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Work Header
Rating:
Teen And Up Audiences
Archive Warnings:
Graphic Depictions Of ViolenceMajor Character Death
Category:
Gen
Fandoms:
Parahumans Series - Wildbow崩坏3rd | Honkai Impact 3rd (Video Game)
Additional Tags:
CrossoverOC insertReincarnationCanon-Typical ViolenceEmotional BaggageBrockton BayHerrschers (Honkai Impact 3rd)No beta we die like Dr. MEICharacter ExpieslongficNot a power fantasyNot A Fix-ItAlternate Universe - Crossover DivergenceSI/OC
Language:
English
Series:
Part 1 of Veronika of Bet Next Work →
Stats:
Published:2023-01-01Updated:2025-08-07Words:260,031Chapters:63/?Comments:523Kudos:1,367Bookmarks:437Hits:111,018
Selene
Synopsynthesis
Chapter 5: Heir 1.4
Notes:
Meh, made it a day early. Once again, would appreciate the feedback.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Heir 1.4
{0}
Two weeks passed in a blur. Fourteen days of trying and failing to force myself to fall asleep as flashes of Taylor's pale and blood-covered face wailing in pain and fear appeared in my mind, followed by imaginings of the Slaughterhouse 9, the Endbringers, and the multidimensional last boss that she would have to face in the future if nothing changed. I'd read somewhere that soldiers were able to fall asleep at the drop of a hat. I wished I had that kind of training, then. Then I remembered that it was more of a side effect of military training in general and dropped the idea entirely.
Since then, I hadn't really gone out to jog. I'd think about it at night, but the memory of the near-death experience would stop me cold. As did the terror of what could happen if too much of my power was unleashed. It was a grim reminder that Brockton was a place where your average street-level threat could be Hookwolf, a living railgun, or a dragon.
I'd fallen back into the old bad habits and started looking for a good fanfic or web serial. Anything, really, to push Taylor Hebert and the misadventures of Skitter out of my head.
Fanfiction (the website, not the genre) didn't really take off. I'd once written an essay about it in my last school. From what I'd gathered, it was because cape culture kicked off and made the forum site Parahumans Online an objectively better ground for hosting the stories and having discussions about them. It helped that the chief admin was an A.I.; Dragon, or rather, Tin_mother was rather open to taking suggestions and was able to somehow able to implement ArchiveOfOurOwn's tagging system in the Creative Writing section. I didn't put that in my essay, of course, but I did point out how PHO was objectively better than any other website on the American Internet sphere.
That was about where the good things that happened to fanfiction because of cape culture ended. Sure, there were a lot more superhero stories, but that was overshadowed by the fact that most, if not all of those stories also happened to be celebrity fiction.
If you thought the Tom Holland x Robert Downey Junior fanfics were bad, imagine if it was now the main subgenre, with Scion as a rather convenient deus ex machina.
Sufficed to say, when Sturgeon said 99% of it was shit, he really did mean it.
(On an unrelated note, did you know that the trope of Mary Sue on Bet started with a story about a woman that had an ability that sounded suspiciously like Path to Victory? If it turned out that the author wasn't a member of Cauldron, or even better, Contessa herself, then I'll eat my shoe.)
These were the things I was thinking about as I walked into Winslow High that morning when I spotted a group of girls by the entrance. I looked at each of them. Emma Barnes and Madison Clements were quite recognizable.
(Oh yes, I finally got around to asking someone for their names. The girls I'd asked back then had appeared nervous around me and I didn't know why.)
I wasn't surprised that Barnes was back. I'd confirmed with the bowl-cut blond Greg Veder that I was right in remembering that her dad was a lawyer. She'd probably been bailed out on account of not actually being the one who put Taylor in the locker and having once been friends with the victim. Still, it would have been nice if she had stayed out for a bit longer.
It looked like they had been talking to each other before I went in, but the chatter quickly cut off as they caught sight of me. Most of them looked away when I looked. Barnes looked like she was trying to glare me to death while Madison nearly succeeded in hiding her body behind their group.
None of them spoke while I passed. Neither did the bystanders that were present for the interaction. Soon, I'd left them behind by the entrance and made my way to computer class.
It was there that I saw a suspiciously familiar mop of black hair. I had to blink the image of bloody tampons and bugs out of my eyes as I looked again. Long and curly black hair, pale, thin, and bespectacled.
Taylor Hebert was there, sitting at a desktop beside the one I'd usually take. She looked up from whatever she was looking at and locked eyes with me. She looked sick, still: dark circles under the eyes, cheeks gaunt, a few veins showing through the skin. I remembered vaguely that she had spent around a week in the hospital in the story after that shitshow. She should have spent a few days longer there because it looked like they didn't even wait until she was healthy enough to walk straight.
"Excuse me." I whipped my head around. I must have spent a lot of time standing frozen in the doorway because it looked like I'd created a line of five people already.
"Ah," I said, then quickly walked over to my desktop. Taylor made a sharp intake of breath as I sat down. I ignored the way she kept glancing at me as I turned the PC on. It took forever and I found myself sorely missing the technology of 2022 once more.
I looked at Taylor again. She glanced at me and froze when she met my gaze. I didn't know what else to do, so I just started talking.
"You Taylor Hebert?"
She nodded slightly.
I pointed to my chest. "Veronika Schariac. I was the one that got you out of your locker."
Her eyes widened at that. I saw her studying me as recognition gradually took over her expression. She slumped.
"Thanks…" she said in a small voice.
"Eh," I said, shrugging. "Not a problem."
Her eyes narrowed at that. That somehow felt wrong, as if the actor in the play wasn't performing their lines, and the character was going off-script somehow. I remembered the old adage: "never meet your heroes." I knew in my head that it was perfectly reasonable for her to act paranoid, given what I knew of what she experienced, but there was still that niggling part that expected lasting gratefulness somehow, that we'd become friends and I can save her from what I vaguely knew was her fate.
Instead, I find someone who was like a cornered rat. A child that was isolated from her world with little to no explanation, subject to increasingly harmful attacks on her physical and mental well-being, culminating in a…
No. I wasn't going to that place. I took a breath to center myself and forced myself back into the moment.
"Well, better keep yourself safe. I may have gotten rid of Hess, but the redhead bitch's back."
She muttered something about nothing being different. I smiled at her, then looked back to my now-set-up computer just in time for Mrs. Knott to stand up and begin the lesson.
The rest of the day was spent with an undercurrent of tension. Taylor was looking tenser and tenser as time passed. Before World Studies, she looked like she was seeing ghosts through the door. By lunch, she was glancing at her seatmate every other minute. When I met her again during the last period, math, she wasn't even putting down her bag.
I suppose I wasn't helping to relieve the atmosphere. I wasn't discreet in watching either Barnes or Clements whenever I spotted either in my classes, doubly so with the ones I had with Taylor. Barnes returned my surveillance with glares of her own. Clements, meanwhile, was making a passable imitation of an ostrich and acted as if I didn't exist. The game of Wild West wasn't interrupted by the teachers, surprisingly enough. Did Blackwell have a hand in this? Did she switch the golden goose status from Hess to me or something?
Was this a good thing or a bad thing?
The period ended. Taylor effectively bolted out of the room, disappearing down the corridor in a matter of seconds. I considered cheating; walking into the bathroom and reappearing in an alley across the street to greet her at the gate. And then what? Tell her I'd be there for her or something? It felt fake and to an extent, it was; I was motivated by a self-imposed obligation to help a person that I thought of more as a character from a book rather than a real person. If I actually went through with it, it would have felt disingenuous.
So instead, I watched her leave. I let myself just stay in my seat and bask in today's mental exhaustion for a few minutes, just long enough so that I can find the willpower to get up and find the bus.
Of course, that was ample time for Tammi to find me.
"Hey, V!" she said as she entered the classroom. I looked up at her, annoyed. She'd started calling me V all by herself sometime last week. I really only let the adults I'd have to deal with and the few I'd consider my friends call me that. In fact, I had already made it known the first time she tried it, and instead of making her stop, it looked like it actually encouraged her to keep calling me that way. Thankfully, she left me alone for the most part, but every so often, she would check in, and then that so often became slightly more often each time.
This time, she was flanked by two other girls, yet another blonde and a tall brunette. Both of them were dressed in branded clothing. Both looked at me with interest while I tried not to glare in return.
"What do you want, Tammi?" I asked.
"Eh, nothing much. There's an arcade downtown that just opened and I wanted to see if you wanted to come with."
I shook my head. "Sorry, don't have the time."
She frowned. "I thought your foster mother gives you a lot of free time."
"Yeah, free time this foster daughter is using to secure her future," I quipped.
She raised a brow. I sighed.
"Why do you think I landed in Winslow?" I asked.
"Um," she began but didn't finish. I continued.
"It's the moves. My record's spotty because I couldn't stay in the same school for too long. Sure, I've already memorized the textbooks, but if you aren't able to take the tests?"
She was quiet at that, considering. It was then that one of her companions spoke up.
"You mean you got eidetic memory? I'm Erika, by the way." the blonde one asked.
I raised my own brow. "Um. Yes."
"Oh, man. Must be good genes."
I frowned at that. In the game, Kiana Kaslana had an IQ of 200, even if she did act like a klutz. She survived by herself and roamed the world more-or-less anonymously for at least five years before the Third Eruption and her subsequent enlistment into Schicksal. She'd notably been to Italy, Haiti, and the Philippines for a while before even coming to Japan where she met Raiden Mei in the prestigious girls' school. Just off of that alone, you could guess that she'd probably learned all those languages, all without a proper teacher and on the run.
Her lineage was no joke either, even if the Kiana you'd meet first in the game was actually a clone. Both the Kaslana and Schariac households were combat monsters that held lasting political influence in their world's military. Kiana's (almost) direct predecessors were also considered prodigies of their time.
The idea that I'd come from their lineage could make an explanation for my own high specs, though that begs the question of how the hell was a Schariac able to get into Earth Bet all the way from their universe in the Honkai games? I'd ask the Imaginary Tree, but apparently, just being a Herrscher doesn't give you that premium.
I shrugged. "Guess so."
The brunette perked up. "Say, Veronika, where were you born?"
I frowned. "Germany."
"Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"
Do you speak German? I understood it completely, but I wasn't about to tell them that.
I forced a smile. "What did you say? Was that supposed to be German? Sorry, but I was too young to really learn the language before my parents moved to America, and what little I did learn, I forgot by now."
That was a blatant lie. My parents died back in Germany. I hitched a ride on an airplane to get into North America by myself.
"I thought you had eidetic memory?"
"It's been, like, ten years now, you know?"
Tammi punched the girl on the shoulder. "Shut up, Theresa."
I took a breath. I could feel my heart trying to punch out of my chest, could hear the blood pumping in my ears. I needed to go.
"Well, I have to go," I said, already packing up. "Don't want to be too late getting home."
I quickly left the classroom. I headed towards the bathroom, silently walked into one of the stalls, and locked it. There was a quiet crackle of distorted reality as I formed a portal there and went through it, stepping into the alleyway I was thinking of when I'd first thought of following Taylor. It closed behind me and I quickly looked through both ends of the alley and found no one. I exited back into the street and headed for the bus.
When I got home, I just went to bed, completely foregoing dinner and a bath. I curled myself up under the bedsheets, eyes closed tightly, and wished all unwelcome thoughts away.
Most of all, I prayed that there wouldn't be any reports of zombies in the morning.
---
Notes:
I would just like to say, first and foremost, D&D what the fuck?
Done with that bit of mini-rant, some life updates. I'd finally opened my bank to roll for Bronya's new battlesuit. The gacha gods did not bless me, and now the confirmation pin the payment's supposed to send isn't arriving on my SMS, preventing me from finishing the transaction. Should have bought the battlepass on my first go.
On to some other considerations; should I crosspost to SB? I'd heard that fic discussion is overall more active on forum websites, and part of me wants to try to be more active with this audience engagement thing. I'm also a little peeved that searching "selene wormfic honkai" brings up MY OLD FANFIC that was posted back in (shivers) Wattpad as the first result after the honkai wiki.