While the Herrscher of the Void, Sirin, clumsily searched for the road ahead, in another world existing on a plane utterly separate from this peaceful one, a catastrophe was quietly beginning to unfold.
The Honkai world.
The rain in Arc City seemed as though it would never cease.
Those droplets falling from the ashen-gray clouds struck the outer walls of the Shencheng Pharmaceuticals building, streaming down the glass curtain wall to gather into winding trails of water that twisted the city's neon lights into a bizarre, kaleidoscopic mosaic.
Deep within the building, in the classified archive room, not a trace of rainfall could be heard.
There was only the low-frequency hum of the server cabinets in operation, and the dry, cold air exhaled by the refrigeration equipment.
Raiden Mei stood before a master control terminal.
The blue glow of the screen was the only source of light in this dim space, casting the contours of her face in an unusually cold, severe light.
Her fingers tapped rapidly across the virtual keyboard, strings of decryption code dancing as they unraveled the deepest secrets of Shencheng Pharmaceuticals.
Only a few days ago, she had received word from Bronya about a message that had come from Sea Abyss City.
That girl who had vanished for months, the one Mei had searched for like a madwoman throughout this jungle of steel, had left traces within the Sea of Quanta.
The moment she learned of it, Mei wished she could sprout wings and fly to Sea Abyss City that very instant.
But the situation in Arc City was like an invisible chain, binding her steps fast in place.
Rita Rossweisse, that Schicksal maid who always wore a flawless smile, had passed her an anomalous piece of intelligence—among the recently active Honkai disasters in Arc City, Zombies had appeared bearing the mark of "Stigmata."
Stigmata—that was the very capital that allowed Schicksal's Valkyries to fight against the Honkai, a technological secret of the highest classification.
It could never appear naturally upon those mindless, walking corpses.
This meant that someone was using the most brutal human experimentation in an attempt to transplant the Valkyries' trump card into ordinary people, or into Zombies.
Even more terrifying was that the scale of these experiments, and the scheme hidden behind them, was like a vast net descending upon the millions of civilians of Arc City.
The Eye of the Sea Abyss had already closed, and the passage to the Sea of Quanta was sealed shut.
Doctor Einstein had calmly analyzed over the comms that what Bronya had seen might be nothing more than an afterimage produced by spatial distortion.
And Arc City's disaster hung right overhead.
But in truth, there was only one real reason that had made Mei draw her tachi and choose to stay behind.
If Kiana were here.
If that carefree fool who was always shouting about beating the Honkai to a pulp were standing here, she wouldn't hesitate even for a single second—she would absolutely choose to defend this city, to protect those defenseless people.
"Click."
A green unlock prompt popped up on the screen, breaking Mei's train of thought.
The encrypted document had been successfully decrypted, and a torrent of data and video footage came pouring down like a waterfall.
Mei's gaze moved swiftly across those densely packed entries.
An observation log marked as top secret caught her attention. On the cover of the file, a face she knew all too well suddenly appeared—Fu Hua.
That Squad Monitor from St. Freya Academy who was always pushing up her red-framed glasses, meticulous and precise in everything.
But in this file, she had once guarded Shenzhou as "Fenghuang," and could even be traced back to a previous civilization fifty thousand years ago.
A Fusion Warrior.
Those few words made Raiden Mei's eyes go wide. She read quickly, and the numbers recorded there left her throat feeling dry.
The data in the lifespan monitoring column was almost impossible to comprehend.
In this world where human lifespans barely reached a century, that number was absurd, like something out of a myth.
Mei's breath caught for a moment.
That Squad Monitor was, in fact, carrying such a heavy weight of history upon her shoulders.
She continued to scroll through the screen, the cursor coming to rest on a folder named the "Stigmata Completion Project."
The instant she opened it, several photographs of experimental subjects, too horrific to look upon, popped into view.
The skin of those ordinary people was covered in purple-black corrosion patterns of Honkai energy, their bodies contorted, frozen in postures of unbearable agony.
As the accompanying text scrolled alongside, a truth that overturned everything taught in Schicksal's textbooks laid itself bare before Mei.
Stigmata were not some gift of nature's survival of the fittest.
They were relics of a previous civilization.
In the final days of that long-extinguished era, those desperate scientists had forcibly implanted complex Honkai-antibody genomes into the embryos of a handful of survivors.
These genes manifested as marks upon the surface of the human body, granting their bearers powerful resistance to Honkai energy and extraordinary strength.
That was humanity's struggle for survival, etched into their very genes.
And the "artificial Stigmata" that Schicksal took such pride in—those mass-produced sources of power—were nothing more than flawed and dangerous imitations.
Their price was irreversible damage to the bodies of the Valkyries. Scarcely any Valkyrie could endure such side effects and live to die of natural old age.
The glow of the screen flickered in Mei's eyes.
The organization behind Shencheng Pharmaceuticals—the "World Serpent"—had found another method.
They were no longer content with Schicksal's clumsy imitation, but instead sought, through crude artificial intervention, to forcibly activate those fragments of previous-civilization Stigmata lying dormant within human genes, and make them express completely.
And the final target location of the plan: Arc City.
Mei's gaze fell upon that last line of red assessment data.
This process of forced activation was extraordinarily violent.
Those who could not withstand the shock of Honkai energy would have their bodies rapidly collapse, until at last they became mindless Zombies.
And among the several million permanent residents of all of Arc City, under this cold, calculating probability model, the number who could ultimately survive and gain the power of Stigmata...
Fewer than one hundred.
The cold air of the server room blew across Mei's collar.
Purple lightning leapt without warning across the hilt of her tachi, letting out a faint yet sharp crackle.
Mei's fingers tightened inch by inch around the hilt, her leather gloves creaking with a strained friction.
Several million people.
In the eyes of those so-called higher-ups, this was merely a number to be traded for around a hundred perfect experimental subjects.
This arrogance that regarded human lives as no more than weeds, this posture of trying to artificially select humanity's future—it was more nauseating than the Honkai itself.
She had to stop all of this at once.
Mei released her somewhat numbed fingers and quickly keyed the frequency band of an encrypted channel into her communicator.
She would contact Rita. Though their positions differed, when it came to stopping a disaster of this magnitude, their goal was one and the same.
The prompt tone signaling the connection sounded once.
However, what came through the earpiece was not Rita's elegant voice, always carrying a hint of composure and playful mockery.
"Zzzt—zzzkkk—"
Piercing electromagnetic interference instantly flooded the entire channel.
Then came a string of chaotic, disordered sounds, transmitted like cloth torn apart by a storm.
The roar of heavy objects smashing through walls, the shriek of some inhuman species, and the brief clash of weapons.
"Captain! The left flank's defense line has collapsed—"
"Retreat! Call for support immediately! That thing simply doesn't belong— I—I can't muster any strength at all, damn it! This is a trap—"
This was the hoarse, screaming cry of a member of an Immortal Blades squad. But that shout couldn't even hold out to its final period before it was utterly cut off by a blood-curdling ripping sound.
All that remained in the earpiece was the erratic static of a dead line.
Mei's movements froze completely before the terminal.
That was the Immortal Blades, Schicksal's most elite force.
Rita Rossweisse, an S-rank Valkyrie of Schicksal—that represented Schicksal's very top-tier combat strength.
Yet an elite Valkyrie squad led by such an S-rank Valkyrie had actually met their downfall in the industrial district?
The faint blue light of Shencheng Pharmaceuticals' underground server room flowed along the edge of the tachi's blade.
Mei violently tore off the communication earpiece and slammed it against the metal control console.
Purple lightning burst without the slightest warning within the sealed space, and the screen of the master control terminal went black in an instant, amid a smell of scorched circuitry.
She had no more time to decrypt further data.
That "Stigmata Completion Project," cruel to the point of outrage, and those millions of lives about to become experimental sacrifices under cold probability, filled Mei with a nausea she could barely suppress.
But at this very moment, the tragedy unfolding deep within the industrial district took priority over everything else.
Mei gripped the tachi horizontally at her side, the remaining lightning power erupting through both her legs.
Striker Fulminata carried her toward the coordinates at maximum speed—though against the darkness of this Arc City, a lone girl and the tachi in her hand could scarcely hope to bring about the arrival of dawn.
But in her heart, Mei knew.
If that fool were here, she would surely charge in without a moment's hesitation.
Kiana, I will hold this city—together with the people you wanted to protect.
Arc City. Shencheng Pharmaceuticals industrial district. The underground core laboratory.
The heavy blast-proof steel door had already been completely deformed, several ghastly white mechanical limbs having savagely torn it apart down the middle.
In the center of this ruin that resembled a slaughterhouse, Rita Rossweisse knelt on one knee upon a floor strewn with shattered glass and bloodstains, leaning on a frost scythe named "Skadi Ondurgud."
That magnificent Argent Knight: Artemis armor had, in this moment, become her greatest burden.
A faintly sweet-scented pale purple mist drifted through the air.
"Cough… cough cough…"
Rita forcefully coughed up a mouthful of dark red blood.
That toxic mist, containing components of an improved version of the HSN-B46 serum, was invading the circulatory system within her body, brutally following the path of her breath.
HSN-B46 possessed the effect of neutralizing Honkai energy. The instant a Honkai Beast came into contact with it, it would begin to wither and rot away.
And when it acted upon a powerful Valkyrie, the effect was self-evident—they would even become more fragile than an ordinary person.
The powerful Honkai energy resistance and physical strength belonging to a Valkyrie were being rapidly stripped away.
Those armor components that had once been as light as nothing now felt like an iron coffin weighing dozens of kilograms, pressing her fast against the ground.
Only a few minutes ago, that hooded woman of the World Serpent, code-named Raven, had mocked Schicksal's arrogance before detonating the poison gas valve.
And then, they had come.
"Skreeek—"
A teeth-grinding sound of scraping metal rang out from the darkness.
Three enormous "Death Webs," like mutated spiders, were slowly closing in on her, treading forward on their sharp, long legs.
The hydraulic piercing lances developed specifically to penetrate Valkyrie defenses gleamed with a deadly cold light beneath the dim emergency lamps.
This was a meticulously orchestrated, one-sided hunt.
From the very moment she had brushed against the enemy's core secret, she and the members of the Immortal Blades had become caged beasts.
The other members of the Immortal Blades squad had already lost contact, and around her remained only the clicking of mechanized parts in operation.
Rita's fingers tried to tighten their grip on the scythe's handle, but her muscles only returned a spasm of exhausted weakness.
Her vision began to blur; the excessive blood loss draped a dim gray filter over everything around her.
The "Death Web" raised its foreleg.
That alloy piercing spear, enough to skewer the armor of a main battle tank, locked onto her heart.
She knew she had already reached her limit.
On this night without miracles, this abandoned underground laboratory would be the place where her bones were laid to rest.
Had this been the original worldline.
There would have been a girl with heterochromatic eyes, wielding twin pistols, tearing through Imaginary Space to arrive, running the Subspace Lance through the body of the Death Web, and saving this S-rank Valkyrie of Schicksal.
However.
Kiana Kaslana no longer existed upon this world.
Without Kiana, the Herrscher, to draw the World Serpent's attention, without her making a commotion, without the disturbances she stirred up, the World Serpent could devote all of its energy to dealing with this elite Valkyrie squad of Schicksal.
On this night, there was no Void Drifter descending from the heavens, no Subspace Lance capable of rending the void.
There remained only the inhuman shrieking of the Death Webs, and the trembling of Rita Rossweisse in the depths of despair.
Rita slowly closed her eyes and gave up her useless struggle.
Cold sweat mixed with blood slid down her delicate jawline, dripping onto the frigid surface of the blade.
"Forgive me, Lady Durandal… I fear I will be unable to return and report to you…"
The alloy piercing spear stabbed downward with a piercing whistle of wind.
And in that razor's edge between life and death.
"KABOOM—!!"
The broken wall on the left was utterly shattered by a violent surge of purple thunder.
Dazzling lightning lit up the entire laboratory in an instant; that thunderbolt tore through the toxic mist, the basement's circulation system was manually activated, and the mist swiftly dispersed.
"Rita! Pull yourself together!"
Raiden Mei's figure was like a bolt of purple lightning, forcibly breaking into the encirclement.
The tachi in her hand traced a perfect arc through the air, severing outright that alloy piercing spear now mere inches from Rita's chest.
On the very brink of losing consciousness, Rita struggled to open her eyes a crack.
That girl wrapped in purple lightning was shielding her behind, the tachi pointed at the mechanical monsters stirring restlessly all around.
"Miss Mei, so you came after all…" Rita's lips somehow forced out a mournfully beautiful curve, her voice so weak it was almost inaudible. "Run—it's a trap—"
Mei did not turn her head. She clenched her teeth, driving the Honkai energy within her body to its very limit, preparing to face the remaining Death Webs.
And yet, in that instant.
A synthetic voice that belonged in no way to this world's laws of physics suddenly rang out, without any warning, throughout the entire underground laboratory.
[Key plot character detected—Rita Rossweisse. Vital signs have dropped below the safety threshold.]
[Emergency containment protocol now being implemented.]
[Coordinate anchor confirmed.]
[Spatial jump, initiating.]
Raiden Mei had just knocked back one of the encroaching mechanical legs, and instinctively moved to turn and pull Rita up from the ground.
But her hand grasped at empty air.
A dazzling radiance, too blinding to look upon directly, erupted with a roar centered on Rita.
That light bore none of the violent characteristics of Honkai energy; instead, it carried an incomprehensible sense of absolute order.
In the very second after the light flashed, both the nearly unconscious Schicksal maid and the frost greatscythe stabbed into the ground vanished into thin air amid a scattering of blue light-spots resembling corrupted data.
All that remained was a pool of not-yet-dried blood.
And Raiden Mei, standing rooted in place, gripping her tachi, utterly dumbstruck.
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