Jordan blinked.
"Atomic Samurai is injured?" He ran back through the afternoon quickly—the imaginary space, the sparring session, the conversation that followed—and felt a brief spike of something before he landed on the relevant detail. He'd left before Saitama's situation had developed. "What happened to him?"
Iaian's hand went to his cheek with the gesture of someone selecting words carefully.
They were colleagues in the same organization. There was a professional expectation about how one relayed information between heroes, particularly information of the category: my master challenged a civilian to a fight for personal reasons and was punched into a tree line. The correct framing for this was proving difficult to locate.
Jordan watched the Mind Network move through Iaian's thought process and arrived at the conclusion well ahead of the explanation.
He patted Iaian's shoulder armor once, with sympathy.
"Bottom shelf of the freezer," he said, pointing to the back of the kitchen. "That's where the real ice is."
Iaian looked at him. "Ah—thank you very much, Super Cop."
He turned toward the freezer. Jordan left.
Behind him, he could feel Iaian's confusion following him to the door—the unasked question of how Super Cop had known both what he was looking for and where to find it without being told either. He filed it under questions that will resolve themselves and kept walking.
In the corridor, F-boy's voice arrived in his mind. Not words exactly—more the quality of a directed notification, the Stand's version of tapping someone on the shoulder.
New card.
Jordan changed direction.
He sealed the plastic bag of chilled drinks into a card—ten-second delay, white light, done—and used the Herrscher's spatial authority to step back to his guest room. The movement was silent and immediate, the imaginary space folding around him and depositing him on the other side of the dojo's layout without drama.
F-boy was already there. He produced the card from somewhere in the skirt armor and held it out.
The border was gold.
Jordan took it.
[Fantasy Card: Undying Will] Type: Ability Card • Rarity: SSR (Gold)
In the One-Punch Man world, Garou possesses an innate willpower talent that operates beyond ordinary human parameters—capable of sustaining him through the very process of breaking his limiter.
The Monster Doesn't Die: Body and will so deeply integrated that even fatal wounds trigger accelerated self-repair; recovery draws from external energy sourcesUnyielding Will: An obsession so absolute it transcends the boundary between life and death; willpower alone maintains function where flesh would fail
Jordan looked at the gold border for a moment.
Then he looked at F-boy.
"That's three SSRs."
F-boy's expression conveyed that yes, he was aware of the count.
Herrscher of the Void. Atomic Samurai. Now Garou. Three gold-border cards in under a week, which was either extraordinary luck or a sign that the people around him were simply extraordinary. Probably both.
He turned the Undying Will card over. The design on it: a white-haired figure, mid-combat, expression fixed and certain, the visual impression of something that had decided to keep moving regardless of what the circumstances recommended.
Appropriate.
The more interesting part was the implication. This was Garou's card—dropped from an encounter with a fifteen-year-old who had just broken a tree with his fists and then attacked from the ground on a concussion. If this was what he dropped at sixteen, the complete form would be something else entirely.
No rush, Jordan thought. He'll get there on his own. Garou reaching his final form without my interference is both more interesting and more useful. He could afford to wait. The card he'd collect at the end of that road would make this one look like the preview.
He stopped the calculation before it could become impatient.
He pressed the warm gold card against his chest and absorbed it.
The effect was immediate and felt like nothing dramatic, which was itself dramatic—a quiet integration, like turning up a dial that had already been running. The vitality already in his body stepped to a new level without announcement. He sat with it for a moment, taking stock.
If his defense weren't what it is, he thought, whatever enemies he runs into won't be able to damage him enough to trigger the healing. The Undying Will wants serious injury to activate properly. He'd have to test what the threshold actually looked like against his current defensive capability. Probably academic for now.
He thought about Wolverine. Then Deadpool.
Somewhere in that range, he decided. Without the healing-factor-as-liability that makes those two so entertaining to watch suffer.
The open-air training ground had transformed.
Jordan descended from above and took in the situation from altitude before landing. The scarring from previous use had been supplemented considerably: the ground was blackened in expanding circles, the soil in several places had reached temperatures that had crystallized it into something that caught the light, and two figures were moving through the center of all this with very different energy levels.
Genos: full output, incineration cannons cycling at overload, the air around him shimmering with heat, every movement trailing a half-second of thermal distortion.
Saitama: hands in pockets, walking.
Bang was sitting on a flat tree stump at the edge of the training ground, watching this with the expression of a man who has long since made peace with the fact that his world contains surprising things.
"Jordan." He noticed the approach before Jordan landed and greeted him with a nod and a slight smile.
"Master Bang." Jordan walked over and produced the chilled oolong tea from his card—ten-second delay in reverse, cold condensation already forming on the can. He held it out. "How long have they been at it?"
"A while." Bang accepted the can with genuine appreciation and looked back at the training ground. "Saitama is helping Genos work the new techniques into actual combat. Testing integration."
Jordan watched.
What Genos was doing now was different from what he'd been doing this morning. The cannon fire was still there—high temperature, high output, the incineration capability that gave him his name—but it was no longer isolated. It threaded between physical strikes, creating openings, covering transitions, the principles of Flowing Water translated into the logic of a cyborg body that couldn't generate the style's characteristic internal energy but could apply its structure.
Don't just accumulate output. Make it flow.
The result was something that looked like a different fighter. Not because the individual capabilities had changed—the cannons were the same, the enhanced prosthetics were the same—but because the architecture connecting them had. Attacks feeding into attacks, each one positioned to make the next one possible, the whole sequence carrying continuous momentum rather than resetting between exchanges.
If this had been a different opponent than Saitama, most of those combinations would have connected.
"His comprehension is remarkable," Jordan said.
"It is." Bang took a sip of the tea and exhaled with quiet satisfaction. "The chip handles retention, but the integration—finding how the techniques fit his specific body and capabilities—that was Genos's own work. And Saitama's patience in letting him develop the timing."
They both looked at Saitama, who was currently blurring sideways out of the path of a maximal incineration burst, leaving an afterimage in the space the beam had expected to find him.
His face, in the brief moment when the afterimage cleared, was placid. Slightly bored, maybe. The face of someone doing the most important thing he was currently being asked to do, and doing it with his full attention, without making it look like attention.
That, Jordan thought, is why Genos trusts him.
Bang set down the can. "The techniques for using and redirecting force—that's where he still has room to develop. He hasn't touched Saitama yet, which is its own kind of meaningful data." He said this without judgment. It was simply accurate. "But the gap doesn't discourage him."
On the training ground, Genos launched three simultaneous incineration bursts in a pattern designed to leave no lateral exit, followed immediately by closing distance under his own propulsion.
Saitama was somewhere else by the time all three landed.
Genos adjusted without stopping. Incorporated the failed position into the next sequence. Kept going.
Jordan watched this and found something in it that was worth watching.
Even if it takes everything I have, Genos had decided, somewhere in the last few hours, I will keep pace.
He wouldn't. Not today. Not against this particular benchmark.
But the deciding itself was doing something.
"Good afternoon, both of you," Jordan said, and sat down beside Bang on the tree stump.
He reached into the bag and pulled out another cold can.
The training ground continued to erupt.