Honkai world.
The storm over Arc City showed no sign of letting up.
This abandoned industrial district on the city's edge had no municipal streetlights, hadn't for years — only the cyberpunk neon billboards in the distance, which occasionally cast twisted smears of light across the oil-slicked, water-logged ruin of the streets below.
Raiden Mei was breathing hard, each ragged exhale dissolving instantly into white mist in the cold, wet air.
Both hands locked around the hilt of her katana, its blade wedged into the joint of a mech's mechanical arm.
Mei threw her weight down through her hips and forced the blade down.
The thick metal arm snapped and crashed into the standing water, splattering mud in every direction.
But the violet arcs of electricity clinging to the katana's blade had already faded to almost nothing.
Those sparks guttered like a candle flame in the wind — twitching weakly along the edge of the blade twice more before dying out completely.
Ever since she'd left that Spatial Rift and returned to this world, what little Lightning power remained in her body had been draining away at a visibly alarming rate.
That was exactly why they'd been pushed into this corner.
The electromagnetic jamming network meant to shield them from the World Serpent's detection had developed a fatal gap as her Lightning power waned.
In order to get the intelligence out, Mei and the surviving members of the Immortal Blades squad had made a decision:
to storm, at the cost of their lives if necessary, a communications hub the World Serpent had hidden here.
The intel had, in fact, gotten through.
But the price was that they were now trapped in an absolute death zone.
Points of crimson light had begun blinking on one after another among the ruined factory buildings around them.
Dozens of heavy mechs and fully-armed World Serpent mercenaries had already closed into an airtight encirclement.
"The comm frequency's been completely locked out!"
Alvitr was half-kneeling behind a blown-out control console, her fingers hammering madly at the tactical keypad.
Her helmet had gone missing somewhere in the fighting; her short hair was plastered to her cheeks with rain and sweat.
"The vice-captain's missing, and reinforcements still haven't arrived..." Alvitr glanced up at the crimson lights closing in around them, her voice cracking with obvious tears. "Miss Mei, our energy shield can hold for thirty more seconds at most."
Mei didn't turn around.
Her stamina had run to the edge of the red line; her fingers twitched around the hilt of her blade, beyond her control.
Directly ahead, atop one of the factory buildings, a heavily modified mech was slowly raising the twin-barreled high-energy beam cannon mounted on its shoulder.
Blinding blue energy gathered rapidly at the cannon's mouth, and the rain, the instant it touched that searing heat, flashed into billowing white steam.
Mei gritted her teeth and forced what little strength remained in her body down into her legs, bracing herself to meet the killing blow.
At that razor's-edge moment—
high above, from deep within the rain clouds, came a low, cracking boom.
It wasn't thunder.
It was the sound of something tearing through the air far faster than sound itself.
The next instant—
a colossal lance, trailing blazing golden fire from its tail like a falling star, plunged straight down onto the mech that was preparing to fire.
The mech's armored shell proved as fragile as papier-mâché against the lance's razor point.
The lance drove clean through the mech's core engine, unstoppable, pinning the fifteen-ton steel monster to the cracked, water-logged concrete beneath it.
The terrible kinetic force didn't dissipate on impact.
A visible ring of shockwave burst outward from the point of impact, hugging the ground as it spread.
Every drop of standing water within thirty meters vanished in an instant, and the ordinary mechs and mercenaries who'd tried to close in were flung away like leaves in a gale, slamming down hard into the distant ruins.
The mud and water thrown up by the shockwave came raining back down across the ground a moment later.
Durandal pulled the lance free from where it had buried itself in the earth.
She wore the Bright Knight: Excelsis armor, its golden hair unmoved by the driving rain.
Holding the lance one-handed, Durandal planted herself between Mei and Alvitr.
"Looks like my timing wasn't bad, after all."
Alvitr froze for two full seconds.
Then the young Valkyrie, worn thin by days of high-pressure flight, finally broke down completely.
"Lady Durandal!"
She scrambled toward Durandal, half stumbling, half crawling — if the armor hadn't been so hard, she probably would have thrown her arms around Durandal's leg.
Alvitr's words tumbled out in a rush, punctuated with sobs.
"Vice-Captain Rita's gone missing! This whole place is a World Serpent ambush, and those monsters just keep coming, like they'll never run out—"
Durandal listened quietly to her subordinate's report.
She didn't interrupt, only reached out with her left hand and patted the young Valkyrie's shoulder twice.
The pats weren't hard, but they carried a steadying weight.
"I'm here now."
Three simple words made Alvitr's whole body shudder. She nodded fiercely. "Mm!"
Then Durandal turned, her gaze settling on Raiden Mei, standing behind them.
Rain ran down the fuller of Mei's katana, dripping steadily.
Her clothes were torn in a dozen places, blood seeping from wounds large and small all over her body.
Durandal inclined her head slightly.
"Thank you for lending Schicksal's team a hand in this dead end," she said, her voice honest and unclouded. "Our positions may differ, but I won't forget this debt."
Durandal set the lance's point at an angle into the ground beside her.
"Leave the rest to me. You can go now, Raiden Mei. In your current state, staying here means only one thing — death."
This wasn't condescension. Quite the opposite — it was Durandal's respect for Raiden Mei.
She could see the girl had been pushed to the absolute limits of exhaustion.
With her Herrscher power spent, that wounded, battered body had nothing left to answer the fight still to come.
But Mei didn't move.
Slowly, her grip on the hilt tightened.
The unfocused haze in her eyes sharpened back into a stubbornness Durandal couldn't quite understand.
She shook her head.
"Sorry."
Mei's voice was unusually firm.
"I have a promise of my own that I have to see through. Until I see that answer with my own eyes, I can't let myself fall here."
Durandal looked at her.
There was nothing in the purple-haired girl's eyes that would bow easily even to death.
Durandal let out a small sigh.
"A promise?"
She raised her lance, gaze sweeping the surrounding area.
The mechs flattened by the shockwave were climbing back to their feet, and further out in the darkness, more crimson lights were converging on this spot.
The World Serpent's deployment here clearly went far beyond a routine patrol.
"Raiden Mei." Durandal's voice cut clear through the roar of the rain. "Without strength to match it, a promise is nothing but a burden you carry for no reason."
The words had barely left her mouth.
Durandal's pupils contracted sharply.
Combat instincts honed through a thousand battles blared the highest-level alarm in her mind.
The temperature plunged without warning — a cliff-edge drop.
The driving rain that had been pouring down a moment ago was, two or three meters above the ground, suddenly stripped of every last trace of heat.
The raindrops didn't even go through the process of freezing — they simply became jagged shards of ice mid-fall, hammering down onto the concrete in a dense, crackling shatter.
The street, previously wreathed in mist from the mechs' overheated engines, was blanketed in a layer of white frost within a single second.
The temperature in the air was plummeting toward absolute zero at a terrifying speed.
Durandal spun around, her gaze cutting into the darkness at the far end of the street.
From within that frost-locked ruin, a figure slowly emerged.
Kevin Kaslana.
His short white hair stirred faintly in the freezing wind; his ice-blue eyes showed not a flicker of emotion — like two chunks of ancient ice buried at the bottom of the deepest, coldest trench.
He walked forward, wreathed in frost.
With every step he took, the ice beneath his feet spread several meters further.
A shrill low-temperature alarm blared inside Durandal's armor.
She tightened her grip on the lance with her right hand, her left settling ahead of the hilt, her body sinking slightly into a standard combat stance.
Two auras, each representing the current apex of the world's military might, collided head-on across the less-than-thirty-meter stretch of street between them.
The neon signs still flickering around them simply shattered under the crushing weight of that energy.
The air fell into a suffocating stillness.
Ten minutes earlier.
Deep underground, at a hidden World Serpent base.
Raven sat in a metal chair.
She'd unzipped her black hoodie; thick medical bandages wrapped around her left side.
Every breath sent a dull throb of pain through her ribs.
She was giving her report to Kevin, seated on his throne.
"the Lord, this is the findings of my investigation."
The report was brief, focused mainly on what had happened when Raven had entered the Spatial Rift again and encountered Su Yu and Rita.
One detail she left out, though, was the part about her deal with Rita — "If you feel you owe me something, then lend Miss Mei a hand when she's in danger. That's our deal. Deal?"
"Rita went missing in the industrial district for under twenty-four hours, total," Raven said, taking a deep breath. "But when she reappeared inside that Rift, not only had all her previous injuries fully healed, she'd somehow also gained astonishing power — enough that her raw physical strength alone was more than I could match."
Raven pointed at the wound on her own ribs.
"That's completely against reason. No ordinary person could gain that much strength in so little time. The only explanation is—"
She looked up at the man seated in the shadows above.
"The world behind that Spatial Rift — time flows differently there than it does here."
Kevin sat on his throne, chin resting on one hand.
He offered no opinion on Raven's deduction, only listened in silence.
No wonder Su Yu had sworn to a three-day promise with such certainty.
If time in that world flowed at a different rate, then everything made sense — he'd had far more time to prepare than Kevin had assumed.
Heh.
Fitting, for someone Su had chosen — had he been played by an uneven flow of information once again?
Very much your style, Su.
None of it mattered to Kevin, though.
No matter how differently time passed in that other world, all he needed to do was wait out the third day in this one — Su Yu would come, guaranteed.
Because Project STIGMA in Arc City would also be executed on that very day.
Kevin's fingers tapped lightly on the armrest. His expression remained as blank as ever, but only someone who knew him well would have caught the trace of something in his eyes — the barest, indescribable hint of pleasure — belonging to the World Serpent's Lord.
—So this counts as turning the tables on you, Su. Given your nature, the one you chose could never just stand by and watch Project STIGMA go through. Which means that girl — Kiana Kaslana — is bound to show up on the third day.
Carrying, presumably, some plan meant to replace Project STIGMA, meant to let humanity surpass Honkai itself.
Kevin had already waited this long. He didn't mind waiting a little longer.
He slowly closed his eyes.
At that moment, a startled, half-panicked cry rose from the control console nearby.
Jackal shot up out of his chair, staring fixedly at the monitor in front of him.
"the Lord!"
Jackal's voice had changed pitch entirely.
"Schicksal's Durandal has broken in! She wiped out our entire third perimeter defense line in under a minute — every unit stationed there is nothing but scrap metal now!"
Raven's rib wound only seemed to ache worse.
Schicksal's S-rank Valkyrie, Durandal.
Rumor had it she was rated S-rank only because S-rank happened to be the ceiling of Schicksal's grading system.
That so-called strongest Valkyrie of Schicksal was a living nuclear weapon — not something numbers alone could overwhelm.
"If we let her keep rampaging through here — if she learns the full picture of the plan — there's a real chance she'll blow Project STIGMA wide open!"
Kevin still said nothing.
He watched the footage Jackal had pulled up.
On screen, that dazzling golden figure stood one-handed with her lance, positioned in front of several Schicksal Valkyries.
He hadn't originally wanted to get involved in Arc City's affairs.
But Durandal entering the fray clearly went beyond what the original plan could contain.
More importantly — Arc City, as a stage, had been reserved by agreement between him and that person, for that white-haired girl.
Kevin slowly rose to his feet.
He hefted Cleaver of Shamash, in one hand. Its tip scraped across the metal grating on the floor, producing a low, grating hiss.
"I'll go take care of it."
He descended the steps of his throne.
In the face of Raven and Jackal's uncertain, questioning looks, Kevin offered no explanation.
There was no killing intent in those ice-blue eyes — only something close to obsessive seriousness.
"I made a promise to Su Yu."
He paused mid-step, tilting his head slightly.
"I'll build the stage here that belongs to him and to Kiana. Before that man arrives on it, carrying the answer he's satisfied with—"
White frost began forming on the ground; everywhere Kevin walked left behind a thick trail of ice.
"—I won't allow a single variable."
Back to the present.
Kevin came to a stop.
His gaze crossed the ten-odd meters of distance between them and settled on the lance in Durandal's hand.
It was a gaze utterly indifferent, without a ripple of feeling.
Durandal was entirely focused.
The energy core inside her armor hummed at a low pitch, its output pushed to peak.
A fierce wind swept fine ice crystals howling between the two of them.
In this space blanketed in ice and snow, only two figures remained, facing each other down.
Durandal's gaze never left Kevin.
Her lance rose and fell slightly with each breath.
As Schicksal's strongest S-rank Valkyrie, she rarely encountered an opponent who could exert this much pressure simply by standing there.
This, then... was the Fusion Warrior from the previous civilization?
Kevin stopped roughly twenty meters from Durandal.
He wore no defensive armor at all — just a coat that looked almost too thin for the weather.
"Step aside."
Durandal didn't move. She lifted the lance slightly off the ground, its point angled at Kevin's chest.
Off to the side, Raiden Mei was breathing hard, her hand trembling around the hilt of her katana, but she was still struggling to stand.
She watched the man who'd broken into the battlefield, and the fear she felt now was entirely different from the fear she'd felt facing hundreds of Honkai Beasts moments ago.
If the World Serpent mercenaries earlier had simply been carrying out orders to kill, this man in front of her was, himself, the very source of the blizzard.
"Kevin, you were once a hero of the previous civilization," Durandal said, her gaze steady, her core engine running at full power inside her armor as she tried to read his next move. "Why walk this path? You must understand — this so-called Project STIGMA is nothing but a pointless massacre."
Kevin's expression didn't so much as twitch.
"I know."
His answer came too fast — leaving no room for the argument, the sneer, or the anger Durandal had braced herself to hear.
He didn't defend himself. He didn't even bother explaining. He simply acknowledged the fact, plainly.
That matter-of-fact acceptance only made the air around them feel heavier.
Durandal pressed her lips together.
She knew words were meaningless decoration in front of an opponent at this level.
"If you want to know more, then show me your strength — successor." Kevin said flatly, resting the unlit Cleaver of Shamash idly across his chest.
Durandal understood.
She took a deep breath and slammed the lance she'd been holding upright into the ground.
"In that case—"
She dropped her center of gravity, and the concrete beneath her feet split apart in a web of cracks.
"—Let's take this to the sky, Kevin. Don't wreck Arc City's defenses down here."
Kevin watched her, and for the first time something faint flickered in his eyes.
He said nothing. He simply lowered his greatsword, and then, as if lifted by some invisible force, rose into the air, freed of gravity's hold.
Durandal followed right behind him.
Their movements were fast enough to make the thunder and rain seem sluggish by comparison.
The instant the two of them left the ground, the frost below them shattered under two completely different resonant force fields, sending out a ring of expanding shockwave that pushed the few mechs that hadn't managed to retreat stumbling backward.
"What... kind of monster is that?"
Alvitr sat slumped on the ground, staring up at the scene in blank astonishment.
Above Arc City.
The cloud layer tore apart in an instant.
Durandal's silhouette carved a brilliant streak of light through the sky, colliding head-on, at the heart of the storm, with that frost-wreathed figure.
BOOM——!!!
The sound nearly drowned out every clap of thunder.
The shockwave from the collision rippled outward through the sea of clouds, shattering the heavy thunderheads around them into a scattering storm of ice crystals and rain.
The two figures crossed paths again and again in midair, every clash of their bodies loud enough to be heard clearly even through the pounding rain.
Neither of them was drawing on Holy Blade power.
It was pure hand-to-hand combat.
"Not done yet!"
Durandal spun in a graceful arc midair, her lance whistling as it swept through the air.
Kevin didn't meet it head-on. He merely stepped back a fraction, letting the lance's point — sharp enough to punch through alloy armor — graze past his cheek.
His movements were as calm as if he were out for a stroll; Cleaver of Shamash never even rose to meet the blow.
After several exchanges, Kevin came to a stop mid-air.
His expression hadn't changed at all.
"If this is all," he said flatly, "then this fight won't produce a winner."
He raised his hand, and along the blade of Heaven's Fire, a dark red pattern began to surface — like magma slowly hardening.
Even across dozens of meters of open air, Durandal could feel the moisture in the atmosphere scorching away from that terrible heat.
"If you use the Holy Blade's power, Arc City won't survive it," Durandal warned.
Kevin's gaze swept toward the distance.
There, veiled in the storm, lay Arc City — countless lit windows scattered across it.
That wasn't his battlefield. It wasn't his target.
He let the flicker of flame fade from the blade's edge.
He had no interest in swinging his greatsword at ordinary people.
"Because of a promise."
Kevin spoke suddenly, without preamble.
"What?"
"The reason you keep pressing me for," Kevin said, looking at her. "You'll get the answer you want, before long. But until then, Project STIGMA cannot be interrupted."
Durandal's brow furrowed further.
She had more to ask.
But at that moment, a strange, cracking boom reached her ears.
It was the sound of space itself being forcibly torn open.
Durandal turned her head.
Several kilometers away, amid the driving rain, a massive violet shadow had unfurled out of nowhere, twisting and warping wildly.
It was the same kind of rift with the anomalous spatial-surface readings that had appeared over Arc City before.
Kevin's gaze fell on the rift as well.
Something changed in his eyes.
That coldness, that ice-block indifference — for a moment, something unfamiliar surfaced in it, something Durandal couldn't place.
It was anticipation, tangled together with a longing for reunion he'd suppressed for years.
"Don't you want your answer?"
Kevin turned to face Durandal.
"Step into that rift yourself, and you'll understand exactly what I've been waiting for."
His voice dropped lower.
"Perhaps that, too, is a kind of fate that belongs to you... successor of Su."
Durandal's heart lurched.
"Successor of Su"?
Before she could think it through, Otto's voice suddenly crackled through her comm channel.
"Bianka, Kevin has no reason to lie to you. If he believes there's an answer waiting inside that rift, then go find it."
Durandal made her decision almost instantly.
She raised her communicator and issued an order to the Immortal Blades squad below.
"All units, retreat immediately. Hold position and stay silent. All combat units, cease pursuit."
She looked across at Kevin — he made no move to stop her, only watched her quietly, like a host who'd long since prepared to welcome a guest.
Durandal took a deep breath.
The Excelsis Battlesuit's thrusters flared with blinding gold light.
Without a moment's hesitation, she flew straight toward the wildly spinning violet vortex, like a moth throwing itself, unflinching, into the flame — plunging straight into the very heart of the rift.
The world spun.
There was no transition — her vision simply tore free of everything, all at once.
When Durandal came to her senses, she found herself floating high above a city.
An inverted city.
No — not a city.
Some kind of shattered wreckage.
She was above a churning sea of thunderclouds.
There was no ground here. No gravity.
Only shattered ruins, floating in the void, drifting through violet lightning.
Before she could get her bearings, a flash of white caught the edge of her vision.
That figure was fighting.
A pure white suit of armor she'd never seen before was weaving through the storm and the swarm of Honkai Beasts in a blur of motion.
That dizzying sequence of maneuvers made Durandal — captain of the Immortal Blades — go rigid, her pupils contracting sharply.
One glance was all it took for her to recognize the fighting style layered into that figure — Tai Xu Sword Qi, Kaslana Gun Kata, even traces of Rita's own techniques.
It was as if a hundred schools of combat had been melted down in a single furnace and fused into every single strike.
But what truly shocked Durandal
was the figure fighting beside that white-armored one — a woman wielding a scythe.
Rita?
Durandal's mind went briefly, completely blank.
The vice-captain who was supposed to be missing, fate unknown, back in Arc City's industrial district — she was here, alongside that mysterious white-armored figure, cutting down Honkai Beasts by the score in an entirely different world.
The white armor left afterimage trails through the air; every swing of its massive greatsword took down several Honkai Beasts at once.
And Rita moved like a dancer caught in a storm — every turn of her scythe part of a dance of death that was, somehow, both beautiful and elegant.
They were fighting.
Even here, in a place where space itself had come unmoored, they were still fighting.
Durandal's hand tightened around the grip of her lance.
She watched the figure below, drenched in blood, battling on.
That was Rita.
The vice-captain who was always carrying afternoon tea with a graceful smile, handling all the tedious, headache-inducing paperwork.
The vice-captain who always worried about her, who'd made looking after her a matter of professional habit.
The Rita who'd walk willingly into darkness, just to clear the road ahead for her.
And now, here she was, standing beside that white-armored figure, their movements in perfect sync, as if they'd fought side by side countless times before.
"Rita..."
She called the name softly.
But the thunder was too loud. It swallowed every word she said.
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