The next morning, in Anti-Entropy's underground laboratory.
The lift platform descended, level after level.
The metal rails trembled faintly beneath their feet as rings of white light lit up one after another, as if ferrying them into an entirely separate world beneath the city.
Su stood at the edge of the platform. He'd slept less than three hours the night before, and there were faint shadows under his eyes, but when the platform finally touched bottom, he still couldn't stop himself from snapping his narrowed eyes wide open.
Then he simply stood there, frozen.
Ahead of him loomed a colossal black steel giant, a thing that defied every law of mechanics he knew.
Twenty meters tall.
Taller even than the maintenance gantry beside the test area.
Its head armor was sealed shut with cold precision, and in the massive core slot at its chest, an unsettling pulse of pale blue light throbbed in steady rhythm.
Layer upon layer of wildly aggressive thruster structures crowded its shoulders, elbows, and knees — thick and savage, as if it could hoist the entire underground arsenal onto its own back at any moment.
Rails ran out from beneath its feet across the floor, and around it swarmed cranes, service racks, cable bundles, and hydraulic lines like a colony of frantic ants surrounding a sleeping steel beast.
Su tilted his head back, staring for a long few seconds, the corner of his mouth twitching violently.
"...I'll admit it. Last night at the bar, I spent the entire evening building myself a full set of materialist psychological defenses."
Su's voice had gone unsteady.
"But right now... I'm seriously starting to doubt I ever flew back to Arc City at all."
"I'm probably still floating in a nutrient pod at the bottom of some deep-sea lab, having an information-overload cyberpunk nightmare."
Standing beside him, Su Yu couldn't help it — he burst out laughing on the spot.
"Quite something, isn't it?"
"Let me introduce you — this is Wotan."
"Anti-Entropy's little house pet, kept around for security."
Su turned his head stiffly, staring at Su Yu the way one might stare at an alien.
That look carried a complicated mix of emotions — thirty percent shock, thirty percent despair, and the remaining forty percent an entirely silent accusation: exactly how many world-ending contraband items have you been cooking up behind my back down here, you bastard?!
Su Yu felt no guilt whatsoever about it — he even had the leisure to stand there and enjoy the sight of his best friend's worldview shattering in real time.
He was in an excellent mood today.
Having just finished sparring verbally with that old fox Otto the night before, today he'd simply taken the newly recruited Su on a full tour of Anti-Entropy headquarters' most critical zones.
The whole approach could be summed up as: since you're already here, you're getting the full tour whether you like it or not.
And Su had, quite literally, seen enough to make his scalp go numb.
First came the high-risk weapons testing zone.
Dr. Tesla stood there with her red hair looking like she'd been struck by lightning, her white lab coat smeared with grease stains.
She swung a heavy wrench in one hand, standing before a sparking workbench, welding some unidentified external weapon module by hand with feverish intensity.
She laughed wildly as she welded, cackling like a villain about to drag the entire lab off to blow up the moon.
"Hahahaha! Add one more output valve here, and we can push the power even higher! This main cannon's output can be forced up another two hundred percent! Blast every last one of those bastards to ash!!"
Su had stood outside the blast door for a full three seconds, in complete silence.
Then he turned his head and asked Su Yu, quite seriously.
"Are you absolutely sure this is a legitimate organization trying to save the world?"
Su Yu answered with utmost sincerity.
"Buddy, you can't hold researchers to normal standards. They all get like this after too much overtime."
After that.
The mech simulation range, the heavy armor workshop, the advanced medicine vault, the superconductor materials room, the Honkai sample containment chamber... and the cyber-surveillance hub that Bronie had taken over so completely it looked straight out of The Matrix.
With every zone they passed through, another crack split open in Su's worldview.
And now.
Every single crack had just been stomped flat by the twenty-meter mech standing in front of him — Wotan.
"Last night, you told me the world was ending in about three months."
"This morning, you dragged me here to look at this thing."
Su lifted a hand in despair, rubbing furiously at his throbbing temples.
"Right now, I only regret one thing... last night at the bar, I clearly didn't drink nearly enough."
"Small stuff. You'll get used to it."
Su Yu patted him on the shoulder, smoothing him over.
"Just relax. There's plenty more absurd stuff coming later, trust me."
The moment he said it, a panel only he could see popped up in front of him.
Bright red border, gleaming gold text, and — with the System's usual tasteless flair — a little celebratory streamer effect.
Blinding gold prompt text framed in scarlet, and the wretched System had even fired off a little electronic confetti cannon effect inside Su Yu's head, just to be extra festive.
[Ding — Deep-level recognition detected from a high-intelligence carbon-based life form! Bond established!]
[Congratulations, Host. Core Tarot Bond successfully unlocked: The Hierophant]
[Current Bond Rank: MAX (life-and-death trust — even though he thinks all of you are seriously unwell, every single day)]
Su Yu looked at the gleaming golden card, the corner of his mouth just starting to curve up, when the System's mechanical voice smoothly shifted into ruthless-roast mode.
[System Comment: Magnificent. No further comment needed.]
[Congratulations, Host! In a team composed entirely of raving lunatics, universal PTSD sufferers, and morally flexible saviors of the world, you have finally successfully trapped a genuine SSR-tier ultimate caretaker — one who possesses normal human values AND a medical license.]
Su Yu: "..."
The System gave him no chance to argue, plowing ahead relentlessly.
[The Hierophant Bond has been fully activated.]
[In traditional mysticism, this card typically symbolizes spiritual guidance, religious authority, and the redemption of the soul.]
[However, given your team's extremely dire ecological conditions, this Bond has been automatically downgraded and adapted into its dedicated form — 'Emotional Counseling and Cyber Rounds by a Team Mom.']
[System Friendly Reminder:]
[With the Hierophant, you don't just gain a top-tier medical logistics chief — you gain your team's very own head psychiatrist.]
[Please, Host, cherish him as you would a rare and endangered wild animal. After all, keeping a group of world-ending lunatics, jokers, and emotionless ice blocks from collectively losing their minds is no small task...]
[He might genuinely go bald prematurely from chronic hypertension.]
"Damn it."
Su Yu looked at the System's shamelessly bolded red text, then turned to glance at Su standing beside him, still rubbing his temples and sighing over the sight of Wotan.
For exactly one hundredth of a second, an unprecedented flicker of guilt over exploiting an innocent honest man passed through the heart of Capitalist Su Yu.
Then he tossed that flicker of guilt straight out the window.
The way he looked at Su now was like looking at a glowing, gold-plated immunity card.
Excellent. Now, whenever this bunch of lunatics had a meltdown in the middle of the night, there'd finally be someone else on call to dispense the meds.
Su Yu kept scrolling down the panel.
Here came the main event — mission settlement.
[High-Risk Side Quest: Bro Hug It Out]
[Quest Status: Officially and fully wrapped up]
[Calculating rewards...]
[Final Settlement Rating: SSS (Host's shamelessness rated top-tier)]
[Standard rewards distributed]
[Hidden Bulletin: Given that the target individual endured four consecutive hell-tier shocks in an extremely short span — the 'airport misunderstanding overthink,' the 'materialist-worldview shattering,' the 'bomb-shelter near-death experience,' and the 'despairing bar confession' — his Emotion Points detonated in a massive spike! This has triggered a critical hit on Emotion Point harvesting. Double payout applied!]
[Ding! Congratulations, Host — you've earned a special high-tier item reward drop!]
The next moment, a small, silver-gray device model began slowly rotating on the System panel.
It combined an ear hook with a forehead ring, with two extremely fine sensor needles at the back — it looked like some kind of advanced neural interface device.
[Item Name: Deep Consciousness Diver]
[Item Effect: When used with individuals of high spiritual capability, enables high-risk psychological intervention, trauma regression, shallow-level consciousness extraction, and spiritual guidance]
[Compatibility Suggestion: Target individual Su possesses excellent mental resilience and clinical judgment, making him ideal as the primary operator. Host's Tier-3 Spiritual Power makes him the ideal support-side operator]
[System Comment: Congratulations, Host! From now on, you can moonlight as Dr. Su's little nurse!]
"Little nurse my ass."
Su Yu grumbled internally.
"How the hell does this damn System keep turning into more and more of a slave-driving contractor, always finding sneaky new ways to pile on extra workload..."
Grumbling aside, Su Yu didn't actually treat the item as junk.
He knew perfectly well this was the ultimate trump card he was banking for future high-risk mental breakdowns and severe spiritual contamination incidents.
After all, the 'Starfire Training Base' had already turned into hell-mode difficulty, with training intensity pushed to the limit every single day.
The body could be forced to keep going with high tech, but if the mental thread snapped even once, a person would be finished for good.
With Su on board, plus this item, the last missing piece in Anti-Entropy's medical defense line was finally complete.
Just then, a soft ping sounded in his earpiece.
Bronie's comm channel opened.
"Boss, the conference room's all set up."
"Dr. Tesla, Dr. Einstein, and Mr. Welt have all arrived."
"Also, Kevin specifically asked me to relay this to you word for word — he says he's feeling amazing today, absolutely peak condition, and it sounds like he wants to have a nice little chat about 'physical martial arts' with you on the training field after the meeting."
Su Yu rubbed his brow and grunted in acknowledgment.
"Got it. Tell him to wash his neck and wait — we're heading over now."
The comm cut out, and he swept a hand through the air; the System panel vanished from view.
The test zone returned to being that quiet, oppressively massive steel space.
Su was still standing stiffly beneath Wotan.
He'd recovered somewhat from his initial shock by now, but his expression remained deeply conflicted, like a man who'd been giving a clinical medicine lecture one second and had a gun pressed to the back of his head and been shoved into the cockpit of a starship the next.
"Now I finally understand why you wouldn't let me keep asking questions last night."
Su sighed.
"Because if you'd actually had the nerve to call me up out of nowhere and say, 'Buddy, don't panic, but tomorrow I'm taking you to see a twenty-meter mech,' I would've absolutely called an ambulance on the spot and had you hauled off to see a psychiatric specialist that same night."
"Not necessarily. Given how drunk you were last night, I bet in the end you'd have had to make a house call and prescribe your own medication."
Su Yu chimed in shamelessly.
Su shot him a flat look.
Su Yu grinned but didn't push it further, just reached up and patted his shoulder.
"Come on, let's go. Meeting time."
"Let me introduce you to the people we're about to save the world with — and see exactly what kind of gods and freaks they really are."
With that, he turned and walked out of the test zone.
Su stood there a moment longer, taking one last look at the silently towering Wotan, then finally stepped forward to follow.
The two of them walked one after the other down the long metal corridor.
Cold white light passed overhead in steady intervals, footsteps echoing off the floor.
At the end of the corridor, light spilled through the frosted glass door of the conference room, along with the faint, lively murmur of voices — startlingly ordinary for the setting.
Just before reaching the door, Su Yu's steps slowed.
He turned back to look at Su.
"For old times' sake, I should give you a heads-up first."
"The people sitting in there... some of them aren't entirely right in the head."
A vein jumped at Su's temple.
"Isn't it a bit late to tell me that now? And honestly, aren't you the least normal one of the bunch?"
"Fair point."
Su Yu shrugged, unbothered.
The lights of Anti-Entropy's conference room blazed on the instant the door opened — clean, bright white, sharp enough to catch even the faint glint off the corner of the table.
Su Yu stood by the door and made an exaggeratedly gentlemanly 'after you' gesture, quite convincingly, too.
"After you, Dr. Su."
Su took a deep breath.
On the way here, he'd already braced himself mentally.
He'd expected some standard doomsday war-room scene behind that door — frozen air, everyone stone-faced, tables piled with dense files and world maps, every word spoken sounding like a will being read aloud.
Then he stepped inside and looked around.
He froze completely.
At the long table, Kevin sat drinking water with a completely blank expression, as if attending a routine company meeting.
Kiana was sprawled across the table like a fish that had given up on its dreams, idly spinning an expensive fountain pen in one hand.
The moment the door opened, she perked up instantly, like she'd just gotten a shot of adrenaline.
Siegfried and Cecilia sat next to each other; Siegfried, despite his towering height, had nearly leaned his entire upper body across the table to catch some gossip, while Cecilia calmly yanked him back by the collar with one hand, papers still in the other.
Tesla was clawing at her own hair over a set of blueprints, muttering "this is wrong" and "this is wrong too," while Einstein sat beside her, sipping coffee at an unhurried pace, clearly long used to it.
Welt adjusted his glasses and nodded in their direction.
Bronie's holographic projection floated in midair, chewing gum, legs swinging idly through empty space, fingers flying across a virtual keyboard as data cascaded down the screen like a waterfall.
Rita stood there with a feather duster, cleaning the conference room.
And even more absurd — over in the far corner.
Eden sat there, a cup in hand. It held plain water, but somehow, the way she held it, it looked like she was sipping the finest vintage wine.
This looked less like a doomsday war council and more like a charity gala.
In another corner, Mobius lounged lazily against her chair.
From the instant the door opened, her serpent-green eyes had locked onto Su and hadn't left.
That look wasn't the look of someone welcoming a new colleague.
It was, unmistakably, the look of someone spotting a plump, juicy piece of live test material that had foolishly walked straight into the cage.
Su stood in the doorway, the corner of his mouth twitching hard, twice.
The sheer concentration of talent and danger in this room alone was enough to blow Arc City sky-high eight times over.
"Yo!"
Kiana spoke up first, waving at him enthusiastically.
"Su, you finally came to clock in too!"
Su closed his eyes.
"...I should've seen this coming."
Case closed.
This explained the bottomless, absurdly deep cash flow behind that meteorically-risen, richer-than-nations business empire.
This explained all that physics-defying, Outclassed by None high-tech equipment.
And this explained the room full of superhuman, world-shaking firepower sitting right in front of him—
It had all been sitting here the whole damn time.
Before he could even finish exhaling the breath he'd just drawn, Siegfried was already leaning in, eyes lit up.
"Su! You're here too? You kept us in the dark this whole time!"
He leaned forward as he spoke, looking exactly like a veteran informant in a crime drama finally making contact with his handler.
"Quick, quick, quick — since you're Otto's own personal disciple, you must know some dirt on that old geezer, right? I'm dying to know, tell me now!"
Su raised a hand and pressed it to his forehead.
What he wanted most right now was to find a needle and thread and sew Siegfried's mouth shut.
Eden gently swirled her cup, the rim clinking softly against her fingertip.
"Welcome to your new workplace, Dr. Su."
She glanced at Su, one eyebrow arching slightly, her words drawn out and unhurried.
"Heh. Well, well, look who's here."
"Su, it seems even a proclaimed paragon of rationality like you couldn't escape this little lab rat's wicked clutches in the end."
Freshly labeled a 'lab rat,' Su Yu immediately raised both hands in wounded protest, the picture of innocence.
"Doctor, that's a bit hurtful, don't you think? The way you put it, I sound like some kind of international human trafficker spanning half the globe."
"Oh? Aren't you?"
Mobius rolled her eyes at lightning speed, not sparing him an ounce of face.
"Heh. I'd love to know who exactly it was that, over summer vacation, sweet-talked little Griseo into hanging around the studio for over two whole months!"
"Do you have any idea how spectacular it was, the night before the break ended, watching Kosma and Daisy sit on the floor surrounded by a pile of craft assignments, questioning their entire existence while helping Griseo catch up on her elementary school summer homework?"
"Glue all over the table, paper scraps all over the floor — Kosma's face looked like it was one step away from writing 'why do I even bother living' across his forehead."
Su Yu immediately looked away.
"Ahem."
"Doctor, look outside — it's already November! I've got two layers of thermal underwear on already! Can we let bygones be bygones on such ancient history, in the spirit of magnanimity?"
The conference room erupted into chaos for a good half-minute.
Absurdly, Su found himself starting to adjust to the rhythm of it all, little by little.
Probably because his brain's defense mechanisms, having been shattered so many times since the previous night by this crowd, had wisely decided to just lie down flat and stop resisting altogether.
"Sit down."
Kevin finally spoke.
He pulled the chair beside him out a little.
Before Su could respond, Su Yu had already chimed in to back him up.
"Don't be so polite among family, just sit already! You've been standing at the door like a telephone pole this whole time — anyone who didn't know better would think you were a dorm supervisor doing a bed check!"
Su said nothing for two seconds, then finally sat down.
The moment the chair was pushed back in—
Click.
The conference room's door sealed shut completely behind them.
The next instant, every projection screen lit up at once.
A three-dimensional holographic model of Arc City rose from the center of the table, and the data panels along the walls lit up one after another. The formerly loose, casual atmosphere shifted abruptly.
Su looked up instinctively.
Su Yu, who had just been trading jabs with Mobius a moment ago, had already walked to the head of the long table.
He planted both hands on the edge of the table, his gaze sweeping across every face in the room. He did nothing deliberate, yet the room fell silent on its own.
"Before we get into the main topic, I want to make an important personnel announcement first."
Su Yu began.
"As of this very second, Su is officially and fully joining Anti-Entropy's highest core action team."
"Medical care, emergency response, drug research, psychological intervention — from now on, all of these fall under his direct responsibility."
He paused, glancing over at Su.
"That's one weakness in our structure we've now finally closed."
Tesla nodded first.
"Finally, someone who can actually treat wounds and also nag people into taking their meds on time."
Bronie blew a bubble with her gum.
"A warm welcome to the official onboarding of our Team Mom."
Su opened his mouth to correct that ridiculous title, then, resigned to his fate, chose to shut up instead.
Su Yu didn't give the rest of the crowd — who clearly loved a good show — any chance to keep the ruckus going.
He decisively raised a hand and swiped down through the air.
[Time until Honkai's Arrival: 97 days]
Today was already the morning of November 2nd — nearly three months had passed since the launch of the Meteoric Salvation project.
Honkai's footsteps were drawing steadily closer.
The conference room went dead silent.
Kiana, who had been spinning her pen a moment ago, went stiff and stopped.
Su watched the string of numbers, his throat bobbing slightly.
He'd already heard the phrase 'just over three months left' the day before.
But seeing that terrifying doomsday countdown appear in cold, literal numbers still made his chest tighten with a suffocating sense of reality.
"That's enough small talk."
Su Yu's finger tapped once against the table — not loud, but enough to pull everyone's attention back in an instant.
"Look closely. What's left for us to squander is now less than a hundred days."
His gaze swept from one end of the long table to the other.
No one looked away.
"Now, all core members, begin your progress reports one by one."
"miHoYo game studio, Anti-Entropy's R&D department, the Starfire Training Base — every critical strategic division."
"Let's lay it all out."
In that instant, the entire conference room shifted onto an entirely different channel.
Full glasses of strong liquor, bitter black coffee, half-blown bubblegum, scattered mech blueprints — all these vivid, everyday fragments still sat right there on the table.
But the people seated around it had collectively slipped into a cold, wartime state of readiness.
Su sat tensely in his chair, watching Su Yu at the head of the table, radiating full command presence, and felt a strange sense of unreality wash over him.
This time yesterday, he'd thought he was coming home for a lecture and maybe to help crack a smuggling case on the side.
Now, he was sitting here, discussing with a room full of people who could topple Arc City itself how to drag the entire world back from the brink of doomsday.
It was absurd, beyond absurd.
And yet it was also utterly real.
He glanced down at the terminal screen glowing on the table in front of him, slowly resting his fingers on the edge of the table, and finally sat up straight, fully upright.
The door to a new world had genuinely swung open.
As for whether he wanted to close it again—
That choice was no longer his to make.
____
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