There is a tendency, when reading about Dragon-level threats in Hero Association briefings, to underestimate them. The rating system exists for good reasons. The briefings exist because the reality of a Dragon-level monster in an urban area is not something the human mind processes well in the abstract.
What it means, in practice: a living thing large enough that its body spans several city blocks, moving with the unhurried indifference of a geological event, and the infrastructure of a modern city — the skyscrapers, the transit systems, the roads, the underground networks — offering approximately the same resistance as wet paper.
Elder Centipede had been sleeping for a long time.
It woke up somewhere under S-City and began the process of establishing its morning presence.
"Centipede Roll."
Half of S-City became a memory in the time it took to complete one rotation.
High above, a figure materialized in the sky over the devastation.
Black high school uniform, gold chain detail, baseball cap worn at the angle that communicated maximum dramatic intent. The War God shadow clone took in the smoking ruins below — the collapsed towers, the craters, the ongoing sound of something enormous moving through the city's remains without particular urgency — and frowned.
"Hey, hey, hey. What an irritating thing."
Elder Centipede, in the middle of another rotation, paused.
Something had happened to its processing. Not an attack — nothing had touched it. Something else. The feeling of being observed by something that existed in a category above it on the food chain, a recognition that bypassed conscious thought and arrived as pure instinct at the base of whatever passed for its brain stem.
It turned its head toward the sky.
Its thinking slowed.
Slowed further.
Stopped.
The clone lowered its hand from the snap position. Around it, the world had become a photograph — every particle of debris suspended at the apex of its arc, every sound wave frozen mid-propagation, the smoke columns halted at whatever shape they'd been in when the finger and thumb connected. The spacetime of the entire world held still, waiting for the instruction that the snap had given it to be rescinded.
Jordan became aware of the freeze the way you become aware of someone turning off a fan in a room — through the sudden absence of background motion. He looked up from the conversation he'd been having.
Next to him, Saitama also stopped.
Looked around.
Looked at Jordan with the flat, comprehensive suspicion of someone who had been in unusual situations around Jordan enough times to have developed a working theory.
"...What did you do this time?"
"I didn't do anything."
"Jordan."
"I genuinely didn't do anything." Jordan held up both hands. "A shadow clone did it."
Saitama absorbed this distinction with the expression of a man who was not sure it was a distinction. "There's a Dragon-level monster tearing apart S-City," Jordan added, already pulling the information from the Mind Network's passive coverage. "The clone froze time to stop the damage. That's everything."
Saitama's expression completed its transition from suspicious to focused, the particular quality of focus he got when something needed hitting and the location had been provided.
"Then let's go."
He turned toward the direction of S-City and loaded his legs for the kind of jump that would eventually involve the lower atmosphere. Jordan grabbed the back of his cape.
The fabric held. Jordan wrapped a precise layer of Biotic Field around his grip specifically so that it would hold without tearing — the gap between enough force to stop Saitama mid-launch and enough force to ruin a cape being narrower than it sounded, given the parties involved.
"Jordan!" Saitama grabbed his cape and checked it with the concern of a man whose wardrobe had recently had a difficult month. "You almost tore it — I just replaced this one!"
"It's fine. Not even a thread." Jordan let go. "And there's no rush — time is stopped, remember? The monster isn't going anywhere."
Saitama looked at the frozen world. Processed this.
Then he pointed at Jordan with the expression of a prosecutor who has located the flaw in the alibi. "You still say you didn't do it."
"The clone did it."
"You and your clone are the same person!"
"Technically speaking—"
"Jordan."
Jordan cleared his throat. "What's important," he said, pivoting with the smooth confidence of someone who had been waiting for an opening, "is that I have information about the monster's situation. That centipede isn't operating alone." He put his arm around Saitama's shoulder. "There are organizations, Godfather. Monster organizations. Think about it — the Hero Association has gotten so powerful that any monster that wants to survive needs allies, resources, coordination. They'd have to build something structured."
Saitama frowned. "No way. Monsters have organizations?"
"Of course. And if I had to name it—" Jordan considered this for approximately no time. "The Monster Association."
"The Monster Association..."
Saitama turned this over with the sincere deliberation of someone who had been smoothly redirected and had not noticed. His brow furrowed, then released. "...Okay. That actually makes sense."
Jordan nodded gravely.
Jordan stopped nodding and looked at his feet.
His vision dropped through the training camp's floor, through the foundation, through the soil and bedrock in successive layers, descending past the point where geological formations gave way to the kind of darkness that had never seen the surface. Fifteen hundred meters down, in a space that had been constructed with enough precision and resource investment to qualify as a small city, something moved.
A woman. Long hair, black stockings, black-rimmed glasses, and the kind of smile that someone develops when they have spent too long in a closed space with only their own experiments for company. She stood over a rack of tubes, mixing something that caught the light in too many colors simultaneously. The solution's effect on standard organic matter would be immediate and categorical.
Behind her, strapped to a reinforced table, a humanoid thing with serpentine hair endured the experiment's ongoing stages. Whatever its face expressed, the vocabulary available to it was limited to varieties of extreme pain. It was already beyond what the disaster classification system had categories for — an artificial creation, Dragon-peak, the upper boundary of the scale before the labels stopped having meaning.
Psykos. And her work.
Jordan watched for a moment.
"Hmm." He withdrew his gaze and let the layers of earth reassemble themselves in his perception. "I was going to give you a few more days. Let you sit there in the dark and think things over." He said this to the ground, conversationally. "But it looks like the timetable is moving whether I'm ready or not."
"Jordan?" Saitama had followed his gaze to the grass. He saw grass, and a beetle doing something purposeful near a clover patch. "Who are you talking to?"
"Nothing. A small bug." Jordan looked up, rolled his shoulders. "Let's deal with the big one first."
He snapped his fingers.
The color that answered was green — not the green of plants or light, but the specific green of infinite power at its most precisely applied, the shade that meant something is being corrected. It spread outward from his hand and downward, flowing through the frozen world in an instant, finding the recently departed in S-City's ruins with the accuracy of something that understood exactly what it was looking for.
The dead returned.
Not announced. Not dramatic. The souls that the Dragon-level disaster had taken came back into the flow of time the way water returns to a shape — finding their way back because the power directing them understood where they belonged and put them there.
In the sky above S-City, the War God clone watched this with the stillness of something that had accepted, a long time ago, that it would occasionally witness things that defied the categories it operated in.
"Capricious," it said, quietly, pressing the brim of its cap down slightly.
Then it moved. The clone's power extended outward, found the hundreds of thousands of civilians scattered through S-City's ruins, and relocated them — carefully, deliberately, out of the collapse zone to a position of safety — in a single coordinated action. No injuries. No memory of the transit, either. That gap would be filled in once the situation was resolved and it was safe to return them.
The city could be rebuilt. What was in it mattered more.
Time resumed.
The smoke began moving again. The debris continued its fall. The sound of a city in the aftermath of a Dragon-level event came back all at once, filling the frequency ranges that the frozen moment had vacated.
Elder Centipede shook its head.
Something had happened. It wasn't sure what. The shadow that had been in the sky — the presence that had made its processing stop and its instincts run the calculation and find no favorable outcome — was gone.
The city around it was also, it noticed, empty of the human life it had been sensing moments before.
It scanned. Found nothing.
...?
The street below was quiet. The ruins were quiet. Somewhere distant, the mechanical sounds of a city beginning to process what had just happened filtered in at the edge of its perception.
Elder Centipede waited, with the patience of something that had been sleeping for a hundred thousand years and had no particular sense of urgency, for events to clarify themselves.
High above, Jordan and Saitama were already on their way.