Titan.
The battlefield of Infinity War. The home world of the Eternals, now a sprawling quiet ruin that had been practicing its abandonment for years. Thanos had always called its destruction a tragedy of resources — overpopulation, depletion, the painful arithmetic of a finite world. This was a lie that anyone with working knowledge of Eternal technology could identify in about four seconds. A civilization capable of rewriting biology across the known universe had, at no point in its history, lacked the means to solve its own population math. Thanos had wanted what he wanted, and he'd built a philosophy around it afterward.
What remained was a perfectly serviceable ghost planet.
Far from Earth. Abandoned. Structurally intact in the way that only true ruins are — past the phase where collapse is ongoing, settled into the long stasis of something that had already fallen and was simply continuing to exist in that state. The sky above it had the particular quality of a sky that no longer had anyone looking at it regularly.
Jordan looked out at the cracked horizon and made his assessment.
If I accidentally destroy the planet during this, there's no local population to have opinions about it.
The last native Titan Eternal had departed for whatever came next roughly a month ago — gone to find the goddess of Death he'd spent centuries fixated on, and who had, in all probability, not been waiting the way he'd imagined. The universe had moved on from Thanos before Thanos had moved on from the universe.
Good timing on his part, all things considered.
Jordan set aside the thought and summoned F-boy.
F-boy stepped out of him with the habitual composure of a Stand that had witnessed the complete arc of this MCU adventure and found all of it professionally interesting. He adjusted his cuffs. Then, with the unhurried elegance of someone who had done this before and enjoyed the presentation, he raised one hand and spread it.
The cards fanned out from nothing — a thick deck of white-bordered cards, edge-aligned, presented in the air between them with the visual economy of a magician who knew the trick was good enough to not require flourish.
Jordan looked at the count.
520 Limiter Fragments.
He paused.
Five-twenty. The universe is sending me love letters.
The fusion requirement read 320. He returned the surplus 200 to the deck and let the remaining fragments ignite — the blue spiritual flame rising in the still Titan air, burning through the cards with the focused intensity of a process that was converting conceptual material into something more consolidated. The fire held for a few seconds. Then it faded.
In the cooling ash, a card materialized.
Deep purple, bordering on the threshold between SR and SSR. The card's art: a bald man in a white cape, one hand casually in his pocket, grinning with the particular carefree quality of someone who has stopped worrying about opponents because opponents have become a theoretical category.
Jordan stared at it.
[Fantasy Card: Limiter Break ACT6] Type: Special Card • Rarity: SR+
Origin: Formed from the fusion of accumulated conceptual fragments. A power that was originally invisible — now made concrete.
Restriction Removed: Designate any object; remove one instance of its racial growth ceiling.Controllable Breakthrough: All attributes of any designated object transcend their racial growth limitations simultaneously.Limit Deployment: Designate any object; it randomly acquires one new extraordinary ability.Limitless Evolution: Gain 20 units of Evolutionary Power. Choose one extraordinary ability; it undergoes transcendent evolution, producing either a qualitative upgrade or a completely new ability. Can be used continuously until Evolutionary Power is exhausted.General Improvement: Designate a specific ability of any object; elevate it to the baseline "Normal" level.
Jordan read through this twice. Then read it a third time with the specific expression of someone navigating a software update that had changed the interface without explaining why.
What exactly did they change here.
He ran the comparison against the previous ACT iteration. Three main differences, once he'd sorted through the phrasing:
Effect 2 had been upgraded from single-attribute breakthrough to across-the-board enhancement. In isolation this was an obvious improvement. For Jordan's current situation, where most of his attributes were already operating in ranges that the term "enhancement" couldn't fully contain, it was a welcome addition to the cart.
Effect 4's Evolutionary Power allocation had approximately doubled from the previous version. More than one ability could push past its ceiling this time. That had implications.
And then there was Effect 5.
Jordan stared at Effect 5 for a moment.
"General Improvement: elevate any ability to the Normal level."
The card's design philosophy was, unmistakably, converging on Saitama's specific aesthetic — the one that reduced every combat variable to a single uncomplicated answer. One punch. Normal-level everything. The art was already there on the card face, grinning at him. The text was following.
If the next fusion produces an SSR version of this card, Jordan thought, and the art style fully commits, I will be using the powers of a bald caped man while developing a bald caped man's personal brand and I cannot allow this.
Saitama's hair had always been a finite resource. Every fusion was one hair closer to the conceptual endpoint. The trajectory was not comforting.
He used the card anyway.
But before the breakthrough, one preparatory step.
The Infinity Gauntlet on Jordan's hand dissolved — not into the deck, not into a card, just dissolved, the nanometal dispersing into ambient energy. The six Infinity Stones lifted free of their settings and floated in the air around him, each one quietly radiating its particular color: Power's purple, Space's blue, Reality's red, Soul's amber, Time's green, Mind's gold.
A faint luminescence rose from Jordan's chest.
He'd been carrying the Pseudo-Herrscher Core since before any of this began — the crystalline energy structure that the Honkai system had built into him, the thing that had reacted to the Infinity Stones twice now with something that felt disturbingly like appetite. He'd suppressed that appetite both times. Today was different.
He let the Core surface.
It emerged from his sternum like a prism rising through still water — translucent, geometric, rotating slowly in the air before him. A single crystal, currently. The Honkai energy it carried was vast and old, predating his arrival in the MCU by the entire span of the OPM arc.
Jordan reached into it with his will and began to work.
The Core was a rule-level construction — not physical, not merely energetic, but conceptual. Built at the same architectural level as the laws of physics, operating on the logic of what things were rather than what they were made of. In that sense, it occupied a similar category to the Infinity Stones themselves. Not the same category. But adjacent.
He'd built it himself, incorporating his own understanding of rules and principles. That foundation made it malleable in ways an external artifact wouldn't be. He shaped the single-crystal geometry now, pulling and extending the structure, folding the ends back into each other until what had been a crystal became a continuous loop — a Möbius strip, smooth and infinite, its single surface running in one unbroken circuit.
Six notches appeared as he worked them in, evenly spaced, each one precisely fitted to an Infinity Stone's dimensions.
He held it up and considered it.
There was a practical problem with carrying Infinity Stones beyond the boundaries of the MCU universe. These were artifacts whose power was intrinsically tied to their native reality — once outside it, they were, as Jordan had privately described them, extremely decorative rocks. The power that had allowed a single snap to alter universal biology simply did not function when the universe in question wasn't the one that had generated them. This was not a problem the Infinity Gauntlet had ever been designed to solve, because no one who'd built it had planned on leaving.
The Pseudo-Herrscher Core was built differently.
It was a rule-level structure from a different cosmology — Honkai-based, drawing on principles that the MCU universe didn't govern. As a carrier, it wouldn't plug the Stones directly into MCU power infrastructure the way the Gauntlet did. It would do something more fundamental: embed the Stones' conceptual nature into a vessel that operated at the same ontological depth regardless of which universe it was located in.
In the language of fantasy novels that Jordan had read enough of to have opinions about: the Core had natural emperor's constitution. The double-pupil quality, the supreme-bone foundation. It was built to contain things that shouldn't fit inside anything.
The six Stones descended.
Power first — settling into its notch with a purple flare, the first rule-node on the Möbius strip igniting. Then Space, Reality, Soul, Time, Mind — each one finding its place in sequence, each one lighting up its node, the infinite power of six universe-origin artifacts activating one after another inside the single continuous loop of the Core.
The eruption wasn't dramatic from the outside.
From the inside, it was approximately what Jordan had expected from six Infinity Stones and a Honkai energy core deciding to operate as a unified system. Every cell. Every meridian. Every layer of his stacked power base — Super Blue, the Eight Gates, the Energy Star Core, the card abilities, all of it — flooded simultaneously with a power density that the word immense handled about as well as a teacup handles a tide.
He let it move through him.
The Energy Star Core, which usually absorbed every available energy source on contact, held back this time — not suppressed, not restricted, but choosing to allow the power to roam freely through the system without immediately converting it to reserves. The infinite power surged and circulated and eventually found its way back to the Pseudo-Herrscher Core, which received it.
The Möbius strip glowed.
Jordan exhaled.
First step: complete.
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