Jordan examined the card in his hands for a long moment.
White hair past the hips. Black stockings past the knees. Golden eyes with the quality of compressed starlight — not warm, but luminous, the kind of luminosity that implies significant quantities of power behind it. The Valkyrie armor was immaculate white, and across it ran currents of vivid purple Honkai energy like circuitry that had decided to become aesthetic. From the short skirt's tassels hung golden eyes — actual Honkai Beast eyes, decorative, watching — and from behind her extended two appendages that had no shared category: one a skeletal golden wing built from Honkai Beast anatomy, and the other the Spear of the Void, a lance of condensed spatial authority that existed in at least two places simultaneously.
White hair. Black stockings. Queen. Jordan thought. Three tags. Maximum 2D energy. The Herrscher of the Void presided over her card's illustrated sky with the expression of someone who had stopped wondering whether she was the most dangerous thing in the room approximately five minutes into being the most dangerous thing in every room.
He let out a long breath.
"The Herrscher of Reason finally pulled her long-lost wife card," he murmured, with the reverence of someone acknowledging a pull that should not have happened statistically.
F-boy, manifested beside the bed, conveyed no particular reaction.
There was, however, a significant item in the card's fine print that required acknowledgment.
Jordan turned it over in his mind the way you turn over a contract clause you noticed late.
Honkai — at its simplest — was a periodic natural disaster. When it erupted, it released highly efficient and highly dangerous Honkai energy. After each major eruption, a Herrscher emerged: an entity born from destruction and devoted to devastation, the living agent of the Honkai's will, whose power expressed itself as the ultimate manifestation of some specific physical law. Put it in Evangelion terms: Angel. Put it in One-Punch Man terms: something in the range of a Vaccine Man — a creature born from the world's accumulated will and built for one thing only.
An SSR card. Undeniably powerful. And carrying, printed clearly in its type label, the word Honkai.
Jordan had some experience with cards that came with built-in complications. Asura Kabuto cards, for instance, sealed destructive consciousness obsessed with ending human civilization — loading one meant first withstanding whatever was inside it. The Honkai consciousness inside the Herrscher of the Void card was a different variety of the same category: a will devoted to entropy, dressed in a very aesthetically pleasing exterior.
If a user's mental fortitude was insufficient, the likely outcome was not gaining Herrscher powers. The likely outcome was the powers gaining a user — becoming the vessel of the Honkai, which in One-Punch Man's ruleset resolved neatly to: monster.
He confirmed this with F-boy, who confirmed it without ceremony.
Jordan stroked his chin.
So the question is who has sufficient mental fortitude to withstand Honkai erosion.
He arrived at the obvious answer immediately.
...Me. Obviously me.
The part of his brain he was choosing not to examine very closely suggested, in a small voice, that this reasoning might not be entirely divorced from the Herrscher's illustrated appearance, the white hair, the long legs, the queen energy.
He was going to equip the card anyway. But he was also going to be honest with himself about his decision-making process.
Sorry, Tracer, he thought. Nothing personal. You're just being temporarily rotated out for strategic reasons. Definitely strategic.
F-boy's expression communicated a complete assessment of Jordan as a person in a single look.
Jordan ignored it.
Jordan set up the AT Field around the room — a passive defensive shell, habit rather than necessity, containing the energy fluctuations so that the apartment's other occupants wouldn't feel the transition. Beyond the door, the TV was still audible. A moment later, Saitama's voice carried through the wall with the distinctive quality of someone talking to no one in particular.
"...Is he tinkering with new powers again?" A yawn. "That man is genuinely diligent."
A pause. The TV went mute.
"Alright. Shower. Bed."
The sounds of Saitama departing resolved into the quieter baseline of the apartment at night.
Inside the room, Jordan lay down on the bed with his hands folded on his stomach and closed his eyes.
F-boy floated over him, reached into his chest with the practiced ease of someone who had done this card-swap operation many times, and began.
The exchange was not subtle. Purple light and gold light alternated in pulses, and between them a third energy arrived — corrosive, violent, carrying the specific character of something that had been sealing its intentions inside a card and was now finding an outlet. The Honkai energy poured into Jordan's body with the conviction of a substance that expected resistance and was prepared to overwhelm it.
It met Jordan's energy reserves.
His reserves absorbed it.
All of it. Completely. With the methodical thoroughness of a drain encountering water.
The Honkai consciousness inside the card, freshly materialized inside Jordan's energy field, took stock of its situation.
...This is not how this works.
My erosion—
Where is it going?
Why is it—
In approximately three seconds, not a single unit of Honkai energy remained in the Herrscher core that had just fully manifested. Every particle had been absorbed, integrated, processed. The corrosive consciousness looked around at the interior of Jordan's energy space and found itself in the position of a predator that has leaped at prey and discovered it has leaped into a recycling facility.
...Well, the consciousness concluded, regrouping. Male body is less compatible. But it's not unusable.
Jordan was asleep. Or appeared to be — his breathing was even, his hands still folded, his expression peaceful. Which was exactly the expression that someone has when they're technically unconscious and the defenses are running autonomously.
The Honkai consciousness materialized above him in the room — a phantom spirit, female characteristics, no fixed features, the face still resolving itself into the specific aesthetic it would eventually settle on: something approaching Kiana Kaslana's face, coming together like a picture developing. It smiled. The smile had the quality of something that had decided this situation was salvageable and was feeling optimistic about next steps.
Come, it thought, with the focused warmth of someone who has identified their vessel and is ready to proceed. Become the host of Honkai. This will be very—
A sound like a bronze bell struck from directly inside reality filled the room. Multi-faceted, prismatic ripples erupted from Jordan's still body, radiating outward, passing through the Honkai consciousness like a wave through mist.
The Honkai consciousness tilted its head back. The sensation was approximately that of having a wooden pestle applied enthusiastically to the inside of one's mind.
Jordan's eyes opened.
"Sorry, sorry." He looked up at the glowing phantom above him with the expression of someone who has realized they left the oven on. "I forgot to turn off the passive defense."
The Honkai consciousness stared at him.
...This one's different from the eligible candidates I've assessed before.
Considerably different.
The instinct to take a half-step back arrived exactly one half-step too late. A large purple hand emerged from Jordan's chest, wrapped around the consciousness's conceptual form with the certainty of something that had done this before, and pulled.
The interior space was warm.
That was the first thing — warmth, which the Honkai consciousness had not expected. Its nature was oriented toward entropy, cold, the space between things after what was in them had been broken down. It had encountered many human mental spaces in the course of its existence, and warmth was not typically the operative quality.
The second thing was light. Abundant, uncomplicated, the kind of light that suggests midday and open fields rather than the compressed urgency of a desperate will holding itself together. A meadow, boundless, the flowers moving in a wind that carried something clean into the air — not empty-clean, but the specific clean of a space that someone has tended and thought about.
The Honkai consciousness condensed into the form it found most functional: long-legged, white-haired, golden-eyed, the Valkyrie armor still marking her as what she was. She hovered half a meter above the flowers, looking at the meadow with an assessment that was equal parts appreciation and professional suspicion.
Artificially constructed imaginary space. She had manipulated imaginary spaces herself — knew the texture of deliberate construction versus organic formation. This was deliberate. Competently so. Which means whatever made this has spatial awareness significantly above the baseline for the species.
Golden eyes moved across the meadow with the patient efficiency of something that had established a threat assessment and was now filling in the details.
Something unexpected is about to happen, she noted. This is that kind of situation.
"I'm Jordan Evans."
He appeared in front of her without having approached — present, simply, in the specific way of someone who controls the space they're standing in and found crossing it optional. He was not in the casual clothes she'd seen him wearing on the bed; he was in his JoJo Hero Suit Set — predominantly black with golden chains, the high school battle uniform that projected a specific quality of physical confidence, an aura of power that wasn't displayed so much as exuded, the way heat comes off something that's been warm for a long time. "This is my consciousness space. Welcome."
He gave the word welcome the quality of meaning it.
"As for what to call you—" he paused, considering with the apparent sincerity of someone who had actually thought about this "—Sirin, or Herrscher of the Void?"
The Honkai consciousness — Sirin's remaining consciousness, resurrected through Kiana's body, become the Herrscher of the Void — registered the distance between them and what it meant that he had crossed it without her tracking the movement. She withdrew dozens of meters with the instant precision available to a Herrscher whose authority was spatial, placing that distance between them in the fraction of a second it took to decide to do it.
Only then did she look at him properly.
"You know too much," she said. The voice was clear and ethereal, the voice of someone who had decided to start from authority and see what happened. She crossed her arms. "I'll grant you're somewhat special. You're actually capable of a small amount of resistance against Honkai energy—"
"There was no resistance," Jordan said.
He opened his right hand. In his palm: a sphere, jet-black, crackling at its surface with purple lightning. It rotated slowly, the way compressed things rotate when they are under sufficient pressure to compress.
"I received everything you released." He turned the sphere once in his hand, easy, unhurried. "All of it."
The Herrscher of the Void looked at the sphere.
Then at Jordan.
Then at the sphere again.
Her golden eyes were very still.