The moment Glasses moved, Garou's eyes registered surprise for the first time.
It happened without preamble. No wind-up, no telegraphed shift in weight — one instant the bespectacled man was standing twenty meters away, and then a scorched black footprint marked the ground where he'd been standing and he was there, already inside Garou's reactive envelope, hand already moving in the unmistakable form-language of Flowing Water Fist.
Rough. Half-learned. But unmistakably the right school.
Half-baked—
Garou swatted the incoming strike aside with the precise contempt of someone who had seen this exact pattern ten thousand times and knew exactly where it ended. His counter launched immediately, fast and targeted, aimed for the opening the blocked arm created—
The needle hit him first.
Not a punch. A current. Sharp and specific, threading through his palm like a live wire had been pressed directly against the nerve, triggering a cascade of involuntary muscle responses that his jaw locked down against before they could register on his face. The electric sensation was new and unpleasant and completely beside the point, but it had taken him half a second to categorize it.
Half a second was what Glasses had been waiting for.
The first punch had been a feint. The real attack was the front kick that came out of nowhere — planted and fully committed, catching Garou clean in the abdomen in the exact gap his raised guard had opened.
The suppression field, already dragging on his speed, made the difference between compensating and not compensating for this. His feet left the ground.
He crossed the training area in a backwards arc and hit the far wall shoulder-first, hard enough to crater the surface and send a web of cracks radiating outward.
The old man is watching.
The thought arrived before the pain did — clear, accurate, and entirely motivating. Garou endured the searing protest from his abdomen, read the angle of the wall against his feet, and launched himself back at even greater velocity than he'd arrived.
Glasses had pulled his kick back and was already moving toward where Garou had landed, because that was the kind of person he was — new power, first real fight, opponent had gone into a wall, obviously worth checking on—
The black shape hit him before he could speak.
Oh.
His whole body lit up in response, the electric current surging to meet the incoming velocity as he threw his knee and forearm into a cross-block. The first impact arrived like a freight train. Then the second. Then the third, because Garou didn't stop between attacks, and the fourth, and the air in the training ground stopped being air and became a continuous crackling thunder of impacts and countercurrents.
The floor didn't handle it well.
Neither did either of them, exactly, but they were handling it — two lean frames cycling through attack and defense at a pace that stripped everything down to the fundamental question of who could sustain it longer. Garou gritted his teeth through the numbing shocks that ran up his arms with every exchange, the electric current turning his muscles against him in ways that his Undying Will cheerfully categorized as manageable while the rest of him noted they were extremely annoying. The suppression field had reduced his speed and strength below his opponent's ceiling. He was working with technique on a power deficit, and it was costing him.
Jordan Evans, he thought, with focused hostility directed at whoever had decided this was a reasonable handicap.
But even suppressed, even fighting through the current, even slower than he should have been — his skill set was real. The gaps in "Glasses'" guard were there to be found, and Garou was finding them, and the accumulated pressure was telling. Across the exchange, he could see Glasses beginning to feel it too: the electric output thinning at the edges, the breathing pattern shifting, the slight fraction of a second's extra thought before each block.
The longer this ran, the more it favored him.
Glasses felt it too. As expected of Silver Fang's disciple. Even like this, even restricted, the C-Class hero across from him was an entirely different category of fighter than the term implied. He adjusted, kept adapting, gave nothing for free — and felt his power reserves sliding steadily toward empty.
The sigh escaped him before he caught it.
That was the opening.
Garou's eyes sharpened with the specific gleam of something that has been waiting. His hands hit the floor, torso dropping below the expected attack line, and his body coiled through a full rotation — all of it converting into a whip-kick that launched from the low angle and tracked straight for "Glasses'" temple.
If that landed, the fight was over. If that landed, it was going to be loud.
A hand caught it.
Large, unhurried, completely in time — fingers closing around Garou's ankle mid-arc and holding there with the casual authority of someone who had simply decided this was the correct moment to stop things. The momentum cut. Garou found himself suspended upside-down, dangling, the floor some distance below his head.
Jordan Evans regarded him with the mild expression of a man who had caught something by reflex and was considering what to do with it.
The electric current left Glasses like a tide going out.
He became aware, all at once, of the full accounting of the last several minutes: his chest felt like something had been burning inside it; his breath tasted of hot iron; his heart was doing things that qualified as drumming rather than beating; and his clothes were soaked through in a way that had nothing to do with the weather.
I was past my limit, he realized. I've been past it for a while. I just didn't notice.
King — somewhere in the back of his mind, filing this away with the serenity of someone whose relationship with personal limits was complicated — that's not how you use the King Engine.
Glasses thought about this, breathing carefully, and decided he would ask about it at the next available opportunity.
Garou looked at the hand holding his ankle, assessed the face of the person it belonged to, and felt a complicated sequence of things that resolved, privately and against his will, into something close to relief.
He had never beaten Jordan Evans. He was not going to beat Jordan Evans today, suppressed or otherwise, upside-down in a gravity field. The match was over in all the ways that mattered.
And the old man had been watching the whole time.
I put in the work, he thought, cataloguing the cracked floor sections, the burnt patches, the full genuine effort of the last several minutes. That should count for something. Another day survived.
Bang was smiling the way he smiled when he was satisfied with what he'd seen and intended for you to know it.
The trainees were very quiet.
"Thank you both." Jordan set Garou upright with the same ease one might return a cat to the floor, then turned to address the group. "That was worth watching. Let's hear it."
The applause was not polite. It was the genuine, startled kind — the sound of people who had been watching something they hadn't expected and were still processing the gap between what they'd anticipated from a B-Class and C-Class matchup and what they'd actually received.
Nobody said anything. The clapping covered it.
Jordan waited for it to settle.
"For context," he said, "Glasses reached one hundred credits this morning. The ability he used just now is the superpower he awakened during today's Potential Guidance session."
The quiet came back, different in quality.
"This morning?"
"He awakened that this morning?"
"That's what a hundred credits buys? That's— you can just become that?"
The credit system had always been a clear proposition. Somehow, watching it produce results in real time, in a person they'd been sitting next to at meals, landed differently than the announcement had. The numbers in their own records suddenly felt more concrete.
Jordan smiled, said nothing, and let the math do its work.
"The specifics vary by individual," he said, once the noise had run its course. "But the principle is consistent — the potential is yours already. The guidance gives it a path. Work hard enough, and the next one who stands up there can be any of you." He looked around the group. "Understood?"
"Yes, sir!" The response was immediate and unanimous, with the specific energy of people who had just had something proven to them rather than promised.
One person present was not feeling the inspiration.
Garou's mouth had been doing something complex for the last thirty seconds — a series of contortions that cycled through indignant, offended, and increasingly aware of the situation — and he finally arrived at the relevant observation.
"Put me DOWN."
Jordan glanced over. "My apologies. I forgot you were there."
"..."
Garou rolled his eyes at the apology's complete sincerity deficit, performed a neat backflip as he was released, and landed without ceremony. He rolled his neck. Cracked his knuckles. Looked at the far wall to avoid looking at anyone specific.
Nearby, Glasses was getting his breath back. Jordan placed a hand briefly on his shoulder — a low pulse of restorative energy, quick and clean — and the visible strain faded out of his face within seconds, his posture rebalancing, color returning. He blinked and straightened, looking more or less like a person who had not recently used his entire body as a lightning conduit.
Jordan turned to Garou.
"Tough fight. Want a break before the next round?"
"Tch." Garou turned his head. "I'm fine."