J-City. A park a few blocks from the clinic, quiet in the middle of a working day.
Two figures on a bench: one tall, one not particularly, creating a scene that had no obvious reason to be as peaceful as it was.
Jordan had taken off the baseball cap when they sat down. The intimidation field dissolved with it, and the park remained empty by coincidence rather than design—just a mild afternoon, the distant city noise, and two people sitting in the kind of comfortable silence that happens when neither party has anything urgent to prove.
Across from him, Mumen Rider had removed his helmet and goggles. The hair underneath was short and a little uneven, the way hair gets when someone cuts it themselves and doesn't spend much time thinking about it. Bandages wrapped his forehead from the clinic's work. Bruising showed along his jaw and cheekbone.
He reached into the chest pocket of his cycling suit and produced a pair of glasses—wire-framed, slightly worn at the bridge—and settled them on his face.
The transformation was complete. He no longer looked like a hero who had just fought a Tiger-level monster and survived. He looked like a college student who'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time and was taking it philosophically.
Jordan studied this for a moment, then nodded toward the vending machine at the edge of the park.
"Soda. My treat."
"Ah—" A small pause, the slight hesitation of someone recalibrating who they were talking to. Then Mumen Rider's posture relaxed by a degree or two, and something warmer came into his expression. "Then I'll have an orange soda, please."
"Orange soda."
Jordan said it half to himself, and almost laughed. He'd handed Saitama an orange soda the first time they'd met—a small coincidence, or maybe just the beverage of choice for a certain type of person. He folded a bill between two fingers and extended it toward the vending machine at the end of the path.
The bill lifted from his hand, crossed the thirty meters of open air, and fed itself into the cash slot with the matter-of-fact precision of something that had done this before. The machine processed. Two bottles dropped. They came back the same way they went—along with the correct change, which redirected neatly into Jordan's jacket pocket.
Mumen Rider watched the entire sequence from beginning to end without blinking.
"That," he said carefully, "requires a lot of control."
"Less than it looks." Jordan caught the bottles and handed across the orange-labeled one. "Cheers."
"Cheers." Mumen Rider accepted it, unscrewed the cap, and drank.
The cold carbonation hit his throat and traveled downward, and for a few seconds the burning along his left side—three ribs minimum, the internal assessment familiar enough to be almost rote at this point—diminished to something that could be acknowledged and set aside. He let out a breath.
A quiet burp followed, which he acknowledged with mild embarrassment.
"Sorry."
"Don't mention it."
They sat for a moment. A bird crossed the far end of the park. Somewhere beyond the trees, a delivery vehicle turned a corner.
"Thank you," Mumen Rider said. "For helping that shop attendant earlier. I saw."
"You had the monster occupied."
"I had its attention," he said, with the tone of someone distinguishing between two different things. "There's a difference."
Jordan looked at him sideways.
The man across from him raised his soda again, the smile settling more comfortably on his face now. "I know what I am. Top of C-Class is still C-Class—I know the ceiling. You show up, Pig God shows up, and the situation resolves." He shrugged, the gesture easy. "That's how it works. I buy time. Someone with the capacity to actually finish things finishes them."
"That's a very calm way to look at it."
"It's accurate," Mumen Rider said. "I've had a while to get there." He paused. "I'm not being self-pitying. I genuinely don't mind. I just think it's important to be honest about what you can do and what you can't."
Jordan turned the bottle in his hand, watching the condensation run down the side.
"You blocked a Tiger-level rotating attack for 0.1 seconds," he said. "With your body. Knowing you couldn't stop it."
Mumen Rider was quiet.
"That's not buying time," Jordan continued. "That's a choice with a very specific cost attached."
"The people behind me couldn't move." His voice was simple. "So I didn't either. That's just—that's just the job."
Jordan looked at him for a moment.
That's the job. As though it were the most obvious thing in the world. As though the calculus were straightforward, the conclusion foregone, the man who did it entirely unremarkable.
"You are the real hero," Jordan said. "My friend."
He reached over and put his hand on Mumen Rider's shoulder.
The effect of the Super Healing was immediate and complete—a warm current that moved through the contact point, found the structural damage along the left side of his ribcage, and reversed it at the cellular level. Not gradually. Not partially. The three fractures, the bruised tissue around them, the hairline stress at the fourth rib that would have shown up in imaging tomorrow—gone, as though they'd never been. The burning along his side stopped between one breath and the next.
Mumen Rider's hand came up instinctively to touch his left side.
I had at least three ribs broken. I know what that feels like.
The contact was complete. His palm pressed flat against his ribs through the cycling suit, and there was nothing there—no catch on the inhale, no sharp complaint when he turned.
He started to say something.
The second effect arrived before he could.
Potential Guidance worked differently from healing—less like repair and more like a door being opened. It didn't add anything that wasn't already there. It found what was present, dormant, waiting for conditions that hadn't arrived yet, and it moved those conditions forward until the potential expressed itself on its own terms.
The sensation was difficult to describe except as expansion—a depth perceived that hadn't been accessible before, a ceiling that had defined the room for years suddenly absent. Energy moved through him from some source that felt internal and permanent rather than borrowed. His hands started glowing faintly.
He looked at his hands.
The armor he'd worn for the past two years—calibrated to fit, comfortable, broken in—was suddenly tight across the shoulders.
If the cake monster came back right now—
The thought completed itself without effort.
Beside him, invisible to anyone without enhanced perception, F-boy had already raised his hand.
Element Pickup.
The technique swept through the newly-awakened energy, finding its structure, reading its composition. What Jordan's perception registered was not a single thing but a sequence—layers of accumulated intent expressing itself as something that qualified, in the card system's judgment, as a genuine ability:
The Roar of Justice. Justice Crash. Justice in the Arms. The Fist of Justice.
And underneath all of them, the foundation:
Unyielding Justice.
[Fantasy Card: Unyielding Justice] Type: Ability • Rarity: R (Blue) The unique superpower developed by Mumen Rider following the activation of his dormant potential. Born from years of absolute conviction and the will to stand regardless of outcome.
Unyielding Power: Base attributes increase proportionally with injury severity and willpower concentration. Stackable. Persists as long as the will does.Unyielding Will: The first potentially fatal blow received in battle is converted to a critical injury instead, substantially amplifying fighting spirit. Does not impair combat function until the battle is resolved.
Classification: R-rank. Considered exceptional among R-rank cards. More a crystallization of character than an acquired technique.
Jordan sat for a moment with the card's impression still fresh.
Then he looked at the list of named techniques that had preceded it.
The Roar of Justice. Justice Crash. Justice in the Arms. The Fist of Justice.
Each one a real thing—not performed, not constructed for impact, but the actual names this man had given to his own techniques, riding his bicycle to Tiger-level incidents, alone, as C-Class Rank 1.
He didn't copy the card. He already carried something similar at a higher tier—Garou's Undying Will, earned at the cost of much greater suffering and expressed differently. The R-rank version of this wasn't something Jordan needed.
But what he felt, looking at the list, wasn't about need.
His respect was not a small thing, and it was entirely genuine.
Jordan stood.
"Super Cop—my injuries—" Mumen Rider had torn the bandages from his arms, staring at the unmarked skin beneath, moving his hands through a range of motion that should have produced sharp objection and produced nothing. His voice had gone quiet with something that wasn't quite disbelief and wasn't quite comprehension. "And my power—what—"
Jordan had already stepped toward the park exit, sunlight falling at an angle that caught his hair.
He didn't turn.
"If you want to keep growing and do more things," he said, "come find me in Z-City."
The air where he'd been standing rippled once, the faint shimmer of a spatial displacement, and then the bench was behind him and the park was empty of anyone but Mumen Rider.
The C-Class hero stood in the afternoon light with his hands open at his sides.
He looked at them for a long moment—the faint glow fading now, the warmth settling into something that felt permanent rather than temporary, a baseline that was simply different than it had been this morning.
He closed his hands.
His knuckles were steady.
He stood there quietly, and felt the shape of what had just been handed to him.
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