The air was thick as congealed glue.
In Sirin's golden pupils, the reflection of a white-haired girl took shape.
"Ha.... hahahahaha!"
She braced her hands on her knees and pushed herself upright — even though that lunatic Su Yu had just spent the last eternity grinding her mental reserves into paste, even though she could tell something was very wrong with Kiana Kaslana.
But facing Kiana — facing this one, this perennial loser she'd already beaten a hundred times before — she fell into old habit. That imperious, looking-down-from-heaven posture settled over her like a second skin.
"Well, well. Look who finally slipped her leash." Sirin tilted her head. "What's the matter — come to avenge your little keeper? What a shame. He's dead. Actually dead this time, I'm afraid."
"By my own hands. Again. And again. And again...."
She let the last word drag out deliberately, drinking in the way Kiana's back went rigid, inch by inch.
"You know what? The last time he came back — when he looked at me, he was still smiling."
Sirin licked her lips, as if savoring something delicious.
"An absolute lunatic, through and through. But no matter — dead lunatics are quiet lunatics. And as for you——"
She stepped forward, extending one finger, leveling it lazily at the space between Kiana's brows from across the room.
"Look at yourself."
Sirin's voice was honeyed malice, every syllable pressed deliberately through the air.
"So what if you've broken free of your chains? You're still the one who killed Murata Himeko, K-423."
She let the pause breathe.
"Your teacher burned herself to nothing so you could live — she torched everything she had left. And you? You didn't even leave her ashes behind."
This was Sirin's sharpest blade.
Every single time — the moment that name came up, Kiana would crumple like a puppet with its spine cut out.
She'd seen it happen too many times to count.
Back in that other world, that name was the single greatest crack in Kiana's psychological fortifications. All you had to do was slide a finger into the gap and pry, gently——
But Kiana didn't stop.
She took another step forward.
Kiana's left eye was blue.
That was the color that belonged to her — sky blue, like the color Su Yu had first seen in the rainy corridor that day.
But right now, that eye held no tears. No self-reproach. None of the things Sirin recognized.
It held only one thing.
Killing intent.
Pure. Uncut. No other emotion mixed in — singular to the point of something almost pathological.
In that instant, a ridiculous thought surfaced in Sirin's mind: she was being watched by a beast that had already gone mad, a beast with only a single command left running in its head.
Kill you, kill you, kill you, kill you——!!
"...Did you not hear a word I just said?"
For the first time, an audible crack split Sirin's voice.
Something was wrong.
Kiana Kaslana.
She was supposed to be weeping. Supposed to be on her knees, begging forgiveness for her sins, being devoured alive by guilt.
"Himeko! You're the one who killed her! You're responsible for her death! You——"
Kiana moved.
No warning. No wind-up.
Her body released like a spring compressed to its absolute limit — she kicked off so hard that the floor of the consciousness space erupted into a spider-web of cracks beneath her feet.
White hair streaked out behind her like a smeared trail of light.
Fast.
Sirin's pupils slammed shut to pinpoints.
Instinct screamed at her to call on her Authority — to do what she'd done a thousand times before, skewer this insufferable insect through the air on a Subspace Lance.
The thought barely formed before a sluggishness welled up from somewhere deep in her mind — the aftershock of that endless massacre with Su Yu, mental exhaustion clinging to her like a parasite burrowed into the bone, shaving half a beat off her reaction time.
Just half a beat.
Kiana was already in her face.
Sirin could make out every line of tension in her expression, could smell the bitter scent of sweat and exertion rolling off her skin.
Then a palm cracked across her face.
SLAP——!
The sharp, bright sound detonated through the consciousness space.
Sirin's head snapped violently to one side. White hair whipped loose in every direction. Her cheek swelled to visible redness in real time.
It burned.
And woven through the pain was something else: shock, disbelief, and — humiliation.
She — the Herrscher of the Void, the Second Herrscher, Apostle of Honkai — had just been slapped across the face by a human being.
"You——!"
Sirin barely got the word out before Kiana's second strike arrived.
A fist, this time.
A fist clenched so tight the knuckles had gone white, carrying the full weight and momentum of Kiana's body, slamming squarely into Sirin's stomach.
"Ugh——!"
Sirin let out a strangled grunt, her body folding in half like a shrimp.
The punch turned her stomach inside out — no, a consciousness body couldn't actually vomit, but the blunt, breathless agony was absolutely real.
She stumbled backward, trying desperately to open up some distance — but Kiana gave her no such opening.
Kiana came at her like an enraged young lion.
She didn't use Gun Kata. She didn't use any technique at all. She threw every learned fighting style straight out the window.
What she used was the most street-level, most brutally graceless brawling style imaginable — wild swinging punches, both fists wheeling in wide arcs, raining down on Sirin's face, her chest, her shoulders in an absolute frenzy.
And all the while, she was forcing strangled, broken screams up from somewhere deep in her throat.
"Give him back! Give him back! Give Su Yu back to me——!!!"
Every punch carried her full body weight.
Sirin threw her arms up to block — uselessly. Her mental exhaustion had gutted her defenses.
Kiana's fists punched through her guard, cracked against her cheekbone, clipped the corner of her mouth.
It hurt.
Worse and worse with each exchange.
What Sirin found even more unbearable than the pain was the totality of the suppression.
Kiana didn't care about her taunts. Didn't care about her Herrscher status. Didn't even care whether Sirin might fight back.
Those mismatched eyes held only her — only the single thought: kill you.
That absolute, singular killing intent — that obsession distilled to its purest essence — formed a crushing, almost physical spiritual pressure that leaked backward, gnawing at the edges of Sirin's already-destabilized consciousness domain.
"Enough! You worthless little——!"
Sirin tried to retaliate. A dim flicker of golden light condensed at her fingertips.
Kiana headbutted her.
Same move. Same savagely primitive method.
THUD.
Forehead against forehead.
Sirin saw stars, and that fragile bead of Honkai energy she'd barely gathered scattered into nothing.
A red welt bloomed on Kiana's forehead too — but she didn't even twitch her brow. She seized the split-second of Sirin's daze, grabbed her by the collar——
And yanked. And swept.
Sirin felt the world lurch out from under her, the ground and sky trading places.
Her back hit the cold floor of the consciousness space with a bone-shaking crash, every organ rattling in her chest.
She hadn't even caught her breath before a weight came down on top of her.
Kiana had mounted her.
Sitting on her waist. Looking down.
The white-haired girl was panting hard, damp strands of hair plastered to her face with sweat, those dark-soaked eyes locked onto Sirin below her with absolute fixation.
She raised her fist. Paused for one breath.
Sirin lay on her back, looking up at the girl sitting astride her.
From this angle, she could see every line of tension in Kiana's jaw. Could see the veins standing out on her neck from the force she was holding herself at.
And she could see — in Kiana's left eye, the blue one that had always held some trace of innocence or stubborn defiance — what was rolling through it now, something Sirin had never seen before.
A madness that edged on annihilation.
And... a grief that had no bottom.
Sirin opened her mouth. She wanted to say something.
Wanted to mock her weakness. Wanted to tell her this was fate. Wanted to say that she was the true master of this body.
Every word jammed in her throat.
Because Kiana's fist came down.
It landed on Sirin's shoulder, her chest — and finally, her face.
Sirin turned her head, trying to dodge.
Kiana's free hand shot out, grabbed her by the jaw, and forced her back to face forward — and kept hitting.
Sirin tried, again, to gather her power. The mental exhaustion and the battering ram of Kiana's unreasonable, unstoppable will made every attempt futile.
She was a Herrscher. A god. A being that transcended all of humanity!
How could she be... by a human... in this... this street-brawler style... being sat on and beaten?
The sensation of a fist connecting with her face. Burning.
A smell like iron crept into her sinuses.
Her vision was blurring. In her ears — the muffled, broken, gasping sobs Kiana couldn't suppress, and the dull rhythm of knuckles against flesh.
Fear.
Cold. Unfamiliar. That emotion finally bored through the crust of rage and humiliation and seeped into the deepest layers of Sirin's consciousness.
She had never experienced this — this comprehensive, utterly helpless, dragged-off-her-pedestal-and-ground-into-the-mud terror.
This Kiana was nothing like the one she knew — the one who always flinched away from guilt, always ran from herself.
And she was nothing like that insane, unkillable, smiling-through-agony Su Yu from before, either.
She was... something more dangerous.
A beast that, when driven to the very edge of the abyss, chose to burn herself alongside everything else.
A rabid, unhinged wreck who was more deranged than that lunatic — who intended to drag Sirin down with her into the wreckage.
"I am — a Herrscher! I am a god! You — you stupid——mmpph!"
The second half of Sirin's sentence, along with half a front tooth, went flying.
The virtual tooth traced a neat parabola through the air, landed three meters away, bounced twice, and was still.
Kiana didn't look at the tooth.
Her eyes had been fixed on Sirin's face from the very beginning.
That face that had once been the thing Kiana feared most in the world.
Those golden eyes that had loomed over her in countless nightmares, peeling her soul back layer by layer with the most vicious words imaginable.
"You're a murderer."
"Himeko died because of you."
"Mei was hurt because of you."
"Every misfortune in this world — it's all because of you——"
The Kiana of before would have believed it.
Would have sunk to her knees, wrapped her arms around her own head, and sobbed until she couldn't breathe — it's my fault, it's all my fault.
But now——
Right now——
There was only one image in her mind.
Su Yu being killed.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Ten times.
Thirty times.
Skewered through the heart by a Subspace Lance.
Shredded into fragments by spatial rifts.
Compressed by a gravity field until he was flat as paper.
He fell. He got up. He was killed again. He appeared again——
And then he smiled again.
Was killed again.
Got up again.
Smiled.
Again——
The last time, he didn't get up.
Kiana couldn't remember how she'd broken free of the restraints.
She only remembered that something in her chest had split open — like someone had taken a razor-sharp blade and was twisting it in the wound, over and over.
What poured out from that crack wasn't blood. It was something scalding, viscous, and completely beyond her control.
That thing was called——
"Give him back."
Kiana's lips moved. Her eyes stared straight at Sirin's face, pupils unfocused.
As if she wasn't speaking to Sirin at all.
As if she was only confirming something to herself.
Su Yu is still here.
Su Yu has to still be here.
So the thing in front of her — the thing that killed Su Yu — has to die.
The logic was exactly that simple.
"I am a Herrscher! I am——"
A punch landed squarely on the bridge of her nose.
Sirin's voice cut off dead, replaced by a choked grunt.
Blood ran from her nostrils, sliding toward her lips, thick with the taste of iron.
"Give Su Yu back to me———"
Another punch.
Sirin's head wrenched to the side again, loose strands of hair plastered to a cheek wet with tears and blood.
She opened her mouth, trying to speak — but the next punch was already there, catching the corner of her mouth, driving her unfinished curse and a mist of blood back down her throat.
The consciousness space trembled.
The very laws of this space were being battered by the force of Kiana's will.
Cracks split the sky. The floor began to fracture. The Honkai remnants Sirin had so meticulously constructed peeled away in sheets, like old wallpaper being ripped down.
Her kingdom was collapsing.
"Enough!"
Sirin poured every scrap of strength she had left into a scream that came out closer to a shriek.
Kiana's fist didn't stop.
"I said enough! Do you hear me! Eno——"
A punch crashed into her temple.
Sirin's vision lurched violently, then went dim for half a second.
When the world swam back into focus, she saw Kiana's fist rising again.
She was afraid.
Not of the pain.
Pain could be endured. A Herrscher's mental body could repair itself.
She was afraid of Kiana's eyes.
Those eyes that did not see her.
From beginning to end, Kiana had never looked at her.
Kiana was looking at "the thing that killed Su Yu."
Not "the Herrscher of the Void."
Not "Sirin."
Not "the Second Herrscher who once made the world tremble at her name."
Just — something that needed to be hit.
An obstacle standing between her and Su Yu.
Nothing more.
That realization hurt more than any of the punches.
"...You."
Sirin's voice crumbled into pieces.
Her lips were shaking.
She understood something, in that moment.
Once, Kiana had feared her.
Hated her.
Confronted her.
Collapsed weeping at her feet.
Every one of those reactions — fear, fury, it didn't matter which — had proven one thing: that Kiana had regarded her as something significant.
An enemy worth fighting. A god worth fearing.
But now.
Kiana was just hitting her.
Without feeling. Without meaning. Without even the concept of her as "the Second Herrscher" — as the nightmare-demon who had haunted Kiana's mind — surviving anywhere in that head.
Herrscher of the Void. Sirin.
She had lost even the right to be hated.
"Wuuu....."
She wanted to curse.
But her lips were too swollen to form words properly.
What came out was a mumbled, half-formed gurgle — less like an insult, more like a pout.
The realization made Sirin's collapse complete.
That last fragment of a Herrscher's pride was torn to shreds by the absurdity of it all. She couldn't hold on anymore.
Tears welled up from those golden pupils and spilled over.
Fat drops rolled down her battered, swollen cheeks and dripped onto the cracked floor below.
Her shoulders shook. Her teeth chattered. Broken, hitching sobs crawled up her throat.
Like a little girl who'd been bullied.
"Stop hitting me... wuu... stop... please..."
Her long hair lay tangled across the ground, caked with dust.
The magnificent gown that symbolized a Herrscher's Authority was crumpled, torn in several places.
Her Majesty, the Queen who had once reigned above all things, was now pinned in the mud of someone else's consciousness, being baptized in the most primitive violence imaginable.
The tear-streaked, bloodied face held no trace of a god's dignity.
Only tears and blood, a strand of disheveled hair clinging to her chin, and lips trembling in small, helpless twitches.
____
________________________________________
If you want more chapters, please consider supporting my page on (P). with 50 advanced chapters available on (P)
👻 Join the crew by searching Leanzin on (P). You know the spot! 😉