Tatsumaki reached for the gem.
The moment her fingers made contact, the imaginary city ceased to exist.
Not gradually. Not with warning. The transition was instantaneous—the pale green sky, the empty streets, the Honkai Beasts in their obeisance, Jordan standing beside her—all of it replaced in a single frame by white light so complete and so intense that it registered as the absence of everything rather than the presence of something.
A supernova, contained in a gem the size of a walnut, detonating against Tatsumaki's fingers.
She threw her arm over her eyes. The light didn't care.
Where is this.
The spacetime rules inside the burst were disrupted in ways she couldn't fully track—something between an instant and a century, the forward momentum of time losing its reference point entirely. When she lowered her arm and opened her eyes, the white light had resolved into—
White.
Not light. White. A world made of it: formless, textureless, extending in every direction without horizon or surface. Pure and absolute and empty.
The imaginary city was gone. The green sky was gone.
Jordan was gone.
The absence hit somewhere specific, in the region of her chest, before she had fully processed what had happened—a sharp, hollow sensation, like something having been removed rather than lost. Not understanding. Not fear. Just the clean, physical fact of less.
Tatsumaki stood very still in the white.
Back in the imaginary city—
The white flash had taken Tatsumaki and left Jordan standing in mid-air above the empty streets.
He wasn't surprised. He was slightly impressed.
She adapted, he noted. The Sirin consciousness learned from last time.
When the Void Core had been in his possession, Sirin's erosion attempt had failed because Jordan had drawn her into his own consciousness space—his territory, his rules, his F-boy waiting at the perimeter with a grab that Sirin hadn't seen coming. The lesson the Honkai consciousness had apparently extracted from that failure was: don't fight the host in their territory. Create your own first.
A mental dimension. The same principle Phoenix Man used with his mascot suit anchor point—pull the target into a constructed space, control the rules of the space, work on them from inside rather than attacking from outside.
Tactically, it was smarter than the previous approach.
It's still not going to work, Jordan thought, but credit where it's due.
From below, a sound he hadn't expected: confusion.
The Honkai Beasts—the dozens of creatures he'd called into existence from Void Realm energy, ranging from human-sized to the hill-class specimen still taking up most of the central plaza—had apparently just registered that the core they were connected to had left the premises.
The confusion organized itself, in the way that confusion among large groups of beings tends to organize itself, into movement.
Several of the tank-class beasts—roughly the size of apartment buildings, with plating that suggested they'd been designed with durability as a primary consideration—lurched toward the nearest building and through it, turning their heads upward toward the single figure remaining in the sky with expressions that communicated: you're still here. Where is the other thing that was here.
"Oh." Jordan looked down at them. "You want to try something?"
He opened one hand, palm down, and pressed it toward the city.
The gravitational field deployed in the space of approximately half a second—a flat, absolute pressure, like the sky deciding to have an opinion about everything beneath it. Every Honkai Beast in the city hit the ground simultaneously. The tank-class ones made sounds that the building materials around them registered structurally. The hill-class one in the plaza simply stopped moving, held down by weight that its mass couldn't resist.
The city went quiet.
Jordan held this for a moment, surveying the flattened landscape of suppressed Honkai Beasts.
"Your mother will be back shortly," he said. "Wait here."
He turned his attention inward.
The pseudo-Herrscher Core was new—hours old, still settling into the architecture of his energy system—but F-boy had been building toward this for months, and the structure held. The spatial authority it contained was a fraction of what the original Void Core had carried; Jordan was under no illusions about that. But fraction of Void Herrscher spatial authority, operating with his total energy reserves behind it, was a different calculation than fraction of it operating alone.
He extended the spatial sense outward and let it find the seams between imaginary spaces—the coordinates that F-boy had been cataloguing since the first deployment, the network of imaginary dimensions that existed parallel to the physical world like pockets in the fabric of a coat.
The Herrscher of the Void card was still a fantasy card. It was still, on the most fundamental level, a part of F-boy's existence—the character card had been created by the Stand ability, and what the Stand ability created, the Stand maintained a thread of connection to, regardless of where it went or who was holding it.
Even in Sirin's constructed mental dimension, that thread existed.
F-boy, from his position in Jordan's shoulder, followed it.
There.
Jordan found the dimension in the spatial network like finding a bubble in water—distinct, enclosed, its internal rules slightly wrong from the outside. He located Tatsumaki's psychic signature inside it. Alive, present, coherent.
He exhaled once.
Then he settled into observation.
She doesn't need me, he thought. This is her test.
Sirin had prepared carefully.
The memory deletion was precise—surgical, the kind of technique that required understanding not just how memory was stored but which memories, specifically, would produce maximum psychological disruption in this particular target. She had read the Void Core's record of Jordan's time with Tatsumaki and identified the one architectural element that everything else had been built around.
Gone.
The white world had paused when Tatsumaki had lowered her arm—held its breath—because what Sirin had just done should have produced extended incapacitation in any normal psychic. The emptiness of suddenly-absent attachment, the instability that followed the removal of something that had been weight-bearing without the person knowing it was weight-bearing—
Tatsumaki stood in the white.
She felt the hollow. The specific, physical shape of something having been removed from a space where something had been.
Haven't I always been alone?
The thought was automatic. The trained reflex of someone who had been building walls since childhood and still knew how to find them in the dark.
She didn't know what she'd lost. She knew only that her chest felt like a room that had been cleared of furniture—the dimensions still present, the walls still solid, the emptiness not smaller for being abstract.
Yes, the next thought came. I've always been alone. So why would losing it matter.
She crossed her arms.
The white world shivered.
From somewhere deep in the space's architecture, pressed against the innermost wall of the dimension she had constructed, Sirin—the Herrscher of the Void, civilization-ender, the consciousness that had survived Jordan's complete claim of her authority by retreating to the core and waiting—felt the shiver and processed what it meant.
She recovered.
The attack that should have bought minutes had bought seconds. The grief that should have compounded into destabilization had been resolved by a reflex so practiced and so automatic that it hadn't even produced a visible transition—just the moment of impact, and then the armor back in place, and the eyes going cold and focused.
Sirin's small fists clenched.
These humans, she thought, with the exhausted fury of someone who had been underestimating people for too long, are unreasonable.
Tatsumaki looked at the white.
She had been in her own psychic constructs enough times to recognize when she was inside one that wasn't hers. The texture was different—the rules slightly misaligned with her own instincts about how space behaved, the way a chair that's slightly too low feels wrong even if you can't immediately identify why.
A mental dimension. The gem. The independent consciousness that Jordan had mentioned—
"Trying to destabilize me in a constructed space," she said to the white. Her voice was flat and entirely unhurried. "Pathetic."
The white didn't respond.
"I know you're here." She turned, slowly, surveying the formless expanse. "I know what you just did. And I know it didn't work."
She stopped.
Her eyes narrowed.
Something was in here with her—not just the space, not just the architecture. A presence. And now that she was fully focused, fully oriented, the psychic ceiling of the Hero Association bearing down on a mental dimension that had been built by a consciousness she outclassed in every relevant category—
She felt it.
Her brows came together in a frown that was not threat response or irritation.
It was something else.
Why does this feel...
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