"Well..." Saitama loosely clenched one fist, pretended to cough twice into it, and said with the magnanimous air of a man who had decided to be reasonable about something. "I suppose it's not entirely unforgivable." A beat. "Just... go easy next time."
Jordan took that as the victory it was and retreated to his room before Saitama could reconsider.
Behind him, on the balcony, Genos filed the entire exchange under the friendship between Saitama-sensei and Jordan and resumed his meditative diagnostic with a thoughtful expression. He had read that maintaining an appropriate level of close camaraderie between strong individuals could stimulate continuous growth in combat power. The research appeared to be bearing out.
Jordan shut his door.
The room's ambient pressure shifted subtly as a force field snapped into place around the building—not aggressive, just thorough. Soundproofing: maximum. Every wall and floor reinforced to a degree that would have raised questions if the building's structural engineer had been present to notice.
Then he sat cross-legged on the floor, cracked his knuckles, and opened the card pool interface in his mind.
Card type: Ability. World: Naruto. Pool locked.
Fate Draw count: deploying 100.
Azure light bloomed from his chest.
F-boy stepped out of it with the fluid inevitability of a well-trained waiter arriving precisely on time—pale purple, immaculately suited, a floating spread of blank card templates already organizing themselves in the air around him. He bowed once, with the slight irony that had become his default register.
Jordan pointed at him. "Divine Draw. Ten-pull. Let's go."
The cards spun. Light cascaded through the color spectrum. Reality rippled at the edges as the system parsed a hundred accumulated draws against a targeted pool and returned the universe's considered opinion on what Jordan deserved.
Ten cards crystallized.
[Fantasy Card: One Thousand Years of Death] Type: Ability • Rarity: N (White) Source: Hatake Kakashi, Konoha's Copy Ninja Effect: Form the Tiger Seal, channel chakra through the fingertips, and strike the opponent at their weakest chakra point. The resulting force is sufficient to send the target airborne. Confirmed victims include: a Konoha Jonin, the One-Tailed Jinchuriki, and the Seventh Hokage.
[Fantasy Card: Leaf Whirlwind] Type: Ability • Rarity: N (White) Leaf Village standard taijutsu. Spinning kick combination.
[Fantasy Card: Leaf Whirlwind] Type: Ability • Rarity: N (White) Leaf Village standard taijutsu. Spinning kick combination.
[Fantasy Card: Leaf Whirlwind] Type: Ability • Rarity: N (White) Leaf Village standard taijutsu. Spinning kick combination.
[Fantasy Card: Transformation Technique] Type: Ability • Rarity: N (White) E-rank ninjutsu. One of the Three Basic Body Techniques. Alters the user's appearance.
[Fantasy Card: Clone Technique] Type: Ability • Rarity: N (White) E-rank ninjutsu. One of the Three Basic Body Techniques. Creates illusory copies of the user.
[Fantasy Card: Genjutsu — The Art of Mistaking One Place for Another] Type: Ability • Rarity: R (Blue) Genjutsu. Manipulates the target's visual signal processing, causing them to perceive their location incorrectly. Effective for disorientation and evasion scenarios.
[Fantasy Card: Shadow of the Dancing Leaf] Type: Ability • Rarity: R (Blue) Taijutsu. Might Guy's Strong Fist style. An extremely fast initial movement that shadows the opponent as they're kicked skyward—imperceptible to the naked eye at full speed. Functions as the opening stance for the Front Lotus. Can be chained into a high-damage aerial combination.
[Fantasy Card: Water Release — Water Prison Technique] Type: Ability • Rarity: R (Blue) Ninjutsu. Encases a target in a sphere of pressurized water, completely immobilizing them and preventing hand seals. Requires the user to maintain contact.
[Fantasy Card: Five Elements Sealing] Type: Ability • Rarity: SR (Purple) Source: Orochimaru. A-rank sealing technique. Draws on all five chakra natures simultaneously to seal the energy within a target's body, rendering it uncontrollable and unable to release. Capable of suppressing Tailed Beast-level chakra output.
The cards settled into a neat floating row.
Jordan's vision went dark for a second as a hundred Fate Draws' worth of spiritual energy processed at once. He breathed through it, blinked, and surveyed the results.
...The Five Elements Sealing pulled through. The SR-rank purple border was doing a lot of heavy lifting for this spread. Without it, he might have needed to lie down.
The tightness in his chest was immediate and professional. His heart—reinforced by the pseudo-Herrscher core, fused with half a dozen power systems that had no business coexisting in one body—came within a sincere margin of simply stopping out of despair.
He looked at the six white-bordered cards. Then at the three blue-bordered ones. Then at the one purple card standing heroically among them.
Three Leaf Whirlwinds. Three of the same Leaf Whirlwind. A technique he could already perform with his left hand while doing something else with the rest of him.
He'd rubbed Saitama's head specifically for this.
"Come here." Jordan's voice was very calm. "F-boy. Come here for a second."
F-boy floated over with the dignified composure of a man who had done nothing wrong.
Jordan put an arm around his Stand's shoulders—the move of someone about to have a talk—and studied the ten cards with the benevolent patience of a parent examining a very disappointing report card.
"I'm not even going to mention the One Thousand Years of Death opening act," he said reasonably. "Classic. Educational. Noted. Moving on." His finger traced the air in front of the white-bordered trio. "What I want to understand—and I'm asking this genuinely, as a collaborative question between equals—is what the three Leaf Whirlwinds are about. And then, while we're at it, the Transformation Technique and the Clone Technique. Which are E-rank Academy exercises." He paused. "That I can already do."
F-boy met his gaze with clear, earnest eyes.
[Who ever said you can't pull a card you already have? The sample size was small before. With a larger draw count, duplicate contamination in the pool is completely normal. Have you ever played a mobile gacha with a shard system? You don't even get the card directly—you get fragments. Enough fragments and you can exchange them for a complete card. That's considered generous by industry standards.]
Jordan stared at him.
[Stop looking at me like that. Your liver is fine.]
The worst part was that it was a coherent argument.
Jordan sat with it for a moment—the logic assembling itself against his will into something that actually made sense. He'd played enough of these games before transmigrating to know the architecture. Duplicate pools were real. Fragment systems were real. Compared to some of the more predatory designs he'd personally experienced—
...Actually, broken down into fragments and fused into Limiter Break cards, his entire haul could have been a single progress bar that never moved.
He looked at his ten cards with a new and reluctant appreciation.
He opened his mouth.
"Thank you, F—" He stopped. Something in F-boy's expression shifted—a microscopic flicker of satisfaction, professionally suppressed but unmistakably present.
Jordan's eyes narrowed.
"—Hey." He was back. "You almost had me. You almost—you're genuinely trying to kill me with this, you miserable little—"
F-boy's serene expression did not change. Not even a little.
Which made it worse.
What followed was a room-scale event.
Jordan had logged a long-standing grievance that every player of a pay-to-win gacha carries in their heart: the desire to reach through the screen and physically confront the designer responsible for their suffering. The general impossibility of this was one of life's minor cruelties.
Jordan was not subject to general impossibilities.
The force field around the apartment building had been doing solid work since activation. It continued to do solid work. The walls flexed. The floor absorbed impacts that had no business occurring on a residential floor plan.
A non-human entity and its Stand engaged in a comprehensive exchange of taijutsu, grappling, and creative application of joint locks.
F-boy's eyes went flat.
[I want it on record that I am cooperating with this performance at significant personal cost.]
He demonstrated this by going completely limp in a cross armbar, which was either the most dignified possible response or the most passive-aggressive one, and Jordan had long since stopped being able to tell the difference.
I can't go all out, Jordan reminded himself, applying measured force. Stand damage is shared damage.
He applied the cross armbar with the precision of a man who was being considerate while also absolutely not letting go.
Upstairs, or rather, in the general direction of the living room, something shifted. Saitama, who had picked up the newspaper, caught a piece of plaster detaching from the ceiling and regarded it with mild suspicion.
"Strange." He turned it over in his hand. "Earthquake?"
On the balcony, Genos's sensor array completed its analysis in 0.3 seconds. His expression hardened into the focused determination of someone who has identified a clear and actionable problem.
He slammed a hand on the table. "Sensei. I'll source reinforcement materials immediately and retrofit the building's structural framework from all contact points."
Saitama barely had time to register this before a gust of displaced air hit him from the balcony and Genos was gone—a silver shape punching through the sound barrier fifty meters up, second acceleration already engaged, vanishing from visual range within seconds.
Saitama stared at the empty sky.
"...He's taking this a bit seriously," he said, to no one in particular. He got up and deposited the plaster fragment in the trash. "It's just a small earthquake." He looked at the ceiling, which was now perfectly still and silent. "The house should..." He trailed off.
After a moment of private, uncomfortable consideration, he looked at the ceiling again.
"Maybe having him reinforce it isn't the worst idea."
He muttered something else under his breath that sounded like it's hard enough finding a good apartment with no utilities or rent and went back to his newspaper.
Inside the room:
Jordan released F-boy from the cross armbar with the satisfied air of someone who had accomplished something important.
F-boy straightened his suit jacket, smoothed an invisible crease, and resumed floating at precisely the height and angle that communicated I allowed that to happen. The dead-fish expression—affecting as a very experienced actor performing mild inconvenience—was operating at full capacity.
[That was an entirely unnecessary use of fifteen minutes.]
"It was extremely necessary," Jordan said. He cracked his knuckles. "All right." His tone shifted; the comedy was over. "I have a question."
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