On the rooftop in City A, the shadow clone finished the last burger and considered the video feed from the surveillance device.
This is freely watchable content?
He took a long pull from his soda and watched Makoi's office with the professionally detached interest of someone conducting surveillance rather than witnessing a personal choice someone had made about their afternoon.
The recording was running. The evidence was compiling itself automatically. None of this required immediate escalation.
The clone checked the Mind Network's ambient data, determined that nothing required urgent attention in the next few hours, and settled back into the chair he'd constructed from a nearby AC unit's housing bracket.
The original can deal with this when the shift ends. He smiled to himself with the specific satisfaction of a man who has found an entirely defensible reason to do nothing. I'll flag it at handoff. That's responsible information management.
Somewhere across the city, through the Mind Network's ambient thread:
You absolute idiot.
The clone raised his soda. You're welcome.
Jordan filed the note—Makoi, new contact, Zombieman, keep monitoring—in the back of his mind and moved on. The Hero Association's internal problems had a timeline. Makoi wasn't going anywhere, and moving against him prematurely would only collapse what was still a useful intelligence source. Let him run. Let the evidence accumulate. There would be a proper moment.
The training site was more immediately interesting.
The land Lanny had secured was exactly what the description had suggested: a broad expanse of Z-City's uninhabited zone, formerly occupied by a row of buildings that had been abandoned after the last major monster incursion had made the area commercially nonviable. The demolition work had been handled by Genos, who had arrived early in the morning and completed the job with his Incineration Cannon in a timeframe that would have taken a professional crew several days.
Jordan arrived to find clean rubble and scorched earth in four football fields of space.
He clapped his hands together.
Earth Release. Foundation work first.
"Ninja Art: Earth Release — Foundation Modification!"
The ground moved.
Chakra converted to matter—tons of earth displaced and restructured at the command of the technique, the charred debris of the former buildings swept down and under as fresh soil surged up to replace it. The process shook the ground for a radius of several hundred meters, raising small clouds of disturbed dust at the edges of the site. Five minutes later, the foundation was level, solid, and clear.
"Plant Manipulation — Lawn Cultivation!"
The Plant Manipulation card was R-rank. In most combat scenarios, against a determined opponent, it would have been a mild inconvenience. But cultivation was a different category of application, and with Jordan's chakra reserves behind it, the gap between R-rank and "functionally unlimited" closed fast.
Green pushed up from the cleared ground in spreading waves—grass first, then the denser growth that would define the path edges and serve as natural boundary markers. The empty expanse began to take shape: open training space, bordered sections, the beginning of something that looked designed rather than improvised.
Then came the capsules.
Dr. Kuseno's delivery had arrived on schedule—an alloy storage case containing rows of custom Capsule Corporation units, each one a folded building waiting to be thrown. Jordan walked the site, following the green lines the plants had marked as paths, placing capsules at the designated coordinates.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
White smoke cleared to reveal dormitories. Classrooms. A training hall. An equipment storage building. Administrative offices. Each one landing at precise angles—occasionally corrected by a quick telekinetic nudge when a capsule's trajectory put a building two degrees off-axis.
By the end of the afternoon, the site had a shape. By the end of the week, it had everything else.
The facilities were functional. The curriculum framework was drafted. The instructor schedule—such as it was, given that most of the instructors had been recruited through hot pot dinners and casual conversation—had been confirmed. Applications were open.
The response was immediate.
The Hero Association's internal channels and the media coverage Lanny had arranged reached the professional hero population efficiently, and the professional hero population responded with the enthusiasm of a demographic that had, apparently, been waiting for exactly this kind of opportunity. By the application deadline, the Z-City branch's intake staff had reviewed and compiled over two hundred qualified submissions.
The staff organized them alphabetically, flagged the ones that required escalation, and collectively decided that anything requiring a judgment call was above their pay grade.
They left a note for the director and went home.
At four in the afternoon, Lanny received the compiled folder and sat down at her desk.
She opened it.
The first page had a photograph.
She looked at it.
"...Atomic Samurai?"
She read through the attached documentation to confirm she was reading it correctly. She was.
Atomic Samurai—S-Class Rank 4, Kamikaze, one of the Hero Association's most senior combat-class heroes, with a reputation that preceded him into every room by several minutes—had submitted a personal application to a training program he was objectively qualified to run himself.
She turned the page.
Iaian, A-Class. Rank three. Personal disciple.
Okamaitachi, A-Class. Another disciple.
Bushidrill, A-Class. Third disciple.
Lanny set the folder down.
She picked up the phone.
"Hello, this is Jordan."
"Director Evans." She kept her voice professional. "The registration period has closed. We've compiled everything into a formal booklet." A brief pause. "I'd like you to come to the branch and confirm the final roster in person."
"I thought we were doing random selection from the qualified pool. That's straightforward enough to delegate."
"It was," Lanny said. "The current situation is somewhat complicated."
He appeared in her office approximately ninety seconds later, which was a thing she had mostly gotten used to.
Jordan looked at her with the mild expression of someone who has detected that news is coming. "You specifically said you wanted this program to be the branch's outstanding project for the year. Don't tell me you're giving up before the first class starts."
Lanny had the grace to look sheepish, which was not an expression he saw from her often. "In your words—plans don't always keep up with developments."
"You've been listening."
"Someone has to." She gestured at the folder on the desk.
Jordan picked it up. Opened it. Looked at the first page.
He looked at it for a few seconds.
"Atomic Samurai."
"Yes."
"An S-class hero applied to attend the first cohort of a training program he is demonstrably overqualified for."
"Yes."
Jordan turned to the next page. Then the next. Then sat with the accumulation of information for a moment. "And he brought his three disciples with him."
Lanny spread her hands slightly, the gesture of a woman who has done her part and is now passing the decision up the chain.
"That's four of ten spots," Jordan said, mostly to himself. He set the folder down, picked it up again, weighed it. "No wonder you called."
"I didn't feel it was my place to decide."
He looked at her for a moment, something between exasperation and approval moving across his face. Then he tucked the folder under his arm.
"I'll take it. I'll sort it out."
He was already moving toward the door—or rather, the spatial displacement point he typically used instead of the door.
Lanny stood and bowed slightly toward the space he'd occupied. "Take care, Jordan."
The air settled.
She looked at the empty room for a moment, decided she had done a competent job today, and went to sign off the afternoon's remaining reports.
Saitama's apartment. Evening.
Jordan sat at the table with the folder open, working through the applications one by one.
Two hundred and fourteen qualified submissions. Ten spots. One pilot cohort that was supposed to be small, controlled, and functional enough to serve as proof of concept for whatever came next.
He'd had, when the idea first occurred to him, a fairly clear picture of what the first class would look like: ten professional heroes at the A or B-class level, technically capable but stalling out, the kind of people who had hit a ceiling and needed structured support to break through it. Manageable. Teachable. A cohort that would generate results without generating complications.
The application from Atomic Samurai and his three disciples complicated the picture considerably.
He sat with it.
Good intentions, he thought, don't guarantee clean outcomes. He'd started this because he'd watched Mumen Rider get sent into a tree by a cake monster and thought what if there were more people who could actually fight back. The program had grown from there—sensibly, he thought—into something with structure and resources and serious instructors.
But ten spots was ten spots. Expanding on a whim would defeat the entire purpose of running a controlled pilot.
He closed the folder.
No expansion. First cohort stayed at ten. Whatever adjustments the roster needed, he'd make them case by case.
Good deeds, he thought wryly, have a way of getting complicated.
He reached for his tea.