Garou landed, coughed up blood, and immediately used his hands and feet to push off the forest floor in the opposite direction.
He didn't hesitate. He didn't give Jordan time to process the intent. He just moved—the specific combination of pain tolerance and reaction speed that made him dangerous even horizontal, even injured, even in full retreat.
Within moments, he was through the undergrowth and into the deeper trees, white hair vanishing between the shadows, his footfalls already fading.
Jordan watched this and felt something like amusement.
"Mind Network off," he noted to himself. "That was an oversight."
Under normal conditions, the Mind Network didn't sit actively in other people's heads reading them. It spread, it covered, it registered presence—but focused thought-reading required directed attention. Jordan had been having a conversation, not running surveillance. The wolf had read the gap correctly and moved into it.
Smart kid. He stood in the forest and followed the signal.
Mind Network found Garou immediately—the pulse of him, still moving hard despite the internal damage—and Jordan saw where he was heading.
The cliff.
He watched through the network as Garou reached the edge without slowing, assessed the rock face below in a single glance, and stepped off.
Jordan blinked. Then he looked more carefully through the Mind Network.
The cliff face wasn't sheer. Vines, branches, irregular protrusions in the rock—a path, if you knew what you were looking at. Not safe, not comfortable, but navigable for someone willing to commit to it. Someone who had been here before and memorized the route.
He scouted an escape before he started training here. Jordan shook his head slowly. The intelligence-gathering on heroes is genuinely insufficient, but the tactical preparation is not.
He took a step and was beside the falling wolf.
Garou's face had been doing something between wild joy and focused calculation on the way down. Both expressions stopped at the same moment, replaced by the expression of a man who had just received information that fundamentally revised his understanding of the situation.
"That's right," Jordan said pleasantly. "I can fly."
Garou's vision went somewhere dark for a moment.
The cliff, the planned escape route, the branch he'd already hit on the way down—all of it immediately irrelevant, because the man he'd been escaping from was directly beside him, descending at the same rate, entirely unbothered by the altitude.
Before the wolf could arrange a response, the ground that wasn't there was there, and the forest around them was the same forest where they'd started, and Garou was falling headfirst from nothing.
His head hit the ground.
He used the impact.
Even head-first, even stunned, even with his internal organs lodged in a formal complaint about the afternoon's activities—his body found a sweeping uppercut from the fall's energy, aimed upward at where Jordan would be if Jordan were a normal person who stood in predictable places.
Jordan was, unfortunately, not a normal person.
He watched the uppercut complete itself against empty air and felt a complicated appreciation for the sheer commitment. You had to respect someone who bounced off the ground and attacked on the way up.
He knelt, and brought one hand down in a chopping motion across the back of Garou's neck. Firm. Precise. Enough to shut the lights off cleanly without structural damage.
The wolf's face made contact with the soil. His exposed leg twitched once. Then he was still.
Jordan grabbed him by the waistband and pulled him out of the ground.
"Still human," he said to no one in particular, as justification. "Can't leave him suffocated."
He set Garou down at the base of the tree—the one Garou had destroyed earlier, now lying at an angle it hadn't been lying at before. The arrogant face, at rest, looked younger than it did awake. A boy who'd been fighting the world since before he had the vocabulary to describe what he was fighting.
Jordan looked at him for a moment.
The education of difficult teenagers, he concluded, still needs to be handled by the master.
He'd thought about it before, on and off—what a different approach to Garou might look like. He'd thought about it again just now, watching this fifteen-year-old attack him from the ground with a concussion rather than simply accept that the situation was over. The conviction was real. The path it was pointed at was going to cause significant problems for everyone.
But that conviction was also why he hadn't killed anyone. Even at the end of everything—even in the versions of events Jordan knew about—Garou had never killed a human being. The monster he wanted to become was, at the foundation, still a person who couldn't bring himself to do the one thing that would have completed the transformation.
Spoiled child who went astray because the world was unkind first. Not a simple fix. But not impossible.
A good conversation with the old man was probably the right starting point. After that—they'd see.
Jordan crouched and pressed his palm to the small impact crater Garou's face had made. Blue psychic energy spread out from his hand, and the disturbed earth folded back in on itself, smoothing the surface. The indentation disappeared. Then the same energy lifted Garou gently and settled him against the fallen tree trunk, positioned like someone who'd stopped to rest on a long run.
He stepped back. Activated the Sharingan.
The forest sharpened. Red light moved in his pupils, the three tomoe rotating slowly, the genjutsu reaching out toward the sleeping wolf.
What he placed in Garou's mind was simple: training, the forest, fatigue, the reasonable decision to rest. No gaps in the timeline. No anomalous memories. Just the quiet narrative of an unremarkable afternoon that had ended in normal exhaustion.
Garou's eyes opened to afternoon light through leaves.
He lay still for a moment, taking inventory. His neck hurt—the specific ache of sleeping on hard ground. His back was sore in the way of someone who had been doing heavy training for hours. He touched the back of his neck and winced.
Must have overtrained. Stiff neck.
He frowned. His back didn't usually hurt this way from tree work. Something felt slightly off about the timeline of the afternoon, like a sentence where one word didn't quite fit the context.
He turned this over.
Found nothing on the other side of it.
Training fatigue, he concluded, and pushed himself upright.
The bones that had been jostled by various impacts during the afternoon settled back into alignment as he moved—a series of cracks and pops, his body doing its maintenance work. His face stayed blank throughout. Pain was information. He'd learned a long time ago not to give it more attention than that.
He looked at the downed tree. Looked at the next one.
"Then let's keep going."
Beyond the tree line, Bang watched Genos complete a full set of Flowing Water techniques and felt a particular kind of satisfaction.
The form was there. All of it—the transitions, the weight shifts, the breathing that threaded through the whole thing like a spine. Mechanical body, unusual range of motion, and a learning system that turned demonstration directly into retained form without the slow attrition of normal practice. Every correction Bang had offered had been integrated before the next repetition.
A genuinely talented student, he thought. And extremely, earnestly diligent.
He held back the sigh that wanted to follow this observation. Also slightly terrifying in his diligence. We'll address that carefully over time.
"The fundamentals are yours now," Bang said, stopping Genos with a raised hand. "The next stage is integration—these techniques need to meet actual combat before they become real. Theory is always provisional until it hits something."
"Yes! I understand completely!"
Bang looked around the training area. Atomic Samurai's three disciples had vanished in the direction their master had last been seen, which was away from here. Saitama was running laps with the easy, metronomic quality of someone who found physical distance soothing.
Bang watched him run.
A hundred push-ups. A hundred sit-ups. A hundred squats. Ten kilometers. He'd seen the training sheet. He understood the principle. He also understood that whatever was happening in Saitama's body right now was something that a hundred of anything probably couldn't quantify properly. But the consistency of it—the simple, relentless daily presence of the practice—that, he recognized.
He clicked his tongue at his own uncertainty and turned back to Genos.
"I'll spar with you myself. Come on then."
Genos took a breath and settled into his stance. "Yes! Thank you, Master Bang!"
Jordan came back through the dojo's rear entrance and considered what Garou needed.
The conversation with Bang could wait until evening. No urgency—Garou wasn't going anywhere, and the genjutsu would hold until morning with no unusual effects. More important at the moment: Genos and the others had been training in afternoon heat for several hours.
He was thinking about cold drinks when he turned a corner in the kitchen corridor and nearly walked into Iaian.
Iaian stopped. Jordan stopped. They both looked at the large bowl Iaian was carrying
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