"Let me start with the conclusion — the official one, at least." Su Yu looked into Cecilia's eyes. "Kiana is the biological daughter of you and Siegfried Kaslana."
The hospital room went silent.
Only the ticking of the second hand on the wall clock broke the quiet.
Cecilia froze where she sat.
Her spine came off the pillow. She sat bolt upright.
Her eyes widened slightly, and she looked at Su Yu with something like confusion, then turned to look at Kiana, who sat in the chair beside her, head bowed low.
"So..." Cecilia's voice wavered. She lifted her left hand, the one without the IV line, and pointed first at Kiana, then at herself. "Kiana isn't some illegitimate daughter like Theresa said — she's really mine and Siegfried's... actual daughter?"
The news shattered everything she'd believed for the past three days.
Of course.
Cecilia's gaze locked onto Kiana and refused to let go.
Of course the girl had that trademark Kaslana white hair.
Of course, back in the Spatial Rift, staring at that dust- and blood-streaked face, she'd kept finding features that echoed her own.
Of course, the moment she'd first laid eyes on her, some inexplicable warmth had welled up — something no amount of agent's training could explain away.
So she really was her daughter.
Hers and Siegfried's.
Cecilia stared at the girl sitting there.
Kiana's shoulders had drawn in slightly with nerves.
The longer Cecilia looked, the more she saw her own younger self in that face.
The last thread of doubt Theresa's story had planted vanished in an instant.
Some long-suppressed emotion broke through the thin wall of an agent's rationality and swept over her mind entirely.
Cecilia threw back a corner of the blanket, heedless of the fresh bruising from the IV, and leaned forward out of the bed.
She seized Kiana's wrist.
Before Kiana could react, she was hauled forward by sheer force.
Cecilia pulled her into an embrace without a word of warning.
Her arms tightened, pressing Kiana's face firmly against her chest.
"I actually have such an adorable daughter!" Cecilia's voice rose an octave, thick with barely contained elation. "This is wonderful! Honestly, I've always wanted a cute daughter of my own! I never imagined my wish would come true today!"
Muffled against Cecilia's chest, Kiana's hands hovered awkwardly in midair, unsure where to go.
Su Yu stood by the window, one hand rising to cover most of his face, fingers rubbing at his forehead.
Where's your agent composure, Ms. Cecilia? Weren't you supposed to be a top-tier assassin?
Su Yu sighed inwardly.
So the Schariac family carries the idiot gene too, apparently.
This kind of scatterbrained reaction was maybe just a hair better than the single-celled organisms of the Kaslana family.
"Auntie Cecilia." Su Yu had to cut in. "That's really not the point—"
Cecilia's movements stopped short.
"Oh — sorry, sorry!"
She hastily loosened her arms and settled back onto the bed.
Kiana finally got a breath of fresh air.
Her face had gone crimson, so red it looked ready to drip.
She gasped for air, hands still unsure where to land.
"Kiana, did I scare you?" Cecilia looked at the girl's flustered state and gave a slightly sheepish laugh.
There wasn't a trace of distance in that smile — only the unguarded doting warmth of an elder for a younger family member.
"I just got a little too excited... Su Yu, please, go on."
Su Yu sighed again.
"So, like I said — that was the official version."
He put weight on the words, steering the conversation back on track.
The smile on Cecilia's face faded.
She'd caught the undertone in that sentence at once.
"To put it simply," Su Yu said, looking straight at Cecilia, "Kiana isn't from this world."
Since she'd already lived through that Spatial Rift firsthand, already seen Honkai Beasts that defied the laws of physics — there was no point hiding the rest any longer.
Before this, both Siegfried and Kevin had told Su Yu, on separate occasions, that they never wanted to drag Cecilia into this apocalyptic countdown.
But the situation now left no room for that kind of protective concealment.
What was done was done.
To pool their resources, and to keep Schicksal from meddling behind their backs, they needed to lay the truth bare before Cecilia and bring the strongest fighter among them into the fold.
Su Yu walked to the foot of the bed and crossed his arms over the railing.
He began to explain.
He didn't reach for a single dramatic word.
In a calm, matter-of-fact, almost clinical tone, he laid out everything he could tell her in brief.
He told her that beyond the sky overhead, another parallel world existed — one ravaged by "Honkai."
He told her that in that world, isotopes of Cecilia and Siegfried existed too.
In a battle against the Second Herrscher, Sirin, years ago, that world's Cecilia had died in combat. Siegfried survived, carrying the real Kiana with him — but in the manhunt that followed, hunted by that world's Schicksal, the real Kiana's fate had ultimately gone unknown.
He pointed to the girl sitting in the chair and spoke the cruelest truth of all —
This ordinary-looking girl was in fact K-423, a clone that world's Otto had engineered by fusing the genes of Cecilia and Siegfried's daughter "Kiana" with the core of the Second Herrscher.
Finally, Su Yu named the sword of Damocles hanging over all their heads: this world had less than five months left before Honkai's full-scale invasion.
He didn't hide the sleepless nights he, Kevin, and Siegfried had spent grinding away at the special-training base these past days, nor the half-built Wotan mech taking shape at Anti-Entropy.
The room fell silent once more.
Su Yu stopped talking.
He leaned against the iron railing at the foot of the bed and waited for Cecilia to absorb it all.
Cecilia said nothing.
She turned her head to look at Kiana, sitting in the chair with all ten fingers locked together, tense to the point of shaking.
She'd never imagined it.
This girl in front of her — who looked no older than fifteen or sixteen, who'd blushed red just moments ago from a hug — her entire existence was the product of a thoroughgoing, tragic experiment.
Her whole life had been built on a scripted lie.
So young, and already carrying such a crushing fate.
Not only had she lost her family — she was even shouldering blame for crimes committed by the Herrscher personality lodged inside her, forced to atone for sins that weren't hers.
Cecilia felt as though a fist had slammed into her chest, a suffocating pressure closing around her throat.
She thought back to the Spatial Rift.
This child, dual pistols in hand, fighting with total disregard for her own safety, throwing herself again and again between the Honkai Beasts and everyone else.
To move with skill that clean, in a world that cruel, she must have endured more suffering than most people could ever imagine.
Su Yu's few offhand sentences just now couldn't begin to capture how much pain and injustice this child had swallowed over the years.
Cecilia understood everything now.
No wonder, when Kiana had first walked through the door, her eyes had carried such heavy guilt and evasiveness.
She must have thought, the instant she saw Cecilia, of that world's own Valkyrie Cecilia — who had died on the snowfield.
And inevitably thought that her own existence had "stolen" the life and family that should have belonged to the real "Kiana."
People always said the Kaslanas acted purely on hot blood, with no thought given at all.
But clearly, whatever woman could make a Kaslana like Siegfried fall so hopelessly in love shared that same nature at her core.
Cecilia might carry a bit more analytical reason than Siegfried.
But in this hospital room, faced with the girl sitting there with her head bowed, that reason had crumbled to nothing.
Nothing was left but a heart aching for her.
Cecilia threw off the blanket and swung her feet onto the floor.
"Kiana."
She walked to the chair and crouched down, bringing her eyes level with Kiana's.
"If you're willing," Cecilia said, reaching out to cup Kiana's flustered face in both hands, "you can think of me as your mother completely."
She looked straight into those mismatched eyes.
"No." She shook her head. "Please — from now on, just call me Mother Cecilia."
She stood, opened her arms again, and pulled Kiana tightly into them.
Kiana didn't cry.
She still hadn't fully processed the barrage of information and the sudden family recognition.
Cecilia, on the other hand, couldn't hold back any longer.
Fat tears spilled from the top agent's eyes, falling straight onto Kiana's black jacket.
The fabric soaked them up instantly, blooming into dark, spreading patches.
One of Cecilia's hands rested on Kiana's back; the other stroked, again and again, through that white hair.
"Kiana, my Kiana..." Cecilia's voice broke with emotion. "You really have suffered so much. Don't worry — your mother's here now. I'm not going anywhere, and no one's ever going to hurt you again..."
Held tight in Cecilia's arms, chin resting on her shoulder, Kiana was completely at a loss.
She didn't know where to put her hands. Her mind was a tangled mess.
By all rights, in a touching mother-daughter reunion like this, shouldn't she be the one sobbing her heart out in her mother's arms?
Why was it Cecilia — a woman she'd met all of twice — crying harder than she was?
Kiana's eyes drifted over Cecilia's shoulder, sneaking a glance at Su Yu standing on the other side of the bed.
Su Yu stood there, hands tucked in his pockets.
He said nothing. He just watched them.
There was the faintest smile on his face.
To Kiana, it looked like he was saying, loud and clear without a word: See? I told you Cecilia would accept you.
Kiana bit her lip.
That absurd insecurity that had been lodged deep in her heart — the fear that she was just a clone, a monster unworthy of love — dissolved completely in that moment, in that room, in those scalding tears.
Yeah.
Even if this wasn't her original world. Even if this was a parallel universe.
Siegfried and Cecilia were still, through and through, unreasonably, ridiculously good people.
She'd stood outside that door earlier, agonizing, worrying over this and that, too afraid to push it open.
She'd trusted Siegfried and Cecilia far too little.
How could they ever have pushed her away just because she was a clone?
Even across an entire universe, even without a single drop of shared blood binding them, they would still choose to accept her unconditionally.
This was her family.
At that thought, Kiana's body finally unclenched.
She raised the hands that had been hovering in midair and wrapped them around Cecilia's waist.
She pressed herself closer, almost without meaning to.
Kiana closed her eyes.
She breathed in greedily — the faint scent of disinfectant on Cecilia, and beneath it, that particular warmth.
It was the warmth she'd dreamed of, on countless freezing nights.
It was the warmth she'd crossed time and space, in her dreams, longing to feel just once — Mother Cecilia.
The sudden mother-daughter embrace stretched on for a long while.
Su Yu didn't interrupt.
He stood quietly off to the side.
Watching the scene before him, he felt happy for Kiana — and, for once, a rare sense of ease for himself too.
Things had gone even more smoothly than he'd expected.
This is wonderful, Kiana, he said silently to himself.
In this world where Honkai doesn't even exist, you've finally found a family of your own.
That Siegfried might come across as a bit of a mess most of the time — running off to a construction site to dodge Theresa, of all things — but he genuinely treats you like his own daughter.
And this Cecilia in front of us, however much her head's clearly been infected by that same illogical Kaslana wiring, however much her agent's composure has scattered to the wind — the tears she's crying for you right now, the warmth pouring off of her, all of it is completely real.
As for Kevin — sure, he's a total blockhead, walking around all day with a face like someone owes him a few hundred thousand.
But he and Dr. Mei both, wholeheartedly wish for you to set down the burdens that were never really yours, to start fresh in this world, to live the ordinary life a girl deserves...
Su Yu turned to look out the window, into the deep night sky.
...Less than five months left.
He ran the ticking countdown through his mind.
Before that day arrived — the day of the "Fated Death" from Aponia's prophecy, when the shooting star flying against the heavens would streak across the night sky —
he needed to move fast, to prepare everything within his power.
He would make sure Kiana built more Bonds in this world.
He'd introduce her to more people, take her through every good restaurant in Arc City, take her to amusement parks, arcades.
In the less than five months he had left, he would create as many precious memories for her as he could.
He wanted those Bonds and memories to become, someday, when she had no choice but to face the darkness alone, a solid strength that could carry her forward.
Su Yu hadn't resigned himself to fate.
He would never simply bare his neck for destiny's blade.
He would struggle, resist, fight to his very last breath — to survive, to stay by her side.
But that didn't stop him from planning ahead, laying down a path for Kiana's future that would hold steady even without him in it.
"Kiana."
Su Yu looked at the white-haired head still buried against Cecilia.
"If — and I mean if — if there really comes a day when you come back from some battle and find I'm not there anymore."
"Please, still lift your head, and keep walking forward."
"Because by then, there will already be more than enough people like me standing behind you."
Su Yu pulled his thoughts back.
Cecilia finally let Kiana go. She wiped the tear tracks from her face with the back of her hand and stood up.
Su Yu looked at Cecilia, his expression settling back into business-like seriousness.
"Now then, Auntie Cecilia." Su Yu cleared his throat. "Allow me to formally extend an invitation, on behalf of Anti-Entropy and everyone involved in the entire Meteoric Salvation project."
Su Yu extended his right hand.
"So that this world doesn't repeat the fate of the other one — please, lend us your strength."
Cecilia looked at the young man's outstretched hand.
The descriptions of apocalypse and Honkai replayed in her mind.
She knew all too well, having seen firsthand the destructive power of those creatures in the Spatial Rift, that if such things ever invaded this ordinary world — armed with nothing but conventional heat weapons — the outcome would be nothing short of a one-sided massacre.
Without a moment's hesitation, she reached out and gripped Su Yu's hand firmly.
"I understand, Su Yu." Cecilia's gaze was resolute. "I don't have any Herrscher or Valkyrie superpowers, so my usefulness might be limited. But I'll do everything in my power to assist your plan — every resource, every intelligence network I have is yours."
She released his hand and turned to look at Kiana, still sitting by the bed.
Her eyes softened again.
"Because this isn't just about defending this world." Cecilia smiled. "It's also about... giving my little Kiana a safe home."
Su Yu let out a long breath.
Tonight's main objective at the hospital had finally been achieved.
Not only had he cleared up Cecilia's misunderstanding — he'd successfully brought this powerhouse into the core circle fighting against Honkai.
He pulled his phone from his pocket.
He was just about to dial that familiar number, to call Siegfried — hiding out in who-knew-what basement — and let him know everything was fine.
And, while he was at it, tell him: "The crisis with Cecilia's emotions has been fully resolved. Theresa's off chasing you now too, so you can drop the act and run straight back to the safety of Anti-Entropy's lab."
His finger hadn't even pressed the call button yet.
BANG.
The hospital room door was kicked open from outside with brutal force.
The solid wood door slammed hard against the wall with a deafening crash.
All three people in the room turned to look at once.
There stood Theresa — that hoodie-wearing, superhumanly strong little powerhouse — gasping for breath in the doorway.
More striking still: her left hand was dragging something by the collar of a leather jacket, the way you'd haul a sack stuffed full of potatoes.
And the owner of that leather jacket was none other than Mr. Siegfried Kaslana, Schicksal's current top S-rank agent.
He was currently bent double in a ridiculous, agonized posture, being forcibly hauled into the room by Theresa.
"Behave yourself! Scumbag!"
Theresa gave a hard yank and flung Siegfried into the middle of the room.
Siegfried clutched both hands to his lower back, letting out a string of hissed intakes of breath.
"Ssss — easy, easy, shorty, my back's actually broken this time..."
He was curled up like a shrimp, unable to even stand straight.
Su Yu, phone still in hand, stared down at Siegfried on the floor, stunned speechless.
While Theresa turned to shut the door, Su Yu seized the moment to make frantic eye signals at Siegfried, exchanging a silent conversation with his eyebrows.
Uncle? What happened? You're a top-tier S-rank agent, aced every counter-surveillance drill they threw at you — and Theresa just took you down bare-handed in this short a time?
Siegfried caught the signal.
He strained to lift his head, his expression worse than crying, and blinked back rapidly in response.
"Don't even ask! Days of overtraining flared up my old back injury! I was in the garage getting ready to make a run for it, moved wrong, and threw my back out completely!"
Siegfried's face was the very picture of having lost all will to live.
"And that's how this little shorty caught me — I couldn't even run, had to drag myself along on two legs like I was mopping the floor with them!"
Having decoded that encrypted exchange, Su Yu silently slipped the phone back into his pocket.
He raised both hands and pressed them hard over his face.
If everything had gone according to plan, all Siegfried had needed to do was put his agent skills to use and make a clean escape beforehand — and tonight's happy family reunion would have wrapped up perfectly right here.
He could've taken Kiana home to the rented apartment, gotten some sleep, and gotten ready for tomorrow's Wotan activation ceremony.
But now.
The unlucky soul who was supposed to have vanished had instead been successfully apprehended and dumped right in front of Cecilia and Kiana.
Listening to Theresa lock the hospital room door, Su Yu felt a powerful sense of foreboding.
Tonight's family melodrama, which should have been over already—
was probably about to get a whole lot longer.
He closed his eyes in something like agony. Is this the Mastermind's doing too? Do you have any idea that Siegfried showing up is basically like planting a live grenade in this hospital room?
Theresa stood by the door, her left hand still clamped around the back collar of Siegfried's leather jacket.
Her chest heaved from the exertion of running. Two black streaks scuffed the tile floor beneath her shoes.
Siegfried had been dumped in the middle of the room like a sack of laundry.
He braced himself up with one hand on the floor, the other clutching his lower back, his face scrunched into a grimace.
This shorty's way too violent! She's not giving me an inch of mercy!
Theresa took a deep breath and let go.
She turned, sweeping her gaze around the room.
From Kiana sitting by the bed, to Cecilia leaning against her pillow, and finally landing on Siegfried on the floor.
"Now then." Theresa took a step forward and planted herself firmly.
The corridor's fluorescent light spilled in from behind her, stretching her shadow long, falling right across Siegfried's face.
"Everyone's here. Siegfried, you'd better tell me everything about that shameful mess you've been—"
She never finished the sentence.
The air in the room froze for a brief instant.
Siegfried lifted his head.
Fighting through the pain shooting up his back, his eyes darted quickly across everyone in the room.
He saw Cecilia sitting on the edge of the bed. He saw Kiana sitting further back.
More importantly, he saw Su Yu standing by the window, his face utterly blank.
As an S-rank agent who'd spent years walking the razor's edge between life and death, Siegfried's mind processed everything in an instant.
He had no idea how much truth Su Yu might have already told Cecilia while he'd been gone.
But he knew one thing for certain: Theresa still had absolutely no idea about the nearly-completed Wotan mech buried beneath Arc City, or the sky-tearing Honkai apocalypse bearing down on them.
Theresa could never, ever be allowed to find out.
To protect that secret, to keep her from digging into an Abyss deep enough to cost her life — he would rather shoulder every bit of blame himself, right here, right now.
Even if it meant being branded a deadbeat who'd abandoned his wife and daughter — as long as it kept Theresa fooled, he'd take it.
He clenched his jaw.
Ready to weld that "scumbag" label Theresa was about to slap on him permanently onto his skull.
At the same moment, on the bed, Cecilia moved too.
She threw the blanket aside completely and planted her feet on the floor.
She looked at her husband, dumped on the ground by Theresa.
She knew this man too well.
Whenever there was trouble he didn't want to explain, or someone he wanted to protect, he always instinctively took every bit of the blame onto himself.
But things were different now.
She already knew the whole truth.
She knew about the coming apocalypse, and she knew that the white-haired girl in front of her was the biological child she and Siegfried had made — across an entire universe.
Now that the family was reunited, how could she stand by and let Siegfried keep bearing that baseless slander, keep hanging his head in shame in front of Theresa, all to cover up the truth about Honkai?
Besides — she absolutely did not want Theresa going anywhere near the secret of that mysterious organization or the Spatial Rift, either.
She had to step in and patch this lie together.
In her chair, Kiana sat up ramrod straight.
She looked at Siegfried on the floor, then at Theresa standing beside him, primed to explode at any second.
If Theresa kept believing the misunderstanding, she really might break Siegfried's legs.
She'd just finally found her way back to a family of her own in this world — she couldn't just stand there and watch Siegfried get pummeled because of her own origins.
And besides, Su Yu had already told her before: anything about the apocalypse or the other world had to stay absolutely secret from Theresa.
If she didn't clear up her identity right now, Theresa would surely start pulling threads to investigate her background — and then everything would come unraveled.
She had to give Theresa an answer she could accept — one that wouldn't invite further digging.
Three different people.
Three different trains of thought, all born from the same instinct to protect the same person.
In the half-second before Theresa finished her accusation — in the very instant Su Yu was about to raise his hand and signal for all three of them to shut up —
three mouths opened at once.
"Cecilia, I'm sorry! Kiana really is my illegitimate daughter from an affair!"
Siegfried's voice rang out loudest, carrying the tragic weight of a man resigned to his fate.
He braced both hands against the floor, veins bulging on his neck.
"Theresa, Kiana is my own biological daughter!"
Cecilia's voice followed right on his heels.
"Auntie, don't hit him! I'm actually the real biological daughter of Siegfried and Mother Cecilia!"
Kiana's voice cracked with urgency, edged with something close to tears.
She sprang up from her chair and planted herself in front of Cecilia's bed.
In that single instant—
three wildly different answers collided in the cramped hospital room.
The sound waves tangled together, forming a shockwave more devastating than any high explosive.
Dead silence fell over the room.
Somewhere outside, the faint wail of an ambulance siren drifted in through the window.
Theresa held her accusatory stance, frozen.
Her left hand still hung in midair.
Her eyes flicked back and forth between Siegfried, Cecilia, and Kiana.
Theresa's pupils lost focus, drifting.
Her lips parted slightly, holding the shape of an "Ah—" but no sound came out.
If the human brain were a precisely running computer,
then Theresa's brain right now looked like it had just been force-fed three mutually contradictory viruses at once.
Siegfried said illegitimate daughter.
Cecilia said biological daughter.
Kiana said she was the biological daughter of both of them.
The three lines of code collided violently inside Theresa's not-especially-large skull.
Her eyeballs even started to twitch slightly, involuntarily.
That already none-too-clever little brain of hers had completely short-circuited.
Su Yu, standing by the window, still had his right hand frozen in the gesture he'd been about to use to stop them.
His five fingers hung awkwardly in midair.
We're done for.
We are so, so completely done for!!
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