The ship's engines coughed and shuddered, belching black smoke into the cratered sky.
Kevin checked the final seals.
Hua gave a small, almost imperceptible nod.
The time had come.
Kevin turned towards Vill-V and Mobius one last time. His gaze passed over them – the last echoes of a dream that had once tried to save the world.
Vill-V flashed him a smirk, throwing up two fingers in a sharp, mocking salute. "Go on, Cold Boy," her voice dropping low enough only they and the broken Moon could hear.
"Get out of here before I start crying."
Kevin didn't smile.
But he nodded – once, deep, almost a bow – then turned away. Hua followed, pausing just once to glance back, her gaze heavy with all the words she'd never say.
The ramp clanged shut. The ship rose, screaming against the Moon's weak, decaying pull, dragging itself skyward towards Earth.
They watched it climb – battered, slow – until it was nothing but a fading speck against the black.
Vill-V remained frozen, hand still raised mid-salute. When she finally dropped it, it felt like letting go of a lifeline she hadn't realized she was gripping.
The ground trembled beneath them – faint, distant. Above, the immobilised Herrscher stirred ever so slightly. They had only ten hours. Maybe less.
No time for regrets now.
Mobius turned first, walking back toward the skeletal remains of a wrecked transport. Vill-V lingered. Watched her go. Then stumbled – just a little.
The exhaustion slipped through her posture like a crack in her foundation.
She crouched, elbows on her knees, head tipped back towards the endless void.
Memories stirred – flickers of lives burned out too soon.
Elysia, laughing as she danced around a vivid Vill-V during a failed machine trial. Smile decreasing the tension around the room.
Sakura, quiet and solemn, once resting a hand on Vill-V's shoulder – no lecture, just stillness and understanding.
Kalpas, roaring with rage after one of Vill-V's gadgets exploded in his hand – Vill-V ducking, grinning, as flames flooding the room.
Kosma, awkward, careful, lifting a too-heavy crate as if it was made of glass.
Pardofelis, darting in – with Can as a distraction - and stealing a screwdriver while demanding snacks as ransom, tail flicking.
Gone.
Gone.
Gone.
Vill-V dragged a hand through her hair, a bit too roughly.
"Fools," she muttered – a bitter chuckle catching in her throat. "But I wouldn't have had it any other way."
She stood - not quite gracefully – and shook herself off like a magician clearing stage dust before the final act.
Mobius waited, half shrouded in lunar shadow, stance guarded, but her eyes shimmered with something... not cold.
Vill-V sauntered towards her, twirling once before stopping, hands on hips. "So, Doctor," she called out, pitch rising,
"Any final experiments you're dying to squeeze in?"
Mobius's mouth shifted, not quite a smile, but not flat either. "Nothing that'll change the outcome."
"Ahah! That's the spirit!" Vill-V grinned, flinging her arms out wide like a showgirl taking centre stage. "Come on. We've got preparations to make, fireworks to build, and nine hours left to make it all unforgettable".
Mobius followed without a word. Their shadows merged in the dust as they stepped into the remains of Earth's Moon Colony.
The facility's ruined halls stretched ahead of them – jagged and scorched, walls split like glass under stress.
Each step echoed differently now. Not just silence, but stillness. Not even echoes wanted to linger her anymore. They passed through a collapsed corridor where a once-sinning centrifuge had torn itself free from its housing. Beneath it, something caught Vill-V's eye.
A glint. Not metal.
She slowed. Then stopped. Mobius noticed her change in pace and turned just enough to track her from the corner of her eye.
Vill-V crouched down. Beneath a fractured slab of shielding, a splintered formation of Honkai crystals glowed faintly – like embers buried in ash. Dozens of jagged fragments. Pulsing with Honkai energy. Her smile was sharp. Almost too sharp. "Well, well. The girl left us a few pieces of herself after all."
Mobius stepped closer, gaze narrowing. "Residual compression," she stated flatly. "It seems the scattered remains of her energy solidified. The radiation here would've annihilated any organic material–except.. "
"Except these," Vill-V finished, fingers lightly stroking the crystalline cluster, feeling their subtle vibration. "Concentrated Honkai in its purest form. It's output is immense, dormant but extremely volatile."
She tapped her temple. "We don't have long, but we should be able to work with this."
They soon pressed deeper into the base. Halfway down a collapsed maintenance shaft, they found a damaged drone lab – half buried in debris, but mostly intact.
Light flickered weakly from emergency backup cells.
Vill-V entered first, humming tunelessly to herself – tossing and catching the crystal as she approached the nearest operational console. Its screen struggled to respond - its code snarling at her touch.
She scoffed. "Honestly. Who coded this? These scripts are atrocious! Some of the worst I've seen."
Mobius raised a brow. "That's saying something."
Vill-V grinned, fingers flying. Her gloves left smears on the cracked glass as she peeled back layer of security and rerouted the core logic. A battered collection drone powered up in the corner – squat, legless, shaped like an inverted beetle with a broken camera feed and cracked manipulator arms.
She slapped the side of it. "Come on, little one. One last adventure."
The drone chirped. Its light flickered. Then stabilised.
She popped open the back chassis and began rerouting the internal containment core.
Mobius watched, her arms folded, "You're going to overload it."
"Not if I give it purpose. It doesn't need to last." Vill-V reconfigured its storage array, holding the Honkai crystal for its scanners to sync with.
She paused only once – staring at the crystals, her gaze unfocused – then kept going. Finally, she sealed it shut.
"There. One crystal vacuum, now officially certified for unstable divine leftovers."
She gave it a playful pat, and it zipped off, wobbling unsteady, but operational.
Mobius made her way to the side of the room where part of the floor had collapsed, revealing deeper storage vaults.
"If we had more time-" she began.
"We'd still be too late," Vill-V cut in, following behind her.
"But we're not aiming to win. Just make the final show too loud to ignore."
She tapped a control pad on the wall, watching the drone's scanner sweep the room with dull red light.
"How long do you think she'll stay asleep?"
Mobius's response was immediate. "Eight hours. Nine at most. Kevin's stunt bought time, but the margin of error of an hour isn't preferable."
Vill-V gazed at the Honkai fragment in her grasp. "So we turn her shedding's into a power source."
Mobius frowned. "That much raw energy would destabilize any standard frame. Even a MANTIS wouldn't be able to wield it safely."
Vill-V didn't respond immediately. She crossed to a damaged schematic table and pulled up a damaged projection – the original blueprints she used to create the 2nd Divine Key: Cosmic Juggernaut. A tool that allows observation of the Imaginary Tree and interaction with bubble universes.
She traced a fingertip across the flickering render, her expression that of contemplation. "Bubble universes. Unstable structures born in the shadow of the Imaginary Tree. In theory, they can act as batteries and catalysts."
Her eyes narrowed, thoughts snapping into focus as the 'The Expert' took over. "Imagine the detonation chain: violently decompressing compressed Honkai energy as a trigger – refined to force the collapse of a bubble universe – the immense outburst of energy released in that instant, detonates within a localized frame-space. One shot. One singularity. No recovery."
Mobius leans forward, scanning the corrupted schematics. She didn't just yet.
Vill-V flicked her wrist, calling up overlapping projection from archived field notes.
Most of them were her own.
"Cosmic Juggernaut wasn't a weapon," she said, pacing "It was a key, abusing the 2nd Herrscher's ability to control and bend the imaginary space. A pathway to observe and touch realities that shouldn't really exist. But... what if it was inverted?"
She snapped her fingers. The display adjusted – a core node at the centre of rotating helix array. "Not a key. A needle."
Mobius finally spoke, her voice low. "You want to collapse a bubble universe into a pinprick and drive it into the Herrscher."
"Precisely," Vill-V confirmed, gesturing with flair. "Cosmic Juggernaut can reach the Imaginary Tree without breaking the connection because it contains the core of the 2nd Herrscher - this is forcing an unstable connection. A spear made from a paradox. A localised paradox. She can't regenerate what was never meant to exist."
Mobius was silent for a moment. Then: "It could work." Vill-V turned to her, eyes gleaming with an almost deranged excitement.
"Could? Oh, Doctor. It will work."
The drone returned with a low hum, its internal storage bay now glowing faintly – fragments of the Herrscher's power sealed within.
Vill-V opened the side of the collapsed schematic table, revealing an embedded fabrication tray. "We'll need to imprint the container with a stabilizing field. I can model a cage–"
"It won't hold," Mobius interrupted. "The decay rate will be too rapid."
Vill-V's expression, however, didn't falter. "Then we let it decay. A controlled collapse." She began feeding calculations and parameters into the console – projections unfolded in jagged arcs, barely stable. Mobius leaned in, inputting code of her own – clean, tighter, wrapping Vill-V's unstable loops with precision tolerances.
They worked without speaking for several minutes – the hum of dying machinery and the distant rumble of lunar tremors the only sounds.
"We'll need a focusing array," Mobius said, tapping her display. "Something to channel the moment of collapse into a directed vector."
"Already ahead of you," Vil-V pipes up. "The trigger's already directional. I'm building the core like a prism – it fractures the instability and launches it like a lance."
She spun the projections again – the outer shell of the weapon taking form. Something long and sleek, with a hollowed-out barrel like the throat of a black hole.
Mobius observed it quietly, noticing some familiarities. "You're modelling after Selene's cannon." Vill-V grinned, not denying it.
"Inspired by it. But this isn't a beam. It's a question." She tapped the centre of the design, highlighting the payload chamber. "It'll force an impossible contradiction – energy that shouldn't exist in a space that can't contain it."
She took a moment for that implications to sink in. "One round. A singular paradox. Fired straight into the heart of a god."
Mobius tilted her head slightly. "It'll destroy itself."
"Of course. That's the point." Vill-V's voice dropped, more serious now.
"Everything collapses – the launcher, the projectile, the field around the detonation, and everything within ground zero of contact. We don't survive this."
Mobius looked back at the drone, still humming quietly in the corner. "And if we don't finish it in time?"
"Then we improvise."
They quickly moved to the fabrication bench. It sparked to life with a reluctant wheeze. Vill-V began assembling the casing – long, narrow, strange. Not quite a rifle. Not quite a cannon. Mobius meanwhile, crafted the containment spike – a needle of an obsidian-coloured soulium alloy, interwoven with Honkai-charged graphene filaments.
At the weapon's heart they placed a stabilized bubble core – drawn from leftover Comic Juggernaut field data and interlaced with resonance from the crystals.
It pulsed once – not with light, but with absence. Like something in the room had been unmade and stitched back wrong.
Mobius stepped back. "We name it?"
Vill-V didn't hesitate. "Yes." She looked at it – at her final act of creation.
"Let's call it... The Penrose Lance."
Mobius blinked. Curious. "After the staircase that loops forever?"
"Yes. And After the lie that pretends it doesn't."
The newly named Penrose Lance sat in the centre of the lab.
Primed. Cold. Seemingly alive in all the wrong ways. "It's ready."
Mobius nodded. "We test it?"
Vill-V looked towards the open corridor – towards the lunar wasteland where the Herrscher's form started to tremble. "We won't get the chance."
Vill-V picked up the Lance, its weight unfamiliar – too heavy and too light, all at once. "Come on, Doctor, only an hour remains."
She slung it over her shoulder. The final prop for her grand finale. "Let's see if a paradox burns brighter than Finality."