The deep purple energy hung in the air between them like a question mark.
Tatsumaki looked at it. Then at her own hands.
The memories were returning. Not all at once—the specific contents of what had been taken were still out of reach—but the power was coming back, filtering in from wherever Sirin had been storing it, the familiar weight of it settling back into her like a tide returning to shore. With each fraction she reclaimed, her body remembered itself. Returned to its own proportions. The cold alloy floor against her bare feet registered differently when she was herself rather than a fragile reconstruction of who she'd been.
"That's enough," she said quietly. Not to Sirin. To the memories. The laboratory walls still stood around her, the iron bars still framed the dark corridor beyond, the ceiling still pressed down with the specific weight of a space designed to make people feel small.
She'd been making herself feel small in here for long enough.
"I've had to walk through this before," she said. "More than once." Her voice had the quality of someone stating a fact they've accepted completely. "I've just gotten used to the idea of not having to do it alone."
The deep purple energy—Sirin's last investment in the erosion approach—trembled.
Tatsumaki absorbed it. All of it. The Honkai energy that had been trying to claim her reversed direction without resistance, drawn inward by the reawakening power that the white dimension had been suppressing, and what Sirin had spent carefully was converted into fuel for the person she'd been trying to break.
"But," Tatsumaki continued, and her voice had shifted—still quiet, but with a quality in it now that people in her professional radius had learned to recognize as a warning, "that doesn't mean I've forgotten how to work alone."
She was herself again. Fully.
The black battle suit was there when she looked for it—the dress she'd chosen because it suited her, because it moved right, because it was hers—and the green light that had been missing from her hands for the entirety of the fight returned with the certainty of a river finding its bed.
The laboratory shook.
Then the laboratory was gone.
The telekinetic release that destroyed it was not large by Tatsumaki's standards. She'd pulled larger forces while half-asleep. But it was precise—targeted at the walls and ceiling and floor and bars with the specific intent of reducing the whole construction to powder—and precision at Tatsumaki's level meant that the prison that had been Sirin's most carefully chosen weapon lasted approximately one second under deliberate attention.
The green ocean filled the white dimension.
The white dimension became green.
Tatsumaki turned.
The figure behind her—the one that had been wearing warmth as a costume, the white-robed presence that had offered arms and called her child—stood revealed by the destruction of her stage: a white-haired girl whose expression was cycling rapidly through the specific emotions of someone whose plan has just experienced an unexpected outcome.
"Fair enough," Tatsumaki said. She looked at her with the measured assessment she brought to any opponent she was about to take seriously. "One-on-one. No tricks."
She let the pause breathe.
"And don't count on anyone coming to save you."
The white-haired girl was done pretending.
The Valkyrie armor materialized without ceremony—the Sky Armor, Honkai-forged and absolute, the gold-bone wing deployment making a sound like reality reconsidering its local geometry. The Void Spears arranged themselves at her back: spatial lances that existed in two dimensions simultaneously, sharp enough that their edges were technically a physics violation rather than a manufacturing achievement.
White hair lit with dangerous purple.
Finally, the Herrscher's expression said. No more of this.
"Don't give me that look," Sirin said, and the frustration in her voice was entirely genuine. "You have no idea what you're dealing with."
Tatsumaki's response was to look at her.
Not at her face. At her. The specific, evaluating, faintly dismissive assessment of someone conducting an inventory of relevant factors.
Her gaze settled somewhere in the region of the Sky Armor's chest coverage.
"Hm," she said.
"What."
"Nothing." Tatsumaki's expression was the particular one she wore when something had confirmed a hypothesis. "Just excess material. Doesn't affect combat."
Sirin stared at her.
The look that followed—the arrogant, maddening, familiar quality of that specific smile—struck something in Sirin's memory like a match against a rough surface.
She knew that expression. She'd seen it before.
Specifically, she'd seen it on the face of the person who had treated the collapse of civilizations as a project management problem and her own erosion attempt as a minor scheduling inconvenience, and whose consciousness space had turned out to contain F-boy waiting in the dark.
The smile was his. Tatsumaki had been wearing the same smile.
Sirin's arm swept outward.
The Void Spears launched.
Tatsumaki snapped her fingers.
It had started as something she'd watched someone else do—that specific casual gesture, making things happen with economical confidence—and she'd adopted it without quite deciding to. It suited her. It communicated the right relationship between effort and result.
Between her and Sirin, the telekinetic energy she'd compressed into a single point completed its compression. A singularity: black, silent, roughly the size of a closed fist, pulling everything in its immediate vicinity toward it with the polite insistence of a gravity well that had made up its mind.
The Void Spears reached it.
The Void Spears went in.
Sirin blinked.
"That's—"
"Now," Tatsumaki said, and snapped her fingers again.
The singularity detonated.
The explosion that followed was above the range of human hearing—which in a mental dimension meant it registered as pure pressure rather than sound, a concussive wave that moved outward from the point of detonation and hit the walls of the white world with enough force to push through them. Where the blast made contact with the boundary of Sirin's constructed dimension, the white material shattered and stayed shattered: the raw chaos of unstructured spacetime visible through the gaps, devouring the torn edges with the appetite of something that had been waiting outside a closed door for a long time.
The dimension was coming apart.
Sirin had thrown everything she had into constructing a Honkai cube barrier at maximum speed, and the cube had held—mostly—but the shockwave had still reached her, and the white-haired girl who emerged from behind the crumbling barrier was considerably less composed than she'd been a moment ago.
"You—" Her voice was doing something interesting with its composure. "That was reckless, the entire dimension—"
"I know," Tatsumaki said.
She teleported.
The spatial displacement—her own, the ability she'd developed from the Potential Guidance, continental range compressed into an instant of non-space—brought her to a position that Sirin had not prepared for. The Void Spears that launched in response were read in advance: the trajectories were visible to someone who could feel the spatial distortions before the weapons finished materializing, and Tatsumaki's telekinetic counterstrikes hit each one at the point of highest structural vulnerability, not because she'd calculated it but because her spatial sense just knew.
The exchange was spectacular in the way that things are spectacular when two people at the absolute edge of their respective abilities stop holding anything back.
Green light and purple energy. Spatial lances and telekinetic singularities. The white dimension crumbling at its edges while the two of them rewrote its interior as a battle record.
Sirin went berserk.
This was not metaphor. The Herrscher authority that had been distributed between precision and adaptation concentrated suddenly into output: Virtual Realm Descent, full release, the spatial barrage spreading across the entire available volume of the dimension in a wall of purple-edged geometric violence.
Tatsumaki matched it.
The telekinetic response that she deployed against the wall of spatial blades was not identical—the physics were different, the underlying mechanics were different—but the scale was the same, and the green wall and the purple wall met in the center of the dimension and annihilated each other in a cancellation event that left the air between them shaking.
Sirin's expression had developed a feature she hadn't intended.
She's not running out, the Herrscher realized. Every exchange—she matches me. Every output I raise—she raises. Where is she drawing this from?
She hadn't expected the answer.
She'd studied Tatsumaki's history. Read the available record. Knew the ceiling of the strongest esper the current civilization had produced.
She hadn't accounted for what a year of Potential Guidance and training alongside someone who had casually absorbed civilization-level powers in his spare time had done to that ceiling.
She reached for the next attack, already preparing the angle, the deployment pattern—
Tatsumaki was gone.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Writing takes time, coffee, and a lot of love.If you'd like to support my work, join me at [email protected]/GoldenGaruda
You'll get early access to over 50 chapters, selection on new series, and the satisfaction of knowing your support directly fuels more stories.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~