The charge came with presence.
Not just speed — something behind the speed, a malevolent weight that pressed against the air ahead of Garou's fist like a dark shape following close behind him. Blue energy wreathed his knuckles. His eyes had that quality they got when the blood was working on him, sharpened past normal focus into something that only recognized targets.
The fist came down from above like he'd gathered the entire sky into the swing.
Mumen Rider's Unyielding Power answered automatically — the core activation preceding the conscious decision, raising his arm into the block with steady, practiced certainty.
The vibranium plate took the impact.
The force didn't disappear. It transferred — distributed through the substrate, through the underlayer, through the shock absorption framework, arriving at Mumen Rider's arm as a deep, bone-level vibration that went numb almost immediately and dropped him into a crouch he hadn't chosen.
He chose what came next.
The crouch became the setup. His waist loaded and released, body spinning low to the ground, one leg sweeping and the other building momentum as he came around —
"A Whirlwind of Justice!"
The sequence was three spinning sweeps building into a rising whirlwind kick, the final strike catching Garou mid-guard with enough rotational force to carry through the block and send him sliding backward nearly ten meters across the training ground floor.
Garou landed, clenched his hands. Felt the numbness running across both palms from slapping the kick. Filed it with the rest of the list, which was getting longer than expected.
If you're so unhappy, the thought surfaced with the clarity of something genuinely meant, directed at the green-uniformed figure across the training ground, come do something about it.
In the audience, Jordan's lips curved slightly. The Mind Network had excellent reception.
This is the best part of sparring with someone who hasn't hit their ceiling yet, he reflected, watching Garou re-anchor his stance. They still have opinions about everything.
He'd noticed the style shift during the kick sequence. Mumen Rider had been working two schools simultaneously — the Flowing Water Fist that Bang had drilled into him, and something else beneath it, an older acquired habit with different footwork philosophy. Gouken-style fundamentals, adapted from Konoha's hard-fist lineage: the principle of a balance between power and flow, each discipline covering what the other lacked. On paper, it was a sophisticated combination for someone with under two weeks of formal training.
In practice — watching Mumen Rider load into that whirlwind kick — it seemed less like sophistication and more like the fighting style finding the person it was always meant to be used by.
Straightforward works if you're built for it, Jordan noted. He is.
The brief distance closed instantly.
Garou moved in a zigzag, low and fast, cutting the line of sight before establishing the attack angle. His fingertips found the first gap in Mumen Rider's guard — a precise, practiced entry from the Flowing Water Fist, the tooth-jaw technique that Jordan had watched Bang's senior students drill for months, here deployed with the casual fluency of something Garou had simply absorbed. The guard came apart at the seam.
The elbow followed before the hand had finished its work.
Mumen Rider felt it land — absorbed into the suit's vibranium layer, kinetic energy logged and stored — and felt his foundation shift. The whip kick was already loading. It was going to be the finisher: all the torque in Garou's lower body, delivered to a point the size of a fist, and if it connected with any part of Mumen Rider that wasn't specifically reinforced, the match would end with a specific kind of loud noise.
Mumen Rider ran the calculation in the fraction of a second available.
I cannot win the technical exchange. He is categorically better at this than I am. If I keep defending, I lose in eight moves or fewer.
He inhaled.
Opened his arms.
And took the next two strikes — elbow, and the beginning of the wind-up — across the suit's chest plate with the deliberate intention of someone who had already decided what they were spending them on.
"— A ROAR OF JUSTICE!"
The shout hit before the kick did. The same stored kinetic energy from the previous exchange, but directed differently — not a shockwave blast but a focused concussive pressure, the sound itself acting as a hard brake on Garou's movement rhythm. The wolf's follow-through stuttered. His whip kick slowed by a fraction.
The thrusters fired.
All of them. Simultaneously — arm units, foot units, the core array across the torso, orange-red jets converging into a single unified forward thrust that was a very different category of force than anything the fight had produced yet.
Mumen Rider closed the remaining distance in an instant and wrapped both arms around Garou's torso, pinning his hands, locking his waist —
"JUSTICE IN THE ARM!!"
They went up.
Not at an angle. Straight up.
The ceiling of the martial arts arena accepted this development poorly. The hole they made going through it was significant. The sound was enormous.
Bang watched the ceiling with an expression that reserved judgment.
Around him, the remaining trainees tracked the receding dot visible through the new architectural gap in the roof.
"Jordan-kun." Bang set down his teacup with the careful precision of a man approaching an important question. "May I ask what style that technique belongs to?"
"Doesn't matter." Jordan was watching the sky with the satisfied expression of someone waiting for a specific thing to happen. "Let them fly a little longer."
Several thousand meters above the training camp, the wind was explaining itself to Garou's face at high speed and without invitation.
He had opinions about this. He had, in fact, a great number of things to say. The first attempt to say them resulted in his mouth filling with high-altitude gale-force wind, which converted every word into an experimental sound that meant nothing, while his cheeks expressed the aerodynamic properties of a face at speed.
Mumen Rider, protected by the suit's energy barrier, was remarkably composed for someone currently functioning as a rocket.
He was also running numbers.
The Potential Guidance had broken certain limits. The exact ceiling was still being mapped. But he'd sparred with Jordan enough times — the one-sided, instructional kind of sparring that left no ambiguity about the distance between them — to understand the relationship between power and control. He had enough data on Garou's constitution from watching every exchange of the last hour to calculate the answer to a specific question:
What is the maximum loading this body can actually absorb?
He reached the apex, felt the momentum peak —
Shut the engine.
The silence lasted exactly as long as the 180-degree drift.
Then every thruster on the suit fired, simultaneously, at full power, downward.
"This move," Mumen Rider announced, into the screaming wind, with the clear and deliberate enunciation of someone who had thought about what they were going to say at this moment, "is called — "
Garou had time to register what was coming. The geometry of their angle, the acceleration building below him, the distant training ground resolving into a very specific and familiar shape —
"THE ULTIMATE JUTSU OF JUSTICE: LOTUS FLOWER!!"
The spiral began.
Following the rotational principles of Gouken-style's momentum technique, the fall became a spinning descent, velocity compounding, the world blurring into a smear of color that was briefly the sky and then briefly the hole in the ceiling rushing toward them and then the crater made everything white with impact and noise.
The dust settled slowly.
Jordan had raised a force field over himself and Bang at the appropriate moment — the blast of displaced air and particulate matter rolled outward and encountered the barrier and stopped there. The trainees received the full educational experience of being in the vicinity of a crater-generating impact without the barrier, and spent several seconds in the productive activity of coughing and craning their necks to see through the settling cloud.
"Did they — is that—"
"From that height? That should have—"
"This whole exercise was reckless from the start—"
From the center of the new crater, a crunching sound. Debris shifting.
"Cough — cough — let me go—"
"Justice... will not be abandoned—"
The murmuring stopped. Several trainees exchanged looks that expressed, without words, a complex mixture of relief and bewilderment. Those were definitely people who were fine. Those were also definitely people who had just been at the center of that. The combination required some processing.
Jordan waved a hand. The remaining dust dispersed in a clean outward sweep. He walked to the edge of the crater and looked down.
Mumen Rider had Garou in a full lock — arms secured, weight distributed, suit's energy systems still running at operational levels, face calm with the composed certainty of someone who had not let go of a thing he had committed to holding. Garou was considerably less composed: blood on his face, blood at the corner of his mouth, dust in his hair, and the expression of a person who had experienced a Lotus Flower from the delivery end and wanted everyone involved to know exactly how he felt about it.
The scene was the precise inversion of a fight that had happened in a different version of this world — one where a lone C-Class hero with no powers and no suit had planted himself in front of a monster of a man and taken the worst of it rather than step aside. Mumen Rider beaten bloody by Garou. A one-sided beatdown dressed up as an act of will.
Now the nano-vibranium suit held every impact without a scratch, and Garou was the one looking like he'd had a conversation with the ground from altitude.
Jordan looked at this with quiet, genuine satisfaction.
"Alright." He crouched at the crater's edge. "I'm calling it a draw. You can both stop now."
Even at maximum durability, even with the Undying Will treating the whole experience as data rather than damage, the Lotus Flower from several thousand meters had left Garou temporarily operating at reduced clarity. He blinked through it. Became aware of his hands, which were still locked. Became aware of Mumen Rider, who had not moved.
He spat. Red, specific, carrying a message.
"Tch." His voice had the ragged quality of someone who was fine but had been somewhere uncomfortable. "Nobody needs your call. Let. Me. Go."