The punch was not remarkable in any technical sense. It arrived without announcement, without buildup, without any of the energy signatures that preceded attacks from people who were trying hard. It was just a fist, at the end of an arm, connected to a man who had been doing this kind of thing long enough that the doing of it required no more effort than crossing a street.
The motorcycle-monster stopped being a motorcycle-monster.
The chassis—which had served as its head, in the particular anatomy of an awakened vehicle—was driven into the rear section by the force of the impact, the structure's own mass working against it. The upright human limbs and the mechanical body they were attached to resolved into their component parts across a generous radius, most of which was engine oil and ambition.
In the ringing aftermath, Saitama wiped a streak of black oil from his cheek and looked at the woman who had been pressed against the shopfront. She was sitting on the ground now, processing the rapid transition from imminent harm to everything fine.
"Are you alright?"
"I—n-nothing," she managed, which under the circumstances was a reasonable approximation of yes.
"Good." He offered it without ceremony. "It's not safe out here yet. Get moving."
He turned and walked toward the shopping center entrance—glass doors removed at speed by a monster that had gone elsewhere, the opening convenient. His silhouette in the vest and shorts, outlined against the smoke and scattered chassis parts of his recent interaction, had the quality that certain figures have when they are not trying to be anything in particular and have ended up being something anyway.
The woman, recovered enough to have opinions again, looked at his retreating back.
"Thank you, balding uncle!"
Saitama walked into the edge of a trash can. The trash can went sideways. He kept walking.
Hoho Fresh Supermarket. Interior.
The atrium skylight admitted Jordan through the path of least resistance, which was simply the air, which moved aside as required. Below, more than twenty motorcycle-monsters were operating at full capacity—black exhaust, erratic trajectories, the particular variety of recreational property damage that came from entities that had been designed for roads encountering an environment that was not a road.
Jordan looked at them briefly. His hands came up, and the ki gathered in his palms found its shape.
Continuous Ki Blast.
The volley launched—dozens of basketball-sized concentrations of energy, each one tracking its target as it went, the spread of them covering the atrium in arcs of contained flame. Each impact was precise. Each one was sufficient. The motorcycle-monsters had approximately enough time to register that something was happening before they were no longer there to register anything.
F-boy moved in the background of Jordan's awareness—the Stand's new independent operating range meaning he could handle the card-draw accounting without maintaining close proximity, his activity extending across the full breadth of the Mind Network's coverage. The counter in Jordan's peripheral vision ticked forward with the rhythm of a task being handled efficiently.
+1. +1. +1.
The surviving shoppers, who had been compressed into whatever qualified as a defensible corner in a supermarket under attack by sentient vehicles, became aware of the smoke clearing. Became aware of a tall blond figure floating in the atrium. Became aware that the motorcycle-monsters were gone.
"Is that—"
"That's Super Cop—"
"Super Cop's new look—"
The enthusiasm accelerated at a rate Jordan was already familiar with from previous Z-City incidents. He let the Ninja Art: Palm Immortal Rejuvenation Technique spread outward in a quiet green rain—the area-of-effect version, AOE coverage for mass casualty scenarios, the Super Healing's single-target precision less useful here than breadth. The cuts and bruised ribs and one woman's fractured wrist resolved themselves in the warm green wash.
He waved once to the crowd.
He teleported.
The fans in his wake took a collective moment to process what they'd witnessed. Several of them started a conversation that was going to be very active on the Hero Association's public forums later.
The sweep took under ten minutes between the three of them.
Jordan came down next to Saitama on the municipal hospital rooftop when the last blip of motorcycle-adjacent ki vanished from the Mind Network's scan. Z-City's center had the post-disaster quiet of a place that had been loud in a bad way and was now adjusting back to baseline—sirens in the middle distance, the Hero Association's emergency broadcast cycling down, the specific silence of a threat that's been handled.
"Clean here," Saitama said, already moving toward the edge.
"Same. Let's find Genos."
They covered the distance in a series of rooftop intervals—no pretense, no conservation of energy, just the efficient velocity of two people who move this way naturally. Genos was in the adjacent neighborhood, standing in a street that bore the comprehensive evidence of the Iron Fist and Incineration Cannon having been applied at full capacity and consecutive frequency.
His arm nozzles were still cycling down from operational temperature. He was looking at the aftermath with the expression of someone reviewing their own performance.
He heard them land. Turned.
"Saitama-sensei. Jordan." A beat. "I'm sorry about the groceries. I couldn't—"
"The groceries are fine," Saitama said, with the specific wave of a man who has decided this is not the emotional content he wants from the next thirty seconds. He looked at the street. At the processed monster remains. At Genos, who had apparently been here alone for ten minutes and had resolved a Demon-level incursion without taking damage. "You did good work."
The optical sensors cycled. Genos did not have tear glands—the current hardware specification didn't include them, a deliberate choice or an oversight that amounted to the same thing—but something in his voice recalibrated, the precise mechanical timbre going somewhere warmer for a moment.
"Thank you, teacher."
"Don't thank me for being correct." Saitama scratched his head, the sheepish motion of a man who has received gratitude and doesn't quite know where to put it. "You did it. I'm just saying so."
Behind Genos, the scattered parts on the ground began to move.
It was not dramatic at first—just a tremor, a rattle, the small metallic sounds of objects relocating without obvious cause. Then the pull became visible: shards of chassis, fragments of flesh-bud, engine components and fuel lines and things that had been separated from each other at some velocity, all of them drawing toward a center point in the street with the slow magnetism of something gathering itself back together.
They assembled into a sphere first—then the sphere grew.
Five meters. The joints where metal met biological matter were visible as it rose, the flesh-buds expanding to fill gaps between chassis components, the whole structure pulsing with the specific wrongness of something that was alive in a way it shouldn't be. It had the quality of an embryo, in the sense that an embryo is something that is becoming something else and the becoming is not complete.
The fans who had been moving to converge on Jordan saw it. The convergence reversed direction immediately.
Genos's arm shielding deployed. The cannons found their aim. His thrusters ignited—he was already in motion, beneath the thing, his hands clasping together, the charge building from the nuclear core outward until the air around him bent with the output pressure.
"Full power—Incineration Cannon!"
The technique lived up to its name. The scale of the flame column that erupted from Genos's hands had the geometry of something that had been designed to end large problems, and it met the flesh-metal embryo with all of that intent intact. The mushroom cloud that followed was the expected result of a system optimized for destruction meeting a target that could not withstand destruction.
The acrid smell of carbonized protein settled over the street.
Genos lowered his arms from firing position. Looked at the column of black smoke where the monster had been. The smoke was thorough.
He turned.
Started to walk back toward Saitama and Jordan, composing his debrief as he went.
"Teacher, I—"