Jordan's sidelong glance at the crowds moving around them was not subtle.
"If I take it out here," he said, "something will probably happen."
Tatsumaki gave him the look she reserved for arguments she found structurally unsound but had not yet committed to dismantling. "What could possibly happen. Why all the secrecy—"
"Shopping first." He put a hand at her back and moved them forward. "Come on."
"You're being ridiculous."
"You're the one who wanted to walk."
She made a sound that communicated a variety of positions simultaneously and let herself be directed down the street.
The jewelry store was bright-windowed and quiet inside—the kind of shop where the display cases caught light well and the staff had learned to let customers look without commentary. Jordan stopped in front of a section of crystal pieces and found what he was looking for without much searching.
Green. A bracelet. The crystals were a vivid, clean green, the color that Tatsumaki's telekinesis made the air when she was calm rather than exerting herself—something between emerald and spring grass, depending on how the light moved through it.
He picked it up and held it out.
Tatsumaki looked at it.
"It's unnecessary," she said.
"I know."
"It's going to interfere with combat readiness."
"Slightly."
"I'm not a child. I don't want something like this on my wrist."
"Mm." Jordan took her hand gently and put it on.
The crystal caught the store lighting. Tatsumaki looked down at her wrist.
She didn't say anything after that.
Her cheeks had gone a color that she appeared to be experiencing privately and had no intention of discussing.
They continued for another quarter-hour, which was approximately when Tatsumaki's willingness to maintain the fiction of enjoying a leisure walk reached its natural limit.
She stopped. Her posture shifted from participating in an activity to having arrived at a position.
Her arms crossed. Her eyes went flat with the particular patience of someone who has been waiting to say something and has now decided to say it.
"I'm done walking." She extended both hands toward him—the gesture of someone done with the current modality and requesting a transition. "Where's the gift?"
Jordan looked at her extended hands.
Then at her expression.
"Are you tired already? We've been walking for twenty minutes."
"I'm powerful," she said. "I float. Walking is optional and I've opted in as a favor to you and I'm rescinding the favor. Gift. Now."
"That's the weakest argument I've ever heard."
"I could say that about most things you say." She raised an eyebrow. "Are you going to fight me about this?"
Jordan looked at her with the mild expression of someone who found a particular conversational partner delightful in ways he would never say out loud.
"Have you ever won?"
The green light arrived before she fully committed to the answer.
A telekinetic column launched skyward from the commercial street with the focused intensity of someone who had decided that the available alternatives to winning included ending the conversation in a satisfying manner. The air pressure displaced the nearby shoppers' hair.
City A appeared, momentarily, to be having a localized weather event.
Jordan's hand settled on top of her head. The green flared. Then settled. Then dimmed.
Tatsumaki stood very still for a moment, with the expression of someone who was conducting an internal review of what had just happened.
"See," Jordan said.
"That doesn't count."
"It absolutely counts."
She made another sound—different register than before, something in the genuinely-annoyed-but-not-actually-annoyed range—and then, with the decisive quality of someone who had made a choice and was executing it, simply rose off the ground.
The green light around her was faint, ambient, continuous. Her feet cleared the pavement by about thirty centimeters. The crystal bracelet caught the street lights as she floated alongside him.
Jordan glanced at her.
She looked straight ahead with the dignity of someone who had made an executive decision about transportation and was not taking further questions.
She looks better with the effects, he thought. Kept it to himself.
"Alright," he said. "Let's go somewhere else first."
"Finally," Tatsumaki said. "Yes."
He put his arm around her waist, and the space around them moved.
Not the rushing blur of teleportation, not the instant of non-place between two points. This was different: a compression and then an unfolding, the world squeezing to its smallest possible configuration and then breathing out again into something new. The commercial street—bright, busy, warm—unwrote itself.
What replaced it was the same.
And wasn't.
The streets were there. The streetlights. The buildings, the shop facades, the deck chairs outside the izakaya where they'd had dinner an hour ago. Everything in the same position, the same scale, exact architectural correspondence to the City A they had just left.
But the sky was pale green. Not night sky, not any sky—a soft, even, sourceless pale green, like grass held up against sunlight.
And the city was empty.
Every surface in the correct place. Every window intact. Not a single person anywhere.
A perfect City A, built from the same blueprint, emptied of everything that had ever lived in it.
Tatsumaki's feet touched the ground without her deciding to land. She looked around—the long street, the quiet buildings, the absolutely motionless replica of a city she knew—and a small furrow appeared between her brows.
"Where is this."
Jordan rose beside her, both of them ascending slowly until they were above the roofline and could see the shape of the whole thing. "Imaginary Space. My personal domain." He looked out over the empty city. "I've deployed it a few times before—you've been through it briefly, as a transit point. We've never stayed."
She was quiet for a moment, taking it in with the kind of attention she gave to spatial phenomena—her own abilities had reshaped how she perceived distance and dimension, and the Potential Guidance had refined that perception further. She was reading the place rather than just looking at it.
"Your spatial sense has gotten better since the last time," Jordan noted.
"Obviously." She turned toward the empty streets below. "It's still quiet."
"Not for long."
He snapped his fingers.
The pale green sky tore open.
Not violently—deliberately, the way a stage curtain parts rather than rips. Dark vortices bloomed in the space above the city, a dozen of them, then fifty, then more than could be counted comfortably, each one a swirling iris of purple-black energy. Through them poured something.
The Void Realm was not empty.
It had never been empty. The Herrscher authority that Jordan had claimed carried with it access to an inexhaustible reserve of Honkai energy—the fundamental force of collapse and annihilation that the Honkai universe had spent millennia doing catastrophic things with, and that Jordan had been doing considerably more measured things with since he'd negotiated the terms of ownership.
The energy found the imaginary space the way water finds the lowest point. Not chaotically—purposefully, as if the space had been waiting for it. It pooled. It gathered. And from the gathering, things began to happen.
A shape in the street below. Formless at first, then structural. Then something that had a spine and limbs and mass, assembling from Honkai energy the way a body assembles from cells—with intention, with pattern, with the specific momentum of life that has been called rather than created.
More shapes. Dozens. The empty streets filling.
They were not human. Armored in organic plates of white and purple-black, some walking, some moving in ways that suggested their joints worked differently than anything evolutionary. Some were the size of people. Some were the size of buses. One that assembled in the central plaza, absorbing energy from the vortices above it directly, grew until its shoulder height exceeded the surrounding buildings.
Tatsumaki watched this in absolute silence.
None of them moved toward the two figures above the city. They moved around them—the distant purposeful motion of things filling a space they had been summoned to fill, aware of the presence overhead the way a compass needle is aware of north.
And then, one by one, as they reached their full form, they stopped.
They turned toward Jordan.
They lowered their heads.
The hill-sized one in the plaza went down on one knee. The sound of it was geological.
Tatsumaki looked at this. Then at Jordan.
"Honkai Beasts," he said. "Creatures of the Void. They answer to the Herrscher authority—which means they answer to me." He watched the plaza creature settle into its obeisance. "I wanted you to see what the imaginary space can do when it's fully running."
She was quiet for a long moment.
"They're not very strong," she said.
"The ones I made tonight are the low tier, yes."
"I could handle those." A pause. "Probably the big one too."
"Probably." He didn't disagree. "That's not the point."
She watched the city of empty buildings now filled with bowed Honkai creatures—the pale green sky above them still cycling through the vortex portals, energy still flowing in, the whole space alive with a kind of kinetic authority that had no equivalent in the surface world.
"The birth," she said quietly. "The growing."
He looked at her.
"I've seen monsters appear," she said. "I've seen them in every form. But I've never watched something come into existence from nothing." A slight pause. "That's rare."
Jordan said nothing, because nothing needed to be said.
He gave her the condensed version of Honkai—the periodic catastrophe cycle, the Herrschers as its embodiment, the relationship between Void Realm energy and the beasts that ran on it. Tatsumaki listened with the particular focus she brought to information she was already partially sorting into categories.
When he finished, she was quiet for a moment.
"That's just a monster," she said.
"Essentially, yes."
"The power that destroys civilizations is the power of something that hates existing, scaled up until it can act on that." She turned it over. "In this world, malice becomes monsters. In yours, malice becomes Herrschers." A small shrug. "Same principle."
"More or less."
"Power is power," she said. It wasn't a dismissal—it was the statement of someone who had been operating at the top of a power hierarchy long enough to have developed a philosophy about it that wasn't interested in aesthetics. "It matters what you do with it."
She looked up at him.
"The thing you were going to give me," she said. "It wasn't this." She gestured at the Void Realm around them. "Not the space."
"No." Jordan raised his palm.
Dark purple gathered in it—slow, deliberate, the Void Realm energy condensing from ambient into focused with the smooth inevitability of something that had been waiting for a direction to move in. It grew denser. Brighter at its core where the compression was tightest. A ball of pure Honkai force, the kind that in the original context of its existence had been used to end civilizations.
In Jordan's hand, patient, contained, waiting.
Tatsumaki looked at it with the steady green eyes of someone who had learned to read power at a glance and was currently reading.
"Show me," she said.