Su Yu took off the black mask covering his face.
The mountain wind poured in through the half-open car window, drawing away, bit by bit, the residual heat lingering on the steering wheel.
The little assistant had driven off the gawking onlookers, and Eden had driven back up the mountain, finding a flat overlook to park on.
No one came to disturb them anymore—there was only the sound of the wind.
The violent heaving of Eden's chest finally began to subside.
She loosened her left hand, which had been gripping the edge of the steering wheel so tightly, and the veins on the back of it sank, little by little, beneath her fair skin.
But her right hand, the one clasping the hand of the passenger beside her, did not slacken in the slightest.
Their ten fingers were still interlaced, the sweat in the gaps between their palms turning slick, yet binding the two hands together as fiercely as superglue.
Eden turned her head.
Her breathing still carried a trace of its former urgency, but the corners of her mouth curled upward, little by little.
This smile was utterly different from the perfect one she'd worn in the lobby of the "Starhall" Panoramic Hotel earlier that day—the one without a single social flaw to pick at.
This was something that had thoroughly torn to shreds all that dignified, elegant, lofty elder's poise, baring instead the instinct of a dangerous predator.
"So, Sister Eden."
Su Yu's voice was a little hoarse.
The fatigue from overspending his mental energy pressed down on his vocal cords, so that speaking required a bit more effort than usual.
"You called me out in the middle of the night just to take me street racing?"
Eden didn't answer right away.
Her gaze roamed over the face in the passenger seat, just as drenched in sweat as her own.
"I like the feeling of being stimulated."
Eden finally spoke.
"Do you know why I like alcohol? Because in a short span of time it can speed up the flow of blood, let me experience the feeling of my heartbeat racing."
"In the concert halls of Vienna, when a performance ended, the applause from the audience could last fifteen minutes. But that kind of sound doesn't reach the heart."
Her thumb brushed across the back of the hand in the passenger seat.
"Over these years, fewer and fewer things have been able to make my heart race. Money can't. Fame can't. Applause can't."
She lifted her head, looking out beyond the windshield.
In the distance, the lights of Arc City spread across the plain at the foot of the mountain, dense and innumerable; from this angle they faced, far off, the starry sky overhead.
"Only speed can—when the speedometer goes past two hundred, the lights along the road become streaks of light, and the roar of the engine drowns out every stray thought."
She paused, her pupils looking deep and dark in the dim glow of the car lights.
"It lets me realize, clearly, that inside this shell of mine there's actually still something beating—that I'm still alive."
Her upper body leaned slightly forward, closing the distance between them.
"Well? Does it make you feel disappointed?"
Her voice echoed in the sealed compartment, and a thick wave of hormonal scent rushed at him.
"I'm not as flawless as you—or anyone else—imagine."
These hands, which dealt with the piano and the violin in Vienna's Golden Hall...
She raised the hand that had been clasped tight, stopping it in the midair where their lines of sight met.
"In private, they grip a steering wheel instead, sunk so deep into a mad craving for speed and the limit that they can't pull free."
"This is Eden's true face. A lunatic who, after performing the most elegant movement on stage, can't wait to go racing up a mountain road and court death."
Eden looked at Su Yu. That gaze that was usually fixed on him, gentle and tolerant as a "mother" or an "elder," had now been entirely replaced by an undisguised heat.
It was the heat of a hunter who has spotted an interesting quarry, heart racing, wanting to make it utterly her own.
"You know what, Su Yu?"
Her body leaned slightly forward, and the cramped space of the compartment was instantly filled with that rich perfume on her.
"That time you bailed me out at the milk tea shop, when you led me charging out of that ring of fans—you ran fast back then, took the corners cleanly. You read the route faster than any bodyguard I've ever seen."
Eden's chin lifted a little.
"And at the hotel in Cioara, that demo of a song you handed over. That was no ordinary pop tune at all—that was a true prelude to The Queen's Descent, capable of ruling over everything. That song made me take an enormous interest in you."
"The old you was very well-behaved, but also very boring."
Eden's fingers tightened a little.
"Elysia dragged you into the Golden Courtyard's circle. Since you were someone she liked, naturally I was willing to treat you as a junior."
"But you couldn't muster interest in anything. Games, music, travel, socializing—you wore that same I-don't-care look toward all of it."
"Like a glass of water gone cold, without any flavor at all."
"I thought that was simply your nature."
"One more boring person in the Golden Courtyard was, to me, no more than the matter of preparing one extra dinner. Looking after one more person is no difficult thing."
Su Yu didn't argue. Finding nothing interesting in anything, showing utter indifference toward everything in this world—that was an accurate portrait of his former self.
That was why Mei and Kevin had been so frantic back then that they'd dragged out the psychological-affairs officer, Elysia.
Eden's breathing quickened again by half a beat, the fabric over her chest trembling faintly with each breath.
"But you changed."
At last a kind of indescribable, nearly boiling-over joy seeped into her voice.
"You became... interesting."
This was completely different from the concern of an elder. If, before today, Eden had still held toward this "boring" man some of the doting and care of an older sister for a younger brother—
then now, that social distance had been torn to shreds.
A woman, looking at a man.
Nothing more than that.
"Your gaze changed, the way you walk changed, the rhythm of your speech changed. You started making games, started forming teams, started getting into fights on the street, started breaking into the den of armed thugs in the middle of the night to save people."
"Your eyes no longer held that attitude of not caring about anything; you became urgent, became anxious, even did things completely out of keeping with your usual persona—"
"At the very start, I thought you'd had a mental breakdown, or else been possessed by some ghost or demon. I even thought of asking Sakura whether she had any method for exorcising evil spirits."
"But you didn't change, Su Yu."
"You were simply ignited by something, and it burned away all that I-don't-care surface of yours, exposing your original form."
"When exactly did it begin? And what was it that lit you up, like a fuse?"
Eden didn't wait for an answer, because she had long since known it.
"It's because of that girl called Kiana. Before her, she was like a ghost who didn't exist at all, appearing out of thin air in this world without any warning."
"You don't need to fool me with the crude lies of those little junior sisters who've just come down from the mountain. You ought to know—in this city, there's nothing I don't know."
"Even..." she tilted her head, "Mei and the officials being able to forge an identity for her so smoothly—that was at my instruction, too."
Su Yu's body stiffened.
"Did you think Mei could handle all those procedures on her own? Did you think Lewis, the head of a single district police bureau, could keep all those investigations down?"
The corner of Eden's mouth curved.
"From the very first day Kiana appeared in this city, I knew she didn't belong to this world."
Su Yu stared at Eden for three seconds.
In those three seconds his mind was racing at high speed.
Fenghuang's voice surfaced in his mind at the same moment, but he didn't respond just yet.
He knew Eden had helped him and Kiana a great deal.
The studio's investment, the venue at Arc City Tower, Fuxi's various arrangements—all of it could be traced back to Eden.
Yes.
He'd long understood that.
If not for Eden, if not for her operating behind the scenes, many things couldn't have been smoothed over with a casual laugh.
"When did you start to notice Kiana?" Su Yu asked.
"From the second day she appeared," Eden said. "I have my own intelligence channels in the Golden Courtyard. A white-haired, heterochromatic girl with no records whatsoever, who appeared out of thin air at your doorstep? Something like that happening in Arc City—there's no way I wouldn't know."
"Then why didn't you just come and ask me?"
"Because I wanted to see what you would do."
Eden's answer came without hesitation.
She quite enjoyed this process of peeling away the other person's layers of disguise.
"A complete stranger, a visitor belonging to no known system of this world." The tip of Eden's tongue swept very quickly across her upper lip. "It finally gave me, in this daily life so calm it held no ripple at all, a new source of stimulation."
"And with her arrival, everything changed. You began to grow at an utterly terrifying speed. You finally tore off that boring dead skin and became interesting."
Eden's hand released the one in the passenger seat.
Before he could react, that hand, still carrying the heat of sweat, had already crossed over the center console.
Her slender fingers hooked directly under the chin of the person in the passenger seat, forcing his face to turn around and meet hers head-on.
This was already an almost blatant, undisguised teasing.
"Do you know? When I learned from Lewis that you'd broken into the Tiger Claw Gang's abandoned factory with Kiana, putting yourself in danger, facing dozens of armed thugs alone—do you know what my first reaction was?"
The tips of their noses were less than ten centimeters apart.
"Did you think it was an elder's worry for a junior? Or anger at your reckless behavior?"
Eden shook her head.
"No."
"You're wrong, Su Yu."
Her voice dropped to its lowest, as if it were some dangerous murmur passed only between members of the same kind.
"The first thought that surfaced in my mind was—"
"I've finally found, in this world, one of my own kind."
The air in the compartment grew thick.
"That perfect filter you had over me—isn't it shattered clean now?"
"I was never the kind of loving, tolerant goddess you imagined. I'm just a lunatic trapped in this unbearably boring world, searching every second for stimulation."
She stared fixedly into those eyes.
"So what about you, Su Yu? For what, because of what, did you become the lunatic you are now—the one who hangs his life from his belt, who can still calmly call out the numbers inside a supercar doing two hundred?"
"The answer is obvious. It's because of that girl called Kiana."
"In fact, I'm not all that interested in your reason. Whether you do it to save the world, or to protect one little girl—that's your business."
Eden eased off a little on the grip pinching his chin, but didn't withdraw her hand.
"I only need to know that beneath that ordinarily harmless, forever good-natured, lukewarm hide of yours, there hides an extremely crazed, destructive, and violent side—that's enough."
"This is the whole of my bargaining chip for making a deal with you."
Eden withdrew her hand, her body settling back once more against the driver's seat.
"Fame, status, power—these things are all boring theater to me. Name however much you want; I'll give it to you."
Her voice was very soft, but every word was bitten off clearly.
"I only want you to promise me one thing."
Her eyes fell into Su Yu's.
"Take me, and let me flee this boring, bland daily life. Let me, like tonight, experience that feeling of my heart about to explode, of adrenaline surging so high the whole world falls silent."
"I want you to drag that lofty Eden—the one everyone worships upon an altar—hard, into your absurd, danger-filled world."
"Let me, in that ultimate stimulation, find the proof that I'm still alive."
"This is my deal with you."
The mountain wind howled in through the gap in the window.
In the compartment there was nothing but the sound of the wind and the engine's idle.
Su Yu leaned back against the seat, gazing at the roof of the car, saying nothing for a long, long while.
"Squad Monitor," he said in his mind.
Fenghuang's voice floated up from somewhere far away.
After overspending his mental energy, his link with Fenghuang had grown somewhat blurry.
"The Eden you know—is she really like this?"
Fenghuang was silent for a good while.
"You think a person capable of dying together with an entire world—"
Fenghuang's voice carried something only those who'd been through the same thing would have.
"Do you really think she counts as a 'normal' person?"
Su Yu didn't answer.
"At the end of the previous civilization, Eden chose to perish together with that civilization."
"Not because she had no way to escape, not because she was trapped. It was because she felt—if this world was no longer worth living for, then she didn't need to live either."
"In that previous civilization ravaged by Honkai, everyone was driven to a dead end. She burned everything she had in that world, using her singing to fight monsters that simply couldn't be defeated."
"That kind of madness, in that apocalyptic environment, was masked as tragic heroism. But in this present peaceful world—where even a shooting can make the front page—those things in her bones have nowhere to be put."
"Money, status, power—they really are hers for the taking. If she can't find an outlet to vent, she'll drive herself mad."
"Of those who could become Fusion Warriors and fight to the very last moment in the apocalypse—how many are in a normal state of mind?"
There was no mockery in Fenghuang's tone, only the detachment of one who'd been there.
"I'm not normal myself, Kalpas isn't normal, Mei isn't normal, Su isn't normal, Sakura isn't normal. Eden—she's just hidden it better than all of us."
"Or perhaps she never hid it at all; it's only that, compared to that mad world, her madness was already nothing worth mentioning."
Indeed.
If this were a world of supernatural free-for-alls, if this were a previous civilization ravaged by Honkai, then a star who races cars and seeks thrills between life and death—
that really wouldn't count as anything at all.
Against that sorrowful backdrop and an end that arrived unavoidably, individual madness was, by contrast, trivial.
Su Yu released his hand from the seatbelt buckle.
He turned his head and looked at Eden.
Eden was waiting for him.
A world-class megastar.
The most dazzling star on the globe.
A woman whose wealth, honor, and power were piled to the skyline.
Right now she sat in a supercar steeped in the scorched stench of tire rubber, waiting for a twenty-three-year-old indie game producer to give her an answer.
Su Yu didn't doubt for a second that if he shook his head now and uttered a single "no,"
then Eden would, without the slightest hesitation, just as she had this morning in the hotel's back garden, once again use those long legs sheathed in black stockings to subject him to a sweet and lethal execution.
He wouldn't be strangled to death by those long legs, but he might die in some other sense.
That feeling left an endless aftertaste, but for a Su Yu who was now exhausted in body and mind, it would absolutely be a form of torture.
So he turned his head and met Eden's scorching gaze.
"Sister Eden, does Ellie know you like street racing?"
Eden's eyebrow twitched.
She probably hadn't expected Su Yu's first question to be this.
"She knows," Eden said. "But only at that level of knowing. She thinks I just occasionally drive fast to take in the scenery."
"She only thinks it's a kind of exercise to relieve work stress."
"She doesn't know that I'm someone whose head is full of nothing but chasing dopamine—someone who, for this bit of stimulation, would drive a car off a cliff."
"Because I hide it well. Better than anyone else in the world."
She looked at the passenger seat.
"Just like, before tonight, you absolutely couldn't have imagined I'd have a side like this—right?"
"I understand now."
The man in the passenger seat sat up straight.
"I understand now. You telling me this is meant to trade your secret for mine."
Su Yu's gaze grew deep.
"The true face, in private, of the world-class megastar Eden... this really is a chip impossible to refuse."
He gazed into Eden's eyes and slowly spoke.
"If I don't make some kind of response now, then I'd seem far too oblivious to romance."
"—Eden."
This time, Su Yu no longer called her "Sister Eden."
Instead, directly and clearly, he called out her name.
That subtle change in address made Eden's body stiffen almost imperceptibly.
Then, an irrepressible joy burst forth from deep within her eyes.
Su Yu looked at her, the corners of his mouth curling into a smile laden with meaning.
"What I'm about to tell you might overturn everything you imagine about the way this world operates."
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