"It's fine — I already anticipated this."
The pose was utterly, disarmingly girlish: both arms held out in a soft, slightly splayed angle, Yue'er rose on the tips of her bare, luminous feet, her curled toes tracing light ripples in the void, the arch of her foot curved like the back of a kitten that had just sneaked a lick of honey.
Both Stelle and March 7th had any number of parallel-world isotopes — but a Super Warrior fused together via a pair of earrings? Across the Imaginary Tree's infinite timelines, there was only ever this one.
The butterfly hair ornament fluttered, scattering stardust. Flecks of broken light dusted the tip of her upturned nose, then rolled along with her head-tilting inspection of her outfit, tumbling into the dimple at her collarbone.
"Isn't this skirt a little over the top?"
She pinched the silver epiphyllum-thread trim of the off-shoulder white gauze between two slender fingers. The purple-pink hem bloomed outward as she spun, layers of silk billowing up, trailing clusters of pink-violet phantom butterflies in their wake.
"Even the leg ring has auto-sensing?"
The magic-circle leg ring on her right thigh sensed its master's mood, its patterns unfurling into the shape of a mimosa leaf curling closed.
"In this young lady's imagination, it was supposed to be a little more cool-looking, just saying."
Yue'er puffed out her cheeks in a small, muttered grumble.
"Wh— I don't know why it's different from the built-in outfit on the magic formal wear, but Master's current look is undeniably a magical girl!"
"It fits perfectly! Perfectly!"
It was like playing a dress-up game and having the plain standard-grade outfit you'd picked for your character suddenly transform into the five-star premium skin you'd need to pay real money for. The Magic Ruby had become some kind of twisted, obsessive entity, all six of its wings flapping back and forth in ecstatic frenzy.
"Master is already cute enough — no, she is simply the most adorable magical girl I have ever laid eyes on, bar none! Ahh, I am so fulfilled!"
"Thank you for the compliment~"
Yue'er strolled barefoot through the void, the ribbon at her hair tips moving without wind, catching playful drifting motes of light and coaxing them into a lopsided heart-shaped knot at the nape of her neck.
"GORGEOUS! To meet a Master this adorable — even death would be worth the price of admission!"
The cuteness meter inside the Magic Ruby was surging — skyrocketing — erupting through the roof!
"Ahem, ahem. Even without any parallel-world skills, it's no obstacle — Master has tremendous potential, you know! I can taste it in the mana — that is, the life force."
"Come now~ my adorable Master, use me quickly! I'm quite powerful, you know~!"
The Ruby's wings mimed a confident chest-thump. "With our combined power, given just a little time, we could bring an entire planet's Honkai collapse! Come — let's do whatever we please together!!!"
"Why would you use 'causing a planet's Honkai collapse' as a selling point?"
Yue'er suddenly had the nagging feeling that this wand was somewhat off from the Magic Ruby in Caelus-Seele's memories.
"Never mind the details! As the most adorable magical girl in history, Master must make every last human being on this entire planet kneel at the hem of your skirt! A life not filled with longing for — and adoration of — Master is a life devoid of meaning!"
"Yue'er knows she's cute and capable, but not quite to that degree~"
Sprightly and playful yet with an endearing, self-deprecating blush, Yue'er tapped a toe lightly on the void. The Kaleidoscope Staff collapsed and reformed in her palm, reshaping into a longbow sculpted from ice crystal, its limbs shimmering with aurora-like washes of pink and violet.
"Yue'er seems to recall it goes something like this~"
Lace gloves fading from white to galaxy-violet ran up past her wrist bones. The instant her fingertips brushed the bowstring, a dawn-bright ice-blue radiance came surging in from the horizon like the breaking of morning light, and an ice-blue arrow — dense with concentrated Imaginary energy — slowly took shape.
"——Shall we set a romantic mood~?"
The girl drew back and arched, the curve of her form a perfect crescent bow.
"Bloom!"
The moment she loosed the string, the ice-blue violet arrow split the vault of the sky.
When the arrowhead pierced the cloud layer it burst apart into ten thousand dreaming violet butterflies. The scale-dust shaking from their wings spread outward, crystallized, and covered every inch of sky within a hundred li — replacing it with a dome of luminous glass-blue.
Elysia doesn't have a chance to visit the Star Rail universe right now, so no need to worry about copyright issues~
"Yes! YES! That's it!"
The Magic Ruby entered some kind of fevered, rapturous state.
"Cuteness is justice!"
"So beautiful..."
Huo Huo stared up in a daze at the pink-violet butterflies beating their wings across the sky, and reached out to catch a single ice blossom that wasn't cold to the touch at all — as though she'd been dropped into a fairy-tale world.
"What the hell?! What's going on with that girl?"
Tail swore outright in its shock. Unlike Huo Huo, who was focused on the environmental changes, Tail's attention was locked entirely on the terrifying, world-overturning power the girl had just displayed.
This was absolutely nothing like a Heliobus fusion. A Heliobus fusion was two forces added together — but those two girls, after combining, had power that was at minimum multiplied.
This was genuinely, ridiculously absurd.
Tail the Great's entire worldview was beginning to fracture.
"That way, it won't be able to leave this space and run amok outside."
The butterflies didn't only scatter blue-violet ice crystals — they occasionally dropped Pom-Pom-shaped ice figurines, which landed on DanteMon and began gradually encasing it in ice.
"AAAAGH~!"
A shriek high-pitched enough to shatter glass — like Tiamat on the set of Fate — DanteMon's miasma-slime arms suddenly blazed with black-cyan spirit-fire, melting the ice layer away.
"Hei-shoo~!"
Yue'er drew and loosed, sending a blue-violet ice arrow flying.
"That casual shot should carry the power of an A-rank Noble Phantasm, you know~ But it can't be helped — the monster over there is no ordinary creature, so Master, keep raising your cuteness value and then use me at full power to bring Honkai upon the world!"
"Bringing Honkai upon the world isn't something a magical girl is supposed to do, is it?"
Yue'er shook her head.
This wand really was a little strange.
But given those absurd numerical buffs — even if it told her to transform into a tentacle monster, having Caelus-Seele as part of the fusion meant she could still use it!
Where DanteMon's blood-red claws shredded through them, the arrow clusters shattered into smaller arrows that continued to ricochet. The pink-violet butterflies replenished their energy. The ice-blossom dome overhead reflected the arrows back. It was like a child hurling a stone into a lake — every ripple that rose became a new weapon.
"Let's join in too, Caelus-cub."
Dazzled by the spectacular scene Yue'er had conjured, Stelle could barely wait to throw herself into the fight.
Caelus and Stelle exchanged a glance, reached out, and clasped hands. Their heartbeats fell into sync. Together they raised the Sun-Moon Brilliance Baton high and spoke in unison:
"COSMOS!"
The petal-shaped tip bloomed open, the core within blazing with brilliant light, and a flood of radiance swept the two of them up into a Möbius-ring of luminescence.
Under the wide-eyed, disbelieving stares of Xueyi, Huo Huo, Tail, and Fuyan —
Sun and Moon Brilliance. The Lunar Deity descends upon the world.
"Come then — the moment to count your sins has arrived!"
StelleGoss's clear, resolute voice rang out across the battlefield.
Caelus had been about to tease her with 'You've mixed up your lines again~', but since this transformation was Stelle's turn to take the spotlight, he let it go.
"Is that… a Giant of Light?"
Xueyi's position within the Ten-Lords Commission afforded her access to certain details of the battle at Scalegorge Waterscape — including the fact that the Express crew had transformed into a powerful, unknown life-form.
But Xueyi raised an eyebrow, her gaze moving over the giant now standing roughly 47 meters tall: its body blue as a base, silver lines for accent, a deep-blue color timer set into its chest.
"Why does this giant's appearance differ from the recorded description?"
Wasn't it supposed to be a red-and-silver giant, and a red-violet-silver tri-color giant? Why had it become blue-silver?
"And that… also appears to be an energy life-form!?"
Energy life-forms similar to Heliobus were not common across the galaxy — but not unheard of either. Fuyan had simply never seen a life-form shaped like this giant before.
As energy life-forms themselves, both Tail and Fuyan could sense the luminous energy pulsing within that towering body.
Fuyan had initially been planning to slip away in the chaos — but now…
It glanced left, glanced right. The entire space was blanketed in Yue'er's domain of violet-butterfly ice blossoms. There was no way out. Absolutely no way out. In the end, Fuyan drifted over to hover beside the Yue-Hiding Gourd at Huo Huo's waist.
Never, not once in its existence, had it yearned to be captured by a Judge as desperately as it did right now.
On the battlefield, DanteMon swung its miasma-purple-fire arms, generating rings of fire waves and shockwaves that sent the endlessly ricocheting arrows flying in all directions.
Then it turned toward Ultraman Goss. As it turned, its body gradually swelled in size, eventually locking at just over fifty meters.
In Digimon: Reboot, most Ultimate-level Digimon match that scale — Wargreymon, for instance, is more than ten times the size of the original, clocking in at around thirty-plus meters.
Under normal circumstances, DanteMon was already somewhat taller than Wargreymon — but having absorbed the vast majority of fragments from the great Heliobus Ignamar, it could even expand to several hundred meters. The trade-off was that the larger the body, the lower the defense.
"Hssssss~!"
That clown-like face. The purple tongue lolling out like a viper's. DanteMon raised its energy arm — now grown to eighty meters in length along with the rest of its body — and spread its palm wide. Miasma laced through dark energy, ignited by Heliobus spirit-fire, swelled into a dark-violet energy orb.
"Ahahahaha~!"
A sharp, glass-scraping cackle. DanteMon hurled the fifteen-meter-diameter energy orb directly at Goss.
"Hey, don't be so worked up — throwing hands the moment you disagree is no way to conduct yourself. Let's be reasonable here."
As though Goss's benevolent aura had seeped in just a little, Stelle — who moments ago had been itching to go all-out — suddenly spoke in a noticeably calmer tone.
StelleGoss raised both hands before her chest and deployed a Moonlight Barrier, blocking the incoming barrage of poisonous, corrosive violet flame rays.
"Be reasonable?"
Both Xueyi and Huo Huo froze in bafflement.
When did Stelle become so… measured?
"Yue'er."
Caelus-Goss called out quietly while gathering luminous energy in his right palm, releasing it as a ring-shaped net of light.
Goss Net — a binding technique with the effect of restraining the target's body and suppressing its movement.
"Understood~ Brother Caelus!"
Yue'er smiled brightly, and in the instant her bare foot shattered a patch of light on the ground, a six-pointed ice-blossom ripple burst open in the void. She drew the bow:
"Freeze! Karmic sins of causality!"
Six-Phased Ice arrows rained down from above.
With both of them applying crowd-control simultaneously, DanteMon was rendered completely immobile.
"You're called Huiyan, right? Listen to me for a moment — leave that body."
StelleGoss pushed her palm forward, releasing multicolored particles from within it.
Full Moon Beam — the signature technique of Luna Mode. It carries no destructive power. Instead, it is a ray of light capable of calming the hearts of berserk monsters and bringing them to a tranquil, docile state.
Strikes by the purifying beam, DanteMon went quiet for five full seconds.
On the sixth second, black flames erupted. The ice layer shattered. That mouth — split all the way to its ears — yawned wide, and energy fluctuations began to gather.
BOOM!
Wave upon wave of dark-violet explosive flames surged forward, forcing Stelle to abandon the Full Moon Beam and raise her barrier once more.
"Fine then! Looks like I'll have to switch to proper negotiation mode."
StelleGoss clenched her fist and thrust it high into the air. Behind her, a sun-disc-shaped halo of light materialized.
The blue-silver markings across Goss's body abruptly surged and churned into rushing rivers of red-gold fire. The soft lunar glow of Luna Mode burned away into blinding waves of flame — silver lines melting into magma-like textures, blue tones swallowed whole by crimson blazes, the crest on her brow erupting with radiance as fierce as the noonday sun.
Ultraman Goss — Corona Mode!
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