September 30th.
Night had fallen.
On the open drill field of Starfire Base, Su Yu sat cross-legged at its very center, atop the bare concrete.
The floodlights ringing the field weren't lit.
Only the low-power security lights along the top of the base's perimeter wall cast a faint amber halo in the distance.
Su Yu's eyes were closed.
His breathing was impossibly slow, the rise and fall of his chest almost imperceptible.
Deep in his mind, a cool, clear woman's voice spoke up.
"Half a month now," Fenghuang's voice came through the Yu Ducheng Spiritual Link. "Your spiritual power stability has climbed another notch since the last check. At this rate, in another two months you should be able to sustain the Eye of Deconstruction for over forty minutes without even opening your Genetic Lock."
Su Yu didn't open his eyes.
His consciousness sank into that pitch-black space, where he could clearly "see" the pathways of vital energy circulating through his own body.
"Squad Monitor, you've been piling on extra lessons ever since you woke up," Su Yu replied over the link. "Why do I get the feeling you're even more brutal than Rita?"
"I'm just making sure none of the spiritual power Aponia gave you goes to waste," Fenghuang said, her tone even. "With her infusion, Yu Ducheng can do a great deal more than before."
Su Yu nodded, mentally.
Fenghuang had woken on the third day after Wotan's activation.
The first thing she'd done upon waking was bring Su Yu good news.
The Yu Ducheng communication channel had originally had room for only two — Su Yu and Kiana.
But with Aponia's infusion of spiritual power, its capacity ceiling had widened.
Now it could accommodate a third person.
Su Yu had barely hesitated before handing that slot to Bronie.
The reason was simple.
On the coming apocalyptic battlefield, he'd need a technical mind capable of processing massive amounts of real-time battlefield data while also providing instant support at the network level.
Of everyone in Anti-Entropy, Bronie was the best fit for that role.
With this Spiritual Link, the flow of information between Su Yu, Kiana, and Bronie would no longer depend on any physical communication device.
Even in a zone with the heaviest Honkai energy contamination and electromagnetic interference, the three of them could still maintain real-time communication on the level of consciousness itself.
It was an invisible web.
A lifeline that, when the apocalypse came, would bind command center, frontline combat strength, and technical backend firmly together.
Beyond upgrading the comm channel, Fenghuang hadn't once let up on tempering Su Yu's spiritual power over the past half month.
Her training methods were nothing like Rita's.
Where Rita beat him half to death on the physical plane, Fenghuang ground him down to the same degree on the spiritual one.
Every day from three to five in the morning, Su Yu underwent spiritual-power sparring with Fenghuang inside his consciousness space.
She assaulted his mental defenses by every means available, from basic willpower suppression to elaborate, layered illusions nested within illusions.
Su Yu had to stay lucid through all of it while also spending effort to keep the Eye of Deconstruction or his disguise technique running.
The results were unmistakable.
Half a month ago, the Eye of Deconstruction had a hard limit of twelve minutes before spiritual exhaustion forced it to shut down.
Now that number had more than doubled.
The energy cost of his disguise technique had also dropped sharply under Fenghuang's relentless coaching.
And on the physical side—
Rita's training remained an unshakable daily fixture.
But unlike half a month ago, several new names had joined his roster of sparring partners.
Every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon, Welt sparred one-on-one with him in simulated combat.
Welt's fighting style leaned toward control and attrition; he excelled at using terrain and distance to hem in his opponent's options.
Sparring with him, Su Yu learned less about hitting harder and more about finding the crack that could turn a losing position around.
Siegfried and Cecilia, meanwhile, ran irregular surprise-attack drills.
The married couple's coordination was uncanny to the point of being almost unfair.
Siegfried would draw fire head-on while Cecilia struck from an angle Su Yu could never have anticipated.
Once, while Su Yu was eating in the mess hall — the instant his chopsticks reached for the Red Braised Pork — Cecilia's finger was already pressed to the back of his neck.
"If this were a blade, you'd already be dead."
He'd nearly upended his rice bowl straight into his own face.
But it was precisely this ever-present pressure that had driven a qualitative leap in his combat instincts over the past half month.
His body hadn't yet broken through to the threshold of a third-stage Genetic Lock, but the duration he could sustain his second-stage Genetic Lock had already doubled since his first awakening.
If he ran into another Honkai Emperor now, he was confident he could take it apart into scrap in the shortest possible time, without taking a single wound.
"Your growth rate ranks among the fastest of any cultivator I've ever seen. But remember—"
"Stay humble, stay steady, right? Squad Monitor, you've drilled that line into my ear ten thousand times already — my ears are practically calloused~"
Listening to him grumble, a touch of amusement crept into Fenghuang's tone. "Be serious. Stop clowning around."
"Anyway — the entire alliance against Honkai has now entered a new phase."
Su Yu gave a wordless hum of acknowledgment inside his consciousness space.
Fenghuang went on.
"Mei's side has made a breakthrough on the armor production."
"Both the White Comet and Shadow Iron sets are fully built, and their Imaginary energy cores are finished as well."
"Ever since Eden and Shenzhou deepened their cooperation, parts production has been distributed across factories all over the country, then shipped here to Anti-Entropy for final assembly. Our production bottleneck has eased enormously."
Su Yu did some quiet mental math.
The White Comet armor had been tailor-made for Kiana; Shadow Iron belonged exclusively to Rita.
Once both sets were deployed, Kiana's and Rita's combat strength would leap forward by an entire generation.
"There's also the holographic combat-simulation pod," Fenghuang said. "The system built from Welt's extracted memories has finished calibration. You, Rita, and Kiana have all tested it personally."
Su Yu recalled that test.
The instant he'd stepped into that sealed spherical pod and pulled on the neural-link helmet, the world before his eyes had shifted entirely.
He'd found himself standing in a ruined city, eaten away past recognition by Honkai energy.
The sky hung a dull, dark red, the air thick with the acrid tang of ozone.
In the distance, a Knight-class Honkai Beast crept slowly through the wreckage, each footfall sending a dull tremor through the ground.
The crushing weight of it, the scent of death saturating the air — it was almost indistinguishable from the battlefield Su Yu had lived through firsthand inside the Spatial Rift.
After the test ended, Kiana had said one thing.
"It's exactly like the real thing."
With this simulation pod, new recruits could stockpile real combat experience in a virtual environment long before ever facing an actual Honkai Beast.
That would drastically cut the odds of them making a fatal mistake out of panic on the real battlefield.
Su Yu pulled up the System panel inside his consciousness space.
Half a month earlier, the long-term quest [Starfire Furnace Selection] had settled, and three rewards now sat neatly arrayed on the panel.
The first.
First-stage Genetic Lock Serum, Improved Edition.
This improved version was the product of two full weeks Mobius had spent reverse-engineering the original serum Su Yu had supplied.
Its potency was roughly halved compared to the shot Su Yu himself had originally taken — but the risk of death had dropped by half in kind.
Recipients would still endure searing pain, but they wouldn't be dragged to death's door the way Su Yu had been.
The trade-off was a locked ceiling.
Anyone who took the improved serum would never, for the rest of their life, be able to break through to a second-stage Genetic Lock.
But for recruits who only needed to pilot a Titan, a first-stage Genetic Lock was more than enough.
Neural linkup demanded extraordinary physical conditioning from a pilot; an ordinary person's nervous system simply couldn't withstand that load.
A first-stage Genetic Lock could raise the body's functions to exactly the threshold needed to handle a mech.
Su Yu planned to have recruits injected with this batch once they finished basic physical conditioning, right before they entered formal mech-piloting instruction.
All the hellish training in the meantime was meant to build a body and a will sturdy enough to absorb the shock the serum would bring.
Meanwhile, Su Yu had already handed a portion of the serum samples over to Mobius.
The snake-like scientist was investigating whether some kind of synergy existed between the Genetic Lock serum and Schicksal's own agent-enhancement formula.
The second.
A defense matrix blueprint.
[Skyward Shield]—
Once deployed, this defense matrix could project a city-wide Imaginary energy barrier over the entire sky above Arc City.
The barrier couldn't stop a true heavyweight.
A powerful Honkai Beast could tear straight through and force its way in.
But it could accomplish two absolutely critical things.
First: weaken the concentration of Honkai energy passing through it.
Ordinary citizens behind the defense line wouldn't sicken or die from Honkai energy contamination; combined with the covert Honkai-resistance inoculations Mobius had already quietly arranged, this would protect ordinary people as much as possible once the apocalypse arrived.
Second.
It would inflict continuous burns on lower-tier Honkai Beasts as they crossed the barrier's surface.
Rank-and-file threats would be slowed and weakened passing through — essentially an automatic filter sifting out the trash.
Only elite-tier Honkai Beasts and above could pass through relatively unscathed, which would ease enormous pressure on the front lines.
That said, the technology, construction time, and production capacity this system demanded were all astronomical.
Worse still, it required a monstrous power supply just to keep running. By Tesla's and the others' calculations, they'd be lucky to finish the shield just barely before the deadline arrived.
The third.
[Starfire · Warzone Map].
It was a palm-sized, silver-white prism of crystal.
Its surface was etched with dense, intricate circuit patterns that gave off a faint blue glow in the dark.
This was the centerpiece reward of the entire Starfire Furnace Selection program's SSS-rank evaluation.
A holographic battlefield command terminal bound to Su Yu personally, though under his own authorization it had already been passed on to Welt Yang for use.
After all, on the battlefield against Honkai, Welt had more experience than anyone else alive; having him hold the map would put it to the greatest possible use.
Once activated, the crystal projected a holographic sand-table two meters in radius before its holder.
A complete three-dimensional map of Arc City hung suspended in the air, every building, every street, every stretch of terrain rendered in perfect clarity.
The sand-table displayed every scrap of battlefield information in real time.
The positions, status, and threat ratings of friendly warriors and mech pilots.
Ammunition and energy reserves for Anti-Entropy's Titan, Lightning, and other mech models.
Wotan's complete system status.
Locations and threat ratings of identified Honkai Beasts.
The real-time expansion or contraction trends of any Spatial Rift.
This holographic sand-table, however, could only function paired with the wide-area Honkai energy detectors already deployed throughout the city.
Anti-Entropy was in the process of upgrading and refitting those detectors further.
Su Yu drew a deep breath.
Intelligence.
A shield.
And an enhanced army.
These three rewards were like three pillars, propping up the basic framework of humanity's fight against the apocalypse.
Before Honkai, humanity wasn't entirely empty-handed. Step by step they were marching toward the end — and step by step, they were also marching toward hope.
Finally, Su Yu closed the System panel inside his consciousness space.
"Squad Monitor."
"Mm?"
"Thanks."
Fenghuang was silent for two seconds.
"For what?"
"For not letting me get a single good night's sleep this whole half month."
"...That mouth of yours is going to get you in trouble one of these days."
Su Yu let out a laugh over the link.
He opened his eyes.
The air on the drill field carried a slight chill.
By late September, Arc City's night wind had already taken on the scent of autumn.
Su Yu lifted his gaze from the ground.
Several people stood at the edge of the training ground.
Siegfried leaned against a concrete pillar, arms crossed over his chest.
He'd changed into a clean training uniform today and — rare for him — even combed his hair, looking noticeably more put-together.
Cecilia stood beside him.
Kiana crouched on the ground, cheeks stuffed full — cake Cecilia had brought.
That had to be her third slice today, Su Yu thought. He knew Cecilia doted on her, but this was a bit much.
Luckily the Kaslana digestive system was astonishing, and Kiana burned through a huge amount of energy training — otherwise she'd have grown a little potbelly within the month.
Kevin stood off at the farthest distance, hands shoved in his pockets.
His face wore that same eternally deadpan expression, but his eyes never left Su Yu at the center of the field.
Susannah and Sin Mal stood together.
Half a month earlier, the two girls had been formally inducted into the Immortal Blades, the squad under Rita's direct command.
Their training was far harsher than that of ordinary recruits, but in exchange they'd received a much greater share of Anti-Entropy's resources and custom-built weapons.
Susannah wore the brand-new standard-issue Immortal Blades tactical suit, a modified electromagnetic pistol holstered at her hip.
Her posture stood straighter than it had half a month ago.
Sin, hands in her pockets, still wore the same expression as if the whole world owed her money.
But the pair of custom explosive short knives at the small of her back occasionally caught the light with a flash of cold steel.
There was only one reason all these people had gathered here.
Su Yu's nearly two-month assassination training under Rita had reached its final session.
The System had popped up a notification for the graduation exam half a month earlier.
But things had been far too hectic since then — every day packed solid with training, meetings, and equipment tests — leaving him no clear block of time to actually take the test.
Until today.
Called a graduation exam for assassination training, but both Su Yu and Rita understood perfectly well what it really was.
This training had started as the instructor thrashing the student one-sidedly, moved on to the student occasionally weathering a few of the instructor's blows, and had now arrived at—
It had become a clash of evenly matched skill.
This time, both had agreed to forgo any special abilities.
No Genetic Lock. No Tarot Bond skills. No outside amplification of any kind.
Pure flesh.
Pure skill.
A pure clash between two martial artists.
Everyone at the edge of the field fell silent.
Because they'd heard footsteps.
Footsteps approached from the passage on the training ground's north side.
The pace was neither hurried nor slow, each footfall landing with perfect, even rhythm.
Rita Rossweisse stepped out of the shadows.
She wasn't wearing her signature maid uniform today — instead, she'd changed into a dark gray standard-issue Anti-Entropy combat suit.
Su Yu watched her approach.
No maid uniform — that detail alone said more than any words could.
Over the past two months of training, every single time Rita had shown up for special sessions with Su Yu, she'd worn that black-and-white maid outfit.
It started as a long skirt, then a short one, and eventually she'd stopped even pretending — one more step and she'd have broken out a high-slit evening gown practically screaming I'm seducing you to throw you off your game.
But today, she wore combat gear.
It meant that, for this test, the woman standing before Su Yu was no longer Instructor Rita, nor Attendant Rita.
She was Warrior Rita.
An equal opponent, someone who had acknowledged Su Yu's strength and now stood with him on the same starting line.
Rita walked to the center of the field and stopped about ten meters from Su Yu.
Her right hand hung loose at her side.
A light flick of her fingers, and the folded super-alloy battle scythe at the small of her back gave a crisp metallic clink as it snapped into her palm.
"Click."
The battle scythe unfolded.
Its silver-white blade traced a cold arc of light through the night.
"Ready, Lord Su Yu? This time, I won't hold back even a fraction. I'll do everything in my power to [kill] you."
Su Yu rose to his feet. As the System's weapon slot opened, the standard-issue Anti-Entropy longsword he'd wielded before inside the Spatial Rift unfolded into his hand.
In that instant, the techniques of Tai Xu Sword Qi, Hokushin Itto-ryu, and every other style he'd learned surfaced all at once in his mind.
Under the strength of his third-stage spiritual power, all those learned techniques fused into this body, gradually becoming truly his own.
Su Yu raised the standard-issue longsword in his hand.
Two months ago, in an abandoned building — an outlaw Valkyrie stranded in a strange world, and a madman who'd bled himself dry to protect what mattered most — had torn into each other on a brutal battlefield.
Two months later, on a newly refurbished training ground, both now warriors fighting the same apocalypse and the same fate, Su Yu and Rita gripped their weapons once more.
But this time it wasn't to tear each other apart, to grind one another into dust.
It was for a shared ideal. A shared wish.
"I ask for your guidance."
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