"He's already put me to work," Blaze confirmed, the flattering smile sitting easily on his face. "Private jobs—off the books, but he's paying through the Association's official account."
Jordan's expression shifted into something dry. "Embezzling public funds for personal errands. Efficient."
"I have everything documented." Blaze tapped the USB drive on the table. "Full recordings of every meeting, video included. Cross-referenced with financial records I found under his name—personal assets that don't match his declared income by a significant margin. It's all on there."
"Good work." Jordan raised a hand, and the USB drive lifted off the table in a clean arc, landing in his palm. He turned it once between his fingers. "What else did he offer?"
"Long-term incentive. He said if I perform well, he'll introduce me to his superiors when the time is right." Blaze paused. "He made it sound like there's a whole tier above him."
"There is." Jordan pocketed the drive. "Middle management always has a ceiling. Keep working him—build the trust, go deeper, report back when you reach something that matters."
"Understood." Blaze rose, brief bow. "Then I'll get going."
"Go ahead."
He watched the red-haired figure disappear into the foot traffic, hoodie pulled forward, indistinguishable within thirty seconds. Jordan picked up his coffee.
Superiors. The word sat in his mind with a particular quality. The corruption in the Hero Association wasn't a few bad actors making individual decisions—it was infrastructure. Hierarchy. People above people, each tier providing cover for the one below and taking a cut going upward. Middle management was the entry point, not the destination.
We'll take them all apart eventually.
He set his cup down and reached for the newspaper.
The explosion hit approximately forty seconds later.
Not nearby—close enough to feel the pressure shift. The Hero Association's emergency broadcast followed almost immediately, the familiar alert tone cutting across the street noise.
Jordan looked up.
Half a block down, the frontage of a dessert shop had been rearranged by something from the inside out. Glass and display cases across the pavement. Cream, chocolate, and fragments of confectionery scattered across a three-meter radius. And standing in the wreckage, holding a young shop assistant by the collar with one enormous hand:
A cylindrical figure roughly two meters tall, brown and layered, with whipped cream peaks at the shoulders, cherry-red eyes, and the general silhouette of a very large Black Forest mousse cake that had somehow developed limbs, a face, and strong opinions.
The shop assistant's scream was immediately drowned out by the monster's announcement.
"Hey hey! I am the Black Forest Mousse Cake Monster!" The figure stepped up onto an overturned phone booth with surprising balance. "Awakened by humanity's endless destruction of desserts!!"
The pedestrians who had been evacuating slowed. Several stopped entirely.
"Why do humans eat desserts?!" The monster swept a cream-covered arm across the ruined street. "Some of you eat them every single day!"
"These desserts are—" its voice cracked with what appeared to be genuine feeling— "so cute! How could you cruel, terrifying creatures bring yourselves to—"
The passerby nearest Jordan leaned toward the person beside her and whispered something that sounded like it does look kind of good though.
Several people were quietly photographing with their phones.
The monster had shifted from terrifying to perplexing to, from a purely visual standpoint, somewhat appetizing. A two-meter chocolate mousse cake expressing righteous indignation about dessert consumption was a difficult threat to contextualize. The hostage situation remained technically in effect, but the crowd's panic had drained into something closer to baffled attention.
Tiger-level, Jordan noted. Manageable. And Saitama would absolutely punch this one apart and carry the pieces home for dessert.
He could almost hear it: Normal Punch. Then—is this edible?
He almost smiled.
The monster was reaching its rhetorical crescendo, one arm raised toward the sky, when a voice from the edge of the cleared space said:
"Aren't all the desserts in the shop ruined by you?"
The monster's oration stopped.
It processed this for a moment.
Then, with the ponderous dignity of something made primarily of mousse, it began to turn toward the voice. The physics of its body composition made this more complicated than intended—the layered cream and chocolate shifted with each degree of rotation, producing a series of soft, wobbling sounds as the cylindrical mass redistributed itself. The monster rotated. And wobbled. And adjusted. And wobbled back.
When it finally completed the turn, it found itself looking at a tall young man in a baseball cap standing at the edge of the debris field, one hand resting lightly on the brim of his hat, an expression on his face that could charitably be described as gently interested.
The monster looked past him.
The dessert shop was a ruin. Every display case destroyed in the initial emergence. Cakes, mousse cups, tarts, and parfaits in various states of destruction across the pavement—cream blending with broken glass, chocolate smeared across overturned chairs, a three-tier celebration cake lying on its side near the drain. The sweet smell of demolished confectionery drifted through the street.
The monster's cherry-red eyes moved slowly across the scene.
Its lips trembled.
Chocolate-tinted tears welled at the corners of its eyes.
"...They were pioneers," it said, voice cracking. "They were pioneers who died in the struggle against human oppression and I will—I will carry their will—"
"You fell out of the shop and landed on most of them," Jordan said.
"—SHUT UP—"
"The display case on the left was already broken before you finished the speech."
"SHUT UUUUUUP—"
The monster released the shop assistant—who immediately ran—and turned its full attention to the tall human who was continuing to stand there with the mild interest of someone watching a cooking demonstration go slightly wrong. Its enormous hand opened.
"You wretched human!!" The cherry-red eyes narrowed to furious slits. "The dessert counterattack begins with you, you—you talkative—"
"You're upset," Jordan observed.
The monster screamed.
Jordan reached up to adjust his cap—he was about to remove it, which would complete the shift from anonymous café patron to registered S-Class hero dealing with a Tiger-level incident, and the fight would be over in approximately one exchange. The baseball cap's field was useful for keeping civilians unfocused, but it served no purpose once the situation had escalated to a formal monster response.
He had just touched the brim when—
"WAIT A MOMENT!!!"
The shout came from down the street. Not close—distant, but approaching fast, and very loud, carrying the particular quality of a voice that had been trained to project over wind and traffic. The sound that followed built underneath it: rhythmic, rapid, the squeal of rubber working hard against pavement, and underneath that, unmistakably—
A bicycle bell.
Ringing with absolute purpose.
The monster stopped. The surrounding pedestrians—the ones who had been recording on their phones, the ones who had been cautiously peering at the fallen desserts, the ones who'd slowed down to watch the argument—all turned, drawn by the sound.
At the far end of the street, a figure was visible and getting larger.
Cycling gear. A green helmet that caught the afternoon light at the rounded top. Windproof goggles. A suit that had seen extensive outdoor use. One hand on the handlebars of a bicycle that was, by any objective measure, not the sort of equipment associated with S-Class disaster response.
The cyclist stood on the pedals, weight forward, driving the old-fashioned machine at a pace that was, for a bicycle, genuinely impressive.
The bell rang again—clear, insistent, righteous.
Jordan lowered his hand from his cap brim and watched the approaching figure with an expression that had shifted from mild amusement into something more attentive.
Well.