Tatsumaki shifted on Jordan's lap until she'd found a configuration she approved of—which took approximately three adjustments—and then turned her attention to the more pressing issue.
"This apartment," she said, with the authority of someone delivering a verdict, "is a disaster. Dust everywhere. When did you last clean it?"
Jordan looked around the apartment, which was immaculate. Every surface clean. The air carrying the faint trace of someone having applied focused telekinesis to every corner of the living space sometime in the last few hours.
He didn't mention this.
"I genuinely can't remember," he said, running a hand absently through her green curls. "I haven't spent much time here lately. I've mostly been staying with friends."
Tatsumaki's expression shifted toward something between disdain and reluctant recognition. Her mind supplied the image without being asked: a particular apartment building in a certain city, unremarkable from the outside, the kind of address that appears in no lifestyle publications. And a certain shiny bald head catching the light in the kitchen.
She scoffed.
"What's appealing about a bunch of men sharing an apartment," she said. "Peculiar arrangement."
"You're not a man," Jordan pointed out, "so you're not really equipped to weigh in on this."
He found the back of her neck—pale, exposed where the curls fell forward—and pinched it with the light, affectionate precision that he'd learned she would not officially acknowledge enjoying. Then he reached over, located the chip bag that she'd been maintaining sole custody of, and tipped the last of it directly into his mouth.
Click. Click. Click.
The sound of chips being chewed filled the apartment.
Something shifted in Tatsumaki's expression that could not be described as a thought, exactly. More like a structural realization. The specific, dawning awareness that the resource she had been managing all afternoon had just been fully consumed by someone else.
"They took them all," she said, in the tone of someone confirming something that they cannot believe they have to confirm. "You actually took them all." A pause. "Do you want to fight?"
Jordan's mouth arranged itself into the particular shape of a smile that is not entirely a smile.
"Fight?" he said. "Is there such a good thing?"
"...Huh??"
The curtains closed of their own accord.
What followed was, by all available accounts, a mixed doubles table tennis match.
A thoroughly enjoyable one.
…Two Hours Later…
Jordan stepped onto the balcony alone and stood there in the evening air, hands resting on the railing, taking inventory of himself.
After the limiter breakthrough on Titan—the third one, the one that had anchored infinite power inside him and spent the subsequent days leaking divinity into his baseline state—he'd been watching for stabilization. The tea with Bang. The time in Dr. Kuseno's warehouse, doing something essentially mundane for a few hours. The afternoon at home.
The last of the three had done the most work.
He could feel it: the oscillation between too much and ordinary that had been running since Titan had finally found a center. Herrscher of Infinity on one side of the scale, thirty-year-old man in slippers on the other, and currently the scale was level. The humanity had come back up. The divinity had settled into the background where it belonged—present, available, not broadcasting.
Decent human being mode: re-engaged.
He went back inside, found the blanket that had migrated off the sofa at some point, and pulled it over Tatsumaki, who had achieved the specific unconsciousness of someone who has had a very full afternoon. She didn't stir.
Jordan quietly left.
Before leaving the Marvel universe, the Dormammu operation had not been purely about acquiring territory. It had been setup.
Time to see if the setup works.
He arrived at the small lake on Z-City's outskirts in a single Instant Transmission step. The location had a quality that most lakes didn't: he'd stood here once before, when Blast's spacetime superpowers had been available and he'd helped himself to them. The spatial topology of the place still remembered that event in the way that places sometimes do. It made a good entry point.
The deep blue portal opened above the water.
Beyond it: chaos. Not the ordinary chaos of a city or a crowd—the absolute, undifferentiated chaos of spacetime turbulence, where the concept of direction didn't apply because there was no fixed frame of reference to define it. Jordan had traversed it before. His body had made peace with it. But traversal and searching were different problems.
Today he wasn't going through. He was reaching in.
He extended his will into the turbulence—past the boundary of normal perception, past the edge of where identity usually maintains itself—and began searching.
The theoretical basis was quantum mechanics.
Indecision, quantum mechanics. The old physics joke, except in this case it described the operational method rather than the uncertainty principle.
Jordan and his shadow clone—specifically, Darkseid, now sovereign of the Dark Dimension in the Marvel multiverse—were both entities constructed from the same infinite power. Assembled from the same origin material, carrying the same fundamental resonance. According to the non-locality principle of quantum entanglement, two particles that share an origin maintain their connection regardless of the distance between them. The connection cannot be severed by space, or time, or the barriers between worlds.
It could, however, have extremely high latency.
It could also have a signal-to-noise ratio so poor that locating it among the infinite noise of undifferentiated spacetime turbulence was roughly equivalent to finding one particular grain of sand in all the world's beaches, using a blindfold, guided by intuition.
The probability of hitting the correct direction on any given attempt was well below one in 1.4 billion.
Jordan's will swept through one direction of the chaos.
Nothing.
He withdrew, recalibrated, tried another direction.
Expected, he noted. Not disappointing. This was a test of the method, not the first attempt at success. If he could find the signal on the first try with 1-in-1.4-billion odds, that would stop being interesting and start being something that required a different explanation entirely.
Come to think of it, he thought, preparing for the next attempt, Strange succeeds with odds like this on a more-or-less daily basis. If luck of that caliber were something you could acquire, the Sorcerer Supreme position would be considerably more competitive.
He let the thought go.
His body lit up—seven colors, spreading outward from his core—as he released the constraint on his will and let it divide. Not two directions. Not a hundred. Billions. The will fractured into an uncountable array of simultaneous exploratory threads, each one probing a different path through the chaotic turbulence, each one carrying the particular quantum resonance of infinite power, this specific origin, this specific entanglement partner.
…2,000 Years Later…
An afternoon passed.
Every search ended in failure.
The Mind Network—which was still running, still connected to every base station Jordan had seeded across the continent—registered a small piece of information from inside the apartment: Tatsumaki, awake, producing a single small yawn, sitting up in the bedroom with the confused energy of someone whose internal clock had filed an inquiry. Her stomach, audible even through the Mind Network, was registering a formal complaint.
Jordan assessed the timeline.
Not long before I need to be back.
Before that, however—
Within the Herrscher of Infinity Core, one of the authority nodes—the time aspect, the rule that governed temporal flow—pulsed with a quiet green light that spread outward from the Core like a tide going out and then reversing.
The river of time stopped.
Reversed.
Jordan stood at the edge of the lake with the portal just opening in front of him, exactly as he had been when this began.
The exploration would continue. The afternoon, from Tatsumaki's perspective, had not yet ended. She would wake up, find Jordan back from wherever he'd been, and the gap in the timeline would be invisible.
Sorry, he thought in her general direction, stepping forward again. I might be a little late.
Fortunately, you won't know.
Across the city, in the professor's dormitory of the S-Class Training Camp, Saitama sat bolt upright.
He looked at his hands.
They were clean. He had not, as far as his current memories were concerned, hit anything recently. He was in his dormitory, which was nicely furnished in ways that still surprised him when he looked directly at the furniture, and everything was normal.
He looked at the balcony.
His rubber suit was hanging there, recently washed, swaying slightly in the evening breeze. A perfectly ordinary sight.
He scratched the back of his head.
"Huh," he said, to no one in particular. "I was just fighting a monster. How did I end up back here?"
He stayed with this for a moment. The memory had the quality of something that had been there very recently and was now slightly out of reach—like trying to recall the specific shape of a cloud that had already moved. Something had happened. He was fairly sure something had happened. But the apartment was normal and his suit was clean and there was absolutely no evidence that anything had been different.
Saitama shrugged.
After a thoroughly unremarkable lunch at the instructors' cafeteria, he changed into his suit and headed out. Genos was staying for his training course, which meant today was a solo patrol.
Strange, he thought, stepping outside into the evening. I've gotten used to having company.
He'd been spending a lot of time lately with— well. With a certain someone. Gaming together, mostly. Going out together. Good company, if you didn't mind the complete absence of small talk. Suddenly being back to solo work was an adjustment that felt larger than it logically should.
He turned the thought over for approximately one more second.
Then something exploded three streets over, and he felt the familiar settling-in of total focused clarity that arrived whenever the world gave him something concrete to address.
Monsters. Monsters he understood.
He was already moving.
Heroes arrive—
Monsters retreat.