Sirin turned her head.
F-boy looked back at her with the same face as Jordan, which was the face of Jordan, because F-boy was the Stand of Jordan, which meant that the consciousness space now contained two versions of the same face, one of which had just materialized from the architecture of the space itself and was holding her arms behind her back.
The logical processing required to explain this took a fraction of a second longer than the threat assessment required to react to it. F-boy used that fraction of a second.
He let go of her wrists.
He teleported.
His fist arrived at her abdomen before she'd finished turning to track where he'd gone — a blow that carried the absolute conviction of a Stand manifesting at full power, the impact traveling through her Herrscher form and into the consciousness underneath it. Sirin's eyes went wide. A few drops of crystalline liquid left the corner of her mouth. The pain from her abdomen shot directly to the core of her consciousness, the deep and specific pain of something hitting where you actually live rather than where you appear to live.
She landed on one knee, clutching her midsection, the flames in her golden eyes going very bright and very hot.
"...Futile resistance!" She gritted the words out through the pain. "Today I am destined to devour everything you have—"
F-boy appeared closer. This time he didn't wind up.
The fist connected with her cheek.
Jordan, watching from across the meadow — or what remained of the meadow — covered his eyes with one hand. The gap between his fingers was, technically, not zero.
The explosive force from the impact rippled outward in a spreading pattern from the point of contact, distorting the air around it the way extreme force distorts things. Sirin's slender figure described an arc across the consciousness space that covered considerable distance before she stopped, catching herself in the air on the gold-bone wing and the spatial authority that was hers regardless of physical position.
She hovered. Breathing harder than she had been.
F-boy was already moving again — but the Herrscher core had been moving too, and the response it triggered was not defensive.
The sky changed.
In the imaginary space beyond Jordan's constructed world, something that had been waiting opened. Rotating doors appeared in the trembling sky one by one — orange-yellow, twisted at their edges, the geometry of spatial gates that shouldn't exist in a space this size — and they kept opening, each one an eye of destruction looking inward, until most of the sky above was covered in them. From each gate, a Void Spear projected downward in pure energy form: not physical weapons but concentrations of Honkai power that had been distilled to the point where the distinction between energy and weapon stopped mattering.
The targeting all pointed at Jordan.
Superman, meet the Tomahawk missile grid, he thought. Plural.
He cleared his throat.
"Can we—" he started, in the tone of a man making a reasonable attempt to resolve a situation through dialogue "—discuss this? Specifically the part where using a substitute shouldn't affect the original user's—"
"Die."
"Right. Negotiations concluded."
His expression shifted half a degree toward serious.
The spatial boundary between the gates and the consciousness space shattered — not broke, shattered, the specific quality of a threshold being exceeded rather than breached — and the Honkai energy came through like continuous artillery. Dark yellow cannon fire, supersonic, each shot creating an explosion where it landed that was self-contained and absolute.
Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom—
The flowers Jordan had reconstructed ceased to exist again. The lawn followed. The light on his side of the divided world held only because he was actively maintaining it, and maintaining it was taking some attention.
Sirin caught herself in the air above the barrage, recovering from F-boy's strikes, wiping the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand. The golden eyes were burning now in the way they burned when the anger had moved past processing and into something more settled and purposeful.
"You've felt the power of Honkai now, haven't you." Not a question.
"Mm." The voice came from behind her.
She spun.
Jordan was standing in the air not four meters away, watching the bombardment of his own consciousness space with the expression of someone taking notes. "Fast deployment. Very high desire to escalate. Those are accurate observations."
When — when did he—
The ambush from F-boy had put her on high alert. She wasn't letting that happen again. Her Herrscher authority extended in a sphere around her, monitoring every fluctuation of imaginary-space—
Her finger rose.
Two-meter square pillars of purple Honkai energy materialized above both of them simultaneously, each one carrying the mass of a concentrated spatial column, and dropped.
Jordan caught the first one with one hand.
His figure dropped half a meter under the weight before it stabilized. He held the pillar there for a moment, assessing, then threw it sideways and punched the next one as it fell. The impact shattered it into Honkai crystals — thousands of fragments raining outward and down across the remnants of the consciousness space like purple hail, covering everything below with the residue of broken spatial force.
Another pillar. He shattered it.
Another. Shattered.
The crystal rain continued falling as he worked through the sequence, each pillar meeting the same result, the broken Honkai energy scattering as if it were giving up and trying to be decorative instead.
Sirin used the window.
Her wings deployed — the gold-bone structure on one side catching the void-energy like a sail — and she accelerated upward and away, creating distance between herself and the man who had stood under a Honkai artillery barrage and looked bored during it.
When was the last time Honkai was handled this badly—
She knew the answer, actually. She'd catalogued it.
Fu Hua.
The memory arrived with the quality of a bruise being pressed: the woman who had met her in her full Herrscher manifestation and struck with the weight of a civilization's worth of martial refinement behind a single blow. A single powerful strike, splitting the heavens. The shout that still echoed sometimes in the deeper registers of her consciousness.
This man was not Fu Hua. But the gap between him and ordinary humanity was the same category of gap — the kind that didn't make sense under the rules she'd been using to evaluate the species.
How does humanity keep producing them?
She was gaining altitude, creating distance, the darkness of eroded space spread across nearly eighty percent of the sky and ground below her. Jordan's consciousness world was riddled with it — honeycombed by Honkai incursion, the original construction barely visible under the accumulated void. The last remaining light occupied a shrinking patch beneath her.
Once it's gone, she thought, and the calculation was familiar, practiced, applied to this type of situation many times before: once the space is fully eroded, his authority here ends. His consciousness floats in void-space. My void-space. And then the body — that remarkable, terrible body — belongs to the Honkai.
She was almost smiling.
"Hey."
The voice came from not far away, from the direction of the shrinking light that was supposed to be almost gone.
She turned.
Jordan was standing in the air with his hands in his pockets, looking up at her with the expression of a man who has been waiting for a meeting to end so the actual agenda can begin.
"When are you planning to get down to business?" He tilted his head slightly. "The warm-up's been interesting. But shouldn't we move past it?"
Sirin stared at him.
The space is eighty percent eroded, her Herrscher authority confirmed. His anchor in this world should be—
She looked at the eighty percent of darkness surrounding them.
She looked at the twenty percent of light he was standing in.
She looked at his expression, which contained no awareness of being on the losing end of anything.
He was right about the Void Spear range issue, she realized, with the distant clarity of someone acknowledging an accurate tactical assessment they didn't enjoy receiving. Massive area suppression was her signature at range. Close-quarters was an entirely different conversation, one she had historically lost more often than her reputation suggested.
The Herrscher of Void was an emperor at distance. At arm's length she was considerably less comfortable.
He's been letting me work at range this entire time.
Two patches of red appeared on her cheeks — not Honkai manifestation, simply the involuntary physiological response of someone who has been made angry by an accurate observation delivered with polite calm.
"Don't get comfortable, human!!"
The Spear of the Void launched — not thrown, but sent, crossing the space between them with the authority of something that existed in both real and imaginary simultaneously, impossible to sidestep through conventional means because it wasn't constrained by conventional space.
Jordan stepped out of the way.
Not sideways — not a dodge in the spatial sense — he simply wasn't where the spear arrived, moving through the consciousness space with the ease of something that lived in it. Then wasn't where the second one arrived. The third. The fourth. His hands stayed in his pockets and his path through the barrage was unhurried, almost leisurely, a series of small adjustments that kept him precisely outside each spear's effective range as if he were reading the trajectory before it resolved.
From the outside, had anyone been watching, it would have looked like a man walking through rain without getting wet.
Sirin gritted her teeth.
Her Herrscher authority locked onto the space he occupied — not the man, the space — and pulled.
Spacetime shuddered.
The tear opened.