The energy ball in Jordan's palm was not doing anything dramatic.
That was, in its way, the most alarming thing about it.
Tatsumaki's perception—honed across two decades of operating at the absolute ceiling of psychic ability, refined further by the spatial awareness the Potential Guidance had unlocked—reached toward the sphere and found the space around it wrong. Not obviously, not in ways a casual observer would notice. But the geometry in the immediate vicinity was slightly concave, pressing inward toward the sphere's surface as if the space itself was trying to get away from what the ball contained.
High density. High mass. The quiet pressure of something that had been told to stay small and was making the effort.
Inside it, purple arcs jumped and vanished—lightning that tried to escape the surface and then found there was no escape to be found, returning to the sphere with the resigned quality of something that had tested its perimeter and confirmed it was solid.
"Civilization-scale collapse?" she said.
"The original version, yes." Jordan regarded the sphere with the mild attention of someone holding something that was objectively dangerous and finding it manageable. "This is a controlled fragment. But you're reading it correctly."
He held it for another moment.
Then he closed his hand and the sphere went out—not violently, not with release pressure, just cleanly gone, the space around his palm breathing back to normal.
"That's a Herrscher's power," he said. "Now you have context for what I'm about to show you."
Tatsumaki looked at his empty hand, then at him.
F-boy had been standing at a respectful distance, which was to say exactly far enough to maintain the appearance of not listening while absolutely listening. At a signal from Jordan, he moved.
The Character Card came free with the quality of something that had been fitted precisely and was now being precisely removed. A ripple crossed Jordan's chest—brief, gold-tinted—and the card emerged between F-boy's fingers: a brilliant orange-bordered SSR, radiating a light that was doing things to the surrounding air that light is not typically asked to do.
Tatsumaki watched this.
She had been watching Jordan produce cards for as long as she'd known him. She had categorized them, in her own working framework, as the source of the unreasonable things. She had not yet run out of ways to be surprised by them.
The card F-boy held radiated spatial authority in waves she could feel against her own psychic field—a different frequency than telekinesis, a different geometry than her own abilities, but unmistakably real power in a form she understood the shape of.
What she could not see, and Jordan did not explain, was what happened inside him at the same moment.
The Herrscher of the Void authority had not left empty-handed. For months—since he'd first equipped the card and negotiated its terms—Jordan had been drawing on the Void Realm's energy reserves, absorbing Honkai energy into his own system, folding it into the existing reserves the way a river folds into a larger river. The energy had been controllable because the card's authority had been present as a frame.
The frame was now gone.
The energy remained.
And it objected.
The Honkai energy that had been integrated into Jordan's core did what Honkai energy does when the authority structure containing it experiences disruption: it moved. Not explosively—Jordan's total energy reserves were, in the most charitable possible framing, substantially larger than what the Honkai component represented, the way the Pacific Ocean is substantially larger than a bucket of seawater poured into it—but it moved with intent, pressing outward, testing the perimeter of the energy core with the specific optimism of something that had been told its leash was off.
The leash was not off.
Jordan's will settled over the entire volume of it like a hand pressing down on a table. The Honkai energy pressed. His energy pressed back. The outcome was never genuinely in question—the Void Realm collapse events he'd been absorbing had been planet-surface scale, which in the Dragon Ball power framework barely registered as interesting—but it took a full three seconds of active management before the last of the Honkai energy acknowledged reality and returned to equilibrium.
The three seconds coincided with the absolute quiet of the empty imaginary city and a complete absence of anything to redirect attention toward.
In the silence, the result of the internal pressure managing itself outward through the nearest available channel was... louder than the situation required.
Tatsumaki turned.
She raised a hand and fanned the air, slowly, with the expression of someone who has just been given information she did not ask for.
"Incredible," she said flatly.
"That's—" Jordan glanced around the empty city. The Honkai Beasts, sprawled across streets and plazas and rooftops in their posture of absolute obeisance, were maintaining collective diplomatic silence. "That's not—the Honkai energy was destabilizing—"
"The most powerful person I know."
"That's not what—"
The green light moved very fast.
— The imaginary city entered a period of renewed activity. —
The great battle ended.
Tatsumaki sat at a slight distance, a flush across her cheeks that she appeared to be processing privately. She pushed back a piece of hair with one hand and addressed the other hand that had not fully gotten the message about the situation being resolved.
"I said that's enough." She pushed it away again. "I mean it."
Jordan raised his hands in a gesture of compliance, settled back, and considered the pale green sky above the empty city with the specific contentment of someone who has had an excellent evening in multiple respects.
After a moment, he sat up.
"The actual gift," he said.
F-boy, who had maintained his own diplomatic distance throughout, reappeared. The SSR card turned in his fingers—the Herrscher of the Void, spatial authority, civilization-class Honkai power compressed into fantasy card form. He applied the Stand ability to it with the focused attention of a specialist performing precise technical work.
The card dissolved.
What remained was a gem.
Small. Clear. The deep blue of very old ice, or very deep water, or something that existed at the intersection of both. It sat in F-boy's palm and emitted slow pulses of warm yellow light that made the air around it behave interestingly—the space bending slightly with each pulse, the same gentle geometric distortion that Tatsumaki had read in the Honkai energy ball, but quieter. Patient.
F-boy extended it toward Jordan. Jordan held it out to Tatsumaki.
She didn't take it immediately.
She looked at it with the careful attention she brought to things that were genuinely interesting to her, which was an expression most people never saw because most things did not meet the threshold.
"The Herrscher's spatial authority is in there," Jordan said. "All of it. The same power you saw me working with—dimensional jumps, spatial manipulation, the Void Realm access." A pause. "To claim it, you'd need to defeat the consciousness that's still resident in the core. There's a Herrscher inside it—dormant, diminished, but present. Her name is Sirin."
Tatsumaki looked up from the gem.
"A challenge."
"Yes."
"For spatial authority." Her eyes moved back to the core, then back to him. "Spatial teleportation is one thing. This is something larger."
"Yes."
"And you're giving this to me."
Jordan said nothing, which was its own kind of answer.
Tatsumaki studied the gem for another moment. The yellow pulses continued their patient rhythm, bending the air.
She reached out and tilted it toward the light. The interior of the gem caught the glow and scattered it, and the space around her hand shifted in response—her own spatial sense engaging with whatever was inside it, each reading the other.
"Hmph." The sound she made communicated several things at once: awareness that this was an attempt to provoke her pride into acting, irritation at the transparency of the attempt, and a complete willingness to proceed anyway because the thing itself was genuinely interesting and she was not going to pretend otherwise.
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