The Templar-class Honkai Beast was still kneeling.
Jordan opened his hands.
Pale yellow Honkai energy gathered in his right palm—then darkened as it compressed, the color deepening toward purplish-black as the density increased. He shaped it the way you shape clay when you know what you want: slow at first, then faster as the form clarified itself.
A blade emerged. Slightly curved, narrow, single-edged. He'd made the proportions for himself rather than borrowing a standard template—his reach was longer than most, his grip wider, so the finished sword came out longer than a standard katana, blade around eighty centimeters, balanced for his height and the way he moved rather than for anyone else.
He worked the edge. Blood groove, handguard, hilt-wrap—everything a proper blade needed, assembled from Honkai energy as easily as sketching it. No scabbard. The sword was temporary by design; when he needed another, the Herrscher's authority would produce one. No reason to preserve it beyond the moment.
That said, he wasn't making trash. The material properties—toughness, edge retention, structural integrity—he brought up to match the Spear of the Void's specifications. Anything less would be an insult to the swordsmanship it was about to carry.
He held it up.
The finished blade caught the light of the quantum sea and threw it back cold and clean, edge gleaming. Every quality he'd intended was present. He tilted his wrist once—the balance answered immediately, unhesitating, as if the sword had been waiting for him specifically.
First blade, Jordan thought. Needs a name.
He considered this for approximately three seconds.
"Honkai Blade."
He was satisfied with this. Clean. Direct. No padding.
He raised it and made a test swing at the incoming wave—a ten-meter wall of energy sea cresting toward the island's edge—and the blade light that left the edge caught the wave at its peak and cut straight through it. The two halves crashed against the island's shore and dissolved harmlessly.
The swordsmanship memories from Atomic Samurai's SSR card had settled completely into his body. He could feel the difference: not that he was thinking about technique, but that the technique was there the way breathing is there. The sword and the hand had reached agreement without needing to negotiate.
Harmony between man and sword, he thought, which was something Bang had said once about a different discipline, but it applied here too.
He looked at the Honkai Blade in the pale light.
One more test.
As he pushed Honkai energy into the blade, the silver of it shifted—a pale gold light coated the edge, something between warmth and voltage, the visual impression of sunlight condensed to a cutting boundary.
Enchantment: Sharpness. Toughness. Strength. The attributes ticked up as the energy integrated. And then, running slightly ahead of everything practical: Style.
Jordan looked at the glowing blade. He could not argue with this assessment.
He turned to the Templar-class Honkai Beast.
Through the thread connecting them—the pale purple star in his mental sky, the cord of Herrscher authority running from his consciousness to the creature's—he sent a single instruction.
Stand up. Attack me.
The Honkai Beast received it.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then something did—not movement, but a quality of stillness that was different from the previous stillness. The creature was processing. In the simple architecture of its consciousness, something was working through an instruction that made no logical sense to it.
Why would the Herrscher want to be attacked?
The instruction offered no explanation. The Herrscher's authority didn't require one. After a moment, the creature accepted this the way a well-built machine accepts unusual input: it might not understand the purpose, but it understood the command.
It rose.
The motion of it rising was not subtle. The purple light under its helmet, which had been dim and patient during the kneeling, brightened to something that pulsed and swelled—the breath of a thing waking up. The Honkai energy along the spear shifted, condensed, wrapped itself into something that howled at the edges and turned the air sharp.
The presence that came off it when it was fully standing and oriented was a different category of thing from a kneeling statue. Jordan stood inside that presence and noted: Demon-level equivalent. Maybe just under. Any A-Class hero encountering this would need to be at the top of their rank, possibly coordinating.
The knight took one step forward. Then it committed.
The lance came down in a straight overhead drive, all the force of twice-human-height Honkai-reinforced armor behind a weapon built to penetrate alloy. A truck swing. The kind that ended conversations.
Jordan stepped forward to meet it.
They passed each other.
The lance hit the island surface and drove itself in to half its length. Stone and energy-material shattered in all directions.
The Honkai Blade left a line across the knight's waist that glowed gold for one fraction of a second—
Then the fraction ended.
Ordinary Series—
The gold blade light exploded outward. What had been one slash became many, became more than many, became a density of edge that turned the air between them into something that could no longer be called air—a thousand overlapping cuts arriving in the space where the first one had started, forming a net with no gaps in it, moving at a speed that made tracking individual strokes a theoretical exercise.
The heavily armored knight's Honkai Giant Shield could stop howitzer shells. Its Heavy Cavalry Lance could punch through alloy doors. Its body was built with the structural specifications of a high-ranking creature.
None of this survived the exchange.
The Honkai Beast came apart—not dramatically, not slowly—just stopped being intact and became fragments, and the fragments caught the pale light of the quantum sea as they scattered, and then they stopped being fragments too. The Herrscher's authority collected them as they fell, dissolving the material back into the energy field it had come from.
Jordan lowered the Honkai Blade.
The island was quiet again. One less star in his mental sky. The thread had gone out cleanly when the creature ended—no loose ends, no residual signal. Clean as a switched-off lamp.
He turned the swordsmanship experience over in his mind. The speed it gave him—the naturally superhuman hand speed that could split atoms, that could drive a hundred-slash-per-second sequence up to a thousand—he'd used it with a sword because that was what he'd been testing. But standing here with the blade hanging at his side, he found himself thinking about what that speed felt like in his hands.
This isn't limited to swords.
He looked at his right fist.
This is just hand speed. And my fist is considerably less inconvenient to carry.
He set the Honkai Blade down on the island surface and stepped off the edge into the air above the quantum sea.
The energy sea churned below him at a comfortable several hundred meters, waves rising and collapsing, indifferent to Jordan hovering above it.
He rolled his neck.
Spider-Time—activate.
The world slowed. The quantum sea's waves went from crashing to creeping, each drop of energy moving through its arc like it had all the time it could want. His own heartbeat spaced out to something he could count the intervals between.
Three-Tomoe Sharingan—activate.
Everything sharpened and brightened at once: trajectory lines appeared along every moving surface, the wave patterns resolved into perfectly readable data, depth and distance became immediate rather than estimated. The sea was a system and he could see all of it.
Fixed Time Control—Ten Times Acceleration.
The world, which had been slow, became very fast in the opposite direction. His body stepped up to match. Ten times. The waves weren't slow anymore—they were frozen. He was moving through a still photograph of a quantum sea, every drop of energy suspended in place, every curl of foam an unmoving sculpture.
He looked at the sea.
And one more—
Ninja Art: Illusion Technique—Za Warudo.
Time stopped.
Not for him. For everything else.
The quantum sea stopped mid-crash. The air stopped moving. The light, insofar as light had momentum, stopped.
Jordan stood inside perfect stillness and looked at his hands.
Then he put them to work.
Ora ora ora ora ora ora ora—
What followed was not, technically, describable. It was a number of punches that strained the concept of a number. Ten thousand was a number. What happened to the sea surface in the next approximately zero point something seconds was a function of ten thousand, applied at speed, with intent.
Time resumed.
The quantum sea took one second to understand what had happened to it.
Then it understood.
The entire surface directly below him caved inward simultaneously—not a wave pattern, not a progressive collapse, but a single instant of recognition that the sea had been hit more times than it had molecules on the surface and had no structural defense for that situation. A crater opened: a kilometer across, bottomless in the literal sense, a hole that went all the way down through the quantum sea to the dimensional barrier at the absolute bottom of this space.
The surrounding sea rushed in to fill the hole. The hole filled faster than the sea could fill it. The dynamic produced a vortex the size of a natural disaster, the eye of it open and calm in the center of absolute chaos, growing steadily as more energy poured in from every direction.
The vortex reached the island.
Jordan watched it cover the kilometer of flat ground he'd spent Honkai energy building—the careful, patient construction of cube after cube, the reclamation from the sea, the pride of a stable surface in an unstable environment—and consume it without particular comment.
He scratched the back of his head.
"Another imaginary space down," he said, to no one still present in the collapsing dimension. "I really need to stop stress-testing these in both directions."
He took one step. The Herrscher's authority opened the way back.
The room materialized around him like coming back from a long thought.
Flowing Water Dojo guest quarters—plain wooden walls, afternoon light through the window, the smell of mountain air. Comfortable in the specific way of places that have been lived in for a long time by people who care about that.
Saitama was still on the floor. He'd migrated from the original sprawl to a different sprawl during Jordan's absence, one arm over his face, the other at an angle that suggested deep comfort. As Jordan watched, Saitama smacked his lips once at something in his dream, turned over, and then—with the specific momentum of a man whose body had decided sleep was over—sat up suddenly and looked around with the expression of someone trying to identify which room this was.
His gaze landed on Jordan.
He blinked.
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