Restoring S-City to its pre-disaster state was within Jordan's current capability. The assessment took about three seconds, and then he decided against it.
There were two reasons, and both of them were the same reason from different angles. The first: if he repaired every city that sustained damage near his operational range, the Hero Association's emergency response infrastructure would quietly stop being maintained, and humanity would quietly stop investing in it, and the next time a disaster occurred in a city outside his range the consequences of that atrophy would be catastrophic. The second: the heroes who had spent the last hour fighting in S-City had done actual work. A citywide restoration that erased all evidence of that work within thirty minutes of the battle ending was a statement he didn't want to make.
He had, however, done something.
The contact with Dr. Genus had gone out at the moment Jordan first received the S-City distress signal through the Mind Network — before the fight, before the portal. The House of Evolution's clone teams operated efficiently and without the bureaucratic friction that most relief organizations accumulated, and their coordination with the Hero Association's disaster response branch was already in progress. Reconstruction contractors would arrive with accurate damage assessment data before the dust had settled on the Hero Association's own survey.
S-City would be rebuilt. It would take time, and it would carry the memory of what had happened, and that memory would be useful.
Humanity needs the scar, Jordan had concluded, watching the citizens move through the ruins. Comfortable people don't build things that last.
At the S-City Hero Association branch, the operations room had been quiet for several minutes before anyone said anything.
The genjutsu cast through the Sharingan during the Rinne pattern's brief appearance had taken its effect and released cleanly, leaving everyone in the room in possession of their own memories — which were the memories the moment had been designed to produce. Nobody in the room had any clear recollection of the period during which S-City had been inhabited by the branch staff, the empty city, and a Dragon-level monster, and nothing else. What they had instead was the footage.
The footage was excellent.
Multi-angle coverage of the entire engagement. Stable camera work throughout the most violent exchanges. Character-focused framing that managed to capture both the group dynamics of the heroes' coordinated assault and the specific visual presence of each individual fighter. The scene of King in full Emperor's Armor against Elder Centipede's charging mass. Genos's cannon assembly and the subsequent discharge. Atomic Samurai's Atomic Dispersion Slash removing a quarter of the creature's body. The graduate heroes routing Centipede Junior and Senior in the secondary engagement with clear, well-shot action.
And the final scene.
The branch operations chief — Kishida, a career association man with gold-rimmed glasses and the steady competence of someone who had been doing this long enough to have a reliable baseline — watched the thirty-second sequence for the third time and clicked his tongue.
"That punch," he said. "Is that not... somewhat beyond normal parameters for an S-class hero?"
The branch manager, who had been using his handkerchief with some regularity since the footage started playing, nodded with the expression of someone who has processed the same information and arrived at the same destination. "S-class certification exists precisely because these individuals cannot be assessed by ordinary standards. Their documented capabilities have consistently exceeded what previous S-class records suggested was possible. This is within that pattern."
Kishida pushed his glasses up his nose. "Minister. I wonder if perhaps the preceding engagement — the combined effort from King and Genos — may have significantly weakened the target, such that the 'Caped Baldy's' strike represented a finishing blow rather than a—"
The branch manager turned his head.
The look that Kishida received was not dramatic. It was calm, precise, and carried the specific quality of a warning delivered by someone who had already seen this exact scenario play out for someone else and was offering a preview of how it ended.
"Kishida-kun." The branch manager put his hand on his subordinate's shoulder. "Do you know how many people headquarters removed from their positions because they publicly questioned the Caped Baldy's performance records online? Those were voluntary comments, not formal reports." The hand patted once. "Some subjects are not within the scope of a branch operations analysis. Understood?"
"...Understood, Minister."
"Good." The branch manager removed his hand and turned back to the room with the bearing of a man resuming a normal day. "Compile all on-site footage. Complete combat report, every hero, no omissions. Submit to headquarters. Coordinate with public affairs on the disaster relief announcement — press conference in fifteen minutes, I'll give the statement myself." He surveyed the room. "Move."
In the ruins of S-City's outer district, the space did something that spaces don't normally do.
It bent. Not dramatically, not with any audible announcement, but with the particular quality of spacetime doing something locally that the surrounding spacetime would prefer not to have mentioned. A point of darkness opened — small, precisely edged, ringed with a faint luminous band that was not light in any category that belonged in S-City's visible spectrum.
A head emerged.
Then shoulders. Then the rest of a figure: tall, built on the scale of someone who had spent decades in environments that required it, wearing a combat suit that suggested deliberate functional design rather than aesthetic consideration. Tactical sunglasses despite the late-afternoon overcast. Evidence of a recent exchange with something that hadn't gone particularly well — damage across the suit's left side, the particular marks of impacts absorbed at speed.
Blast looked at S-City.
S-City looked back at Blast, which is to say the scattered citizens in the surrounding blocks turned, noted the unusual method of arrival, assessed the figure's general appearance, and began the social process of deciding whether to be concerned.
"That's a strong-looking person."
"Is that a hero suit? Never seen that design."
"Could be a hero. Or one of those independent types."
"I've never seen them in any rankings. Probably a side character."
Blast's hearing was, as with most of his attributes, at a tier that the Hero Association's ranking system would describe as top-tier and that the ranking system's numerical infrastructure was not quite equipped to fully represent. He processed every word of the scattered assessment without making any visible response to it.
"Caped Baldy apparently killed the monster, over there's where—"
"—one punch, you can see the trail—"
"—already up online if you haven't seen it—"
He was the number one S-class hero. He had spent the last period operating in dimensional spaces where the threat class made Dragon-level look like a warm-up exercise. He had the best reaction time in the Hero Association by a margin that the second-place entry found demoralizing. His combat record contained entries that the Hero Association kept in a restricted file because publishing them would constitute an invitation.
The citizens of S-City, collectively, seemed to have very strong opinions about a bald person in a yellow jumpsuit.
He took a moment. Centered himself. Adjusted the sunglasses.
This is the aura of a top-tier combatant, said his tactical self-assessment, completely ignoring the previous thirty seconds. Adjust for current operational context and continue.
He surveyed the ruins with professional thoroughness. The citizens were densely distributed across the damage zone — unusual for an active disaster area, but explicable if the evacuation and return had been handled cleanly. No visible casualties. Infrastructure damage was extensive and consistent with something that moved by displacing rather than striking, which matched the intelligence description of Elder Centipede's movement pattern.
The intelligence had said: Dragon-level, active threat, S-class response required urgently.
The current status said: Dragon-level, confirmed eliminated, no active threat, citizens present and intact.
The gap between those two descriptions was interesting.
He stopped a passing citizen. "Excuse me. The monster that attacked S-City — which direction did it go?"
The citizen looked up at him. Processed the build, the suit, the sunglasses, the energy that Blast carried the way high-capacity batteries carry charge. Made the assessment that this was someone whose day he did not want to complicate.
The contemptuous comment that had been forming dissolved before it reached his mouth.
"The Caped Baldy killed it already," he said, and pointed. "The marks are over there."
Blast looked.
The trail ran straight through the ruins — a channel tens of thousands of meters long, cut through debris and structural wreckage, the physics of a single impact having organized the surrounding material into two neat parallel banks. Along those banks, embedded in the asphalt and rubble at regular intervals, the remnant legs of a 10,000-meter centipede protruded at angles, their purple carapace faded to grey in the hours since separation.
He stood with this information for a moment.
"It's already online," offered a nearby citizen, who had apparently decided that Blast's expression warranted elaboration. He held out his phone.
Blast looked down.
The footage was excellent quality. He noted this distantly, as an observation, before the content of the footage claimed his complete attention.
A figure in a yellow jumpsuit. The particular lazy efficiency of someone for whom effort was not a limiting factor in the outcome of any given action. The punch. The Elder Centipede's response — which was to stop existing in a continuous manner.
Blast watched the last three seconds twice.
His expression behind the tactical sunglasses was the expression of the number one S-class hero learning that the operational landscape he'd been navigating, with great seriousness and considerable personal cost, had developed a new feature while he was busy elsewhere.
He handed the phone back.
"Thank you," he said, with the mechanical courtesy of someone running on automatic while most of his processing was occupied elsewhere.
He turned to face the center of S-City.
Who are these people, he thought.