Saitama lowered his arms from the stretch and stared at nothing in particular for a moment.
"I've got to move back to my apartment when the training camp wraps up," he said. "I brought way too much stuff when I moved over. All of it has to go back." He rubbed the side of his head. "My head hurts just thinking about it. What a hassle."
Genos received this statement with the focused attention he gave everything Saitama said, processing it against the interpretive framework he had developed over months of close observation.
Maintaining normal life priorities despite reaching a level of power that places you entirely beyond conventional threat. The insight was elegant in its simplicity. Even now, teacher's concerns remain grounded in the practical realities of human existence. This is not ordinary.
"I'll handle the move, Saitama-sensei," he said, with the resolution of someone committing to a project rather than offering a favor. "Leave all of it to me."
"Well, there are some personal things I should go through myself, but—" Saitama considered this. "That would actually help a lot. Thank you."
His mood, which had been carrying the weight of imaginary logistics for approximately thirty seconds, visibly improved.
He looked at Genos.
"Something's on your mind," Saitama said, with the flat directness of someone who has arrived at a conclusion without being able to fully account for the method.
Genos's micro-expression system — the product of Dr. Kuseno's ongoing conviction that a cyborg who could engage naturally with humans required the full complement of facial functionality, a project that had grown considerably more ambitious in scope than the original brief — had done its job. Or, more accurately, had done a job that was technically different from its intended job, since the intended job was conceal rather than communicate, but the result was the same.
"I'm fine, teacher," Genos said, which was the response he produced while his actual cognition was running at a different speed. "Actually—" He gathered the previous conversation's relevant points. "Jordan and the others are planning a direct engagement with the Monster Association's underground base. That was what everyone was discussing. What do you think?"
Saitama gazed at the evening sky.
"I'll watch from the side," he said.
Monsters were monsters. Strong ones took two punches sometimes. Very strong ones, a few more. He had never experienced a situation that required him to plan around the disaster classification system, and his expectation of encountering such a situation was low.
He looked at Genos.
The expression Genos was wearing — not the designed micro-expressions, but the underlying real ones — said something that Genos had not said and was not saying.
Saitama smiled, a simple open smile, not complicated by any of the things it could have been complicated by. "You want to go too."
"I — teacher, I—"
"If you want to go, we'll all go." Saitama picked up his chrysanthemum tea, took a measured sip, and set it back down with the settled ease of someone who has made a decision they're comfortable with. "More people, faster work. Fewer problems. Makes sense."
Genos's hand had already found the notebook.
He had not made a conscious decision to retrieve it. It was simply in his hand, and the pen was moving, because his teacher had just said something that needed to be in the notebook.
When engaging a large-scale hostile organization, the effectiveness of coordinated team action cannot be understated. Rapid elimination of threats reduces harm to the general population.
— By Saitama-sensei
Saitama watched the pen move. Looked at what it was writing. Looked at Genos's face.
"...Did I say something worth recording?"
"Yes," Genos confirmed, without looking up from the notebook.
There is a saying — loosely translated — about those who live by the blade and how their relationship with conventional law tends to complicate itself. The group currently assembled on the Royal Manor's terrace, collectively known among themselves as the Hot Pot Group, was an illustration of this principle that would have interested anyone studying informal power structures.
From the outside: several S-class heroes, a few of their associates, enjoying a hotel's lawn facilities after a Dragon-level incident.
From a more accurate angle: the most concentrated collection of destructive capability in the country, discussing when to act on intelligence about a large-scale underground criminal organization, with the relaxed certainty of people whose operational capacity is not in question.
Bang, for his part, had been carrying a quiet frustration since the afternoon.
He had stood on the sidelines and watched the graduates fight centipede monsters. He had watched King and Genos engage Elder Centipede for twenty minutes. He had watched Saitama end it. He had been present for the whole thing and had not actually fought anything.
This was not the old man's preferred configuration. The composed and measured persona he presented in public — the Silver Fang, respected elder of the martial arts world — was a genuine expression of who he was, but it was not the whole picture. Beneath the measured patience was a practitioner who had spent eighty years pushing himself into harder situations and finding out what he was made of, and that practitioner was currently very interested in what a Dragon-level underground organization full of elite monsters would feel like as a problem.
He had agreed with Atomic Samurai's proposal faster than he'd agreed with anything all week.
"How about this," Jordan said.
He set down his teacup. The conversation on the terrace came to a natural pause.
"I'll reach out to the association tomorrow. Have Sitch check which other S-class members want to participate." He glanced around the assembled faces. "We'll call this the first official team-building activity for the S-class sequence. Go in together, clear it together."
The S-class heroes received this framing with the collective shrug of people who find a proposed label acceptable and have no investment in what it's called.
"Works for me," someone said, which was approximately everyone's position.
The intelligence was Jordan's. The operation was Jordan's to define. Nobody was going to argue about terminology.
S-class heroes, as a category, were distributed across the country's cities the way extreme weather events were distributed: intermittently, without coordination, each one handling their designated zone. The practical consequence was that the threat level you needed to be to constitute a problem for an S-class hero was substantially higher than the threat level you needed to be to constitute a problem for anyone else, and S-class heroes therefore spent most of their time operating alone because there was no structural reason to do otherwise.
Going out together occasionally, Jordan reflected, sounds like a reasonable thing to do.
Even if "together" means a dozen people who could each end a small war.
At the Hero Association headquarters in A-City, the morning light was still early when Sitch's phone rang.
The meeting had been running for forty minutes. Sitch was chairing it, which meant he was balancing the specific alertness of someone managing a room of executives against the specific alertness of someone who had learned to recognize Jordan's number.
He answered. He listened. He wrote. He nodded several times and said "yes, sir" with the interval regularity of someone receiving information whose quantity and nature were both exceeding his available processing.
"Lord Evans, I'll make certain it's passed on." He hung up.
The room was looking at him.
Sitch had been at Hero Association headquarters long enough to have experienced several eras of unusual events, and he had developed the professional capacity to receive alarming information without immediately expressing his face's opinions about it. This capacity was currently under some strain.
"We have received intelligence from Super Cop," he said, with the composure of a man spending his composure deliberately. "A large-scale organized monster operation has been confirmed active beneath Z-City's no-man's-land. The designation is the Monster Association." He looked at the notes he'd made. "Current intelligence indicates a minimum of several dozen mid-level elite operatives at Demon level or above, and a confirmed executive tier of ten or more individuals at Dragon level."
The room made no sound.
Then several sounds happened simultaneously, which added up to the general experience of a room of senior executives discovering that a problem exists at a scale they had not allocated budget or response protocol for.
Sitch waited for this to settle.
There's more, he did not say immediately, because he had learned that when Jordan provided information, there was always more, and the practice of releasing it in manageable increments was the difference between a productive meeting and a room full of people who couldn't think straight.
He let them finish reacting to the first part first.
His forehead vein had opinions. He kept them internal.
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