By the time the lunch service at the Royal Manor had been running for two hours, the catering staff had quietly revised their mental model of how fast a group of professional heroes could work through a buffet.
The answer was: faster.
Jordan had booked the property for three consecutive days, a fact he delivered to the assembled graduates as information rather than announcement, in the tone of someone who had already checked his account balance and found the number acceptable. The hotel's management had learned, over the first two hours, to maintain a buffer of at least four trays of food behind the serving line at all times.
After the meal, almost nobody stayed.
The S-City engagement had pushed most of the graduating class within one additional incident of a second Potential Guidance redemption. Mumen Rider was already there — his accumulated credits from the camp, plus the S-City combat average, already clearing the second threshold. Jordan's suggestion to him was gentle and direct: you get the Guidance for free, so skip the standard redemption for now and keep building toward the higher-tier resources. The plug-and-play superpower package can wait.
Mumen Rider had looked at the credit projections Jordan laid out and made the correct decision immediately.
The others watched this exchange happen with the specific attentiveness of people who are doing math.
The math resolved. Everyone said they'd be back for dinner, and went to work.
By mid-afternoon, the news cycle across six cities had something in common: heroes who had been quietly absent for a month were suddenly very visible, and they were doing their jobs considerably better than they had been before the absence.
In the T-City commercial district, a Tiger-level monster had selected a shopping mall for its afternoon activities, which a building full of civilians found extremely inconvenient. The evacuation was still in progress when a figure dropped from the mall's second-floor balcony onto the creature's back.
Green had grown into his body over the past month in the way that some people grow into a new city — not all at once, not dramatically, but continuously, until the person who arrived and the person who is currently present are recognizably different. The vine-based energy that had previously left him depleted after a single technique now ran through him like a current through a wire: constant, sustainable, the Fountain of Life ability humming in the background of everything. The eight-pack had been a side effect.
He wrapped two vines around the monster's neck, used the tension to redirect its momentum, and let the follow-through do the work. The creature hit the mall's polished floor with an impact that cracked the tiles in a six-meter radius.
He straightened up, rolled his neck, and was halfway to the exit when the reporter caught him.
She had excellent determination and inadequate footwear for the situation, but she had a microphone and the particular focus of someone who had spotted a story and intended to catch it.
"Please — wait — excuse me—" She arrived at his shoulder slightly winded. "Are you Green? A-class hero Green?"
He stopped and turned. "That's me."
She looked up. Her professional composure held for approximately two seconds before she recalibrated, because the person she had met three months ago in the Hero Association's press files and the person currently standing in front of her were technically the same individual but had undergone some changes that the press files had not accounted for. The eight-pack was doing a great deal of work against a shirt that had been designed for a smaller frame.
She swallowed, lifted the microphone, and continued. "You've been out of the public eye for a month. The Hero Association confirmed your identity from dental records because we couldn't — I mean, because you look quite different. Could you tell our viewers what happened?"
Green scratched the back of his head. His thought process, which had always operated at its own pace, worked through the question with the unhurried focus of someone who had genuinely been busy and hadn't prepared an answer.
Before: one vine skill, then several hours in the recovery position. The plant symbiote in his body had been producing energy at a rate his cellular architecture couldn't absorb, which had expressed itself in a variety of ways that his teammates had found concerning. The Potential Guidance had found the blockage and removed it, and the vitality that had been backing up for years had come through all at once, and now his muscles had opinions about things his muscles had not previously had opinions about.
"S-rank training course," he said. "Run by Super Cop. I was there for a month."
The reporter's pen was already moving. "And the changes specifically—"
Green thought about this.
He planted his feet, squared his shoulders, spread his hands at chest height, and produced, with complete sincerity and zero self-consciousness, a bodybuilder's display pose that would not have looked out of place on a competition stage. He held it. Tilted his head. "Taller," he said. "Stronger. And my confidence is back."
The reporter looked at the pose.
Looked at her notebook.
Looked at her photographer, whose camera had stopped moving.
"I see! Thank you for your time!" She took three steps backward at a pace that was technically still walking, then the photographer touched her shoulder and they both found somewhere else to be with impressive speed.
Green watched the retreating figures and stood there for a moment, genuinely puzzled.
Why did they leave so suddenly?
In the Q-City seafood market, the last survivor of what the disaster classification system had logged as a Rat Monster Tribe incident discovered that its afternoon had a conclusive ending when Lightning Max's rocket-assisted 360-degree spinning kick arrived at a speed its threat assessment system hadn't registered as relevant until it was. The pile behind him had reached a height that was going to require a dedicated cleanup team.
He shook out his leg, watched the last monster stop moving, and turned to find a cluster of reporters who had clearly been waiting for the fight to finish before approaching.
The first question was about the suit.
He looked at it. Looked at them. The nanosuit had been on several news feeds in the last three hours — himself, Mumen Rider, Battery Man, all with the same sleek design, the same J-insignia on the shoulder, the same obvious non-standard fabrication. He hadn't prepared an answer for this question.
He held up a hand, stepped to the side of the market's exterior wall, and activated the communicator on his wrist. The holographic display unfolded in a compact projection: Jordan's channel, Royal Manor Hotel, immediate response.
In D-City's suburbs, by the hotel pool, Jordan was horizontal on an inflatable mat in the early afternoon sun, sunglasses on, the specific stillness of someone who has earned a rest and is taking it. To his immediate right, in the same horizontal posture, also wearing sunglasses, Tatsumaki had apparently reached the same conclusion about the afternoon and had not yet offered a verbal opinion on the fact that their sunbathing situations were identical.
The communicator pinged. Jordan tilted it toward himself.
Lightning Max explained the situation, concisely.
"Tell them the truth," Jordan said, with the same energy as someone advising on whether to order dessert. "You redeemed it through the training program. There's nothing to hide."
He clicked off and resumed his previous orientation.
Lightning Max returned to the reporters with the relieved expression of a man who had received permission. "It's equipment from Super Cop's training program," he said. "I earned credits doing hero work and redeemed it. The program paid for everything. It's completely free."
The reporters wrote this down with the focused attention of people who have just confirmed that the story is bigger than they thought.
In E-City's shopping district, a Phantom Thief Bird monster — Ghost-level, fast, had been running a surprisingly efficient robbery operation on the pedestrian walkway — met Forte's ascending elbow on its third pass.
Forte had already taken the earphone out of one ear, which was how she indicated that she was currently working rather than simply moving through the world at pace. She stepped off the wall behind it, grabbed its neck on the way down, and introduced it to the pavement with the efficient conviction of someone for whom this was the logical conclusion to an obvious problem.
The monster bounced once. Stopped. She put her foot on it and signaled the passing civilians to call the nearest Hero Association branch for collection.
She put the earphone back in.
A local news crew had caught the whole thing. She gave them thirty seconds.
"Yo." The beat was already running in her head, because for Forte the beat was always running. "You want to know why I'm strong?"
The camera was on. She didn't need more invitation than that.
"Don't ask why I'm strong — I've always been like this, naturally. Yo." She tapped the side of her head. "Don't ask how I got stronger — I joined Lord Evans's S-rank program. Yo." She pointed at the camera. "You study hard, you work the credits, you come out on the other side like this. Yo. I walked in with a baseline and walked out with a hundred credits cleared and a reason to keep going. Hey."
The camera crew exchanged a look.
She replaced her second earphone and was already moving.
Across six cities, the pattern repeated with enough consistency that the pattern had become, by evening, something that journalists were writing about rather than simply documenting.
The heroes were back. All of them, in the same week, suddenly active after a month of absence. All of them with upgraded equipment — the matching nano-vibranium suits carrying the same insignia, the same fabrication standard, the same obvious non-Association origin. All of them better at what they did in ways that were visible on footage and measurable in outcomes: response times, damage-per-engagement, threat levels cleared.
Atomic Samurai's three disciples — Iaian, Bushidrill, and Okamaitachi — had run three simultaneous solo engagements in different districts of F-City and cleared them faster than the city's Hero Association branch had managed to log the initial incident reports.
Mumen Rider, Glasses, and Captain Mizuki had each handled their afternoon assignments with the specific efficiency of people who have been operating below their actual capability for a while and are now not doing that.
The answer, from the interviews — some of them coordinated, some of them spontaneous, all of them pointing to the same source — was obvious before the day was out.
The S-rank training program. Super Cop's class. Credits and guidance and a month of working harder than they'd ever worked, and the results.
Any journalist who did the math on what that month had produced was going to have a very busy evening.
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