"Tch." Atomic Samurai bit down on his toothpick hard enough to put a crease in it. "What a load of nonsense."
His left hand had already found the hilt at his waist, which was the most honest statement he was going to make about how he was processing the current visual.
"His Excellency Atom is right," Jordan said, stepping forward with the unhurried tone of someone who had looked at the creature and arrived at a different conclusion from everyone else. "The morale we built up on the way here has been completely demolished by the first glance. Nothing to be concerned about." He looked up at the scale of the thing stretching across the horizon. "It's just a few hundred million cells of insect material, arranged consecutively."
The trainees standing behind him did not find this reassuring in the way it was probably intended.
What they found instead was Jordan pressing one hand to his chest.
The transformation was ceremonial in the way that a certain type of power expression is ceremonial — not because it needed to be, but because it should be. Particle effects erupted from nothing, gilded lightning etching itself through the air in the shape of a capital J, the diamond border locking in around it as it imprinted on his chest. Then the Black Gold suit loaded: force field particles in jet-black flowing outward from the contact point and spreading across his frame in a smooth, continuous expansion until the transformation was complete. He lifted slightly off the ground. The scarlet cape moved in the air behind him.
The pre-battle anxiety in the group changed character.
It was still there, but it had something to organize itself around now. The tense, formless quality — too many people staring at too large a thing with no reference point for what came next — settled. This was a reference point.
At the front of the group, Mizuki, A-class, high ponytail, sharp professional eyes, had her palms pressed against her own cheeks in a gesture she would not acknowledge making. Her expression had developed a quality inconsistent with pre-combat focus. "Super Cop's suit," she said, to nobody, at a volume below what she intended. "That's — the fit on that — that is an exceptional suit—"
From the opposite side of the formation, a sound that no one immediately wanted to claim responsibility for.
Okamaitachi, who shared with Mizuki the quality of being completely derailed by aesthetics in situations where the combat brief called for undivided attention, had produced a single appreciative noise and developed, somewhere in the vicinity of his eyes, an expression that Iaian and Bushidrill had learned to simply look away from.
Iaian looked at the centipede. Bushidrill looked at the centipede. The centipede, to its credit, remained ignorant of the dynamics occurring in the group below.
Saitama, positioned closest to Jordan, was doing something with his mouth that suggested he had intended to say something and had been delayed. He looked at Jordan — floating, suited, cape moving, the transformation having been exactly as much as it appeared to be. He hadn't expected the particle effects.
Then lightning moved at the edge of his peripheral vision. He turned.
King had pressed his hand to his own chest.
The nano-vibranium particles seeped from his casual clothes the way mercury moves — controlled, purposeful, catching the available light as they flowed and reconnected in new configurations. The Emperor's Armor assembled itself in the same moment it chose itself, the golden plates locking into position with the authority of something that had found its correct context. The crown-shaped visor's narrow eye-slits illuminated. Golden electricity played across the surface as the biomagnetic field completed the integration.
The effect, Jordan had to admit, was excellent.
Saitama had started to take a breath before any of this was finished.
Behind him: a series of mechanical sounds, overlapping, the specific sound of precision engineering engaging simultaneously. He turned again.
Mumen Rider and every other trainee who had redeemed a Type-0 suit had activated them at the same moment. The transformation ran through the group in one synchronized sequence — casual clothes converting to vibranium-reinforced armor, the golden J lightning bolt appearing on every left chest and both shoulders in the same instant, each suit a variation on the same language of materials and design.
Standing together in the ruins of S-City, they looked like something with a name.
Professional unit was, by any operational measure, the correct term.
Saitama looked at them.
Then he looked at his own suit — the yellow and red rubber ensemble that the Association had approved for field use and that a monster, once, had described as the kind of clothing that identified you as a hero among humans, in the tone of an observation that contained a critique. Somewhere in the compressed space of his internal monologue, a small rendered version of Saitama took a hit from the remembered comment and wiped its mouth and said: ...not sour. I'm fine.
Jordan heard it.
The Mind Network didn't require intention to function passively, and the signal that came off Saitama in that moment was distinct enough to register without effort. Jordan descended to standing height and moved close.
"Don't stress about the suit," he said, quiet enough that it wasn't for anyone else. "Kuseno is already working on yours. And Genos's. Better materials, full customization on the design — if you want it to look exactly like what you've got now, he can do that."
Saitama turned to look at him. His expression was, technically, neutral.
If it could look even better than the current one, he did not say, I wouldn't object to that. Just saying. If that's an option. No pressure.
The Elder Centipede had been tracking human presence through smell, sound, and the specific thermal and electromagnetic signatures that a city full of living organisms produced, and for several minutes now it had been registering anomalous data. The city was wrong. Empty in ways it wasn't supposed to be.
Then voices. Below. It turned its head.
The face on top of its head found the group standing in the ruins and smiled.
"Finally."
The roar hit the remaining intact structures like a physical force. Then the body moved.
What followed could be described clinically as: Elder Centipede changing direction. What it looked like, from below, was geological. The purple shell — hardened through more cycles of death and rebirth than the creature's current psychology had kept count of — tilted and rolled, the sheer mass of it demolishing whatever had survived the initial attack by proximity. The legs, each one a moving blade at this scale, carved parallel lines through anything they touched. The mandibles at the head were operational tools, not ornament.
The ground shook in a way that had less to do with sound than with what the earth was actually doing — the shock wave of that much mass in motion moving through the substrate and arriving at their feet as a fact.
Several trainees adjusted their stance involuntarily.
Some of them had started thinking about the logistics of fighting something this large — the actual geometry of it, the question of where you even aimed an attack — and had arrived at the thought that this was a situation for a different scale of response entirely. The Ultraman equation: some threats required the same class of entity to address.
Jordan watched the approach with the expression of a man making a comparison.
He had recently spent a meaningful amount of time in the Dark Dimension, in direct conflict with Dormammu, whose definition of scale involved consuming entire parallel universes as a resource. By that referent, the creature currently destroying S-City's remaining infrastructure was, if not small, then at least measurably finite. He felt something shift in him that was close to amusement and kept it off his face.
You're very large for something with a zip code, he thought, in the direction of the centipede. Dormammu did this with dimensions.
The S-class instructors had finished processing.
King moved first. The biomagnetic field expanded outward from him at full extension — not the controlled application he used in daily operations but the full, unrestricted deployment of something that had been developing for decades and had recently been enhanced past its previous ceiling. The sky responded: the cloudless air of S-City's ruins began generating cloud mass at a rate that had nothing to do with meteorological conditions and everything to do with electromagnetic interference at scale. Black clouds built. Lightning moved between them with the undirected energy of a system that had found its conditions. Thunder followed, not as an echo but as a continuous statement.
The golden beam left his body before the storm had finished forming — an output line from the Emperor's Armor's full integration with the biomagnetic field — tracking straight toward the centipede's leading mass.
"Magnetic Field Rotation — 250,000 horsepower —" King's voice had the quality it got when the power was fully active, deeper than his normal register, the words carrying physical weight. "Emperor's Destructive Fist—"
The battle cry that followed was Genos's thruster ignition sequence, as he registered King's commitment and made the immediate logical decision: if King was making contact with that thing at full power, someone with range support should cover the approach vector.
"Saitama-sensei," Genos said, in the same tone he used for operational reports, "I'm providing coverage." He was already rising.
Saitama cupped both hands around his mouth. "Be careful!"
"Yes!" The response came back from altitude, already receding.
Atomic Samurai threw his toothpick.
He watched Genos's thruster trail arc toward the centipede and his jaw set with the specific expression of someone who has assessed a situation and found their position in it.
"Beaten to the punch." The sword cleared its scabbard with a sound that didn't carry for long because the thunder took the register. "Both of them. Eager." He looked at the remaining assembled heroes. "Enough analysis. We hit the worm together, all of us, and we see which piece falls off first."
He didn't wait for confirmation before he moved.