Qlipoth's vast, dispersed cluster of heads should have looked like the radiant aspect of a god — solemn beyond measure, magnificent beyond words.
But at this moment that towering, mountainous body was drowning in milk-white cream, and the squirming cream tentacles clung to copper ore, amber and opal like… lubricant for a sex toy.
The golden light of Preservation was smothered under the sticky cream, until Qlipoth resembled nothing so much as some old man facing his first trendy cream-tentacle Play.
As for Xipe, whose divine body manifested in female aspect — that shattered purple skin had always been cesium-sexy, and now it was even more cesium!
The entire god looked like a fanservice girl soaking in a sweet, cloying, milk-white haze of innuendo.
Bugs, dense and swarming, large and small, filled the cosmos, until some of them settled onto Qlipoth's body.
Only then did the cream-wrapped colossus of Preservation erupt with a blinding golden radiance beyond anything seen before.
"Indestructible! I will not be — DEFILED!"
The majestic voice of a god fell together with the amber light of a Path that pierced the whole universe. The cream tentacles coiled around Qlipoth and His star-hammer went the way of butter under a red-hot iron: turning transparent, vaporizing.
He raised the hammer, and the gravity of the entire star system convulsed with the motion.
In that seething melt, the thick, viscous cream was forced apart, boiled away, reduced to nothing!
Inside a cream sphere whose diameter ran to who-knew-how-many millions of miles, the expressions on Xipe's three faces shifted from initial bewilderment into an eerie calm.
"Resonance."
She lifted Her voice in a hymn of tempered concord, and rainbow-colored melody wrapped itself around the cream.
Hundreds of millions of harmonious notes, drawn from different lives and different worlds, were guided inward to seek out the discordant nodes in the cream's structure.
An imperceptible resonance point formed first inside one particular sphere, and then, like a chain reaction, it propagated in an instant to every sphere that held Xipe's notes.
Crackle-snap-shatter!
There was no earth-shaking detonation, only hundreds of millions of crisp fracturing sounds ringing out at once. The hardened cream spheres, like glass artwork struck by an invisible hammer, filled with hairline cracks and collapsed into a sky full of glittering pink sugar-crystal powder.
Xipe's divine form, built from countless fragments, poured elegantly out of the exploding cloud of sugar dust like light slipping free of a spiderweb.
"A molten state of Preservation, a resonant deconstruction by Harmony…"
The Herta dumpling watched the battlefield without blinking, terrified of missing a single frame. "What in the world IS this magical girl's 'cream'?! It actually forced two Aeons to push their very Path manifestations to extremes just to get free of it?!"
There was no especially exotic mechanic at work. There were only numbers.
This was the power of raw numbers!
The Ruan Mei dumpling stared at the disintegrating sugar crystals, and a strange brilliance surfaced on her face of pixel blocks. "Forcibly solidified 'harmony'… the microscopic energy released at the instant of collapse… interesting… a very interesting structure…"
This was priceless data.
The opponent had backed even Aeons into a corner!
"Log: …the target individual, Magical Girl Momiji (Caelus), demonstrates an ability capable of forcing an Aeon to briefly alter the manifestation mode of its power. Target's fundamental composition: unknown."
Screwllum, too, was recording without pause data that came once in a thousand years.
Every single byte was precious, even if the situation had spun entirely out of control.
"Huh? Why did the sky just… go dark?"
Asta had been staring nervously at the holographic data streams refreshing beside the Herta dumpling when she felt the light around her dim sharply.
She looked up, dazed, and saw that the starlight — which a moment ago had been steeped in dreamy pink — along with the Simulated Universe's own light sources, had been covered over as if by a black curtain.
What had replaced it was a suffocating darkness: an endless, writhing, boiling Swarm, a living curtain that blotted out the heavens.
They were on the verge of filling every inch of vacuum within sight, and space itself groaned under the crushing weight of that horrifying biomass.
"Still churning out troops, Hachi-Caelus? You absolute…"
Stelle gazed up at the sea of bug tide that had swallowed the universe whole.
Above that sea hung the newly freed Amber Lord and Xipe, their Paths surging, their immense silhouettes radiating a pressure that made the heart stutter.
Caelus-cub held a heart-shaped dial, pink skirt fluttering.
Aha was still flailing around in the cream.
Bot-Akivili stayed silent.
And HooH, who had never once made a move.
Just as Qlipoth and Xipe were preparing to clear out the Swarm around them first, They saw the pink-haired girl raise one tender, snow-white little hand.
A magic circle of dizzyingly intricate, gorgeous construction assembled above her palm in an instant, spinning, layering upon itself.
"Become my power!"
The magic circle contracted, collapsed inward, and from the heart of the light a graceful figure surfaced wrapped in her own distinct radiance. A clear, ringing declaration rang out across this Swarm-shrouded universe: "99th Class, Kagura Hikari! Making my entrance! All of it is for the sake of — Starlight!"
A blue-and-white military-style dress, its pleated skirt and the light cape at her shoulders stirring faintly, lending her crisp silhouette a touch of motion and dash.
Long black hair streamed loose. Her deep blue eyes carried the focus and gravity peculiar to a stage performer, and yet nothing could hide the pure light in them, clear as lake water steeped in Moonlight.
"Th-that's WHO now?"
The Herta dumpling felt the processor she had just barely managed to reboot heading straight back toward smoking overload.
She scanned the newly appeared figure like a maniac. "Human? No… her life-signal profile is closer to some kind of highly condensed… energy aggregate?"
"Oh, fine, that isn't even the point!"
"The point is — what godforsaken corner did she pop out of?!"
Herta was going a little feral.
What was with every single one of these things?!
"There is no such person anywhere in the Simulated Universe's database!"
"Not so much as a byte's shadow of her!"
"Could it… could it be that damned unknown code again?! But the code pointed at exactly one target, and that target was Caelus!"
These developments, one after another, all of them well outside the underlying rules and logic, made the wisdom and control the Genius Society members prided themselves on look utterly feeble.
The Simulated Universe at this moment felt alien even to the handful of people who had created it.
"Ready? Qlipoth~ Xipe~ Aha~ and… HooH~"
The pink-haired girl hovered between the sea of bugs and the Aeons, smiling sweetly — but deep in those gorgeous red eyes glittered a delight that chilled the blood.
Her slender fingers ticked off the names of the Aeons one by one, as though inviting honored guests to a grand party.
As for bot-Akivili…
Please hold for a human operator.
"Asta~ do you like watching fireworks?"
Caelus-Momiji's figure vanished without warning, and in the next instant appeared out of thin air like a ghost beside Asta, who was tensely tracking the battle.
For an existence of that tier, spatial movement should have been utterly routine — yet it made another question mark pop up over the head of the Herta dumpling, who was still frantically crunching data.
That had not been a teleport skill or anything of the kind. That was speed. Movement speed rivaling light itself.
Holy hell!
What was that?!
"Uh…?"
Half-gathered into an embrace, Asta had no time to brace herself, and her head burrowed instinctively into the crook of the other's neck.
It was the posture she liked best when she and Caelus were doing that sort of thing — the one she reached for when she wanted to feel safe.
Except that right now Caelus was an adorable girl a full head shorter than her, with a completely unfamiliar face, and the mismatch left her faintly off-balance.
"Th-they're all right, I guess," she answered, a little lost, working to adjust to the closeness. "Why are you asking that all of a sudden?"
"Because… I'm about to give you the grandest fireworks show of all~?"
Pitching her voice to match the pink hair, Caelus-Momiji brushed that tender little hand across Asta's soft cheek, and the cold fingertips came to rest at last on her slightly parted lips.
"Keep your eyes wide open and watch closely, okay? If you miss even one second, I'll be so sad~?"
Caelus-Momiji's voice was gentle, and it carried a magic that brooked no argument.
Before the words had finished, the pink figure vanished again, reappearing beside Kagura Hikari as if by teleport, and shouted in the most fired-up and least sincere tone imaginable: "I won't waste words! Long story short, it's friendship and bonds — CHAAARGE, yeaaah!!"
Caelus-Momiji took her familiar's cool little hand. Their fingers laced tight together, and together they gripped the exquisite short sword — small as a dagger, yet breathing an air both ominous and holy.
Caelus-Momiji tilted up that criminally cute face, and her mouth split into a fervent, near-savage grin utterly at odds with those sweet features as she cried out the ultimate incantation like a herald announcing the end of the world: "Blossom—"
On the blade, unimaginable energy began to gather and compress at a frenzied rate.
"—Bright!!!"
You did not need to know what the skill did.
You only needed to know its damage formula:
40% x 10 x 10000 x (1.25)^N (note: N = number of elites/Swarm currently on the field).
And right now the Swarm's numbers could not be pinned to any figure at all. They filled the entire living universe.
The moment starlight kindled at the sword's tip—
The first to react was Aha.
He had been about to chase down where His own cream tentacles had gotten off to — the ones He'd been steering toward turning Tayzzyronth into a white-haired, red-eyed, baby-faced, huge-b○obed l0li — when both feet slammed to a stop mid-sprint like a car hitting the brakes.
Aha whipped around to look at that seemingly feeble little glimmer of starlight. First came a flash of astonishment, and then—
"Haha… hahahaha ahahaha!"
Aha's body writhed with excitement, tumbling in place, doubling over in something close to helpless side-splitting hysterics. "She was hiding THIS the whole time? Too good~ Ha, hahahahahaha!"
"So much Elation! What a riot! Yes, exactly like that! THIS is what I wanted to play, yeaaah!"
Aha threw His right hand up at a forty-five degree angle and cheered: "Long live magical girls!!! Momiji-chan! You are Aha's god!!!"
"?"
"??"
"???"
Question marks bloomed over the heads of the three Geniuses standing braced for battle, and the Herta dumpling started yanking violently at the poor little flower on her head again.
What had gotten into Aha this time?
What was He going insane about now?
Had Caelus pulled something again?
The next second — flash, flash, flash!
As if the gates of a hellish Pandora's Box had swung open: blood-red alert windows, streams of glaring error code, crash reports from the underlying protocol stack…
Countless holographic screens signaling total system collapse multiplied at a terrifying, visible rate, like a burst dam.
In an instant the three developers' small figures were completely buried under them.
"Wait!"
For the first time, obvious shock and dread showed on Screwllum.
"This is—!" Ruan Mei went pale with astonishment.
"A goddamn data overflow?! How is that possible?!"
The only one who swore was Herta, and her face just then could have cosplayed March 7th — blank-brained, wracked with worry, eyes full of despair, an expression complicated enough to make you question the meaning of life.
"How can the Simulated Universe possibly overflow?!"
This was the Simulated Universe!
The Simulated Universe!
Impossible, surely?
It doesn't happen…
It makes no sense!
The next second, she learned why.
No data stream required. No analysis report required.
The reason presented itself directly, crudely, with utter arrogance, in the field of view of every existing being.
It was… a sword!
The blade's radiance swept up the glittering river of stars, its light stretching across light-years counted in the hundreds of millions, spanning the whole Galaxy!
Set down in a xuanhuan world, this heaven-splitting river of sword qi would have been enough to press all the ages of eternity beneath it.
Light of Destruction, brilliant past all bearing, tore open a universe stuffed full of Swarm!
In her daze, Herta seemed to see a screenful of astronomical figures leaping like mad, numbers floating up from every single bug in the cosmos, stacking, stacking…
Honkai Fun Fact:
Yi (hundred million) = 10^8.
Zi = 10^24.
Gou = 10^32.
Zheng = 10^40.
Ji = 10^48.
Henghesha (sands of the Ganges) = 10^52.
And what floated up before Herta's eyes at this moment were 'nayuta (10^60)' and 'wuliang, the immeasurable (10^68)'.
Endless, boundless colossal numbers filled the universe!
This wasn't seeing a ghost.
This was an exponential-tier level of screwing the ghost sideways!!!
BOOM!
The Swarm of the entire universe had shown up purely to serve as big numbers, and before the noble mechanics of exponential stacking, even Aeons had to kneel!
Qlipoth's indestructible amber bulwark was blasted into a sky full of shimmering energy dust.
Xipe's body of fragments was blown into far smaller fragments.
The bot simply died on the spot.
HooH could not Balance this much power.
"Hahahahahaha!!!"
Aha's laughter, deranged to its absolute limit and pure to its absolute limit, rang out like the final movement of the universe's end.
He howled with laughter, offering the most frenzied applause of all to this preposterous performance, there among the embers of annihilation!
Herta, Ruan Mei, Screwllum, Stelle, Asta, and even Caelus-Momiji herself were all forcibly ejected from the Simulated Universe.
The Simulated Universe had blown up.
A power more terrifying than the time The Hunt's gaze came down and wrecked the external hardware, more terrifying than the collision between Aha and Qlipoth before that!
An entire simulated real universe.
Detonated, thoroughly and completely!
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