Arc City was still bright at night.
The giant screens flanking the overpass kept cycling through posters for Honkai Impact 3rd.
As the car pulled out of the studio's underground garage, Su Yu casually tossed his phone into the console tray.
The screen was still open to Elysia's livestream.
The viewer count in the top right corner had already broken ten million, and danmaku streamed thick and fast across the top of the screen.
The interlude for Chapter Nine of Honkai Impact 3rd was set four months after the events of Final Lesson.
Elysia wore a pair of pink cat-ear headphones, her cheek close to the mic.
"Whoa, four months... looks like our little Kiana's been missing for quite a while."
The stream cut to a modern cyberpunk-style metropolis.
Skyscrapers pierced the clouds, flying cars wove between the towers, and enormous holographic billboards flickered against the overcast sky.
This was the last bastion where survivors fled the Honkai catastrophe to seek shelter.
Three words appeared at the bottom of the screen: Arc City.
Elysia froze.
She blinked, leaned closer to the screen, and made sure she wasn't seeing things.
"Wait — Arc City?" She pointed at the screen, tapping her slender finger against the place name. "Isn't that where we are right now? This guy Su Yu actually put the city we're living in straight into the game?"
The livestream chat exploded instantly.
[Holy crap! Arc City?! Is this hinting at something?!]
[Don't tell me miHoYo's about to blow up their own headquarters inside the game?]
[The old scoundrel's got some nerve. Isn't he worried the building's actually gonna get torn down by a Honkai Beast when he shows up for work tomorrow?]
[Immersive experience, huh? I'm heading downstairs at miHoYo right now to see if I can catch a wild old scoundrel.]
Two weeks earlier, someone had spotted the Herrscher of the Void here, and the hunt led by Schicksal and Anti-Entropy had already begun.
The story continued.
A brief CG flashed across the screen: a gray, desolate coastline, waves crashing against the rocks.
A white-haired girl lay face-down on the beach, unconscious.
Not far from her right hand lay an empty syringe, perfectly still.
It was the remains of the Godkiller Spear serum — the one Himeko had bought with her life and injected into her.
Elysia clenched her back teeth and said nothing.
The chat fell briefly silent, then was flooded with a solid wall of [Teacher Himeko...] and [That's a killing blow].
The scene cut back to Arc City.
Schicksal's hunter appeared.
Rita stepped out of the night fog.
An elegant but chilling smile hung at the corner of her mouth.
Using Schicksal's intelligence network, Rita quickly tracked down a ranking member of the underground group known as the World Serpent — Gray Serpent.
Rita tried to force Gray Serpent to hand over information on the Herrscher of the Void.
But Gray Serpent wouldn't budge, neither to threats nor to bargaining.
Without wasting a word, Rita swung her massive scythe and cut him down on the spot.
"Such a decisive maid," Elysia commented. "But if you kill him, doesn't that cut off the lead too?"
But Rita's next move showed every viewer exactly what an S-rank Schicksal Valkyrie was capable of.
She didn't take Gray Serpent's authentication chip with her. Instead, she deliberately left it behind as bait.
She knew Theresa and her group were also tracking Gray Serpent, so she had the top hacker Bronya crack the database while she herself lay in wait in the shadows.
Sure enough, Theresa's group arrived at the scene.
But after retrieving the authentication chip and finding the compound's defenses suspiciously empty, Theresa immediately realized it was a trap.
To turn the tables, Theresa decided to play along.
Once Bronya cracked open the humanoid unit hiding the intel, she sent Mei to deal with the tail lurking in the shadows.
On a neon-lit street in Arc City, Raiden Mei and Rita stood face to face.
This was their first direct clash in the main storyline.
The chat instantly lit up with excitement.
[Here it is! Lightning Queen VS the scheming maid!]
[Mei just got her Striker Fulminata amplifier core, this has gotta be a plot-armor moment for her!]
[Striker, activate! Show Schicksal the power of lightning!]
But the fight went nowhere near where anyone expected.
Even suited up in her brand-new Striker Fulminata armor, Mei's attacks fell short against Rita.
An S-rank Schicksal Valkyrie simply wasn't something Mei — currently without her Herrscher Core — could handle, and in the end Mei was defeated.
Rita silently planted a tracker on her before leaving.
The fight ended cleanly, without fuss.
Elysia opened her mouth, and for once had no idea what to say.
[Wait, that's it? It's over?]
[This patch literally just gave Mei her Striker amplifier core, and they don't even give her a highlight moment before she eats dirt in front of Rita?]
[The old scoundrel is definitely nerfing Mei! I'm shaking! When is our girl ever gonna get a win?!]
[Earlier at the Schicksal battle they swore up and down they'd bring Kiana back, then got their core snatched away by the Herrscher of the Void. Now they say they'll cover the retreat, and instead they get ground into the pavement. What kind of hell-tier treatment is this?!]
[Speaking bluntly as a Mei fan — does old scoundrel Su Yu have some kind of grudge against this character?!]
Well, Su Yu had something to say about that too.
How was this nerfing Mei, exactly? All you Mei stans keep yelling that Su Yu's nerfing her, but really, he just replayed something Mei had already done herself!!
Bronya quickly discovered the tracker on Mei's body.
To keep her comrades' whereabouts hidden, Mei made a choice: she split off from the group and took a route in the completely opposite direction, using herself as bait to throw Rita off.
Rita quickly noticed something was off.
Just then, a tide of mechs surged into the streets of Arc City.
Without hesitation, Rita abandoned the chase and headed straight for where the mechs were converging.
Amid the mechs, she finally revealed her true power — the S-rank Valkyrie armor, Argent Knight: Artemis.
With that power, she forced her way to the center, used Gray Serpent's bionic eye to seize the humanoid unit's highest-level authority, extracted the key intel, and at the last moment wiped the unit's data.
By the time Theresa's group arrived, all that remained was a useless mechanical husk.
The trail to Kiana had gone cold once again.
Meanwhile, on the other side, Rita concealed from Otto the fact that she had only wiped the humanoid unit's data.
Aboard the Hyperion, the atmosphere was heavy.
Tesla and Einstein, the two brilliant scientists, were sweating bullets as they borrowed the warship's processing system, trying to recover the data from the wiped humanoid unit.
Just then, the comm channel on the console was forcibly cut into.
A face appeared on screen that made everyone grit their teeth — Cocolia.
Cocolia needed the Hyperion crew to come to Sea Abyss City; Otto wanted the Gem of Desire she held, in order to restore the Herrscher of the Void to full strength.
She asked everyone to set aside their past grudges and head to Sea Abyss City to lend support.
The moment those words were out, the livestream chat drowned in outrage.
[How does this woman even have the nerve to say that!]
[She got Wendy killed, nearly got Mei killed, and left her own daughter Bronya half-dead. And now she wants cooperation?]
[The old fox is up to something rotten again! Do NOT trust her!]
[Just blow her away with the Hyperion's main cannon already!]
Just as the standoff between both sides hit a stalemate, something went wrong.
Alarms blared.
Gray Serpent, who had already been confirmed dead, had somehow smuggled his consciousness into the channel through the humanoid unit and forcibly seized control of the Hyperion's main system!
Every screen flickered with an eerie red glow.
Gray Serpent had not only taken over the warship but was also frantically hacking into Anti-Entropy's databases, trying to steal its core secrets.
Without a moment's hesitation, Bronya plugged her own consciousness directly into the Hyperion's virtual data space. She would seize back control of the ship with her own hands, inside the digital world.
But waiting for her deep within that data space was a nightmare trap Gray Serpent had carefully woven.
Countless fragments of painful memories transformed into blades, trying to tear Bronya's consciousness completely apart.
Just as Bronya was about to be lost in the darkness, a single feather glowing with crimson light drifted slowly down.
It was the power of "Yu Ducheng" that Fu Hua had left buried deep in her mind.
Guided by Fenghuang, the Immortal, Bronya broke free of the nightmare's grip.
Not only that — amid the chaotic data streams, she stumbled onto a top-secret experimental record classified by Anti-Entropy: a device beneath Sea Abyss City called the "Eye of the Sea Abyss."
In the recording, two figures stood before a rift glowing with pale blue light.
One of them was Einstein.
The other man wore a dark trench coat, stood tall and straight, and held a cane in his hand.
The leader of Anti-Entropy — Welt Yang.
From the exchange between the two men, the viewers gradually pieced together the truth.
Something within the Eye of the Sea Abyss held the possibility of ending Honkai itself, but a fatal error had occurred during the experiment, triggering a chain collapse of spatial structure.
If left unchecked, the entire real world would be torn apart.
At the last possible moment, Welt stepped forward.
Wielding his gravity Authority, he forcibly neutralized the spatial distortion.
But the price was that he and Einstein were both swept into that bottomless rift — the Sea of Quanta.
There, Einstein witnessed a horror he would never forget for the rest of his life.
At the deepest point of the Sea of Quanta, an enormous rift spanned the void.
Beyond the rift, a viscous darkness that defied description churned and surged.
And within that darkness, a "serpent" slowly emerged, facing off against Welt.
It carried an absolute, crushing sense of higher-dimensional pressure.
Just glimpsing it through the screen was enough to make it hard to breathe.
Even the leader of Anti-Entropy gripped his cane tighter before that "serpent," his back drenched in cold sweat.
In the endless dark, the Star of Eden burst into blinding light.
Without hesitation, Welt unleashed his Rated Output Zero, forcibly holding back the serpent's advance and tearing open a passage back to reality for Einstein.
As for himself, he remained behind in that dark Sea of Quanta, continuing that endless battle.
The livestream fell into a long silence.
[So... this is the leader of Anti-Entropy?]
[Just an ordinary human, and yet he held back something like that. So that's the weight behind the nickname "Yang Sit-Ups."]
[Old Yang... what a real man.]
[Just what kind of people are these, willing to give up their lives just to resist Honkai?]
As Bronya's consciousness returned to reality, Gray Serpent was completely purged and the Hyperion's main system returned to normal.
The second interlude ended there.
Elysia took off her headphones and let out a deep breath.
She didn't speak right away. Instead she picked up the water glass on the desk and took a sip, trying to steady herself.
"Whew... that was way too much information to take in.
The Sea of Quanta, Welt, and that terrifying serpent."
"But there's one more thing bothering me. When Gray Serpent was building that nightmare, he kept trying to use Bronya's past to break her. That girl called 'Seele' — who is she, really?"
She clicked on the Chapter Ten option.
A red pop-up box appeared on screen: [Please complete the chronicle Azure Waters first to unlock the following storyline.]
"Fine. Guess Su Yu isn't planning to let us get through this easily."
Elysia clicked open the Azure Waters icon.
The screen cut straight to the year 2000.
The aftermath of the Second Eruption had turned Siberia into an earthly hell.
Amid the driving snow, a little girl in a worn-out army coat pulled the trigger of her sniper rifle, her face utterly blank.
She was barely in her teens, but there was no longer anything human left in her eyes.
Her name was Bronya.
In Siberia, she carried a name that struck fear into everyone who heard it — the "Ural Silver Wolf."
January 2012.
Bronya received the organization's highest-priority order: assassinate a core member of Anti-Entropy's radical faction — Cocolia.
The mission failed.
But instead of killing her, Cocolia brought her back to the orphanage she had established in Siberia.
When Bronya woke up on a soft bed, she felt a warmth touching her face.
She snapped her eyes open, her body instinctively snapping into a defensive stance.
But in front of her was a girl with gentle eyes.
The girl was holding a warm towel, carefully wiping the grime from her face.
The girl's name was Seele.
That was the first ray of sunlight to break through Bronya's frozen life.
Cocolia adopted her, becoming her "mother."
It turned out this ruthless woman had once been a special forces captain herself.
Having witnessed the plight of orphans left homeless by the Second Eruption, she chose to build this shelter, purely so those children caught in the crossfire of war could live.
As the story went on, the mood in the chat softened a little.
Viewers watched Bronya slowly transform, with Seele by her side, from an emotionless killing machine into an ordinary girl who'd crack a smile over a HOMU plush toy.
But this warmth was only the calm before the storm.
March 2013.
By the shore of Lake Baikal.
Because she was born with a rare Stigmata, Seele was kidnapped by mercenaries hired by a Russian tycoon.
Bronya stormed the mercenaries' stronghold.
When Bronya, covered head to toe in blood, stood before Seele and tried to untie the rope binding her hands, she believed she had saved the sister who mattered most to her.
But Seele's reaction sent her plunging into an icy pit.
Seele was trembling all over, her eyes wide with terror, staring fixedly past Bronya's shoulder at something behind her.
There stood a shadow radiating an overwhelmingly ominous presence.
That shadow's shape was identical to Seele's own.
In the depths of her terror, Seele screamed without thinking: "The Devil! Don't come near!"
That scream cut into Bronya's heart like a blade.
She thought Seele was screaming at her.
Looking down at her own hands stained with blood, that killer's instinct in her filled her with deep self-loathing.
From that day on, Bronya made Seele a promise: "Bronya will never hurt anyone again."
After that.
In order to survive in a world overrun by Honkai, Cocolia secretly launched a project at the orphanage called X10.
She understood all too well that children without power would eventually become nothing but fodder for Honkai.
The experiments were brutal.
Bronya's compatibility with Honkai energy was unremarkable, but she showed astonishing talent for manipulating it.
She could even take an iron ball weighing several hundred pounds from the lab and crush it with Honkai energy into a long-eared HOMU plush toy.
But her closeness with Seele drew the jealousy of another girl at the orphanage.
Sin Mal.
After a routine checkup, Sin deliberately pushed Bronya down a long flight of stairs.
Bronya tumbled down the steps, and Sin didn't even stop there — she walked down and stomped on Bronya's injured leg.
Bronya didn't fight back.
She remembered her promise to Seele, and she never told Cocolia what had happened.
But all of this was witnessed by Seele, who was hiding around the corner.
Fear made Seele's legs feel like lead, unable to move.
She watched, helpless, as the sister who protected her more than anyone was tormented, without the courage to even rush out.
The crushing guilt and self-blame that followed became the last straw.
At the moment when Seele's spirit was at its weakest, the ancient power dormant in her natural Stigmata fully awakened.
A second personality began whispering to Seele.
At first, Seele still tried to reason with Sin using words.
But at the stairwell corner, Sin not only ignored her warning but mocked her even more viciously: "You're nothing but a coward who hides behind other people. That fake little sisterly act between you and Bronya makes me sick."
That remark lit the fuse inside Seele completely.
In a storm of grief and rage, the second personality took control of her body.
Seele's once-clear eyes turned a blood-red the color of dripping blood in an instant.
Dark Seele used the power of her Stigmata to create an infinite loop of space.
She threw Sin down the very same stairs Sin had once pushed Bronya down. Sin screamed in an endless, repeating fall, the torment looping over and over.
Seele sat cross-legged on a throne suspended in the void, a massive scythe in her hands.
She looked down at Sin with the contempt one might show for garbage.
This part of the story sparked a frenzy of cheers in the chat.
[Nicely done! Dark Seele's the best!]
[That's what you get for bullying a good girl! Grind her into the dirt!]
[So satisfying! I feel amazing after watching that!]
But the cheers didn't last long.
Because the real disaster had only just begun.
Seele learned the danger of the X10 experiment.
If anyone was going to die in that experiment, it would be Bronya, whose Honkai energy compatibility was only average.
To protect her sister, Seele made a decision.
She went to Cocolia, revealed the terrifying power of her Stigmata, and demanded to take Bronya's place in the next stage of the experiment.
At the very depths of the experiment, Seele finally faced, for the first time, that other self living inside her Stigmata.
Cocolia's calculations proved fatally wrong.
Even Seele, with her natural Stigmata, couldn't withstand an energy surge of that magnitude.
Amid the shrieking of the machines, Seele's body began to turn translucent.
Starting from her fingertips, her skin dissolved into blue points of light — a phenomenon of her body being broken down at the subatomic level: quantization.
She vanished from the real world, forever.
No blood, no body — nothing left but an empty experiment pod.
Seele wasn't dead — she had fallen into a dimension of Quantum Entanglement — but that was somehow more devastating than death.
She could never again touch anything in reality, and Bronya could never again touch her.
When Bronya learned the truth, her whole world shattered.
She threatened to take her own life unless Cocolia agreed to let her join the next phase of the X10 experiment immediately — she had to go to that unknown place and bring her sister back.
The moment she entered the quantum level, Bronya finally saw the figure she'd longed for day and night.
In this space that didn't exist in reality, Seele was still the same gentle girl she'd always been.
She gave Bronya Project Bunny 19C, and the two of them finally made a promise to each other.
The summer of 2013.
The girl named Bronya lost so much.
Her legs had their nerves completely destroyed by the high concentration of Honkai energy during the experiment; without the exoskeletal levitation of Project Bunny, she couldn't even stand.
The part of her brain that governed emotion had been completely burned out.
From then on, she could never feel joy again, never smile again.
She became an even more thoroughly "emotionless doll" than she had been as a killer.
And she lost the one sister in this world who had ever given her warmth.
But this one grief, this piercing sorrow, was the one thing this cold machine of a girl kept intact.
Because she was afraid — if she forgot even her sorrow, she would forget the promise to bring Seele home.
To fulfill that promise, Cocolia pinned her hopes on Raiden Mei.
February 2014.
Senba Academy.
To awaken the power dormant in Mei, Cocolia orchestrated an artificial Honkai catastrophe and sent Bronya to retrieve the newly awakened Raiden Mei.
But the plan was ruined by a white-haired idiot — Kiana Kaslana.
Three girls, each carrying different wounds, met like this in the ruins of Nagazora, and by a twist of fate, walked together through the gates of St. Freya Academy.
And so began the story of the Trio.
The mood in the livestream went completely still.
A few seconds later, the chat erupted like a bursting dam.
[Bronya finally had a family, a mother, a sister... and then she lost it all with her own hands, and even her own body ended up wrecked like that?]
[Knowing the other person's still alive, right there in that invisible quantum level, and never being able to meet again — that's a hundred times crueler than just writing her off dead!]
[Where's the sunshine and good health? I'm asking you — is there a single thing about this Trio storyline that a normal person can stand to watch? Put these three girls together, could you even piece together one complete set of biological parents?!]
[Mei's dad's in prison, Kiana's dad's missing and her mom died in battle, Bronya never even met her real parents and her adoptive mother's a psycho who'll do anything for her goals! Is this really okay?!]
[Now I get it — old scoundrel Su isn't even pretending to hold back anymore.]
[Kids, look at the free S-rank Valkyrie voucher in your inbox! This isn't a gift, kids — this is hush money he's paying us!]
[Old scoundrel, I'm telling you! Until Seele comes back, your buddy Old Feng's gonna be blowing his top every single day!]
Elysia watched the chat scroll by. This time, she didn't try to smooth things over.
She sat quietly in front of the screen, and for once, her perpetually perfect smile had lost a shade of its color.
It was that particular process — showing you something beautiful, and then, right in front of your eyes, tearing it apart piece by piece.
She opened her mouth, wanting to say something to ease the mood, but it felt like there was a lump of lead lodged in her throat, and no sound would come out.
"Inflatable hammer, equipped! Whoever's name is Su Yu — I will end his life!!"
Elysia grabbed her inflatable hammer and stormed furiously out of the livestream room, leaving the chat flooded instantly with a string of question marks.
But three minutes later.
"He's fled the scene of the crime again!!"
Elysia came back into frame, hammer in hand, swinging it around in fury, looking like she wanted nothing more than to bite Su Yu to death on the spot.
Su Yu wasn't in the office at all — he'd left early with Kiana for Anti-Entropy's headquarters.
But as far as Miss Pink Elf was concerned, this was undoubtedly yet another premeditated, guilt-ridden escape.
Right now, in the Anti-Entropy headquarters conference room, watching the murderous Elysia on the livestream, Su Yu turned his gaze to Kiana, who was sitting next to him munching on potato chips.
"Kiana?"
"Mm?"
"You did say we're good partners, right?"
Kiana licked the seasoning powder off her fingertip, looking a little confused at Su Yu.
"Yangtze, Yangtze — this is Yellow River — tomorrow's job of calming Elysia down is all yours."
Kiana set down her chips and looked at the man in front of her, so grave and solemn, and remembered the sight of this guy openly hugging Elysia on the variety show.
"Su Yu."
"Mm?"
Kiana patted Su Yu on the shoulder, and in the exact tone he'd used countless times before to trick her, poor little Paramecium that she was, said with grave sincerity:
"You reap what you sow. Go meet your fate like a man. I'll burn incense for you next year."
Beside them, Siegfried's face turned bright red, his shoulders shaking violently, until he finally couldn't hold it in any longer —
"Unbelievable! Aren't you usually the sneaky, scheming one, Su Yu? How'd you end up on the losing end with Kiana?!"
Su Yu looked at Kiana beside him, wearing an expression that said "go on, die in peace," and couldn't help but sigh into his hand —
Damn it. Too many sins committed. Guess you really can walk the night road one too many times and finally run into a ghost.
____
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