Mumen Rider let go.
The lock released, he stepped back, brushed the crater dust from his knees with the composed manner of someone wrapping up a technical exercise, and looked at Garou with the genuine concern of a person who had just put someone through a ceiling and a re-entry and felt some responsibility for the outcome.
"I'm sorry you got hurt. Let me help you get that looked at."
He held out his hand. The tone was sincere in the specific way that Mumen Rider was always sincere, which was to say: completely, without performance.
Garou looked at the hand for slightly under a second.
Then he slapped it aside.
"Tch. It's a minor injury." He straightened, wiping his face with the back of his wrist, which did nothing useful given the state of his wrist. "I'm completely fine. I don't need your help."
The assembled trainees observed this without comment.
A mere fatal wound, Jordan thought, watching Garou stand at full upright height in a crater while bleeding from three separate locations and radiating the focused certainty of someone who had decided the situation was under control.
The tsundere response time is improving though. That hesitation was shorter than last week.
Two weeks passed.
The morning Garou sparring sessions became institutional — as fixed in the training day's rhythm as Bang's martial arts instruction and Jordan's occasional unannounced ability assessments. The results were not subtle. The trainees fought differently now: not just stronger, but smarter about where their strength was and what to do when it wasn't enough. Garou was an excellent teacher for the specific lesson that technical superiority beats raw enthusiasm, and he taught it repeatedly, at close range, without pulling punches.
He was also demonstrably improving, which he did not discuss with anyone.
Mumen Rider and Glasses had moved furthest — their starting advantages of the Type-0 suit and a freshly awakened 50-volt electric ability having compounded week over week into something that was difficult to express in rank terms without sounding implausible. But the rest of the class had not stood still.
Green had shed his previous reputation entirely. The Potential Guidance had found something waiting in him — the Fountain of Life ability, a generative vitality power that had rebuilt his physical foundation from the inside out: eight-pack musculature, accelerated recovery, the kind of presence that came with a body operating at its actual capacity rather than whatever it had been managing before. The Wood Release that had begun to emerge alongside it was still early-stage, rough at the edges, but the seed was real.
Mecha-Esper had arrived at the training camp as a walking liability — psychic potential without the stability to aim it, the kind of uncontrolled output that made him a danger to everyone in his radius. He left as a qualified telekinetic with operational precision and a helmet that Dr. Kuseno had quietly transformed into a dedicated amplification instrument. The upgrade tripled his practical output and gave it a shape. Combined combat power: roughly three Fubukis, by Jordan's estimate, which was a metric he found useful and had stopped apologizing for.
Lightning Max had spent his credits on the Type-0 suit and a custom foot-strike augmentation module, and the combination had done what combining things you're already good at with equipment built to maximize them does. His kicking style had always been technically sound. Now it was technically sound with propulsion assist, vibranium transfer efficiency, and a force output ceiling that placed A-Class within reach, probably this season.
Battery Man had received a suit configuration with a dedicated charge accumulation module integrated into the energy layer. The math on his combat power when fully charged had moved from significant to exponential, and everyone in the sparring program had stopped volunteering to be his training partner during the final charge phase.
Jordan stood before the assembled class for the last session, looking at the gathered group, and experienced something he had no particular philosophical framework for: the satisfaction of having taken a collection of working professionals and returned them as significantly better working professionals, with no ulterior motive more complicated than this seems useful.
He was aware it was uncomplicated. He allowed it.
Nearly the full mentor team flanked him — Bang, King, the relevant S-Class instructors in their various states of engagement with the proceedings. One conspicuous gap existed at the left edge of the lineup, where a certain green-haired S-Class telepath had, according to reliable sources, not yet emerged from her room.
The gap communicated its own message.
The reason I sleep in, said the gap, is nobody's business but mine.
Jordan directed a thought at the gap that was diplomatically unrecorded.
"Before I close out," he said, addressing the class, "a few administrative matters." He kept his tone businesslike. "The association has been informed that participation in this program constitutes an approved professional development activity. No one who attended has been flagged for insufficient hero activity output. Stipends have been maintained in full throughout."
A brief murmur. The subtext — that this had required specific intervention with specific association officials who had held specific opinions — went unspoken, but the trainees were professional enough to read the shape of what hadn't been said.
The two officials who had raised objections were currently reconsidering their positions from a facility that provided ample time for reflection. They had been joined by a third, more recent arrival.
"Going forward: your personal credit count continues accumulating automatically through normal hero work. When you've saved enough, come back and redeem. That offer doesn't expire."
The room was very quiet for a moment.
The trainees had arrived at this program knowing it was unusual. Most of them had not, at the start, been entirely sure what it would turn out to be. What they had found was an S-Class hero who taught them things, gave them equipment, told the association to sit down when it objected, and was now informing them that the arrangement was permanent with no strings attached.
"There are no classes today." Jordan let the previous statement settle, then continued. "I've reserved the Royal Manor Hotel — full property, for the day. Graduation dinner. All of you."
Several seconds of silence.
"...The Royal Manor. In D-City?"
"The one that costs—"
"That Royal Manor?!"
"LONG LIVE SUPER COP!!"
The eruption was immediate, unanimous, and probably audible from the corridor. Jordan accepted it with the patience of a man who had anticipated this exact response and allotted appropriate time for it.
At the S-City branch of the Hero Association, the atmosphere was producing a very different kind of noise.
Hurried footsteps crossed polished floors. The command center's electronic doors opened to admit a group of executives in suits whose expressions shared the specific quality of people who have received information they don't have a protocol for. The branch manager — built like someone had decided to construct a man out of a summary of what a manager should look like, broad-shouldered and square-jawed in the manner that reminded Jordan, had he been present, of the B-Class hero Mountain Ape — took the room with two strides and turned to his operations chief.
"Current situation."
"Branch manager." The operations chief had sweat on his collar despite the air conditioning. He gestured to his staff. "Connect everything we still have signal from. Main screen."
The connections came up in sequence. Audio first: a sound that had no clean category — too deep for a roar, too sustained for an impact, something that seemed to come from the ground rather than the air. Then the visual.
The entire main screen could not contain it.
What occupied S-City's footage was not a monster in the sense the threat classification system had been built to process. It was a structural condition. A centipede — but the word required revision at this scale. The body filled the frame and continued beyond it in both directions, segments the size of apartment buildings, legs carving through the city's infrastructure with the casual indifference of roots displacing pavement. Skyscrapers met it and lost the argument. The ground behaved like liquid where it passed, soil and bedrock offering no more resistance than mud. In the time the footage had been running, a rough quarter of S-City had been reclassified from city to former city.
The command center officers heard this information with their eyes.
"Is that a centipede," someone said, in the tone of a person who had asked a clarifying question while already knowing the answer was going to be unsatisfying.
"Its body isn't even fitting on screen—"
"What does something that size eat—"
"Quiet." The branch manager's voice landed on the room like a weight. His face had gone the specific grey of someone doing rapid calculation under pressure and not liking the results. "Heroes on site. Status."
"Two A-Class responders. Multiple B-Class support." The operations chief's voice had the over-controlled quality of someone keeping it professional by force of will. "All contact lost approximately seven minutes after the first report. Situation on the ground is unconfirmed."
Seven minutes.
The branch manager's fist came down on the control panel with a sound that made two junior staff members flinch. "A monster this scale is outside the parameters of anything below S-Class. I don't care what's on the schedule or who's not available — contact headquarters. Emergency deployment request. S-Class, immediately."
The orders went out.
In the rubble that had been S-City's commercial district, the roar continued, unaware of and uninterested in the humans conferring at a distance about what to do about it.
Elder Centipede. The disaster classification sat unspoken in the room, waiting for someone with the authority to say it out loud.
Dragon-level.
The ground shook again.
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