What Saitama had actually heard in Jordan's suggestion was a precise distillation of its essential components:
No cooking. No dishes. Free hot pot.
He was off the tatami before Jordan finished the sentence. His outline blurred, resolved, and when the motion settled he was standing in the complete Caped Baldy battle suit—yellow jacket, white cape, red gloves—with the expression of a man who had not moved quickly but had simply appeared in a different configuration.
Jordan gave this a moment of quiet appreciation. When he'd returned from the Dragon Ball world, the ki-training residue had done things to his casual movement speed that he still sometimes noticed. Apparently Saitama, living at close quarters, had picked something up from the ambient example.
One who stays near fire gets warm, Jordan thought. Even when the fire doesn't notice it's warm.
They left together.
Behind them, the apartment settled into the particular quiet of a space that has been inhabited all day and then suddenly isn't.
Lights off. Evening light through the window. The spot on the tatami where Saitama had been lying all afternoon still held the warm impression of someone who had been there a long time.
In the corner of the living room, a figure in a purple suit uncrossed his legs from the sofa, snapped his fingers once, and went to work.
The spot where Saitama had been glimmered faintly—the residue of something extraordinary dissipating back toward the universe's general balance, wanting to disperse. F-boy redirected it with the practiced efficiency of someone who had been doing this for months and had developed strong opinions about optimal harvesting windows.
The white cards assembled themselves and settled into his palm, one by one.
On each one, a simple-featured, dead-eyed, carefree face grinned up at him.
F-boy regarded the growing stack with the expression of a professional who had made peace with the nature of his work.
The Z-City Hero Association branch's VIP dining room was, by any reasonable standard, an excellent facility. Private rooms, quality ingredients sourced at the association's expense, and—for S-Class heroes—complimentary access.
The logistics department coordinator who managed the branch's culinary budget had not, when she had authorized the evening reservation, fully processed the implication of two S-Class heroes dining together in the same sitting.
She had a clearer picture now.
The damage assessment she was mentally compiling as she escorted Jordan and Saitama toward the exit covered: three premium wagyu hot pot sets completely consumed, two additional broth refills, side dishes that had required three restocking trips, and a final dessert course that had arrived as a polite gesture and departed as a casualty.
More than half a month's worth of high-end ingredients. One meal. Two people.
She maintained a professional expression all the way to the branch gate.
"Please take care, gentlemen."
Don't look down at the tally sheet.
Don't ask how long the kitchen staff will be cleaning.
The only dignified response is to thank them for visiting and process the requisition form for emergency resupply.
"The ingredients were very fresh," Saitama said, with complete sincerity. "Thank you for the hospitality."
"Yes, thank you," Jordan added.
The coordinator smiled.
She waited until they had cleared the gate, then turned to face the direction of the kitchen with the quiet composure of a person recalibrating their expectations for the rest of the evening.
The night air was clean. City sounds, the first stars above the association building's roofline, the comfortable weight of a meal that had been genuinely good.
Jordan tilted his head at the sky. "I have to step out for a bit. Head back without me."
Saitama patted his stomach twice—a resonant sound, the tactile satisfaction of someone whose internal calibration had been thoroughly addressed. "I'll walk around anyway. See if anything needs handling."
Jordan looked at him.
"You just ate."
"I need to digest something." He shrugged, as if hero patrols and digestion walks were a natural pairing that required no further justification. "Besides, if something comes up—"
"—you're already outside."
"Efficiency."
Jordan pointed at him. "That's the most thoughtful thing you've said all week."
"Don't push it."
They separated at the gate—Saitama's leg lifting in that particular high-stepping walk of his, the one that looked leisurely and covered ground at a pace that would have required most people to jog. Jordan watched him for a moment, then raised a hand to his brow.
Ki-sense extended outward and east, past Z-City's boundary, past the intermediate cities, ranging toward City A with the clean, passive precision that a year of Dragon Ball training had refined into something almost automatic.
A green flash.
Jordan was gone.
City A. Train Station.
The creature had been in a suitcase.
This detail, which would have been the headline in any normal incident report, was something that Tatsumaki processed and filed in approximately the time it takes to make a decision. The creature was now in two pieces on the platform, having made the error of being present when she arrived. The passengers it had been eating were no longer inside it, which meant they were currently falling.
She redirected her attention to all of them simultaneously.
Hundreds of spherical telekinetic shields deployed in a cascade, each one perfectly calibrated to the mass and velocity of the person it was catching, each one decelerating and lowering with the careful efficiency of someone who had done this particular task often enough to not find it interesting anymore. The passengers touched down on the platform surface without a scrape between them.
"Thank you, Miss Tornado!"
"Miss Tornado is amazing!"
"Miss Tornado—"
She was already in the air, gone before the third repetition.
The city lights fell away beneath her. The wind at altitude had a specific quality—clean, consistent, the kind that existed at heights where complications didn't tend to follow. She exhaled once.
Then her perception registered something ahead, and a fraction of a second later she hit a wall.
Warm. Solid. Familiar.
Two arms. Jordan.
The psychic field she'd been radiating—sharp-edged from the combat focus—softened on contact, the way a clenched hand opens when it recognizes what it's holding. She took a moment to register that she'd flown directly into him, then arranged her expression into something that communicated this had not been her intention and she was currently assessing how to feel about it.
"What are you doing here," she said flatly.
"Visiting." Jordan's expression was completely easy. "Is that a problem?"
Her eyes moved to the left. "...Not particularly."
"What kind of answer is 'not particularly.'"
"The accurate kind."
They were approximately two hundred meters above City A's skyline, and the exchange that followed involved several telekinetic constructs, varying degrees of seriousness, and a quantity of ambient psychic discharge that the residents below interpreted as an unusually vivid meteor shower and made genuine wishes upon. Jordan had the advantage of finding the whole thing funny. Tatsumaki had the advantage of being Tatsumaki.
The outcome was the same as it always was when Jordan deployed what he privately called Serious Headpat Mode: approximately thirty seconds of increasingly halfhearted resistance, followed by the specific expression of someone who had decided that the dignity points available were not worth the continued expenditure of energy.
She let him keep his hand on her head.
The psychic discharge faded.
City A's night sky returned to normal.
They found a place to change—civilian clothes, nothing that announced what either of them was or what had just happened two hundred meters up—and reappeared on the commercial street as two ordinary people on an evening out.
The most accurate word for it was couple, though this was a word that both of them had arrived at through a process that involved very little direct discussion and a great deal of implicit agreement.
The food street was busy at this hour, which suited them. Busy meant anonymous.
Jordan found a roadside izakaya with curtains and two outdoor seats and steered them in. The owner—stocky, middle-aged, a towel over one shoulder—took their order with the practiced speed of someone who had been doing this for twenty years and appeared not to notice anything unusual about his customers beyond the fact that one of them was very tall and the other was very small.
"Your cold noodles and deluxe skewer set!" The plates landed in front of Jordan—the noodles thick with ingredients, three varieties of charcoal-grilled skewer arranged on the adjacent plate with the slight char marks that indicated a competent operator of the equipment. "And your fruit salad platter, miss! Take your time!"
Tatsumaki looked at the fruit salad and the two small side dishes that constituted her order. She picked up her fork.
Jordan worked through the cold noodles with the systematic attention of a man applying himself to a task. The skewers followed. He was on the second plate before Tatsumaki had finished half her salad.
"You already ate," she said. It was not a question.
"The association hot pot, with Saitama."
She looked at the empty plate. Then at the new plate arriving. "And you're eating again."
"Meals and snacks are completely separate categories," Jordan explained. "Different stomachs. The science is settled."
Tatsumaki's expression communicated that she found this argument structurally unsound but was not going to invest further in dismantling it.
Behind them, the city lights were fully on now, City A's commercial district doing what commercial districts do at 9PM—busy, bright, the particular warmth of people being out because they want to be rather than because they have to be. The curtains of the izakaya created a quieter pocket inside it, the kind of space where conversations don't carry.
Tatsumaki finished her fruit salad. She considered the two remaining side dishes and ate about half of each.
"Done?" Jordan asked.
She folded her napkin.
The commercial street was less crowded away from the main drag—the same lights, fewer people, the kind of pace that actually permitted walking rather than navigating.
Tatsumaki had her hand in Jordan's. This had happened the way most things between them had happened: without announcement, through a series of small movements that each individually required nothing, and collectively added up to something neither of them felt the need to name out loud.
She did, however, notice that she was walking. On the ground. Under her own feet.
This was unusual enough that she was aware of it.
"You said you had something for me," she said.
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