Su Yu woke again.
How many times now — he'd lost count. Maybe the seventeenth. Maybe the forty-third. Maybe the hundred and eighth.
Anyone who claims you get used to dying is a liar.
That agony — every nerve shredded, every cell screaming annihilation — had been seared into Su Yu's soul with perfect, merciless clarity. Close your eyes: hell. Open them: still hell.
He felt like a man walking a tightrope stretched over an infinite abyss, his sanity a wobbling balance pole in his hands — and every death snapped off another piece of it.
"Come on then... Sirin..."
He was pulling his consciousness back together in the dark, bracing for the next round. The twisted smile hadn't fully faded from his lips before the killing intent was already boiling back to the surface.
But this time, the moment his fingers brushed that frozen air, the world ahead of him flickered — like a dying old television set.
The burning ruins, the shrieking of Honkai Beasts, Sirin's contorted face — all of it receded like a tide pulling out, and in a single instant was gone.
In its place: a soft, inconceivably gentle white light.
This force wasn't overbearing. It was like a gentle hand, quietly cradling Su Yu's consciousness just as it tipped toward the abyss, holding the jagged edges of his pain at bay.
"...?"
Su Yu opened his eyes, disoriented.
No blood. No fire. Only a stillness so absolute it made his chest ache.
"Calm down."
The voice was soft, with a texture like a mountain spring — it doused the wild, snarling fire still smoldering in his chest in an instant.
"Your mental state is critical. Keep going like this, and you'll break before the Herrscher does."
Su Yu turned around.
In that expanse of pure white void, a figure stood waiting.
She wore ancient-style robes in blazing red, the hem drifting like burning feathers. Her long hair was tied back, a few flame-colored streaks catching the white light with vivid brilliance.
Her face was cool and familiar — yet it carried a depth of quiet, weathered calm he had never once seen on the part-time convenience store girl he knew in the waking world.
Su Yu faltered. The word left his mouth before he thought about it: "Ah Hua...?"
No.
He shook his still-throbbing head. That wasn't the Fu Hua he knew.
This weight she carried — as though she had walked out of fifty thousand years of history and dust — belonged only to the real one. The true Immortal.
"You're... Su Yu, right?"
She didn't carry herself with any immortal airs. Her tone was measured, even, with a note of something almost apologetic.
"As you can see — I am Fu Hua. Although... perhaps not the one you met at the convenience store."
Su Yu didn't answer.
His lips moved slightly — reaching for something to say, probably I know or hello or some other useless filler.
But all that came out of his throat was a vague, blurred exhale.
The last dregs of the madness still hadn't fully drained from his body — like puddles left stranded on a beach after the tide goes out. Shallow, but still slippery underfoot.
Fenghuang didn't rush him.
She simply stood there, and waited.
About ten seconds passed.
Su Yu's fingers stopped trembling.
He lifted his head and looked at Fenghuang. The clouded fog behind his eyes was slowly, steadily clearing.
He took a breath. His stalled thoughts began to turn again.
If Kiana had transmigrated here, then Yu Ducheng — who had always been residing within her — would naturally have come along for the ride.
"So you've been here all along. I assumed that without Honkai energy, you might have already..."
"Indeed."
Fenghuang gave a small nod. Her form in the white light looked slightly translucent, as though she might dissolve at any moment.
"In this world, Yu Ducheng lost her energy source. I have been in a state of deep sleep — unable to manifest, unable even to transmit my voice to Kiana. That much was beyond me."
She paused, her gaze sweeping toward the edges of this space.
"But today... the Herrscher of the Void, in her effort to torment you, forcibly constructed this consciousness space. The realm of consciousness is Yu Ducheng's domain. Her power became, in the end, the very catalyst that woke me."
Fenghuang drew a slow, deep breath. For the first time, a ripple of something crossed those composed eyes.
"Su Yu. I have been watching."
"Though I could not intervene — I have seen everything since Kiana arrived in this world. Your meeting. What you did for her." A brief pause. "To be honest, I find myself both astonished and shaken."
A peaceful world with no Honkai energy.
An ordinary person with no power whatsoever, willing to die for a Herrscher.
All of it lay well beyond what this veteran warrior of a prior civilization could have imagined.
"I would very much like to speak with you properly about this world — about your plan." Fenghuang let out a quiet breath, and her tone shifted, sharpening. "But right now is not the time for conversation."
She raised one hand. A fingertip brushed the void.
The white mist parted instantly.
"Look."
Su Yu followed her direction — and his pupils snapped tight.
Beyond the mist: the ruins from before.
But the figure he saw was not the imperious Herrscher of the Void. It was a girl who felt both achingly familiar and heartbreakingly wrong.
Kiana.
She was sitting astride Sirin.
Sirin's face was no longer recognizable.
Her left eye had swollen to a slit. Blood from her nose smeared half her face. A split opened the corner of her mouth. Her silver-grey hair, matted with dried blood, clung to the ground beneath her.
She was crying.
The Herrscher of the Void was crying.
Su Yu stared at the scene, motionless.
He could hear a voice.
"Give Su Yu back to me."
Kiana's voice.
Not loud. You could even call it quiet.
But the quiet wasn't from lack of strength. It was because the person speaking had no more need of volume to express anything.
Her cadence was flat as a flatline — no rise, no fall, no emphasis anywhere. Like someone reciting a line they had repeated ten thousand times until it was worn smooth.
A fist came down.
Sirin's body convulsed. A strangled, muffled sob escaped her.
"Give Su Yu back to me."
Another punch.
Su Yu's throat moved.
The Kiana in the vision lifted her head.
No expression on her face. Her mismatched eyes were wide open, pupils contracted to two pinpoints, the whites threaded through with broken veins.
She looked—
Not human.
More like a machine set to run a single command.
Su Yu's lips parted slightly.
Fenghuang's voice came from beside him.
"She's been watching the whole time."
Su Yu turned his head.
Fenghuang's expression hadn't changed, but her words came slightly slower than before.
"From the moment you were pulled into this space. The first time you were killed. The second. The third." She paused. "Sirin set up a one-way mirror. Kiana could see you. You could not see her. She couldn't call out. She couldn't move."
Fenghuang stopped.
"Do you know what it does to a person — to be forced to watch someone important to them die, over and over again?"
Su Yu didn't answer.
He knew.
He'd seen the trope countless times in the entertainment of his previous life. But between seeing and living through lay an uncrossable line.
Kiana had lived through it.
"Fear reaches a threshold."
"Once it crosses that line, it doesn't disappear. It transforms into something else."
Kiana drove another punch down.
Sirin let out a wail, pitched and broken.
"Look at her eyes."
Su Yu looked.
There was no anger in Kiana's eyes.
No hatred.
Even the killing intent had faded — at least, not the kind that fits inside any human definition of killing intent.
What remained was something older. More primal.
Like a beast kept too long in a cage. When the door finally opens, it doesn't charge out because it has somewhere to go. It charges because being caged has burned away every last faculty it had. All thinking — gone.
Only one drive left: tear apart everything standing in front of it.
Crash into something, bite it.
Until it collapses too.
"This can't continue."
"That isn't fighting. That's something else entirely."
Fenghuang moved to stand beside Su Yu.
The two of them stood side by side, watching together as that white figure swung her fists without rest, without fatigue, without end.
"This can't continue." Fenghuang's voice was iron. "She is walking toward self-destruction. The Herrscher of the Void deserves every ounce of hatred directed at her — but if Kiana lets this emotion consume her completely, even if she wins..."
She paused.
"She will no longer be the Kiana Kaslana you know."
Su Yu watched the girl in the mirror — familiar and foreign at once — watched those eyes that made his chest ache with every blink.
"This... idiot..."
He muttered the curse low, but his body answered before his mind did — a sudden sway, the world going dark at the edges again.
The mental toll of dying that many times was far heavier than anything his mouth had been willing to admit.
Fu Hua caught him.
"You need rest — even just a brief stillness at the level of consciousness."
She looked at the pallor of his face, the cold sweat on his brow.
"But I know you won't listen."
Su Yu drew a long breath and forced down the iron taste clinging to the back of his throat, the ringing packed into his skull.
He was just about to ask Fenghuang exactly what the plan was.
A translucent panel blazing with eye-scorching red light smacked into existence without a single second's warning, nearly plastering itself across his face.
[URGENT MISSION: Fenghuang's Commission]
[Detected: Bound character Kiana Kaslana's emotional fluctuation pattern is in extreme disorder, approaching Honkai collapse threshold.]
[Detected: Hostile consciousness Herrscher of the Void's mental resonance is violently destabilized, stability rating: zero.]
[WARNING: Collision of two uncontrolled, rampant forces — projected outcome: 99.87% probability of total consciousness space annihilation, with permanent spiritual damage to bound character.]
[Mission Requirement: Immediately halt Kiana's self-destructive behavior.]
[Notes: This mission is a forced trigger. Refusal is not an option. Failure penalty? Oh, if you fail, you both turn into vegetables~ ♪]
Su Yu stared at the tilde-and-hearts affixed to the last line, a vein twitching visibly above his brow.
He drew a very slow breath, then forced the following sentence out through his teeth.
"You piece-of-shit System... I just got killed a thousand times by that lunatic woman and you were sitting there watching the show? Now you pop up to say that?"
The panel flickered once, ignored him entirely, and faded of its own accord.
Su Yu dragged a hand hard across his face, shoved down the urge to reach through the interface and beat the System to a pulp, and turned his head toward Fenghuang, who had been waiting in quiet patience the whole while.
"So," his voice still carried the rough rasp left behind by all those deaths, "what's the actual plan? You said you needed my cooperation — what do I do?"
Fenghuang's expression didn't change. She had clearly been waiting for exactly this.
"Your memories," she said.
"Her consciousness is completely occupied by fear and killing intent right now — external sound and physical contact cannot reach her. But memories can."
Fenghuang raised her right hand, palm upward. A thread of deep red filament rose from her fingertips — impossibly fine, bending gently like a strand of spider-silk caught in a breeze.
"The things you shared with her — meals eaten, words spoken, all those small and trivial moments. I can use Yu Ducheng's power to weave them into a signal and send it directly into her consciousness core."
Su Yu watched the red thread.
"Side effects?"
"It will consume another piece of your mental reserves. Given your current state..." Fenghuang weighed her words carefully. "It will be painful."
"That's it?"
Fenghuang glanced at him.
Su Yu's mouth pulled to one side.
It didn't quite look like a smile. More like a muscle spasm.
"Ah Hua, I died a thousand times today. The word suffering has been removed from my vocabulary."
Fenghuang said nothing more.
The red thread flew from her palm and came to rest against Su Yu's forehead.
The consciousness space was coming apart.
Cracks radiated outward from the center in every direction, the tears in the sky growing wider and wider.
Kiana's blood ran down her wrist, falling in drops onto Sirin's swollen face — mixing with Sirin's own blood until there was no telling whose was whose.
Sirin had stopped struggling.
She lay completely limp, eyes half-open, left eye fully sealed shut by swelling, the gold of her right pupil adrift — unfocused, unseeing.
The sounds coming from her throat were no longer anything resembling human language. They were closer to the whimpering of a small animal being tormented.
Kiana's fist came down again.
"Give Su Yu back to me."
The same words.
The same tone.
The same force.
Her eyes were open wide, those mismatched pupils holding nothing.
The blue one — like a frozen lake. The gold one — like a furnace burned completely dry.
No anger. No hatred. Even that extreme killing intent from before was slowly fading — not retreating. The fuel had simply run out.
She was burning her own spirit as kindling.
The kindling was almost gone.
Her fist rose for the unnumbered time.
And then—
Someone embraced her from behind.
"Kiana."
The motion of Kiana's punch froze — locked rigid in midair.
Her entire body went still, the frame of her still sitting astride Sirin beginning to tremble very slightly.
And in the same moment, a force — warm and soft — flowed through Su Yu's encircling arms, seeping soundlessly into the cold, chaotic depths of Kiana's consciousness.
They were fragments. Scattered pieces of their time together.
The burst of satisfaction on her tongue the first time she tasted hot, fresh pizza.
Waking from a nightmare in the middle of the night, and the instant grounding of safety that came from closing her fingers around a warm hand.
Holding an ID Card printed with her own name, running her thumb across those small letters, throat tight with something she couldn't quite name.
Watching him fumble around the kitchen making instant noodles — clumsy and determined — absolutely insisting on cracking an egg into them, and the small smile rising up inside her that she hadn't even noticed until it was already there.
Home.
A place she could return to.
The rigidity in Kiana's body eased, slowly, degree by degree.
The raised fist came down — gently, this time.
She lowered her head, looking at her own fist, caked in dust and blood. Then she looked at the figure beneath her — Sirin, wretched and ruined, only terror left in her eyes.
Then, slowly, she turned her head.
And met Su Yu's eyes, close enough to touch.
Kiana's shoulders shook.
Just once. Very slightly.
Like a little girl who had gotten lost.
She had been walking for a very long time. Night had fallen. The streetlights were dead. All around her were shadows she didn't recognize.
She didn't dare cry — if she cried she'd be found. So she just kept walking, and walking, and walking.
And then she saw the light on above her own front door.
"Su...?"
Her voice was soft, trembling faintly with uncertainty — like she was afraid the person in front of her might only be a hallucination.
"Mm." Su Yu answered, and tightened his arms, pulling her closer against him. "It's me."
Those two words were a switch.
"Su..."
The rest of the word dissolved into sobbing.
"...Ugh... ah..."
It began as suppressed, shuddering gasps — and then, almost immediately, broke open into full, heaving, ugly crying.
She stopped paying any attention to Sirin beneath her. Her whole body fell backward, pressing entirely into Su Yu's arms.
Su Yu said nothing. He just let his chin rest lightly against the top of her head, ruffling his jaw gently through her soft hair, while his other hand rose and fell in slow, steady pats against her back.
"Okay, okay..." His voice went very soft. "I'm right here. Look — alive and kicking, not a scratch on me."
"So..." He paused, and a thread of gentle teasing slipped into his voice. "Stop crying. Smiling suits you so much better, you know. Idiot Kiana."
Kiana's crying slowly wound down into broken, intermittent hiccups.
She still held onto Su Yu, tight, as though letting go for even a second would make him vanish.
Around them, the burning flames — at some point, without either of them noticing — had begun to dim and die.
The ruined Honkai wasteland around them had begun to blur and go transparent.
"Kiana's consciousness has stabilized. She is separating from this consciousness space."
Fenghuang's voice sounded directly inside Su Yu's mind, calm and even.
"Her mental state will enter a period of deep sleep for self-repair. You can rest easy now."
Su Yu let out a breath. Long, and long, and long.
The taut string of his nerves finally went slack — and in its wake came a wave of exhaustion so vast it nearly swallowed him whole.
He held the girl in his arms — cried out, quieting now — and felt her body grow lighter and lighter, more and more transparent, until she dissolved at last like scattered starlight, fading from his embrace.
The dream battlefield that Sirin had constructed now held only him — and...
Su Yu looked down.
Sirin was still there on the ground, just a short distance from his feet.
She hadn't disappeared. She hadn't left.
She lay curled on the cracked floor like a broken rag doll someone had picked out of the trash and thrown back in.
Her clothes were mostly torn apart.
The dark formal gown that had once been the symbol of a Herrscher's authority was split from collar to hem in several places, exposing skin beneath — pale to the point of translucence, mottled in blue and purple from every place Kiana's fists had landed.
Her hair was spread across the ground, silver-grey strands matted together with dried blood, plastered to her face and stuck to the floor — as though she had been dragged across it for a few hundred meters and only just been set down.
She had not yet fully recovered from the beating Kiana had administered. Her gaze was unfocused and drifting.
Only when Su Yu's eyes landed on her did she flinch sharply — recoiling backward in terror, arms raised to shield her face, like a small animal that had been badly frightened.
Su Yu looked at her. His face held no particular expression.
He sorted through the noise in his head.
Sympathy? A little.
The circumstances of Sirin's creation were a tragedy in their own right. The child who had been used as a test subject genuinely deserved pity.
But that was Sirin.
Not the Herrscher of the Void.
For the thing in front of him now — the one that had tormented Kiana for so long, that had just killed him god knows how many times — his inner landscape held only a stretch of cold, flat calm. If anything, he felt a mild impulse to kick her a couple of times extra for good measure.
"Squad Monitor," he asked inwardly, "is there any way to... right here, right now... erase her completely?"
Fenghuang's sigh sounded in his consciousness, carrying a quiet helplessness.
"No. Even in the original world with a sufficient supply of Honkai energy, a Herrscher's consciousness cannot be fully erased by external force."
"This is Kiana's own trial. Her own knot to untangle. Her own war to fight. What we can do, at most, is suppress — as we did just now — or provide support when cracks appear in her heart. Taking her place to defeat the Herrscher is simply not possible."
Su Yu frowned.
"Didn't that just count?" He thought of Kiana sitting astride Sirin, throwing punch after punch. "She got beaten pretty thoroughly."
"That was only a surface-level conflict of consciousness — emotional discharge." Fenghuang explained. "The Herrscher Core is entangled too deeply with the fundamental nature of Kiana's soul. Unless Kiana herself genuinely accepts and processes that piece from within — with real understanding, or with absolute will — it will always be there."
Su Yu turned this over in his mind a few times.
He arrived at one conclusion: consciousness was just too abstract to pin down neatly.
Winning a fight doesn't mean the enemy's gone. It's like a Boss in a game — health bar hits zero and a second phase begins.
So what now? Just leave her like this? Wait for her to recover and take another shot at tormenting Kiana?
While Su Yu was mulling over whether he should do something — frighten her a bit more, maybe, or try some other form of psychological pressure —
That familiar, insufferably smug red panel gave a cheerful ding and snapped back into existence.
[Side Mission Updated!]
[Mission Name: Taming the Queen]
[Mission Description: Detected — hostile consciousness [Herrscher of the Void] is currently in a state of extreme weakness and psychological trauma, will to resist at a historic all-time low. This is a once-in-ten-thousand-years [Educational] opportunity!]
[Mission Requirement: Using your wisdom (with a trace of assistance from your System godfather), attempt to take this chuunibyou queen — whose head contains nothing but revenge, destruction, and divine majesty — and begin the preliminary taming process. Goal: a specimen that at minimum understands "basic courtesy," "rule compliance," and "relative emotional stability"... let's set the current benchmark at "Student with Room for Development Across All Five Virtues." Aim low, aim achievable!]
[Mission Reward: To be determined based on taming progress and outcome. Hint: complete taming may unlock special bonds, skills, or story routes~]
[Failure Penalty: None. (Taming wild animals carries inherent risk — getting bitten back is perfectly normal.)]
[Friendly Reminder: She has killed you 1,024 times today~ Do your best! ♡]
Su Yu stared at the line reading Student with Room for Development Across All Five Virtues, and felt the corner of his mouth begin to twitch entirely against his will.
He slowly raised his head. He looked at Sirin on the ground — terrified, yes, but with that glint of venom and arrogance still lurking somewhere deep behind the fear in her eyes. Then he looked back at the panel.
"..."
"You piece-of-shit System," Su Yu finally could not hold it in, and the words came out, "you are absolutely... taking the piss, aren't you?"
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