Johar Cardmon
Johar Cardmon.
When people picture the head of a criminal organization, a certain image usually comes to mind.
An untouchable heavyweight of the underworld—arrogant, armed with overwhelming power, and backed by a force no one dares to challenge.
I have no idea how crime syndicates worked back on Earth, but in this world, at least, most of them fit that mold. The bosses of the major outfits are the kind of people who clawed their way to the top on the back of some exceptional ability and then built a private empire around it. Their personal strength is nothing to scoff at, and neither is the size or quality of the forces under their command. The rank-and-file might be ordinary street trash, but once you hit the level of a trusted lieutenant or officer, underestimating them becomes a very expensive mistake.
People like that tend to have pride to match. They have no interest in kneeling to anyone else; if anything, they only feel satisfied once they've forced the rest of the world onto its knees beneath them.
And this is the man who made every last one of them submit.
That is where Johar Cardmon's terror comes from.
A single individual who never even bothered to raise a faction of his own—and yet, one by one, he drove the heads of the most formidable crime syndicates to their knees and extracted their obedience. How does something that absurd succeed?
It's obvious, really.
In a fight between a group and one man, Johar Cardmon loses on numbers from the start. Wealth is no different. As far as I know, Johar Cardmon as an individual cannot outspend the war chests of organized crime. Run the math any way you like and the question remains: how did he force so many syndicates into submission?
Because he crushed them with pure ability.
No politics, no money, no networks, no headcount. Johar Cardmon took the simple, decisive route: he used the power he had and pinned them under it by force. When your life is about to leave your body, you will press your forehead to the floor if that is what it takes.
A time leap makes that kind of thing entirely possible.
Even on the community boards, people used to write idle wish-fulfillment posts about how broken the setting would become if Johar Cardmon were on the heroes' side—that's how overwhelming the ability is. He foresight-reads a few seconds of the future, then leaps to whichever moment among those futures he wants.
Calling it a "leap," though, is a little misleading. I still remember how odd the official description felt the first time I read it. It is less a leap and more, frankly—
A few seconds of detachment from the timeline.
That is the more accurate name.
The moment the ability activates, he temporarily becomes something like an observer—pulled free of every event in this world.
He becomes an untouchable existence, bound by nothing in this reality, slips past whatever danger was coming, and then drops back into the world's time at the moment of his choosing. Imagine a character in a novel briefly stepping out of the prose and into the real world. Think of it that way and it becomes easy to grasp.
On pure ability alone, he is the natural enemy of every superhuman who fights physically.
The one small mercy is that the entire world's time does not leap with him. The concept is that he observes, from the present, what is about to happen to his future self, then detaches himself from that stretch of time and escapes it. The only one skipping through time is Johar Cardmon himself.
At this stage, his goal is to patch the ability's weakness.
Johar Cardmon's power looks invincible, but it has one fatal flaw. He can make other ability-users attack the version of himself that has already vanished from that stretch of time, while he safely slides into their blind spot. It is an invincible skill optimized for ambush and assassination—but it does nothing to guarantee the user's own destructive power. A leap is only a leap. The attack that follows depends entirely on Johar Cardmon's personal capability. Worse, the instant the leap ends, the opponent can realize their strike missed, which opens the door to an immediate counterattack.
A Philosopher's Stone, if absorbed completely, can steal the power of the person used as its material.
I intend to use Philosopher's Stones to make Homunculi. Johar Cardmon, on the other hand, almost certainly means to absorb them whole and expand his own capacity—so that a post-leap ambush can reliably kill, and so that he can survive if a high-level powerhouse counters the moment he reappears. Consecutive time leaps are impossible, which makes that the only solution available to him.
"……Does an ability like that even get to exist?"
I shared everything I knew with Jerie. Hitting him the moment a leap ends is a viable win condition, so the more people who can respond if we are ever ambushed, the better our odds.
Jerie stuck her tongue out at what sounded like an absurdly broken power a child might invent without thinking, but I just gave a dry little laugh.
"By that standard, what does that make me?"
Whether you call it a time leap or timeline detachment, Johar Cardmon's ability is unquestionably broken. Even so, it does not reach the level of my Universal Transmutation. His power pours every ounce of its design into a single purpose—safety. My alchemy is different.
Universal Transmutation. A Gift of absurd versatility, armed with nothing but advantages and no real cost. And as long as there is enough Ether, alchemy can become all but omnipotent within the material world.
Even if he skips through time, we are talking about a window of maybe a dozen seconds at most. If I use alchemy to flood the surroundings with an environment no human body can endure, then the moment Johar Cardmon's leap hits its limit and ends, he dies. Detaching from time as an observer does not grant him superhuman speed. The speed at which he moves through that erased stretch of time still cannot exceed Johar Cardmon's own physical limits.
Of course, he knows that as well as I do.
A fox like him will force the fight into conditions where that weakness cannot be used. If allies are nearby to be caught in the blast radius, or if the battle starts in the middle of a crowded city, wide-area lethal techniques become impossible from the start.
"Which is why we cut off his limbs before he has the chance to get any stronger than he already is."
At some point the scenery around us had become the middle of an industrial complex. Following Jerie's lead, we cut quickly across the deserted yards toward the Green Forest Dawn Society's base. And at last we arrived right in front of the destination.
"This is it."
"Pretty respectable digs for a back-alley outfit."
It was less a factory than an office building put up to administer one. I spent a moment admiring how solid it looked, then tried to sweep the interior with mana detection—I needed to know how many people were inside, and whether anyone in there demanded special attention.
Unfortunately, the attempt failed.
"Looks like they've got an interference field up."
"Those old fossils always did know how to look after their own skins."
Given that the Green Forest Dawn Society's elf elders were pathologically obsessed with their own safety, it made sense they would shut down even basic reconnaissance in advance.
"No choice, then. We'll just have to smash it open."
"Fine by me. We came here to wipe them out anyway, so it shouldn't be a problem."
To cut off any chance of someone bolting out of the building and running, Jerie grew a wall of living tree trunks around the perimeter. I glanced once at the barrier—easily twice the height of the building—then set my hand against the structure the elf elders were supposedly inside.
The interference field made the Ether flow unstably, but at this level I could work around it with a little more precision in the handling.
"I'm breaking it."
On that cue, I dismantled the entire building. Like a balloon bursting, it shattered in an instant into fine particles and scattered, dumping everything it had held onto the ground under gravity's hand. Even as my eyes tracked the collapse, mana detection—no longer blocked by the interference field that had died with the building—swept the surroundings.
And caught a strange thread of mana.
"So the old elves weren't talking nonsense after all."
From the heap of rubble, the same mana signature from before suddenly appeared. The mana of the one who had been trailing us. Johar Cardmon's.
"So you've come in person."
"You know who I am?"
"I wouldn't be picking a fight like this if I didn't."
He was right there in front of me, and yet aside from the dark red-and-black suit, I could not pin down a single defining feature. It was as if he had pulled a shadow on over his entire body—I could not make out his face, much less tell where his gaze was pointed. Almost certainly an ability stolen with a Philosopher's Stone. The Hohenheim family, who could produce those stones, had already made themselves into his hands and feet.
Should I half-kill him here while I had the chance?
The thought crossed my mind, then I dropped it as pointless. With alchemy powered by a Philosopher's Stone, a man like him would knit wounds back together in moments. Unless I meant to finish him for real, I would only be wasting strength.
"What did you do with the Green Forest Dawn Society?"
"Loyal subordinates. They have found a new purpose now, though."
As he spoke, he opened his hand toward me. On Johar Cardmon's palm, a reddish jewel revealed its luminous form.
A Philosopher's Stone.
Saying something like that and deliberately showing it at this exact moment—the reason was obvious.
"You used them as material, then."
"Quick on the uptake. Is that because you're an alchemist?"
Johar Cardmon never stands carelessly in front of an opponent. He always appears without warning, revealing himself in the same breath as the ambush. If a man like that was standing this openly, the intent was clear.
Probing. Or recruitment.
But the fact that he had shown himself at all meant he had already realized I was the one interfering with his plans. Which made it highly likely that his present behavior was about gauging my level before he tried to dispose of me.
In that case, I am not about to make myself look small.
If I played this well, I might even be able to clean up the Hohenheim family in the same stroke. If I could reverse the relationship—use the man who was using the Hohenheims—then dealing with Denis van Hohenheim, the family head, would become almost trivial. For that to work, Johar Cardmon first had to stop dismissing me and start treating me as a threat. To make him wary enough to drag the Hohenheims into the board, I needed to brand my danger into him right here.
"Johar Cardmon."
With that thought, I spoke his true name, activated my Transmutation Barrier, and took a single step forward—
"……Hey. He's gone."
Johar Cardmon had skipped through time and fled.
That was not how this was supposed to go.