Elysia's tear-tracks still hung on her cheeks, and the mouse cursor hadn't even had a chance to move to the "Next Chapter" option.
The computer screen suddenly went dark without warning.
The picture flared back to life.
That was a bizarre, otherworldly visual space built from countless shattered world bubble.
Bronya limped forward through this space, staggering with every step.
Her leg armor was badly damaged, her skirt torn, and every step looked unbearably heavy, as if invisible iron shackles dragged at her body.
She passed by fragments of the past reflected in the Sea of Quanta, utterly exhausted.
"Seele..."
A young yet resolute voice cut through the oppressive background music.
"Bronya... will definitely save you."
She reached her left hand out toward the bottomless void ahead.
A blinding blue light erupted at the center of the screen.
A gem with sharp, angular edges and a cold luster appeared before her.
The Herrscher of Reason core.
But this was not the moment of instant salvation.
The power that burst from the core was like some uncontrollable, raging beast — a dazzling red light violently yanked the colossal monster that had already been knocked into the Abyss — Tlaloc — back into this space.
Countless ribbons of materialized Honkai energy, dark red like crimson silk, surged out from the core and wrapped tightly around Bronya's body.
Those scarlet patterns spread across her skin like living vines.
She gripped the core with all her strength.
The intense pain twisted her character model's face in agony, and even the viewers watching in the livestream chat found their breath catching at that instant.
"The core... is going out of control..."
Her fingers loosened weakly, and the blue gem slipped from between them.
Bronya's eyes closed completely, and her body fell backward.
The screen began to plunge downward.
As if falling into a boundless, endless deep sea.
Bubbles surged upward around her; she could only let that suffocating weightlessness drag her down, and down again.
Just as everyone's hearts were caught in their throats, a faint light flickered in the darkness of the deep sea.
A butterfly glowing with a hazy blue light gently flapped its wings, piercing through the crushing water pressure to arrive before Bronya.
The butterfly's wings brushed against her limply drooping fingertips.
Hazily, the phantom of a girl with short blue hair reached out her hand from the depths of the deep sea.
"Seele..."
A warm glow burst open in Bronya's chest.
The Herrscher of Reason core, which had slipped away moments before, now rested in her arms, glimmering with light.
Outside, the crimson ribbons that had bound her tightly shattered inch by inch the instant they touched that light, like a spider's web consumed by fire!
At that very moment, the opening notes of "Cyberangel" exploded to life!
The intensely rhythmic electronic female vocal track tore through all the oppressive weight.
Countless blue butterflies scattered outward in a dreamlike radial burst.
The colossal steel construct — Project Bunny — reached out its massive mechanical hand amid a blue-white glow and steadily caught Bronya.
Cradled in its embrace, the girl's body slowly rose.
The power belonging to the Herrscher of Reason surged around her, coalescing into an entirely new armament.
A shadow of a blue butterfly melted into her chest, condensing into a brilliant gem.
An overwhelmingly suffocating aura of pressure surged out through the screen.
Below in the Abyss, Tlaloc let out a thunderous roar, its massive claws tearing through space as it slammed toward Bronya suspended in midair.
What met the attack was a sequence of movement that could only be called a visual spectacle.
Bronya's leg armor instantly transformed into streamlined roller skates.
She swung her legs alternately through the air, using the thrust to spin and glide like a spirit dancing on ice — with an elegant yet dangerous grace, she casually dodged every one of Tlaloc's lethal strikes.
She leapt high into the air.
Tlaloc seized that airborne moment, its chest flaring with blinding red light as a thick beam of Destruction energy erupted forth, threatening to swallow her small frame whole.
An energy barrier radiating a blue hexagonal matrix appeared out of nowhere, blocking the way in front of Bronya.
Project Bunny stood like an impregnable steel fortress, blocking the beam capable of tearing space apart.
Smoke and dust from the explosion billowed across the screen.
In that grayish-white haze, a line of shimmering blue electronic characters appeared alongside a synthesized mechanical voice:
"All systems normal?"
"Ride on!"
With that emotionless yet supremely hype-worthy "Ride on," Project Bunny behind Bronya began an incredibly complex sequence of mechanical disassembly and reconstruction.
Armor plates flipped, gears meshed, the engine roared!
That massive, hulking robot actually transformed midair into a cyberpunk-styled, sharply contoured, ridiculously cool heavy motorcycle!
Bronya's singing perfectly synced with the engine's roar tearing through the air.
The danmaku went absolutely wild.
Viewers who had just been quietly crying over the previous world bubble were now slapped upside the head by this sudden mechanical transformation and its extreme aesthetic of violence.
[Holy crap! Project Bunny transformed into a ghost-fire bike!]
[Isn't she underage to be riding a ghost-fire like this?!]
[Now THAT's cinematic! Imagine the Spaniard riding this bike to Seele's place, pulling the key out and yelling up at Cocolia: "Old man, I'm just parking the ghost-fire downstairs, that's fine right?"]
[Holy hell, ghost-fire?! This is basically a sci-fi motorcycle! Bronya's become a Kamen Rider, this is so damn cool!]
[Little girl, what kind of bike is that? Wanna race?]
On screen, ribbons of blue light kept unfurling through the void.
The power of the Key of Reason continuously constructed a solid road ahead of Bronya's wheels.
Riding the streamlined heavy motorcycle, she carved blinding blue afterimages through the twisted quantum labyrinth.
Tlaloc chased frantically behind her, its massive claws smashing the freshly formed road again and again.
But no matter what, its attacks couldn't so much as graze the hem of Bronya's clothes.
The motorcycle's speed reached its absolute limit, and the enormous monster could only watch helplessly as that blue taillight grew smaller in the distance.
Circling, accelerating.
Bronya finally found the perfect angle — the motorcycle completed a drift in midair that defied the laws of physics, its front wheel locking directly onto Tlaloc's hideous, massive face.
The blue roads she'd left behind her all erupted with blinding light at that instant.
They disintegrated in a flash, transforming into hundreds upon hundreds of heavy energy gun platforms suspended in midair.
An airtight, terrifying web of firepower locked Tlaloc completely in place.
A straight blue road stretched from beneath the motorcycle's tires all the way to the monster's face.
Her right hand wrenched the throttle open.
The numbers on the motorcycle's dashboard spun wildly, rocketing within an instant to three glaring red digits — 999!
The engine let out a roar as brutal as some ancient beast.
The instant the thrusters hit their peak output, Bronya lowered her body, becoming one with the motorcycle.
She turned into a blue comet bringing Destruction, charging along that road of light straight at Tlaloc.
The monster raised both arms in an attempt to block her.
There was no suspense in the crushing blow that followed.
The blue comet, with unstoppable force, easily pierced through that fragile defense, driving straight through Tlaloc's entire head.
The instant she burst clear of the explosion's radius, Bronya released the handlebars, her body spinning lightly once in midair.
Project Bunny unfolded its massive mechanical hand once more, steadily catching her small one.
The hairband holding her long hair loose came undone in the rushing wind.
That signature silver spiral twin-tail hair burst free instantly, dancing wildly in the wind.
The Herrscher of Reason's power completed its final touch — a gorgeous long dress woven from blue and white light settled over her body.
Behind her, the suspended gun platforms all opened fire at once.
A dense torrent of light beams poured down like a downpour, completely swallowing Tlaloc's massive body.
The blue-white flash of the explosion filled the entire screen, so bright it was almost blinding.
The light faded, the smoke settled.
Bronya floated amid the countless points of light that had once been the monster's remains.
She spread her arms wide, eyes closed, a faint smile at the corners of her mouth.
One of Bronya's hands gripped Project Bunny's mechanical fingers tightly.
"Seele..."
A faint murmur rose in the background music.
"Bronya's coming to find you."
The screen froze.
As "Cyberangel" reached its closing notes, the final symbolic animation began.
That blue gem sank into the bottomless seawater.
It touched a white, formless barrier covered in cracks.
A crisp shattering sound.
The gem tumbled as it sank, its light refracting into a hazy spectrum of colors, guiding the way through the broken space like a lighthouse.
In the deepest part of that space, a blue butterfly broke free from the surrounding fragments and spread its wings to soar.
Fragments of Bronya's past flickered across the trail the butterfly flew.
Finally, the small butterfly merged into the falling gem.
Two similar yet not quite identical butterflies met in the deep sea, circling each other before flying off toward somewhere deeper, further away.
This was a preview of a reunion not too far in the future — a vow of return.
The short animation ended completely, and the screen cut back to the game's results interface.
At that moment, the backend danmaku server for Elysia's official livestream let out a shrieking alarm of overload.
If they hadn't expanded capacity beforehand, this wave of traffic alone would have been enough to crash the entire livestream platform.
Colorful text piled up so densely that individual comments were unreadable — all that remained visible was a boiling sea of emotion.
From The Queen's Descent's stunning intensity, to Final Lesson's tragic resolve, and now to Cyberangel's extreme tension in this very moment.
The speed at which miHoYo's animation team was iterating their technology filled every viewer with a deep sense of dread and fervor.
Mechs.
Heavy motorcycles.
An expressionless, deadpan beauty with three "nos."
When these three elements were stitched together in such a violent, gorgeous way, the chemical reaction they produced was nuclear-grade.
[AAAAH! Bronya, take me with you!]
[This bike is too damn cool! Nobody stop me, I'm going to get my motorcycle license right now!]
[Project Bunny, you are my god! It can actually transform! This is way too romantic!]
[I don't care what kind of Sea of Quanta creature it actually is, I just need to pull for this character! Right now! Immediately!]
[Why is my wallet topping up itself? This game must be cursed!]
[Ducky, run me over with the bike, Ducky, hehehe!!]
This wave of fervor wasn't confined to the player community alone.
In an office tower a few kilometers away, an art director at a major game company slammed his coffee cup down onto his desk hard enough to spill brown liquid across the floor.
He stared fixedly at the frame on his screen — Bronya leaping off the motorcycle, her long hair flying loose.
"How the hell did they pull this off?!"
He tore at his own hair, despair evident in his voice.
"The camera work, the particle effects, and that damn mech-transformation skeletal animation! They're a game company — why can they pull off 3D animation to this level?!"
The lead designer sitting across from him looked equally ashen.
"Ops just sent over their preliminary data projections."
The lead designer wiped a hand down his face.
"Just from this short film alone, plus the Herrscher of Reason as the selling point — this version's revenue for Honkai Impact 3rd might end up exceeding our entire company's total for the whole year."
"Is this even fair anymore..." The art director slumped back in his chair. "He gets all the good luck! Is this what they call being 'Outclassed by None'?"
Wails of anguish echoed through the office.
At the same time.
Anti-Entropy headquarters, central command room.
The last of Cyberangel's blue light faded across every major livestream.
The danmaku server had survived tonight's fiercest wave of traffic.
Layers of colorful text piled on top of the black background, almost swallowing the entire screen whole.
[If this gaming world doesn't produce an old scammer like Su Yu, it's like eternal night with no dawn!]
[Is miHoYo even a game company or an animation and music studio at this point? With this level of quality, you all should just stop competing!]
[Does anyone even remember when this thing started as a free mobile game?]
[You win, old scammer. Take my wallet. Take my life too.]
In the gaming discussion groups Su Yu lurked in, some of his fellow industry planners who had been watching the livestream saw the despair-inducing visual quality and the revenue projections threatening to break through the ceiling, and one after another began venting heartbroken wails in the group chat.
He sighed, silently apologizing to these colleagues in his mind, then turned his gaze back to the screen.
Elysia's livestream was drawing to a close.
She hoisted a pink-and-white inflatable hammer, half her own height, over her shoulder.
"That despicable cliffhanger master Su Yu... next time I absolutely will not let him escape!"
A wave of cheering danmaku instantly flooded the livestream chat, everyone rallying behind Elysia's plan to lock that no-good so-and-so in a dark room to write scripts.
The harsh fluorescent light shone down on the metal console. After Elysia finished the main storyline, played through this version's event content again, and interacted with her viewers, the time had already reached ten-thirty at night.
Su Yu let out a long sigh. "Am I really such a terrible, terrible game producer?"
Kiana leaned against the metal wall with her arms crossed. She rolled her eyes without a shred of mercy.
"You're not a terrible, terrible game producer," she said, tilting her chin up slightly. "You're an old fossil."
"Where on earth did you learn such a strange word?"
Kiana didn't rise to that. She just pursed her lips and shifted her gaze toward the console.
Tesla was standing in front of a row of monitors glowing red, where the wide-area Honkai energy detectors placed throughout Arc City had just sent in new data — a Spatial Rift was about to open.
"Something's changed."
Tesla slapped the paper down on the console, her voice tight.
She raised her head.
"The Spatial Rift is confirmed to be appearing, exactly as predicted, in about two hours."
Tesla paused, her throat bobbing twice, as though she were struggling to swallow something down.
"But the destination..."
She pointed at the coordinate on the screen, flashing with a red ring, and went completely silent, like a duck that had suddenly been choked.
"Where's the destination?"
Tesla opened her mouth, took a deep breath.
"Arc City Tower. Directly above miHoYo Studio."
The air in the command room seemed to get sucked out in that instant.
Kiana snapped upright, her mismatched eyes contracting sharply.
"What did you say — Arc City Tower??"
It wasn't just Kiana — nearly everyone present wore a look of shock.
Tesla didn't answer right away.
She stared at the glaring red ring on the screen marking the Rift's landing point, drew a deep breath, and then let it out heavily.
"Yes, Arc City Tower. And the margin of error is minimal — the landing point points directly at the topmost floor, where miHoYo Studio is."
"If it were just a landing point, the problem wouldn't look this bad."
Tesla's fingers tapped rapidly across the virtual keyboard on the console.
The red ring on the screen zoomed in rapidly, and a three-dimensional structural model of Arc City Tower, soaring into the clouds, projected outward, densely marked with lines representing floors, entrances, and elevator shafts.
"This is Arc City's central business district. This building is a landmark."
"It's the hub of the top financial circles — banks, trusts, venture capital firms, foreign company offices, all crammed in there floor after floor."
Tesla extended a finger and swiped it forcefully across the 3D model.
"It's ten-thirty at night right now."
She looked at Kiana.
"Based on this building's daily foot traffic, if it were daytime, there'd be at least thirty to fifty thousand people inside. Even at night, there are still at least three to four thousand people left."
She paused.
"Those Office Slaves staying behind at their companies, pulling all-nighters at work... tch, this is a real mess."
"Two hours." Kiana stared at the red countdown numbers. "Only two hours — if we don't get them out before the Rift opens..."
She didn't continue, but the image was already crystal clear in everyone's mind.
If those ordinary people got pulled into the opening Rift.
That wouldn't be a battle. It would be a one-sided massacre.
Several thousand ordinary people with no ability to fight back would become prey beneath a monster's sharp claws within minutes.
"Then sound the fire alarm!" Kiana's voice sped up. "Say the building's on fire, or there's a bomb threat — get everyone to evacuate immediately!"
"That won't work."
Welt's voice came from the other side of the console.
"That's Arc City Tower. A super-tall building with countless major corporations occupying it."
"If we sound the highest-level fire alarm without any warning, or issue a bomb threat, that's not evacuation — that's manufacturing panic."
Welt pushed up his glasses, which had slipped down.
"That many people all rushing toward a limited number of stairwells and emergency exits at once."
"Trampling, crowding, shoving. The casualties from that process alone could end up worse than anything we're trying to prevent by getting ahead of the Rift opening."
Tesla picked up where he left off.
"There's something even worse."
She raked a hand through her hair in irritation, making her already-messy red hair even more of a wreck.
"You think they'll just obediently run the moment the alarm sounds? This building runs fire drills once or twice a month. Most people's first reaction will just be: 'Ugh, this stupid drill again, ignore it, it'll stop in ten minutes and we can get back to work.'"
The command room fell into a brief silence once more.
It was a suffocating kind of dilemma.
They held in their hands weapons powerful enough to destroy Honkai Beasts, commanding the power of the Genetic Lock and the Herrschers.
But faced with several thousand ordinary people who needed to be moved out of a danger zone legally, reasonably, and without their even noticing — all that power had absolutely nowhere to be applied.
"But—"
Kiana clenched her jaw, her gaze fixed unmovingly on that red dot marking the top floor.
It wasn't just a few thousand lives.
That place was also miHoYo Studio.
It was where Su Yu coded day and night, where Nuwa and Bronie stayed up debugging data, where Elysia joked around with everyone while running her game livestreams.
More than that, it was the control room of the massive vessel that was Honkai Impact 3rd.
"If that place gets destroyed..."
Kiana's voice dropped low.
She didn't continue.
If a battle erupted on that top floor, one misstep and miHoYo Studio would be reduced to ash in the fighting's aftermath.
Servers, original artwork, data backups, all the development progress.
All of it would be lost in an instant.
If the game had to stop updating at this critical juncture, the players' anger and disappointment would flip in an instant, and the Emotion Points that had been keeping her stable, that were being used to buy time against the apocalypse arriving in over ninety days, would be severed completely.
This wasn't simple property damage — this was directly cutting off the oxygen line she needed to keep breathing in this world.
They couldn't spook anyone. They couldn't cause panic. They couldn't let anyone in the tower get hurt. And above all, they couldn't let the fighting reach the studio's foundations.
Su Yu's brow furrowed slightly, his mind racing at full speed as well. First priority: make sure everyone at the studio was safe — like Elysia, who had just wrapped her livestream—
Getting Elysia to leave was simple; one phone call would handle that. But what about everyone else? Elysia wasn't a fool — she'd already sensed he was keeping something from her; otherwise she wouldn't have said what she said back on the island survival show.
Su Yu looked at the countdown on the screen.
01:58:43.
Time slipped away, second by second.
This damned problem, in this moment, pressed down heavily on everyone's shoulders, weighing so much it was almost hard to breathe.
____
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