A sonic-boom cloud detonated above the ruins of the abandoned building.
Su Yu's body became a blood-red afterimage that defied all reason.
His first-level Genetic Lock, forcibly catalyzed by the drug, had overloaded into the second level, and the savage kinetic energy compressed every particle of air along his path into a shrill, mournful shriek.
Rita's deep-blue eyes suddenly contracted.
She didn't even have time to adjust the stance of the Argent Knight: Artemis.
She could only rely on the Valkyrie instinct all but branded into her bones, gripping the icy shaft of the Skadi Ondurgud with both hands and holding the massive ice scythe across her chest like a shield.
At the same time she braced her lower body, drove a biting frost from her waist, and cut diagonally at that blood-red afterimage.
"Shhhkk——!"
The ear-piercing sound of a blade sinking into flesh burst through the air.
This slash, powerful enough to cleave a heavy armored vehicle in two, had landed with unerring accuracy.
But Su Yu made no attempt to dodge at all.
Not only did he not dodge — he met that pale-blue edge head-on, cruelly thrusting out his own left arm.
The ice scythe sliced without resistance through the skin of his left forearm, already scorched a dull red by the extreme heat, severed the thick muscle fibers, and bit deep into the stark-white radius bone.
Blood, scalding as boiling water, sprayed madly along the cold blade, splattering across the frozen rubble and hissing as it evaporated with a "sssss."
Rita felt a heavy, clogging resistance in her wrist.
This was nothing like the feeling of cutting through a human body — the blade felt as though it had sunk into a mire woven from countless high-tensile steel cables twisted together.
The next second.
A hair-raising image was reflected, crisp and clear, in Rita's eyes, which had dilated slightly from her extreme shock.
The enormous wound where Su Yu's entire left arm had nearly been severed.
It did not droop feebly the way an ordinary person's would.
Those severed, dark-red muscle tissues and blood vessels seemed to possess some kind of frenzied self-awareness.
Countless tiny buds of flesh, driven by the terrifying force of the drug, sprouted like wildly growing vines from both edges of the wound, entangling and knotting themselves together in a death-grip.
The place where the bone had snapped let out a teeth-gritting "crack."
Accompanied by great gouts of scalding steam thick with the reek of blood.
That fatal wound, incredibly, was forcibly wrenched shut within the span of a single breath!.
Aside from the freshly grown pink flesh-buds that looked somewhat grotesque, this arm had actually regained the ability to exert force again!.
A chill crawled swiftly up the spine of this battle-hardened S-rank Valkyrie.
Inhuman self-regeneration.
A fighting style that had utterly abandoned all sense of pain and every concept of defense.
Rita realized that the man standing before her was no longer the one who had tried to intimidate her with words and an RPG.
This was a meat grinder that had been forcibly overclocked, one that knew only how to tear apart every obstacle by the most savage means.
"Cut me, did you... not deep enough."
Su Yu's voice, hoarse as though his throat were full of broken glass, was right beside her.
Using the brief pause he'd bought by taking the slash on his left arm, he had already forced his way into the inner blind spot of Rita's proud long-hafted weapon.
The distance — less than half a meter.
Su Yu's right arm suddenly yanked backward, and the savage muscular power granted by the second-level Genetic Lock swelled his entire right arm a full size larger.
Veins bulged out like gnarled, knotted tree roots.
Then, the last dregs of Tai Xu true qi in his qi sea were wrung out without reservation, pouring frantically into the palm of his right hand.
His twisted right arm gave a cracking report of bone strained past its limit.
"Hummmm——!"
There was no motion of drawing a weapon.
When Su Yu's right fist was less than ten centimeters from the chest armor of Rita.
That dagger icon which had been lying quietly in the System's storage space all this time was activated in an instant.
A rugged short blade — no more than thirty-five centimeters long, bearing no paint of any kind, matte-black from end to end — appeared out of thin air in Su Yu's palm like a ghost.
Eighty-one point four kilograms.
[White Dwarf].
The very instant it appeared, Su Yu jammed down the gear switch at the base of the hilt with all his might.
A shrill, ear-splitting high-frequency vibration, accompanied by a dark-red heatwave of plasma, detonated with a roar at point-blank range!.
Rita's expression finally changed.
She sensed the terrifying physical mass and devastating high-frequency cutting force contained within that black short blade that had appeared out of nowhere.
In such a cramped space, with Su Yu tugging at her in a near-suicidal grapple, there was no way for her to pull back the massive ice scythe to defend.
"CLANG——!!!"
A deafening metallic blast, one that even drowned out the sound of the abandoned building collapsing.
This was no exquisite martial technique.
This was the purest, most reason-defying crush of sheer mass!.
Su Yu slammed the full kinetic force of his body, along with the terrifying impact generated by the high-frequency vibration, without holding anything back, straight into the blade of the ice scythe.
The enormous impact, laced with the savage hidden force of Tai Xu Sword Qi, transmitted directly through the haft into Rita's hands like an artillery shell fresh from the barrel.
The armored gauntlets of the Argent Knight: Artemis erupted with ear-splitting electric sparks, and the webs of Rita's hands, clenched tight around the haft, split open in an instant.
She felt a severe, aching numbness shoot through both arms.
The unstoppable, monstrous force compelled this death-god of Schicksal to release her weapon for the first time.
The black short blade [White Dwarf] and the [Skadi Ondurgud], radiating its frigid cold, were both wrenched from their grips in that violent collision.
The two weapons spun through mid-air, and with a "BOOM" plunged deep into the ruins more than ten meters away, one to the left and one to the right.
The ice scythe snapped a load-bearing wall in half, while the White Dwarf sank completely into the concrete floor as if slicing through tofu, leaving only a smoking length of hilt jutting out.
Su Yu's right arm, too, twisted into a grotesque angle from the impact.
Capillaries ruptured across a wide area, and the entire arm was a mangled ruin of blood and flesh.
But he paid no mind at all to that already-crippled limb.
He had succeeded.
With one ruined arm, and a trump card that could only be used once.
He had forcibly torn away the greatest fang and claw of an S-rank Valkyrie.
And dragged this unwinnable battle by force into its most brutal, most merciless domain — close-quarters hand-to-hand combat.
The instant she lost her weapon, Rita showed not the slightest hesitation or panic that an ordinary warrior might.
The combat discipline of an S-rank Valkyrie was displayed to the fullest in that moment.
She swiftly released her hands, still trembling faintly from the shock, let her body sink slightly with the momentum, and drew on the terrifying strength of the Argent Knight: Artemis, which still overwhelmed Su Yu's.
Her knee shot up violently, kicking up a gust of bone-chilling wind, driving straight for Su Yu's lower abdomen.
A vicious, precise assassin's martial art.
Su Yu still did not dodge.
No — to put it precisely, he had utterly abandoned the very concept of dodging.
He arched his body slightly and, with a chest scorched crimson by the extreme heat, took the full force of that knee-strike — one capable of shattering a half-meter-thick steel plate — head-on!.
"Crack——"
The sound of ribs breaking was crisp enough to make the heart clench.
Su Yu spat out a great mouthful of blood, his body arching upward against his will.
But in the very instant of taking that lethal blow, his still-mobile left hand clenched into a fist.
The savage kinetic energy of the second-level Genetic Lock gathered in his knuckles, and he smashed it viciously into the cracked armor on Rita's shoulder!.
"BANG!"
The armor caved in with a jarring, dull thud.
The brute force made Rita's shoulder dip slightly, and she took half a step back.
This was the fighting style of a mad dog.
Wound for wound, blood washed away with blood.
Su Yu didn't even let out a single scream.
No sooner had he been driven back than his right foot crushed the ground again.
Like a tireless demon that knew nothing of death, he hurled himself once more toward Rita's deadly fists and feet.
Fists, elbows, even shoulder-rams.
With every collision, his body gave off the sound of bones cracking and muscles tearing — yet he could always, in some bizarre posture, leave a fist-print smeared with his own blood on Rita's body.
That horrifying spectacle of a body bleeding at every moment and being forcibly stitched back together by the drug at every moment; those eyes wholly seized by crimson, without a shred of reason left in them.
In the span of a few brief dozen seconds.
This S-rank Valkyrie, always so proud, who had toyed with every enemy in the palm of her hand.
Was, in terms of sheer momentum, forcibly suppressed by this blood-soaked man.
No matter how she exerted her strength, no matter how she tried to circle around this madman to attack the Herrscher behind him.
That slight, thin figure would always stand like a wall, blocking her stubbornly in front of the white-haired girl whose legs were frozen in place.
"Bang, bang, bang!"
The dull echo of fist meeting flesh reverberated madly through the abandoned building.
After one more brutal wound-for-wound exchange.
Su Yu's upper body was now completely dyed red with blood.
He abruptly thrust out both hands, caked with mud and blood, utterly disregarding how the ice-spikes on the Artemis armor sliced his finger-bones bloody, and seized Rita's swinging arms in a death-grip.
A beast-like roar erupted from his throat.
The very last residue of the Star of Eden's energy was wrung out of him.
An invisible gravity field spread along his hands and, in an instant, engulfed Rita's body as well.
Locking the two of them in place at extreme close range, less than twenty centimeters apart.
Both their bodies were trembling violently.
It was a contest of strength that pushed past all limits.
Rita's deep-blue pupils contracted.
She tried to launch another knee-strike, but the crushing gravity delayed her by that tiny fraction of a second.
And within that fraction of a second.
Su Yu's eyes, gone bloodshot with madness, stared fixedly at that face before him, mostly hidden behind its visor.
He didn't hesitate for an instant.
His head snapped violently backward.
The thick muscles of his neck bulged, cord by cord, from the excessive strain.
And then.
Using no weapon, without any flashy technique.
Like a primal beast venting its rage.
Su Yu smashed his own forehead, like a meteor plummeting to earth, carrying that burn-the-boats resolve, mercilessly into Rita's forehead!.
"BAM—!!!!"
The teeth-gritting, dull sound of bone slamming violently against armor thundered through those deathly-still ruins.
This utterly reason-defying, street-thug brawler's move — this savage collision of skull against tactical helmet.
The enormous recoil split Su Yu's forehead open in an instant, and blood came flooding out like a breached dam, gumming up his eyes.
And Rita most certainly did not get off easy either.
That savage kinetic force punched straight through the helmet's shock-absorbing layer.
On her ever-cold face, an expression of pain finally surfaced.
A violent dizziness slammed against her brain, and a thread of scarlet blood seeped from the corner of her forehead, sliding down the side of her fair face.
On the sturdy visor of the Argent Knight: Artemis, there had suddenly appeared an extremely obvious, appalling web of cracks.
Sirin, hiding behind that load-bearing column at the back.
She stared blankly at this scene.
The frost on her legs was still bone-piercing, yet her body had stopped trembling.
That crude, primal, even faintly comical headbutt.
In this ruin full of blood and gunsmoke.
Like a bolt of lightning, it pierced straight through Sirin's memory in an instant.
It overlapped, in a brutal manner, perfectly with that similar scene.
The rooftop.
That fool had done the very same thing — clutching that body bent on suicide in a death-grip, and slamming his own head hard against her forehead.
Only, that time it had been to awaken Kiana Kaslana.
And this time, it was to protect her — the Herrscher of the Void, Sirin.
Gazing at that figure with its back to her, without a single unbroken patch of flesh on its body, blood gushing madly from its forehead, yet still gripping the Valkyrie's arm and refusing to retreat even half a step.
That proud outer shell of Sirin's, named "Herrscher of the Void," that had regarded itself as lofty and looked upon humanity as mere weeds.
Was smashed to powder by that blood-soaked headbutt, without even a speck of debris left behind.
She opened her mouth, trying to produce the mocking laugh of before, or that scornful, disdainful cold snort.
But all that came from her throat was a broken sob.
Great, scalding teardrops came spilling without warning from those golden eyes of hers.
Sliding down her ghastly-pale cheeks, splashing onto the cold ground.
"That's enough..."
She murmured, and in her voice there was no longer the slightest trace of a queen's majesty.
And yet.
Miracles do not forever favor a madman who tries to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the gods using nothing but a mortal body.
"Bwuah——!"
A great mouthful of blood, mixed with countless tiny fragments of flesh, sprayed from Su Yu's mouth like a fountain, splattering across Rita's crack-riddled visor.
The brutal force that had been suppressing Rita all this time was, in that moment, as though its power source had been yanked out.
Su Yu's movements went into a fatal rigidity.
The side-effects of the forcibly injected drug finally erupted, in full, in that instant.
The repeated use of the White Dwarf, the taking of that slash head-on, and that monstrous, frenzied self-healing had thoroughly overdrawn every last cell in his body.
The final scrap of the Star of Eden's energy was declared exhausted.
The layer of white vapor on his skin, like high-temperature steam, dispersed in an instant.
Across his whole body the capillaries began bursting one after another like tiny firecrackers.
The muscles that the drug had forcibly sewn shut split open once more, and blood came surging out again.
His body was overloaded.
He had reached the limit of the limit.
As an S-rank Valkyrie, one of Schicksal's supreme combatants, Rita's combat awareness had long since become instinct.
In that one-thousandth of a second as she recovered from the dizziness.
She keenly caught the instantaneous rigidity of Su Yu's body, and the utterly collapsed strength within it.
A flash of cold, resolute finality crossed Rita's deep-blue eyes.
The leg armor of the Argent Knight: Artemis erupted with a roar even more ear-splitting than before.
The miniature thrusters spat out flames of the most extreme, frigid cold.
Seizing the instant Su Yu's hands lost their strength, she abruptly threw herself backward.
Her long, straight right leg carried terrifying kinetic force enough to kick apart a mountain peak, wrapped in bone-chilling blue Honkai energy, like a great axe splitting the heavens.
It swept without the slightest mercy across Su Yu's chest, already riddled to ruin by fractures and breaks.
"Crk-crk-crack!!!"
This time, it was truly the shattering sound of a sternum caving in completely.
In this silent hall, it was clear enough to make one's scalp crawl.
Su Yu's hands slid feebly from Rita's arms.
His body, now completely dyed red with blood, was like a tattered kite whose string had been utterly snapped in this storm.
It traced an arc through the air, scattered with dark-red droplets of blood.
"BOOM——!!!!!"
Accompanied by an enormous, muffled thud.
Su Yu crashed hard into another thick brick wall deep within the abandoned building.
That wall could no longer withstand the successive, terrifying impacts.
Amid an earth-shaking din of collapse, it came crashing down.
A great mass of dust, rubble, and rusted rebar poured down like a waterfall.
Burying that man, limp as a sack of torn rags, completely beneath the ruins and the thick, choking smoke and dust.
Not a single sound, his life or death unknown.
All that hung in the air, besides the gunsmoke, was that pungent stench of blood.
The brick wall deep in the abandoned building had utterly become a heap of dust-covered ruins.
The smoke and dust were still slowly churning and settling in the air.
"Clack."
Rita's hand once again gripped the Skadi Ondurgud that had earlier been wrenched from her grasp.
The frigid cold on the blade let out a faint "hiss" as it made contact with the residual heat generated by Su Yu's earlier eruption.
She walked with slow, heavy steps toward that corner buried in dust.
The web of cracks on her visor made a faint bead of blood seep out whenever she breathed.
This was the highest respect an S-rank Valkyrie could express toward that man who had thrown his life away entirely.
Respect was respect — but confirming a target's death and delivering a finishing blow was a basic rule of any mop-up mission.
All the more so given the bizarre recovery power that man had just displayed, which left her not daring to be the least bit careless.
Recalling the demonic state Su Yu had just been in, even this top-tier agent of Schicksal felt a shiver of dread.
Though she was not currently in perfect condition, the armor on her body and the Skadi Ondurgud forged from soul-steel were absolute divine weapons.
If she had been without her gear, without the protection of Artemis, and in her present state relying on nothing but the scythe and her martial techniques——
Facing Su Yu's wound-for-wound, life-be-damned fighting style, the one to lose in the end would absolutely be herself.
As a human being who could not use Honkai energy, pitting a mortal body against a fully-geared S-rank Valkyrie — even a wounded one, an S-rank Valkyrie suppressed by this strange battlefield.
This was likewise akin to an ant trying to shake a tree.
And yet it was precisely this ant that had all but drained the last of Rita's strength — she felt her whole body was as if it had been filled with lead.
If Su Yu could still stand up, then the one to fall would likely be herself.
Sirin, hiding behind the load-bearing column, still had her legs frozen fast to the ground by solid ice.
Her vacant golden eyes stared blankly as Rita walked, step by step, toward that field of ruins.
There was no movement in the ruins.
No cry of pain from fractured bone, not even a single faint sound of breathing to be heard.
Sirin's pupils trembled violently.
The scene before her, in the interweaving of the dim surrounding light, actually began to distort and blur into double images.
With utter brutality, it tore open that bloody scar buried deep in Sirin's memory — one long since interred, yet never once healed.
That was the snow plains of Siberia.
That was the apocalypse, its sky dyed purple by Honkai energy.
A great demon-dragon, its whole body covered in ghastly wounds, its blood nearly drained dry, let out the final, mournful death-wail of its life amid the sky-filling artillery fire and humanity's slaughter.
And then, it plummeted heavily onto the cold snow.
Bella.
Her most loyal symbiotic Honkai Beast, the only friend and family she had in this world.
In that moment, too, just like now, in order to block the way before her, to protect that arrogance of hers — Bella had had her body ruthlessly torn apart by those running dogs of humanity.
That agony, as though a piece had been carved bodily out of her very soul, still tormented her beyond endurance whenever she recalled it, even now.
And now.
Was the very same thing about to play out once more, in this cursed abandoned building, in this inexplicable, peaceful world?
That foolish human who always cooked for her, who despite his venomous mouth always kept her sheltered behind him.
Was he too, like Bella, to become a cold corpse in that heap of ruins, all for the sake of her — a monster who could do nothing but cause trouble?
"No... never..."
Rita was now less than five meters from that field of ruins.
She slowly raised the ice scythe in her hand.
"STOP RIGHT THERE!!!"
A scream carrying a shrill, blood-weeping anguish suddenly detonated through the hall of the abandoned building.
In this voice there was no longer the slightest majesty of the Herrscher of the Void — there was only the wail of a despairing girl about to lose everything.
"Crk-crk-crack!"
Sirin abruptly clenched both fists and, heedless even of the risk of necrosis to the frozen nerves in her legs, drew upon the very last shred of strength in her entire body.
She didn't even try to mobilize the void's Honkai energy.
Instead, relying on near-self-mutilating brute physical force, she forcibly tore herself free of the solid ice encasing her knees!.
Great swaths of skin and flesh were ripped away by the ice, and blood instantly dyed her two pale, slender legs red.
She felt no pain at all.
Sirin scrambled and crawled forward.
Because of the numbness in her legs, she even fell twice along the way, her knees striking the rubble with dull thuds.
But she immediately clambered up again, using both hands and feet.
This body belonging to Kiana, which in this moment seemed so frail and fragile, flung itself like a rag before that heap of shattered bricks.
Sirin spread her arms wide.
With her own utterly defenseless chest, she blocked, in a death-grip, the way before the ruins that buried Su Yu.
Her golden eyes brimmed with scalding tears, mingling with the blood on her forehead, carving two muddy trails down her face.
She was like a lioness driven into a corner, one who would protect her cub even with every tooth knocked out, and she let out a hysterical roar toward that death-god holding the scythe:
"I absolutely will not allow it! I will not allow you to hurt him again!!!"
Rita's wrist, poised to chop downward, stopped dead in mid-air as though it had struck an invisible wall.
Her pupils contracted violently, uncontrollably.
How could this be?
A shock that utterly overturned all her cognition and common sense slammed against that heart of hers, long since tempered by a thousand hammer-blows, like a tsunami.
This was the Herrscher of the Void?
This was the one defined in Schicksal's top-secret files as harboring extreme hatred for humanity, the ultimate catastrophe that brought endless destruction and death?
A Herrscher, a god who stood above the laws of physics.
Was actually, for the sake of protecting an ordinary male human — one whose very name had never even appeared on Schicksal's radar.
Not only shedding tears.
But even going so far as to willingly expose her most vulnerable vital point to a scythe blade capable of cutting her in half in an instant?
That utterly insane forbidden project of Bishop Otto's — "artificially controlling a Herrscher and endowing it with human emotions."
Could it be that, in this wholly unfamiliar world, upon this experimental subject, it had truly come to pass in such an absurd fashion?
"Beep beep beep beep——!!!!"
Just as Rita's brain crashed briefly at this scene defying all reason.
The life-signs detector inside the helmet of the Argent Knight: Artemis suddenly blared its highest-frequency alarm, loud enough to nearly rupture her eardrums!.
On the detector screen.
That cluster of feeble red light, previously already judged as having life-signs below five percent and all but extinguished.
That was the man beneath the ruins.
Every one of his physiological readings was, at this moment, climbing upward along a curve that utterly ignored all biological common sense!.
Heart rate breaking three hundred fifty.
Cellular activity reaching dozens of times the norm.
This was the inhuman recovery power born of the violent shattering and reassembly of Su Yu's cells, in the process of breaking down and rebuilding, after he had finally stepped through the door of the second-level Genetic Lock.
A film of fine cold sweat instantly seeped across Rita's back.
If this monster — one who could still heal frantically even at the brink of death from grievous wounds — were allowed to stand up again and recover his ability to move.
Then with her own body, likewise gravely depleted from continuously employing Honkai energy and resisting the gravity, the course of this battle would become utterly uncontrollable.
A madman ready at any moment to die in mutual destruction was far more dangerous than the Herrscher before her in her current state.
This all had to be ended at once.
"I can spare his life."
Rita swiftly suppressed the shock in her heart and withdrew the ice scythe, that massive weapon smashing a spray of ice shards from the ground.
Her words came very fast, her voice sounding somewhat muffled inside the visor.
"His recovery power is astonishing. If you stop attacking now, he can survive."
Rita's gaze locked, fixed and unwavering, onto the arms-spread Sirin.
"But in exchange."
"You must come with me. Now."
This was no act of mercy.
This was the most fatal, most impossible-to-refuse dead-end bargaining chip that a hunter would throw out after weighing the situation and the danger coefficient.
Upon hearing these words, Sirin's face, covered in mud and tears, gave an uncontrollable, violent shudder.
A deal.
Go with her.
Sirin understood, better than anyone else in this world, that cursed "Reality Anchor" she carried on her, and the cold, merciless rules of the System.
Once she left this place with this woman, once the Absolute Freedom Time expired.
What awaited her would absolutely not be some imprisonment or trial.
It would be this body beginning to turn transparent the instant it lost its "observation," the utter loss of all senses, and being finally erased by this world's laws as though she were garbage data — erased so completely that not even the ash of her scattering would remain.
To go with her was to die.
But.
Sirin slowly turned her head.
Through the gaps between the bricks, she saw Su Yu's hand — still clawing desperately at the ground, caked with blood and grime.
That finger, its nail snapped off from excessive force, was still twitching faintly.
He was struggling to breathe.
He was trying to survive.
So long as she nodded, that woman with the scythe would let him go.
Sirin turned her head back again, and looked at Rita.
In those golden eyes, once full of arrogance, always looking down on everything, all light had now utterly dimmed.
What remained was only a kind of resignation, like burnt-out dead ashes.
That fire of vengeance that had once sworn to make all of humanity pay the price was, in this instant, entirely extinguished by that blood-drenched foolish human.
"Fine."
She closed her eyes.
Two streams of clear tears slid down her cheeks.
This time.
The lofty god, for the sake of her foolish servant, had resolved to go serenely to her death.
Just as Sirin was about to lower her arms, bidding a final farewell, in an awkward tone within her mind, to that man collapsed in the ruins.
"Clatter."
A dull sound of several shattered bricks tumbling came from the ruins behind her.
Sirin's body abruptly went rigid.
That blood-caked arm gripped, in a death-hold, an exposed length of rebar beside it.
Then.
Under the gaze of Rita's eyes, dilating slightly once more.
Amid Sirin's terror-stricken backward glance, her heart all but stopping.
That battered body — without a single unbroken scrap of cloth anywhere on it, its skin scalded crimson, its bones twisted into contorted shapes in many places.
Incredibly.
Swaying and unsteady, yet like a steel spike nailed fast into rock.
Stubbornly.
Rose to its feet once more.
Su Yu's breathing was heavy, like a broken bellows being frantically yanked.
His left eye, gummed shut with blood, could not open at all — he could only look ahead with that right eye laced with red bloodshot threads.
Even though his legs shook violently.
Even though with every step he shifted, great quantities of blood streamed down his thigh to the ground.
He still dragged that body, seeming ready to fall completely apart at any moment, limping resolutely to stand in front of Sirin.
And then.
Once again, with that thin but broad back, he blocked her face — utterly frozen with shock — behind him.
"You..."
Sirin's golden eyes went wide in disbelief.
From extreme terror and heartache, her voice cracked and broke, and she cursed at him with an almost-collapsing sob:
"You bastard! Why did you stand up?! You lowly ant!"
"I already agreed with her! I told you to lie there obediently! I told you to stand down! Can't you understand my order?!"
She waved her scraped-raw arms about like a madwoman, trying to pound on Su Yu's back — yet just as her fingertips were about to touch that curled, mangled flesh, she jerked them back as if electrocuted, not daring to use any force at all.
What was this supposed to be?
She had, with such difficulty, finally steeled her resolve to give up her own noble life in exchange for a chance for this ant to live.
Why did this fellow, who couldn't even stand steady, insist on tearing her resolve to shreds in this savage way?
Su Yu did not turn around.
He still stared fixedly at Rita, five meters away.
But on that face of his, covered in blood and even somewhat grotesque, he had pulled up a smile — anguished, yet carrying a pride and defiance ingrained in his very bones.
Rita Rossweisse gripped the scythe warily and, like a reflex, retreated several meters.
As an S-rank Valkyrie of Schicksal, a top-tier agent who licked blood from the blade's edge, she felt, incredibly, a kind of shudder and fear.
Compared to an enemy that could not be defeated, a monster that could not be killed, a devil that could rise to its feet again no matter what — was far more troublesome to deal with.
What the Honkai Beasts on the battlefield could not achieve, what the enemies encountered in the world-bubbles could not achieve, what even fighting a Valkyrie as powerful as Durandal could not achieve——
It was precisely this man, a man without a shred of Honkai energy in his body, who with that strange power and that mad fighting style made Rita's heart feel, for the first time in a long while.
What fear truly was.
Her body taut, she came no closer to Su Yu; Rita rapidly analyzed the situation.
In the fierce fight just now, most of Artemis's stored energy had already been consumed, and against the enemy's recovery ability that defied all reason, if this were dragged into a war of attrition, she would be certain to lose.
Perhaps here, a temporary retreat was not a bad option after all.
"Cough..."
Su Yu spat out a mouthful of bloody foam, looking at that Valkyrie who watched him warily. He could not even feel a single finger now, holding himself up from falling on willpower alone.
Though his voice was hoarse and faint, it carried clearly into Sirin's ears.
"Even though I'm just an Office Slave who only knows how to bang on a keyboard and cook..."
"I'm still not so weak that, in this cursed world..."
"I need a girl who can't even cook, who only knows how to secretly watch cartoons..."
"To trade her own life for the chance for me to keep living."
These words carried no ornate rhetoric, and no earth-shattering vow.
But they were like an iron hammer.
They utterly smashed the fortress deep within Sirin's heart, the one named "tsundere" and "Herrscher."
In this moment, Sirin was completely conquered.
This man.
In this moment had never treated her as that world-destroying monster who might go berserk at any time and had to be perpetually guarded against.
Nor had he ever treated her as that lofty god who had to be sacrificed to and worshipped.
He only.
Treated her as a girl who would get angry over not having strawberry cake, who was clumsy and needed to be looked after.
An utterly ordinary girl.
All this time, she had wrapped herself in that hard, cold shell of a Herrscher.
Only because, in this world, there had never once been anyone willing to embrace that fragile version of her.
Now, there was.
And this person was standing right before her, using his own broken, ruined flesh-and-blood body to block the malice of the entire world for her sake.
The tears burst the dam completely.
Like beads from a snapped string, they crashed down madly onto those blood-reddened ruins.
Sirin closed her eyes.
She gave up all her pride.
She gave up her obsession with this body.
She gave up those tedious, deranged fantasies of destruction and vengeance.
In the deepest depths of her own consciousness space.
Toward that golden ocean of soul, shrouded by Tai Xu Sword Qi and long dormant in slumber.
She let out the most throat-tearing, most unreserved roar of her entire life:
"Kiana Kaslana——"
"Haven't you always wanted my power?! Haven't you always styled yourself the savior?!"
"Take everything I have! Take my authority, my power, my body — take all of it!"
"Wake up already!!! Go save that idiot who doesn't even care about his own life!!!"
"How much longer are you going to keep sleeping?!"
"Hummmm——"
In the instant that desperate roar echoed through the consciousness space.
Kiana Kaslana abruptly opened her eyes.
They were a pair of azure-blue eyes, clear and clean as a sky washed by rain — yet holding within them a resolve powerful enough to burn away all things.
The next second.
The Tai Xu Sword Qi in the Tai Xu Illusory Realm, suppressed for so vast a stretch of time.
If before it had been merely a trickling stream, then now it was a savage tsunami that had burst through every dam, bearing the momentum to smash heaven and annihilate earth!.
"BOOM——!"
This power, in an instant, leapt straight across the abyss of consciousness.
And brutally seized absolute control of this frail body.
In reality.
The nerve that had been forcibly propping Su Yu upright, after he finished speaking those words, finally snapped completely.
The overload penalty of the second-level Genetic Lock arrived right on schedule.
His legs lost all their strength entirely.
The world began to spin and darken in his eyes.
All sounds grew distant and blurred.
His body, like an invertebrate with its bones drawn out, toppled stiffly backward.
In the second before the back of Su Yu's head was about to smash onto those jagged shards of rubble.
A pair of arms — slender, yet in this moment steady enough to seem able to hold up the entire firmament — powerful and strong.
Caught his heavy, broken frame.
Su Yu felt himself fall into a warm embrace, one carrying a faint scent of gunsmoke and a certain special body-fragrance that belonged only to that white-haired girl.
The bone-piercing frost that had frozen her legs was gone.
In its place was a sense of security so profound it made one's scalp tingle.
With the last shred of his strength, he opened that right eye, not yet completely gummed shut with blood.
He did not see those arrogant golden pupils full of hostility.
What entered his vision.
Was a pair of azure-blue eyes he knew so very well, clear as crystal.
In those eyes, there was no longer the earlier dimness and lifelessness, nor that stray-cat terror and wariness.
What filled them was a supreme tenderness gentle enough to melt even the hardest steel, and a heartache so deep it made one's very heart tremble.
"I'm back..."
The girl lowered her head.
Her long white hair, grown somewhat disheveled from battle, fell against Su Yu's cheek, bringing a faint, tickling sensation.
Her voice was no longer Sirin's lofty tone, nor that stubborn, tsundere edge from before.
Soft.
So soft it seemed she feared that raising it even slightly would shatter the broken man in her arms. "Idiot."
Su Yu gazed at that face so close before him.
On his own face, contorted with pain, those taut muscles, in this moment, miraculously relaxed completely.
That anguished smile finally spread all the way to the depths of his eyes.
"Welcome back..."
In a voice like the faint droning of a mosquito, he uttered a few blurred words.
"...Kiana."
The breath Su Yu had been forcing to hold dispersed entirely.
His head lolled feebly against the girl's soft chest, both eyes shut tight, as he fell completely unconscious.
In the hall of the abandoned building.
That brutal death-struggle seemed to have hit pause in the instant of this embrace.
Rita Rossweisse's hands gripping the ice scythe clenched tight, beyond her control.
Void.
This was the only word that surfaced in her mind as she stared, in this moment, at the white-haired girl holding the man.
If the Herrscher of the Void a second ago had been like a volcano ready to erupt at any moment, with savagery and destruction written across her face.
Then the girl now.
Not the faintest ripple of Honkai energy could be felt on her.
Gone were those wildly dancing strands of hair, gone was that oppressive aura that seemed about to crush the very air.
She simply half-knelt there quietly amid the ruins.
But it was precisely this utter, bottomless "void."
This state of returning to pristine simplicity, one that seemed to completely shut out the very breath of the whole world.
That made this S-rank Valkyrie.
Feel, for the first time, a cold, dreary terror, one that seemed to freeze her very marrow, crawling frantically up her tailbone.
Her back was already utterly soaked with cold sweat.
Kiana paid no heed at all to that Schicksal death-god not far off, braced as if facing a formidable foe.
She carefully pillowed Su Yu's head on her own thigh, its skin scraped raw from her earlier falls.
She reached out that slender hand, her movements gentle in the extreme, as though touching some exceedingly fragile, priceless treasure.
"Honestly... you great big idiot."
She pulled a reasonably clean white handkerchief from her pocket.
Like a young wife heartbroken over her husband's recklessness yet at a total loss for what to do.
On one hand she grumbled her complaints in a voice heavy with a stuffy nasal tone.
On the other, bit by bit, she wiped away the congealed blood and grime on Su Yu's face.
"You're so weak... you promised me you wouldn't push yourself too hard..."
"Why did you have to use that dangerous drug... do you have any idea, if just now you'd really died..."
Her movements were exceedingly slow.
Until she had wiped Su Yu's face, ghastly pale from excessive blood loss, clean enough that his features could just barely be made out.
Until she confirmed that this man's chest was still rising and falling — faintly, but tenaciously.
Until she had forced that whole cascade of tears back into her eyes by sheer will.
Rita finally could no longer bear this maddening, suffocating pressure.
Even though the other party had done nothing, she instinctively felt that if she kept standing here without moving, she might be devoured by that unknown terror in the very next second.
She drew a deep breath, the engine of the Argent Knight: Artemis roared once again, and she gripped the ice scythe tight — either attack, or flee; apart from that, she had no other choice.
But just as she was about to lift her right foot.
"You'd better not move."
A voice without the slightest fluctuation of emotion rang out in the empty hall.
Kiana still kept her head lowered, arranging Su Yu's torn collar, without even lifting her eyelids.
She merely, offhandedly, cast a cold glance in Rita's direction.
There was no need for any of those excruciatingly embarrassing, chuunibyou lines like "Star of Eden, release."
She didn't even raise a finger.
"BOOM——!!!"
An absolute gravity field, more refined and terrifying by an incalculable degree than the one Sirin had wielded earlier, descended without any warning.
If earlier it had been like a mountain crashing down — crude and scattered.
Then now, this gravity had been focused, by an unbelievably terrifying control, into a single sharp steel spike.
It covered only the less-than-one-square-meter space where Rita stood.
"Krk!!!"
Rita had no time whatsoever to react — even the roar of her engine was forcibly choked off by this gravity.
Her entire body was pinned, in a death-grip, like a specimen, to the spot by this absolute crushing force.
Her feet sank deep into the concrete floor.
She could feel that the instant she dared move so much as a single finger, that gravity, compressed to its very limit, would instantly grind every bone in her body to powder.
No way to resist.
Not even a sliver of possibility of breaking free.
Kiana slowly rose to her feet.
She turned her head.
On that fair, lovely face that no longer held any ripple of expression.
The left eye, an azure-blue as clear as the deep night sky.
The right eye, a dark gold as resplendent as a burning star.
The heterochromatic eyes of two coexisting souls, at this very moment, cast a cold gaze of judgment toward that death-god pinned to the ground.
The absolute gravitational suppression covering Rita was, under this single glance, lifted in an instant.
Rita gasped for air in great gulps, and the life-support system of the Argent Knight: Artemis blared its warning of extreme oxygen deprivation.
She raised the ice scythe, braced as if facing a mortal foe.
Kiana stood atop the ruins.
A cold wind blowing in from who-knew-where lifted her head of silver-white hair.
Her voice was still without sorrow or joy, but that marrow-chilling oppressive presence, like an invisible giant hand, gripped the air throughout the entire abandoned building in a death-hold.
"Perhaps, once that idiot wakes up, he'll think what I'm doing is terribly irrational, that I'm not considering the bigger picture..."
"Perhaps he'll tell me that you have your own difficulties too..."
Kiana slowly raised her right hand, the five slender fingers clenching once, emptily, in the air.
"But I'm sorry."
"Right now, in my head, there isn't a shred of reason left."
"Right now, in my heart, there's only one selfish thought left."
In those heterochromatic eyes, a certain flame named fury was, in this instant, completely ignited.
"And that is..."
"To use every last bit of my strength to take that self-righteous iron shell of yours..."
"And smash it to smithereens!"
The words were not yet finished.
The trailing syllable had not even fully dispersed through this space.
"CRACK——!"
That was the crisp report, like glass shattering, produced as the air was instantly compressed and evacuated by extreme speed.
Kiana's figure, in that crisp report, simply vanished.
This already exceeded the dynamic vision-capture limit of the Argent Knight: Artemis, equipped with Schicksal's most top-tier optical radar.
In but a single instant.
Not even one-hundredth of a second.
That girl with the heterochromatic eyes, like a wraith that had broken free of spatial bindings.
Carrying savage kinetic force enough to tear apart all things, appeared directly before Rita.
The distance — less than half a meter.
On that fist burned a terrifying wave of air, mingling Tai Xu sword-intent with a Herrscher's body.
Rita's pupils suddenly shrank to pinpoints, every single cell in her whole body screaming at her to dodge, time seeming to freeze in this moment.
Facing that fist drawing bit by bit closer to her own chest, she found she had already been completely locked on — she couldn't even manage to move so much as a single millimeter.
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