone who looks, at first glance, like exactly the kind of person who gets overlooked in a room full of professional heroes—which was, Jordan had noted from early in the camp, actively misleading.
"I'd like to use my credits for the Potential Guidance session," Glasses said, pushing his black-rimmed frames up his nose. "Not the suit."
Jordan considered him for a moment.
"That's a sound call," he said. "The suit is useful. It's also external. Your own output is the foundation everything else builds on." He tilted his head. "What made you decide?"
"Mumen Rider mentioned it," Glasses said, with a shade of shyness. "When we were discussing the credit options."
They've become friends, Jordan realized. Which made sense, in retrospect—the two of them had been training in proximity since the first day, both working from a similar position of not being the most naturally gifted fighters in the room and having made peace with that in the productive rather than resigned way.
"Good advice," Jordan said. "All right. Ready?"
The Potential Guidance went in.
Jordan had done this enough times now to have a sense of what to expect from different baseline types. There was usually a brief physical response—the body recognizing a structural change, muscles adapting to new load parameters, the nervous system recalibrating its reference points. Sometimes visible, sometimes not. Usually manageable.
Glasses started glowing.
Not metaphorically. His skin began emitting arcs of electricity—actual, crackling, visible electrical discharge, which was not a typical response to Potential Guidance and which Glasses had not previously demonstrated the capability for. A wind came from nowhere in particular and moved through the office with the purposefulness of something that has a reason for being there. Glasses's fists were clenched. His eyes were wide open, and something was shooting out of them.
Jordan looked at this.
"...Huh."
"AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH—!!"
The battle cry that came out of Glasses was uncontrollable, total, and extremely loud. It had the specific quality of something that was coming out of him rather than something he was producing—like a valve releasing.
Jordan looked at the electricity, the wind, the clenched fists, the wide eyes, and heard the sustained battle cry, and thought: If he had slightly longer hair and one of those iconic swept forelocks, I would be genuinely concerned that I was looking at a specific person who transmigrated here from a different dimension.
As it was: same energy. Same posture. Same involuntary screaming. Completely identical power-up aesthetic in every dimension except the hair.
Gohan, Jordan thought.
"AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH—!!"
Jordan looked at him.
"...You can stop yelling now."
The yelling continued.
"Glasses."
The yelling continued.
Jordan looked at Glasses still going full Cell-Saga-transformation-sequence in his office, and arrived at the only sensible position.
"...Why are you still yelling?"