"Despicable human! Contemptible worm!"
Sirin's voice was so shrill it nearly tore the false sky apart.
She hung suspended in mid-air, her golden pupils trembling violently from pure, overwhelming rage — and from something else, something she refused to acknowledge even to herself. Fear.
"You think you can defy me?! You think you can defy a god?!"
The spatial rifts at her back yawned open and snapped shut in a frenzy. The Subspace Lances had multiplied several times over — a dense, bristling constellation floating in the air, every tip aimed at the man standing perfectly upright below.
Golden Honkai energy erupted like a tsunami.
In this moment, she abandoned all pretense of elegance. No more cat-and-mouse games inside this consciousness space.
She wanted one thing only — to erase the disgusting, smiling man before her. Completely. Utterly. Forever.
"You want to defile a god? You want to kill a god above your station? Fine..."
The expression on the Herrscher of the Void's face twisted into something almost deranged.
"I will make you taste ten thousand flavors of despairing death! I will mince your soul into pulp and see if you can still smile through it!"
The instant those words fell — the assault began.
It was methodical. Deliberate. A slow death drawn out with pure, gleeful malice.
The first wave: fire.
Purple Honkai energy flames ignited from thin air and swallowed Su Yu whole. His skin sizzled and hissed at the temperature, the stench of scorched flesh spreading through the air. Su Yu's body convulsed inside the inferno — but he didn't scream. He just fixed his gaze on Sirin floating above, and held it there.
The flames died. A charred husk collapsed.
One second later, Su Yu stepped out of the ashes, perfectly intact, and brushed imaginary dust from his shoulders.
Sirin's cheek gave a single twitch.
The second wave: blades.
Invisible spatial cutters worked like a meat grinder, shredding Su Yu's body into dozens of pieces. Blood and viscera splattered across the ground in a scene grotesque enough to turn the stomach.
The fragments writhed. They converged.
Su Yu appeared again — a shade paler than before, but his eyes just as calm.
Third wave. Fourth. Fifth...
Drowning. Freezing. Impalement. Crushing. Dissolution. Sirin exhausted nearly every cruel death she could conceive of.
Every single time, Su Yu died in the extremity of agony — and then, after a brief silence, materialized again, refreshed, as if rebooting from saved data.
His revival speed was even getting faster.
At the start, he'd needed a few seconds to "load." By the end, a new body was already solidifying the instant the previous one was destroyed.
Every death was brutal beyond measure. Every death sent what felt like a thousand red-hot blades dancing across every nerve.
But.
With every death, he was one step closer to Sirin.
With every revival, the smile on his face grew a little more deranged.
On the other side of the mirror.
Kiana was on her knees, both hands clawing at the one-way glass. Her fingernails had already torn back, her fingertips a bloody ruin — but she seemed to have lost all feeling for pain.
"Stop... please... I'm begging you... don't make him..."
Kiana had been drowning in despair at first.
Watching Su Yu die horribly in front of her, over and over — the agony of having her heart crushed and re-crushed made it almost impossible to breathe. She couldn't cry. She couldn't scream. She could only collapse against the glass like a wooden doll, driving her fingernails deep into her own palms until they left crescent-shaped wounds.
But gradually, something inside her began to shift.
Not pity. Not sorrow.
Rage.
A cold, all-consuming rage — cold enough to reduce even her to ash — surged upward from the very bottom of her heart.
"Why... why don't you care at all..."
She watched Su Yu get skewered by a Subspace Lance again. She watched his face, contorted in pain — and yet still wearing that mocking smirk.
Kiana murmured to herself. The tears kept falling. But something in her eyes was slowly, irrevocably changing.
"That's your life, Su Yu! That is your LIFE!"
The words tore silently through her.
"How can you... how can you throw it away so easily... over and over and over..."
The target of her fury blurred.
At Sirin — that cruel, monstrous thing stealing Su Yu's life, again and again.
And at Su Yu — that bastard. That lunatic. That absolute idiot who didn't value himself at all and just kept dying right in front of her.
"You're mine..."
A strange, unfamiliar thought burrowed into Kiana's mind.
"Su Yu... is mine..."
"You're my Reality Anchor... you're mine... YOU'RE MINE!!"
Behind the glass, Kiana's eyes changed.
The fear and grief that had flooded her drained away like a receding tide, replaced by something close to obsessive, feral possessiveness.
She stared at Sirin — at that Herrscher who kept killing Su Yu and kept flinching in shock each time he came back.
"Don't you dare... touch him again..."
The words were barely above a whisper, hoarse and raw.
"Herrscher of the Void... Sirin... you piece of trash!!"
Kiana lunged to her feet.
No more tears. No more trembling.
In those mismatched eyes, only two things remained — icy killing intent, and an obsession that bordered on something breaking apart inside her.
Kiana's fist slammed into the glass.
BANG!
A full-body blow, the kind that bordered on self-destruction.
"You want to take Su Yu?! You want to tear him away from me?!"
Bang! Bang! BANG!
One punch. Then another.
The sound of knuckle bones cracking was clear and crisp. Blood traced winding rivers down the glass — but Kiana didn't feel a thing.
"I won't allow it... I WON'T ALLOW IT!!"
"Let go of him! Get OUT! Don't you dare let your hands touch him! Don't! DON'T! DON'T——!!"
Kiana herself didn't even realize what was happening. Under the catalysis of that extreme grief and pain, something in the deepest part of her was breaking.
The fear of the Herrscher was being displaced by something older. Something rawer. Something more savage — the possessive need to protect, the primal, nearly bestial instinct that screams: anyone who touches what's mine will answer for it with their life.
Up in the ruins above.
Sirin, in the middle of her relentless barrage, lurched to a sudden stop.
She felt it.
A bone-deep, skin-crawling chill — and it wasn't coming from the unkillable lunatic in front of her. It was coming from... behind?
Sirin instinctively glanced back at the one-way glass.
Where K-423 — who should have been cowering in a corner, trembling and sobbing and begging for rescue — was instead staring back at her like a demon clawing its way out of hell, face drenched in blood.
Those eyes... were even more unhinged than Su Yu's.
"Wh... what?"
Sirin's pupils shrank to pinpoints.
That worthless girl... that Kiana who had always feared her own powerlessness... was resisting?
In her domain? In her consciousness space?
How was this possible?!
In that exact 0.01-second window while Sirin stood frozen —
A gust of wind detonated in her face.
"Eyes on me, Your Majesty!"
Su Yu's voice.
Sirin snapped her head around. Her vision was filled by a single image: a fist, expanding at extreme speed.
This time, she didn't teleport in time.
CRACK——!!
A deep, solid impact.
A clean, unembellished straight punch, holding nothing back — landed square on the Herrscher of the Void's exquisitely beautiful face.
"AAAAAH——!!"
Sirin let out a short, sharp cry of pain, her whole body sent tumbling backward through the air, rolling several times before she barely managed to stabilize herself.
She pressed her hand to her burning cheek and stared downward in pure disbelief.
Her Highness the noble Herrscher — had just been punched in the face by a mortal. With the most basic, unadorned straight right hand imaginable.
"You... you..."
Sirin pressed her hand over her nose in miserable shock. Blood seeped between her fingers — the first time she had bled in this dreamscape. The first time any mortal had humiliated her this way.
Su Yu rolled out his slightly-numb fist and stood there, looking up at her.
He was smiling.
The lunatic she had killed she didn't know how many times — the one whose very soul should have been ground into dust by now — was still smiling.
Brighter than before. Sharper. More feral.
Blood covered his face. His eyes burned like twin fires, terrifying in their brilliance — the look of a starving wolf that had finally clamped its jaws around its prey's throat.
"Come on then, Sirin!" Su Yu spread his arms wide and bellowed up at the Herrscher in the sky, his voice ringing with absolute provocation and wild, unhinged excitement. "Come on! Weren't you going to kill me? Weren't you going to torture me? Keep going!!"
"I'm right here! Everything that can't kill me only drives me closer to you!!"
Watching that lunatic charge straight at her again, Sirin finally, truly, unmistakably felt it.
Fear. Bottomless, vertiginous fear.
She had finally understood the truth.
In this dreamscape she had built with her own hands — in this consciousness space where true death had no dominion — Su Yu was simply, absolutely, an unkillable monster.
Every act of slaughter. Every exquisite torture. Far from breaking his will, it had only made this creature more unhinged.
She had, with her own hands, created an unbeatable enemy — and then locked herself in the same cage with it.
This was nothing short of shooting herself in the foot.
"Stay back! Stay BACK!!"
Sirin completely lost her composure.
She screamed, flailing her arms wildly, unleashing Subspace Lances like she had an infinite supply.
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
A scattered volley of lances ripped through the air in a panic and impaled Su Yu once again.
Su Yu dropped.
One second later.
Su Yu stood up — two meters away from her — his smile not having shifted by a single degree.
"As long as you can't kill me..." Su Yu dropped his voice to something low. That voice, like a devil's whisper in her ear: "I will chase you. All the way to the bottom of hell."
"AHHHH!!!!!"
The once-invincible Queen now shrank like a little girl whose nerve had shattered. With no plan and no dignity left, she hurled one final Subspace Lance — and turned to flee this nightmare.
Have to leave. Have to run. Have to get away from this man, she had to —
Thud.
Su Yu didn't dodge.
The lance punched clean through his abdomen. This time, he didn't so much as furrow his brow. With the weapon still lodged through him, as though the pain didn't exist, he took one stride forward — and closed the last distance between them in an instant.
A blood-soaked hand locked around Sirin's wrist like iron.
"Got you."
Su Yu grinned — a grin more savage than any demon's.
Sirin panicked and wrenched against his grip, trying to trigger a spatial transfer.
But Su Yu held too tight. The distance was too short. Her Authority stuttered for the briefest, most critical fraction of a second.
That 0.1 second of lag.
Su Yu reared his head back — and then, carrying every last ounce of his strength, every last shred of his madness, brought it down —
CLANG——!!
A headbutt. Full force. Straight onto Sirin's smooth, pristine forehead.
"AHH——!!"
Sirin screamed, head spinning, eyes blurring — tears blasting from her eyes on impact.
What kind of fighting style was this?! What kind of lunatic was he?!
"That one's for what you did to me on the rooftop!"
CLANG!
Again.
"That one's for frightening Kiana!"
CLANG!
"And this one — is for stomping on my chest!"
Su Yu seemed to feel no pain whatsoever — or perhaps he simply didn't care. He kept his grip on Sirin's wrist like a vice, giving her no room to escape, and brought his forehead crashing down again. And again. And again.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!!
Every impact wrenched another sob-laced shriek out of Sirin. Her magnificent gown was in tatters, her white hair splayed across her face, every trace of the imperious Queen she had been utterly erased.
She looked less like a god now and more like a cat pinned under a beast's paw, struggling uselessly to get free.
The Authority she prided herself on. The so-called "dignity of a god." In front of this lunatic, it was a joke.
"Let go of me! You madman! You savage!!" Sirin wailed, beating at Su Yu with her free hand — but in this dreamscape, even her strength seemed to be under some kind of suppression.
Or perhaps more accurately: Su Yu's presence and sheer force of will were so overwhelmingly intense right now that, inside this mind-driven mental space, he was not about to lose to a Herrscher who had been half-scared out of her wits.
Finally, after who knew how many impacts.
Sirin threw everything she had left into a savage kick to Su Yu's abdomen, simultaneously forcing her spatial transfer to activate, ripping herself out of Su Yu's iron grip — and blinking to open ground dozens of meters away.
Simultaneously, she sent a volley of Subspace Lances hammering into the area where Su Yu stood.
She pressed both hands over her bruised, bleeding, swollen forehead and gasped for breath in ragged, desperate heaves — her eyes wide and unsteady with lingering shock.
But this time, Su Yu didn't immediately revive.
Dead?
Actually dead?
Haah...
Sirin slumped to the ground, chest heaving.
Was it over?
Had that lunatic... finally... gone down for good?
She stared hard into the smoke and debris ahead, waiting for that nightmare of a silhouette to emerge again.
One second.
Two seconds.
Three seconds.
Su Yu did not appear.
"Ha... haha..."
Sirin let out a dry, hollow laugh.
Finally... she'd finally broken him.
Just as she'd always known — even a mortal's spirit had its limits.
"You nearly gave me a heart attack... a mere human..."
Sirin wiped the cold sweat from her forehead. She was just beginning to claw back a shred of dignity befitting a Herrscher — preparing to mock that reckless fool who'd had no idea what he was getting into —
Crack.
A sound — sharp and sudden, like shattering glass — rang out directly behind her.
Sirin's smile froze on her face.
That sound wasn't coming from in front of her.
It was coming from... the one-way glass that had been containing Kiana.
A chill shot from the soles of her feet straight to the crown of her skull.
That aura...
Frigid. Violent. Unhinged.
A full ten thousand times more terrifying than anything she'd felt radiating off that madman Su Yu.
Shaking like a rusted marionette, Sirin turned her head. Degree by agonizing degree.
The one-way glass that had kept inside and outside divided — the glass that had always held firm — was now covered entirely in a web of fractures, branching and spreading like cracks in ice.
And then.
CRASH——!!
The glass shattered completely.
Countless glittering shards danced through the firelight like confetti at a grand, terrible funeral.
And within that storm of falling crystal —
A white figure, radiating boundless killing intent, like a beast that had finally snapped its chains and burst from its cage to hunt — slowly raised her head.
Kiana Kaslana.
She walked across the carpet of shattered glass — one step, then another — advancing toward the Herrscher of the Void collapsed on the ground.
She carried no weapon in her hands. But those hands, soaked in blood, looked more lethal than any Subspace Lance.
Kiana did not look toward where Su Yu had vanished. She did not look at the ruined landscape around her.
She only stared — fixed, cold, merciless — directly at Sirin.
In those mismatched eyes, not a single spark of light remained.
Only endless, absolute darkness. Darkness deep enough to swallow a god whole.
And something else.
Killing intent. Pure as a blade. Cold as the void.
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