The dispatch center of Anti-Entropy's underground laboratory.
On the massive holographic display screen, the red high-energy alert zone marking District 7's abandoned metal recycling plant had gone completely dark.
The radiation index curves that had been spiking up and down dropped to zero, flattening into a single straight green line.
Bronie sat at the main control console.
The keyboard still held the lingering warmth from her fingers' rapid typing.
"The Rift has closed."
She said it into the microphone.
The screen's glow reflected off the tactical goggles on her face.
"Electromagnetic interference has cleared. Establishing comms link."
A progress bar loaded rapidly at the center of the screen.
"Contact target: Su Yu."
Bronie hit Enter.
Only faint static hissed from the speakers.
No connection beep. No Su Yu's usual half-exhausted, half-annoying "Can you hear me?"
Just static.
A silence like death.
On the other end of the channel, inside a black SUV racing at full speed toward the recycling plant, Kiana sat in the back seat, her hand clenched white-knuckled around the headrest of the seat in front of her.
Fenghuang's link had also vanished after a burst of static, as if struck by some violent tremor, and hadn't reconnected since.
"Bronie!" Kiana shouted into her earpiece. "Reconnect! Try again!"
Outside the window, Arc City's streetlights streaked past, slicing across her face in flickering bands of light and shadow.
Still nothing but static from the speaker.
"What is going on?" Kiana's voice rose, her breathing turning short and ragged. "Didn't the Spatial Rift already close? The interference is gone! So why hasn't Su Yu come out?"
She started jabbing the call button on her earpiece over and over.
Again and again.
"Su Yu! Can you hear me?! Su Yu!"
The SUV's suspension groaned dully as it rolled over a speed bump, jolting Kiana in her seat, but her finger never left the call button.
"Calm down, Kiana."
Welt's voice cut into the channel.
Behind him, the thunderous roar of helicopter rotors churned through the line.
"I've already dispatched the nearest Anti-Entropy team to comb the recycling plant ruins.
The space there just underwent a collapse — the terrain's a mess."
Welt kept his pace steady, trying to hold back the panic starting to spread through the channel.
"Maybe Su Yu just exhausted himself past his limit and passed out — that's why he's not responding."
Kiana's chest heaved.
She let go of the call button.
She leaned her head against the window, pressing her forehead to the cold bulletproof glass.
"Right. Right." She listened to her own voice echo through the cramped cabin, dry and strained. "That has to be it. It has to be!"
She closed her eyes. Images kept flashing through her mind — Su Yu, that other time, carried back drenched in blood.
"I'll be there soon."
Kiana opened her eyes, staring fixedly at the silhouette of District 7's industrial ruins growing closer ahead.
"That giant idiot." She gritted her teeth. "Every time he says he'll take care of himself, and every time he pulls something like this. This time I am not letting him off. I'm going to beat him black and blue."
Beside her, Rita Rossweisse said nothing, but the tight furrow of her brow gave away that the perfect maid's heart was anything but calm.
Ten minutes later.
The SUV's tires screeched against the dust-covered concrete as it braked.
Before it had even fully stopped, Kiana shoved the door open and leapt out.
The night wind hit her face, thick with the smell of gunpowder and scorched metal.
Most of District 7's abandoned metal recycling plant had simply ceased to exist, replaced by a deep, ragged-edged crater.
The bottom of the pit was heaped with lumps of metal that had melted and refrozen in the heat, mixed with rubble.
More than a dozen high-power searchlights lit the ruins bright as day.
Anti-Entropy search teams, clad in heavy protective suits, spread out across the rubble.
The displays of several life-detection scanners glowed faint blue in the darkness.
Kiana ran into the wreckage, stumbling over the debris underfoot.
She'd expected to see a stretcher.
To see medics clustered together.
To see Su Yu lying on it, tubes running into him, pale-faced but still managing an apologetic, wry smile for her.
But there was nothing.
The searchlight beams swept across the search team members.
They had stopped what they were doing.
The ones holding the scanning devices stood beside the twisted rebar and concrete slabs, heads bowed.
No one spoke.
Only the wind moved through the ruins, making a sound almost like sobbing.
Kiana's steps slowed.
She walked up to the nearest team.
The suited team members looked away, avoiding her eyes.
"What happened?" Kiana asked, looking at them, her voice barely audible.
The team leader hesitated for a few seconds before slowly pulling off his mask.
He looked at the white-haired girl in front of him, his throat working.
"I'm sorry, Miss Kiana."
His voice carried with unnerving clarity through the empty ruins.
"We couldn't find any trace of Mr. Su Yu. The life-detection scanner... shows no readings."
The instant those words landed, the air around them seemed to drain away entirely.
Kiana stood frozen, her eyes widening slightly.
Her mismatched eyes reflected the lifeless ruins.
The wind stirred her white hair, brushing across her cheeks.
"That's not possible."
She shook her head, taking a half-step back.
"It's absolutely not possible!"
She suddenly screamed, her voice cracking into a hoarse, broken pitch.
Kiana spun around, tearing through the yellow caution tape strung along the edge of the ruins, and charged into the heart of the danger zone bristling with sharp debris.
Several helicopters roared down for landing.
Kevin, Siegfried, Welt, and Tesla leapt down from them one after another.
The rotor wash whipped the dust on the ground into a swirling storm.
Kevin strode out in front of the others.
His placid, ice-blue eyes swept straight down into the crater.
He saw the white-haired figure darting frantically among the massive scrap metal and shattered support walls.
She was tearing charred stone blocks apart with her bare hands, heedless of the sharp edges cutting into her palms, blood dripping from her fingertips onto the gray concrete.
Kevin stopped. He turned to look at the team leader who had just reported to Kiana.
"You couldn't find Su Yu?" Kevin asked.
The leader met Kevin's gaze, then lowered his head under the sheer weight of it.
"Yes. I'm sorry, Mr. Kevin. We've combed through this entire area. We did everything we could."
Siegfried, standing just behind Kevin's shoulder, watched the near-frenzied figure in the crater below, his lips moving slightly.
He wanted to go over and say something — "Let's keep looking," maybe, or "He'll be fine" — even though he didn't believe the words himself.
But before he could take a step, a gust of wind tore past him.
Kevin had already leapt in.
Without a moment's hesitation he crossed the tape and dropped straight down into the crater, more than ten meters deep.
Two white-haired figures. One man, one woman.
Under the searchlights' blinding glare, in ruins that spoke of nothing but an ending, they tore frantically at the heavy stones and twisted steel plates.
Kiana hauled at loads far beyond what her body could bear, her hands bleeding, all the while shouting Su Yu's name.
"Su Yu! Come out!"
She flipped over a slime-slicked sheet of iron. Underneath was only a pool of blackened standing water.
"You bastard! You damned idiot! You promised me you wouldn't do anything reckless!"
Tears mixed with the dust on her face, carving two muddy tracks down her pale cheeks.
Her breathing had fallen apart completely, every inhale stabbing through her lungs.
A dozen meters away.
Kevin wasn't shouting.
He simply hauled aside, one after another, concrete pillars massive enough to stop a tank.
Each one crashed to the ground with a thunderous boom.
He stared fixedly into every gap he uncovered, muttering fast and low under his breath.
"Damn you, Su Yu."
Kevin's fingers dug into a crack in the rock.
"You unfilial son, don't you dare play dead on me."
He hurled the two-ton boulder aside.
"You're probably hiding somewhere right now, laughing at all this."
His eyes darted through every hollow gap in the debris.
But there was nothing.
"Get out here already!"
His voice broke, at the end, into a strangled, choked-back growl.
Above the crater.
Welt, Tesla, Siegfried, Einstein, and Rita stood in a row.
The helicopter searchlights cast long shadows behind them.
They watched in silence as the two figures below kept tearing through the rubble — neither stopping them, nor joining in.
In this fully sealed physical zone that had just suffered a catastrophic collapse—
the life-detection scanners registered nothing at all.
No trace of a living heat signature.
If Su Yu wasn't here,
it meant he'd been left behind inside the collapsing Spatial Rift.
And that Rift — along with everything inside it — had been utterly shredded by the turbulence of imaginary space the moment its Honkai energy core shattered.
In the server room of Anti-Entropy's underground laboratory.
Bronie still sat at the main console.
The comms channel had stayed open the whole time.
Linked to every terminal on the scene.
She'd heard the wind. Heard the boulders crashing down. Heard Kiana's hoarse, screaming curses and sobs, and Kevin's cracked, broken roar.
The dense strings of data still scrolled across the display, but she couldn't take in a single character of it.
She raised a hand and scrubbed roughly at her eyes with the back of it. Underneath her goggles, things had gotten wet.
"Boss."
Bronie stared at the comms window, gone completely dark.
"You bastard." Her voice into the microphone was thick, nasal. "What about my overtime pay you promised me — are you really..."
She didn't finish the sentence.
At the same moment.
On a wide bridge spanning the river in Arc City.
A black luxury sedan cruised smoothly through the night.
The cabin's soundproofing was excellent — no wind noise leaked in from outside.
Eden sat in the spacious leather back seat.
Several floating holographic comm windows glowed in front of her.
She'd just finished handling Arc City's official media response — the press release about the "chemical plant explosion" had already gone out.
A miniature earpiece was tucked into her ear, linked to Anti-Entropy headquarters' command channel.
Through it, all the chaos came through with perfect clarity.
Kiana's sobbing screams.
Kevin's roaring.
The search team's dead silence.
Eden sat perfectly upright, her spine straight as a rod.
The dark gold, haute couture evening gown she wore caught the dim cabin light with a cold, faint sheen.
She heard those sounds.
Sounds that were enough to declare that the man hidden behind everyone else, the only man in this world who could ever move her heart, no longer existed.
She didn't cry.
Eden closed her eyes.
Her breathing stayed perfectly even.
But the hands resting on her knees slowly curled tighter.
She could not cry.
Su Yu was hers.
She was his woman.
No one understood better than she did just how vast a web that man had spent these past months weaving, all to prepare for the so-called end of the world.
A web bought with his own life.
If she broke down now, if she let herself fall apart, everything Su Yu had poured his heart into could be undone within hours.
She opened her eyes, her gaze cold as a shard of golden ice.
Eden raised a hand and pressed the talk button on her earpiece.
"Listen to me. Kevin. Kiana."
Her voice rang out through the channel, cutting straight through the chaotic noise.
"Get out of there. Now."
At the bottom of the crater—
Kiana and Kevin both froze at the sudden voice.
"The life-detection scanners have already checked." Eden watched the river flash past the window, her voice flat, without a trace of feeling. "No response. Su Yu isn't there."
"But—!"
Kiana turned her head and shouted into the collar mic.
The blood on her hands looked stark and terrible under the searchlights.
"But—"
"Kiana!"
Eden's voice snapped up sharply, like a whip cracking through the channel.
Beneath that stern command, the very tail of her voice carried a barely perceptible tremor.
But she clenched her back teeth and forced the tremor down.
"You want everything Su Yu has done—" Eden stared at the empty windshield ahead of her, "—to be for nothing?!"
Up in the ruins, Kiana's whole body shuddered.
She looked at the pool of black water in front of her, at her own hands caked in mud and blood.
Then she bit down hard on her lower lip.
Her teeth broke through the thin skin.
A salty, coppery taste of blood spread through her mouth.
She stayed there half-kneeling, her shoulders trembling faintly in the empty crater.
"Besides, Su Yu could still be alive." Eden's voice softened considerably. "Didn't Su Yu tell you your lives are bound together? If he died, you'd—"
"—But who can guarantee that!" Kiana's fists clenched. "I can't even reach the Squad Monitor. Even if Su Yu isn't dead, how could he possibly come through space that violent unharmed? Maybe he's only alive for now. Maybe—"
"Kiana." Eden's voice came again. "Don't let him down."
Kiana Kaslana shook violently from head to toe. She closed her eyes. A moment passed.
"I know."
Kiana's voice was so quiet it was little more than a whisper, scattered instantly by the wind.
Ten minutes later.
Anti-Entropy had set up a temporary medical tent at the edge of the ruins.
Kiana and Kevin sat side by side on two folding metal chairs.
The attending medics cleaned their wounded hands with saline solution, using tweezers to pick out the shards of gravel and glass embedded in their flesh.
It hurt.
But both of them stayed silent without a word between them, letting the doctors work without so much as a wince.
Kiana kept her head bowed, her long white hair hiding her face.
She looked like nothing more than an empty shell that had lost its soul.
Beside her, Kevin's frost-cold face had turned even harder, the chill in it deepening.
His unfocused eyes stared down at the gray concrete beneath his feet.
Siegfried walked up in front of Kevin.
He crouched beside the metal chair and reached out a callused hand, giving Kevin's tense, stiffened shoulder two firm pats.
"If I'd insisted back then."
Kevin spoke suddenly.
His voice was quiet and dry.
"If I'd gone in there with him too — would things have turned out different?"
Siegfried looked at the young man in front of him, already stronger than himself, and let out a sigh.
"Son, this isn't your fault."
Siegfried sat down on the ground beside Kevin, pulled a crumpled cigarette from his pocket, and turned it between his fingers without lighting it.
"Su Yu said it himself — at your current level of strength, in a place built entirely against Honkai energy, going in would only have made you a burden to him."
Siegfried paused.
He watched the searchlights still sweeping the scene in the distance.
"Your dad's never been good at comforting people."
His voice roughened.
"I just want you to understand — if even Su Yu, who could perform a Spatial Jump, couldn't make it back out of that Rift, then whatever fate would've waited for you in there would probably have been—"
Kevin knew.
Of course he knew.
If a man wielding the Authority of the Herrscher of the Void hadn't even had the chance to run, then Kevin going in would have meant nothing but one more life lost.
Precisely because he knew this—
he hated it, with everything in him.
He hated this weak, useless self of his who could do nothing at all.
That bastard Su Yu.
Kevin cursed inwardly.
One man, shouldering the fate and secrets of two entire worlds.
Carrying that weight for so long.
Facing the constant risk of his own comrades turning on him in suspicion, he'd forced this scattered group of misfits into something whole.
Kevin had finally — after so much difficulty, truly so much — earned his place in that bastard's ranks.
He'd wanted to stand beside him, to face whatever hardship and danger lay ahead together.
He'd even already resolved to become, over the coming six months, the sharpest blade in that bastard's hand.
But.
He hadn't even managed to catch up to Su Yu's pace yet.
That guy who always wore that punchable grin right up to the last moment—
had already—
"I couldn't do anything."
Kevin stared down at his bandage-wrapped hands.
"Nothing at all..."
That grief at losing a close friend, that irreversible guilt and helpless refusal to accept it, rose over him like the coldest seawater in the dead of night, silent and complete, swallowing his heart whole.
A single clear drop welled up at the corner of his eye, ran down the hard line of his jaw, and struck the dust on his shoe, leaving a dark round mark.
It was a silent tear.
Even Mei, before this, had never once seen Kevin cry.
But on this night thick with smoke and blood, he wept — for a close friend of this world, for a partnership that had ended before it had truly even begun — tears of unbearable pain and self-reproach.
"Su Yu."
Kevin closed his eyes.
"Where the hell are you?"
That question hung over the whole of Arc City that night.
The same question gripped everyone Su Yu had ever taken under his wing, everyone who held him as the most important person in their lives.
In the cold night wind, it was a knot lodged deep in their hearts, one that refused, no matter what, to come undone.
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