F-boy tilted his head.
He studied the Herrscher Core where it sat on the island's surface—a pale yellow gem, prismatic, deceptively harmless looking, radiating the soft Honkai glow of something that had accepted its situation and was waiting it out with great dignity. The expression on F-boy's deep purple face was the one he had when he found something mildly interesting, which was barely distinguishable from his expression when he found something entirely uninteresting.
He raised one finger and flicked it.
The gem went skipping across the surface with all the indignity of a rock across a pond—and then a clear, sharp female voice rang out from inside it, startled out of what had clearly been a comfortable sulk.
A ring of pale yellow Honkai energy burst outward from the Core in all directions. The island shuddered. Out across the quantum sea, the rolling energy waves paused—just for a moment, as if the sea had remembered something and then forgotten it—before resuming their work against the shore.
F-boy reached into the pulse of energy and pulled.
Under the authority of Fantasy Cards, the intelligence sealed inside the Core could be extracted: a consciousness avatar, given temporary form enough to walk in the real world. What emerged from the pale light stumbled badly, lost her footing on the island surface, and barely stopped herself from going face-first into the ground.
White hair. Golden eyes. Valkyrie armor now somewhat diminished in the way of things that have lost a decisive argument. Sirin steadied herself and looked up at Jordan with an expression that had started as regal and arrived somewhere considerably less composed.
"You already stripped me of all the Herrscher powers." She crossed her arms. The grievance in her voice was the specific grievance of someone who has been defeated fairly and is still finding it unreasonable. "Why are you dragging me out here?"
Jordan looked at her.
She looked back.
What's with that expression? The look she was giving him—the set of her shoulders, the way she was holding herself against the island wind—managed to convey the total pathos of a former civilization-ending entity who had been having a perfectly adequate rest and been interrupted for no good reason.
Jordan felt something flicker in his chest that was absolutely not guilt. He was not going to examine it. He knew what she was. He knew exactly what she was.
He pointed at her. "Don't do that."
"Do what?" Her voice was entirely too innocent.
"The look. Stop it." He straightened up and pointed more firmly. "You're a Honkai consciousness. You came here specifically to claim a human body and destroy civilization. I have nothing to feel guilty about."
"Have I said anything?"
This is a logical trap. He recognized it clearly. He remained trapped in it anyway.
"—Enough," he said, rerouting. "I called you out because I need information. You cooperate, we're done in five minutes, everyone goes back to what they were doing."
"And if I don't cooperate?"
F-boy raised his fist.
He did not do anything else. He simply raised it and held it there, knuckles forward, at approximately her eye level, with the patient and total confidence of a man—or Stand—who had personally driven her out of eighty percent of a consciousness space and was fully prepared to continue the conversation in any register she preferred.
Sirin looked at the fist. Then at Jordan. Then at the fist again.
She breathed out through her nose.
"...Just tell me what you want to know."
Even the mightiest have to bow when they're under someone else's roof. Jordan sat down cross-legged on the island surface, which was perfectly stable and only existed because he'd built it, and began asking questions.
Sirin answered them.
She was, under the implicit presence of a sandbag-sized fist in her peripheral vision, entirely cooperative. She spoke without reservation, which—Jordan noted—she did with the particular quality of someone who had stopped caring about the outcome and had decided that unhelpfulness was simply too much effort.
The topic: Honkai Beasts. Creation mechanics. What a Herrscher actually did when they summoned them from nothing.
When he had what he needed, he nodded once and signaled F-boy.
"Wait." Sirin took a small step backward. Something in her expression shifted—not hope, exactly, but its adjacent relative. "I cooperated completely. I didn't cause any trouble. Couldn't you—"
Couldn't you just let me out? Is that what you were about to ask?
F-boy picked her up by the back of the collar with one hand.
"What—"
The motion that followed was, in F-boy's defense, technically gentle by his standards. He had been known to hit things harder. He placed her back into the Herrscher Core with the precision of someone who had done this before and considered it a solved problem.
Sirin's indignant protest was cut off mid-syllable by the Core closing around her.
The pale yellow gem sat on the island surface again, entirely still, radiating what Jordan chose to interpret as reproachful silence.
He looked at F-boy. F-boy looked at him. Neither of them commented on what had just happened.
She said something, Jordan thought at the Core. Something she was going to ask. I know what it was.
You brought it on yourself, he did not say out loud, because it was slightly more complicated than that.
He sighed. "For the record—" he addressed the Core with the resignation of a man talking to a gem he knew was listening— "you'll get a chance to stretch your legs again. Eventually."
The gem did not respond. It did glow slightly more intensely for approximately two seconds, which he chose not to read anything into.
F-boy retrieved the Core and, with the same motion of the previous chapter, returned it to Jordan's left chest. The reintegration was smooth and immediate. Heart beat once. Sirin's presence resettled behind the layers of AT Field and her own exhaustion with the quality of someone pulling a blanket over their head.
I'm tired, her general disposition communicated. Don't speak to me.
Jordan stood up.
He raised his right hand, palm upward.
The information Sirin had given him was already integrating—not as memorized facts but as something closer to instinct, the kind of knowledge that settles into the hands before it settles into the mind. He let it find its shape.
Pale yellow Honkai energy condensed in the center of his palm. Not much—a small amount, carefully controlled, a test rather than a deployment. It pulled itself together into a small cocoon of light, the size of a closed fist, and sat there.
Then it began to move.
The rhythm of it was wrong for something mechanical. It pulsed the way a heartbeat pulses, light alternating with shadow at irregular intervals, accelerating and decelerating in the way that living things do and machines don't. Jordan felt the Herrscher's authority extending outward from the cocoon—a field of influence, slow and gradual, like warmth spreading through cold water—and pushed more energy into it, steady and continuous.
Turning lead into gold, he thought, remembering the way Sirin had described it. The Herrscher's authority isn't fuel. It's a catalyst.
The cocoon throbbed once, hard, like a sneeze—and burst.
Light scattered. In Jordan's palm, where the cocoon had been, something very small lay still.
He looked at it.
White bio-armor, smaller than his thumbnail, edged in purple-black at the joints. A miniature spear no bigger than a needle. A shield the size of a thumbnail. The overall impression: a medieval knight who had been subjected to a significant reduction in scale.
A Templar-class Honkai Beast. According to Sirin's information: the lowest tier of summoned creature. Trainable. Loyal. Limited in intelligence but entirely committed to the commitment that Collapse Domination placed on it.
It was, objectively, very small.
It was also, objectively, alive.
Jordan looked at it for a long moment—the tiny armored thing lying quiet in his palm, the miniature spear, the pale purple glow of Honkai energy condensed in its structure.
A new life. He was aware of the weight of that. Whatever Sirin's original purpose for creating these things, whatever destructive function they'd been built to serve, this specific one hadn't asked to exist and hadn't done anything yet.
He infused more energy into it steadily, and it grew.
Not quickly—then very quickly. The miniature form inflated like something filling itself in, joints articulating properly, the bio-armor sealing into full coverage, the spear reaching proper length, the shield broadening. By the time it reached the island surface—too large for his palm now, large enough to need the ground—it stood twice his height, fully formed, the oppressive weight of a high-ranking low-level Honkai Beast settling around it like a field it couldn't turn off.
The Templar-class Honkai Beast stood on the island.
Then it looked at him.
Then it went to one knee. The motion was not hesitant—it was immediate, absolute, the acknowledgment of something that understood at the deepest level of its newly created existence what the relationship between a Herrscher and a Herrscher's creation meant. The spear lowered. The head dropped.
In Jordan's mind, a thread extended—fine as silk, invisible, covering the distance between his consciousness and the pale purple star that had appeared in his internal sky the moment the creature came into being. He followed it and found the star there, constant and dim, the way a distant lamp is dim: not weak, just far.
Hello, the thread seemed to say, not in words.
Hello, something in Jordan said back, more surprised than he'd expected to be.
He looked at the kneeling armored shape. Then at the quantum sea around them, which was large enough to make one of him and one Templar-class Honkai Beast seem like a very modest starting point.
"If this keeps going," he said, "and there are thousands of these—I'm going to have a trypophobia problem." He looked at the thread in his mind. The star at the other end pulsed once. "Not your fault. Just an observation."
He spent the next hour giving it simple commands.
Move here. Stop. Turn around. Hold position.
It understood all of them. Executed every one without delay or deviation, with the precision of something that had been built specifically to receive and obey instructions. No initiative. No curiosity. No self-preservation instinct worth mentioning. An engine shaped like a knight, tireless, fearless, loyal in the way that only things with no competing motivations can be loyal.
Jordan watched it comply with the fourteenth instruction of the hour and thought about what armies of these would look like, and then thought about what armies of these would do, and then decided that was a question for a different day when he had more context for what he was building toward.
For now: one Templar-class Honkai Beast, kneeling on an island in a quantum sea, waiting for the next instruction.
Progress, he decided. Strange, specific progress. But progress.