The punch had shattered spacetime.
Not metaphorically. Not as an expression of force. The void dimension's spacetime membrane had simply given way—fractured like glass along invisible fault lines—and what poured through the cracks took the shape of black lightning.
Serpentine. Inky. Moving with the unhurried certainty of something that had been contained and no longer was.
Each bolt struck the pixelated terrain of the imaginary space and erased it. Not destroyed—erased. The color-block squares of ground and mountain and sky vanished at contact points the way Dio consumed bread: completely, immediately, leaving voids that had nothing at the bottom of them. The annihilation chain-reacted outward from each impact point, one absence breeding the next, the apocalyptic geometry of a world eating itself from multiple directions simultaneously.
Several black lightning bolts swept within meters of Atomic Samurai's position. His eyelids twitched. He did not swear, which cost him something.
One punch. One punch fractured the fabric of space.
What in the—
The wind pressure arrived before he finished the thought. It came down from above, a suffocating column of displaced air so dense it felt solid, and the void-realm ground cracked beneath it all at once—not piece by piece but simultaneously, a single catastrophic shatter—while the surrounding atmosphere evacuated in every direction.
Ordinary Series—
"Ordinary Fist — Evening Elephant!"
Atomic Samurai moved on instinct that had twenty-plus years of grandmaster-level refinement behind it. The blade light that Jordan's punch had deflected was already moving—he caught it on the turn, the rebound, redirected all of it through his arms and out through the edge as he forced through his own limit, muscles burning with the specific pain of more that the body demands a price for.
One slash. Two. A sequence that opened a gap in the fist wind through sheer concentrated output.
The "Atomic Slash — Desperate Version" split the pressure column just enough to move through.
He broke free.
Jordan landed with a thud and looked around.
Black lightning was still traveling—he extinguished the nearest bolt with the casual attention of someone swatting something that had flown too close, and the bolt ceased to exist. Around them, the imaginary space had the structural integrity of something that had already decided to collapse and was simply working through the process.
He turned to look at the extent of the damage.
"...Ah." He absorbed this. "I didn't realize the spacetime barrier here was this fragile." The Herrscher's spatial authority was genuinely powerful. It was also, he was discovering, something he had claimed rather than trained with, and his first real test of it at actual output had produced results he hadn't fully modeled. He looked at Atomic Samurai. "Should we... continue somewhere else? Somewhere more stable."
Atomic Samurai took two controlled breaths.
In fewer seconds than Jordan would have thought possible, the residual strain left his face. The composure returned—not performed, not pasted over something raw, but genuinely rebuilt from the inside out. Whatever he'd felt in the previous thirty seconds, he'd filed it somewhere, and what remained was the steady, clean attention of a man who had been in difficult situations long enough to have a process for them.
Jordan watched this with genuine respect.
You can take a hit and not let it show. That's a skill.
Atomic Samurai flicked his robe straight. "There's no need to continue."
He looked at Jordan directly, and his gaze had changed. Not softened, exactly—the sharpness was still there—but recalibrated. The way a blade gets a new edge, which is different from the old one.
"I acknowledge your strength." A pause. "My voice got a little loud earlier. You and Silver Fang are both figures worthy of genuine respect." He said this with the flat simplicity of a man who doesn't embellish statements he considers factual. "My apologies for the noise."
—If I'd had any idea you were this kind of absurd anomaly, I would have saved us both the theatre.
Jordan stared at him.
The fist he'd been keeping ready slowly lowered. The dark energy that had been coiling around his forearm dissolved quietly into the air.
"...That's it?"
He looked at the collapsing void around them, which had maybe ninety seconds of structural integrity left, and accepted that this was apparently the conclusion.
If I ever want a genuine fight in this world, he thought, with the mild resignation of someone who has run the numbers on an unfavorable situation, I'm going to have to go find Saitama.
"Alright. Let's head back."
Atomic Samurai nodded with the gracious warmth of a man who had just recategorized a potential rival into something more useful. "I'll leave that to you."
Jordan reached for the Herrscher's authority, communicated with what remained of the void dimension's origin point, and folded spacetime back into alignment. The imaginary space, grateful for the excuse to stop existing in its current state, released them.
Reality snapped back into being around them.
The remaining disciples hadn't left. When two people materialized out of empty air, the room's reaction was immediate—people converging, questions launching, the general chaos of an audience that had been waiting in sustained uncertainty for an indeterminate stretch of time.
Bang looked at both of them from across the room. His gaze moved quickly—a grandmaster's assessment, taking inventory. No visible injuries. Both standing steadily. Neither carrying the particular expression of someone who had just lost something they hadn't expected to lose.
He let out a breath.
"Jordan-kun. You're back."
"Sorry for making you wait." Jordan nodded to the old man's smile.
They made eye contact. A brief exchange over the heads of everyone between them.
—Did you two actually...?
—No. Don't ask.
—...Good.
Bang stroked his beard, privately satisfied. The boy had listened after all.
On the other side of the room, Atomic Samurai had been surrounded by his three disciples, Okamaitachi having navigated past Iaian and Bushidrill with the efficiency of someone who had practice at this.
"Master, are you—"
"What is there to worry about?" Atomic Samurai fixed her with a look. "What could possibly have happened to your master?"
Okamaitachi, who had asked out of genuine concern and received a lecture, retreated with an expression that was doing several things simultaneously, most of them aggrieved.
Bang stepped in smoothly, the practiced peacemaker move of a man who has been talking people down from elevated emotional states for decades. "Atomic Samurai. Your disciple was only concerned for you."
Okamaitachi directed a look of profound gratitude at Bang and concluded several things about Silver Fang that she would think about later.
"Pointless sentiment." Atomic Samurai shook his head. Then, to the obvious confusion of everyone watching: "Besides. Super Cop is a genuinely powerful professional hero—like Silver Fang. With that level of ability, he obviously knew how to calibrate his output. There was never any real concern."
The room absorbed this.
Bang blinked.
Iaian, Okamaitachi, and Bushidrill exchanged a look that communicated, without words: who is this person and where is Master.
Atomic Samurai became aware of the quality of attention being paid to him and felt his face warm by approximately two degrees. He was a seasoned practitioner of twenty-plus years at the grandmaster level. He could regulate blood pressure as a conscious skill. He did so now, and his expression settled back into its usual lines of cool authority.
Knowing when to yield is wisdom, he thought, with great dignity. This is what separates the experienced from the merely strong.
Nobody else needed to understand that. It was enough that he did.
Bang stroked his beard and thought about the things that had clearly happened in whatever space those two had occupied for the past several minutes. He decided, on reflection, that he didn't need more information than he currently had. The storm had passed. That was sufficient.
The group dispersed naturally—Bang leading Iaian, Okamaitachi, and Bushidrill toward the back mountain for training, Atomic Samurai announcing, with his full restored authority, that he would also attend to supervise.
Jordan watched them go, found he had the restaurant more or less to himself, and activated the Mind Network.
The invisible field spread outward, moving through walls and corridors, finding Genos in the guest room—still tending to Saitama with the attentive thoroughness of someone who had taken "let him rest" as a comprehensive mandate. Jordan sent the message through the Network's quiet channel.