That's exactly what I've been waiting to hear.
Jordan was already moving before the thought finished. He turned to the crowd and pointed.
"Mumen Rider. You're up."
Mumen Rider blinked from his seat, where he had been sitting with the focused attentiveness of someone cataloguing everything that had just happened for future application. He stood, started toward the training ground, then stopped.
"...Mr.Jordan. Did you just call me by the wrong name?"
"Ahem." Jordan patted him on the shoulder as he drew level, already steering him forward. He dropped his voice to a register that carried, with perfect clarity, to everyone in the room. "Not important. What's important is that you get out there before he recovers his strength. Don't hold back — this guy hits hard and he adapts fast."
"..." said Mumen Rider.
"..." said Garou, from across the training ground.
So much for subtlety, Garou thought, at approximately the same moment every trainee in the room arrived at the same conclusion.
Mumen Rider walked onto the training ground anyway, working through his fight strategy as he went. He'd watched the Glasses match from beginning to end, cataloguing what Garou prioritized, how he read distance, where the suppression field was visibly affecting his movement. He bowed from the center of the ground, unhurried.
"C-Class, Mumen Rider. Good match."
Garou rubbed his still-complaining abdomen, looked at the earnest face across from him, and produced the greeting with the effort of a man contributing to a form he found unnecessary.
"...Good match."
Bang, Garou thought he could hear from somewhere to his left, is watching.
Hm, Bang was thinking, with the quiet satisfaction of an educator who has identified incremental progress. The method is having some effect.
I'm not polite, Garou thought, in the general direction of his master. I just know when the cost-benefit doesn't work in my favour.
There was no formal start.
Garou moved first.
He'd learned what he needed to learn from the previous exchange: even with the suppression field grinding on his output, his technique was in a different tier. The thing that had gotten him into trouble with Glasses was underestimating the variable he didn't know about. This time, he wasn't giving the opponent time to introduce variables. He closed the distance in an instant, committed, purposeful —
Mumen Rider's knuckles lit up.
The glow was faint and particular — not the broad crackle of electric current but something deeper, emanating from the skin itself, the quiet luminance of Unyielding Power running through the mechanism of a fist that had been hitting things far past the point where a normal person would have stopped. He stepped into the attack rather than retreating from it, and the punch he threw didn't slow when it hit Garou's guard.
It accelerated.
Justice Series — a decision, the suit's jets opening across his back and forearms in a single synchronized burst, the accumulated thrust converted into forward momentum in an extreme instant, vibranium-reinforced impact driving straight through the gap the block had created —
"The Fist of Justice!"
Garou took it across the face.
Not without response. Blue energy was already flowing from his palms the instant the first contact landed — Flowing Water Fist, reading the force, beginning to redirect it — but the acceleration was continuous, the momentum compounding, the inch of striking distance producing more output than the full extension of the punch had any right to. The force broke through the deflection and kept going.
Both of them felt the simultaneous exchange land.
Garou's counter had fired the moment Mumen Rider committed — a clean Flowing Water Fist strike to the chin, precise and efficient, the kind of hit that finished things. He felt it connect.
Then he felt it not do anything.
He watched Mumen Rider land, one hand pressing the floor for balance. The metallic shimmer ran across the suit from throat to cheekbone — particle effects cycling visibly across the surface as vibranium processed and redistributed what it had just absorbed. Energy absorption, shock distribution across the full substrate, the internal Justice Power adding one more layer of defense over vital areas. The hit had been real. The result was negligible.
Garou landed in a controlled somersault and stood straight.
He raised his hand.
Touched his nose.
Looked at what was on his fingers.
The smell hit before he catalogued it visually — iron, copper, the specific wet warmth of an injury that was informing him it had happened. The trickle started at his nose and ran down to his upper lip.
Mumen Rider's eyes went wide. He took a step forward, one hand half-reaching. "I'm sorry — that wasn't intentional, I didn't mean to—"
Garou smiled.
It was an innocent smile, completely at odds with everything else about his face, and Mumen Rider recognized it approximately two steps too late.
The blue-wreathed hands were already in motion — fingers drawn together like a blade's edge, knuckles dense and sharp, both hands moving in separate lanes targeting eyes, throat, ears, the pressure points that maps of the body marked in red because they ended things quickly. The strikes came faster than the eye tracked, a continuous rapid-fire sequence that didn't pause to assess damage because it didn't need to —
Mumen Rider threw up his Flowing Water Fist guard.
He'd had under two weeks with the form. Garou had grown up with it — absorbed it from the inside of a real fight against Bang's own students, adapted it into a language his body already spoke. The guard held for six moves. Seven. Nine. On the tenth exchange, the structure came apart.
What followed was comprehensive.
Fists, fingers, elbows, knees — the full vocabulary of a fighter who had stopped holding anything back and converted every suppressed percentage of his strength into technical density. Mumen Rider's feet left the ground. The purple glow spreading across the suit's surface deepened to a sustained radiance, the vibranium's energy absorption running at capacity, the framework straining visibly against the accumulated kinetic load.
He stopped trying to block.
He had one option left.
"— A ROAR OF JUSTICE!"
The shout came from the diaphragm and below, and it wasn't empty sound. Every impact Garou had landed in the last thirty seconds — the fists, the elbows, the accumulated force the vibranium had processed and held in reserve — converted in a single instant into output, channeled through the suit's framework, released through the one direction that was still open.
The shockwave was purple and immediate and extremely loud.
Garou's punching rhythm met a wall of pure converted kinetic energy at close range and experienced what a wall of pure converted kinetic energy at close range produces.
The far wall had not fully recovered from Glasses' match.
It absorbed the new human-shaped impression without complaint, because walls in training facilities for S-Class programs are built with this in mind. The crater was approximately Garou-shaped. Garou was in it, upside-down at a slight angle, blinking through falling concrete dust.
...Where did the ceiling go.
Bang set his teacup down with the deliberate care of someone who has decided to make a point.
"Suppression or no suppression — you attacked without reading the opponent's capabilities. You led with force because you assumed there was nothing to read. Your training," he said, with the calm finality of a verdict, "is not yet sufficient."
Jordan was already refilling the old man's cup. "He's young. A bit more education and he'll sort out the fine details."
Bang looked at the wall. Looked at Garou.
"It appears," he said thoughtfully, "that I haven't been applying enough education recently."
Garou pried himself out of the concrete with the methodical focus of someone performing a task that required complete attention. He stood. A line of blood had opened across his forehead at some point during the wall interaction, and it ran in a clean track down his face to his jaw, dripping.
The trainees went very quiet.
Jordan watched without visible concern. He had seen enough of Garou's constitution to know that the dramatic presentation was unrelated to the actual medical situation. In practice terms, the injury was the equivalent of a notification — present, acknowledged, irrelevant to continued operations.
Mumen Rider had not yet arrived at this conclusion.
"Are you — are you alright?" He was already moving across the training ground. "That looked—"
Him too.
Mumen Rider had been getting Potential Guidance sessions more frequently than anyone else in the class — the quiet perk of being the instructor's first choice for extended mentorship, which he had initially resisted on the grounds that he hadn't done anything to deserve special treatment. Jordan had let that go exactly as long as it took for the phrase with great power comes great responsibility to work its way back into his thinking, which had taken about a week, after which Mumen Rider had started training with the focused guilt-fuelled recklessness of someone making up for lost time. The result was that Mumen Rider genuinely did not have a clear picture of where his current ceiling was.
He was currently discovering parts of it in real time.
"You're so loud." Garou wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, looked at the result, and felt something behind his eyes shift — the specific activation that blood and genuine resistance produced, the part of him that assessed injury as data rather than problem. His pulse quickened. His expression settled into something that was almost peaceful in the way that a lit fuse is peaceful.
"I don't need you checking on me."
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