The citizens recognized him before he'd crossed half the block.
"He's here!"
"The hero's arrived!"
"The top C-Class—Mumen Rider!"
The name spread through the gathered crowd in a wave of genuine warmth, people who had been pressed against shop fronts and parked cars straightening up, some of them actually clapping. The cyclist came on hard, legs driving, standing on the pedals, and the enthusiasm that met him was the kind that couldn't be manufactured—this was a crowd that knew who was coming and was genuinely glad about it.
Even the cake monster paused its rampage to stare.
Mumen Rider hit the intersection at full speed, and what happened next was the product of obvious repetition: he left the saddle while still moving, letting the bike carry forward on its own momentum as he landed running beside it, two quick strides to match its speed—and then his hands caught the handlebars again and he heaved.
The bicycle became a projectile.
"Justice Crash!!"
The front wheel connected squarely with the monster's face. The chocolate surface compressed, shattered, reformed—the monster's entire upper mass rippled like something being shaken in a bowl, its balance going completely. It toppled backward into the ruined shop frontage with a crash that sent the remaining intact dessert display rattling off its mounting.
In the half-second the monster spent hitting the ground, Jordan stepped forward and put a hand on the shop assistant's arm.
She came out of her daze fast—adrenaline did that—and looked up at him with the particular expression of someone who has just processed that the person helping them is, objectively, quite something.
"Hey," she said. "Thank you—you're—"
"Keep moving." Jordan guided her firmly toward the gathered crowd, putting bodies between her and the combat zone. "Go now. This area's about to get worse."
She went, glancing back once.
You're about three years too late for that to go anywhere, Jordan thought, and besides, this version is already taken.
He turned back to the street.
Mumen Rider had landed in a wide stance, hands raised in a guard that combined elements of several different fighting styles without being precisely any of them. His goggles were fogged at the edges from the exertion of the ride. His helmet was slightly crooked from the dismount.
He looked, in Jordan's entirely honest assessment, exactly like what he was: a man with no extraordinary physical gifts, who had arrived at a Tiger-level threat on a bicycle, and was preparing to fight it.
"The Mumen Rider is here!!"
"MUMEN RIDER!" Multiple voices at once from the crowd behind the barriers. Some of them were chanting it. The hero was genuinely beloved in this district—not in the way that powerful S-Class heroes generated awe, but in a warmer, more personal register. These were people who had seen him show up.
The cake monster, which had been pulling itself upright from the rubble, extracted a fist from the pavement and looked at its own face. The bicycle's impact had left a significant crater in the chocolate surface, which was already slowly filling back in as the mousse composition reformed.
Chocolate chunks fell away as it healed. Its eyes refocused on the rider.
"You insignificant human." The temperature in its voice had dropped several degrees. "You're going to regret that."
It reached up with both hands and plunged them into the chocolate mass at the top of its head. When it pulled them out, it was holding two spherical projectiles the size of basketballs—dark chocolate shells, dripping, still warm enough to produce a faint steam.
"Sugar-Coated Bullets."
It threw them.
Mumen Rider was already moving—read the windup, committed to the dodge without hesitation, rolling sideways across the pavement as both projectiles sailed through the space he'd occupied. They hit the greenery strip behind him at full force, the chocolate detonating across two meters of flower beds and tree trunks, splattering everything in a wide radius before the liquid began to cool and harden, the fluid mess setting rapidly into a solid sculptural mass that encased the plants like a cast.
Mumen Rider came up from the roll, looked at what was now a chocolate-encased shrub, and spent exactly one second recalibrating his threat assessment of this particular monster.
Sealed in that, I couldn't move. And it runs hot.
"Well." The monster pulled two more projectiles from its head, grinning. "Now you know what you're dealing with—"
"You missed twice, though."
The monster's grin flickered.
"Both shots. Wide left on the first one, long on the second." Jordan hadn't moved from his position at the edge of the cleared space. "You were telegraphing the throw."
A few members of the crowd—the ones who hadn't run yet and appeared to have made a collective decision to experience this event—nodded with the energy of people who found this assessment credible.
"...That is a fair point," someone said.
The cake monster stood very still.
Its eyes moved from Jordan to the crowd to the rider and back to Jordan. A tremor went through its chocolate exterior—not from damage. Something more involuntary.
It had been arguing with people since it emerged from the shop. Every declaration it made was immediately undercut. Every righteous speech was met with factual corrections. Every dramatic moment was interrupted by someone pointing out the specific flaw in its execution.
There were a lot of humans. They all seemed to have opinions. And they were all looking at it.
How, it thought, in whatever passed for coherent thought in a cake monster, is this repairable?
It chose the only available response: conversion of social discomfort into forward velocity.
"I'VE PUT UP WITH YOU LONG ENOUGH, TALKATIVE HUMAN—DESSERT CHARIOT!"
The monster hurled its loaded projectiles aside—both of them, discarded—crossed its arms in a large X across its chest, and folded. Its cylindrical body tilted and dropped sideways, hit the pavement, and immediately began rotating. The spin accelerated within seconds, the monster's mass becoming a wheel of churning chocolate and cream, trailing chocolate streaks across the pavement as it built toward Jordan at the edge of the space.
It covered the first ten meters very fast.
A chocolate chunk hit it in the side of the face.
The spin destabilized. The monster skidded, overcorrected, and completed a confused half-rotation before righting itself—and found, upon righting itself, that Mumen Rider was between it and the crowd, hands still outstretched from the throw, breathing hard.
"Hey—!" Mumen Rider had already refocused, stance wide, voice cutting through the street noise. "The civilians aren't your target! I am!!"
The cake monster looked at him.
Then it looked past him at the line of citizens who had failed to clear the area in time—who were pressed against the wall of the building behind Mumen Rider, nowhere left to go.
Its trajectory adjusted.
Jordan had been moving already—a half-step toward the fight, position calculated, the timing clean. One well-placed intervention, clean and unattributed. The monster would fold before it completed the charge. No one needed to see anything except a monster suddenly stopping.
He stopped instead.
Mumen Rider hadn't moved.
The Dessert Chariot reformed and accelerated, the monster's rotating mass closing the distance between them, and Mumen Rider spread his arms wide—not as a fighting stance. As a barrier. Planting himself between the incoming impact and the people behind him with an absolute finality, the decision already made, the calculus already complete.
From where Jordan was standing, he had a clear line of sight.
He also had a perception threshold that most people didn't. The Sharingan's passive registration, the Mind Network's constant ambient read of bioelectric signatures, the layered sensory system that came with every power source he carried—all of it was operational, all of it was pointed at the same thing.
And he saw it.
It was faint. Not chakra—nothing that structured. Not psychic energy in any recognizable form. Something that condensed from the body under extreme conviction, from the absolute certainty of a person who was going to stand here regardless of the outcome: a faint luminescence, present for a fraction of a second, that pushed against the ambient air like something real.
Jordan's eyes narrowed.
Interesting.
The impact was massive. The Dessert Chariot hit Mumen Rider head-on with the full weight of a charging Tiger-level monster, and the sound it produced was not the sound of a man being destroyed.
It was the sound of something meeting resistance.
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