Jordan read the conviction clearly in Genos's movements and said nothing.
Don't push it, he thought at the training ground. Your teacher is almost completely bald. There is a ceiling here that has nothing to do with how hard you train today.
Out loud: "This is the first time I've seen Saitama look this focused." He cracked open the chilled orange soda and took a sip. "Is this what happens when a man becomes a mentor?"
Bang considered this with the weight it deserved. "Perhaps." A pause. "Partly, at least."
They sat on the tree stump together and watched the training ground continue to erupt, the sound of cannon fire absorbed by the mountain air, the crystallized patches of soil expanding as Genos's temperature output climbed. An old man and a young man sharing cold drinks in the afternoon heat, the conversation easy.
Jordan set his can down.
"By the way, Master Bang. There's something I should tell you."
The shift in his tone was small but distinct. Bang turned to look at him.
"Is there something wrong with my dojo?"
"Not with the dojo." Jordan said the name quietly: "Garou."
Bang was quiet for a moment. The image that came to him—the taciturn white-haired boy, the careful eyes, the thoughts he never quite let surface—was familiar, but Jordan's tone attached something new to it.
"What happened to him?"
Jordan explained it plainly.
The Mind Network had shown him what it showed him—the childhood Garou had never discussed with anyone, the specific formation of the worldview he'd been constructing in silence, the destination he had in mind when he talked about absolute power. He laid it out simply, not dramatizing it, letting the shape of it speak for itself.
Bang listened without interrupting.
The expression that settled onto his face as the picture became complete was not the specific disappointment of a man whose disciple had done something wrong. It was quieter and more personal than that—the expression of someone who had been responsible for something without knowing it, who had now been told, and who was doing the arithmetic on what that meant.
"As his teacher, I should have seen this. That I didn't—that's my oversight."
"It's not as far gone as it sounds," Jordan said. He watched Bang's face carefully. The disappointment there was real and deep, and he needed to be precise about this. "There's an old saying—'it's never too late to mend the fence after the sheep are lost.' If you start paying real attention to him now, there's still time to turn it."
Bang absorbed this.
Jordan kept his follow-up thought to himself: And if your approach doesn't work, there's always the option of Saitama and me explaining physics to him in more applied terms. There is bound to be one approach that gets through.
He did not say this. He had made the right call in laying this out, and he would keep making the right call, which meant not adding the part that made it sound like a problem he'd already solved.
Bang was quiet for another moment.
Then he straightened.
The motion was not large—a few degrees of spine, shoulders settling back—but the whole quality of him changed with it. The slightly-hunched, genial old man who'd been sharing cold drinks on a tree stump was still visually present, but something else had surfaced behind him. The shape of a man who had once been known across the entire martial arts world as the Blood Wind. Whose technique had been called Heartbreaker for reasons that weren't metaphorical. Who had won every room he'd walked into for decades before he chose to stop walking into those rooms.
"If he wants to be a monster," Bang said, and his voice had found a different register, "then he'll have to get past me first."
Jordan scratched the back of his head.
And there it is.
What he had meant to do: inform Bang and prompt gentle, guided mentorship that redirected Garou's convictions toward something that wouldn't eventually tear the city apart.
What he had actually done: wake up the part of Bang that had been sleeping under seventy years of genial dojo-mastering.
Merit -1.
He could see it playing out already—Garou receiving more thorough beatings from his mentor than before, which would accelerate certain developments that Jordan had been hoping to delay. The old man's current expression suggested that "kind and amiable" was going to be taking an extended leave of absence.
Martial artists are manageable, he reminded himself. What you have to be careful about is martial artists with something to prove.
He looked at Bang—apparently calm, drinking his tea, watching the training ground—and decided that extreme vigilance was warranted going forward. If Bang's two personalities started actively fighting each other about Garou's situation, Jordan might end up having to physically mediate inside someone else's mental landscape, which was a development he did not want.
He filed this under created problems, handle carefully.
Three days later.
Atomic Samurai was discharged on day two.
His recovery speed was a function of the body he'd built across a career's worth of serious training—far beyond the human baseline, though not quite into the territory that made bruising and percussion damage entirely academic. It had taken two days. He emerged from the guest room with the composed bearing of a man who had taken stock of his situation and made his peace with it, which in his case meant updating his internal ranking of the world's dangerous individuals and accepting the revision.
Saitama: comparable to Super Cop in the category of things that could end Kamikaze if they decided to. Fine. He had enough self-awareness to take in new data.
It meant that forcing challenges at the Silver Fang's dojo—where both of those individuals were currently present—was not the correct strategic approach. He had come here to visit an old peer, not to collect injections.
When Jordan and Bang independently noted that he'd taken the loss without sulking, both of them found something worth respecting in that. A man who treated defeat as incomplete training rather than personal affront was a man who would be harder to beat next time.
There will be a next time, Atomic Samurai's expression conveyed, without specifying who it was directed at.
On the afternoon before departure, Bang organized a tournament.
He called it a friendly competition. Genos knew it was a learning opportunity. Garou knew it was whatever Bang said it was, which was the source of a different set of feelings.
The referee panel: Bang, Atomic Samurai, Jordan, and whoever Bang had convinced to fill the fourth seat. Jordan also held the secondary title of medical personnel, which prompted Atomic Samurai to give him a look that suggested this information had arrived too late to be useful.
"You have healing abilities," Atomic Samurai said, with restraint.
"You didn't ask."
The farce resolved, they ran the tournament.
Five competitors: Genos, Garou, and Atomic Samurai's three disciples. One afternoon of elimination rounds, the mountain air carrying the sounds of swordsmanship and cannon fire and the Flowing Water style and its corrupted cousin, and the three masters watching from the sidelines with the collective experience of several centuries of professional combat assessment.
Garou was extraordinary. Everyone present knew it. He was sixteen years old and fighting A-Class heroes in consecutive rounds with the style he'd built from scratch on top of Bang's curriculum, his durability carrying him through damage that would have ended normal fighters earlier, his pattern-reading upgrading in real-time as each bout added to his model.
He came in second.
Genos won.
The circuit board integration, the learning chip, the afternoon Bang had spent walking him through every principle—it had converted into something with edges on it. His cannon fire was no longer isolated from his physical attacks; it breathed through them, each one positioning the next, the whole sequence carrying the continuous pressure of a fighter who understood what he was doing rather than simply outputting maximum force. Against opponents who didn't have Saitama's specific properties, these combinations would have closed most fights by the third exchange.
Garou had come closest to stopping it. He hadn't stopped it.
When the final round was done, Genos stood in the middle of the training ground with his power core cycling down from overload, scorched earth all around him, and the particular quality of stillness that followed genuine effort.
Jordan walked out onto the field.
"Congratulations." He put his hand on Genos's shoulder—the specific impact of palm on metal that passed for the gesture—and meant it. "Well done. Don't forget to pay Master Bang's training fee."
Genos straightened immediately, bright-eyed. "Thank you, Jordan! I'll make sure to—"
"No need for fees, Genos." Bang appeared at Jordan's shoulder, smiling with genuine warmth. He raised one hand in a wave. "Jordan is joking."
"—Of course," Genos said, adjusting instantly, then after a brief pause: "I'll still remember your guidance, Master Bang."
Bang looked down at his own shoes for a moment, in the way of a man who has just received something and needed a second to hold it properly.
He raised his head. Looked across the training ground to where Garou was lying on the ground, chest heaving, one hand on his face.
"Jordan." Bang's voice was quiet and even. "Would you please treat my disciple."
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