Bang watched Atomic Samurai's group disappear into the tree line, the crunch of footsteps fading until there was only the sound of the wind through the dojo's back mountain.
Then he heard new footsteps approaching from behind.
Jordan, Saitama, and Genos had gathered at the edge of the training ground—the natural conclusion of an afternoon that had run its course. Bang turned and found himself looking at the three of them with something quietly fond settling in his chest.
"Are you leaving as well, Jordan?"
"We've imposed on you for days now." Jordan inclined his head. "It's past time we made ourselves scarce, Master Bang."
Saitama, standing to the side, had already arrived at his own separate and equally pressing conclusion. "Yeah—if we don't head back soon we'll miss tomorrow's supermarket sale. They've got the good cuts of beef on discount."
Genos went very still.
"Teacher." He turned to Saitama with the focused urgency of a man who had just been informed of a tactical emergency. "Then we should leave immediately."
He seemed to catch himself, and turned back to Bang. The urgency didn't quite leave his eyes, but he straightened and bowed properly. "Master Bang. Thank you sincerely for everything these past few days. The guidance you gave me—I won't waste it."
Bang looked at him for a moment—the rigid posture, the genuine earnestness, the cyborg face that couldn't fully conceal how much the old man's approval meant to him.
He waved his hand. "Think nothing of it, Genos-kun. It was no trouble at all."
He let the warmth sit for a moment, then tilted his head toward the sky. The light had shifted to late afternoon gold, long shadows stretching across the courtyard.
"It's getting late," Bang said. "Why not stay for dinner before you go? I'll have someone prepare the spicy hot pot—I know it's to your liking."
The old man's gaze moved across the three of them with genuine feeling. "It's been a while since we all sat around the table together."
Saitama's eyes lit up with the immediacy of a man who had never once in his life played it cool about food. "I'll wash the vegetables!"
Genos nodded with the same gravity he applied to combat training. "If Teacher is staying to help, then I'll stay as well."
"Then—" Jordan rested his chin in his hand, eyes drifting briefly sideways. "I'll go to M-City and bring King. Like you said, it's been too long."
"That would be wonderful." Bang smiled. "Sorry to trouble you for the trip."
"With respect, Master, it's about three minutes of effort." The faint smile stayed on Jordan's face. His gaze shifted—almost casually—to the figure standing just behind Bang's shoulder.
Garou had been watching all of this with the detached expression of someone who had wandered into someone else's reunion and was considering the most efficient exit route. He had his hands in his pockets. His jaw was set. He was doing an admirable job of appearing not to listen.
"Since you've been standing there through all of it," Jordan said, "you might as well come along, Garou."
The courtyard went slightly quiet.
—This is backwards.
Bang's first instinct was to object. He'd been building toward a very specific and loving conversation with his wayward disciple, and it did not involve hot pot.
But then—it's just a meal. And there would be time enough afterward. A full stomach wouldn't change anything except the timing.
The old man said nothing.
Behind him, Garou had pointed at himself with the expression of someone who suspected a trap and was trying to locate it. His eyes cut to Jordan with undisguised suspicion.
Are you actually speaking to me? Is something wrong with you? Do you know what I'm planning to do to this city's heroes?
"Don't overthink it," Jordan said, with the cheerful transparency of a man who was absolutely thinking several things at once. "It's just hot pot. Super spicy, by the way. If you're not up for it—"
Garou's eyes narrowed.
"—then obviously no one's going to force you."
"Who said I'm not up for it?" The wolf clicked his tongue, turning his head away with elaborate disdain. "It's just food. Don't make it into something."
Jordan nodded with the gravity of a man who had just won a chess match by moving a pawn. "Settled. You all start on the ingredients—I'll go find King."
He snapped his fingers.
He was gone.
No footsteps. No wind disturbance. No transition. One moment there, the next simply absent—as though the space he'd occupied had quietly decided to be empty.
Garou stared at where he'd been standing.
—What the—I didn't catch a single thing. Not movement, not intent, not direction. Nothing.
He'd faced opponents faster than him before. Speed he understood—you felt the air shift, the displacement, the micro-tells that preceded motion. This was different. This was like watching someone step through a door that wasn't there.
What kind of ability is that?
"Jordan's presence keeps becoming harder to read," Bang remarked, with the tone of a man filing away information rather than expressing concern. He turned back to the group. "Come. With this many of us, the preparations won't take care of themselves."
His gaze found Garou. Patient. Unhurried. "You too, Garou."
Garou opened his mouth.
He had a response ready—something about wasting time on domestic nonsense, something suitably dismissive. But Bang's eyes held the particular quality of stillness that Garou had learned, over years of training, to recognize as non-negotiable.
He closed his mouth.
"…Fine," he said, to no one in particular. "What a hassle."
He fell in behind the others.
Space folded.
Jordan stepped out of it onto the roof of the tallest building in M-City, and the wind hit him immediately—strong enough at this height to snap his coat against his legs and pull at his hair. Below, the city spread out in a dense grid of afternoon traffic and neon signage just beginning to wake up.
He pulled out his phone and called King's number.
It rang. And rang. And rang.
Not home. Or ignoring it. Either is plausible.
He put his phone away and let the Mind Network unspool instead—a quiet expansion of electromagnetic perception, invisible and instant, spreading outward through the city like ripples from a dropped stone. The city resolved into a tapestry of biomagnetic signals: thousands of people, vehicles, the background hum of infrastructure, the Hero Association's disaster frequency cycling in the middle distance—
Jordan's attention sharpened.
The Association's emergency channel was active.
Something's happening.
The thought barely had time to form before the answer arrived in the form of a sound like God had decided to remodel part of M-City's commercial district. A mushroom cloud erupted from the northeast quarter—visible even from here as a churning pillar of smoke, orange at the base, black at the top, the kind of explosion that sent shockwaves through the ground and into the building's foundations.
The roof shifted underfoot. Jordan widened his stance.
Through the Mind Network, King's biomagnetic signature was sitting almost exactly at the origin point of the explosion.
King is already there.
He breathed out slowly. Then whatever it was, it's handled.
His focus expanded further—two other signals near King's location, close enough to be at the scene. One was weaker, though still well above baseline; the other—
The other was the unmistakable signature of Tatsumaki, psychic field roiling at the edges like something that couldn't quite contain itself. That particular electromagnetic turbulence was difficult to mistake for anything else.
Both sisters are in M-City? They were usually based out of A-City. Whatever had drawn them here—
Another explosion, smaller than the first. A secondary detonation, maybe, or something that hadn't finished yet.
Jordan stepped off the edge of the roof.
Space moved with him.
Ten minutes earlier.
M-City, North Commercial Street.
The street had been ordinary. Afternoon foot traffic, delivery vehicles, the usual urban texture of a busy city mid-afternoon. Then the pavement trembled—subtle at first, the kind of tremor that made pedestrians glance down with mild confusion before it became something impossible to misread.
The tremor deepened. Accelerated.
The asphalt cracked open like an eggshell.
A hand punched through from below—massive, black as cooling lava, each finger the length of a city bus, glowing orange at the joints where the magma flowed hottest. The palm spread wide enough to shadow half the road beneath it.
Then the rest of it came.
The upper body of something that had been building under M-City for reasons best known to itself tore upward through thirty feet of concrete and rebar, showering the street with debris. It was enormous—twenty stories of chest, shoulders, and arms, its skin a living layer of flowing magma that cooled black at the surface and broke open at the pressure points to reveal the hellish orange beneath. No legs. It didn't need them. It braced its hands against the rubble and pushed its face toward the sky, and the heat rolling off it turned the air above the street into a shimmering haze.
Screams.
Then a stampede.
"I am a child born from the wrath of Mother Earth!" The monster's voice was tectonic—felt in the chest more than heard with the ears. It slammed a fist into the ground, and the shockwave knocked pedestrians off their feet two blocks away. "Humanity has destroyed and consumed and poisoned! You are fleas. Parasites. And I—the Child of Lava—am the first consequence of your arrogance!"
Disaster Level: Demon.
The Hero Association's alerts were already broadcasting. The Child of Lava roared and drove both arms into the nearest row of storefronts, and the buildings came apart. Molten splatter arced outward; what it touched caught fire. The street was becoming a disaster zone in real time.
On the top floor of a shopping mall across the intersection, Fubuki pressed herself against a structural column and assessed the situation with the careful calm of someone who had faced worse and survived.
No. Actually—this one might be a problem.
The Child of Lava had the mass of a building and a body that regenerated through the simple physics of flowing lava. Conventional impacts wouldn't—
She saw an opening.
Blue light erupted around her hands.
"Since I've run into you," Fubuki called across the burning street, her telekinesis flaring to full power, "I'll be the one to deal with this!"
The ability reached outward. Debris—structural beams, broken concrete, lengths of rebar, building materials the explosion had helpfully pre-scattered across a hundred meters—rose from the ground in a massive constellation. Fubuki's eyes blazed sky blue. Her arms extended, and she threw.
Hundreds of improvised projectiles broke the sound barrier simultaneously. The airburst was spectacular—a wall of sonic cracks, one after another, the concentrated output of everything she had.
The volley hit the Child of Lava across its chest and face.
Its half-body rocked backward. One foot—one arm, bracing against rubble—slid back several meters, gouging trenches through the ruins. A reinforced concrete spear ten meters long punched deep into the creature's left eye socket.
Yes. Fubuki's breath caught with something close to triumph. That worked.
She watched the spear.
The magma eye socket closed around it. The concrete glowed, softened, and dissolved. The "wound" filled from within—fresh magma flowing in, cooling, sealing—and then the surface was intact again, as though nothing had happened.
The back half of the spear broke and fell.
Fubuki's expression went very flat.
"You've got to be kidding me."
The cold sweat on her forehead wasn't from exertion anymore.
The Child of Lava had turned its attention toward the shopping mall.
"Harmless," it pronounced, with the particular contempt of something that had been poked and found the poking beneath notice. "Humans—"
It grabbed two house-sized chunks of collapsed building, one in each hand, and hurled them.
The air screamed.
Both impacts hit the shopping mall's upper floors precisely where Fubuki was standing—or had been standing. The structure detonated inward, dust and debris exploding outward in a churning grey cloud that swallowed the intersection whole.
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