The Möbius strip pulsed.
The six notches had sealed themselves around the Infinity Stones with an intimacy that no mechanical housing could have matched — not because the fit was engineered, but because the Pseudo-Herrscher Core and the Stones were both operating at the same ontological depth, rule-level constructions recognizing each other across cosmological distance. The gaps closed the way atomic bonds close: absolute, invisible, seamless. If you'd enlarged it ten million times and studied every edge, you would have found nothing to find.
The seven colors it radiated were, technically, a mathematical curiosity.
Six stones. Seven colors. Jordan had long since stopped expecting the things in his life to observe conventional arithmetic. There are, after all, famously four members in the Four Heavenly Kings.
F-boy stepped out of Jordan's body.
The Stand adjusted his cuffs, met Jordan's eyes, and gave a small nod. They'd planned this together, in the way that a Stand and its user plan things — not through discussion, but through the complete shared understanding that comes from occupying the same consciousness. F-boy knew what came next. Jordan knew F-boy knew. The Limiter Break card was already in F-boy's hand.
Jordan raised the new Gauntlet — the Möbius-strip Core seating the six Stones in their living housing — and turned the infinite power inward.
The Infinity Stones had been created from the universe's foundational energy at the moment of the MCU's birth. Everything that had ever existed in that universe, and everything that ever would, had contributed to what they were. They were, in the most literal sense, the concentrated essence of an entire cosmos.
Jordan used them to destroy themselves.
The power required to dismantle an Infinity Stone was, by any conventional measure, the power of an Infinity Stone. The recursive logic of it was clean: you needed infinite force to overcome infinite structure, and the only available infinite force was the structure itself. He directed each Stone against the concept of its own continued existence, and the Pseudo-Herrscher Core — locked now into the center of the reaction, immovable at the rule level — held the process in.
F-boy inserted the Limiter Break card at the same moment.
The conceptual power of a different universe — the OPM universe's specific and peculiar rule that allowed the removal of every growth ceiling — erupted into the maelstrom as a barrier, a container, the specific kind of conceptual lock that didn't depend on force to function but on definition. It defined the interior of Jordan's body as the space where this explosion would occur.
The two powers collided.
Saitama's gift — the thing that had cost one man everything he was and given him everything he'd asked for and left him alone on the other side of it — met the simultaneous self-destruction of six cosmic artifacts that together constituted the entirety of a universe's foundational energy.
The explosion was complete.
Jordan's existence disappeared.
Not died. Disappeared — the way a quantum state disappears when the observation conditions change, every particle going somewhere indeterminate, the footprints he'd left in Titan's soil the only evidence that a blond young man had been standing there at all. The planet trembled. Not from the explosion itself — that was contained — but from the aftershock of the footprints. The ground remembered the weight of what had stood on it.
Then the Limiter Break held.
The entire starry sky seemed to change — a vast phantom superimposing itself over the stars, shapeless but unmistakably present, something enormous grinning at a private joke and reaching down with casual, absolute certainty to push. The way you push a friend who has momentarily lost their footing. The way you push someone back into existence when they've gone too far in a direction that shouldn't exist.
Jordan returned.
Not cleanly. Not definitively. He returned in the manner of something that had been negotiated between two conceptual forces that couldn't entirely agree on the result — oscillating, the word here and the word not-here taking turns being true about him, the quantum superposition that was the only available compromise between infinite power and Saitama's ceiling removal.
He stabilized, eventually, in something new.
The color of deep space — dark blue from crown to heel, luminescent in the specific way that things are luminescent when they are simultaneously present and everywhere, when the distinction between here and the universe has become a matter of convention. He looked at his hands. They existed. He could confirm this, though the process of confirmation was more interesting than it used to be.
He rested his chin on one hand, contemplating this development with the ease of someone who has found a surprising result and is deciding what to think about it.
"I've become Dr. Manhattan," he said, to no one in particular.
F-boy, who had come approximately as close as a Stand could come to losing its user entirely and had witnessed the entire sequence from a distance of roughly zero, produced a gesture that communicated the full range of his feelings on the matter with impressive economy.
That was close enough, the gesture said, that I am choosing not to discuss it further.
The fact that Jordan had time to make a Watchmen reference while navigating a quantum superposition between existence and non-existence suggested, to anyone who might have been observing, that the situation was under control. Or that Jordan was constitutionally incapable of not making the reference, which was also possible, and which ultimately reached the same practical outcome.
You could always trust Saitama's conceptual gift to catch you when it counted.
Jordan turned his attention inward.
Two tasks, and limited time to complete them before the quantum state stabilized into whatever it was stabilizing into.
The first: the third limiter breakthrough of his main body. The racial growth ceiling — the hard limit baked into Saiyan biology, human biology, every biological system he carried — cracking open for the third time, making room for what he'd become. He directed the Evolutionary Power to the work and applied it with the focused ease of someone who had done this before.
The ceiling gave way like paper.
There was no drama in it, no struggle, no resistance that required genuine effort. What had been, in origin, a biological law that entire civilizations spent lifetimes trying to circumvent dissolved under the conceptual force of Saitama's gift the way frost dissolves in morning light. The attribute enhancement completed itself across every system simultaneously — not one thing elevated but everything, the entire stacked architecture of his power base lifting together.
More than the size of a galaxy, compared to before.
The number itself was almost unhelpful.
The second task was stranger. Transforming infinite power into something finite — not diminishing it, but grounding it. Anchoring it. Giving infinity a self to be located inside, instead of letting it remain formless expansion. The logic was the logic of cultivation: Prove the Way through strength, and reshape the golden body. You didn't just accumulate power. You became a specific thing that contained it. The infinite power stopped being a tide and started being his.
The quantum body settled into itself as this completed, the oscillation between existence and non-existence resolving into a stable new state.
Then the Evolutionary Power began to distribute its remainder.
A new card materialized in his ability library as the Limiter Break's fourth effect ran its course.
[Fantasy Card: Knight of Owner — Never Dies Barehanded] Type: Ability Card • Rarity: SR
Origin: In the Type-Moon universe, Lancelot du Lac — Berserker class, Fourth Holy Grail War — wielded a Noble Phantasm that allowed him to turn any perceived weapon into his own instrument of destruction.
Weapon Master: Complete proficiency with any weapon form. Any object that can be perceived as a weapon is a weapon. The distinction between trained combat implements and improvisational tools ceases to exist.Knight of Owner: When Lancelot takes up a weapon, it becomes a Noble Phantasm of at minimum D-rank. Weapons that already carry a higher Noble Phantasm rank retain that rank under his control.Never Dies Barehanded: Using one's own fists as the weapon increases attack power by a factor of 199. Capable of injuring beings of divine or royal tier.
Jordan considered the third effect for a moment.
A factor of 199 applied to the basic punch.
The basic punch, which had already been upgraded by every stacking modifier he'd accumulated across multiple universes, which already carried the weight of Super Blue's output and infinite power's density and chaos magic's conceptual disruption, now had a Fate-universe Noble Phantasm declaring that his bare hands were a divine instrument of war.
Saitama's normal punch, he thought. Jordan's version. Let's see how that feels.
Twenty units of Evolutionary Power remained available, and every ability in Jordan's library seemed to know it.
He could perceive them the way you perceive a room full of people who are all trying to catch your eye simultaneously — each one presenting its case through the quality of its presence, each one arguing its own claim to the resource. Spider-Sense. Chaos Magic. The Eight Inner Gates. Every card ability that had spent time inside his system and grown with it. They vibrated with the particular energy of things that understood what transcendent evolution meant and wanted it.
Jordan floated in his quantum state — deep blue, one hand at his chin, the universe visible through him and around him simultaneously — and reviewed the candidates with the calm deliberateness of someone who had all the time this moment contained.
The twenty units moved.
Ability by ability, the allocations completed themselves.
The Evolutionary Power drained to zero.