Something clicked behind King's eyes.
He stood before the rotating gold armor and, quite against his will, pictured himself at a controller — the armor as his unit, the battlefield as a map, Saitama as a final boss. The mental image arrived with startling clarity, complete with the specific satisfaction of executing a perfect multi-pronged engagement from maximum range while the main body held center.
He understood exactly how to use this thing.
"Doctor," he said, with the measured calm of someone who had just made a major life decision, "I'd like to try it."
Dr. Kuseno smiled, already moving to his workstation. "Of course. King, if you'll place your hand here — just press down and hold. I need a surface tissue DNA sample to bind to the armor's core code. Once it's registered, it won't respond to anyone else."
King did as instructed, setting his palm against the scanner plate and easing back the biomagnetic field's outer layer. The machine emitted a clean red laser sweep, reading and logging whatever it needed in under three seconds.
"Thank you very much, Doctor."
"Thank you," Dr. Kuseno said, still working the terminal. "Once the suit's in active use, it will log your combat data continuously. That feedback is invaluable for the next generation of development. Honestly, I should be the one expressing gratitude."
King scratched the back of his head. "Not at all. I'm the one receiving the equipment."
"No, no — the data alone—"
"Really, Doctor, please—"
The two of them went back and forth in the unhurried, earnest manner of men who genuinely meant their thanks, while the armor's control system quietly finished binding itself to King's identity. Two narrow beams of red light swept across the inside of the crown-shaped visor as it registered the final handshake.
The boot sequence ran.
Then the Type One took itself apart.
The chest plate separated first, propulsion jets igniting at its edges, trailing a curve of golden flame as it arced through the air. The pauldrons followed. The greaves. Gauntlets. Every component launched independently, each one drawing its own arc through the workshop's open space, converging on King from multiple angles simultaneously.
King spread his arms wide and let his biomagnetic field take the wheel.
The pieces came in fast — not random, not chaotic, but precise. Guided. Each segment knew its position in the whole, and his field confirmed it, slotted it, locked it. The assembly was less like putting on armor and more like being claimed by it. Metal met flesh with a series of solid, resonant impacts—
Clang. Clang. Clang. Clang.
—each one announcing, with the authority of forged steel, exactly what King was capable of powering.
Golden electricity arced between the plates as the magnetic field integration completed. The three old scars across King's face caught the light beneath the crackling discharge. His frame, already built for presence, filled the armor like it had always been the correct context for him. The visor's narrow eyes illuminated.
Jordan folded his arms.
"Brilliant." He nodded once, already decided. "It's settled. The Type One gets a proper name — I'm calling it the Emperor's Armor."
King's expression did not change, but something behind it did.
"...What if I said that made me feel inexplicably embarrassed?"
"You don't feel embarrassed calling out your techniques during a fight," Jordan pointed out.
"That's completely different." King's tone was the exact blend of dignity and defensiveness that only a man who had spent serious time thinking about this subject could produce. "A magnetic field expert calling their moves is a matter of principle. It's not the same thing."
"Right, right. Of course."
Jordan circled him slowly, studying the fit from every angle, while Dr. Kuseno observed with the quiet satisfaction of an engineer watching a thing work the way it was supposed to.
"Doctor — I did tell you King was the right choice for this, didn't I?"
"You did." Dr. Kuseno tilted his head. "I had some uncertainty before meeting him in person. I don't anymore."
King raised a hand slightly. "I appreciate it, but — isn't this a bit much for daily use? I'm not exactly someone who likes drawing attention."
"Normally, yes, it'd be a bit conspicuous," Jordan admitted. "That's what the mimicry function is for. Standard mode looks like whatever you're already wearing. Combat mode drops the disguise. You'll barely notice it on a regular day."
King extended the biomagnetic field's reach inward, touching the suit's control interface. The Type One responded immediately: the gold lost its solidity, plates flowing apart like heated metal, the entire structure dissolving into a mercury-silver liquid that seeped invisibly into the fabric of his existing clothes and disappeared. One moment the Emperor's Armor. The next, just King in his usual outfit.
King considered this for a moment.
Then he started experimenting.
The nanometal re-emerged in controlled waves, flowing out and reshaping under his field's direction. Forms assembled themselves with the careful precision of someone who had spent years looking at character design sheets and thinking about them seriously. Humanoid silhouettes, each one distinct. Detailed armor configurations. Matching weapon loadouts. The figures materialized one after another, each rendered with a sculptor's attention to proportion and accuracy — life-scale, technically exact down to the equipment.
Jordan and Dr. Kuseno watched without comment.
"...You know," Dr. Kuseno said eventually, in a thoughtful tone that suggested he was working through something genuinely useful, "perhaps I should bring King in when I start designing Genos's upgrade suit. He has a real instinct for this."
Jordan looked at the assembled gallery of nanometal figures.
He thought about how many hours of software libraries, handbooks, and collector's archives it would take to produce results this specific from pure aesthetic memory.
He said nothing, because what could be said.
They wrapped up at the institute shortly after. King launched from the compound's exterior clearing, the Type One unfolding from his clothes in a single flowing cascade and reassembling at speed as his magnetic field caught the air. He had combat data to collect and a very specific list of operational parameters to test.
Behind him, Dr. Kuseno had already pulled up a design document titled Adaptive AI Interface — User-Specific Configuration and was making quiet notes about personality matrices and interaction models. Versatile, he muttered to himself. That was the key word. Whatever the user actually responded to. A proper AI companion for field operations should understand the individual.
He underlined versatile twice.
Jordan returned to Z-City through the portal and made it as far as his desk, coffee still untouched, before the knock came.
The door opened on two white-haired figures.
The first he recognized immediately from the light, purposeful step: Bang, Silver Fang, ranked second in the Hero Association, currently sporting the quiet energy of a man who had dragged someone somewhere for a reason and felt entirely justified about it.
The second walked with the coiled wariness of something that had been made to come and hadn't forgotten it. White hair splitting into distinct upswept points, jaw set, sixteen different varieties of reluctance written across his face.
"Hey, isn't it—" Jordan stepped through the portal and appeared in front of them, hand raised in greeting. "Water Wolf Warrior. You look a little stiff. Long patrol today?"
Garou's eye twitched. He looked sideways at Bang with the specific expression of a person recalculating whether this detour had been worth it. "Old man, you dragged me here just to see him? I haven't even finished today's patrol route. I was in the middle of—"
WHAM.
The Iron Fist of Love connected with the top of Garou's head with the precision and weight of something that had been doing this long enough to have a consistent strike angle. His hair — specifically the carefully maintained upswept division — compressed by approximately ten centimeters.
Jordan looked at the resulting silhouette and privately arrived at a theory about how that particular hairstyle had come to exist.
Bang withdrew his fist, which was still faintly trailing a suggestion of smoke, with the serene expression of a man who considered this an act of care.
"Be respectful to Jordan-kun," he said pleasantly. "And it's Master. You know the word."
The wolf — reduced temporarily to one hand on his head and a pained grimace — straightened by degrees. The punch had been heavy. It had also, notably, stopped well short of the threshold where heavy became structural. The old man's self-restraint was intact even when his patience wasn't.
Getting heavier every day, Garou thought, with the private grievance of someone who had checked and was keeping track.
"...I got it." He let go of his head. "Master."