The air in the underground training ground felt somewhat stagnant.
The ventilation system let out a low-frequency hum, but it couldn't blow away the peculiar odor — a mixture of machine oil, sweat, and disinfectant. Eight o'clock sharp, night.
Two hundred fifty new recruits of the Starfire training camp stood assembled in a neat formation atop the massive metal platform known as Central Plaza.
Not one of them was late.
Not one of them had dropped out.
On the left side of the formation stood those who had passed Rita's hellish final test — the combat-ready personnel.
Dressed in dark black special-ops uniforms, they stood ramrod straight, their breathing almost perfectly in sync.
On the right side stood those who had been eliminated in the test but had chosen to stay anyway.
They would be assigned to logistics, communications, maintenance, and medical units.
They carried no weapons, but they stood just as unyieldingly as those on the left.
Five days. A hundred and twenty hours.
Su Yu had given them time enough to spend as they wished — to think things over, to say goodbye to loved ones, or simply to enjoy what peace the world had left to offer.
But now, all two hundred and fifty of them stood here, in the flesh.
In this moment, the phrase "elite of humanity" took on real, tangible weight.
They had traveled here from every corner of the country, turning themselves into a shield.
To hold back the unknown apocalypse waiting five months away.
Susannah Manatt and Sin Mal stood dead center in the front row.
Their heels pressed tightly together.
The muscles of their backs drawn taut.
After that life-or-death battle against the simulated Battle-Car Class Honkai Beast, after the agonizing tearing pain of their Genetic Locks opening—
the whole formation's gravity seemed to bend faintly toward the two of them.
The recruits standing behind and beside them looked at their backs with something like reverence.
This was an army. This was the last line of defense against the apocalypse.
Strength was the only currency here.
Footsteps sounded across the silent plaza.
One heavy, one light. Distinct in rhythm, neither hurried nor slow.
Susannah's ear twitched faintly.
Since opening her first-stage Genetic Lock, her five senses had been sharpened to an inhuman degree.
She could make out a flying insect dozens of meters away in near-total darkness; she could distinguish the faint differences between shoe soles of different materials scraping the floor.
She recognized the footsteps as Su Yu's and Rita's.
When the two figures stepped out of the shadows into view, Susannah's breath caught for half a beat.
Her pupils contracted instantly.
She stared at Su Yu, walking in front.
Five days ago, on this very plaza, Su Yu had felt like a live volcano ready to erupt at any moment, radiating a wild, uncontrollable pressure.
But now — that violence was gone.
In its place was a calm with no visible bottom.
Like a peerless blade, finally finished forging, sheathed once more in its plain, ancient scabbard.
As he walked, even the air around him seemed to bend to the pull of his presence.
Stronger. He'd gotten stronger.
Susannah's instincts screamed an alarm inside her skull.
She was certain — if the Su Yu standing here now fought the Supreme Commander who had overseen their test five days ago—
it would take only a single move.
The Su Yu of five days ago would have his neck snapped by the one standing here today.
What on earth had he gone through during these five days of leave? What monster had he gone off somewhere to kill?
Susannah swallowed and glanced sideways at Sin Mal.
Sin Mal's hands had curled into fists.
Her usually fierce eyes had narrowed to mere slits.
As someone who had likewise opened her Genetic Lock, her nose for danger was even sharper than Susannah's.
She stared at Su Yu, a fine sheen of cold sweat beading on her forehead.
Su Yu stepped up onto the high platform.
Rita fell half a step behind, standing at his rear flank.
The overhead lights on the platform lit up Su Yu's face.
He looked down.
His gaze swept across the formation below like a physical blade.
His Eye of Deconstruction opened on its own in that instant.
Through his eyes, the recruits' vital signs — heart rate, muscle tension, even the adrenaline concentration in their blood — dissolved into translucent streams of blue data, scrolling rapidly across his retinas.
He saw it all clearly.
Tension showed on their faces, along with fear of the unknown, and the unease that came with facing an approaching apocalypse.
All of it was the most ordinary human physiological response.
No one could face death with true, unruffled calm.
But they had crushed that tension and fear down with sheer, brute willpower.
Beneath those faces, the framework holding them upright was a resolve that looked death in the eye without flinching.
They had already made their flesh and blood into a levee ringing the outskirts of Arc City.
"Good." Su Yu's voice rolled out over the training ground through the platform's PA system.
Not loud, but clear enough to reach every ear.
"All two hundred fifty, present and accounted for. Not one missing."
Su Yu clasped his hands behind his back.
"Looking at your faces now, I can tell — over these past five days, you've had your fill of everything good this world has to offer."
"You thought it through carefully. You weighed every gain against every loss. You gave up your beds, your air conditioning, good food, your families."
"And in the end, you made your choice — and came down here, underground."
Su Yu stood ramrod straight.
"So — here, now."
He raised his right hand, fingers pressed together.
"On behalf of the Meteoric Salvation project, and on behalf of everyone you're here to protect — first, I want to commend your courage."
He raised his right hand to his temple.
"And I want to offer you my respect."
Su Yu snapped off a textbook military salute.
Standing behind him, Rita stepped forward half a pace at the same moment and returned a flawless salute of her own.
A crisp swish—
Below. Two hundred and fifty right hands rose as one.
Two hundred and fifty recruits returned the highest salute to the commander on the platform above.
The silence held for three seconds.
"Salute complete." Su Yu lowered his arm.
The recruits below lowered their hands in turn, settling back into parade rest.
Su Yu drew a deep breath and let it out.
He glanced at Rita beside him.
"Now then." Su Yu stepped back. "Chief Instructor Rita will explain everything to you in detail — what you'll be learning over the next five months, the calm before the apocalypse breaks, and exactly what our plan of action will be."
Rita stepped forward.
"Good evening, everyone. Your leave is over — I hope you're still adjusting to the air down here."
She raised her hand and pressed the remote in her grip.
Behind the platform, a massive holographic projection screen — taking up half the wall — flared to life.
Blue light washed over the faces of the recruits below.
"You've all been wondering — against Honkai monsters whose armor is too thick for even an RPG to punch through, what exactly is humanity supposed to fight with?"
Rita's finger swiped across the remote.
Several high-resolution blueprints appeared on the screen.
Then the blueprints began to rotate, merge, and resolve into three-dimensional models.
They were steel giants.
Rough-hewn lines, sharp angles.
Massive mechanical arms, thick leg armor, thrusters on their backs spewing pale-blue flame.
"These are war machines built by Anti-Entropy." Rita pointed at each rotating mech in turn on the screen. "The melee heavy-armor model — Titan. The long-range fire-suppression model — Thunder."
A faint stir rippled through the formation below.
The recruits' eyes went wide, unblinking.
They stared at the steel constructs on screen, painted with battle livery, radiating an air of Destruction.
Many of them had racked their brains over these past five days, imagining themselves going toe-to-toe with the monsters using heavy anti-materiel sniper rifles, or strapping explosives to their bodies to blow the creatures' legs off.
But not one of them had ever imagined this. The answer, it turned out — was piloting mechs.
Real, genuine bipedal walker mechs, existing in the flesh.
More than a few of the male recruits' eyes reddened, a fevered light kindling in their gazes.
To hell with life-or-death odds, to hell with the coming apocalypse!
Mechs. This was the ultimate romance of every man's dreams!
To sit in the cockpit, haul back on the controls, listen to the engine roar.
To pilot these steel behemoths — humanity's finest industrial achievement — into battle against the calamity that would destroy the world, to defend it.
Wasn't this exactly the top-tier, blood-pumping fantasy every man had dreamed up under the covers since childhood?!
Even the soldiers on the right side of the formation — the ones who'd failed the final test and were consigned to logistics — felt a fire kindling in their chests.
Even if they couldn't pilot these giants themselves, tightening bolts and fueling them up in the hangar would be an honor beyond measure.
Fervor spread through the formation like a virus.
Rita looked down at all those reddened eyes.
The smile on her face didn't change.
"Well, it looks like everyone's quite taken with the new toys."
Rita said softly.
The hand holding the remote fell to her side.
"However—"
Her voice dropped an octave, like a ladle of ice water poured into a pan of scalding oil.
"I have to interrupt everyone's little fantasy right now."
The image on screen changed.
It was a cutaway diagram of a mech cockpit's interior.
Behind the seat, a dense tangle of wiring extended outward, converging into several thick cables tipped with metal probes.
"As mech pilots, the difficulty and danger of your training will far exceed anything your adrenaline-soaked brains can currently imagine."
Rita pointed at the cables.
"What you'll be facing isn't just the physical destruction of running fifty kilometers a day."
"What you'll face is something far more lethal — a crushing of the mind."
"In order to make their massive bodies respond as nimbly as a human's own hands and feet, none of the Titan or Thunder mechs use traditional physical control sticks."
"Instead, they use neural linking."
The moment those words left her mouth—
Susannah, in the front row, shivered.
"That means the moment you sit in that cockpit and press the ignition, every impact the mech takes, every crack in its armor, even the agony of its engine overloading — all of it will be fed straight into your brain through your own neurons, one hundred percent."
Rita watched the faces below gradually cool.
"Immense physical strain. Extreme mental pressure."
"If, in battle, the strain exceeds the threshold your brain can bear, you might well suffer instant brain death from burnt-out neurons — long before the mech itself is even destroyed — and end up nothing more than a drooling husk."
"Even if you're lucky enough to survive, frequent neural linking can leave you with severe phantom-pain syndrome."
Rita put the remote away.
"In this world, there's no such thing as great power easily won. To wield the kind of force that can go toe-to-toe with a Honkai Beast, you have to pay a price ordinary people wouldn't even dare imagine."
The plaza fell into dead silence.
Only the whir of the projector's cooling fan broke the quiet.
"That said—"
Rita's tone shifted, softening back to its earlier warmth.
"You can all rest easy. We brought you here for one purpose alone — to fight the apocalypse, to defend Arc City. Not to torture you."
"So, over the next few months, before Honkai arrives, I'll design a rigorous, step-by-step adaptation program for you."
"Over these past five days, our patron, Miss Eden, has already overseen a complete equipment upgrade at Starfire Base, top to bottom."
"A great deal of new equipment for mental-resistance and physical-tolerance training is sitting in storage right now, waiting for you."
"I'll raise your thresholds step by step, until you can truly command these steel monsters."
Rita finished speaking.
She stepped back, yielding the center of the platform.
Su Yu stepped forward again.
He took the microphone and hooked it over his ear.
"You've heard it."
Su Yu looked out at the crowd below.
"It'll be agonizing. It'll be brutal. Some of you might die in ways that aren't pretty."
"I know that even now, some of you must be secretly wondering."
"Against monsters that blot out the sky, against a future doomed to destroy everything — with just the people we have, what exactly is humanity supposed to win with?"
Su Yu walked to the edge of the platform.
"That's exactly why I've gathered every one of you back here, at this precise moment."
He lifted his head, his gaze sweeping past the ranks of recruits toward the vast, darkened space beyond.
"I want to tell you — even in that parallel world ravaged by Honkai."
"there, too, there are people who fight Honkai, who defend their comrades, who bleed themselves dry, one after another, to bring the world back to what it should be."
"I want to tell you — humanity is not truly helpless before a calamity like Honkai."
Su Yu turned his head, looking at Susannah, at Sin Mal, at all two hundred and fifty of them.
"Now it's time you saw for yourselves — the wisdom and unbending pride of humankind."
Su Yu reached up, pressing the edge of his earpiece.
"Wotan."
He said the single word softly.
"Activate."
The instant after the command left his lips—
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
In the darkened space several hundred meters from the formation of recruits—
ten rows of high-power floodlights blazed to life one after another, bottom to top.
Blinding shafts of light sliced through the darkness.
The recruits, who had thought they were merely standing in an ordinary underground training ground, suddenly realized that the metal platform beneath their feet extended out over open air — it was, in fact, a suspended platform, like the command bridge of some colossal warship.
And at the very back of the hangar—
caught in the crossing beams of the floodlights—
a towering steel humanoid, twenty meters tall, stood.
Its armor was thick, black shot through with red.
Metal brows as wide as a mountain range. Forearms thick enough to crush a main battle tank with one hand.
At its chest—
a massive circular reactor churned, running.
It was the fusion reactor core, its calibration just completed.
Through the thick radiation-shielded glass, it blazed with an orange-red light brighter than the sun itself.
That light flowed like blood along the thick energy conduits across the mech's surface, coursing out to every part of the giant's body.
The moment this steel beast, slumbering beneath the earth, revealed its true form, it nailed all two hundred and fifty pairs of eyes to the spot.
No one could tear their eyes away from this raw aesthetic of violence, forged purely from industry and destructive power.
Inside the main control room—
Tesla gripped the edge of the console so tightly the veins stood out on the back of her hand.
She watched the self-diagnostic readings on the screen, every one of them turned green, watched the steady pulse of the fusion core's parameters.
She reached out with her right hand and slapped open the protective cover marked with a red warning symbol on the console.
Her thumb slammed down on the red release-lock button.
"Wotan! Activate!" Tesla shouted.
A deep hum—
A shrill alarm buzzed through the entire hangar.
Wotan. This steel giant, ten years asleep, was waking now.
"Restraint lock, stage one — released."
The massive mechanical clamps fixed to Wotan's shoulders, waist, and legs all roared at once with the shriek of grinding metal.
Condensed gas hissed out from the gaps in the clamps, forming white mist in the floodlights — like the breath of some great beast stirring awake.
"Restraint lock, stage two — released."
Wotan's arms moved.
The two multi-ton steel arms lifted off their support frames, moving with a slowness like something submerged underwater — yet every inch of that motion carried a sense of power that made scalps prickle.
The hydraulic bearings let out a low hum; the grinding of alloy joints sounded like some long-dormant beast working the stiffness out of its limbs.
"Stage three — all restraint locks, released."
The last sets of clamps at Wotan's ankles, knees, and waist all sprang open at once.
The twenty-meter steel giant was, at last, completely free.
The exhaust vents on the giant's back snapped open, letting out a deafening roar.
Inside the cockpit within Wotan's chest—
Welt Yang, dressed in a dark, form-fitting pressure suit—
sat in the control seat, molded to fit the human body perfectly.
Behind him, an intricate array of neural-link cables had already plunged deep into the ports on his suit, establishing a data connection with the nerves of his spine.
Welt opened his eyes.
He wasn't wearing his glasses.
A holographic display unfurled around him.
Streams of green data cascaded past like a waterfall.
[System self-check: passed.]
[Neural link connection rate: 98%. Status: stable.]
[Reactor output: 15%.]
Welt's hands closed around the control sticks.
This machine, into which he'd poured over a decade of his heart's blood—
built in that lightless Anti-Entropy basement, misunderstood by colleagues, dismissed by the whole world as the work of a madman—
the steel giant that he, Tesla, Einstein, and the others had pieced together, bit by bit, from nothing but blueprints—
was finally, in this moment, waking up.
[Final control lock: opened.]
The System's cold electronic voice finished its announcement.
Su Yu's voice came through the internal comm channel, into Welt's earpiece.
"Deploy!"
Welt tightened his grip on the controls.
For an instant, his eyes seemed to carry him back to the burning Astral Express.
"Wotan — deploy!"
The colossal mech received its pilot's command.
Its metal body, ten years dormant, stirred to life amid a thunderous roar.
Under the stunned stares of two hundred and fifty recruits, the twenty-meter mech—
raised its two mechanical arms, each weighing dozens of tons.
CLANG!!!
Wotan slammed its two massive steel fists together in front of its chest.
The collision of metal on metal erupted in an earth-shaking crash.
The shockwave of the impact turned into a scorching gale, carrying the scent of machine oil and ozone, howling out from the depths of the hangar.
It tore through the recruits' hair.
It lashed against their faces.
But when they opened their eyes again—
reflected in their pupils stood the steel titan, its chest blazing with the light of nuclear fusion.
Every trace of confusion and fear they'd once carried about the future, about those unknown, colossal monsters — was shattered utterly in that single, deafening clash of metal.
Susannah, standing at the very front of the formation, tilted her head back, staring up at the titan that seemed to hold up the sky itself.
Her hands trembled, overwhelmed with excitement.
Amid the stunned, utter silence—
Susannah's lips moved.
At last, unable to hold it in, she let out a heartfelt cry of amazement.
"That is... so damn cool!!"
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