Jordan's announcement landed among six different personalities and produced six different reactions.
The high-energy clone pumped a fist immediately. "Combat test? Finally, let's go!"
The accommodating one sighed with the expression of someone who had accepted his lot in life. "I mean... I suppose we don't really have a choice, do we."
The edgy one swept his gaze across the park with affected menace. "Fear not, primary self. I'll show these pretenders what it means to challenge someone of our caliber—"
A fourth clone—arms crossed, expression carrying the particular flatness of someone who has assessed a situation and found it beneath them—cut in. "The main body can't fight for himself so he needs substitutes. Noted."
The fifth one checked his nails. "What's the compensation package? Benefits? Hazard pay? Because I'm not seeing a contract here."
The sixth straightened his posture with the gravity of a labor attorney who has just identified a billable situation. "I have several things to say about this arrangement from a statutory perspective—"
Jordan looked at them.
Then he looked more carefully at the one who had delivered the arms-crossed assessment, and something registered.
"You again."
The delinquent clone held his gaze without blinking, expression radiating the specific energy of someone who was present under protest and intended for that to be known.
It keeps coming back. Jordan filed this under consistent personality expression, says something about me, do not examine closely.
He had no particular interest in another argument. The previous round had already confirmed what the clone was—an amplified manifestation of a real aspect of his own character, neither more nor less valid than the enthusiasm or the perfectionism or whatever had produced the labor lawyer. Fighting it was fighting himself, which was a category error.
What he could do was manage it.
Jordan stepped forward.
"Sneak attack!" the delinquent clone announced, with the accusatory energy of someone performing offense they had fully anticipated. "I was not paying attention. I failed to dodge."
Jordan's finger connected with his forehead anyway.
"That's martial misconduct! You—"
Thud.
The second clone—the complaining one—got it next.
"This is genuinely unfair from any—"
Thud.
The third—the edgy one, mid-declaration about the nature of power—received a controlled flying kick that sent him three meters sideways before the chakra tether snapped him back upright.
"—cowards who—oof."
All three of them staggered, recalibrated, and looked at Jordan with the unified expression of people who had been treated incorrectly and intended to say something about it at length.
Jordan had calibrated the force precisely: enough to make the point, not enough to dispel. Each clone had landed squarely within their tolerance threshold. They were operational, just inconvenienced.
"Are we done?" he asked pleasantly.
The three stared at him.
"Great." He turned. "You three—go."
The remaining clones—high-energy, accommodating, and the fifth who had apparently decided that since there was no salary he might as well get the exercise—didn't need further instruction. They were already moving.
The park erupted.
Three simultaneous one-on-one exchanges filled the space with golden light and compressed airwaves. The clones moved at the intersection of every power system Jordan carried: Super Saiyan passive state driving the physical baseline, chakra feeding into the movements, psychic force fields activating on reflex whenever impact exceeded a threshold. The combinations were different for each—one clone was running primarily physical, one had deployed the AT Field as a central tactical element, one was threading Wind Release through the hand-to-hand.
Jordan watched from the center of the park with the focused attention of someone collecting data.
The speed was extraordinary. Even a well-trained eye would have struggled to follow the individual exchanges—the yellow streaks registering as afterimages rather than movements, the shockwaves arriving at the position where a body had been a fraction of a second after it had already moved. Jordan found himself thinking of Minato Namikaze, whose reputation for speed had defined an era in the ninja world—and then, somewhat inevitably, of Borsalino, who was the entire other end of that scale and would still have had to pay attention.
At least the park cleanup was worth it.
He let the afternoon run.
By the time he called a halt, the light was angling toward evening and he had a clear picture.
The headline conclusion: up to ten shadow clones, each one inherited roughly half his base physical attributes and retained over eighty percent of his superpowers. The force field came across intact. The chakra natures transferred. The psychic abilities scaled proportionally. A single shadow clone in a fight against anything below Dragon-level was a genuine threat—not a distraction, not a decoy, but a functional combatant operating at a level that most of the Hero Association would have difficulty managing.
The bad news was F-boy.
The Stand was tethered to Jordan's original body in a way that no shadow clone technique could replicate. Each clone generated independently, without the Stand's direct support. They could use the abilities Jordan had integrated, but the underlying consciousness that operated Fantasy Cards—the ability to generate new cards, to interface with the system, to exercise the Stand's more complex functions—that remained singular. One original. One F-boy.
Jordan: The Stand system has received a critical limitation.
F-boy, from somewhere above his left shoulder, offered a single gesture of serene indifference.
The good news partially compensated.
Each shadow clone was, by nature, a node of Jordan's Mind Network. The electromagnetic consciousness that let him perceive and communicate across the city didn't diminish when it was distributed—it expanded. Six clones meant six simultaneous vantage points, six feeds of real-time sensory data, six mobile base stations adding their perception to the shared field. The tactical information density available to the original body had increased by a straightforward multiple.
F-boy, as Jordan's spiritual entity, had also demonstrated the ability to perform something the Stand himself had described as a quantum displacement—jumping between clone positions at need, with transmission delay proportional to distance. Close range: essentially instantaneous. City-scale separation: a noticeable lag. Still operational.
[Working people, working soul,] F-boy observed, with the air of someone reflecting on a difficult season. [The 997 era comes for all of us eventually.]
"You made the schedule," Jordan pointed out.
F-boy said nothing, which was a form of agreement.
The next morning was clear, the city traffic running at normal volume, the hero activity feeds showing routine dispatch across several districts.
Jordan had swapped the standard casual look for his custom baseball cap—the one with the low-key intimidation field baked in, strangers: approach with caution operating at its usual ambient level—and a plain tracksuit. He was sitting at an open-air café table in one of Z-City's commercial districts, reading the Hero Morning News, a flat white on the table in front of him.
The surrounding foot traffic had made its assessment and quietly redistributed away from his immediate vicinity. Two passing office workers had attempted eye contact and then found something interesting to look at in the other direction. A woman in business attire had slowed, reconsidered, and continued walking at a slightly wider arc. The field worked as designed.
Jordan turned a page.
A few minutes later, a figure in a gray hoodie arrived at the café entrance and scanned the tables. The hood was pulled forward, face partially obscured—but the few centimeters of fiery red hair visible at the neckline were distinctive to anyone who'd been following the recent Hero Association rankings. The newly registered A-Class hero "Fire Fist"—hero designation: Blaze—kept a lower public profile than most.
He spotted Jordan, crossed to the table, and bowed.
Jordan raised a hand to the nearest waiter. "Coffee for my colleague."
"Of course. Here you are, sir."
Blaze accepted the cup with a quiet nod of thanks and settled into the seat across the table.
Jordan waited for the waiter to move away. Then he reached up and drew the Ram seal—both hands crossing briefly before his chest, a gesture that looked like nothing in particular to anyone watching.
The Sharingan surface-activated in his left eye, the red iris barely visible under the cap's brim. A fractional draw on the genjutsu chakra established the scope.
"Grenjutsu: Mistaking One Place for Another."
The effect was subtle. No visible shimmer, no obvious distortion—just a quiet pressure that radiated outward from their table, covering the surrounding few meters of pavement in a light genjutsu that interrupted the visual processing of anyone passing through. Eyes slid away. Attention found other objects. The street around them continued at normal volume and pace, and the two people sitting at this particular table became, for all practical purposes, not there.
Jordan picked up his coffee.
"Go ahead."
Blaze reached into his hoodie pocket and set a small USB drive on the table between them. "As instructed. I've established contact with a mid-level executive inside the Association."
"That fast?" Jordan tilted his head, genuinely interested. "Let me guess—he's already assigned you something on the side."
Blaze's expression shifted fractionally. "The boss is perceptive."
Jordan smiled and picked up the drive.
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