Chapter 218: The Purge Operation
"Done." Irene raised her head. She had taken on Klein's appearance — and thankfully, even though the Herrscher Core structures of the Previous Era and the Current Era differed somewhat, their Authorities were the same.
That was why the infiltration had gone smoothly. She couldn't have done it earlier, though — back then, the Herrscher of the Legion's ranks were at full strength. One extra member would have been suspicious.
But then the puppets had started causing trouble, gotten beaten up, and Schicksal had taken losses, and so had they. At this point, one more face in the crowd wasn't a big deal. The Herrscher of the Legion was One Person, Thousand Minds — not one unified mind. They wouldn't bother getting to know every single comrade.
The only thing binding them together was the fact that they all shared the same identity as the Herrscher of the Legion. That was why Klein could blend in relatively easily.
"Miss Irene truly is a woman of many talents." Rita watched Irene with a slightly twitching expression. "Speaking of which, Miss Irene — how many different Herrschers can you actually transform into?"
"Not that many." Irene shrugged and held up her fingers. "Including myself as the Herrscher of Death, there's also the Herrscher of Wind, the Herrscher of the Legion, and the Herrscher of Corruption. That's only four Herrschers."
She said nothing about also possessing the Authority of Origin. There was no need to mention it. Though she had to admit — four was still just four. Sirin at her peak had been a Six-Core Herrscher.
"My, Miss Irene really is something else." Rita's expression twitched again. Why did it feel like Irene was being falsely modest? Well, whatever — that was just her talent, she supposed.
You simply couldn't compare yourself to a cheat code. Rita had learned that lesson long ago from spending time with Durandal. This world genuinely had people who just broke every rule.
Not that Rita herself was any slouch in the eyes of ordinary people — not just anyone could become an S-Rank Valkyrie. Being where she was already made her exceptional.
And yet the people around her — there was a certain Goose who could reverse-engineer a Bubble Universe into her own body, there was Theresa, endlessly mocked as a C-Rank Valkyrie, who was undeniably S-Rank in actual combat power, and that wasn't all thanks to Judah either, so people really should stop giving Theresa grief. She was genuinely adorable. And then there was that Li — the big pillow.
That one was an extraordinarily rare case of true Sword Heart clarity, a master of the Taixuan Sword God's techniques. Among this crowd, Rita really did look like the most ordinary person in the room.
She didn't know who "Li the big pillow" was exactly, but she understood the principle well enough — there truly were people in this world who played by no rules, who had every cheat code unlocked.
Like Irene. Like Durandal.
"Alas, you really can't get by in this world without a special talent or two." Irene spread her hands with a sigh, then stood and wandered toward the exit.
She had to admit — she rarely transformed into Klein. Part of it was that Klein simply wasn't all that useful in most situations. Klein's signature trick was always splitting herself apart, or using weakened versions of certain Authorities — Authorities that even Klein herself rarely used.
The other trick was creating copies of herself. But the problem was that any duplicate Irene produced while transformed would only look like Klein. And the moment Irene reverted to her true form, every one of those copies would instantly vanish. There was basically no practical use for them. She couldn't stay as Klein indefinitely.
Which meant a power that should have been incredibly useful for generating clones was effectively useless in Irene's hands. A lot of problems couldn't be solved just by having more copies of yourself around anyway.
Irene still needed to stay close to St. Freya first before she could set up operations elsewhere. And frankly, the real reason came down to this: Klein simply wasn't much of a fighter.
As for why...
Irene walked with her brows lowered, looking vaguely listless. It wasn't just the limited utility — there was another reason she rarely transformed into Klein:
Exhaustion. A fatigue that defied description.
She had no idea how Klein had pushed her body into this state. A Herrscher, inexplicably tired — and not the kind of tired where you collapse, but the kind where you feel the weight of every bone in your body and yet somehow manage to keep going.
Still, being the Herrscher of Death had its advantages. Irene placed a hand on her chest. White mist poured from her palm and seeped into her sternum, slowly restoring Klein's body.
When she transformed into other Valkyries, she inherited not only their strength — but also their ailments. Just as Pardo's Quantization came with the territory, so too did Klein's exhaustion.
And that was when Irene had truly understood what Klein's overtime actually meant. What kind of overtime could reduce a Herrscher's body to that state.
So unless it was absolutely necessary, Irene had zero desire to become Klein.
[So how exactly did the other Dr. Mobius work Klein into the ground like that?] Elysia had just synced with Irene's current sensations through shared perception, and immediately felt deeply, thoroughly uncomfortable.
Irene usually kept her shared perception permissions fully open. Anyone who wanted to sync in could — though in practice, most people only borrowed her eyes or ears. Anything beyond that they generally left alone.
And everyone was a grown adult. They knew when to step back. When the moment called for privacy, everyone would cut permissions without a word and stay well out of the way.
[How should I know, it's not like I'm the one who did it.] Mobius rolled her eyes. She did work Klein hard, yes — but not to this degree.
The more likely explanation was that Klein had driven herself into this state.
Klein, standing beside Mobius, gave a small nod. "This has nothing to do with Dr. Mobius. I needed to do this myself. I needed the work — it helps manage my emotions."
For her, the shock had been tremendous — whether it was her attempt to kill Dr. Mobius, or the deaths of the two sisters she had caused at the time. The weight of it was overwhelming.
But Klein was not a genius. She was not a top-tier scientist. She wasn't even a warrior — combat was entirely foreign to her, and cutting-edge research was equally beyond her reach.
In a fight, she would never match Kevin or any of those born-for-battle soldiers. In research, she would never surpass Dr. Mobius. There was only one thing she could do — the thing she was best at.
She knew how much Mobius had sacrificed to keep her alive back then, how much she had shouldered. But Mobius hadn't said a word about it, and Klein wouldn't ask.
All she had to do was perform. All she had to do was hold her end up.
And what Klein was best at was overtime. The Herrscher of the Legion's Authority was best applied precisely for that purpose — working overtime for the entire Fire Moth organization.
That was what had reduced her body, even as a Herrscher, to such a wrecked condition.
After treating herself for a while, Irene felt somewhat better. She continued forward, following the resonance of the Herrscher of the Legion Core, heading in its direction.
As for the detector the Doctors had developed earlier — its main purpose was actually to track those people within Imaginary Space, at close range.
Under careful attention, even a Herrscher of the Legion — a Herrscher famed for concealment — was not particularly hard to sense. A Herrscher's aura was still quite distinctive.
Especially when standing alongside ordinary humans. That inhuman aura was simply unmistakable to fellow Herrschers.
But in Imaginary Space things got harder. Even the Herrscher of the Void had trouble locating their hideouts in there.
So the detector remained a necessity — at minimum it could narrow down their approximate location. Once pinpointed, you just followed the trail. And after that, the rest was simple.
Days passed. Under Irene's deliberate permissiveness, the originally modest factory had accumulated several hundred new arrivals. Among them were some Schicksal personnel, but the majority were puppets of the Herrscher of the Legion.
You really had to hand it to this crowd — they had the audacity of a battering ram. They barged right in, acting as though Irene had personally written their résumés for them.
They showed up empty-handed, not even pausing to consider whether the identity of whoever they were replacing made any logical sense. One puppet even walked through the gates wearing a student uniform.
What were they expecting — an intern badge to go with it?
But then, this place had been designed from the start as a trap to draw them in, so Irene didn't particularly care. She let them all through, one by one.
This group clearly hadn't engaged their brains. What kind of industrial facility publicly recruits hundreds of workers from the general population? Obviously it was Shenchen Pharmaceuticals and Schicksal jointly staffing the place.
But apparently none of the Legion puppets had risen high enough in the ranks to figure that out. And from the very beginning, both Schicksal and the World Serpent had designated this location as a trap for rounding up the Herrscher of the Legion.
So it didn't matter. Civilians who had genuinely been attracted by the job listings were turned away with politely fabricated reasons — "unqualified" and so forth. And the Legion puppets, upon sensing the Herrscher of the Legion Core within Irene's body, had no suspicions about their own acceptance. If a comrade had already made it this far in, why wouldn't they be let through too?
Irene yawned and glanced back. Three hundred and some odd Legion puppets had gathered in this tiny factory. That was a satisfying number. She refused to believe the Legion could still cobble together a coherent mob after losing this many here.
She looked outside at the trickle of remaining arrivals drawn by the job posting — almost no new Legion puppets left. By now, any remaining ones were either not planning to come, or had already gone to Shenchen Pharmaceuticals.
Shenchen Pharmaceuticals wasn't a concern. Kevin would be holding down that front in person. When the Judgment of Shamash ignited, they'd all die in a batch.
She handed off the remaining logistics to Schicksal's staff and drifted toward the back. Numbers were right. Time to close the net.
Following her resonance sense, Irene drifted all the way to a massive warehouse at the rear of the factory. Outside, staff were already beginning to clear away the remaining civilians — things were about to get lively in there.
Irene stepped into the warehouse and felt the Herrscher of the Legion Cores converging all around her. This many people — and they'd been hired, naturally, to do... moving work.
There wasn't much other choice. Letting these Legion puppets anywhere near actual production was out of the question. With several hundred of them in every sort of occupation, a unified assignment was the only sensible option.
Fortunately, Legion puppets weren't the sharpest tools in the shed, and they didn't protest. Their real goal was still to steal the reagents, after all. Several puppets spotted the Irene who had "hired" them and sidled over.
"Comrade — we've been stationed here for days now, and everyone's assembled here. Are you sure this is fine?"
"Then what exactly do you think I could arrange for you?" Irene crossed her arms and looked at the puppets who had shuffled up. "You're not scientists. You're not chemists."
"The closest thing among you is a middle school chemistry teacher. What position was I supposed to give you? You're the ones who didn't have the qualifications, I had no other slots to offer you — are you going to blame me for that?"
Irene's bluntness left several puppets looking distinctly uncomfortable. "We didn't mean it like that. We're just saying — we've been here days and haven't seen any of the goods."
"Production takes time," Irene said, looking back at them. "And do you want to know why I came over just now? Precisely to get you to work. I'm your foreman, after all."
Before her words had fully faded, the door beside them swung open. A conveyor belt emerged, stacked with cargo, slowly trundling in their direction.
Irene produced a megaphone from somewhere and bellowed: "Alright, friends — time to start moving boxes! One item per person, and be careful — don't break anything!"
The puppets surged toward the conveyor belt, but when they got close enough to see the sealed packaging on the goods, their expressions fell. This wasn't quite what they'd imagined.
Stealing from sealed boxes was going to be tricky. Opening the Theater of Domination on the spot? Impossible — they couldn't conceal the Honkai energy fluctuations that would cause.
Now wasn't the time to show their hand. Better to wait and see if another opportunity arose later. And if not — well, they'd just have to make it a smash-and-grab.
Decision made, the puppets stopped hesitating. They stepped forward, each taking a box from the belt. It was heavier than expected — and when they tilted it, they could hear the faint slosh of liquid inside. Had to be the reagents.
On the other side of the warehouse, the loading doors rolled open. Several trucks reversed into position, backs facing the crowd. The puppets understood at once — they were loading for transport — and moved toward them.
But without warning, Irene appeared atop one of the trucks. The puppets looked up at her — and Irene reached up to her shoulder and gave a sharp, deliberate yank.
Klein's appearance peeled away like a mask, dissolving into a ball of light. The aura of the Herrscher of Death, her true self, flooded out without restraint.
"Friends," Irene said, "are you ready to die?"
The words had barely left her lips before the sealed truck doors burst open, revealing Valkyries who had been concealed inside. And then Irene pulled out a violet crystal and crushed it between her fingers.
Only Little Senti and Irene had come here in person. Little Senti could use the Herrscher of Sentience's Authority to disguise herself and avoid detection by the Legion. As for Irene — she had Klein's disguise, plus that inexplicable ability she now possessed to share other Herrschers' powers, letting her borrow Little Senti's Authority as a cloak.
Everyone else had been on standby at a distance. The moment Irene crushed the crystal Sirin had given her, Sirin would teleport the whole group over instantly.
"Welcome to our newest round of live combat testing." A smile played on Irene's lips. From the portal beside her, everyone poured through in single file — and thankfully this time, Sirin had remembered to make the gate wide enough.
Even Mei didn't hit her head walking through.
A few puppets heard Irene's voice and something clicked — they looked down at the cargo in their hands. In the next instant, every single reagent container held by every single Legion puppet detonated simultaneously.
Reagent and shrapnel alike sprayed across the assembled Herrschers. Massive quantities of Honkai energy were instantly purged — and with the Honkai energy stripped away, their disguises could no longer hold. Every puppet collapsed onto the ground as what they truly were: a floor full of dolls.
Above on the trucks, the Valkyries hauled out the Gatling guns they'd discovered during the earlier test.
Thunder filled the warehouse.
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