Chapter 194: The Omnipotent One
"Understood, Dr. Mobius."
Klein's voice carried from outside a moment before a second Klein stepped through the door and took her place beside Mobius.
But Mobius also caught the sounds drifting in from outside — two small gasps of surprise, the original Klein-puppet's startled reaction, and even the voice of yet another Klein.
"…The Herrscher of the Legion?"
Mobius raised an eyebrow, studying the Klein who had just walked in. Klein gave a docile nod.
"Yes, Dr. Mobius. I am the one and only Herrscher of the Legion — which means any Herrscher of the Legion is also, by extension, me."
"How interesting. So the Herrscher of the Legion can actually self-multiply?" The expression that was truly Mobius's — that insatiable curiosity — finally surfaced on her face.
"I can't say for certain." Klein had no particular reaction to Mobius's barely-contained research instincts. The Mobius from her own world had reacted exactly the same way upon discovering this. Since Klein there had been an isolated Herrscher of the Legion who had never demonstrated anything similar, it had remained nothing more than a curiosity.
"Well, I'll dig into that later." Mobius pulled her gaze away. Klein had just become considerably more useful — how lovely.
Sometimes, having a flexible set of principles really was a blessing. Once she'd learned certain things, the anxiety that had been wound tight inside Mobius simply… unwound, collapsing all at once.
Might as well toss her earlier worries out the window and just accept Klein's help without complaint.
As for the other world's Klein — who was not her Klein — Mobius had made her peace with that too. After all, strictly speaking, she wasn't truly the real Mobius either.
A mental-projection Mobius and a Klein from another world. Had a nice ring to it, didn't it?
"What does Dr. Mobius need?"
"Synthesize a test batch using this formula." Mobius tapped the chemical diagram on the screen. "Then hand the results to Irene and have her run a trial."
"Understood, Dr. Mobius." Klein nodded, spent a moment working through the instructions, and then crossed to the other side of the laboratory. Mobius turned back to the diagram before her and gave a satisfied nod.
What was displayed on that diagram was none other than the Honkai Resistance Enhancer that Irene had handed her some time ago. After all this time, she had finally reverse-engineered the entire process from start to finish.
Mass production was now essentially within reach. Barring any unforeseen complications, every stage of manufacturing could be handled — reverse engineering, it had to be said, was genuinely exhausting work.
But she had cracked it. All that was left was a live test run. The trouble was that this was a data space — everything still needed to be validated in the physical world to get truly accurate results.
So actual production was still necessary. It was just that until recently she had been too caught up second-guessing herself to find the time to run through the whole manufacturing process herself from scratch.
She absolutely would not admit that she had gone so long without doing this kind of basic synthesis work that her hands were slightly out of practice. Absolutely not. Not even a little.
What she wanted to look into now was whether she could leverage this breakthrough — if Honkai Resistance could be enhanced, there was no reason Honkai Adaptability couldn't follow.
Resistance and Adaptability might look similar on the surface, but in practice the gap between them was enormous — the raw materials alone might need to be swapped out entirely.
But what if? If she could actually pull it off, it would be an evolutionary leap for all of humanity. Far better than MEI's genetic inheritance approach — nobody even knew how many generations down the line that would still be producing Stigmata possessors.
For now, though, she still had no idea where to begin.
"Looks like things are going pretty well."
Just as Mobius was fully absorbed in her work, a familiar voice broke the silence from nearby. Mobius flinched, spinning sharply toward the doorway — and found herself looking at a head of deep blue hair. She frowned.
"Little Corruption?" Mobius wasn't quite sure, because ever since Elysia had discovered she could pull off that particular color palette, she had been swapping her look around every now and then.
"It's me~" Little Corruption hopped forward and gave an exaggerated nod, blinking at Mobius. "Ahh, I just happened to be passing by and thought things looked like they were going smoothly in here."
"Get out of here. Like I'd believe that." Mobius fixed Little Corruption with a flat look and rolled her eyes. This one and Elysia were definitely sharing a single brain between them.
There was no way this visit was a coincidence. She had come here on purpose — though that didn't necessarily mean she was up to anything. Knowing Elysia's thought process, she was probably just worried about the dynamic between Mobius and this Klein, or simply wanted to see how things were going — the same way she and Elysia had grabbed Mobius without a word the last time.
"Hehe." Little Corruption made an exaggeratedly cute face in an attempt to charm her way past the subject, then tilted her head up to look at the diagram. "Oh my, I didn't expect Dr. Mobius to have already figured it out!"
"Who did you think you were dealing with?" Mobius crossed her arms. She wasn't going to pretend the work had been simple — a reagent capable of enhancing Honkai Resistance was complex by any definition. Reverse-engineering something like that from scratch, without any knowledge of the manufacturing process? For anyone else, that would have been a flat-out impossible task. But she was Mobius.
So yes, it had been difficult. But she had done it.
"Mm, as expected of Mobius." Little Corruption nodded approvingly. "Even Anti-Entropy's two doctors only managed it by cheating — using the Herrscher of Reason's recreation ability to work backwards."
"Oh? The Herrscher of Reason?" Mobius raised an eyebrow, turned, picked up the tablet Klein had left for her earlier, and started searching for intelligence on Anti-Entropy and the Herrscher of Reason.
"Hm… now that's interesting. A Herrscher who sided with humanity right from the start — and managed to pass that down through generations. Tch, if it weren't for what Klein recorded, I honestly wouldn't have believed it."
The conditions of the Current Era truly were something else. The circumstances surrounding the Herrscher of Reason's birth and origin were enough to make Mobius uneasy just reading about them.
What did it even mean to be the Herrscher of Reason? It meant that from the moment of awakening, the Core had already absorbed an enormous repository of knowledge — representing the cutting edge of contemporary civilization's science and technology. The moment a Herrscher of Reason was born, she effectively understood all existing technology.
For the Herrscher of Reason, that was both her greatest strength and her central problem. Her Authority lay in understanding and recreation — and if a Herrscher of Reason was born already possessing comprehensive knowledge of all human technology at that moment...
It meant she could produce unlimited replicas of the most powerful weapons humanity had ever devised. She could potentially devise countermeasures against any weapon ever built.
That was a genuinely terrifying thing.
But fortunately, the people of the Current Era had also proven themselves more than capable. There might have been some outside assistance somewhere in that history — but if the Current Era's people hadn't had that capacity in themselves, all the help in the world wouldn't have mattered.
"Right," said Little Corruption with a nod. "They used the Herrscher of Reason's recreation ability to generate the compound, then worked backwards from the reconstruction process to approximate the synthesis method. That's exactly how those two doctors did it."
Of course, the Herrscher of Reason's recreation wasn't perfectly accurate — so what the two doctors had ultimately produced was a replica. Its efficacy had already been tested and wasn't particularly impressive, but it did work. The rest was just a matter of slowly optimizing the production process.
But nobody had expected Mobius to come through like this — grinding through every single step of the manufacturing process purely on her own. As expected of Mobius.
Those two doctors were far more at home with mechanical engineering anyway. Biology had always been slightly outside their wheelhouse — understandable, given that they were the ones who built Titans.
Different fields, different expertise.
"In any case, take a production batch and the synthesis workflow with you when you go. I'll hand a copy to Klein as well, so you can figure out how to set up a production line on your end — it should all fall within the capabilities of your technology."
"Don't worry, I have faith in them." Little Corruption nodded. "Speaking of those two doctors — I'd imagine they're with Vill-V right now. If they hear about this, they'll be thrilled."
Not that they'd have any complaints about someone having fully cracked what they'd spent so much effort producing a knockoff of — they'd understand exactly how significant this was, and they'd just be happy.
The only question was how Vill-V was going to handle the two doctors and Bronya.
— Helix Workshop —
"Ugh, when is this going to end?"
Tesla stared at the maze layout that had materialized before her yet again. Ever since that magician-like figure had shown up, they had been going around in circles in this place.
Well — not exactly going in circles. More like being dragged along as unwilling participants in an assortment of games: whack-a-mole, grand illusions, and claw machines, among other things.
To clarify: they were the moles getting whacked. The grand illusion involved making enemies disappear. And the claw machine was, naturally, trying to grab them — except this particular claw machine came equipped with a chainsaw.
The speed of every contraption was nothing special — even Chicken Nest Head had time to react — but being played with five or six times in a row? What was this nonsense?
"My, it seems our dear audience is growing a little impatient."
At that moment, the voice Tesla had come to find thoroughly irritating rang out again. Vill-V came strolling forward, top hat raised high, applauding them at a leisurely pace.
"My sincerest apologies — it seems my little tricks have lost their power to hold your interest."
"You finally showed yourself." Tesla crossed her arms and fixed Vill-V with a look. "So you've had your fill of games. Is this supposed to be some kind of test?"
Tesla's tone was far from pleasant after being jerked around for so long — not that Vill-V seemed to care in the slightest. That same grinning expression hadn't shifted an inch.
"Oh, dear audience, how could this possibly be called a test?" Vill-V looked at the three of them. "It was only a game. A game, nothing more — after all, you're Irene's friends."
If she had actually wanted to test them, would she have used something like that? There wasn't even a cannon. How could that possibly count as a test?
The mechanisms moved slowly enough that even Einstein — a pure researcher — had time to react. How could that be a test? After all, there was a Herrscher among them.
Naturally, there had still been some degree of danger — but at this level, if that Herrscher couldn't protect the others, then Vill-V figured it wouldn't much matter whether she showed up or not.
And in the course of the exercise, the Herrscher of Reason had performed fairly well — her synthesized weapons and countermeasures had come together with impressive speed.
From what Vill-V had observed, she was satisfied that without bringing out her real capabilities, she probably wouldn't be able to put any meaningful obstacle in the Herrscher of Reason's path. A highly educated Herrscher of Reason really was a handful to deal with.
"But in any case — congratulations, dear audience, on clearing the game. In recognition of your achievement, the magnificent Vill-V has decided to grant you your reward."
"In that case —" Einstein nudged Bronya with her elbow. "Bronya, show her that thing."
"Mm." Bronya closed her eyes and concentrated, mentally tracing through the weapon structure that the two doctors had drilled into her head over the past few days until she had it memorized cold. Slowly, in midair, a cannon barrel began to take shape, component by component assembling itself above them in a blue glow.
In that blue radiance, a rough and unfinished cannon gradually solidified into view before Vill-V.
"…Oh. The Moonlight Throne."
Vill-V's eyebrow arched upward as she watched the cannon take shape in the air. "What an unexpected trick."
Rough, sketchy — she could see that plenty was missing, the power system chief among them. It was essentially a scale model, a cosmetic stand-in. But it was unmistakably the Moonlight Throne.
"Come to think of it…" Vill-V's gaze lingered on the Moonlight Throne above. The bright, playful lilt in her voice faded into something heavier. "Was it a mistake, back then, to have turned the Herrscher of Reason's Core into the Void Archives?"
The Void Archives could mimic other Divine Keys — but at its core, it was imitation. Its output power was inferior to the genuine article.
And the remaining capacity had been crammed full by them — every piece of technology, every invention, every project they had ever created. To manage and safeguard all of those projects and technologies, to prevent them from falling into the hands of those who would use them against humanity, they had even installed Prometheus specifically to oversee it all.
But now, watching Bronya's demonstration, something stirred in her. Had they perhaps underestimated what the Herrscher of Reason's Core could have been used for?
If they had turned it into a weapons factory of some kind — would that have been better?
"…"
Bronya watched the aura around Vill-V deepen and shift. Given how this was going — this wasn't another split personality, was it?
Was dissociation really this common these days? Then again, Bronya recalled everything she had read in the records about the state of the Previous Era, and decided she could probably understand how it happened.
"Allow me to introduce myself." The figure before her lowered her gaze to Bronya. "You can call me the Expert. The one from just now, you can call her the Magician. Of course, if that's too much trouble, just calling her Vill-V works fine."
"Hello, the Expert." Bronya gave a nod. Another dissociated personality. As expected.
"As for what you came here for —" the Expert gave a nod of her own. "Follow me. I hope you can take everything away with you."
Vill-V had no intention of holding anything back. There was no point. Time was running short — they would see how much this child could absorb. They had once thrown countless Moonlight Thrones at the problem themselves.
Theoretically viable — but in practice, everything had depended on just how much Finality could endure. And reality, as ever, had been far less accommodating than hope. The Honkai had fought without honor and simply demolished the Mu continent.
That land had borne almost all of the Previous Era's heavy industry and technological production lines. Losing it was like a blade through the aorta — and both arms severed at the shoulder at the same time.
Which was why they had been forced to throw everything into MANTIS technology — the biologically integrated combat soldier program — and the technological output after that had grown sparse. There simply hadn't been anywhere left to produce it.
"The Moonlight Throne technology you need is, of course, included in all of that."
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