Jordan was already three meters above the balcony before he consciously registered the teleport.
He took a breath, pressed a hand to his chest, and looked down.
"Some warning next time."
Saitama, standing where Jordan had been standing, had the flat-eyed expression of a man who has been accused of something entirely reasonable.
"I wasn't doing anything. I just wanted to ask—" He tilted his head. "You said you were transferring a hundred million first?"
"Yes."
"As in, to start."
"It seemed like a reasonable opening amount. I wasn't sure of the exact figure."
Saitama was quiet for a moment.
Poverty limits my imagination, he thought, in the privacy of his own head, and said nothing.
The S-class stipend was good. Genos's tuition contributions were substantial. The number Jordan had just recited to a phone contact as casually as ordering delivery was a different category of quantity entirely.
"So," Saitama said, with the composure of a man putting something into a mental filing cabinet. "When does the class start?"
Jordan floated back down to the balcony. "Why are you and Genos both more invested in the timeline than I am?"
No answer was offered. From the kitchen came the sound of a ladle.
Less than a day later, Lanny had secured land use approval.
The relevant Z-City municipal office had reviewed the application, noted that the proposed training site was located in a notoriously depopulated zone that the city had been paying for emergency response visits to for years, and processed everything at the fastest available speed. Then, as a gesture of civic goodwill, they tripled the approved land area without being asked.
Four football fields of monster-adjacent wasteland, the supervising official had apparently thought. Take it. Please take all of it. We were going to fence it off anyway.
Jordan brought the documents home.
Saitama looked at the land area specification for a long time.
"You bought this," he said. It was less a question than a statement of something he was working to integrate.
"Used."
"From the government."
"They were very motivated to approve it quickly."
Jordan had spent about a year operating in Saitama's vicinity as something roughly approximating a normal person—picking up groceries, complaining about work, arguing about hot pot ingredients. Watching Saitama recalibrate now was, privately, very funny.
"I was going to tell you eventually," Jordan said. "I'm not broke."
A beat from the kitchen. Genos's voice, with the careful accuracy of someone providing relevant data: "I also have savings."
Saitama looked at the kitchen doorway.
Then back at Jordan.
Then at the documents.
"...How much savings."
"The S-class stipend," Genos said, emerging with a bowl of cut vegetables, "accumulates significantly when one does not have rent or grocery expenses."
Saitama looked at the ceiling for a moment and then appeared to reach a philosophical acceptance.
The Hot Pot Group received the news with characteristic variety.
King called twice—once to confirm the details, once to ask about the electromagnetic theory curriculum and whether Jordan expected him to prepare lesson materials. Jordan told him to teach whatever he felt like teaching. King said he'd think about it. His voice had the quality of someone who had not been asked to explain things to other people before and found the prospect unexpectedly interesting.
Tatsumaki's response arrived through an oblique channel—Fubuki mentioned, during a brief window of contact, that her sister had heard about the program and had described the participants as "not my problem, but probably someone's." Which was, from Tatsumaki, close to a blessing.
Fubuki herself had barely been findable. The Blizzard Group's operations had expanded considerably since the spring, and the schedule showed it.
Garou sent no response because Garou was currently occupied.
The situation with Garou was, from a certain angle, Jordan's fault.
The Potential Guidance applied to Bang several weeks ago had worked as intended—ten times the power, dramatically elevated baseline capacity, the kind of improvement that left a man feeling, as Bang had described it privately, as though I'd been carrying a weight I'd stopped noticing. The master of Flowing Water Rock Smashing Fist had responded to this development the way he responded to most things: by training harder.
Significantly harder.
C-class heroes operating in Z-City had recently discovered that their weekly hero incident quota had become a daily one. Bang, who ran the informal oversight on Garou's field activities, had implemented this change with the serene certainty of a man who sees no reason why more training would not produce more results.
Garou—C-class Rank 5, hero designation Water Wolf Warrior, currently completing his fourth incident of the day—had the specific expression of someone trying to identify which decision in their life had led here.
Why is he so energetic all of a sudden, Garou thought, dispatching a Wolf-level with the tired efficiency of accumulated practice. What happened to the gentle old man.
Back at the dojo, a master who had recently discovered he had been training at a fraction of his actual capacity rolled his neck and looked at his updated sparring schedule.
That kid's been performing adequately, Bang thought. So we can start the proper training.
The sounds that emanated from the dojo over the next hour sent birds off their perches for a hundred meters in every direction.
The next morning, Jordan arrived at the Z-City Hero Association branch in time for the press conference Lanny had organized.
She'd put it together with the focused efficiency that apparently came naturally to someone who had been managing S-class heroes' public relations in a branch office for the better part of a year. The live webcast was set up. The official announcement documents were prepared. The program details were clear, concise, and presented in a way that made the whole thing sound both credible and inevitable.
Jordan read through the program name on the materials and found it entirely appropriate.
S-Class Training Program.
Simple. Accurate. The teaching staff made the name obvious; there wasn't really any other thing to call it.
Afterward, before leaving, Lanny paused at the door and mentioned—with the precise casualness of someone who has been waiting for the right moment—that she'd taken the initiative to add the program to the Z-City branch's annual operational portfolio.
"The branch," she said, "will provide full administrative support."
Jordan looked at her.
Lanny looked back with the expression of someone whose performance evaluation for the year has just quietly resolved itself.
"Thank you, Lanny."
"Not at all."
In a makeup chair somewhere in the city center, a man with an immaculately angular face watched the live broadcast on a monitor while a stylist worked on his hair.
"He actually did it." Amai Mask's voice carried the particular quality of genuine, unguarded admiration—a rare register from someone who spent most of his public-facing hours in perfectly calibrated performance mode. "This is what an S-class hero should look like."
"Yes, yes—" The stylist, who had been trying to maintain professional composure for the past three minutes, gave up. "Amai Mask-sama has such perfect taste—"
"Contact our contracted advertising company." He was already looking at his phone. "Produce several promotional spots for the program. Prime time slots, complimentary. Bill it to my management office."
"Yes, Amai Mask-sama."
Deep in the mountains, a man with a weathered face and the relaxed posture of someone who had spent decades becoming very good at a single thing sat across from his three disciples and read the headline twice.
S-Class Training Program. Open to professional heroes who feel their current capability is insufficient. Voluntary enrollment. No fees.
Atomic Samurai set the paper down.
"Any hero who feels they're not where they should be is welcome to apply." He looked at each of his disciples in turn—Iaian, Okamaitachi, Bushidrill—with the expression of a man conducting an internal poll he already knew the result of. "Okamaitachi. Sign all four of us up."
Okamaitachi had the form open before he finished the sentence.
In a cell that had been gradually furnished, over the past three weeks, to a standard that other inmates were trying not to look at too closely, Puri-Puri Prisoner sat on a double bed that had no official explanation for its presence and watched the news broadcast with complete attention.
From behind, his prison uniform strained across a physique that was, by any structural measure, excessive for the purpose of wearing clothes. The muscles had the particular quality of something that had been developed through genuine conviction rather than mere routine.
The camera caught his face in the glow of the television.
His eyes had become hearts.
Tears were running down his face in earnest.
"He's doing this for free," Puri-Puri Prisoner said, to no one, his voice thick. "For free. Using his own resources to make all the boys in the Association stronger."
He made a sound that was half-sob and entirely sincere.
"He's so gentle." A pause. "Just like the ones I love."
The bed, which had not been rated for the force of someone that size getting to their feet with emotional urgency, expressed its objection structurally.
Puri-Puri Prisoner did not notice. He was on his feet, fist clenched, expression cycling from tearful to impassioned to something that burned with genuine purpose.
"I want to be like him." The voice had taken on the quality of a vow. "I want to use love to guide the boys who've lost their way. To protect them. To help them grow." A beat. "Those who resist the love will simply have to receive it more directly."
From the cell next door, the A-class wanted criminal who had been sharing this block for the past three weeks and had learned several things about himself that he hadn't previously known, pulled his blanket over his head.
Please, he thought, with great feeling, let someone come arrest me again.