Elder Centipede decided that the cold wash of unease it had felt was a side effect of waking too fast.
After a hundred thousand years of sleep, even a Dragon-level entity needed a moment to fully come online. The predator-recognition instinct that had fired at the shadow in the sky — that was just the system running its startup diagnostics. Nothing more.
The city wasn't going to fight back. Cities didn't fight back.
The face growing from the top of its head produced a sound that had no classification in any acoustic database, somewhere between laughter and a declaration, and it resumed its work. Tunneling. Surfacing. Buildings meeting its body the way reeds meet a river current.
It didn't notice, as it moved through what had been S-City's commercial district, that the screaming had stopped.
In the training camp's main hall, Jordan and Saitama materialized in front of the assembled graduates.
They'd been in the instructors' area a moment ago. Now they weren't. The trainees had gotten used to this.
Jordan raised one hand. "Everyone's attention, please."
He had it before he finished the sentence — the particular quality of attention that a group of heroes gives when the person addressing them has established, over the course of a month, that they don't call for attention unless something warrants it.
"S-City is under Dragon-level attack. Confirmed threat. Ongoing destruction." He looked around the room. "Who wants to come?"
The response was, essentially, everyone.
Not a wave of hands, exactly — more a collective forward shift of weight, the posture of people who had been training for a month and had been waiting, without knowing they were waiting, for the question. A dozen voices answered simultaneously. The ones that didn't speak were still nodding.
After a full month of drills, sparring sessions, and assessments conducted entirely within the training camp's walls, the news of an actual Dragon-level monster in an actual city had the effect of opening a window in a sealed room. The career math was also not lost on anyone present: these were professional heroes, which meant this was their work, and a Dragon-level incident was the most credit-generating event the classification system offered.
Atomic Samurai's expression had the very specific quality of someone who has been thinking about something for a while and just received information that makes that thing available. The toothpick shifted from one side of his mouth to the other. "A Dragon-level monster," he said, to nobody in particular, in the tone of someone running a private calculation. "I wonder if my current technique can split it cleanly from this distance." His eyes had the cold, appraising quality that made his junior disciples walk carefully around him during training. "Heh."
King rose from his seat. Golden electricity moved behind his eyes. "I'll take a look."
Bang rolled his neck — the vertebrae making a series of sounds that accurately represented his current mood regarding the situation — and said, simply, "I'll join."
He had intended to see the graduates off and return to the dojo. Plans adjust.
Garou had technically graduated, his sparring rotation complete, and Bang had dispatched him back to his hero patrol route before all this developed. He was currently somewhere in C-City, being a professional hero under duress, which was his own situation to manage.
Jordan looked at the room — the gathered faces, the posture that had shifted from attendees at a ceremony to people ready to work — and felt something that he noted privately and did not mention aloud.
"Graduation party is postponed," he announced. "Two days. I'll extend the hotel booking." He said this with the complete lack of concern that comes from checking one's account balance and finding nine figures in it, which Jordan had just done — a brief, directed extension of the Mind Network into the bank's systems, a glance, and a withdrawal of attention. All legal income. S-class stipend, hero activity rewards, and the particular stream of endorsement revenue that accumulated when the Hero Association positioned you as an idol-grade public figure and you had the rank to support it.
"Super Cop doesn't worry about money," Jordan said, with the understated confidence of someone who has just confirmed they don't need to. "He worries about the bill after he orders."
The room's energy went up another level.
Saitama, beside him, shook his head once with the expression of a man who had learned that certain things were simply going to happen around Jordan and the correct response was to accept this and plan accordingly.
Jordan snapped his fingers.
The blue spatial gate opened in the center of the hall — large, the misty swirl of spatial matter at its edges, the opening wide enough for the full group to step through side-by-side. Through it: an aerial view of what had been a city. The skyline had been restructured by something that didn't understand the concept of load-bearing walls.
The heroes had seen Jordan's spatial gates throughout the training period. They'd stopped finding them surprising three weeks ago. What the envy toward the ability itself — the practical usefulness of it, the sheer efficiency — had not diminished.
"S-Class Training Squad." Jordan gestured toward the gate. "Move out."
He stepped through first.
S-City, from the inside, was a different category of experience from the surveillance footage the branch command center had been working with.
The team emerged through the portal onto what had been a commercial street and was now a study in structural collapse theory. The dust was settling — the particular gritty white of concrete pulverized to particulate — and the silence was the kind that follows a sound too large to fully register.
Every hero in the group looked up.
The body of Elder Centipede stretched between the remaining towers and through them and past them and kept going, visible in both directions without resolution — no head visible from this angle, no tail, just the middle of something whose scale didn't have a clean reference point. Each segment was the approximate width of a residential block. The legs that periodically scraped the ground as it moved left parallel furrows in the asphalt that a car could have parked in.
The heroes who had been confident thirty seconds ago were performing rapid mental revisions.
"This..." someone said.
"...Is that the whole thing? That's just the middle of it?"
"How is something this size even—"
The sound of several people swallowing at the same time was audible.
Jordan turned around.
The expression on his face was one of mild confusion, in the manner of someone trying to identify the problem. The trainees looked at him. He looked at them. He looked at the creature. He looked back.
Are you hungry? he did not say, having correctly identified that this was not the moment.
The S-class instructors had not lost their composure — not exactly — but the quality of their attention had changed. Atomic Samurai's toothpick was very still. King was doing his internal assessment with the focused discipline of someone who had learned that his instincts were reliable and to trust them carefully. Bang's expression was the one he wore when he was deciding which version of himself was appropriate to the situation.
That was understandable. Most of the combat experience present in this group, even at S-class level, had been built against things that were roughly humanoid, or at least things that fit within the conceptual framework of opponent I can engage with. Something that spanned the visible horizon in both directions was a different category of problem.
There were people with diagnosable megalophobia who would have had a difficult time here. There were also people without it who were having one. The creature's scale hit some register in human perception that bypassed reason entirely and went straight to a more ancient layer — the one that existed before there were cities to build or classifications to assign, that simply noted this is much larger than you and drew conclusions.
The SAN value of the assembled heroes had, Jordan estimated, taken a meaningful hit in the last thirty seconds.
He was about to address this when Elder Centipede stopped moving.
The motion that had been continuous — the ongoing grind and crash of its progress through the city — cut off. The face on its head, grotesque and too human and angled entirely wrong, went through a series of expressions while it processed its current sensory inputs.
No screaming.
The specific frequency of human beings in fear, the sound that a predator of this type was calibrated to track — absent. The air, which should have been layered with the information that a city full of panicking organisms produces, was instead clean and neutral and completely wrong.
The smell was gone too.
The Elder Centipede turned its head with the slow, searching motion of something that had expected to be surrounded by prey and found itself surrounded by rubble and silence.
The ruins were empty.
It produced a sound that was the Dragon-level equivalent of genuine confusion.