The entertainment area had a small lounge near the entrance—circular table, good chairs, a coffee station that a clone managed with the focused dedication of someone who had been given one domain and intended to master it.
Jordan sat. Dr. Genus sat across from him. Mosquito Girl took the seat to Jordan's left as part of the formal escort arrangement, then apparently decided that the coffee on the table was interesting, and picked up the nearest cup.
She took a sip.
"Mm—" Her compound eyes widened fractionally. "Hot!"
She set it down.
Dr. Genus looked at the cup. Then at Mosquito Girl. Then at Jordan. He appeared to be composing several responses and discarding each of them on the grounds that none of them would accomplish anything useful.
He did not get angry.
He did, very quietly, slide his own cup across the table toward Jordan.
Jordan accepted this without comment and took a sip.
Mosquito Girl, now aware that she had made a minor error in cup identification, resolved the situation by rising from her chair, moving around to Jordan's side of the table, and beginning to work on his shoulders with the efficient application of approximately the right amount of pressure—the kind that suggested she had either been specifically trained in this or had very good instincts about where tension accumulates.
Jordan noted that the strength calibration was genuinely good. Not too much, not too little. The compound eyes and the horns remained; the technique was flawless.
Dr. Genus, he thought again, has not been idle.
They ran through the administrative agenda first—the Hero Association placement strategy, social identity construction, coverage distribution. Jordan outlined the approach; Dr. Genus took notes with the focused efficiency of someone who had been running a research organization for five decades and knew how to receive operational instructions without needing them repeated.
"Standard hero activities," Jordan said. "No special operations until I say so. Let them build track records—become reliable names at their respective ranks. That's the foundation."
"Understood."
"If anyone in the association approaches them about side work—informal assignments, jobs that aren't logged through official channels—I want the complete chain of evidence. Who made the approach, what they asked for, what they implied. Everything."
Dr. Genus's glasses caught the lounge light as he nodded. "Logged and reported."
Jordan read the adjustment in his expression and knew what it meant. The doctor had followed the thread to its natural conclusion: assets embedded in the Hero Association, tasked with documenting internal corruption, connected back to Jordan. He was smart enough to see where it was going and pragmatic enough not to require further explanation.
As long as I'm here, Jordan thought, the House of Evolution's pieces move the way I point them. He believed this not because of the Sharingan—though that option remained available—but because of what Mind Network confirmed every time he made contact with the doctor's thoughts. The devotion was genuine. The reformed-academic quality was genuine. Dr. Genus had looked at the door Jordan opened and walked through it, and he hadn't looked back.
"You had something to report?" Jordan prompted.
"Yes." The doctor accepted the tablet from the clone who'd been waiting nearby and turned it to face Jordan. "Two items. Interconnected."
The first: the seven subjects weren't finished.
Dr. Genus's framing was precise—the initial batch represented version 1.0, a clean proof of concept for the genetic superpower modulation approach. Their starting floor was extraordinary by any standard. But in a world where the monster threat ceiling was not static, extraordinary starting points became ordinary midpoints over time. A superhuman who couldn't improve was, eventually, just a human with unusually good first-year performance.
The House of Evolution's foundational expertise wasn't in creating superhumans. It was in modifying existing biological systems—enhancement, augmentation, the long tradition of taking what was already there and making it structurally better. This expertise had not gone anywhere when the research focus shifted.
Physical transformation. Mechanical augmentation. The upgrade pathways were already designed; they simply needed to be applied to a new baseline.
Jordan nodded. The logic was sound. The monsters would keep getting stronger. The superhumans needed a growth trajectory, not a ceiling.
The second item was the more interesting one.
Carnage Kabuto had left behind complete genetic data and tissue samples. The experiment had failed on the ambition of creating the ultimate creature. What the failure had produced, incidentally, was a comprehensive catalog of high-performance genetic sequences that hadn't existed in usable form before.
Dr. Genus proposed extracting the viable segments and synthesizing gene enhancers—injectable compounds that could push a compatible human subject's baseline upward in targeted areas. The initial clinical trials would run on the seven subjects, using their already-stable sequences as a controlled environment. The longer-term projection extended the technology outward: to naturally gifted individuals who were approaching but hadn't reached extraordinary thresholds, and eventually, at reduced intensity, to the general population.
Jordan listened to all of this and did not respond immediately.
Dr. Genus, who had learned to read silences, went still.
Jordan tapped the table once. "The project can run. But every phase requires a report before the next one begins. Nothing advances without my sign-off."
"Of course." No hesitation. "That's how it should work."
"I'm not refusing it," Jordan clarified. "I want you to understand why the oversight exists."
He set down his coffee.
The OPM world operated on a principle that most people in it had never consciously articulated, because most people in it had never needed to. But Jordan, coming in from outside, had catalogued it early: will determines the shape of matter here. Not metaphorically. Structurally. The world's physics had a relationship with human psychology that the world he'd come from simply didn't share.
Saitama was the extreme case—a man who wanted to be strong enough that there was nothing left to fight and just kept wanting it until his body had nowhere left to go. The other direction was less inspiring but equally documented: hate, resentment, inadequacy, obsession, any negative emotional state sustained long enough and intensely enough, and the world's physics began to accommodate it. Onion-sellers became Onion Head. Telephone poles grew legs. A manhole cover could, under the right conditions of existential grievance, become a threat level Tiger.
Gene enhancement that put extraordinary physical capability into the hands of ordinary people was, in most worlds, a research ethics question.
In this world, it was also a stability question.
"The enhancement works," Jordan said. "The problem is who receives it and what they do with it afterward. Someone with a strong enough reason to become better gets better. Someone who wants power as an end in itself, who's already carrying something dark—" He didn't finish the sentence. The implication was visible in every case file the Hero Association had ever generated about monster origin conditions.
Dr. Genus was quiet for a moment.
Then he set down his pen.
"I should have accounted for that," he said. "I apologize, Boss. That was an oversight."
He said it simply, without performance. The cold sweat was real—Jordan could read it—but the apology itself was clean. Not the backpedaling of someone caught doing something wrong. The genuine acknowledgment of a researcher who had followed a problem to its solution without following it all the way to its consequences.
Jordan looked at him.
Eighty years of doing this work. And he's still capable of the moment where he says he missed something and means it.
"Don't be nervous, Doctor." He kept his voice level. "I know your intentions are good."
Dr. Genus looked up.
"The project runs on your timeline," Jordan said. "With reporting requirements. That's all I'm changing." He paused. "I trust you to do the work correctly. I'm adding the oversight because the work is significant enough to require it, not because I doubt you."
The doctor's posture settled—not relaxed, but resolved. The difference between a man carrying a weight he isn't sure he deserves and a man carrying a weight he's been told is appropriate and manageable.
"Understood, Boss."
From this moment forward, Jordan quietly extended the Mind Network's presence across every corridor and laboratory of the House of Evolution—not intrusively, not searching, but present. A background awareness. If something changed in the doctor's intentions, or in the intentions of any clone, Jordan would know before it became a problem.
He was fairly confident he wouldn't need it.
Dr. Genus had chosen his direction when he looked at what the House of Evolution could become and decided to build a city capable of housing disaster survivors. The evil scientist who had once drafted plans for the extinction of old humanity had, somewhere between the Carnage Kabuto defeat and the completion of the new base's residential sector, returned to the version of himself that had gone into science in the first place.
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