Sirin used Phase Shift before the panic fully registered.
The spatial displacement carried her out of her previous position and deposited her somewhere new inside the dimension—which was, at this point, an increasingly theoretical concept. The white walls were crumbling at the edges. The chaos of raw spacetime beyond the boundary had been eating the dimension since the singularity had gone off, and the process was accelerating.
She looked around.
Green.
The entire sky of the pure white dimension—what remained of it—was green. Not the localized green of Tatsumaki's telekinesis operating at normal scale. This was the green of everything: an ocean that had simply replaced the sky as a category, extending from edge to collapsing edge, lit from within, moving with the slow deliberate rhythm of something too large to hurry.
Tatsumaki was nowhere in the green.
"I see," the voice said.
It was everywhere—sourceless, the way a voice sounds when it's coming from all directions simultaneously rather than from any particular point. Clear. Carrying a quality of observation rather than emotion, the tone of someone who has just understood something and found it satisfying.
"I think I understand now. Is this how it works?"
Sirin looked up.
The green ocean parted.
What occupied the sky was a face. Recognizably Tatsumaki's face—the sharp eyes, the severe brows—but vast, filling the visible sky the way a face might fill a window when it's pressed close to the glass, except the window was the entire boundary of the mental dimension.
Outside the dimension.
Looking in.
Sirin's memory produced, unbidden, a specific image: Jordan Evans, from outside her previously constructed consciousness space, appearing with that same quality of immensity—the lazy smile, the complete absence of effort in his expression, the sense of something looking at a small thing from a great height and being mildly entertained by it. The memory came with the visceral addition of what had happened next.
She had been crushed without meaningful resistance.
"No," Sirin said, not quite to Tatsumaki, not quite to herself. "Again?"
The enormous hand descended.
Not gradually. Not with warning. It covered the entire visible sky, and when it pressed downward the mental dimension—white world, collapsing edges, floating debris, the whole construction Sirin had built and fought in and lost in—compressed. The consciousness inside it went the same direction.
Down.
Into dark.
Into the gem.
Outside the dimension, in the space between the imaginary city's pale green sky and wherever collapsed mental dimensions go, Tatsumaki opened her hand.
The Void Core sat in her palm. Warm. Pulsing with slow yellow light that had, if anything, changed register slightly—a different quality now, like a radio that's found its station.
The information arrived before she consciously invited it.
The Herrscher of the Void's authority was extensive, and the mechanics of it transmitted directly through the core's contact with her hand—the spatial catalogue, the Void Realm access, the command structures for the beasts below, the technical specifications of the Void Spear—all of it reorganizing itself around a new reference point with the efficiency of a system that had been waiting for exactly this.
Tatsumaki stood in the sky above the empty city and let it happen.
The transformation that followed was not subtle.
The Valkyrie armor assembled itself from Honkai energy—plate by plate, joint by joint, the combat-forged materials that the original Herrscher had worn arranging themselves around Tatsumaki's frame with the automatic fidelity of something building to a template. The Void Spears manifested at her back. The Honkai wings deployed. The black stockings, the high-heeled combat boots, the ribbons that the Sky Armor used as trailing details—all present.
And her hair.
The green curls—the signature spinach, as certain people in her professional radius had privately described it, which she was aware of and chose not to address—stretched, elongated, and turned white. Waist-length, luminous, with pink highlights catching the imaginary city's light.
Tatsumaki looked at it.
She reached up and took a strand between two fingers.
No.
The green spread from the roots down, reclaiming the length, until what hung behind her was emerald-green and waist-long and entirely more acceptable than whatever that previous configuration had been.
Better.
She sat down.
The throne materialized without particular effort—not conjured so much as declared, the Honkai energy organizing itself into structural form under her will. Velvet cushion, spatial authority woven into the armrests, the kind of furniture that announced who was sitting in it without requiring any additional explanation. She crossed her legs.
She looked at herself in the reflection of a passing Void Spear.
"Hmph," she said, in the tone of someone who has confirmed a satisfactory result.
She deactivated the transformation.
The Valkyrie armor dissolved. The white hair—which she'd already made green—dissolved with it. The ribbons, the boots, the wings: gone.
What remained was her usual battle suit and what had not dissolved: the waist-length emerald hair, apparently a permanent adjustment courtesy of however the equipping process worked with character cards.
Tatsumaki reached back and pulled a strand forward to look at it.
"Inconvenient," she said. Then: "Will I need to do something specific to my hair every time I activate this?"
She filed the answer for later and reached outward.
The Herrscher spatial authority extended from her—tentative at first, then with increasing confidence, the way you might test the weight of a new tool before committing to the swing. It found the seams between imaginary spaces immediately, more easily than she'd expected, as if the authority had been waiting for her to ask it a question it already knew the answer to.
Jordan's spatial signature was not difficult to locate.
There.
The throne moved.
Or rather: the throne and the woman sitting in it stopped being where they were and started being somewhere else, with the particular clean completeness of spatial teleportation operated by someone who had absorbed the Void Herrscher's catalogue.
Jordan had been in the process of retreating.
Not obviously—he'd been in the process of looking like he'd been doing something reasonable rather than observing a fight he'd promised not to observe. The imaginary city, the suppressed Honkai Beasts, the pale green sky: he'd been looking at all of this in a suitably uninvested way when the light shifted in front of him.
His spatial sense caught the arrival before his eyes did: same Void Realm energy, same authority signature, but coming from Tatsumaki rather than from himself or the core. His pseudo-Herrscher Core registered it with what he could only describe as recognition—the specific response of related energies finding each other.
Then he saw the throne.
It was substantial. Honkai energy architecture, properly constructed, the kind of spatial furniture that broadcast its own legitimacy. Tatsumaki was sitting on it with her legs crossed, long green hair over one shoulder, the expression of someone who had done something and found it satisfactory.
"Wow," Jordan said.
He sat down next to her.
The throne's Honkai energy registered the new occupant and made an immediate assessment. The charge that built was halfway through preparing to eject him when the energy's threat-detection reached a different conclusion: also Honkai faction. Core signature. Known quantity.
The charge dissolved.
Jordan settled in and reached over to lift a strand of the new hair between two fingers, holding it up to the imaginary sky's light. Emerald green, waist-length, smooth in a way that Tatsumaki's usual curls weren't.
"Your hair's different," he said.
"It's the transformation." She swatted his hand away without particular force. "Don't touch it while I'm figuring out what to do with it."
"How did it go?"
She snorted. "You're asking as if you don't already know."
"Hypothetically. If I hadn't been watching."
"Hypothetically." Her expression did the thing it did when she was suppressing something that wasn't quite a smile. "It was straightforward."
"I knew it would be."
"Don't be smug about it." She tilted her chin downward at the city below, where the Honkai Beasts were beginning to stand, and the earth was beginning to tremble again in a hundred small ways. "What do I do with those?"
Jordan released the gravity field.
The Honkai Beasts experienced this as a collective event: the weight that had been holding them down lifted, and they scrambled upright in sequence—the smaller ones quickly, the hill-class one in the plaza with the slow inevitability of a geological feature reversing a decision.
They gathered themselves. Looked around. Tested the connection to their Herrscher authority—
Found it.
But something was different about it.
The connection was there—the same structure, the same command pathways—but the presence at the other end of it felt different. Still familiar. Still right, in the fundamental Honkai sense. But different in the specific way that something is when it's been handled by a new person who is entirely authorized to handle it.
The Honkai Beasts processed this at whatever cognitive speed was available to creatures less than an hour old.
Parent's back. But not—quite—
Well. Parent's still parent. Just—
Wait, is this a different parent? Did we get two?
Several hundred distinct processing attempts arrived at several hundred variations of the same conclusion, and the conclusion was: the person attached to this authority is slightly unfamiliar, and the original person is also present, and this situation is confusing but not threatening.
The horde turned toward the sky with the collective expression of beings who had questions and could not articulate them.
Above them, on the throne, Tatsumaki was receiving the distributed incoming awareness of thousands of simple consciousnesses simultaneously and finding it significantly more full than she'd prepared for.
"This is noisy," she said flatly.
"They're confused," Jordan said. "You're their new authority, but I'm still nearby, and you two feel related to them. They're reconciling it."
"How do I turn it down?"
"Practice. You get used to filtering."
She looked at the horde again—the hundred-meter beasts, the hill-class specimen who had turned its entire body to face them, the thousands of smaller ones filling the city's streets with upturned faces.
"Do I have to keep them."
"Your call," Jordan said. "Leave them here—they don't need food, they don't need maintenance, they'll wait in the imaginary space indefinitely. Useful if you ever want an army that answers to you without asking questions." A pause. "Or destroy the space entirely. They go with it, no residue."