Jordan straightened his shirt—the fight had left it comprehensively wrinkled—and got back to business.
"What happens to duplicate cards?"
F-boy's expression lit up with the particular enthusiasm of someone who has been waiting for this question.
[Sell duplicates. Recover currency. Standard equipment recycling.]
"Speak like a person."
F-boy cleared his throat with great dignity.
[Disassemble a fantasy card. Receive a refund of Fate Draw attempts. One-to-one. Fair and transparent service.]
Jordan's mood lifted immediately. "Wait—disassemble one fantasy card and get ten Fate Draws back? That's actually reasonable—"
F-boy looked at him the way a doctor looks at a patient who has just said something that suggests a serious misunderstanding of their own condition.
[Disassemble one fantasy card. Receive one Fate Draw in return. One-to-one. As stated.]
Jordan stared at him.
One card in. One draw out.
One draw, which in this targeted pool cost ten draws to execute.
Under F-boy's politely attentive gaze, Jordan ran the math twice to make sure he hadn't made a mistake. He hadn't.
"You're calling this a one-to-one refund." He kept his voice very measured. "When the pool we're drawing from costs ten times the standard rate."
A handsome young man in a purple suit responded to this observation with an elegant shrug.
[Unhappy with the service? Physical complaints accepted.]
Round two was briefer than round one but no less committed.
Saitama, in the living room, looked up from his newspaper at the swaying chandelier. Plaster dust drifted down from the ceiling in a thin curtain.
He watched it settle on the coffee table.
"...Yeah," he said, to no one in particular. "Genos should really do that reinforcement job properly."
Inside the room:
F-boy straightened his tie—slightly askew from the second altercation—and activated the fourth ability again with the unruffled composure of a professional who has separated the personal from the operational.
The second ten-pull spread across the air.
[Fantasy Card: Substitution Technique] Type: Ability • Rarity: N (White) E-rank ninjutsu. One of the Three Basic Body Techniques. Replaces the user with a nearby object at the moment of impact.
[Fantasy Card: Wind Release — Vacuum Ball] Type: Ability • Rarity: R (Blue) B-rank Wind Release ninjutsu. Inhale, then expel multiple compressed wind shockwaves simultaneously, attacking the target from several angles at once. Sufficient force to penetrate flesh.
[Fantasy Card: Konoha Gale] Type: Ability • Rarity: N (White) Leaf Village standard taijutsu. High-speed sweeping kick combination.
[Fantasy Card: Earth Release — Earth Flow Wall] Type: Ability • Rarity: R (Blue) B-rank Earth Release ninjutsu. Raises a massive earthen barrier from the ground, carved in the shape of a dog's head. Highly effective defensive structure.
[Fantasy Card: Eight Trigrams Palm] Type: Ability • Rarity: R (Blue) Gentle Fist taijutsu. Hyuga clan exclusive. Uses the Byakugan to perceive the opponent's precise position within the Eight Trigrams formation, then releases a concentrated chakra shockwave at range. Note: Without the Byakugan, accurate targeting is significantly compromised.
[Fantasy Card: Fire Release — Dragon Fire Technique] Type: Ability • Rarity: R (Blue) C-rank Fire Release ninjutsu. Uses a wire or string already connecting to the target as a guide channel, directing a stream of fire along its length. Effective at medium range with preparation.
[Fantasy Card: Clone Technique] Type: Ability • Rarity: N (White) E-rank ninjutsu. One of the Three Basic Body Techniques. Creates illusory copies of the user.
[Fantasy Card: Fire Release — Great Fireball Technique] Type: Ability • Rarity: R (Blue) C-rank Fire Release ninjutsu. Uchiha clan signature technique, recognized throughout the ninja world. Chakra is gathered in the throat and expelled as a massive fireball. Power scales with the user's reserves. Accuracy is low; compensated for by sheer size.
[Fantasy Card: Wind Release — Vacuum Wave] Type: Ability • Rarity: R (Blue) B-rank Wind Release ninjutsu. A variant of Vacuum Ball. Releases a single razor-edged air current in the shape of a blade, with exceptional cutting force at range.
[Fantasy Card: Fire Sealing Method] Type: Ability • Rarity: SR (Purple) B-rank sealing technique. Capable of containing and sealing flames of any nature or form—including chakra-enhanced fire—within a designated medium such as a sealing scroll.
A second SR. The pool had at least been consistent on that front.
Jordan could work with this. He'd expected the distribution to be rough—a bulk draw session was always going to produce noise—and noise was manageable as long as the signal held up. He stopped tallying wins and losses per pull and let the session run.
The third ten-pull.
Nine cards materialized in the familiar white and blue range—taijutsu, basic ninjutsu, a pair of genjutsu entries—and then the tenth card came through.
It wasn't purple.
It was orange.
[Fantasy Card: Rasengan] Type: Ability • Rarity: SSR (Orange) A-rank ninjutsu. Developed by the Fourth Hokage, Minato Namikaze, inspired by the mechanics of the Tailed Beast Ball. Concentrates chakra in the palm and spins it simultaneously in multiple directions, compressing it into a sphere of pure rotating force. Strikes with continuous grinding damage rather than a single impact. Chakra nature transformations can be added to produce derivative forms: Wind Release Rasengan, Rasenshuriken, and numerous others developed by subsequent users.
Jordan stared at it.
He'd tried to develop this one himself, back in the Naruto world. Months of work. He understood the principles—rotation, compression, the three-stage refinement—but the internal structural change, the part that made the sphere cohere instead of just scattering, had been the sticking point. The same thing that had taken Naruto years with shadow clone assistance and Jiraiya's guidance.
He'd gotten close. He'd never gotten there.
And now here it was.
Orange light pulsed gently from the card's border. Naruto's signature technique. The spiral that had ended Kaguya. The cornerstone of an entire generation of high-tier ninjutsu.
Jordan conjured it immediately—palm extended, chakra responding to the new card's framework with immediate structural clarity. The sphere assembled itself: spinning, grinding, humming with contained rotational force.
There it is. That's the part I was missing.
He let it disperse, satisfied in a way that was difficult to adequately describe.
F-boy watched this display with the expression of someone who had processed significant information and arrived at whatever makes you happy.
Jordan pocketed the card and gestured for the next pull.
The fourth ten-pull delivered its guaranteed SR on the final slot.
[Fantasy Card: Chidori] Type: Ability • Rarity: SR (Purple) A-rank Lightning Release ninjutsu. Developed by Hatake Kakashi. Lightning chakra is gathered and compressed in the palm, producing a high-density current of exceptional penetrating force. Named for the sound it produces—a thousand chirping birds. Alternate designation: Lightning Blade, earned when Kakashi used the technique to cut through actual lightning. Effective delivery requires high-speed linear thrust.
Jordan read through it once, then a second time with the expression of someone conducting a professional assessment.
He already had Magnetism Exceeding Limit. He already had five chakra natures, including lightning. He had particle-level electromagnetic manipulation that could produce effects Chidori could not approach in either precision or scale. The Chidori's entire combat concept—concentrate electricity, go fast in a straight line, pierce target—was a more primitive version of applications he ran casually.
On the other hand.
He conjured it experimentally. Lightning snapped and crackled around his palm, filling the room with sharp electric light and the distinctive metallic screech of condensed current. The sound alone was genuinely impressive.
Yeah, that's going in the rotation. Not for practical combat. For situations requiring a specific aesthetic. Sometimes the occasion called for something that looked like it meant business rather than something that actually ended the fight before the opponent registered what happened.
Fashion skill. Extremely situational. Non-negotiable.
The fifth pull. The sixth. The seventh.
The ability pool was filling steadily—ninjutsu, genjutsu, sealing techniques accumulating in layers across every combat range and tactical application. Jordan kept running and stopped tracking individual results, letting the session find its own rhythm.
Two patterns emerged clearly by the hundredth card.
First: bloodline limits were rare. The Magnet Release he'd gotten from the very first Divine Draw had spoiled him. Over a hundred subsequent draws, not a single bloodline limit had appeared. The distribution was heavily weighted toward ninjutsu and taijutsu—useful, some of it genuinely excellent, but it wasn't the targeted acquisition he'd hoped for on that front.
Second: the pool was large. Basic academy techniques, standard taijutsu, E-rank exercises—they shared space with A-rank jutsu and sealed techniques, and there were a lot of them. The dilution was real. A significant portion of each pull was clearing undergrowth before you reached anything notable.
Both of these were problems he'd have to accept. There was no mechanism to filter the pool beyond the world selection, and the bloodline limits were presumably just rare by design—which tracked, given how rare they were in the source material itself.
Still.
By the time the hundred-and-seventieth draw completed, the session had produced three orange-bordered cards.
Three SSRs in 170 draws.
Jordan did the math: one SSR per roughly fifty-seven draws. For a targeted pool with a ten-times cost multiplier, that was—
Actually, that was extremely good.
The three cards arranged themselves at the front of the collection:
[Fantasy Card: Diamond Sealing Method] Type: Ability • Rarity: SSR (Orange) A-rank sealing technique. Uzumaki clan exclusive. Releases massive volumes of chakra simultaneously, forming it into chains of condensed spiritual energy. Applications: offensive binding, defensive barriers, sealing tailed beasts and similarly powerful entities. The chains bypass standard chakra defenses by targeting the soul directly. Effective against sealed entities and chakra-based constructs.
[Fantasy Card: Eighty Gods Vacuum Strike] Type: Ability • Rarity: SSR (Orange) Taijutsu. Developed to its ultimate form by Kaguya Otsutsuki; considered the pinnacle of the Hyuga clan's Gentle Fist lineage. Concentrates the user's maximum chakra output into the palm and releases it as a continuous barrage of ultra-dense vacuum shockwaves—dozens, then hundreds, overlapping in rapid succession. Impact force sufficient to completely shatter a fully manifested Susanoo.
[Fantasy Card: Eight Gates Formation] Type: Ability • Rarity: SSR (Orange) Ultimate taijutsu. Passed from Might Duy to Might Guy. Opens the eight chakra gates that naturally restrict the body's output—the Gate of Opening, Rest, Life, Injury, Closing, View, Shock, and Death—sequentially unlocking exponentially increasing physical capability.
Techniques by gate:
First Gate (Opening): Front LotusThird Gate (Life): Reverse LotusSixth Gate (View): Morning PeacockSeventh Gate (Shock): Daytime TigerEighth Gate (Death): Evening Elephant; Night Guy
Note: Opening the Eighth Gate releases power exceeding that of the five Kage simultaneously. Complete activation is lethal—the user's muscles and organs are destroyed by the output. Do not open the Eighth Gate unless all other options have been exhausted.
Jordan looked at the three cards for a long moment.
The Diamond Sealing Method and the Eighty Gods Vacuum Strike both shared one fundamental requirement: chakra. Enormous, continuous, near-unlimited chakra as the foundation for everything they did.
He glanced inward at his reserves—the Hashirama Sage Body's Tailed Beast-level depth, amplified by Sage Mode's passive absorption, the 90% consumption reduction from Superpower 100% applying across every system simultaneously.
He almost laughed.
Chakra. Of all the resource constraints in the world to be asked for.
That particular problem had stopped being a problem quite some time ago.