The next morning—kidnapping notwithstanding; no, the second morning after officially confirming the partnership with Griseo—
Su Yu stared at his phone screen, his expression so vivid it looked like he was watching Kiana fight Honkai beasts in real time.
On the screen was a progress update Griseo had just sent.
Dense lines covered the entire page. The character silhouettes were so crisp they looked like they might start moving in the next second. In the background, even the cherry trees at Chiba Academy had bark texture carefully sketched in.
Even the pacing of the panels was frighteningly seasoned—he didn't need to say a single extra word as the "client."
It looked at least seventy percent complete.
As Su Yu reviewed the draft, he realized Griseo's version of Three-Year Sakura wasn't quite the same as the depressing little short comic he remembered.
The kid had added a kind of filter—more beautiful, more ethereal, with an even sharper sense of fragility.
And the style was more exquisite, more tense, more pulling.
Asakura Miyuki's sickly brokenness was carved into the page with clinical precision—and Kiana's entrance was like a brutal, unreasonable beam of light, ripping apart the darkness around Miyuki by force.
But the most insane part was the ending adjustment.
Griseo moved Miyuki's confession scene beneath the cherry tree behind the hill.
Right at full bloom.
In a storm of petals, Miyuki offered a sachet packed with a girl's earnest feelings—was rejected—snapped.
And in the end, a cold gun barrel pressed to her forehead.
The frame froze at the moment Miyuki fell.
She lay in a sea of cherry blossoms, smiling.
There was no hatred in that smile—only a strange relief, like she'd finally been allowed to let go.
In the speech bubble, there was only one simple line:
"Happy birthday, Kiana."
What even is this?
This is… too good.
Su Yu felt his scalp prickle; goosebumps crawled up his arms.
This was absurd.
This was like grinding glass shards into powder… then mixing it into sugar and spoon-feeding it to people.
It wasn't that he didn't know Griseo could draw.
But the moment he saw a script he had written turned into a comic in someone else's hands, he finally understood it viscerally:
This kid was a genius.
"When did she even sleep?" Su Yu muttered, briefly suspecting he'd somehow time-traveled a month forward.
He clearly remembered sending the storyboard script yesterday evening.
It was only ten a.m. now.
Even subtracting time for food, sleep, and school, her actual drawing time could not have been more than six hours.
Six hours.
Twenty pages of line art.
Was that even human hand speed?
Was Griseo's true form secretly some tentacled monster?
"What's wrong?"
Kiana's voice came from beside him.
She was holding a cup of hot milk, leaning over to look at the phone.
Even though the 1.2-meter restriction still forced her to sit close to him, her posture was noticeably more natural than when she first arrived.
Su Yu handed her the phone.
Kiana took one look, and her pupils tightened.
"This is…"
"Griseo drew it by herself last night." Su Yu sounded helpless. "The line art's basically done."
Kiana stared at the panels, her expression turning complicated.
Back at St. Freya, she'd known classmates who loved drawing—people who could grind away at a single illustration until they'd earned a week's worth of dark circles.
But these…
The composition was precise, the lines smooth, and even the faint glimmer of light inside despair had been captured with uncanny accuracy.
Especially Miyuki—collapsed in the cherry blossoms—tragic and hauntingly beautiful, like a grand funeral.
Was this really something a kid under ten could produce?
"…Talent." Kiana returned the phone, her voice dry. "I guess that's what people mean by 'talent.'"
"Yeah." Su Yu pocketed the phone, smiling slightly. "Some people are born just to make ordinary humans despair."
The smile faded from his face as his fingers started typing, opening a new document.
"With Griseo on the comic, we don't need to worry about progress there—but we can't slack off on our mainline either."
Kiana's movement paused.
She knew what he meant.
Over the last two days, she'd told him bits and pieces about Chiba Academy—cafeteria menus, the wind on the rooftop, the oden at the convenience store…
Those ordinary fragments were being collected by Su Yu, filed into the game's material library.
Proof that her world had existed.
"Next," Su Yu's voice pulled her back, "is the Third Eruption."
Kiana's grip on her cup tightened.
The Third Eruption—where everything began, and where her fate became tangled with Mei's.
"…Yeah."
Her voice was so light it barely carried any emotion.
Kiana set the cup down on the coffee table, leaned back into the sofa, and looked out the window.
Morning sunlight was warm, casting bright patches across the floor.
The sunlight in this world was always like this—good enough to feel almost painful—nothing like the gray, screaming world in her memories.
She inhaled slowly. With the earlier retellings as a kind of groundwork, she didn't need as much mental preparation this time.
"I only found out later."
"Mei's father—Raiden Ryoma, the former CEO of ME Corp…"
"The reason he went to prison was because he was framed by Cocolia, another Anti-Entropy executor."
Su Yu didn't interrupt.
The room held only the soft tap-tap of his keyboard as he recorded each keyword.
Raiden Ryoma. ME Corp. Anti-Entropy. Cocolia.
He knew those names well—but hearing them from Kiana's mouth felt completely different.
"Cocolia treated Nagazora City as her laboratory."
Kiana's voice sank lower, her pace slowing.
"She implanted the Gem of Conquest… inside Mei."
She fell silent for a few seconds. Outside, a bird called—clear, distant.
"And then… the Third Eruption happened."
Her eyes stayed on the window, but Su Yu noticed her fingers unconsciously clutching the fabric of her pants.
"What was that day like?" Su Yu asked softly, his fingers hovering above the keys.
Kiana didn't answer right away.
The images rose in her mind.
The sky split open into a purple-black vortex, like a massive wound.
Honkai beasts poured out of the裂—tearing through the streets, swallowing screams and cries whole.
Explosions. Alarms. Monster roars—layered together into a single, choking wall of sound.
It was… the end of the world.
And she—
Standing in the rubble, gripping a blood-smeared baseball bat, watching a purple-haired girl wrapped in lightning, floating in midair with hollow eyes fixed on the sky.
"It was chaos."
She finally spoke, her voice hoarse.
"Dead ones everywhere. Honkai beasts everywhere. I didn't even know what was happening—I only knew I had to stay alive."
She paused.
"Then I saw Mei."
Su Yu's fingers froze above the keyboard.
"She was surrounded by lightning… suspended in the air." Kiana's voice went very quiet. "That was the first time I ever… saw a Herrscher."
....
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