Several hours later.
In the broadcast room on the other side of Arc City Tower.
After a long tug-of-war, the progress bar of the Second Eruption Chronicle finally reached its end.
With the main storyline wrapped up, the Chronicle's epilogue followed.
The screen laid out the facts crisply:
Theresa's memories had been rewritten by Otto using Yu Ducheng's feather, and the truth of the Second Eruption was sealed away by Schicksal for good.
In the eyes of the world, Schicksal had defeated the Second Herrscher.
And the Anti-Entropy mechs that had fought to the death on the snowfield, and Welt, who burned himself down to the last ember, might as well have never existed.
The scene shifted.
Siegfried returned Welt's Core of Reason to Einstein.
Faced with Einstein's invitation to join Anti-Entropy, the man burdened with his family's fate refused.
He still had something he had to do. His daughter, Kiana, was waiting for him to come home.
Meanwhile, Fu Hua, awakened from her grievous injuries, quietly left Schicksal.
Little joy or sorrow showed on that cold, composed face, yet Otto's monologue, playing as a voiceover above the screen, cruelly laid bare one fact.
Otto knew perfectly well that this immortal, who had lived tens of thousands of years, no longer had any place to return to.
Time flowed on.
Several years later, in Schicksal's cold, dim laboratory.
Lifeless shells floated in culture tanks, one after another.
To recreate the Second Herrscher's power, Otto had combined Sirin's DNA with Kiana's and produced these test subjects.
Yet the shells were like exquisite dolls. Not one of them had given rise to even a trace of consciousness.
After weighing his options, the man did something that could only be called insane.
He forcibly implanted the Second Herrscher's Herrscher Core, its surface a web of cracks, into one of the test subjects, number "K-423".
Time ticked away, second by second.
Eighteen hours passed.
In the cold nutrient fluid, K-423's eyes remained tightly shut, like a lifeless piece of white stone.
On the screen, the golden-haired Bishop stood before the enormous glass tank.
["Looks like this one's a failure too…"]
He murmured to himself, his voice echoing through the empty laboratory.
["Or is it that you don't want to wake up, Second Herrscher?"]
His gaze seemed to pierce the glass and the fluid, reaching deep into the sleeping soul within.
["What kind of dream are you having, I wonder?"]
As Otto's words faded, the picture slowly went dark. In its place came a few fragmented, blurry shards of memory.
Sirin's voice rose faintly in the darkness.
["In the endless dark, I dream a false dream. In the dream, I miss the woman who isn't my mother."]
["I long for the warmth she once gave me. That warmth made me feel safe."]
The voice had lost its old arrogance and madness. Only helplessness and a deep, clinging longing remained.
["I've thought it more than once. If I turned back into an ordinary person… could I live happily with her?"]
["If I were given one more chance…"]
With that last faint wish,
the picture suddenly flared bright.
In the nutrient fluid, K-423 slowly opened her eyes.
They were eyes as clear and blue as the sea.
The moment he saw the white-haired girl awaken, Otto's face, always so calm and calculating, showed a rare flash of shock on the screen.
["I want to hear her voice one more time."]
["ich liebe dich. (I love you)"]
As those German words drifted away into the air of the laboratory, the story of the Second Eruption Chronicle came to a complete close.
The whole broadcast room fell into a brief silence.
Elysia's fingers loosened on the mouse.
She stared at the darkened screen as realization dawned.
So this was the truth of how Kiana came to be.
No wonder that girl's fate was tangled so deeply with Sirin's.
Rather than a copy, she was more like a continuation, in this world, of the longing for warmth and love buried deep inside Sirin.
After the brief hush, the danmaku erupted like a geyser.
Elysia and the danmaku launched into a frenzied retrospective of the Chronicle together.
Recalling how Sirin had been treated like a lab rat in Babylon Laboratory, forced to give blood even when she was sick with a fever, quite a few viewers sucked in a sharp breath.
Under torment with no limits at all, it seemed only natural that the little girl's hatred would swell without bound until it brought about that devastating catastrophe.
But the opinions in the danmaku soon split into two camps.
[Sirin had it rough, sure, but did the people she killed on the Siberian snowfield deserve it? If you call her attacking the lab researchers revenge, then throwing meteors at the Earth to drag the whole world down with her was just insane lashing out!]
[Easy for you to say, sitting on the sidelines. She's a kid who grew up in a freezing lab and knew nothing but pain. You expect her to have a normal moral compass? Does she even know right from wrong? In her world, humans equal the devils that hurt her!]
Just as the two sides were about to start a fight, a bold red danmaku drifted across the center of the screen.
[What's there to argue about? At the end of the day, isn't it all that bastard Otto's fault?!]
That line landed like a depth charge, instantly focusing everyone's fury on a single target.
[Yes! It's all Otto's fault!]
[If he hadn't tacitly allowed, even pushed, those cruel experiments at Babylon Laboratory, Sirin would never have become a Herrscher!]
Elysia clenched both fists and swung them in the air, puffing out her cheeks.
"Exactly! Even I wanted to hit that guy over the head with an inflatable hammer after watching this arc!"
And that was far from the old fox's biggest crime.
Just when Sovereign Welt had given it everything and finally managed to nearly subdue Sirin, Otto jumped out to meddle for the sake of his own goals.
That directly let Sirin escape and set off an even bigger disaster.
It was fair to say that tens of thousands of extra deaths on the Siberian battlefield were all on Otto's account.
If there were ever a blame-splitting meeting, Otto would take the head seat without question.
Speaking of Welt, the chat shifted direction at once.
[Old Yang's run was so frustrating to watch! He dragged a losing game into a real shot at a comeback, then got backstabbed by his own teammate Otto.]
[He was carrying with his actual life! His Honkai energy compatibility was poor to begin with, and using the Core of Reason meant risking his body being eaten away. Every time I watched him cough blood, my heart jumped into my throat.]
[I thought he was a goner when Sirin absorbed him. Who could've guessed Old Yang would lie low inside the core and, at the critical moment, coordinate with the outside attack to forcibly strip the core off Sirin?]
[Is this what they call an old man's romance…? Without Old Yang's blood carry this round, the Earth would've been gone already!]
[I said Arahato was badass, so what are you, an evil dragon?]
Besides Old Yang, the story of the master and disciple pair, Cheng Lixue and Fu Hua, also left plenty of players teary-eyed.
To protect her weakened master, Cheng Lixue stepped in front of Fu Hua without hesitation and died in that world of ice and snow.
[Su Yu, you beast! The Squad Monitor already had it bad enough, and you still had to torture her like this! Do you have any human compassion at all?!]
[The old thief's heart must be made of obsidian. You couldn't even smash it!]
[Poor Lixue. She hardly got to see her master at all. And honestly, Fu Hua, couldn't you have visited the kid more often?]
[Fu Hua had her reasons too, I think. She had her own difficulties.]
Amid the discussion of the story, some lore-diggers also noticed the conversation in the consciousness space between Otto and the mysterious "Will of Honkai".
After meeting that being, Otto seemed to have become certain of something, which led to his even crazier moves afterward.
This was obviously a huge piece of foreshadowing for the main storyline to come.
Either way, tonight's stream had been packed to the brim, with more than enough content.
From the Void Drifter's pain and breakthrough in Void Heavens & Diane's Sojourn, to the grand unfolding of the entire worldview and historical truth in the Second Eruption Chronicle,
the players' emotions had been yanked back and forth by the game's story.
The danmaku started eagerly speculating about where the plot would go next.
[Mei has been searching for Kiana all along. Will she chase her all the way to Arc City?]
[If they meet again, how awkward would that be, one Herrscher of Thunder and one Herrscher of the Void…]
[Where's the Herrscher of Thunder? Didn't they rip Mei's core out?]
[Sigh, poor Mei, sigh! When will our Mei ever get back on her feet! I'm shaking with rage!]
[Our Mei isn't a doormat! Not a doormat!!]
[Will Lady Raiden Mei ever have her day of rising like a dragon? Su Yu, you old thief, say something!!]
"Okay, okay, that's all for today's stream!"
Elysia waved at the camera, and beside her, Himeko nodded along.
Amid a danmaku flow that was still fairly "harmonious", the stream was cut off.
The moment the two pulled off their headsets, their phone screens lit up at the same time, as if on cue.
It wasn't just them. A red-flagged System notice also popped up in the work group chat.
[Important Notice: The Dome Sports Center will be temporarily requisitioned by miHoYo Studio to test the latest core technology for Ordinal Scale.]
[Test level: Top secret. Physical and network lockdown perimeters have been set up in the surrounding blocks. Do not approach. Violators will be treated as leakers. — Su Yu]
Elysia looked at the line on the screen, and her lovely brows drew together slightly.
Phone in hand, she pushed open the half-closed door of the broadcast room.
She had barely stepped into the corridor when she ran into Nuwa, who was walking over with a stack of sketches in her arms, grumbling under her breath.
The moment Nuwa looked up and saw Elysia, she hurried over and jabbed a finger at the phone screen to complain.
"Did you see that? Did you see?! Su Yu's pulling the act-first-report-later routine again on a tech test!"
"Not even a heads-up beforehand? Tell me, how many more secrets does he have stuffed in that belly of his that he hasn't told us? Is this how a proper studio is supposed to run?"
Elysia smiled and didn't take the bait.
She patted Nuwa on the shoulder, then turned and walked straight toward Hack Bunny's little den at the end of the corridor.
Elysia knocked lightly, and after a moment the door lock opened by itself.
She peered in through the gap.
The lights in the room were off. The cold glow of several high-end monitors fell across Bronie's face.
Her gray-white spiral twin tails swayed behind the chair back a couple of times.
Bronie wore noise-canceling headphones, her fingers striking the holographic keyboard so fast that only afterimages could be seen.
"Helping with the test?"
Elysia didn't push the door open. She just stood in the corridor and asked in a low voice.
The clatter of keys paused for a moment.
Bronie turned her head and popped the bubble in her mouth.
"Ah… yeah."
"Pass a message to that guy Su Yu for me," Elysia said, leaning against the doorframe. "He made me cry so many tears on the stream today, and we're not even close to square. When he's done and back, if he doesn't treat Miss Pink Elf to the most luxurious feast, he's dead meat!"
Having said that, Elysia didn't wait for Bronie's reply. She pulled the door handle and eased the door shut.
With the lock clicking closed, the corridor went quiet again.
Inside the room,
Bronie leaned back in her chair.
She looked at the tightly shut door and let out a long breath.
She'd thought that with Elysia's sharp social instincts and her refusal to let anything go until she got to the bottom of it, she would definitely have come in, and might even have asked to see for herself what this so-called "technical test" was really about.
But she hadn't said a word.
She had only tossed out a joke about wanting a big meal.
"She's been waiting for you to speak up, BOSS."
Bronie moved her gaze back to the rows of code matrices running wildly in front of her, building defense networks and data models, and murmured the words to herself.
"You really are a man weighed down with sin."
She turned to the footage of Su Yu on the screen. In the video transmitted by the man clad in the Key of Blankness, a massive Chariot was being run through by [White Dwarf].
The high-frequency vibrating dagger churned its silicon armor to pieces, and Su Yu's hand crushed its core with effortless ease.
"Kiana, the Zombies are yours. Rita, leave the regenerating Honkai Beasts to your scythe."
"Got it, got it!"
"Understood."
The rift clearing was proceeding in good order. This time the single rift that had opened in the Dome was spewing out far more enemies than before.
But it was obvious that Honkai Beasts and Zombies on this scale posed no threat to Su Yu's squad.
The battle went on for a full twenty minutes. From the moment Su Yu's three-person team entered the rift, Honkai Beasts and Zombies had poured out like a tide.
Some of them were genuinely troublesome, but with the three working in perfect sync, they were still mowed down like melons, flattened all the way through.
Even an Emperor-class Honkai Beast, up against the combat strength of two genuine S-rank Valkyries plus one near S-rank, was nothing more than a speed bump in a bigger costume.
Soon, the Honkai Beast purge inside the Dome was nearing its end.
The huge scythe in Rita's hands swept out a chilling arc of light, and the last Chariot's colossal body was cleanly cut in two.
The battlefield finally fell quiet.
Not far away, beside the ruined wreckage, Kiana, who had just put away her twin pistols, suddenly lost every drop of color from her face, staggered, and pitched stiffly forward.
In the next instant,
Su Yu was already rushing over.
When Kiana fell into his arms, her whole body was trembling in slight spasms, her fingers clutching his sleeve for dear life.
Su Yu's retinas were already flooded with a glaring blood-red light.
Row after row of bold red System text leaped frantically across his vision.
[Highest-level alert!]
[Detected: the "Herrscher of the Void Sirin" persona is undergoing deep self-severance!]
[Cause analysis: the target has actively cut her soul link, and her consciousness has fallen into a black hole of deep-seated trauma.]
[Irreversible countdown: 11 hours 59 minutes 59 seconds.]
[When the countdown ends, the secondary persona will be completely annihilated. Host Kiana Kaslana will inherit 100% of the Authority of the Herrscher of the Void with no side effects.]
The air around them, which had only just eased a little after the victory, dropped to freezing the instant those lines from the System appeared.
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