The scrutiny from the assembled trainees had nothing to do with Garou's looks.
Well — it had a little to do with his looks. The bone structure didn't help him appear approachable, and the weight-suppression field he was standing in gave his stillness a particular quality. But the real reason every set of eyes in the training ground was tracking him with careful attention was standing to his left: Jordan Evans, S-Class, and behind him, Bang, Silver Fang, second rank in the Hero Association.
Sparring partner, they'd been told.
What the trainees understood, reading the geometry of the room, was: future connection point. Hero careers were built on more than fight records. Every person in this training class had already internalized the fact that graduating from the S-Class program meant being associated with the name "Super Cop" for the rest of their professional life. Not as followers — as lineage. The kind of affiliation that opened doors, got assessed more generously, and gave junior heroes someone to call when a situation went sideways.
The Tank Top Army hadn't grown to its current size because everyone who joined genuinely loved tank tops.
Whatever organization came out of this program would be considerably more formidable. And the C-Class hero currently standing on the training ground, absorbing their attention with the expression of a man actively suppressing the instinct to clear the room, was — whether he appreciated it or not — already part of that picture.
Garou appreciated it approximately not at all. If Jordan and Bang weren't standing where they were, the situation might have resolved differently.
Jordan stepped forward before it could develop any further.
"Our Water Wolf Warrior may not be sitting at the top of the C-Class rankings, but underestimating him is a quick way to end up on the floor." He let that land, then glanced around the assembled group. "I've said my piece. Who wants to go first?"
Genos raised his hand. The movement had the clean, unambiguous speed of someone whose reflexes operated faster than deliberation. "I'll do it, Jordan."
"...Genos." Jordan paused with the careful delicacy of someone navigating a social situation they had partly caused. "Didn't you two already have a match? Maybe give someone else the opportunity."
A beat passed. Genos appeared to locate the relevant memory, process its contents, and arrive at the conclusion that he was, in fact, the one who had won that fight. His hand lowered with the generous grace of a man who could afford magnanimity.
"...Understood."
Across from him, Garou's jaw tightened by a fraction. The specific quality of Genos's consideration — the implication that being asked to yield was a reasonable accommodation given the established outcome — landed exactly as intended, which was to say: it landed like a second Iron Fist, administered without contact.
Relying on your master's reputation, Garou thought, directing this at Genos with the precision of someone who had identified the exact thing most likely to be untrue, because the alternative reading was worse.
Jordan scanned the group and pointed. "Glasses."
Glasses stepped onto the training ground in his martial arts uniform — clean lines, nothing unnecessary, the composed ease of someone who had already spent the morning having their power limits completely rewritten and still managed to find a fighting stance that communicated precisely nothing alarming.
He bowed. Not a performance. Just the reflex of someone raised to mean it.
"Water Wolf Warrior. I'm Glasses, B-Class." A brief pause. "My goal is A-Class. Lets have a good match."
Garou had, over the course of his life, developed a specific relationship with the word hero and everything associated with it. The polite introduction, the careful bow, the stated aspirations — none of it landed the way it would have six months ago, when his response to this exact scenario would have been automatic and had nothing to do with formal sparring protocols.
He was, he reminded himself, operating under different parameters now. The hunting instinct was a feature of a prior version of his plan. Current version: follow the rules of heroes, because the alternative was apparently an iron fist every time he forgot.
He nodded. Stiffly. Barely. "...Good match."
For Garou, this constituted warmth.
The suppression field settled into his joints like ballast as the spar began. Garou let his opponent come.
This was not reluctance. This was method. He had spent enough time in real fights — against monsters, against heroes, against things that didn't fit either category — to know that the first exchange of any unfamiliar matchup was data collection. What was their opening preference? How did they read distance? Did they commit to the first strike, or feint? Every attack absorbed at the beginning of a fight was an investment in ending it correctly later.
And if the investment cost him some damage in the meantime — he'd operated on worse margins.
This was the other half of the calculation, the one that had nothing to do with tactics and everything to do with what he was: the kind of constitution that treated damage as a lesson plan. The Undying Will wasn't a technique he had developed. It was something structural, deeper than training, that had been with him since before he understood what it meant. Anything that couldn't kill him eventually became the reason he got better. The math was uncomfortable, but it was consistent.
He watched Glasses with the flat attention of something that had found a comfortable place to wait.
Across the ground, Glasses watched back, recognized the open stance for what it was, and made the decision he'd been building toward since his conversation with King after this morning's awakening.
Presence, King had explained, with the calm authority of someone sharing knowledge without embellishment, can end a fight before it begins. I once stood in front of a monster without moving. It exploded.
Glasses had written this down, reviewed it twice, and concluded that he had significant work to do in this area.
But he had electricity now.
He let it go.
The current erupted from his skin in a crackling sheet — not one arc but dozens, running in parallel channels along his arms, his chest, the column of his spine. The cellular friction that Jordan had catalyzed that morning translated outward: muscles dense with current, bones resonating with it, short black hair rising in a full standing halo of charge. The air around him smelled of ozone and hot metal. The light shifted.
He looked, in that moment, like something that had stepped out of a different kind of story.
Garou's eyes widened.
He had been waiting for a roar, a charge, the committed recklessness of someone trying to overwhelm him on the first exchange. He had positioned himself to read that attack, step inside it, find the gap, and close it.
This was not that.
Superpowers, he registered, with the specific recalibration that came from encountering something that didn't match your pre-fight model. The old man's camp actually has something to it.
He corrected the thought immediately: A little. Not much.
Glasses held his charged state and exhaled slowly, letting the power settle into something sustainable. He could feel it in his blood — not uncomfortable, exactly, but present in a way that was still new. He had approximately one morning of experience with this. The person across from him was Bang's top student.
He thought it was worth mentioning.
"This is my first time using this ability in a match," he said, the courtesy entirely genuine. "Just — be careful, please. Lightning isn't something I can really dial down yet."
Garou's lip curled. He didn't shift his stance. He didn't raise his guard. The absolute disregard for the visual spectacle of someone wrapped in live current and apologizing about it was, in its way, its own kind of statement.
"Tch. Stop talking."
What neither his expression nor his dismissal communicated — what he was working through internally with the focused attention he gave to things that mattered — was the actual assessment:
The power in front of him wasn't training-weight. The current crackling across "Glasses'" skin wasn't cosmetic. Somewhere between King's biomagnetic influence, absorbed through months of proximity and genuine study, and whatever Jordan had done during the Potential Guidance session that morning, a B-Class hero with no combat history had arrived at the threshold of something that warranted actual attention.
Fifty volts of Electric Current Propulsion, running through a frame that had been comprehensively upgraded and a nervous system learning, for the first time, exactly what it was capable of.
By the current Hero Association's metrics, that placed Glasses at the edge of S-Class combat range.
Garou had been given a suppression field, a weight load, and a B-Class opponent.
His expression didn't change, but something behind it did — the specific sharpening of a predator that has just been informed the prey is more interesting than expected.
He waited.
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