The three disciples processed the situation for a long moment.
Then, collectively, they ran.
Top-tier A-Class speed deployed without discussion—all three of them moving at once, crossing the training ground toward the tree line where Atomic Samurai had disappeared, their footfalls merging into a single continuous sound.
At the edge of the forest, the large tree that had caught him was already shedding branches.
Atomic Samurai had landed in the canopy on the parabola's endpoint—clean arc, precise landing point—and the tree had tried to hold him and failed. Branches gave way in sequence as he fell through, each one slowing him slightly, and then he hit the ground with his back and stayed there.
"Cough—"
He lay in the undergrowth and took inventory.
Everything hurt. The inventory process confirmed this comprehensively. The bones weren't broken—he knew what broken bones felt like, and this was different—but the percussion of the blow had gone through his whole body like a truck had run over the concept of him rather than the physical reality. His nose had met something during the fall that disagreed with its current position. Blood was running freely from it, which was inconvenient. When he moved his jaw experimentally, his teeth informed him that they had opinions about this.
Didn't expect... He lay in the dark under the trees and looked up through the broken canopy at the sky above the training ground. In the distance, Saitama's figure was still visible—unremarkable, slightly disheveled, the face of a man from a comedy manga who was currently inspecting a tuft of lost hair with genuine distress.
This person. He couldn't finish the thought yet. This person is actually...
The disciples' voices were getting closer. He heard them—Iaian's controlled urgency, Okamaitachi's louder version of the same, Bushidrill's direct pragmatism.
He forced himself to presentable.
Sat up. One hand pushing from the ground. Got to the sitting position and stayed there while the world rearranged itself into something stable.
Coughed out another mouthful of blood—the internal percussion working its way out, which was the right direction for it to go. His color returned. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
Tried to stand.
Everything went dark.
He was unconscious before he finished falling.
In the dense forest beyond the dojo's cleared training area.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.
The sounds came through the trees in a steady rhythm that had been going for a while before Jordan located the source—a pace that started measured and had been accelerating, each strike a little heavier than the last, the accumulation of effort visible in the sound itself.
He moved through the undergrowth quietly and found a vantage point.
Garou was working a tree.
Shirtless, loose white training trousers, black cloth shoes. The tree he'd chosen was large enough that two adults couldn't comfortably hug it. He was hitting it with the focused, methodical commitment of someone who had picked a target and intended to finish the job.
The rough outer bark was already gone. The exposed trunk beneath was marked with dozens of impact points—deep indentations, some of them penetrating several centimeters into the wood. Each new strike added to the pattern. Each one landed harder than the previous.
The sweat had been running long enough to soak his belt. His breathing was controlled—not easy, but controlled, the discipline of years over the body's honest opinion of what it was being asked to do. His expression: blank. The specific blankness of someone operating somewhere between concentration and somewhere else entirely.
Jordan watched the fists land and thought about what they were hitting.
Not the tree. Not really.
There was a particular quality to the rhythm—the acceleration of it, the way each strike landed with something personal behind it—that read less like training and more like an argument being conducted in the only language available. Jordan had watched enough footage of Garou's history to fill in what the argument was about. The group of children who had played heroes. The one who always had to be the monster. The years of that, absorbed in silence, reprocessed into this.
Bang, bang, bang, bang—
The final punch was different from the others: a full rotation of the hip and shoulder behind it, all the accumulated force of the session discharged in one twisting strike. The tree took it and bent. Then it cracked. Then the crack became something that couldn't be undone, and the whole structure—three or four stories of wood that had been growing for decades—swayed once and came down.
The forest accepted it without ceremony.
Garou stood in the settling dust and breathed.
Then he picked up his training clothes from a branch, wiped his face and chest without particular attention, hung them back up, and walked to the next tree. This one was larger. He put his fist on the bark and steadied himself for another round.
"No wonder," Jordan said quietly, not intending to be overheard. "Ruthless to himself. No wonder the limiter gives way almost without resistance."
He turned it over in his mind. Both Saitama and Garou—the two men in this world who had found their own way through the ceiling every human being runs into eventually—shared this quality of unreasonable willingness. The refusal to stop that wasn't stubbornness exactly, more like the property of objects that simply don't accept certain forces as stopping conditions.
Saitama's version was almost comedic in its simplicity: he had decided to do the thing every day and he had done it, and one day the limiter had found this too boring to maintain. The only price was the hair.
Garou's version was different in kind. More like Psykos's research—the Monster Near-Death Breakthrough Principle—each ceiling broken under pressure, each evolution driven by the specific conditions of being in genuine danger. Rapid, dramatic, dangerous. The price each time was the risk of not coming back as the same thing.
Two paths to the same impossible place. One through sheer cheerful stubbornness. One through a fire that kept burning hotter.
If I were trying to do this myself, Jordan thought, I probably couldn't. Not either version. He glanced at the card inventory in his mind. Hence the cards.
He didn't feel particularly bad about this.
Garou's ear moved.
The motion was small—a fraction of a degree, the natural twitch of something that had been trained to catch sounds at the edge of range. Then his whole body changed quality, turning from focused inward to alert outward in the time it took to process the input.
Jordan hadn't been hiding. He hadn't been announcing himself either. The observation had been quiet but not silent, present but not concealed.
Garou turned.
His arms were already positioned—weight forward, ready, the combat instinct that operated faster than the decision to act. His eyes swept the tree line. His muscles had the specific tautness of a predator that has detected something and hasn't yet identified what.
The bushes at the forest edge moved.
Jordan walked out.
At the sight of him—the height, the particular way he carried himself, the quality of presence that the Mind Network gave off as something fundamentally larger than the physical frame—Garou's body responded before his face did. Already taut, he went tighter. The posture of a lone animal that has located something in its territory that it cannot classify as prey.
"We meet again," Jordan said, and nodded. His hands were in his pockets. His stance had no combat geometry in it at all—open, relaxed, entirely unguarded.
Garou's teeth came together.
This man. The hatred was there—not personal, exactly, more the specific friction of something that had classed itself as superior encountering something that clearly wasn't reading the classification. Anyone else standing in front of Garou with their hands in their pockets, giving no ground and offering no threat, would have provided one hundred immediately available solutions. Garou had catalogued all of them automatically. His fists knew the answer to every problem.
Except this one.
He'd felt Jordan's presence the first time they'd crossed paths—a pressure that sat outside the normal hierarchy of things he'd measured himself against. He hadn't forgotten it. He hadn't forgiven it either, because the feeling had been, in its particular way, clarifying.
There are things you're not ready for yet.
He hated that more than anything.
Jordan looked at him without hurry, standing in the dappled light at the forest edge, hands still in his pockets. Waiting, apparently, to see what Garou would decide to do with the next few seconds.
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