Jordan's lips twitched.
That tone. That phrasing. The particular combination of theatrical gravitas and completely unironic enthusiasm that his shadow clone had just deployed in asking for a nickname.
As expected of me.
He stood with the portal still open behind him and gave the question approximately three seconds of genuine consideration. Then a thought clicked into place with the satisfying completeness of the right answer to a very stupid question.
"Darkseid," he said.
The shadow clone stared at him.
"A born lord of darkness," Jordan continued, with the confidence of someone presenting an excellent proposal, "ruler of his own dimension, commands dark energy across the multiverse. Does that not suit you perfectly?"
"You killed Thanos," the clone said, with enormous patience, "and now you want to name me after the DC equivalent." A pause. The eye twitch was identical to Jordan's own. "You're genuinely something else, my other self."
"Stop complaining. Do you want it or not?"
The shadow clone looked at the portal. Looked at the newly illuminated Dark Dimension behind him, the blazing stars, the revived worlds, the darkness concentrated at the edges into something genuine and rare.
"Of course I want it." He drew himself up with full dimensional-lord dignity. "From now on, I am Darkseid—dark sovereign of the Marvel multiverse."
Jordan stepped through the portal and let it close.
One-Punch Man World. Z-City.
Afternoon sunlight. The kind that arrives at that specific angle where everything it touches looks briefly beautiful—streets, storefronts, the unremarkable rooftops of a mid-tier city that had been mostly destroyed and mostly rebuilt more times than its residents cared to count.
Jordan emerged from the black hole and stood in it for a moment, letting time reorient itself around him. The Dark Dimension had its own relationship with the passage of moments; stepping back into a world with normal physics always required a brief recalibration.
He narrowed his eyes.
Not because of the sunlight.
[Fantasy Card: Lord of Darkness]Type: Ability Card • Rarity: SSR
Introduction: In the Marvel multiverse, Darkseid—an avatar wielding infinite power—claimed the Dark Authority and became lord of the Dark Dimension, gaining the following capabilities:
Dark Authority: Within the Dark Dimension, Darkseid is its absolute sovereign. By will alone, he may alter the forms of matter and energy, rewrite the rules of spacetime, create darkness from raw existence, demote lower beings to nonexistence, or generate souls to produce dark servants.Dark Energy: Even at vast distances from the Dark Dimension, Darkseid may draw upon its inexhaustible dark energy reserves without limitation.Dark Avatar: Darkseid may gather darkness indefinitely to create and project avatars of any scale.Dark Magic: Darkseid may employ darkness as a medium for spellcasting, or transmute it into various elemental and material forms.Dimension Devourer: Darkseid may teleport freely within the Dark Dimension and project dimensional portals capable of consuming material-world territory.
The SSR card dissolved into the familiar blue light and settled into Jordan's chest.
Worth noting: the card hadn't come from Dormammu. It had come from his shadow clone—the seal formed at the moment the clone completed its absorption of the dark authority and F-boy registered the resulting entity as a new card source. A classic case of the system eating itself.
Technically, the Shadow Clone Release technique returned chakra and memories when a clone dispersed. This was more efficient than that. Considerably more efficient. The word "cheating" came to mind, though Jordan preferred to think of it as creative optimization.
The Dark Authority settled into the Herrscher of Infinity Core like a key finding a lock that had been waiting for it.
In the dazzling seven-colored crystal of the Core, a new node appeared: a dark star, small relative to the other structures, unremarkable at a glance. But the dark star contained, compressed and complete, the entire essential nature of the Dark Dimension—the governing principle that Dormammu had spent his divine existence cultivating and which he had, in the end, been unable to keep.
Gollum, from somewhere across the dimensional membrane: My precious—
The darkness didn't last long as a discrete thing.
Infinite power has a tendency to absorb. It had absorbed the Infinity Stones' energy during the Titan Limiter Break. It absorbed the dark authority now—the way ink dropped into water doesn't remain ink, but becomes the water's color. Within moments, the dark star had been digested into the broader infinite authority, transformed from a foreign element into simply another facet of what Jordan already was.
The net change was subtle.
The quality Jordan occasionally projected—that particular register of dangerous calm, the undertone that made people in his vicinity instinctively reassess whether they were entirely comfortable—deepened. His villainous boss aura, which had always been latent, achieved something approaching its final form.
He stood in the Z-City afternoon sunshine and radiated, gently, the unmistakable energy of a final-act antagonist.
I, Jordan thought, with some firmness, am a dignified law enforcement professional and a certified S-Class hero.
Not a villain.
At the very most—an undercover operative who has infiltrated the forces of darkness for strategic purposes. This is standard heroic methodology. I am, in fact, an underground worker embedded deep within evil structures for the benefit of all.
Resolved. The sky above Z-City seemed to clear slightly.
He turned his attention toward the training camp.
My children, he thought, with a warmth that was entirely genuine underneath the theatrics. Your king has returned.
S-Class Training Camp — Martial Arts Hall
The hall smelled of exertion and clean cotton.
Every trainee was in white — uniform martial arts gi, pristine, any trace of their individual hero aesthetics temporarily set aside. The effect was striking: heroes of wildly different heights, builds, temperaments, and power types somehow cohering into something that looked like an actual team. Genos stood at the front in his class leader position, his mechanical posture unnervingly perfect in the traditional stance. The three class committee members flanked the group.
At the head of the hall, Bang moved through the basic stance of Water Stream Rock Smashing Fist with the unhurried precision of someone who no longer needed to think about what his body was doing — every shift of weight, every adjustment of center, a demonstration of decades reduced to pure instinct.
The rejuvenation had been good to him.
He was at his peak — genuinely, physically, not the qualified peak of for his age. His body had been rebuilt from the inside out, and what it had rebuilt into was something that exceeded the outer limit of the human capability range he'd been working within for most of his career. He moved now the way water moves: not fighting resistance, simply finding the path that resistance had always been leaving open.
He walked the hall with his hands behind his back, reading his students the way a master reads a text he's memorized but still finds new things in.
Lightning Max — good foundation. Formal school, legitimate technique, a natural feel for the interplay between speed and impact. The problem was the technology. His lightning generation had been the center of his combat identity for long enough that it sat at the base of every instinct he had; separating the technique from the tool it had grown around was going to be the project of months, not weeks. Not something to resolve in a training camp. Bang noted it and moved on.
The bulk of the class had arrived with no formal martial arts background at all — a fact that said less about them than it did about the Hero Association's promotion criteria, which Bang had always found optimistic in certain respects. Among these, two stood out: Glasses, B-Class, lean and methodical, picking up the principles of weight transfer with the focused attention of someone who treated every new piece of information as a problem to solve. Mumen Rider, C-Class — arguably no business being at an S-Class training camp by rank, indisputably earning his place by every other metric. Both of them quick. Both of them genuinely understanding rather than just mimicking. Promising didn't quite cover it.
Then there was Green.
Green had, by any honest assessment, limited natural aptitude for martial arts. His body worked against certain principles that the techniques required. He knew it. Bang knew it.
What Green had was something that couldn't be trained in.
He was currently on his third attempt at a basic form that most of the class had gotten through on the first pass. Swaying slightly, jaw set, running through the movement again with the specific quality of concentration that comes from knowing you aren't good at something and refusing to let that be the final word. Not performing effort. Actually spending it.
Bang watched him and felt something that he might, in a different mood, have described as pride.
These are good young people. Not the most talented class he'd ever seen. One of the better ones. The ones with talent were one thing. The ones who showed up anyway, and kept showing up, were a different and arguably rarer thing.
He called the class to attention, moved through the group making corrections — a shoulder angle here, a weight distribution there, explaining the underlying principle in each case so the adjustment wasn't just mimicry but understanding. The trainees returned to practice with the adjusted mechanics. The hall filled with the rhythm of shouts and movement, the particular organized chaos of people training seriously.
Bang settled at the tea table in the corner and poured himself a cup.
He had just raised it to his lips when the door opened.
The young man who walked in was tall, dark-haired, moving with the specific quality of ease that Bang associated with practitioners who had stopped thinking about what their bodies were doing. Handsome, in the way of someone who wasn't especially concerned about it. The kind of presence that took up exactly as much space as it needed to — not more, not less — and was therefore impossible to overlook.
Bang blinked.
He was not, he confirmed, seeing things.
Heh. The old man set down his cup. Young men these days have a much larger appetite for trouble than mine did.
He gestured toward the empty seat across the tea table and reached for the teapot.
"Jordan," he said, with the mild satisfaction of someone whose timing has worked out well. "You've arrived."
Jordan took the seat and accepted the cup.
"Yes, Master Bang."