The monster's core detonated deep inside the psychic tornado.
An explosion that should have leveled a city block happened in the space between one heartbeat and the next. It was a silent concussion. The Lava King's crystallized heart simply gave out under the immense, crushing compression of Tatsumaki's storm. The fireball that followed was enormous, preceded by a genuine, blistering wave of heat.
But the tornado swallowed all of it.
Tatsumaki had built the vortex so tight that the shockwave had nowhere to go but inward. It bounced, dissipated, and spent its fury against the rotating walls of concentrated psychic force until there was nothing left. The slivers of energy that managed to leak outward slammed into Jordan's force field perimeter, scattering into harmless interference patterns. Colorful ripples chased each other across the invisible barrier before vanishing into the air.
Just outside the combat zone, M-City's quiet afternoon continued without a single interruption.
The vortex began to slow. Tatsumaki let it wind down gradually, allowing the massive structure of psychic energy to disperse in controlled stages rather than letting it collapse all at once. The heavy green light faded from the sky. The air, which had just been moving at speeds fast enough to bend light, finally went still.
Where the Lava King had stood, the ground was entirely flat. It was not the jagged bowl of a crater, but a smooth, scraped surface that dug several meters below the surrounding street level. It was a brand new topographical feature, courtesy of a few minutes of work.
Tatsumaki dusted her hands together. The gesture was small and entirely self-satisfied.
Dragon-level, she thought. Is that really all?
She glanced sideways, almost involuntarily. Jordan caught the look. He had been watching her work with the attentive focus of someone performing a genuine professional assessment, and what he had seen earned his approval.
"Clean one-shot, and you kept the battle damage contained." He nodded once. "That was well done."
He reached over, almost as an afterthought, and ruffled the top of her head.
It actually felt nice. His hand was warm, and the gesture was gentle in a way that seemed entirely at odds with her usual prickly demeanor. Tatsumaki said nothing. She kept her head down. But from beneath her green bangs, visible to anyone who happened to be paying close attention, the unmistakable shape of a smug smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.
Across the newly formed crater, King stood at the edge of the force field perimeter. He stared at the smooth depression that had, only minutes ago, been a perfectly ordinary commercial district. He stayed quiet for a long moment.
"Thank you, Jordan."
When Tatsumaki's technique had hit its peak, Jordan had quietly extended his force field to cover King. It formed a personal bubble that kept the tall man planted on solid ground instead of being swept away by the psychic gale. King had felt it happen and stayed silent at the time, but he acknowledged it now.
Jordan clapped him on the shoulder. "Don't mention it. What's the point of worrying about something that small?"
King's face shifted, doing that specific thing it did when he was genuinely pleased but could not quite force his severe features to show it normally. "Fair enough. Though I've been wanting to ask you more about those advanced magnetic field applications."
"Easy," Jordan replied. "We'll talk over hot pot."
Nearby, the protective psychic shield Tatsumaki had placed around Fubuki dissolved into the air. The younger sister lowered her arms slowly, the color mostly drained from her face.
She had been doing the math.
The calculations had started the moment Tatsumaki built that first wall of green light. They continued, reluctantly, through the formation of the vortex, the crushing compression, and the flawless containment of a city-killing explosion inside a psychic bottle. Fubuki had been trying to measure the ratio of her own maximum output versus her sister's casual display. The final number she arrived at was so impossibly large it made her stomach turn.
One hundred million.
She could throw herself at that single technique one hundred million times and still not break it.
Right, she thought, a familiar dark cloud settling over her mood. That is where we are.
She knew this. She had always known this. She just occasionally forgot the sheer scale of it, and then something like this would happen to remind her. The reminder was never gentle.
Forget catching up, she told herself. That is not a realistic goal.
She was still working through the grim implications when a shift in her peripheral vision caught her attention.
F-boy materialized right behind Jordan. He stepped out of thin air with his usual professional calm, resting his chin briefly in his hand as he surveyed the aftermath of the battle. His gaze moved across the blast zone with the methodical, sweeping focus of someone looking for something very specific.
He found it.
With one precise movement, a sudden flash of speed that completely contrasted his normally unhurried stride, his hand shot out and closed around something hiding under a scorching slab of displaced rock. He pulled his arm back. Clutched in his grip was a spirit. It was humanoid and miniaturized, its surface running with tiny, glowing lava patterns that had not yet cooled down.
The Lava King, now reduced to a fraction of his former terrifying scale, had been trying to burrow away. But the Mind Network's coverage had boxed him in from below. Every direction downward just met another impenetrable wall of Jordan's biomagnetic field. Above him was F-boy's hand. There was simply nowhere left to run.
The spirit's expression, to the extent that a molten spirit could have one, communicated its absolute defeat clearly.
F-boy's Stand ability activated. The struggling, miniature king was drawn into a strange psychic current. Its resistance dissolved, its physical form transmuting and flattening out, until all that remained was a pale gold card. It spun once in the air before F-boy caught it effortlessly and filed it away.
Fate Draw Count plus one. SSR Lava King.
Tatsumaki had watched the entire bizarre sequence without blinking. She tilted her head up to look at Jordan, her eyes wide with full intensity. She had about seven different questions trying to exit her mouth at the exact same time.
Before she could speak, Jordan pressed his palm down on top of her head again. He did it gently, clearly just to interrupt the incoming interrogation.
"It's a secret."
"What kind of—"
"The kind that can't be told," he said smoothly.
Fubuki and King, standing at a respectful distance from the pair, exchanged a silent look.
What secret? King's look seemed to say.
I have no idea, Fubuki's expression answered.
These two are extremely strange, both of their looks communicated simultaneously.
"Alright." Jordan surveyed the gathered group. "Wrap it up. Time to move."
Fubuki, still slightly dazed by the sheer scale of the day's events, drifted half a step closer. As she did, she gradually realized that Tatsumaki had not moved away from Jordan's hand.
Her older sister was just floating there beside him, perfectly content under his palm like a small pet being carried along. Neither of them seemed to register anything remotely unusual about this arrangement.
How long has that been happening? Fubuki wondered. When did they start doing that?
Fubuki studied her sister's face very carefully. She determined that Tatsumaki had simply gotten entirely used to his touch, and was not currently processing it as a situation that required her usual violent response.
I have so many questions.
Jordan communicated a brief, silent command inward, consulting whatever spatial mechanism governed his dimensional travel ability. The edges of the world began to go soft.
Spatial awareness scrambled. There was a brief, disorienting moment of absolute blur.
Then the ruined landscape of M-City vanished. They were suddenly standing in front of a high-end residential building right in the middle of a bustling city center. The late afternoon light hit the pavement differently here, and the air carried absolutely no trace of burning sulfur.
King identified his own apartment building immediately. He looked up at his balcony on the twenty-second floor, assessed the vertical distance, and pushed off the ground. A controlled magnetic field carried him upward in a smooth, unhurried arc, depositing him exactly on his own balcony.
Fubuki tested the air under her feet experimentally. It held her weight perfectly. She made a quiet mental note about the mechanics of that.
Beside her, Tatsumaki remained completely still.
Jordan felt a very slight tension in the hand that was still resting on her green hair. She stiffened, reacting the way a cat goes entirely rigid when something unexpected happens but it hasn't quite decided whether to bite or purr.
He is stronger than last time, Tatsumaki realized. She could feel the difference in the sheer quality of the spatial displacement. The range, the pinpoint precision, the number of people he had carried without showing any apparent effort. The last time he teleported them, it had carried the heavy, straining texture of someone pushing their power to its absolute limit. This jump had felt like a routine stroll down the street.
He has gotten stronger again.
She turned to look up at him. The hostility in her glare was genuine and highly focused, but it was also tinged with a strange, complex emotion that did not quite match her anger.
"What's wrong?" Jordan asked.
"Nothing." She turned her head away sharply, her curls bouncing. "I'm fine."
"Good." He finally lifted his hand off her head. "Glad to hear it."
Fubuki was openly staring at her sister. Fubuki was not managing her own facial expression nearly as well as she thought she was. In her twenty-plus years of life, she had never once seen Tatsumaki look like that after someone casually touched her head and dismissed her with an offhand remark. She had seen Tatsumaki level entire office buildings for far less disrespect.
She was so busy staring in sheer disbelief that she completely forgot to account for the current lighting conditions when she slowly reached into her pocket for her phone.
The camera flash went off, bright and blinding in the afternoon shade.
Two sets of eyes, one glowing green and one dark, snapped toward her with the synchronized, terrifying velocity of apex predators identifying a sudden stimulus.
Fubuki froze, briefly considering her very limited survival options.
"I forgot about the flash," she said flatly.
King returned from his twenty-second-floor apartment a moment later. He was carrying a securely sealed box of premium seafood, and he offered no particular comment on how exactly he had managed to get back down to street level so quickly. Jordan made a quick gathering gesture with his hand.
"Hold on."
The world blurred for a second time.
The familiar courtyard of the Flowing Water Dojo seamlessly assembled itself around them. Wooden fencing, raked gravel, and the crisp, clean smell of the mountain air blowing off the dojo's back slope replaced the city street. It was late afternoon here too, the setting sun casting a warm, golden light across the empty training ground.
Tatsumaki floated a few feet upward to survey their new surroundings. Her hands had automatically found their default crossed position over her chest again, the strange, compliant phase apparently concluded.
"So this is Silver Fang's dojo." She turned slowly in the air, taking in the compound with the highly proprietary assessment of someone who evaluates spaces for their structural integrity first and their aesthetic appeal second. "Not bad, actually. Though—"
She stopped mid-sentence.
A solitary figure was crossing the far end of the gravel courtyard, a large storage box tucked neatly under one arm. The person wore a crisp black and white apron and moved with a purposeful, mechanical stride. They had the very particular, rigid efficiency of someone who knows exactly where every single item in the world belongs.
Tatsumaki pointed a finger at the figure. "What is that? Some kind of new housekeeping model?"