"Hmph."
The sound Tatsumaki made when Jordan's expression shifted into unmistakable smugness was the specific one she reserved for situations where she had decided to do something and someone was visibly pleased about it and she was going to address that.
The green light moved.
Jordan was already going. The chase covered several hundred meters of imaginary sky before Tatsumaki caught up—which was to say, she was faster but he had the advantage of finding the entire situation funny, which added a quality of unpredictability to his evasion that pure speed couldn't easily account for.
Eventually she caught him.
The satisfaction on her face afterward was genuine.
"Enough," she said, and straightened her jacket with the finality of someone who had fully resolved a matter. The overpowering authority of a queen who had just won something important radiated off her in the particular way it did when she'd decided an argument was closed.
"I'll take the power."
Jordan, somewhat rearranged, agreed this was the correct decision.
He had, of course, thought it through.
The "double happiness" reasoning—which he produced internally, examined, and immediately recognized as the kind of thought that existed to be immediately discarded—had briefly suggested that combining Tatsumaki's abilities with the spatial authority of the Void Herrscher's card might have certain compound effects. He had considered this for approximately three seconds, concluded it was the kind of reasoning that F-boy would have opinions about, and filed it firmly under not the actual reason.
The actual reason was tactical and defensible.
Before his return from the Dragon Ball world, Tatsumaki had been the Hero Association's ceiling: the strongest esper, the benchmark against which psychic power was measured. Formidable. Functionally untouchable by most things she would realistically encounter.
After the Potential Guidance, that ceiling had moved.
Jordan had watched her burn through a practice imaginary space until the terrain was gone, had registered what she was capable of when nothing needed protecting and nothing needed managing, had run the numbers against things like Boros's combat output and concluded that she now had a credible answer for it.
The Honkai consciousness remaining in the Void Core—Sirin, diminished, stripped of her actual Herrscher authority, the vestige of what had once been a civilization-scale threat—was not Boros.
Against the current Tatsumaki, Sirin's resistance would be exactly as significant as the Crazy Motorcycle King had been to Saitama.
Which is to say: it would be an educational experience for Sirin.
Jordan kept this assessment private. There was something about explaining to a person exactly how comfortable you are with their odds that removes the satisfaction of the challenge.
Besides, he thought, glancing at her expression as she studied the gem, she'd prefer the version where it's actually a test.
[Jordan's Consciousness Space — Brief Technical Consultation]
F-boy, in his CEO suit, had a tea cup.
Across from him, the concept of Jordan Evans—rendered in the consciousness space with the approximate fidelity of a mirror that had been looking at the same face for twenty years—also had a tea cup.
"I understand," F-boy said, in the tone of a man who had reached a conclusion.
"Oh?" Jordan raised an eyebrow. "What do you understand?"
F-boy set down his cup. Looked at his employer with the particular directness of someone who had processed all available information and arrived at an accurate conclusion and had decided to deliver it anyway.
He extended one finger. Upward.
"The actual reason is fine," he said. "I just want it noted that I know."
Jordan considered this. "Noted."
"Good."
F-boy picked up his tea cup again with the dignity of a man who had said what needed to be said.
The actual reason Jordan had uninstalled the Herrscher of the Void card was this:
F-boy had been analyzing it for months.
While Jordan had spent his year in the Dragon Ball world mastering ki manipulation, the Super Saiyan transformation, and the various technical refinements that came from training with people who had been doing this their entire lives—F-boy had been doing something different with the same period. He had been taking the structure of the Herrscher of the Void's spatial authority apart, understanding it at the level of mechanism rather than application, learning not just what it did but how it worked and why.
His precision attribute had reached A-rank during the evolution process. At A-rank precision, the work of understanding a complex power system from the inside was less analysis and more translation—converting the language of Honkai spatial authority into a form that could be integrated with what Jordan already had.
The Herrscher of the Void card was no longer needed because Jordan no longer needed the scaffold.
What he needed was already happening.
While Tatsumaki examined the gem, Jordan turned his attention inward.
The Honkai energy that had been destabilized by the card's removal—the same energy that had caused the incident in the empty city—was not random. It was structured. It remembered the shape of the core it had occupied, the architecture of Void Realm authority, the specific configuration that let a Herrscher draw inexhaustible energy from the imaginary dimension.
F-boy reached into that structure and began to work.
Not rebuild. Not replicate. Construct from existing materials.
Jordan had spent multiple Limiter Breaks accumulating powers that approached the level of rules—abilities that had pushed past ordinary category into something that operated on the underlying mechanics of reality rather than its surface. Each one had done this in its own domain. The electromagnetic manipulation that could work at particle-level. The spatial abilities that bent dimensional geometry. The temporal control. The psychic force that interfaced directly with consciousness rather than matter.
Each of these had been pushing toward the same threshold from different directions without a structure to contain what they were becoming.
F-boy, with A-rank precision and a year's worth of analysis, provided the structure.
The Honkai energy compressed. Oriented itself. The architecture of the Void Core served as a template—not copied, but referenced—and from the inside of Jordan's energy system, something began to take shape.
Not a Herrscher Core.
Not yet.
A pseudo-Herrscher Core. The distinction mattered: the original was Sirin's, marked with the authority of the civilization-destroying force that had produced it. What was forming in Jordan's chest was marked with something else entirely—his own power, his own accumulated progression, his own name in the structure.
It would absorb Void Realm energy without limit—that property had transferred completely. It held spatial authority as a native capability rather than a borrowed one. And it was drawing toward itself all of the rule-approaching powers that Jordan had been building toward:
Power. Speed. Life. Dimension. Space-Time. Mind. Electromagnetism. Creation.
Each one had been a separate line of development. The pseudo-core was becoming the point where the lines converged.
It would take time—genuine time, not something that could be rushed or shortcut. The evolution from pseudo to actual required that the structure reach a threshold of internal coherence that accumulation alone couldn't produce. But the direction was established. The architecture was sound.
And at the end of that process: a Herrscher Core that owed nothing to the Honkai civilization's cycle of collapse, that carried no corrupting consciousness, that was simply Jordan Evans's power having reached the stage where it organized itself around a single principle rather than distributing across many.
This was worth more than keeping the card.
The OPM world's own scaling made the point plainly enough. God-level disasters—the kind the native gods of this world produced, the kind that had required Saitama's intervention in every canonical case—were real, dangerous, capable of threatening civilization. They were also, in the final assessment, below the threshold Saitama had established.
The power ranking was clear-eyed about it: Bald Level was its own category, sitting above the divine because Saitama existed and the mathematics of this world had to account for him.
Jordan was not going to suddenly find himself below Saitama in any meaningful framework. They operated differently—Saitama's power was the end of quantity, Jordan's was the expansion of quality—and neither trajectory was going to reverse.
But god-level as a ceiling was something Jordan had already moved past. The pseudo-Herrscher Core was the beginning of whatever came next.
He exhaled once.
The formation process continued quietly in the background, patient, incremental.
Outside his chest, Tatsumaki was still looking at the gem.
"You're looking pleased with yourself again," she said, without turning.
"I'm always pleased with myself."
"It's annoying."
"You say that every time."
She tilted the gem slightly, watching the yellow pulse catch the imaginary sky. Her spatial sense was clearly engaged with it—he could see the quality of her attention, the difference between looking at and reading.
"This thing," she said. "The consciousness inside it."
"Sirin."
"She's still present."
"Diminished. Waiting for an opportunity." He watched Tatsumaki's profile. "She won't get one. Not against you."
Tatsumaki turned this over internally, her expression doing the thing it did when she was assessing a problem and had already reached a conclusion but wanted to review her work.
"Fine," she said. Her fingers closed around the gem. "I'll handle it in my own time."