The Hero Association's executive conference room was very quiet, and Sitch looked like a man standing in the eye of a hurricane he himself had summoned.
Only he knew the full scope of what he hadn't said.
The intelligence he'd just delivered to the room—the intelligence that had already turned a dozen senior officials pale—was the sanitized version. The curated version. The version stripped of the additional dozens of Demon-level elites and the virtually uncountable mass of lower-tier monsters that formed the Monster Association's rank-and-file body.
He'd given them enough truth to be useful. Not enough to cause cardiac events.
The centerpiece of his briefing was already doing plenty of damage on its own: the Elder Centipede, a Dragon-level calamity, had attacked S-City. A living weapon capable of absorbing buildings whole. And it had been defeated—but that wasn't the point the room was focused on.
The point was what lived alongside it.
When more than ten Dragon-level threats congregate under a unified command structure with a clear division of labor...
The thought completed itself without anyone needing to say it aloud. The silence that followed was the loudest thing in the room.
Then, all at once, the collective exhale hit—a sound that wasn't quite a gasp and wasn't quite a groan. Someone loosened their collar. Someone else stopped pretending to take notes. The temperature in the conference room seemed to physically climb, as if the air itself were sweating.
By the Hero Association's own threat classification standards, any entity capable of defeating Demon-level or higher disasters qualified for S-Class consideration. Dragon-level disasters—the kind that rendered multiple cities non-functional—typically required one or more S-Class heroes working in concert just to contain them.
The classification had been designed with precision. It separated ordinary heroes from the genuine apex tier. It kept Association deployments calibrated and efficient.
It had not been designed for this.
There were twenty-six cities within human-controlled territory. Ten Dragon-level monsters, distributed optimally, wouldn't even cover a full territorial sweep. They'd run out of cities before they ran out of monsters. And that was the minimum figure.
If the Monster Association launched a coordinated surprise offensive—no warning, no preparation window—
The term "God-level disaster" existed in the Association's classification framework as a theoretical worst case. An event capable of threatening humanity's extinction as a species.
It no longer felt theoretical.
The room's mood curdled further when someone ran the numbers on S-Class availability. Nineteen heroes currently active and reachable. Minus the Number One S-Class—"Blast"—who operated on his own schedule and answered to no one, whose whereabouts were functionally unknowable on any given day.
Eighteen, then.
Against what Sitch had described as a minimum estimate.
"So." A senior official broke the silence, voice carefully controlled. "What did 'Super Cop' say?"
Sitch had been expecting this question. He'd been quietly dreading it.
"The 'Super Cop,'" he said, pausing for a fraction of a second to compose himself, "has stated clearly that he intends to lead a team assault on the Monster Association." He cleared his throat. "His exact words, relayed through the liaison channel, were as follows."
He read from his notes.
"Have the liaisons of each branch contact all the S-Class heroes they can reach. Those who are interested in participating in this team-building activity should gather in the no-man's land of Z-City."
The room stared at him.
Sitch stared back, expression professionally neutral.
Team-building activity.
The phrase hung in the air of the executive conference room like a foreign object. An event significant enough to end human civilization, framed as something a mid-sized company might organize for quarterly morale. Several senior officials looked at each other with the eyes of people sharing a specific kind of suffering.
No one said anything for a long moment.
In the middle of the table, Makoi—Second Operations Director, cross-shaped eye patch over his glasses, the look of a man always calculating three moves ahead—let the silence stretch, then allowed a thin smile to settle on his lips.
He'd recently processed a rather profitable string of orders. Monster corpse procurement. Even requests for live specimens. The intelligence Jordan had just handed upward through the chain had, apparently, unstuck something in the market.
Business was good. He had every reason to be in a generous mood.
"Lord Sitch." He crossed his legs and raised one hand, the motion unhurried. "Given the scale of what we're facing, shouldn't we finally make contact with that lord? The one none of us have managed to reach?"
He didn't use the name. He didn't need to.
The realization rippled through the room in the span of a breath.
Blast.
The Number One S-Class hero. The one who appeared at headquarters occasionally—twice, three times a year if you were lucky—and operated entirely outside the Association's actual command structure. The one for whom Sitch served as dedicated contact, despite the fact that "dedicated contact" mostly meant leaving messages that may or may not be received by a man who may or may not be in this dimension.
"If Lord Blast were willing to intervene—"
"The Dragon-level threat count becomes manageable overnight."
"If Blast and Super Cop were fighting on the same side simultaneously—"
"Forget Dragon-level. That combination could probably end a country."
"Does anyone actually know where Blast is right now?"
"Don't be absurd. You see him at headquarters two, maybe three times a—"
The conversation fractured into overlapping voices. Not panic—these were professionals trained for composure—but the kind of tightly controlled urgency that looks calm from the outside and feels like drowning from the inside.
Sitch listened to all of it.
The vein at his temple throbbed once, twice, three times. He breathed through it.
Blast operated on missions of existential importance to the human species. Missions that, by their nature, couldn't be publicly disclosed. The fact that most of the room viewed this as dereliction of duty rather than the costly sacrifice it actually was—that was a frustration Sitch had long since accepted as part of the job. He would not be voicing it today.
"Master Blast is engaged in crucial work concerning the survival of humanity on a continuous basis," he said, tone measured. "Even I cannot guarantee contact at any given time. But I will make every effort."
He rose from his chair.
"A mobilization of Monster-Association scale is not natural. It is not coincidental. It is coordinated, strategic, and deliberately timed." He looked around the table. "Gentlemen. For us, this is war."
"Headquarters must act immediately. Every available resource goes toward supporting S-Class operations." He picked up his notes. "Meeting adjourned."
One phone call from Jordan Evans, and the Hero Association lurched into motion like a machine that had forgotten it was a machine.
The problem was finding anyone to actually send to war.
S-Class heroes, as a category, were famously difficult to locate. Their exclusive Association communication devices had a habit of being destroyed in the course of the violent, property-demolishing, occasionally city-leveling work they did on a weekly basis. Replacement cycles were ongoing. Coverage gaps were chronic.
Within hours, a small army of black-suited Association staff poured out of branch offices across every city—flooding streets, checking known haunts, calling every contact number on file—in a coordinated search that, from the outside, probably looked like a very organized kind of panic.
J-City. A coastal city.
The beachfront stadium near the Gold Coast resort had been built for spectacle, and tonight it was delivering. High-energy idol pop poured from the speakers in waves, a crystalline male voice threading through the bass—rich, practiced, technically flawless—as "Amai Mask" ran through a final sound check for the evening's concert.
The crowd wouldn't arrive for hours. The venue was his alone right now. The way he preferred it.
He finished the last run-through of the set-closer and walked offstage without breaking pace, heading for the dressing room. His reflection passed in every mirrored surface he moved through: perfectly composed, not a hair out of place, the practiced ease of someone who had never in his life performed accidentally.
The heavily made-up young assistant caught up to him just as he reached the makeup chair, phone extended, expression carefully apologetic.
"Amai Mask, sir—your phone is ringing."
He settled into the chair and studied his reflection, not the phone. "I told you. No interruptions during work hours." A glance at her in the mirror. "Who is it?"
"They said the situation is urgent." The assistant hesitated, reading him carefully. "It's a call from Hero Association headquarters."
One eyebrow lifted, precisely one millimeter.
"Then give it to me."
She did.
"This is Amai Mask." A pause. "...Mm. Mm." His eyes, fixed on his own reflection, went still. Something cold moved through them—not surprise, not fear. Something older and quieter than either. "What? The Monster Association?"
The assistant watched his face and took a half-step back without meaning to.
Whatever the voice on the other end of the call was describing, Amai Mask listened to it the way someone listens to news they've been waiting for for a very long time. Not shocked. Waiting.
"Interesting." His voice was perfectly level. "I understand. I'll make time." He tilted the phone slightly. "And—tell your team they did excellent work. If something like this develops again, I want to know immediately."
His reflection in the makeup mirror smiled.