Faint arcs of purple lightning skittered across the surface of the massive Death Web's wreckage.
Then that mixture of metal and Honkai energy crystals lost its support and, without any warning, collapsed inward.
Fragments crashed onto the crack-riddled floor with dull thuds.
The ventilation fan at the mouth of the duct had long since been melted through, and dark purple waste fluid still dripped from the edges of its charred metal blades.
The stench of machine oil mingled with biological tissue careened wildly through the cramped underground laboratory.
Raiden Mei's chest began to rise and fall.
She drew a deep breath and turned her wrist.
A dim purple arc flickered across the blade's edge.
With a backhand flick, Raiden Mei cast the last layer of viscous residue clinging to the blade onto the ground, and sheathed the long sword.
The crisp click of metal meeting metal was especially jarring in the deathly silent ruins of the laboratory.
She did not hesitate; she had no more time to ponder just who had taken Rita away. In this moment when the Death Web had fallen, no new enemy appeared.
After returning to the upper level of the industrial district.
She once again saw the members of the Immortal Blades squad she had saved not long before.
There, several members clad in the standard-issue armor of Schicksal Valkyries leaned behind battered cover.
One of them had cracked thigh armor and was winding a bandage to stop the bleeding.
Another had a helmet visor half shattered, slumped against the base of a wall, coughing violently.
The B-rank Valkyrie Alvitr came around from behind an armored vehicle whose roof had been completely sheared off.
The shoulder plate of her right arm was utterly caved in, and her gait had a slight stumbling hitch as she walked.
"Raiden Mei." She stopped roughly three meters from Mei, gasping in several big breaths, her chest heaving rapidly.
Alvitr straightened up, speaking quickly, her voice echoing down the empty street: "Just now… Vice-Captain Rita…"
Her gaze swept swiftly behind Mei, but there was nothing there.
Alvitr slapped the tactical comm on her ear a few times, but all that came through was the harsh static of dead air.
"Where is the Vice-Captain?" Alvitr asked, her hands unconsciously tightening around the weapon she held.
Raiden Mei halted.
She closed her eyes; the scene from a few minutes ago seemed to still linger on her retinas.
"Gone," Mei said.
Her tone was even, without any superfluous pauses.
Alvitr froze. "What do you mean, gone?"
Mei turned aside, recalling the spot in the laboratory where Rita had fallen moments ago.
There, the ground held a shallow pit half a meter deep, the stones around it displaying an eerie spiral-shaped radiating pattern.
"About three minutes ago, in the instant the Death Web lunged in for the kill, the space beneath her feet distorted."
Mei did not look into Alvitr's eyes; her gaze went past her shoulder.
"Distorted?" Alvitr pressed.
"An energy singularity." Mei recalled the energy waveform from that moment.
It was absolutely not Honkai energy, nor any technological creation known to Schicksal or Anti-Entropy.
"No warning at all, no roar of space tearing apart—just a burst of pure high-frequency energy that enveloped her."
"And then?"
"And then, like data that had never existed in this world, she was simply erased. Not even an afterimage remained."
The surrounding Immortal Blades squad members all stopped what they were doing—dead silence.
"This is impossible…" A Valkyrie with a leg wound leaned against the wall, her lips trembling.
"Arc City is completely locked down right now!"
Another short-haired Valkyrie forced herself to her feet, clutching an unresponsive comm terminal.
"We can't even send out Schicksal HQ's highest-level distress signal. How could anyone possibly be here, right in front of…" She glanced at Mei. "…right in front of you, and spirit away an S-rank Valkyrie in an instant?"
Alvitr's breathing grew heavier. She glanced down at the red light blinking on her armor's screen.
[Signal Connection Severed—]
[Regional Physical Interference—]
[Shencheng Pharmaceuticals Surveillance Network Warning—]
Alvitr leaned against the wall, biting the soft flesh inside her lower lip, and immediately tasted blood.
Had she been rescued by some third-party faction? Or had she fallen into some experimental trap even more terrifying than the World Serpent?
No one could provide an answer.
The pipes overhead let out a dangerous hum.
"Digging into whose energy that was serves no purpose now." Mei looked at the comm terminal in Alvitr's hand. "What do you all plan to do next?"
Alvitr let out a laugh.
There was dried blood at the corner of her mouth; the laugh tugged at the wound and made her brow furrow slightly.
"Plan?" Alvitr tossed the unresponsive comm terminal onto the floor tiles nearby.
The terminal bounced twice on the ground, its screen going completely black.
"Arc City is an iron drum right now." The short-haired Valkyrie pointed up at the ceiling.
Tonight's night sky over Arc City held not a single star—only thick cloud cover and the red neon glow at the city's base.
"Aboveground, underground—every surveillance probe, drone, and underground pipeline sensor has been taken over by Shencheng Pharmaceuticals and the World Serpent."
"Schicksal's comm bands are being physically jammed across the entire spectrum."
"We've become blind—and targets too. In ten minutes at most, the second wave of pursuers will trace the energy readings and find us."
Isolated and without aid.
A dead end.
Mei closed her eyes.
She reached her senses into the depths of her chest.
That place, once brimming with violent power, now held only a few tiny, broken fragments—the last embers left behind by the Herrscher of Thunder's Core.
A speck of purple electric light leapt across her fingertips.
Mei opened her eyes, spread the five fingers of her right hand, palm facing down.
"Zzzrt—"
Several dazzling bolts of lightning shot from her fingertips, striking the cut ends of five rebar rods jutting from the ground around the group.
Using these five rods as nodes, an extremely faint, nearly invisible purple electromagnetic curtain of light rose upward in a hemispherical dome, sealing shut over everyone's heads.
The instant the curtain closed.
Alvitr started, glancing down at the armor detector on her wrist.
The red light that had been blinking constantly from being forcibly scanned by external signals went dark.
"You…"
"An electromagnetic force field that shields against all external tracking signals."
Mei withdrew her hand.
"This field can hold for three hours. No electronic device inside it will emit any signal outward, and the World Serpent's life detectors will judge this place to be a heap of high-intensity electronic junk."
The Valkyries all stared at Mei with wide eyes.
Mei's gaze swept across their faces.
Once, on the road of pursuing Kiana, the Immortal Blades had been the obstacle she most detested.
But now, what they faced were monsters who regarded the entire populace of Arc City as experimental fodder.
They shared the same bottom line.
"I need your cooperation."
Mei looked at Alvitr.
Alvitr opened her mouth, but no sound came out.
"Until we figure out who took Rita, if you want to survive, you must work with me."
Raiden Mei calmly regarded the Immortal Blades members before her, composed as a block of ice.
Yamato Nadeshiko, the rice-cooking granny—before those titles, she was first and foremost a Valkyrie capable of holding her own.
That gentleness and kindness were given only to those close and important to her. And once she stepped onto the Honkai battlefield, the Lightning Queen had returned once more.
"On my own, I can't handle so many mechanical units modified by the World Serpent all at once. And once that Stigmata Completion Project is carried out, this city will descend into a living hell."
Mei looked at Alvitr again.
"You need to survive, and I need to find a way to stop the Stigmata Completion Project. Our interests align."
Alvitr clenched her fists.
She turned to look at the few squad members behind her.
The member with the leg wound gave a nod.
"All right." Alvitr looked back at Mei. "Since we can't reach HQ, and the Vice-Captain is… missing."
Alvitr straightened up and gave a standard Schicksal military salute.
"Immortal Blades Arc City provisional detachment, Alvitr. For the duration, I obey your command."
The remaining Valkyries also helped one another to their feet, saying nothing, silently shifting their positions to surround Mei at the center.
Their standpoint was different now.
Before, it had been for Schicksal's orders; now, it was for the lives of the millions of ordinary people in Arc City.
Mei gave a nod.
"First step." Mei pointed at Alvitr. "Break up into small units. Use your Immortal Blades' physical covert markers to contact the scattered members of the other squads. In five batches, withdraw through the underground drainage pipes to Zone C."
"Zone C?" Alvitr asked. "That's extremely close to Shencheng Pharmaceuticals' blockade perimeter—there'll be patrols at any moment."
"The most dangerous place is precisely where you can now avoid the wide-scale, indiscriminate bombing sweeps." Mei paused. "I've prepared three high-security temporary safe houses there in advance. Withdraw there in batches; all the food and medical supplies are in the freezers in the basement."
Mei walked to the central control console that the Death Web had smashed, her fingers rapidly tapping across the few screens still able to light up.
Alvitr beckoned, and the Valkyries began helping one another move toward the drainage outlet.
Alvitr, walking at the very back, stopped. "Raiden Mei, you're not coming?"
Mei did not turn around.
Her fingers hovered over a red virtual button.
"If nothing is left behind, the pursuers will still follow the scent right to you."
Mei turned her head, her gaze passing over Alvitr toward the unfathomably deep underground tunnel from which the Death Web had just emerged.
"You go on ahead. I'll leave them a gift."
Alvitr didn't hesitate for a moment and turned to leave.
Five minutes later.
Mei confirmed that everyone had cleared the danger radius.
She drew a deep breath and pressed her thumb hard onto the red button on the screen.
BOOM—!!
It was the command to directly overload the entire underground laboratory's backup high-energy reactor.
A tenth of a second before that terrifying heat wave devoured the console, Mei kicked hard off the ground with the sheath of Raikiri, her whole body like a bolt of purple lightning shooting straight up the ventilation shaft.
Above the industrial district in the distance.
Night hung low.
A pillar of fire shot skyward from the ground, flipping the dozen-meter-thick concrete surface into midair.
The violent chain of explosions seemed as if to tear apart half of Arc City's night sky.
This enormous commotion was enough to leave Shencheng Pharmaceuticals' PR department and stability-maintenance forces frantic for several days.
This—this was the time she had bought.
Shencheng Pharmaceuticals Headquarters.
Surveillance Center.
Hundreds of screens were densely arrayed across the walls, like countless emotionless eyes surveilling the city's dark underbelly.
On the largest screen at the very center.
A clip of footage from roughly twenty minutes earlier, taken at the edge of the industrial district, played on repeat.
The footage had been processed with noise reduction and slow-motion.
When the timestamp in the lower right corner of the screen ticked to [23:14:07].
In the center of the frame.
The short-haired woman who had been lying on the ground with her armor extensively damaged—a spiral-shaped halo of light suddenly appeared around her body.
It was as if a black hole had abruptly opened its eye.
The air at the edge of the halo showed obvious refraction and fault-lines.
In the next frame, the halo vanished, and the woman on the ground vanished with it.
Left behind on the ground was only a ring of radiating patterns, as if scorched by high heat.
Jackal stood before the screen.
That highly iconic Anubis mask gave off a faint blue sheen under the cool-toned lighting.
Her fingers tapped rapidly a few times across the floating holographic keyboard.
Rows upon rows of red data streams popped up beside the screen.
[Energy Analysis: Failed.]
[Honkai Energy Residue: 0.]
[Quantum Fluctuation Threshold: No matching sample detected.]
Jackal's fingers stopped on the keyboard.
Beneath the mask, her pupils slowly contracted, her gaze nailed firmly to the frozen frame of the spiral halo.
Jackal abruptly leaned in close to the screen, her eyes beneath the mask reflecting that glow, an extremely fanatical thirst for inquiry surfacing in their depths.
"No change in spatial curvature. No Honkai energy residue. It doesn't even conform to existing Imaginary-dimension collapse theory."
Jackal's sharp nails scraped along the screen's edge, producing a teeth-grating sound.
"A power belonging to no known system whatsoever—one that even bypasses every physical barrier directly?"
Raven, standing in the room's shadows, wiped down the massive sniper rifle in her hands.
"So, that S-rank Valkyrie was rescued?"
Raven looked up at the screen.
"Just a mortally wounded piece of experimental material. It doesn't matter who rescued her."
Jackal turned and walked toward a circular tactical sand table in the middle of the surveillance room.
The sand table displayed a three-dimensional topographic map of Arc City.
Just then, at the industrial district location on the edge of the sand table, a huge red dot suddenly lit up.
A piercing alarm blared through the surveillance room.
[Warning: High-intensity chain explosions have occurred in the Zone D-4 underground laboratory.]
[Warning: Power outage across three surrounding blocks.]
Jackal glanced down at the red dot, the corner of her mouth twitching beneath the mask.
"Raiden Mei." Jackal spoke the name aloud.
"She's cleverer than I imagined." Jackal tapped a few times on the sand table. "She knows that if she keeps tangling with the mech units, she'll only be worn down to death, so she gave us a big surprise."
"This explosion is enough to send Arc City's mayor and those media reporters hopping about like ants on a hot pan."
"We'll need to mobilize a great deal of manpower to seal off the scene, fabricate lies, and suppress public opinion."
Jackal gave a cold laugh.
"She's making trouble for us to buy time for herself."
Raven slung the sniper rifle onto her back and walked to the edge of the sand table. She had to admit, this move was truly ingenious.
Art is Patrick Star—it seemed that saying did hold a bit of truth after all.
"She lost her Herrscher Core." Raven looked at the blinking red dot. "And she can still create destruction on this scale?"
"Explosives, or she detonated an underground natural gas line—but that's not the point; none of it matters."
Jackal waved a hand dismissively.
"The Third Herrscher who's lost her Herrscher Core—that pitiful bit of residual lightning left in her body dwindles with every use, like a toy about to run out of batteries."
Jackal raised her head, looking at Raven.
"Since she so enjoys hopping about, let those rats hide in the sewers a few more days. The Stigmata Completion Project's progress can't be slowed by this swarm of ants."
"However…"
Jackal extended a finger, pointing at the sand table.
"If you run into Raiden Mei."
"Take her alive for me."
"A perfect vessel that once housed the Herrscher of Thunder's Core. She's experimental material worth more than its weight in gold—her value to the Stigmata Completion Project is far higher than that row of cold, hard data."
Raven did not answer.
The dagger in her hand spun a flourish through the air before she snatched it into her grip.
The blade reflected the screen's red light, a flash and then gone.
In a place extremely far from Arc City.
In an abyss where space and time interweave.
The core hall of the World Serpent base.
The hall had no light source—only several massive holographic projection screens floating in midair gave off a faint glow.
Kevin Kaslana sat upright upon the throne.
His hands rested on the throne's armrests, his body still as a cold statue.
An extremely cold aura pervaded the air.
A thick layer of frost had formed on the ground below the throne.
On the holographic screen at the center of the hall, a briefing sent from Shencheng Pharmaceuticals was being displayed.
On one of the screens, the energy waveform diagram from the instant Rita vanished was starkly playing.
It was a waveband that presented a high degree of regularity yet completely defied all known physical laws.
Kevin raised his eyelids slightly.
His blue eyes, still as an ancient well, mirrored the flickering waveform diagram on the screen.
The index finger of his right hand, resting on the armrest, tapped once, very slowly, against the hard metal surface.
"Tok."
A muffled sound reverberated through the empty hall.
No.
That wasn't right.
His memory began to rewind.
Not long ago.
The Sea of Quanta.
At the moment he had seized the Gem of Desire and broken free from the Sea of Quanta, he had likewise detected this same energy ripple.
In an instant he had locked onto the other party's location, yet there had been nothing there—utterly empty.
And now.
In Arc City.
This familiar energy fluctuation had appeared once more.
And it was a perfectly identical waveform diagram.
They came from the same source.
Kevin withdrew his finger.
On this chessboard that should have run along its predetermined track, someone—no, some force that transcended this set of rules—was interfering with causality without the slightest restraint.
To whom did this force belong?
Was it another of Finality's tricks? Or some unknown tumor upon the Imaginary Tree?
Would this be the greatest variable within the soon-to-be-launched 'Stigmata Completion Project'?
The waveform diagram on the holographic screen still pulsed.
The hall sank once more into deathly silence.
Only the faint crackle of frost spreading across the ground.
Kevin's gaze moved away from the waveform diagram, toward the hall's bottomless entrance.
The projection went out with a snap.
The hall was swallowed once more by pure darkness and silence.
He had already waited for ages long enough.
From the flames of the former civilization to the long night of the present.
To wait a few more days and see just what this unseen 'hand' intended to do—for him…
…was nothing at all.
Arc City Old District.
This was an abandoned, unfinished building.
No windows, drafts on every side.
A few rusted threaded rebar rods jutted diagonally from the broken load-bearing columns, like the skeleton of some large animal.
Outside, the sky was bright; several beams of harsh sunlight slanted in through gaps in the unfinished ceiling, and countless tiny motes drifted through the air.
In midair, a ring of distorted air appeared out of nowhere, as if an invisible hand had torn an irregular rent in space.
Then came a muffled "thud."
A figure clad in blue-and-white armor tumbled out of the rent, crashing heavily onto the dust- and rubble-strewn concrete floor.
The impact sent the grayish-white dust that had accumulated for who knew how long bursting outward in a violent ring.
The rent sealed in an instant, not leaving even a breath of wind behind.
Rita Rossweisse lay sprawled on the ground, her chest contracting violently as she coughed up a mouthful of saliva laced with bloody foam.
The blood splattered on the dry concrete, immediately soaking in as dark red specks.
Rita's fingers dug tight against the rough concrete.
Her breathing was short and ragged.
There was a gash on the left flank of the Argent Knight: Artemis armor, and the toxin lingering from that Shencheng Pharmaceuticals underground laboratory was circulating through her bloodstream.
She paid no mind to her surroundings, instead quickly rolling over and propping herself against the base of a thick load-bearing column.
She gritted her teeth and pressed a fingertip against a concealed compartment at the waist of her armor.
A small metal first-aid box popped out.
Rita's movements did not pause for a moment.
She pulled the cap off a syringe filled with hemostatic gel, drove the needle deep into the gash in her flank armor, and forcefully pressed down the plunger.
The cold gel instantly expanded and solidified inside the wound, plugging the severed blood vessels.
She let out a muffled grunt, fine beads of sweat seeping from her forehead.
Then she drew out a cardiotonic and jabbed it into the artery in her neck.
Only after doing all this did Rita rest her head against the cold concrete column, close her eyes, and let her racing heartbeat ease a little.
It was quiet all around.
From the distant streets came the occasional honk of a car horn, and the rumble of a light-rail train passing over its tracks.
Something was off.
Rita's eyes snapped open.
Something was missing from the air.
As an S-rank Valkyrie of Schicksal, her perception of Honkai energy was as natural as breathing.
But the Honkai energy radiation in that Arc City underground laboratory—so thick it could nearly drown a person—had now vanished without a trace.
Not merely vanished.
The air of this world was like a complete "insulator."
She felt the Honkai energy that had once been active within her body going quiet at an incredible rate.
It was like a burning torch suddenly plunged into ice water—not only did the flame extinguish, but even the heat was being rapidly drawn away.
But it was precisely because of this uncanny "insulating" environment.
The Shencheng Pharmaceuticals serum toxin-mist she had inhaled earlier in battle—that weakness eating at her nerves like maggots on the bone—had also lost its potency as the Honkai energy quieted, and was now being rapidly metabolized by her formidable physical constitution.
Rita glanced down at the Argent Knight: Artemis on her body.
The faint blue glow on the armor's surface had dimmed somewhat.
There was no Honkai energy in the outside world to draw upon.
But fortunately, the independent, sealed energy reserve chamber inside the armor's core remained intact.
The energy within was enough to sustain her through a high-intensity annihilation battle without activating the external circulation.
Bracing against the load-bearing column, she slowly rose to her feet.
The readouts on her tactical goggles were flickering; every function was normal. After all, it was a god-slaying armor, representing the crystallization of Schicksal's highest technology. Whether in defensive power or endurance, it was far beyond what ordinary Valkyrie armor could match.
Emotion surged up in this moment.
She thought of Alvitr, thought of those battered Immortal Blades members left behind at Shencheng Pharmaceuticals.
If only she had been a little sharper, had discovered the World Serpent's trap a little sooner—
Rita closed her eyes.
But this feeling of remorse did not last long.
Two seconds later, she opened them again.
The emotion in her eyes was completely swept away, leaving only a resolve colder than ice and snow.
As an S-rank Valkyrie of Schicksal, she had, in her youth, already saved a world bubble on the brink of destruction alongside Durandal. In adulthood she had gone through battles great and small. The Immortal Blades were Schicksal's sharpest blade, and superfluous negative emotions would only become an obstacle to carrying out the mission.
The most important thing now was to survive, to figure out where this place was, and then to relay back to HQ the intelligence on Shencheng Pharmaceuticals' plan, and on that mysterious force capable of spiriting away an S-rank Valkyrie in an instant.
Rita raised her left wrist and operated the miniature control panel on her armor.
[Attempting to connect to Schicksal's primary frequency band—]
[Connection failed.]
[Searching for backup satellite nodes—]
[Search failed; target protocol mismatch.]
A harsh red light blinked on the screen.
The surrounding electromagnetic bands, the underlying code of the network base stations—all of it exuded an uncanny sense of unfamiliarity.
This was not any kind of communication network set up by Schicksal or Anti-Entropy at all.
Rita lifted her head, looking through the ruined rebar mesh overhead toward that azure sky.
Even the angle of the sun and the texture of the light's refraction gave her a deep sense of wrongness.
Could it be that this was not the Eigen-world, but some world bubble with its own special rules?
Rita, who had experience traversing world bubbles, had naturally thought of this possibility right away. Otherwise there would be no explaining why this world exerted some kind of suppression upon Honkai energy.
But she couldn't readily draw a conclusion either; she couldn't rule out that she had come within range of some device, set up by the World Serpent, that had a suppressive effect on Honkai energy.
After careful calculation, Rita coolly analyzed that although this armor had Honkai energy internal circulation, that energy would likely be dissolved by some force the moment it left her body—which meant the power she could bring to bear was extremely limited.
[Silver Moon] could not be used.
All she could rely on was Skadi Ondurgud and her own martial skill. Even without the augmentation of Honkai energy, Skadi Ondurgud remained a divine weapon of the finest edge—even the shell of an Emperor-class Honkai Beast could be sliced open as easily as tofu.
Just as she was preparing to activate the armor's optical camouflage and leave this unfinished building first to scout the surrounding environment.
"Snap."
A faint, crisp sound.
It came from the entrance of the unfinished building's abandoned ground-floor doorway.
It was the sound of a shoe sole crushing a dried-out chunk of cement.
Rita's body tensed instantly, her left hand instinctively gripping the hilt of the weapon hanging at the small of her back.
A breeze stirred a few scraps of discarded newspaper on the ground floor.
A figure sauntered in unhurriedly.
It was… a girl wearing an ordinary loose white hoodie, with a pair of light gray athletic shorts on her lower half.
Her long white hair hung loosely down her back, and a single stray ahoge stuck up from the top of her head.
The girl was even carrying a transparent plastic shopping bag in her left hand.
Across a distance of more than ten meters, Rita could clearly see that the shopping bag held a soil-covered white radish, a few potatoes, and a box of sliced fatty beef bearing a yellow discount label.
The air of everyday life was so thick it was as if this were the back door of some large supermarket.
But in that instant Rita's pupils shrank to dangerous pinpricks.
Because the girl had raised her head.
They were a pair of golden pupils without any warmth, lofty and aloof, radiating a bone-deep arrogance.
In the instant their eyes met, every cell in Rita's body—even her very spine—screamed frantic alarm.
It was the most primal shudder of a creature facing its natural predator.
It was—
The Herrscher of the Void.
Sirin?
The air in the unfinished building seemed to freeze in an instant.
"Cha-chak."
A crisp mechanical clicking sound.
A massive, dread-cold-radiating faint-blue scythe—Skadi Ondurgud—unfolded in an instant in Rita's hand.
The enormous blade nearly cleaved through a discarded rebar rod beside her.
Frigid, freezing air spread out in all directions with Rita at its center, the dust on the ground instantly frozen into ice crystals.
Rita's breathing halted completely; her mind entered an overloaded state of operation in this moment.
Schicksal's radar network covered the entire globe; even the faintest Honkai energy fluctuation from the Herrscher of the Void would be captured in an instant.
So how could she have appeared here without the slightest sound?
And moreover, why was she completely unharmed? In the Schicksal battle, she had clearly first been struck by the Moonlight Throne main cannon mounted on the Hyperion, and then injected with a Honkai-energy-neutralizing serum.
She should not be safe and sound—or rather, at the very least, the version of her now should not be the Herrscher of the Void, "Sirin."
She should instead be—
Kiana Kaslana.
And those casual clothes, that shopping bag—they were clearly the posture of someone utterly relaxed, one who might even regard this place as her own backyard garden!
A terrifying chain of logic rapidly took shape in Rita's mind.
In that underground laboratory, the trap the World Serpent had laid, the encirclement of those Death Webs around her.
And the suddenly appearing, unanalyzable spatial teleportation force.
After being stripped from the battlefield, in this uncanny place where she couldn't contact the outside world at all, she had run straight into the Herrscher of the Void.
The truth seemed all but ready to leap forth.
This was a perfect kill-trap.
The World Serpent and the Herrscher of the Void had formed some secret alliance!
The World Serpent had used Shencheng Pharmaceuticals' technology to sow chaos in Arc City and to block Schicksal's tracking radar.
And the Herrscher of the Void had used her unmatched spatial Authority to forcibly strip her from the battlefield and toss her into this isolated "cage"!
Just what were they trying to do?
Were they using her to coerce the Bishop?
Or simply, did they want to utterly wipe out Schicksal's combat strength here, like crushing an insect to death?
From Rita's perspective, the power to possess such a terrifying spatial Authority—to teleport her in an instant—was something that, in this world, perhaps only the Herrscher of the Void could accomplish.
And now, the Herrscher of the Void stood right before her.
Even if she looked just like a girl who had just finished stocking up at the supermarket and was ready to head home and feed the "pet" waiting there.
Her threat was not to be underestimated all the same.
Rita knew full well what kind of terrifying power the Herrscher of the Void possessed—within her body there was not only the Herrscher of the Void's core, but even the Gem of Conquest and the Gem of Serenity.
Once she unleashed her power without reservation, the whole of Arc City would become a living hell in an instant.
Rita's hands gripped the long haft of Skadi Ondurgud tightly.
The lingering trace of confusion and worry for the future in her eyes was, in this moment, completely replaced by an utterly pure, cold killing intent.
No matter what, the intelligence had to be sent out.
Even if it meant using her own life to smash a breach in this cage.
Since the "truth" was now clear, there was nothing left but a fight to the death.
Fifteen meters away from her.
Sirin, carrying the plastic bag, halted her steps.
She had only cut through this unfinished building to take a shortcut.
Originally it was to hurry back to Su Yu's home and then prepare a surprise for him.
But instead, the moment she walked in, she saw a woman covered in blood sitting beside a column.
She hadn't wanted to meddle—she was hardly a paramecium like Kiana, overflowing with compassion.
In her mind, whether humans lived or died had nothing to do with her.
But the instant that woman stood up and turned her head.
Sirin's golden eyes narrowed slightly.
She recognized that face.
In Kiana's memories, at that place called St. Freya Academy.
This woman in a maid outfit, holding a scythe, had once made even that ant called Theresa wary.
Schicksal's S-rank Valkyrie, Rita Rossweisse.
Sirin's gaze fell on the massive scythe radiating cold air, sensing that undisguised, bone-piercing hostility and killing intent.
She had no idea how this woman had crossed worlds to arrive here.
She only saw an ant, holding a piece of scrap metal, releasing killing intent toward a noble Herrscher.
Sirin's fingers loosened slightly.
"Plop."
The plastic bag holding the white radish and sliced fatty beef dropped onto the dust-covered ground.
A breeze blew through the unfinished building, stirring the strands of both their hair.
The gazes of the S-rank Valkyrie and the Herrscher of the Void collided in midair.
There was no sound, yet it was as if there were deafening thunder.
The scent of gunpowder burst forth between the two of them.
A life-or-death struggle built upon an absolute information gap was about to erupt with a roar between two people who had completely misread the situation.
____
Gift for Everyone: Once we hit 20 Powerstones, I'll release +1 bonus chapter
________________________________________
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! 😉