Friend: LV560, Honkai Girl.
"Love and dreams are the wellspring of power! Magical Girl Momiji, making her gorgeous debut!"
After tapping in, that crisp, saccharine voice rang out again.
"Magical Girl Faintheart Momiji?"
Caelus gazed at the pink-haired beauty before him, gathering the scattered scraps of information about her from his memory.
Seemed to be the limited Reminiscence storybook form of the six-star equipment, Momiji Perfume.
But the old man had once said: the character doesn't matter, the badge does.
Caelus only had to give it a light tap, and instantly he gained a beautiful girl's body, max-level and kitted out in divine gear—though it was Simulated Universe exclusive and lasted only ten minutes.
"Let me have a look-see at little Momiji's kit."
Tap.
View details.
"Even the costume is Divine Awakening gear? Envy, envy."
Honkai Impact 2 had a total of eight loadout slots: one familiar, one costume, three badges, three weapons. A LV560 Honkai Girl naturally had them all filled, every one of them max-level Divine Awakening.
In other words, one waifu came bundled with several more waifus.
The costume, [Birth of the Goddess of Love], was one Caelus had never seen back when he used to play.
He opened the weapon first.
[Tide of Disorder], intrinsic skill:
Clamor Sanctum: infinite ammo. On attack, fires a full-screen barrage dealing 12,000% of weapon ATK as damage, and increases the weapon damage taken by struck enemies by 3,700% for 20 seconds.
Disorder Realignment: when attacking with the weapon, there's a 100% chance for the weapon to gain one stack, 2-second cooldown, up to 10 stacks; each stack grants 50% CRIT DMG and 50% CRIT Rate for 20 seconds.
500% CRIT Rate and CRIT DMG—mm, passable.
On top of that, there was an EX skill:
Sea of Noise and Agile Transmission. Set aside the skill effects for now—no one could ignore that stat-drenched beauty.
Bear in mind, this was just one weapon among the divine gear.
There were six more weapons and badges just like it!
To borrow the Saiyan's words: I can go through six more transformations like this!
What a concept!
Caelus reined in the surge swelling in his chest and kept warning himself, over and over.
The you inside the Simulated Universe, no matter how mighty, is fake, not real.
Not real!
But then again, why did this familiar look so familiar?
Caelus looked at his friend the Honkai Girl's familiar—black hair, blue eyes, wearing a blue-and-white military-style dress, a blue cashmere cape draped over one shoulder.
Looked like the getup for performing opera on a stage?
"Hold up! This is literally Revue Starlight!"
One of the leads from Shoujo Kageki Revue Starlight—Kagura Hikari.
"A collab familiar?"
Caelus knew that old geezer Honkai Impact 2 loved to pull Life Drain.
He opened the familiar's details, and the leisurely, envious look on his face froze stiff; his grin set solid and slowly turned grave.
The max-level familiar [Kagura Hikari] provided two permanent BUFFs—increased Evasion and Fire DMG—plus three skills.
Setting aside the two intrinsic skills, Caelus's gaze locked dead onto the Ultimate skill.
[Blossom Bright:
Against elite enemies, increases all damage by 40%, counting up to 10. On use, deals 10,000 points of True Damage to enemies on the field; for each elite present, skill damage increases by 25%, calculated multiplicatively.]
His line of sight clung like iron to a magnet, riveted to the last four words of the skill description:
Cal-cu-lated MUL-TI-PLI-CA-TIVE-LY!?
"Motherf— … calculated multiplicatively!?"
Caelus sucked in a sharp, hissing breath.
Come on, come on~!
Set aside all those flashy character, badge, and weapon amplifiers—look at this familiar skill [Blossom Bright] on its own.
Base amplifier: against elite enemies, +40% all damage, counting up to 10—that's 400% increased damage!
Skill body: on use, straight up 10,000 points of True Damage.
The broken multiplier zone: for every elite enemy present, skill damage rises another 25%! And… it's multiplicative!
The ultimate variable: the moment [Propagation] ascends to godhood, the Simulated Universe fills with a near-endless sea of bugs, and every single bug of the Propagation Path can be judged as an elite.
40% × 10 × 10,000 × (1.25)^N (N = number of elites/swarm units currently on the field) = ?
This simple formula detonated in Caelus's mind, and he seemed to see strings of astronomical figures leaping, stacking, and swelling in a frenzy!
His cerebral cortex sent waves of overload-like tingling and trembling; wave after wave of Elation washed over him.
"Haha! Hahaha!"
Caelus clapped his hands hard in delight, his blazing-gold eyes glittering, then spun around, unable to wait, to look at the Herta dumpling logging her idle-run records.
"Hero Herta, is there still enough reserve in the Simulated Universe?"
"?"
The Herta dumpling tilted her head in confusion and put out a question mark.
"What are you spazzing out about now?"
The pixel dot representing her eyebrow shot up, her tone edged with wariness. From those two gold irises of the Gray-hair, Herta saw a joy and Elation nearly spilling over—giddier even than when he got his hands on a puppet cast from her own mold.
Dancing about, radiant with glee, laughing like Aha himself.
Watching Caelus leaping up and down, a distinctly ominous premonition somehow sprang up in Herta.
An ominous premonition?
No way, surely?
She swiftly booted up the Simulated Universe's self-diagnostic program.
This time, she had joined forces with Ruan Mei, Screwllum, and Stephen—four Geniuses together—to reinforce the Simulated Universe's firewall and underlying architecture on an unprecedented scale. Even if Caelus stirred up another Aeon-brawl-level commotion, in theory it would hold up just fine!
Fortunately, that inauspicious premonition flickered out in an instant, like an electronic ghost.
"Must be my imagination."
After a calm analysis, Herta reached her verdict: "Redundancy is sufficient."
Caelus had already set down the rare bug he'd been toying with for a good while—the one Mitri had caught on Verminstar and given him. A sly grin hung on his face as he strode with big steps toward the warship's command room.
"Crimson Pestle, use Super Paimon Whirlwind!"
The Stelle-Asta fusion's voice came from the side. She was crouched on the ground in a girlish pose, a simple magnetic-levitation platform arena set up before her.
She was directing her own bug—crimson-shelled, a sharp ramming horn jutting from its head—to slam Caelus's bug into a stagger, teetering right at the platform's edge.
"Caelus-cub, your Sky-Cleaving White-Iron Little Violet-Claw is about to lose~"
The battle was at its peak; the Stelle-Asta fusion's bug carried an unstoppable momentum, Caelus's bug was in dire straits, on the verge of being knocked out of bounds.
She arched an eyebrow smugly, only to find her opponent had already left his seat:
"Wait? Where are you going? Bolting the second you lose?"
"You go on and play by yourself."
Caelus didn't even turn his head, excitement he couldn't suppress in his voice:
"I'm off to score some… truly powerful bugs."
Caelus shot a glance at the annotation in the commission quest: [The final reward is positively correlated with settlement points.]
He was going to speed up the birth of the Swarm Disaster, and let the swarm blanket every corner of the Simulated Universe!
And then…
"Don't you dare sneak off—I'm coming too!"
The Stelle-Asta fusion swept the still-facing-off 'Crimson Pestle' and 'Sky-Cleaving White-Iron Little Violet-Claw' off the levitation arena and into a specially made bug-cage jar.
With his new status as General Mitri's right-hand man, Caelus's clearance within the fleet had risen with the tide.
The two of them passed unimpeded the whole way and arrived straight at the warship's core—the central command room.
The moment they stepped in, a taut, oppressive atmosphere hit them full in the face.
Before the holographic tactical map, a staff officer was brandishing his fist:
"These damned, lawless bounty hunters! They actually dare to ignore our warnings! General!"
"I request authorization to immediately and thoroughly wipe out these hyenas who scorn our military might!"
Verminstar was not a place of dead silence.
There existed here an extremely scarce population of human natives who had adapted to the brutal swarm environment—and aside from these near-'protected-species' locals and Mitri's expeditionary force,
a great many interstellar bounty hunters were also entrenched across Verminstar at this moment. The planet's jaw-droppingly rich rare-bug ecology was like a colossal magnet, drawing desperados from tens of thousands of light-years around to come and hunt.
Right now, these scattered stragglers were massing all over the planet, becoming a disruptive force that couldn't be ignored.
"Wipe them out?"
Mitri sat in the command chair. He was confident, but no brainless hothead.
"If we can't guarantee a lethal first strike, and erase them from this planet completely and cleanly…"
"Then these hunters, clinging like maggots to bone, will become the most maddening kind of trouble. They'll seep in everywhere like cosmic dust—harassing, ambushing—turning every step we take into a thornfield."
"Especially their leader…"
"Their leader?"
Caelus, who had listened in for a while and grasped the gist of the situation, cut in at the right moment and asked curiously: "Is she strong?"
"Strength is only part of it."
The commander gave a wry laugh and pulled up an intelligence brief:
"From what the bounty hunters say, their leader is a person of singular personal charisma—she possesses credibility on the level of Aha."
Caelus: "…"
The Stelle-Asta fusion: "…"
The two of them instantly fell into a bizarre silence.
That singular personal charisma… truly maxed out, huh!
Now that's just super reliable!
Lmao~
[Speculation: possibly Aha's true body.]
Screwllum chimed in at the right moment.
After all, the earlier incident had confirmed that Aha's true body was right inside the Verminstar System.
With a jokester popping up at a time like this, the suspicion had to be at least 80%.
"That character soothes everyone, going: 'Relax, folks, we're just playing a collection game—compiling a bug catalogue, that's all!'"
A game? Wouldn't that be light and breezy?
"Light and breezy? Now that's hilarious. Wait till those idiots fight the bugs head-on—they'll find they've hit the jackpot!"
An officer couldn't help sneering. Even an organized, structured army had, over these past two days, taken a real beating from all sorts of unexpected swarms—let alone these bounty hunters who each fought for themselves and couldn't coordinate for shit.
"General, I have a plan??? that can bring the Sieglin from darkness back into the light!"
Caelus held up a single finger.
"Oh?"
Mitri's attention was instantly hooked, and he cast a glance over: "Let's hear it."
"We can conscript bugs as weapons. Some burrower bugs have the trait of self-replication, splitting endlessly on the battlefield like an infinitely regenerating Legion; and there are also giant sac bugs we can use to sweep the surface clean…"
Caelus offered the suggestion with a smile.
A weapon of boundless hunger, far surpassing any Tyranid army.
Aha or not, just hurry up and let Propagation ascend to godhood and be done with it!
I want an elite swarm!
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