"So that's the mechanism. The spatial teleportation in the Herrscher of the Void's authority works on the same principle as the Flying Thunder God Technique—mark a coordinate, collapse the distance between."
Understanding it changed how it felt. Jordan took a single step forward, and the imaginary space carried him through the boundary without resistance, depositing him directly outside the martial arts hall where Bang was conducting his lesson.
The Herrscher's authority did something subtle and precise at the threshold: it blurred the line between the imaginary and the real, projecting his observation point into the hall like a window cut through the wall of nothingness. The two overlapping worlds—the pixelated void dimension and the fully-rendered reality—bled together just enough for him to see everything clearly.
Bang remained completely unaware. So did every disciple in the room.
Jordan looked around his vantage point and noted that something was missing.
He snapped his fingers.
The omnipresent Honkai energy hanging in the imaginary space answered immediately. It condensed around a set of structural coordinates, pale light tracing lines and curves and joints, and within a few seconds a set of rosewood furniture materialized from the void—a low table with clean grain patterns, an armchair with cushioned upholstery that had somehow already developed the soft patina of a well-used antique.
Using inexhaustible energy as raw material, constructing real physical structure from nothing, projecting real existence into nothingness. Jordan turned the concept over in his mind as he settled into the chair and ran his fingers along the armrest. Strictly speaking, this is edging into the territory of the Rule of Reason.
The craftsmanship was genuinely excellent—indistinguishable from furniture made by real hands. The only flaw was aesthetic rather than structural: the grain patterns glowed with a faint pale purple where Honkai energy ran through them like sap through wood. Beautiful, in its way. Also immediately lethal to any ordinary person who touched it—Honkai corruption worked on contact, and these armrests would enslave a normal human within minutes.
Jordan considered this briefly.
Saitama would probably be fine. He considered further. I'm not taking this set out of here. It's disposable. Built for watching interesting things happen.
From his chest, a deep purple shape emerged and pulled itself upright.
F-boy materialized fully, took one slow look around the imaginary space—cataloguing the pixelated terrain, the dark-red upper atmosphere, the general strangeness of a void dimension that shouldn't contain furniture—then reached to his own skirt armor and peeled away a single card-plate. It dissolved from pale purple into a white-bordered fantasy card and landed on the table with a soft click.
[Melon Snack Set for Eating (N): Item Card.]
White light pulsed across the tabletop.
When it faded, the rosewood surface was covered: a half-watermelon split down the middle, glistening and cold, surrounded by a bowl of sunflower seeds, a bag of potato chips, and two cans of soda beaded with condensation.
Jordan reached over and picked up a wedge of watermelon. Bit into it.
Sweet. Crisp. The exact temperature of something that had been properly chilled.
He pointed at F-boy with the watermelon rind, giving him a solemn thumbs-up.
Five stars. Highly recommended. Domestic service provider of the year.
F-boy's expression conveyed, without words, that he found this evaluation insufficient compensation for his existence. He sat down across the table anyway.
The training hall was very quiet.
Disciples in white uniforms lined the perimeter, seated in neat rows, their breathing controlled and their attention fixed on the center of the room. Nobody spoke. Nobody shifted. Even the younger students had absorbed enough of the dojo's discipline to understand that when the master was teaching, the room listened.
Bang stood in the middle of the floor with his hands clasped behind his back.
He was wearing what he always wore for indoor training—a black fitted top that left no ambiguity about the physique underneath, paired with loose casual trousers cut for movement. The top outlined geometry that most men half his age would find discouraging: the shoulder-to-waist ratio of someone who had been training for more decades than most people had been alive. His white hair stood straight up from his head, defying gravity with the conviction of a man who had never once considered whether it was reasonable.
He looked, standing there in casual stillness with his hands behind his back, like a mountain that had decided to take a human form for the afternoon.
"Next." A pause. "Garou."
Across the room, a tall boy rose to his feet.
He was fifteen, still carrying the last traces of youth in his face—but only in his face. The build on him was already a man's: broad shoulders, developed arms, the kind of frame that arrived early in people who trained before they knew how to stop. His hair was naturally white and stood in two parted strands that forked like bull horns above his brow, and his eyes, as he crossed the floor to the center of the room, held the specific quality of someone who had decided early that most things around him weren't worth looking at directly.
His gaze moved across the watching disciples without acknowledgement. It stopped at Bang.
Not respect, exactly. Not yet—not the earned, permanent kind. Something more provisional and sharper: the recognition of a wolf that had located the only thing in its territory it couldn't beat. Yet. The fangs were in. The ruthlessness was folded back on itself, waiting.
Garou stopped at the appropriate distance. Bowed slightly.
"Hmm." Bang's eyes moved over him with a quality of attention that had nothing casual in it. He straightened his back and beckoned once. "Come on. Give me everything you have. Show me where you are."
The boy's answer was a single casual syllable. Then he stepped forward, raised both fists—one leading, one chambered—and settled into the Flowing Water Rock Smashing Fist opening stance.
Textbook. Jordan cracked a sunflower seed between his teeth.
Actually, better than textbook. The weight distribution is already his own.
The watching disciples held their breath collectively.
Flowing Water Rock Smashing Fist versus Flowing Water Rock Smashing Fist.
Garou had been training with Bang for years. Everyone in this room knew what that meant in practical terms: he stood above every other disciple by the kind of margin that made direct comparisons meaningless. He was the de facto leader of the dojo through nothing more sophisticated than being undeniably the strongest person in it below Bang himself.
Bang had watched him get there. He still watched him, now, with the unhurried attention of someone reading a very long book they already knew the ending of.
Garou moved.
He covered two meters in a single explosive step, shoulder feinting left—body weight going right—right arm driving a straight punch at Bang's face, fast and with real intent behind it. Not a training speed punch. An actual punch.
Bang did not move his feet. He raised one palm and redirected the fist.
Garou had already accounted for this. His center of gravity had shifted mid-step; waist and core adjusting, left foot lifting off the mat and swinging in a tight arc—a whip kick targeting Bang's right ear, fast as a python strike, with the hips behind it.
The wind off his foot moved Bang's hair.
Bang's hands had already drawn a circle, slow-looking and very fast, sky-blue energy following the arc of the Flowing Water Fist. It connected with the kick and dissolved it—not blocked hard, redirected smooth, like water deflecting around a stone.
Garou didn't retreat. He used the moment of contact as a launching point, pressing forward, both hands and feet cycling through a rapid-fire series of attacks aimed at Bang's vital points. Throat. Temple. Solar plexus. Knee. The attacks came in patterns that folded into each other, no gap between them, each one positioned to limit the defensive options against the next.
Throughout the hall, only one person noticed the small thing Bang did after the very first punch landed on his palm.
Jordan paused mid-seed-crack.
Bang had shaken his head. Almost imperceptibly—a millimeter of motion, controlled immediately, like a thought he'd decided not to finish. It was the gesture of a teacher who had just seen something he'd seen before and didn't like the second time either.
Jordan set his watermelon rind down on the table.
"Old man," he said, to no one in the real world. "That's a terrible way to run a lesson."
He watched Bang let Garou push him back half a step—not from necessity, but to give the boy something that felt like traction. Watched Bang's defense ripple and absorb and redirect, never actually engaging with the full violence Garou was throwing.
If they keep training like this, Jordan thought, watching the boy's ruthless combinations find no real resistance, it's not surprising that they end up producing a world-ending problem.
Bang knew. That much was obvious from the outside looking in. A grandmaster with his read of people—of this specific boy, who he'd been watching for years—couldn't be missing what was visible even from a void dimension through a borrowed spatial window. The ambition was there in every combination Garou threw: not the ambition to improve, but the ambition to surpass. Not the hunger of a student, but the patience of a predator mapping the distance to its target.
The white-haired face under those bull-horn strands was young. The expression behind it wasn't.
Jordan had seen what Garou became. He knew where this road ended if it stayed on its current course.
And Bang, he suspected, knew too. Saw the talent—exceptional, the kind that arrived once or twice in a generation—and saw himself in it, somewhere behind the ruthlessness. Saw the obsession with martial arts, the daily improvement that was almost visible if you watched carefully. Saw the wolf that was already there and chose to believe he could shape it into something that wouldn't eventually turn and bite.
The old man isn't blind, Jordan thought, watching Bang's careful hands redirect another barrage with the patience of someone who believed time and technique could fix anything. He's just betting on the wrong therapy.
He picked up the soda and cracked it open.
The sparring continued below him, master and student moving through their patterns in the quiet hall, disciples watching with held breath, and somewhere in the white-haired boy's eyes—if you knew where to look—a very old kind of darkness going about its patient work.
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