Thirty minutes later. Training Hall No. 1.
The lights in the training hall blazed at full brightness, the air filtration system humming at a low frequency.
Several people already stood off to the side. Anti-Entropy's two chief scientists, Tesla and Einstein, were calibrating instruments in front of a bank of portable data terminals. Siegfried leaned against a partition wall, Cecilia standing beside him, while Welt held a cup of coffee.
At the very center of the field.
Kiana and Rita stood facing each other, about ten meters apart.
Kiana wasn't wearing her usual baggy hoodie.
She'd changed into a lightweight training outfit, her white hair pulled up into a simple high ponytail.
In her hands she gripped the specially enchanted alloy bat Su Yu had just given her the day before.
Rita wore her usual dark gray standard-issue combat suit, her super-alloy battle scythe in hand.
The sparring match had been arranged over breakfast, meant to gather real combat data on Rita after she'd received her new Stigmata.
Su Yu walked over to stand beside Tesla.
"All set?"
Tesla didn't even look up, her fingers flying across the virtual keyboard.
"Sensors are all linked in—heart rate, myoelectric response, nerve conduction speed, everything's being monitored." Tesla punched the last key hard. "We can start whenever."
Einstein tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and glanced at the field.
"Both of you, this is a data-collection match. Please hold back your lethal finishing moves and simply push your baseline physical limits as far as you can."
At center field.
Kiana hoisted the bat onto her shoulder.
She rolled her neck, joints popping twice.
"Rita." Kiana looked at her. "I've been eating well and sleeping well these past couple days, so I'm plenty strong. Don't go running off to serve tea halfway through the fight like you did the last two times."
Rita gripped her scythe's shaft with both hands, the blade angled downward.
"Lady Kiana." The curve of Rita's mouth was calibrated to perfection. "You did seem to eat rather a lot at breakfast today. I do hope the exercise afterward won't upset your stomach."
The words had barely landed.
No starting signal was needed.
Two dull concussive booms rang out through the hall at the same instant.
The composite flooring beneath their feet caved in instantly.
Two afterimages, moving at a speed that defied common physical sense, collided head-on with a thunderous crash at the center of the field.
"Clang—!"
The deafening clash of metal made everyone's eardrums ache.
A ring of visible white shockwave burst outward from the point where scythe and bat met.
The blast of air made the surrounding filtration system's fan blades shriek with friction.
Siegfried's slouched posture against the partition snapped instantly upright.
His eyes locked onto the center of the field.
If this had been yesterday—
Rita, faced with such a brutally simple heavy blow, would absolutely have chosen to redirect the force with technique, or dodge with footwork.
But now—
Rita didn't retreat so much as half a step.
Her feet planted firmly on the ground, the scythe's shaft holding fast against the enchanted bat.
Pure strength against strength—raw physical contest.
Not a single vein bulged on Rita's arms.
She absorbed the thunderous blow looking more relaxed than when she carried a tray upstairs.
"Bang!" After a brief standoff, the two of them used the rebound force to launch themselves backward simultaneously.
The instant their feet touched down—
the pace of the fight snapped to an absolute extreme.
No flashy release of energy, no crushing Herrscher Authority.
This was two bodies, honed to the absolute limits of human flesh, colliding in the most primal and savage way possible.
Kiana's attacks were sweeping, unrestrained.
Her footwork carried the wild, unruly quality of a Void Drifter, the bat whipping through the air in her hands as a solid, impenetrable blur of afterimages, each strike tearing the air with a sharp shriek.
It was a fighting style built entirely on monstrous physical attributes and raw instinct.
Rita, meanwhile—
her movements were like a dance calculated down to the last precise degree.
With the new Stigmata now underpinning her, she no longer needed to compromise her transitions between moves out of fear of overloading her old artificial Stigmata.
Her scythe moved like a streak of gray lightning.
Every swing, every parry, landed with a precision that seemed measured out with calipers.
She no longer relied entirely on force-redirection and evasion the way she once had.
More often now, she chose to meet Kiana's attacks head-on with even greater counter-force, then used that rebound energy to launch a counterattack from an even more unpredictable angle.
"Crack!" A wild swing of Kiana's bat, missing its mark, blasted a huge chunk of concrete off a support pillar at the edge of the field, sending rubble flying in every direction.
Rita used the flying debris as cover, her body twisting through the air in an impossible arc, the flat of her scythe's blade slamming hard into Kiana's back.
Kiana stumbled forward two steps, rolled with the momentum along the ground, her bat scraping a long trail of sparks across the floor as she swung it backhand to block Rita's follow-up strike.
Five minutes. In the space of a mere five minutes—
the two of them had exchanged blows no fewer than two hundred times.
The floor of Training Hall No. 1 was pitted with craters, the air thick with the scorched smell of metal-on-metal friction.
"Zzzt—" The two weapons crashed together one final time.
Kiana gripped her bat with both hands, breathing hard, her ponytail coming loose.
Rita held her scythe reversed, her chest rising and falling in a steady rhythm.
The two exchanged a glance and lowered their weapons at the same moment.
This was a sparring match, not a fight to the death—they'd each already gauged the other's current limits. Pushing further would mean resorting to finishing moves that would level the entire base.
Off to the side.
"Beep beep beep beep—" Rows of red data streams flickered furiously across the virtual screen in front of Tesla.
Siegfried raised a hand and wiped away a cold sweat that didn't actually exist on his forehead.
"Nope, not watching this anymore." Siegfried turned away, waving his hands. "The kids these days are all damn monsters."
He glanced at Kevin standing beside him, still expressionless.
"Kevin, come on, let's head to the equipment room next door." Siegfried grabbed his arm. "Your old man's confidence is shattered into a thousand pieces. I need to go pump some iron and salvage what's left of my dignity—if I don't train up, I won't even be able to beat my own daughter anymore. Where would I put my face then?"
Kevin let himself be dragged along, turning toward the exit.
Cecilia stayed where she was.
She watched the white-haired girl at the center of the field wiping sweat with her sleeve.
That wild but devastatingly effective footwork Kiana had just shown, that instinct for dancing along the razor's edge of danger—
Cecilia's eyes were full of a pride she couldn't hide at all.
She straightened her spine.
Her gaze swept over the Anti-Entropy people standing nearby.
The message was clear.
Did you see that?
That girl—
That's my daughter!!
"This blasted data." Tesla slammed her data stylus down on the console.
She pointed at the lines on the screen spiking in geometric multiples.
"Rita's muscle fiber peak output has jumped by a hundred percent. Her neural reflex arc's conduction delay has been compressed almost to the absolute physical limit of the human body."
Tesla turned and stared at Su Yu.
"And her energy conversion efficiency is frighteningly high. Five minutes of that kind of intense anaerobic exertion, and her lactic acid buildup is only a third of the normal value."
Einstein leaned in to check the screen.
"This Stigmata set complements her baseline attributes almost perfectly," Einstein remarked. "Her technique was flawless before—her biggest weakness was that her body couldn't keep pace with her brain's calculations. That weakness has now been filled in."
Tesla grinned.
"Su Yu." Tesla crossed her arms, looking at him. "If you'd been up against this body and this Stigmata set last night, all your sneaky little force-redirection tricks would've gotten you cut in half by her scythe long before now."
"That lucky last-second win of yours wouldn't count for much against a pure stat overwhelm like this."
Su Yu leaned against the console.
He watched the two girls walking toward him.
"Winning last night really did come down to a bit of luck." Su Yu spread his hands. "But you know the old saying."
He turned to look at Tesla.
"There's no end to learning. A true master always keeps the heart of a student."
Tesla rolled her eyes so hard it looked painful.
"What line are you ripping off from your game this time." Tesla tapped a few keys on the console, saving the data. "Cut the motivational-poster nonsense."
She pulled out the data storage disk and held it in her hand.
"Anyway, this Stigmata really is a fantastic piece of work. It's given our top-tier combat strength a genuine, solid boost."
Tesla glanced at Su Yu.
"Also, both their Valkyrie armors are finished. A dedicated convoy will deliver them to the training base's receiving area this afternoon. You'll need to send someone to sign for them yourself when it arrives."
She tucked the storage disk into her pocket and clapped her hands together.
"Bird's-nest-hair and I will head back to Anti-Entropy first."
Tesla glared at Su Yu, pointing at the dark circles under her eyes.
"We've still got a bunch of old-timers here who haven't even finished digesting whatever Imaginary energy engine and controlled nuclear fusion tech you dumped on us, kid, and now you've pulled out that damn [Skyward Shield] thing on top of it."
She yanked at her own twin ponytails.
"Do you have any idea how many hours a night Einstein and I have been sleeping this past half month? My hair's falling out in clumps!"
Su Yu looked at her fiery red hair.
"Doesn't Dr. Mobius have that potent hair-growth tonic?" Su Yu said. "Want me to have a word with her? Get you an employee discount?"
"Don't you dare!" Tesla glared and grabbed Einstein, turning to march off.
"Just hurry up and finish that update for your crappy game! If you don't bring in more funding and energy resources soon, you're going to bankrupt Anti-Entropy's entire lab!"
Welt watched his two colleagues' retreating backs.
He raised his coffee cup in a nod to Su Yu and followed after them.
Su Yu turned around.
Kiana and Rita walked over side by side.
"Quite the show." Su Yu looked at the two girls.
"Obviously." Kiana planted her bat on the ground, hands on her hips.
Her high ponytail swung twice behind her head. Despite how fierce the fight had just been, she looked remarkably lively.
"As if you needed to ask who I am." Kiana tilted her chin up, glancing at Su Yu. "Little Su, you as Supreme Commander really need to put in some more practice."
Rita stood beside Kiana.
She didn't play along with Kiana's teasing, instead keeping that perfectly measured smile in place.
"Thank you for the compliment, Master Su Yu."
Kiana was just about to brag a bit more.
She suddenly stopped.
Her nose twitched lightly, twice.
During the intense sparring match, the two of them had inevitably come into extremely close contact more than once.
The air of their breathing, the heat radiating from their bodies, had all mingled together in the training hall's relatively enclosed space.
The faint, almost imperceptible scent she'd caught in the corridor earlier now came through with perfect clarity.
Kiana turned her head.
Her gaze lingered on Rita for a second, then snapped over to Su Yu.
In her heterochromatic eyes, made especially bright from exertion, a flame of suspicion shot up several notches in an instant.
She was now nearly a hundred percent certain.
That scent Rita had given off when she'd pressed close a moment ago—a blend of high-end body wash and some faint, indescribable fragrance—
was exactly, precisely, the same scent that had been on Su Yu's collar this morning.
There was no way that could be explained away as just using the same brand of laundry detergent.
It was body scent—the kind two people pick up from each other after spending a long time together in an extremely intimate space.
These two—
Just what had happened between them last night?
Kiana's grip on the bat tightened. She fixed her eyes on Su Yu's.
Su Yu saw the sudden, dangerous glint in Kiana's eyes, and a cold sweat broke out across his back.
He knew that look far too well.
It was the telltale prelude to a Kaslana about to launch into one of their utterly illogical yet uncannily accurate flights of lethal imagination, upon spotting something that didn't add up.
He opened his mouth.
His mind raced, scrambling to concoct a flawless lie.
Right at that moment—
"Ding—dong—diddle-dee-doo—it's your adorable Elysia calling~"
A ringtone bursting with bubbly pink cheerfulness echoed through the empty training hall.
Su Yu felt like a condemned man granted a pardon.
At a speed even his second-stage Genetic Lock couldn't match, he yanked the comm terminal from his pocket, answered, and pressed it to his ear.
"Hello."
"Su—Yu——!!"
On the other end, Elysia's voice pierced straight through the receiver.
Su Yu could practically picture Miss Pink Elf stamping her feet in fury inside that luxurious office tower.
"Why aren't you at the office yet!"
Elysia's voice was thick with an anger she was trying, and failing, to hold in check.
"Have you completely forgotten what day it is?! Today's the version-preview livestream!"
Her voice through the receiver only grew louder.
"We agreed ages ago that you'd get on stage with me and introduce the new version to the players! If you're not here, what are we supposed to run lines with?! How are we supposed to rehearse?!"
Su Yu held the terminal a bit farther from his ear.
"I'm literally on my way to the office right now." Su Yu's voice was the picture of sincerity. "Don't worry, I'll be there soon."
"You'd better actually be there soon!"
Elysia took a deep breath.
"And Kevin too! What is up with you two lately?! Always late!"
"Even if one of you is the game director and the other's the CEO, that doesn't mean you can blatantly lead the charge in skipping work! Don't you two need to set an example for the rest of the staff?!"
"Keep this up and I really will go report you both to Eden!"
"No, no, no! Please, dear sister!"
Su Yu caved instantly.
If Elysia actually went and tattled to Eden, the consequences would be a hundred times more terrifying than facing down a Judgment-class Honkai Beast!!
"I promise I'll be there right away, really, right away!"
Su Yu hung up at lightning speed and stuffed the terminal back into his pocket.
He turned to find Kiana still staring at him with that suspicious look.
"No time to explain, Kiana!"
Su Yu grabbed her by the wrist.
"The version livestream's about to start, and Elysia's ready to eat someone alive over there—let's go!"
"Oh—oh, okay!"
Kiana stumbled forward a step as he pulled her along.
The lethal question that had been about to fully form was scattered instantly by the phone call and Su Yu's tug.
She followed him toward the door on reflex, her mind filled with terrifying images of Elysia losing it.
Su Yu dragged Kiana out through the training hall doors.
Welt stood there holding a coffee cup that had long since gone empty.
He watched the two of them hurry off and vanish down the corridor, shaking his head.
"Running back and forth every day between miHoYo Studio and the Starfire Furnace training grounds—being Supreme Commander really is... no easy job."
The training hall doors suddenly banged open again, and Su Yu and Kiana poked their heads back in.
"Old Yang, what are you doing standing there getting all wistful?! You're a member of our studio too! Come on, hurry! Do you want Elysia to chew you out too?!"
Old Yang's expression froze for a second. "M-me too? I'm gonna get yelled at too?!"
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