Arc City, the Central Shopping Street.
The late-August sun had finally toned down its vicious heat. The weekend shopping street was packed shoulder to shoulder, crowded everywhere with sharply dressed young men and women and tourists hunting down internet-famous shops.
Su Yu trudged along with a full seven or eight shopping bags in both hands, trailing behind the energetic Kiana like some heartless bag-carrying machine whose wallet and stamina had both been drained dry.
A full ten days had passed since that "Starfire Furnace" special training camp opened its gates and changed everyone's fate.
For Su Yu, these nearly two weeks had been the ultimate hell mode of "a Palu by day, a punching bag by night."
The good news was that all the core storyline needed for the launch of Honkai Impact 3rd was, at long last, completely finished!
Leaning on that "Schicksal Wikipedia" inside Fenghuang, the Immortal's head, the whopping five-hundred-page "Anti-Entropy Mech Design Fanatic PowerPoint" that Mr. Welt had sent over, plus Sirin—who every night in his sea of consciousness spat out spoilers with impotent rage and tsundere reluctance…
From the cozy daily life at St. Freya, to the tragedy of the Poem of the Wind, all the way to the earth-shaking final showdown storming into Schicksal HQ, the launch-version script had been polished until it was utterly flawless.
And the animated shorts for The Queen's Descent and Final Lesson were fully completed across the board. At launch, the game would push a one-time update all the way to the Chapter Eight The Queen's Descent segment, using an ultra-high-quality audiovisual experience to detonate the entire gaming scene on the spot!
The other piece of good news was that his "Midnight Assassination VIP Special Menu" at the special training base had yielded remarkable results.
After ten straight days of being strangled with Rita's stockings in ever-changing ways, slapped across the face with the hem of her maid dress, and even ambushed by hidden weapons when someone burst through the door mid-shower…
Su Yu had now honed his reflexes to a ridiculous degree.
He could even catch, one-handed and with his eyes shut, a screwdriver that Bronie hurled at his back in a sneak attack, all while sipping water and reading spreadsheets.
The price was that the sight of black lace and the smell of black tea now triggered severe, PTSD-grade heart palpitations in him.
As for the training camp, its progress was even more surreal.
That "mad dog" Sin Mal, the most defiant and unruly at the start, who yelled about killing people every single day—ever since that day.
She had now become the most obsessive, most fanatical training maniac in the five-hundred-person formation. Every day she not only overachieved Rita's hellish quotas, she even voluntarily added extra drills until she coughed up blood.
And the one who dropped everyone's jaws the most was that soft, adorable good-for-nothing who couldn't do a single thing right—Susannah.
Though she still tripped on flat ground and dragged the team down every day, she somehow gritted her teeth and never once cried out to quit, miraculously surviving the first week's devil boot camp with its elimination rate as high as thirty percent!
Last night, while compiling the roster, Rita looked at Susannah's utterly wretched report card that nonetheless clung stubbornly to the passing line, and the corner of her mouth curled into a smile that was both scheming and touched.
"Heh heh… I knew it. No matter which world it is, this child Susannah is always a stubborn little fool."
Kiana's vibrant, lively call pulled Su Yu back from his thoughts to reality.
"Su Yu! Hurry up! That new internet-famous shop up ahead has limited-edition Homu ice cream!"
To reward this "number-one contributor" who had been frantically extracting memories and losing countless brain cells over this period, Su Yu had specially approved himself half a day off today and brought her out for a wild shopping spree.
"Coming, coming, my ancestor." Su Yu quickened his pace helplessly.
Watching the white-haired girl walking ahead, Su Yu calculated the commercial battle formation to come.
The game's promotional PV had finished rendering, and the marketing matrix had been rolled out.
Once they finished shopping and got back today, he'd have to immediately drag this whole core crew into the conference room for a closed-door meeting and officially lock in the public-beta detonation countdown for Honkai Impact 3rd!
"Su Yu, I'm thirsty!"
At the street corner, Kiana suddenly stopped in her tracks, her big eyes locked onto a milk tea shop with a dragon-long queue, the ahoge on her head standing up in longing.
"I want that! An extra-large full-sugar bubble milk tea! With double pudding and taro balls too!"
"…You just ate a crepe, two boxes of takoyaki, and half a roast chicken. Is your stomach connected to Imaginary Space?"
"For a rice-devouring gremlin, how could that count as full? Go, go! If you don't, I'll make trouble!"
"Fine, fine, fine. You stand right here and be good, don't run off. I'll go line up."
Su Yu sighed. As everyone knows, a Kaslana has two stomachs—one for the main course, one for snacks.
He set the big pile of shopping bags down at Kiana's feet, then turned and walked toward that long, long line.
And Kiana was soon lured away by a pizza shop not far off. Toting the shopping bags, ahoge bobbing, she came skipping and hopping over to the pizza shop's entrance.
What neither of them knew was this.
At the other end of this bustling shopping street.
A middle-aged man in a worn leather jacket, stubble on his chin, a black canvas travel bag slung over his shoulder, stood at the crossroads with a dumbfounded look, holding a battered city map he'd torn off from who-knows-where.
Siegfried Kaslana had just squeezed his way off the bus from Arc City International Airport.
"What kind of garbage navigation map is this… why is it all clothing shops and snack stalls?"
Siegfried scratched irritably at his signature head of white hair.
He couldn't get through to that pint-sized Theresa either. She was supposed to come pick him up, but at the last minute she claimed she had a scheduling conflict and couldn't make it, casually firing off an address for Siegfried to wander over to.
And of course Siegfried had no idea that Theresa really had just tossed him a random address. Her whole goal was to give Siegfried a taste of humiliation—who told this scumbag of an old man to be so smug! He deserved to be brutally punished on Cecilia's behalf, this dog of a man!
This was, quite simply, a hard time for Siegfried.
He'd originally planned to charge straight over to Kevin's company and surprise that stone-faced son of his, but he'd barely gotten off the plane before getting hopelessly lost on Arc City's shopping street.
"Forget it. Let me find somewhere to fill my stomach first. That airplane meal was simply not fit for human consumption."
Muttering, Siegfried raised his head and let his gaze sweep aimlessly across the crowd, finally locking onto the pizza shop at the shopping street's entrance. A sun umbrella was propped up at its door, and the air drifted with the mingled smell of cheese and tomato sauce.
That was the fragrance of calories.
Siegfried, dragging his travel case, walked in.
"Boss, give me a twelve-incher! Beef bits with double bacon, and absolutely, positively, definitely do NOT put pineapple on it!"
He fished a shriveled wallet from his jacket pocket, pulled out a large bill, and slapped it down on the counter with a smack.
"Listen up—pineapple is a fruit, not a pizza topping! Putting pineapple on a pizza is a blasphemy against food. This is a family precept handed down through generations of the Kaslana clan!"
The cashier shot him a glance like he was a lunatic and very wisely offered no comment whatsoever on this outrageous rant.
Five minutes later, Siegfried carried his steaming-hot pizza over to the open-air seating by the door and plopped down, yanking out a chair.
He couldn't wait to take the first bite.
Perfect cheese pull, the rich fat of the beef bits bursting apart on the tip of his tongue, the salty aroma of bacon shooting straight to his head.
Fourteen hours of an empty stomach magnified the taste of that bite of pizza a full tenfold.
Siegfried closed his eyes and let out a satisfied sigh.
He opened his eyes and saw the seat across from him.
At the far end of the open-air seating area, two empty tables away, a white-haired girl was demolishing a twelve-inch pizza—also twelve inches—at an astonishing speed.
Her method wasn't taking it slice by slice.
It was folding an entire slice in half, cramming it into her mouth, chewing it down in three bites, then grabbing the next slice.
Cheese strings dangled from her chin, tomato sauce smeared on the tip of her nose, and she didn't care in the slightest.
Siegfried's hand froze in midair, the second bite of pizza hovering by his mouth.
He stared hard at that girl.
White hair.
Very white.
Not the kind of edgy dyed white—natural, pure, snow-plain-of-Siberia Kaslana white!
On top of her head was a highly recognizable ahoge, swaying arrogantly back and forth in the wind.
Blue eyes.
Sky blue, clear as crystal that had never had its intelligence developed.
And this appetite-fueling way of eating…
Siegfried watched the girl polish off the last bite at lightning speed, then flip the empty pizza box upside down, stingily checking for any missed cheese crumbs and meat scraps.
This gesture—it was far too familiar to him!
When Kevin was eight, every time he finished pizza he'd flip the box over and inspect it like a forensic examiner performing an autopsy.
Back then Siegfried asked him why, and little Kevin answered: "Wasting food is shameful!"
Siegfried took another look at that girl's pizza box.
Inside the box were three pitiful diced pineapple chunks, picked out in disgust, arranged in a neat little row, sitting lonely in the corner of the box lid as if they were some toxic substance.
No pineapple!
Siegfried's second bite of pizza still hovered by his mouth, his whole body petrified like a statue.
But his brain had begun overclocking, spinning like mad at a terrifying ten thousand revolutions per second! White hair. Blue eyes.
Ancestral ahoge.
The same wild eating style passed down in one unbroken line.
The iron family law of refusing to eat pineapple to the death.
And this world-shocking appetite…
Alike.
Too damn alike.
This wasn't just alike—this was simply Kevin sitting here in a wig and a set of women's clothes!!
Siegfried shuddered violently, trying to snuff out this horrifying thought.
Impossible! Absolutely impossible! Kevin's a pure-blooded man with the full package!
This is a girl! Sure, she looks alike, but the vast world is full of strange things—there are plenty of people who look alike! Siegfried, calm down, don't scare yourself!
He bit down on his second slice of pizza, trying to calm himself.
But at that very moment, the white-haired girl suddenly turned her head.
The reason Kiana turned her head was very simple and pure.
She'd finished her own table, but her keen foodie radar had caught a whiff of the double-bacon aroma wafting from the next table, and she wanted to see what heavenly flavor it was.
Then, she saw Siegfried's face.
Kiana's frantic chewing stopped in an instant.
Half a slice of unchewed pizza was still stuffed in her mouth, tomato sauce dangling comically from her chin.
But her eyes, in that one second, went wider than brass bells.
That face.
The stubble on the chin.
The kind of face that squeezed three creases into the corners of its eyes when it smiled.
Kiana's brain short-circuited in that single second!
She knew this wasn't the Honkai world.
She knew that this world's Siegfried was Kevin's father, not hers.
She knew she should stay calm and shouldn't do anything that would expose her identity!
She knew all of it.
Rationally, she knew all of it.
But in that instant, blood ties and longing made her body half a second faster than her brain.
CLANG—!
The chair was knocked flat to the ground by her.
Kiana came charging over like a little white cannonball.
The half-slice of pizza in her mouth hadn't even been swallowed, her eyes had gone red in an instant, tears spraying wildly like a broken string of beads.
She grabbed that man's jacket collar in a death grip and, in a familiar, punchable, cracking voice mixed with grievance and fury, bellowed one earth-shattering line right there in the middle of the street:
"Stinky Dad—!!! You finally deigned to crawl back from the dead, you bastard?!!!"
Plop.
The slice of pizza still in Siegfried's hand, not yet swallowed, dropped onto the table.
Cheese side down.
But right now he completely, utterly failed to notice this grievous loss.
Because a white-haired girl was clutching his jacket collar in a death grip!
And she'd even sprayed out a few bits of half-chewed pizza crumbs!
And in a tone that made his very soul tremble, she'd shouted "Stinky Dad" at him!
This voice…
This tone…
This "Dad" that seemed to come from the depths of his soul…
Siegfried's brain went off with a buzz, as if someone had stuffed a high-explosive flashbang into it!
Kevin had never, absolutely never, called him "Dad" in that tone!
Normally Kevin called him "Father" like a robot.
When he was in a bad mood he called him "Mr. Siegfried."
When he was extremely angry he'd just call him "that man"!
But!
If… if one day Kevin, because of some irresistible force, suddenly turned into a girl… suddenly became someone who would cry, throw tantrums, and unreasonably act spoiled…
Then what "she" would call out would absolutely be this exact voice!!!
Siegfried's hand began to tremble violently.
It was the ultimate despair of an old father whose worldview had been utterly shattered, whose entire moral compass had been pinned to the floor and ground away.
He stared hard at this tear-streaked, tomato-sauce-smeared face before him.
White hair. Blue eyes. Ahoge. Eating style. No pineapple.
Freakish appetite.
And now, solidly, another item had been added—calling him Dad with her own mouth!!!
Siegfried Kaslana, codename K-0017, one of Schicksal's most brilliantly decorated agents, a man who had once subdued eight armed smugglers in three minutes.
At this moment, only one lonely, despairing thought echoed madly through his head:
[It's over. My dear eldest son really went behind my back and got sex-reassignment surgery in Thailand!!!]
"Kiana—where'd you run off to? The ice in your full-sugar milk tea is about to melt!"
At this instant that rivaled a scroll straight out of hell, this supreme killing-ground of a moment, Su Yu rounded the corner carrying two cups of full-sugar bubble milk tea, breezing over like nothing was going on.
"Kiana—where'd you run off to? The milk tea's going to melt."
Su Yu rounded the corner carrying two cups of full-sugar bubble milk tea.
He saw Kiana clutching the collar of a stubble-chinned middle-aged man, bawling her eyes out.
Su Yu's steps slowed half a beat.
He recognized this man. Though there was some gap between him and his appearance in the game, that signature white mane still gave away his identity.
Siegfried Kaslana.
Jacket, jeans, travel case leaning against a lamppost—he looked like a tourist who'd just gotten off a plane.
The expression on his face was complicated, as if he were simultaneously experiencing shock, heartbreak, and constipation.
Su Yu walked over and held one of the milk teas out in front of Kiana.
"Here, full-sugar with pearls and double pudding, like you wanted."
Only then did Kiana snap awake as if from a dream, realizing what an outrageous thing she'd just done in the middle of the street.
She let go of Siegfried's collar and took a step back.
The tears on her face weren't dry yet, but they had already started to turn red.
Su Yu noticed this detail.
He reached out and wiped the tomato sauce from the corner of Kiana's mouth with his thumb.
"Eat slower, nobody's fighting you for it, dummy."
He was just about to ask what kind of melodramatic scene Kiana and this Mr. Siegfried had been staging.
BOOM!!!
Kiana's face went from pink to a fully ripened red apple in an instant.
Right in front of her own dad, getting the corner of her mouth wiped by another man and being called a dummy…
She was so mortified she wanted to dig out a three-bedroom apartment with her toes right there on the spot!
She let out a "hmph," turned her head away with a tsundere jerk, snatched the milk tea, clamped the straw between her lips and took a fierce, big gulp, trying to cover up her fluster.
And Siegfried just stood rooted there like a wooden post, eyeballs nearly bulging out of their sockets.
A young man who looked all fair and clean.
Buying full-sugar milk tea for his "son."
Skillfully wiping the corner of his mouth.
And even, damn it all, publicly calling him "little dummy"?!
And his own son—that iceberg who had been expressionless since childhood, who could crush a walnut with one hand, so cold he didn't even know how to smile—
had actually blushed?!
And even let out a tsundere little "hmph"?!
The edges of Siegfried's vision began to blacken furiously.
This was a severe physical burnout of an old father's CPU!
His brain was automatically generating, at a terrifying three hundred frames per second, the ultimate horror film he would rather die than watch:
His expressionless son Kevin, dressed in a floral-print skirt, sitting in the waiting room of some shady clinic, flipping through a copy of Post-Op Recovery and Fashion Coordination Guide.
Saying to the nurse without any expression: "Please make the sex-reassignment surgery quick—I've got a shopping date with my boyfriend this afternoon."
Siegfried covered his face in agony and let out a shrill, mournful wail!!
No, this isn't real! This absolutely can't be real!!!
But as a top-tier agent, Siegfried, propping up the last shaky thread of his reason, tried to find even the tiniest shred of logical support in this world that had already gone completely insane.
With a trembling hand, he pointed at Kiana, his voice shaking as if he were streaking naked through the Arctic Circle: "Wait… you… don't call me Dad just yet…"
"You… you clearly told me on the phone before that you'd recently gotten yourself a girlfriend, a girl named Mei!"
Siegfried's eyes had gone red, like a drowning man grabbing at his last straw.
"You even bragged to me that this girl named Mei was a gentle, black-haired genius scholar! You—you now that you've turned yourself into this state, how do you expect that black-haired girl to feel?!"
Kiana was completely baffled by this incoherent rambling.
What girlfriend? Did Stinky Dad's brain get struck by lightning in the Sea of Quanta?
"What—what are you even talking about?"
Siegfried whipped his head around, his bloodshot eyes locking onto Su Yu beside her like a radar acquiring its target.
Su Yu.
Male. Young.
Clean and handsome features.
And the most, most, most fatal part of all—he had a full head of pure black hair!!!
Siegfried's complexion instantly shifted from ghastly white to a ghastly green, as if he'd just swallowed ten live blowflies whole!
His worldview, in this moment, met an ultimate annihilating explosion even more thorough than the Second Eruption!
Got it.
I understand it all now!!!
My son not only went to Thailand and turned himself into a daughter!
But that black-haired genius girlfriend named "Mei" he mentioned… turns out to be a man with the full package, damn it?!
My son turned into a girl, and then found a man to be his girlfriend?!
What kind of cyber-ethics relationship is this, more twisted than a damn Möbius strip?!!
Siegfried raised his trembling hand and pointed at Su Yu.
In that moment, this battle-hardened, iron-blooded tough guy voiced the shrillest, most despairing question from the depths of his soul:
"You… don't tell me you… you're damn well Mei?!!!"
Su Yu: "?"
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