"If you're just going to stand and pose there," Atomic Samurai said, "you'll regret it."
He took the toothpick out of his mouth as he spoke, turning it between his fingers with the loose, absent quality of someone thinking about something else entirely.
Then the wind moved.
It wasn't really wind—the imaginary space didn't have weather. But something swept across the still air, carrying with it several cold points of light that arrived from no particular direction, angled toward Jordan with the unhurried certainty of things that expected to connect.
Jordan's fist moved once.
The sword energy dissolved against his knuckles. Not absorbed, not deflected—broken, the way something intricate breaks when you apply sufficient force to the right point. The breeze that had carried it went still.
Atomic Samurai looked at the unscratched fist. His expression shifted in a way that had nothing to do with disappointment.
He punched apart my Flying Sword with bare skin.
The toothpick hit the ground somewhere behind him. He wasn't holding it anymore.
"Now we're talking."
The sound of a blade clearing its scabbard was the only warning—and it was barely that, more texture than noise, the friction of steel against lacquered wood lasting approximately no time at all. The red cape blurred. The atomic pattern on it appeared to spin, though that was likely just what the eye did when trying to track something it couldn't actually follow.
The slash arrived.
In Spider-Time, with the world pulled down to a fraction of its normal speed, Jordan could see it: a gleaming line of displaced air, moving fast enough that the Damascus steel pattern on the blade was still legible—still beautiful, the layered folds of hammered metal catching imaginary-space light even at this velocity.
He read the trajectory. He read the intent behind it.
Holding back at the last moment. Planning to leave a lesson rather than a kill.
Jordan raised one hand, palm out, as the blade arrived at the point where the decision would have to be made.
It was the sound that did it—something in the quality of Jordan's movement, the complete absence of alarm in it, that reached Atomic Samurai through the noise of his own acceleration and almost disrupted the mechanics of the strike.
He saw it coming. He's not moving.
The blade reached him.
Two fingers closed around it. Thumb and forefinger, at the flat of the blade, the grip precise enough that the edge went exactly where Jordan had decided it would go, which was not into his hand.
Metal rang against the pressure.
"Don't worry," Jordan said, conversationally, as if he were commenting on the weather. He released the blade. "I'm not as fragile as you think."
Atomic Samurai used the released force to slide back, creating distance, checking his sword with the reflexive care of a craftsman accounting for his tools. The feedback through the hilt was clean. No damage.
He exhaled.
"Let's see your real technique." Jordan rolled his shoulder and waved one hand with an invitation that was also, unmistakably, a provocation. "The one that's supposed to cut through anything."
Atomic Samurai looked at him.
That is either the most confident thing anyone has ever said to me, or the most foolish.
"You underestimate what you're asking for."
"I'll manage."
A sound from the blade—not quite a hum, more a vibration felt in the chest than heard by the ears—as Atomic Samurai's wrist moved once. The feedback confirmed what he already knew. Still good. Still ready.
"Then let's begin."
He stepped forward.
The dinner-table version, the drinking-contest version, the irritable swordsman annoyed about gift rankings—all of it fell away. What moved through the imaginary space now was something that had been doing this for thirty-five years without stopping. The aura built with each step, not performed, not theatrical—just accumulating, the way pressure accumulates in a system approaching its operational limit.
Jordan felt it arrive at the edge of his awareness and acknowledged it with a nod. This is more like it.
Atomic Samurai raised both hands overhead. Upper stance. The blade caught the dark-red sky.
What came down appeared, from the outside, to be a single slash.
It was not a single slash.
It arrived as a network—blade energy dispersing at the moment of execution into a web of intersecting cuts that spread across the space Jordan occupied, every angle covered, every gap addressed. In Spider-Time, the grid of it was almost beautiful: precise intersections, clean geometry, the architecture of someone who had reduced cutting everything to a technical discipline.
The network closed.
The figure inside it shattered.
Not Jordan—a pale yellow shape, roughly man-sized, that had been occupying the space a fraction of a second ago and now came apart in the backsweep of wind like something made of very old paper. Pieces of it scattered and dissolved before they landed.
Jordan was in the air above, looking down.
"Body Replacement Technique," he noted, as if citing a reference. He patted his jacket where no dust had settled anyway. "That was fast. I almost didn't get clear in time."
Down on the ground, F-boy's improvised decoy finished dissolving into nothing.
Atomic Samurai's thumb found the hilt guard. Pressed.
The blade eased forward a precise millimeter—steel against lacquered wood, tension and release held at the exact point of equilibrium between sheathed and not.
Let's find out how many times you can move.
"Atomic Iaijutsu."
The draw happened.
What followed was harder to describe than to experience. The blade came out in an upward arc that became something else at the point of full extension—not faster, because it had already been at the limit of fast, but more, the way a river becomes a flood not by accelerating but by adding volume. The slash that continued from the draw painted a line of light across the imaginary sky that lingered after the blade had already passed through it.
The ground fissured. A clean trench, narrow and deep, cut along the trajectory of the aftershock alone—the work of wind that had been adjacent to the actual strike, too close to escape its geometry.
The blade light swept upward.
If Iaian had been here to see it, he might have embarrassed himself. The level Atomic Samurai was producing right now, without announcement, in a private sparring match in a dimension nobody else could reach—it was the level Iaian had been building toward for years.
Jordan felt it on his skin before it arrived. A genuine warning—not just Spider-Sense reading trajectory, but something at the base of his skull registering this one counts. World-class. The real thing. A Dragon-level monster would end in two pieces with no meaningful interval between the two halves.
His AT Field would take this. Three layers, maybe four—he'd lose those layers, but they'd hold.
He made a different decision.
No defensive posture. Meet it.
He dropped into a throwing stance, right fist chambering back. Energy answered immediately—layering onto the fist in sequence, each system recognizing the call and responding.
Psychic force, pressing outward from the interior, restructuring the air around his arm.
Electromagnetic field, tightening like a second skin over every cell, hardening the surface.
Honkai energy from deep in his reserves, the pale-yellow kind that had been Sirin's and was now simply his, flooding through his arm in a wave that left the skin beneath it looking like it had been cast from dark metal.
In the lower-left corner of his vision, F-boy—entirely unprompted—had projected a small status window, the kind that appeared in certain video games Jordan had opinions about. It displayed his current active buffs with small icons and numbers.
You know what buffs are, Jordan thought, without looking away from the incoming blade.
F-boy's expression, in the corner of his peripheral vision, said: This is the least I can do with the abilities you've given me.
He threw the punch.
Time folded.
The moment his fist reached full extension, something happened to the imaginary space that had never happened to it before: the dark-red sky tore. Not dramatically, not with noise—just several long, narrow rifts opening in the fabric of the void, their edges dark and irregular, as if the space itself had absorbed too much and expressed the excess in the only direction available. They hung there for a moment, ragged lines across the pixelated sky, and then continued spreading.
The blade light and the punch found each other in the space between them.
The impact didn't happen yet. The chapter ended here, in the instant before—energy meeting energy, the blade's geometry against the fist's, the imaginary space trembling around both of them, waiting to find out what the answer was going to be.
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