The roof was gone.
Tatsumaki looked up—the reflex of someone whose spatial awareness had just registered a significant discontinuity—and found deep blue where the dojo ceiling should have been. Not night sky. Something denser and stranger than night sky, a color that had no precise equivalent in natural light. It spread in every direction, swallowing the sky and the mountains and the earth beneath them, filtering everything through the same impossible shade until the world had a single consistent hue.
The psychic storm still raged around her—she could feel it, her own energy, brilliant green against the deep blue—but there was nothing for it to damage. The air here was different. The gravity was notional.
She looked around.
"If you're going to destroy something," Jordan said from beside her, "nothing here counts."
Tatsumaki let out a breath. Some of the tension in her shoulders released, not all of it. "That's none of your business."
But she looked at the space again—the depth of it, the scale, the absence of anything fragile—and the question that was louder than the residual anger surfaced first.
"Did you make this?"
"Not exactly. More like—" Jordan opened his hand.
What appeared above his palm was black. Not the absence-of-light black of shadow, but something with density to it—a compressed sphere of energy crackling at its edges with purple-white lightning, the light it generated somehow making the space around it seem darker. It radiated wrongness in the specific way that things do when they're structured around principles that don't agree with the world they're occupying.
Tatsumaki narrowed her eyes.
She was one of the strongest psychics alive, and she'd learned to read energy the way a musician reads sound—not just the surface of it but what was underneath, what governed it. The destructive quality of what Jordan was holding was obvious. That wasn't what she was looking at.
Beneath the erosion, beneath the hostility to anything organized—
Rules. Authority. Something that owns this space.
Jordan closed his fist. The sphere extinguished cleanly.
"I have access permissions here. That's what brought us through." He gestured at the surrounding deep blue expanse. "And yes. Whatever you do to this place doesn't matter."
Tatsumaki was quiet for a moment.
Then: "How much?"
"As much as you want."
Her lips curved slightly. The expression was small and private and didn't last long.
She opened her arms.
There was no windup. The power that had been restrained—by responsibility, by the presence of buildings, by the constant low-level calculation of how much is safe, what's the radius, which direction won't hit something that can't be replaced—came out all at once. A lifetime of careful management simply stopped being necessary for approximately three minutes.
The tornado that formed was the real one. Not the controlled, surgical instruments she deployed against monsters. Not the demonstration she'd given in M-City. The thing that formed between her raised hands and the deep blue sky was what happened when Tatsumaki stopped thinking about the walls.
It hit the ground like a drill through paper.
The earth of the imaginary space—whatever the imaginary space used instead of earth—came apart in sections, each piece consumed by the rotating column before it could finish separating. The roar was total. Mountains that weren't real mountains shattered in sequences, their matter drawn up into the vortex and annihilated or hurled outward into the blue dark. A pit opened beneath the storm—vast, lightless, dropping to depths that had no visible floor.
Jordan glanced at the abyss.
Didn't break through the barrier. He relaxed slightly. Good. No emergency relocation required.
The storm slowed. The roar diminished. The last of the imaginary matter settled or disappeared, and Tatsumaki floated at the center of a transformed landscape—a cathedral-scale absence where there had been world, the edges still crackling faintly with residual green.
Her breathing was slightly elevated. Her expression had changed.
The anger was gone. Not suppressed—gone, spent completely, every last particle of it burned through the expenditure. What remained was the particular clarity that comes after total release, every cell of her doing exactly what it was built to do without restraint and then arriving at stillness.
She drifted to Jordan's level. Her voice, when it came, was quieter than her usual register.
"If I can't manage it next time—" She looked at the deep blue distance rather than at him. "Bring me here."
Jordan processed this. "Next time implies a recurring schedule."
"I can't guarantee anything either way."
He considered the alternative—Tatsumaki's next overflow event, somewhere with infrastructure—and nodded. "Fair point. Agreed."
She made a sound that wasn't quite a snort. Her cheeks had acquired a slight color that was possibly exertion and possibly something else. She turned her head deliberately away.
"Are we going back?"
Jordan looked at the expanse around them—the deep blue, the quiet, the absence of anyone needing anything from either of them. "We're already here. Let it air out a bit first."
Tatsumaki considered this and found it difficult to argue with. "It was getting warm in there."
F-boy appeared at Jordan's shoulder with the timing of someone who has been waiting for a natural pause. A white card passed between them—the Stand's hand to Jordan's—with the efficiency of a transaction that's been done enough times to require no conversation.
The card released. A bottle materialized—high-end shochu, the label the kind that comes with a dedicated shelf position. Genos had selected it, which meant the price tag was significant and the quality was commensurate.
"You wanted to try this earlier," Jordan said.
Tatsumaki's interest in the drink lasted approximately one second before her attention caught on what had just happened.
She pointed at the bottle. "That purple arm—" She pointed at F-boy. "And that thing from this afternoon, with the monster—that's the same—"
"Related, yes."
"So it's your ability."
"His ability," Jordan said, with the slight correction of someone maintaining an important distinction. "He's not a trick. He's—" He glanced at F-boy, who was holding the bottle with the patience of someone who is accustomed to being discussed in the third person. "Step out properly."
F-boy emerged fully—the complete form, no longer partly merged with Jordan's silhouette. Purple-tinged, transparent at the edges, the blue spiritual flames present along the outline. Muscular. Wearing the card-armor at the waist. He stood beside Jordan with the bearing of someone who has no opinion about being examined and intends to continue having no opinion regardless of what happens next.
Tatsumaki orbited them once.
She leaned forward and poked F-boy in the chest with one finger.
Solid. Actual resistance.
"It's physical." She sounded genuinely surprised.
F-boy's expression did the thing it did when he was enduring something with professional dignity.
Jordan pulled Tatsumaki back gently by the shoulder. "He's called a Stand. A spiritual entity—independent of me, capable of independent action, with his own abilities." He patted F-boy on the arm. "He goes by F-boy."
F-boy gave Tatsumaki a look that communicated several things, the primary one being that the chest-poking incident was noted and filed.
Tatsumaki was already circling again, examining the Stand from multiple angles with the comprehensive attention she brought to anything she didn't yet fully understand.
"It's made of the same kind of energy as you," she said. Not a question. "But it's separate."
"Correct."