Tatsumaki had completed most of a second orbit when Jordan reached out and pressed his palm gently down on top of her head, stopping her in place.
She stilled immediately. It had less to do with the physical pressure, which was minimal, and more with the sheer unexpectedness of the gesture. The vibrant green glow surrounding her flickered and dimmed for a second.
"So what is it you actually want?" Jordan asked.
Tatsumaki stood under his hand. She kept her arms crossed and her expression carefully neutral, refusing to look up at him. A beat passed in the quiet of the ruined street.
"I'll reluctantly accept the invitation," she said. "Hot pot."
Jordan's eye twitched. "When exactly did I invite you?"
She didn't answer him. Instead, she turned her attention to Fubuki. Her younger sister had spent the last thirty seconds completely frozen. Fubuki had the particular stillness of someone who had been gearing up to do something important, only to have the opportunity snatched away before she could act. Jordan's head-press maneuver had caught Fubuki mid-thought, and now she was trying to mentally reassemble the pieces.
"You're coming too," Tatsumaki said. "Aren't you."
It wasn't a question. Fubuki blinked once. She processed the situation with the speed of someone who had spent her entire life reading the subtle tonal shifts of her older sister, and she began nodding.
"Hot pot sounds fine. Yes, absolutely, I can do hot pot."
There was definitely more to this, Fubuki thought. This was extremely interesting, and she was going to watch it very closely.
Jordan looked at the strange group he had somehow accumulated. King, who had been genuinely invited. Tatsumaki, who had forcefully invited herself. Fubuki, who had just been drafted by Tatsumaki. He ran the arithmetic in his head and decided it didn't change the fundamental math of the evening.
"Fine." He shrugged, dropping his hand from Tatsumaki's head. "Two more isn't going to affect the overall situation. Right, King?"
Something lit up behind King's severe, scarred expression. A sudden flicker of competitive purpose showed in his eyes, even though the rest of his face refused to acknowledge it.
"Agreed. In the end, it will still come down to the same thing."
The sisters looked at each other, thoroughly confused, then looked back at the two men.
"What does eating hot pot have to do with—" Fubuki started.
The ground moved.
It was not the residual settling of a crater or shifting rubble. This was something deliberate, rhythmic, and ascending from deep below. Fubuki lost her footing as the earth bucked, dropping into a low crouch to keep from falling over. The massive field of debris around them shifted and rolled like the surface of a disturbed lake right before something huge breaches the water.
Tatsumaki was already airborne. Her green light flared automatically, painting the dust clouds in eerie emerald hues. Jordan rose into the air beside her without any visible effort, the ground releasing him without a sound. King followed a moment later, a golden current sparking at his feet as he lifted off.
Fubuki's exhausted energy reserves had been slowly refilling since the previous fight ended. She reached inward, scraped together just enough power, and floated upward to join the others. The air higher up smelled sharply of ozone and pulverized concrete.
"Wasn't the monster already dead?" Fubuki asked.
"Different one," Jordan said, his gaze fixed on the trembling earth below.
"Bigger," Tatsumaki added. Her voice carried the particular brightness of someone who had just been handed a very entertaining toy.
Below them, the remains of the commercial district were completely unmaking themselves. The ground surged and folded, buckling as if something vast was pressing upward against the crust. The already-demolished streetscape lost what little shape it had left, collapsing inward into a sinkhole and then pushing outward in slow, powerful waves of displaced soil and asphalt.
"I'll handle it." Tatsumaki's eyes were locked straight ahead on the epicenter of the violent tremors. "None of you interfere. This one is mine."
"Works for me," Jordan said. "Though I should mention, this one is about twice the size of the last one. Dragon-level, if I'm reading the energy right. You need one clean shot, or it will take the rest of the city apart before you can line up a second."
Tatsumaki shot him a sideways glare that contained approximately seven distinct objections.
"I know," she snapped. "Don't lecture me."
But as she turned back to the destruction, her expression shifted. The reckless eagerness sharpened into something much more serious and focused. She had heard him.
An ocean of green energy poured out of her small frame.
It flooded the sky above M-City like a rapid, unnatural tide. She was outputting psychic energy in quantities that made the earlier fight look like a mild parlor trick. Citizens three districts away, who had been safely watching the lingering mushroom cloud with their phones out, now found themselves standing under the shadow of something that turned the late afternoon sky an impossible, heavy green.
Jordan watched the power build and ran a quick internal assessment. If Boros's ship took a direct hit from that density of energy, it would flip over entirely.
He started his own work. A deep blue psychic force seeped downward from his floating position. He sent it neither up nor outward, but straight into the ground in a rapidly spreading ring. The blue energy found the outer edges of the current destruction zone and anchored itself there. It pressed upward through the ruined foundations, forming towering, invisible walls in a rough circle around the site. He built an arena. Whatever came up from the earth would come up inside it, and whatever happened inside it would stay inside it.
There would be no shockwaves reaching the surviving residential blocks. No chunks of debris clearing six-story apartment buildings to crush bystanders.
Tatsumaki caught the blue flash in her peripheral vision. She had been taking a breath, ready to say something cutting about his unnecessary interference.
She pressed her lips together instead. She said nothing.
I have been trying, she thought, to no one in particular. It is not as though I enjoy putting cities back together afterward.
She had been trying recently to care about collateral damage more intentionally, rather than just treating it as an afterthought. It was not always intuitive for her. Having an overwhelming amount of power made it incredibly easy to forget about the fragile scale of normal human life.
She channeled another massive surge into the suspended green ocean above. She could feel the immense pressure of it building against her own mental control. It was dense enough now that even she had to brace herself to hold it properly.
The ground split open.
A massive black arm tore through the surface. It was as thick as a skyscraper's structural column, completely coated in flowing, incandescent lava that left bright orange channels as it ran down the exposed, rocky muscle. The giant palm opened to the sky, its fingers spreading wide like the trunks of mature redwood trees. The heat radiating off it was instant and stifling, baking the air around them.
Then came the second arm. Then the head.
A hundred meters of molten body erupted from the earth, accompanied by a deafening roar that physically distorted the air, sending heat shimmers rippling across the ruined skyline.
The Lava King stood in the center of the demolished commercial district and blazed with blinding intensity.
Jordan looked at the towering creature. He registered the name forming in his mind. Lava King. Dragon-level. Another monster who simply named himself after his category and element. Jordan sighed quietly to himself.
The creature's glowing eyes swept over the apocalyptic scene. They stopped, locking onto the charred, dark mass on the ground that had once been its child. The earth cracked and melted under the monster's foot as it took a step forward, a waterfall of lava pouring from its torso into the ruined street.
"My child," the beast rumbled, its voice like grinding tectonic plates.
"HUMANS!" it roared, snapping its blazing gaze upward to fixate on the tiny figures floating above it. "YOU WILL PAY THE PRICE FOR THIS!"
A solid column of green psychic energy, terrifyingly dense and precisely aimed, hit the monster directly in its open mouth.
The speech stopped instantly.
Tatsumaki hovered in the air, her dress whipping around her legs, and pointed downward with one single finger.
The green ocean covering the sky above the city moved. All of it reacted simultaneously, finding a single focal point. It condensed and accelerated. The widely dispersed mass of psychic energy collapsed inward, forming a massive, screaming vortex. It spun with an absolute, emerald brilliance, drawing the surrounding air, dust, and debris into its violent rotation.
The Lava King had spent a very long time deep underground. It possessed excellent instincts for what was happening beneath the earth.
It had never needed to develop any particular awareness of threats coming from the sky.
By the time the massive creature processed the drastic change in the atmosphere above, the vortex had already locked onto its target.
"Super Psychokinetic Tornado," Tatsumaki said.
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