"Boss, backup didn't come too late, did it?"
Bronie's voice, muffled by the bubblegum she was chewing, slid into Su Yu's right ear through the micro-earpiece.
"When I saw you'd gone into the men's room and hadn't come out for so long, I figured you'd probably been cornered by that stray old salted-fish agent."
"And Theresa just happened to be storming your way, murder written all over her, so I went ahead and unlocked all the door controls. This round of 'kill-with-a-borrowed-knife' rescue service—pretty thoughtful, right?"
The corner of Su Yu's eye twitched violently twice.
Out of the corner of his eye, he struggled to glance back at the S-rank agent father figure behind him, brandishing a large-caliber pistol, cold murder all over his face.
Then he rolled his eyes to the side and looked at the Auntie—the Academy Director—blocking the doorway, panting heavily, wreathed in fury made manifest.
"Bronie."
"Here, Boss."
"This slaughterhouse in front of me, where someone could die any second… you call this a rescue?"
The earpiece fell into an eerie silence for two seconds.
"…Ahem, Boss, no time to worry about all that. I'm contacting Kevin now, having him close in on your coordinates at full speed. Hold on! On the stage countdown side, I'll have Elysia go live and hold the crowd first!"
With a beep, this boss-dooming hacker unilaterally cut the line.
Su Yu stood in front of the sink, a gun muzzle pressed against his back, phone still held to his ear. Kevin's voice came through the receiver: "Hello? Boss? Did the signal drop? Why does it sound like a building's being demolished on your end?"
He didn't answer Kevin.
Because he was using his last remaining brain cells to process the disaster scene before him—one ten thousand times more absurd than any game bug.
On the left:
An old father figure in a cheap janitor's uniform, but with an aura that could stop a child from crying in the night. A gun in his hand, and in his head the rock-solid conviction that his precious son had been brainwashed and remodeled by an evil game company, then stuffed into a meat grinder to fight the apocalypse.
On the right:
An Auntie, under one and a half meters tall, but with enough physical combat power to tear down an entire load-bearing wall with her bare hands. In her head, the rock-solid conviction that this gun-wielding old man before her had sown his seed all over the place in his youth, and had brazenly raised a sixteen-year-old illegitimate daughter right under his own son's nose.
In the corner:
Himeko, landlady and best friend, was leaning comfortably against the tiled wall. Arms crossed, sizing up the three of them with a melon-eating expression that said, "Let's see how you get out of this alive today."
She even expertly fished a pack of charcoal-grilled squid strips out of her trench coat pocket, tore open the packaging, and started chewing with great relish.
Su Yu drew a deep breath.
A dead end.
This was an absolute, goddamn dead end.
Siegfried spoke first.
At that moment, Siegfried broke the stalemate first.
The ace agent's muzzle finally lifted away from Su Yu's body, but it didn't slide back into the holster—instead it hung warily at his side.
He turned around, facing Theresa head-on, those weathered blue eyes now blazing with the raging fire of betrayal.
"Theresa."
"…You worthless old scumbag, you've still got the face to say my name?"
"We've reached a life-and-death moment like this, and you still plan to keep me in the dark?"
Theresa froze. Her chest full of fury was choked into a half-second stall by that cross-channel remark.
Siegfried took a step forward, the dust on his labor uniform standing out sharply under the men's room's incandescent lights.
"When exactly did you get in bed with those Anti-Entropy people?! Kevin was tricked and dragged into that Starfire Furnace 'super-soldier modification program,' where he could die any moment!"
"As his Auntie, to cover up this reckless disregard for human life, you'd even join forces with outsiders to deceive me, his father?!"
Theresa's expression, in the span of one and a half seconds, went through an epic evolution rivaling a Sichuan opera face-change.
From fury to confusion, from confusion to the shock of staring at a lunatic, and finally back to an even more violent fury.
"Siegfried, is your head packed full of moldy vodka?! What the hell nonsense are you spouting?!"
"Stop acting!"
Siegfried's voice dropped very low, but every word sounded like it was ground out and squeezed through his back molars.
"That garbage paternity test in your hand—you deliberately forged that too, didn't you? All to divert my attention! To get me fixated on some illegitimate-daughter scandal that doesn't even exist, so you lunatics could keep Kevin locked up in there waiting to die!"
Theresa's face changed completely.
Not only was this old thing a cheating scumbag—he was also a goddamn blame-shifting, terminal-stage chuunibyou?!
What apocalypse, what super cyborg?! To dodge responsibility, he could actually spin lies like these?!
"Siegfried! Listen to yourself—are you even speaking human words?!"
Theresa pulled the second paternity report out of the file envelope and shoved that crumpled paternity test right up to the tip of Siegfried's nose.
The paper, gripped too tightly, let out a harsh crackle.
"A top-three private hospital in Arc City! The highest-precision molecular gene sequencing! A 99.99% confirmation of biological father-daughter relationship!"
"It's printed right here, black on white, stamped with an official seal, crystal clear! And you've got the nerve to tell me I fabricated this to cover up some crappy biohazard?!"
"Of course you people fabricated it!" Siegfried stiffened his neck and roared.
"You—have no shame!"
"You think I don't know how monstrous Anti-Entropy's hacking tech is?! Forging a gene report is as easy as drinking water for them! They even stuffed a whole anti-explosion kitchen cookbook into my encrypted hard drive to humiliate me!"
The veins at Theresa's temples throbbed wildly, as if ten thousand Paramecia were pounding drums like mad inside her skull.
She took a deep breath, trying to keep what was left of her sanity from collapsing on the spot.
But Siegfried's next words stomped straight through her last shred of moral bottom line.
"A person needs a conscience, Theresa! As Cecilia's best friend, you'd personally shove her own son into the pit of fire! You're the real traitor who betrayed Cecilia!"
The men's room fell into about half a second of eerie, stagnant-water silence.
Then, Theresa moved.
She didn't smash at him with her fists like some shrew.
Face cold, she turned and walked toward the nearest individual men's stall.
Both hands clamped down hard on the top edge of the thick solid-wood door panel, her hips suddenly dropped, and her heel stamped hard against the floor tiles.
"Creeeak—BOOM-CRASH!"
An entire load-bearing solid-wood door panel fixed to the wall was violently torn straight off its frame—twisted metal hinges and all!
Those seemingly slender, fair little hands now clutched the panel's edge for dear life, all ten fingers digging into the wood, the skin around her nails flushing faintly pink from the effort.
A few thin veins surfaced on her forearms, running from wrist to elbow, clearly visible under the incandescent light.
These hands, which five minutes ago had been leafing through a paternity report, were now hoisting a solid-wood door panel a full twenty kilograms heavy as if it were a feather fan.
"Siegfried! You irredeemable old scumbag!"
Theresa hoisted the panel high, eyes rimmed red—clearly gone completely mad.
"Today! I'm going to deliver heaven's justice for Cecilia! And butcher you, you nonsense-spewing bastard!"
Facing this unreasonable Humanoid Tyrannosaurus, Siegfried's pupils shrank sharply.
Quick-eyed and quick-handed, he stuffed the gun back into his waistband, then snatched up from the floor a stainless-steel towel rack that had been knocked loose when Theresa kicked the door, holding it crosswise before him as a desperate block.
"You short stump! Have you lost your mind?! I'm the one who should be avenging Cecilia and Kevin!"
The panel and the towel rack collided, letting out a dull clang of metal on wood.
Su Yu, reading the room, retreated three big steps, his back pressing hard against the cold marble wall, doing his best to lower his own presence.
He watched the utterly surreal brawl in front of him.
A forty-seven-year-old S-rank agent, and a magical girl teriri who looked like a middle schooler but could actually tear a door off with her bare hands.
In a VIP men's room reeking of air freshener, they were fighting to the death with a bent towel rack and a busted toilet door panel.
And the cause was, of all things, a paternity report that the wretched System he carried around had forcibly tampered with and swapped in using Kevin's genes!
The most ridiculous part: everything these two were shouting at each other while they fought was a masterpiece of cross-server chatting—not even half a punctuation mark lined up!
Siegfried thought Theresa was an Anti-Entropy mole who'd tricked Kevin into the super-soldier modification program.
Theresa thought Siegfried was a scumbag who'd sown his seed around, betraying Cecilia sixteen years ago, using a sci-fi apocalypse lie to divert her attention and betraying Cecilia's heart!!
Both kept swearing they'd avenge Cecilia.
Both gritted their teeth, convinced the other was the unforgivable traitor.
Each one's logic chain was perfectly self-consistent within their own channel, without a single flaw—but goddamn it, not one of them was true!
Su Yu felt his temple throbbing.
He swallowed, and while Siegfried and Theresa were locked in an indecipherable panel-smashing brawl, he hugged the wall and, like a thief, quietly edged toward the doorway.
One step.
Two steps. Three steps.
Thank the immortal Fenghuang, his hand had already touched the door frame.
Fenghuang: "?"
Don't ask; ask, and the answer is that in a situation like this, even Fenghuang could only mute her mic outright.
"Su Yu!"
"You bastard kid!"
Two murder-laden roars exploded through the men's room at the same instant, neither before the other.
At some point, Siegfried and Theresa had stopped in perfect tandem.
Two pairs of eyes—one blue like ice, one blue like fire—locked in unison onto the game producer who was about to slip away under the pretext of taking a leak.
Su Yu's hand froze in despair on the door frame.
Siegfried tossed aside the bent towel rack and strode up to Su Yu.
Siegfried casually flung away that stainless-steel towel rack, now bent into a "V" shape, strode up on Su Yu, and grabbed him by the collar of his suit:
"What on earth is going on?! What kind of despicable biochemical means did you use to brainwash my son and this little shorty?!"
Theresa flanked in aggressively from the other side, the half-length solid-wood door panel in her hand thudding heavily against the anti-slip tiles with a muffled thump.
"Su Yu! Don't play innocent here! You actually knew Kiana's true origins a long time ago, didn't you?! Why did you keep hiding it from me?! Were you bought off by this old scumbag, joining forces with him to deceive me?!"
Su Yu was pinned firmly against the door frame.
On his left, an agent father-in-law reeking of machine oil and gunpowder; on his right, a berserk Auntie reeking of murderous intent and premium laundry detergent.
Both faces leaned in extremely close—close enough for him to make out the wood shavings in Siegfried's stubble and Theresa's eyelashes trembling with rage.
He shut his eyes in agony.
Heavens above.
Siegfried thought he and Theresa were on the same team, jointly sabotaging Kevin into the super-soldier modification program.
Theresa thought he and Siegfried were on the same team, jointly keeping the earth-shattering illegitimate-daughter scandal sealed airtight.
And in this hell of a men's room, he was the only clear-headed one who knew the entire truth.
The truth was:
Kiana had transmigrated from another parallel world.
That gene report was something the unreliable, wretched System on his own body had directly tampered with and swapped in using Kevin's DNA, all to cover her identity.
What Siegfried had come to steal from the base in the dead of night wasn't meat or top secrets, but an anti-explosion kitchen cookbook.
And Theresa, from start to finish, was just a naive airhead who'd been jerked around in turns by all three factions—yet she was firmly convinced she'd found the truth!
But right now, he couldn't say a single word—not even half a punctuation mark—of any of this!
Say Kiana was a transmigrator from another world? Siegfried would smash his skull open with the gun on the spot, convinced he was making up a trashy sci-fi novel to fool ghosts.
Say the gene report was tampered with by the System? Theresa would slap the remaining half of the door panel across his face right then, convinced he was making excuses for a scumbag.
Say Siegfried was actually Schicksal's ace agent? That would be like detonating the highest-yield nuke of all right here in this explosive-packed men's room!
Su Yu slowly opened his eyes, staring in despair at the two faces before him, both plastered with "you're dead today if you don't tell the truth."
Inside, he let out a roar from the depths of his soul:
You people of the Kaslana family… is this damned brain-wiring of yours all possessed on the same crooked-necked tree?!
"Su Yu! Talk!"
"Bastard kid! Don't play dead!"
The two spoke in perfect unison again, about to resort to brutal interrogation.
Su Yu opened his mouth, but before he could fabricate the first self-rescuing syllable—
Hurried footsteps came from outside the men's room.
A figure appeared beyond the door frame with its hinges kicked off.
Kevin stood there.
He wore that black shirt that never wrinkled, cuffs rolled up to mid-forearm, still holding that thermos printed with "Work Hard."
The lid wasn't screwed on tight; goji-berry water was seeping out through the gap, leaving a wet streak on the back of his hand.
His breathing was a touch faster than usual, proof that he really had sprinted the whole way over.
But apart from that, not a single trace of extra emotion showed on his stern face.
Kevin's gaze swept from left to right.
Su Yu, leaning against the door frame, suit collar askew, face pale.
Siegfried, in a janitor's uniform, a large-caliber pistol tucked at his waist, wood shavings in his hair.
Theresa, propping herself on a door panel torn from the toilet stall, the paternity test with its glaring "99.99%" scattered by her feet.
Himeko crouched in the innermost corner, chewing grilled squid strips while waving at him with zero sympathy and plenty of excitement.
Kevin held his thermos, standing in the doorway like a statue, sinking into three full seconds of dead silence.
"…Father," Kevin said, his voice without a ripple.
The hand Siegfried had gripping Su Yu's collar stiffened abruptly.
"And, Auntie."
Theresa's fingers propping the door panel suddenly tightened; the panel let out a groan of overburdened creaking.
Kevin paid no mind to the two of them stiffening.
He looked at this VIP men's room that resembled it had been steamrolled head-on by a category-twelve tornado, at the broken wood all over the floor and the stainless-steel towel rack twisted like a fried dough stick, at the lethal weapon at his father's waist that shouldn't have been here, at the A4 sheet covered in ethical tragedy by his Auntie's feet.
He lowered his head, blew on the mouth of the thermos, and unhurriedly slurped a mouthful of warm goji-berry water.
Then he raised his head again, scanning back and forth across Siegfried's and Theresa's faces.
"So, could someone please explain to me…"
Kevin's voice was calm as a pool of dead water, yet it carried an eerie, oppressive weight.
"You two, whose ages add up to nearly a hundred years, running into a men's room in the middle of the night… what exactly is this shady demolition project you're carrying out?"
Meanwhile.
Skyward eSports Center, main stage.
The instant the countdown hit zero, every light in the venue went out in unison.
Three thousand seats erupted in brief screams, immediately drowned under an overwhelming tidal wave of cheers.
The giant LED screen directly ahead, taking up an entire wall, lit up, and the Honkai Impact 3rd logo slowly emerged out of a deep, profound void.
Accompanied by a cathedral-grade symphonic prelude personally composed by Eden, low-frequency bass drumbeats surged out of the speaker matrix beneath the floor, shaking the chest of every person present into violent resonance.
The PV began.
On screen, a white-haired girl stood alone amid the burning ruins of a city.
Behind her was a horde of Honkai Beasts blotting out the sky, surging like a tide.
She slowly raised her head, those heterochromatic eyes reflecting the shrill firelight filling the sky, yet the corner of her mouth curved into a fearless smile.
"Even if this world is already unrecognizable—"
The girl crossed her hands and abruptly raised that iconic pair of pistols.
"I'll still fight for it, to the very last moment."
"BOOM—!!"
The cheers in the venue blew the roof off in that instant.
And on the other end of the network, hundreds of millions of viewers were flooding into the livestream.
This broadcast was split across a joint effort by six of the country's top platforms, each bearing tens of millions of concurrent viewers.
Even so, less than thirty seconds after going live, two of those platforms' CDN nodes had already started sounding alarms.
Bronie sat cross-legged in the venue's temporary server room, four monitors in front of her, each one flickering with dense streams of data.
Her left hand hammered the mechanical keyboard into afterimages balancing server loads, her right hand raised a walkie-talkie frantically coordinating livestream dedicated lines, the bubblegum in her mouth long since chewed flavorless.
"Node Three traffic overflow! Cut to the backup cluster immediately! Platform Four's push-stream latency is over the limit—tell them to drop the video bitrate to 4K, now! Quit dawdling!"
Stealing a moment, she glanced at the main stream's danmaku monitor and nearly swallowed her gum in one gulp.
That danmaku wasn't "scrolling" at all.
It was "pouring."
Cascading down like a mudslide, all but smearing the entire screen into an opaque white.
[Holy crap, holy crap, this is fire! Damn! I'm an old fan of Brother Su Yu!]
[Old fans, assemble! I was a fan of Brother Su back when he was still doing streams out of a rental flat!]
[On my knees for Brother Su! A few months ago he said he was going to make a world-changing big game, everyone thought it was empty talk, and it turns out he was for real, and it's about to go open-beta?!]
[The most absurd part is he actually managed to get Elysia and Eden to headline! Brother Su, you thick-browed, big-eyed traitor! You've absolutely gotta be some hidden hundred-billion-yuan rich second-gen!]
[Rich second-gen my ass! Could a rich second-gen pull in a heavyweight like Eden? Brother Su absolutely saved the galaxy in a past life!]
[Where's Ellie, where's Ellie, where's Ellie! Without Miss Pink Elf I'm gonna die!!!]
[Make way, brothers up front! Who still remembers Brother Su's original intention behind this game? He said he made it for his Little Junior Sister! The game's female lead is named Kiana!]
[Could it be… we finally get to see the legendary Little Junior Sister in person today?!]
[Little Junior Sister! Little Junior Sister! Little Junior Sister, front and center!]
The final frame of the PV froze on a close-up of the white-haired girl glancing back.
The venue erupted in deafening applause and whistles.
The spotlight lit up again, snapping down onto the center of the stage.
The lift platform slowly rose, but the one standing on it wasn't Su Yu.
Elysia, in that evening gown, the rhinestones on her hem shattering into a whole galaxy of stars under the spotlight.
She stood dead center on the platform, hands folded before her, and for three thousand spectators and the hundreds of millions of eyes behind the screens, flashed a perfect smile flawless enough to crash the livestream servers all over again.
"Hi~ hello everyone, I'm Elysia, and also the official brand ambassador for Honkai Impact 3rd!"
The danmaku was instantly flooded with pink.
[Ellie Ellie Ellie Ellie Ellie Ellie Ellie Ellie Ellie Ellie]
[Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa]
[I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead]
[Ms. Elysia, do you still need a dog? I can go woof woof woof]
Bronie watched the concurrent numbers rocketing up on the monitor, cold sweat sliding down from her temple.
The cheers erupting in the venue nearly blew the roof off.
The danmaku scrolled so fast you could no longer make out any single line; the whole screen turned into a vast blank stretch of white.
Through Bronie's headset came the despairing screams of six platforms' tech directors, one after another.
While both hands flew madly across the keyboard to salvage bandwidth, she griped into the microphone:
"My good heavens, Boss, this isn't a launch event you're running—this is a terrorist attack on the country's internet infrastructure!"
On the private channel end of the headset, dead silence, no reply.
On the front stage, Elysia had already begun smoothly introducing the world-setting of Honkai Impact 3rd.
Her crowd-control rhythm was practically perfect: every couple of hardcore game-lore lines, she'd naturally weave in a playful interaction, keeping the audience's emotions pinned firmly at their peak.
"This game is the crystallization of our Boss Su Yu's hard work, sweating blood over it for months. He always says it's a story about heroes and salvation… but I think, it's more like a romantic love letter written to all the brave ones~"
The danmaku exploded again.
[A love letter?! Ironclad proof it's a love letter Brother Su wrote to his Little Junior Sister!!!]
[Where's the Little Junior Sister!!! Can we actually get the Little Junior Sister out for a walk today or not?!!]
[Wait, where's Brother Su? A scene this big, how is the producer still not on stage?]
[Could it be Brother Su's never seen a crowd this huge, got so nervous he wet his pants and hid in the men's room hahahaha!]
Bronie saw that last danmaku, and the corner of her mouth twitched hard.
This netizen—not only did you guess the location right, you even underestimated just how dangerous the men's room is.
Bronie switched back to Su Yu's private comms channel again.
Still dead silence.
She decisively switched to Kevin's channel.
"Kevin, did you make it there?"
"I did."
"How bad is the situation on scene?"
"…Very lively."
Bronie caught the subtle pause in Kevin's tone.
"Alright, listen to me." Bronie laid out tactics rapidly while typing code. "The way Siegfried and Theresa are looking ready to eat someone alive right now, they definitely don't want to expose their own messes in front of you, the junior. To keep you steady, they'll absolutely shut up for the moment."
"You seize this perfect window and toss out that PR script I just sent to your phone! Remember, tone grave, expression on point. Can you do it?"
"…I'll try," Kevin said, his voice still without a ripple.
"Not 'try'—you must do it! The Boss is pinned against the toilet wall by a large-caliber pistol and can't get out! Elysia up front can hold the crowd, but she's got at most fifteen more minutes of script! You have to keep those two ancestors steady within fifteen minutes and fish the Boss out intact, hide and hair!"
"Understood."
The channel cut off.
In the VIP men's room.
Kevin stood outside the door frame, holding his thermos, gaze sweeping the crime scene from left to right.
The moment Siegfried saw his son, his shoulders sank an inch.
But very soon, the agent's instincts pulled him taut again like a fully drawn bow.
Though his right hand hadn't drawn the gun, it still pressed firmly on the holster at his waist, his index finger merely lifted for now off the trigger guard.
He stared fixedly at the son standing before him.
Intact. No missing arms or legs. Wearing that boring black shirt, holding that old-cadre-style thermos, the expression on that deadpan face no different from usual.
No external wounds, no traces of drug-injection dilated pupils—even his hair was combed immaculately.
Siegfried's throat bobbed up and down with difficulty.
But he immediately forced down the surge of euphoria and relief nearly welling up into his eyes.
Wrong!
No visible flaws on the outside didn't mean the inside hadn't been contaminated!
If Anti-Entropy's biochemical modification tech had truly matured to this degree, those modified monsters would be impossible to tell apart from their appearance! Perhaps Kevin's memories had already been thoroughly rewritten and brainwashed by now, and he himself just didn't know it yet!
Siegfried's fingers dangerously slid back onto the clasp at the edge of the holster.
On the other side, Theresa too reined in all her firepower the instant Kevin appeared.
Guilty as a thief, she yanked the paternity report she'd been using as a weapon off of Siegfried's face, wadded it up in a mess, and jammed it firmly into her pocket.
Her movement was so fast it was as if she were concealing the murder weapon at a crime scene.
Because in that instant, the Academy Director's sanity had finally briefly come online.
If I now, right in front of Kevin, point at Siegfried's nose and scream, "Your dad not only has a sixteen-year-old illegitimate daughter out there, he's even raising her inside your own company"… what would Kevin think?!
Even though she'd already done exactly that back at the coffee shop, the situation was different—right now she was holding ironclad evidence in her hands!
How would he regard the father he'd always admired?!
How would he face his mother, Cecilia, far away at the edge of the world?!
Wouldn't this originally happy family of three be declared broken on the spot, right here in the men's room?!
Theresa gritted her teeth and swallowed back down every word that had surged to her lips.
The men's room fell suddenly quiet.
The men's room sank into a suffocating, eerie quiet.
Siegfried didn't speak.
Theresa didn't speak.
Su Yu pressed his back tight against the cold marble wall and, in that same second, made the exact same tactical choice—shut up and play dead.
These two, at this moment, each harbored their own scheme.
One was frantically calculating in his head how to knock Su Yu out the fastest way possible and forcibly haul Kevin out of this den of demons.
One was frantically weighing in her head how to first fool Kevin away with lies, then close the door and beat that scumbag Siegfried to death.
But in this moment, they'd reached a tacit consensus:
Kevin must absolutely not learn the truth!
Kevin watched these two elders who had suddenly fallen into an eerie silence, and his perpetually expressionless brow gave a rare, faint twitch.
He lowered his head, made a show of blowing on the thermos, and pretended to drink a mouthful of goji-berry water that had in fact long gone stone cold.
In the instant his lips touched the stainless-steel rim, at a volume only he and his collar microphone could hear, he quietly confirmed:
"Now? Just read it off as is?"
Through the headset came the instant clatter of Bronie's furious keystrokes.
"Just read the script I sent you! Don't change a single word! Whatever you do, don't ad-lib!"
Kevin set the thermos down on the sink counter.
The bottom clinked against the marble surface with a crisp sound.
He raised his head, looked at Siegfried, then at Theresa.
"Father, and Auntie."
Hearing these two forms of address, both their bodies tensed up uncontrollably at once.
"I think, tonight… you may have formed a serious misunderstanding about certain matters—regarding Kiana's identity."
The finger Siegfried pressed on the holster stiffened abruptly, his gaze turning razor-sharp in an instant.
The hand Theresa had jammed in her pocket clenched that wad of paper for dear life.
Kevin's gaze wasn't on them; it fell downcast onto the crack-riddled tile floor of the men's room, pausing for a full two seconds.
His broad shoulders sagged in a slight curve, as if bearing some weighty secret heavy enough to crush a man.
"The truth is, Auntie's report isn't wrong—Kiana… really is your biological daughter, Father."
Siegfried froze utterly in place, as if struck by lightning.
That invisible murderous aura scattered clean away in an instant.
Theresa's eyes went round in a flash.
She lunged half a step forward, lips parting, about to roar out, "So you knew about this scumbag's affair all along."
But Kevin's next unruffled sentence beat her roar by half a second.
"But at the same time, she's also Mother's… biological daughter."
The air in the men's room seemed sucked dry in an instant by an ultra-high-power exhaust fan.
"In other words."
Kevin's voice still carried no fluctuation, as flat as reporting a batch of dry server-bandwidth daily-active figures at a department morning meeting.
"Kiana Kaslana is my biological younger sister."
Clatter.
Siegfried's large-caliber pistol slipped from his stiff fingers, crashing hard onto the tile floor.
The heavy metallic clang echoed through the dead-silent men's room for a good few seconds.
The hand in Theresa's pocket lost all its strength.
That wad of paternity report, crumpled like pickled vegetables, slipped quietly from between her fingers, flipped two mocking somersaults in midair, and landed squarely on the toe of Siegfried's dust-covered work shoe.
The expressions of the two of them, in this moment, reached perfect synchrony.
Mouths agape.
Eyes wide.
Lips slightly parted.
Eyeballs as if about to bulge out of their sockets.
All the high-speed spy-thriller logic chains and cheating-in-the-act ethical logic chains running in their brains… all met a thoroughly destructive meltdown in the same second.
In the corner.
The half-chewed charcoal-grilled squid strip in Himeko's mouth hung stiffly in midair.
She looked at the statue-like Siegfried, then at the worldview-shattered Theresa, and finally lowered her head to look at the squid strip packaging in her hand.
As if confirming whether what she'd just eaten had been some kind of expired, moldy, toxic fungus that induced severe mental hallucinations.
Su Yu leaned against the sink.
He let out a long breath, lifted his head, and looked at Kevin standing in the doorway.
Kevin was quietly looking back at him too.
No one spoke.
Siegfried stood rooted in place, hand hanging at his side, gun still tucked at his waist.
His mouth was open, but it neither closed nor made any sound.
The brain of this Schicksal S-rank ace agent, in this moment, underwent a thorough system crash and physical blue-screen.
Biological child. Biological sister.
Kevin's biological sister.
Converted into humanity's most basic biological ethics, that meant… that white-haired girl with monstrous strength was a daughter he and Cecilia had birthed together?!
Siegfried's dull gaze shifted off Kevin's unruffled deadpan face and landed stiffly on the paternity report on the floor, stamped with several grayish-black footprints.
99.99%.
Biological father-daughter relationship confirmed.
The agent's logic chain began to reverse-engineer uncontrollably and wildly: if Kiana was Kevin's biological sister, then this report bearing an authoritative official seal absolutely wasn't forged by the Auntie.
If the report was real, then Kiana really was his own biological daughter.
But…
When exactly did I ever get Cecilia pregnant a second time?!
No matter how much vodka I drank back then, or how densely packed my missions were, there's no way I'd forget a thing as monumental as my own wife going big-bellied and birthing a white-haired girl—clean out of my memory, right?!
Siegfried swallowed hard, his throat rolling violently up and down.
And beside him, Theresa's mental state was no better than Siegfried's.
She'd originally been fully prepared to hide the "scumbag's affair" truth from Kevin to the death.
But she'd never in a million years expected that Kevin himself, without changing color, would shake out an even more explosive truth.
Not an illegitimate daughter.
Born in wedlock.
Carried and birthed by Cecilia over ten months!
Theresa's clever Apocalypse-family brain ran at full speed for a full three seconds, then arrived at a despairing conclusion that plunged her, on the spot, into an even more violent state.
If Kiana was Cecilia's biological child, then it meant Cecilia not only knew of this child's existence but had personally participated in the creation process!
If Cecilia knew, then for a full sixteen years, she'd never once told her, her best friend.
Siegfried knew, and had kept her sealed off airtight, treating her like a fool.
Now even Kevin, the son, goddamn knew—and still not a single person had planned to breathe half a word to her!
So the whole world has been keeping it from me?! Is this Auntie something they threw in for free with a phone-bill top-up?!
Theresa's hands clenched hard.
She whipped her head around, both eyes rimmed blood-red, glaring fixedly at Siegfried, who was still rebooting his brain.
"Siegfried."
Siegfried was still in his despairing blue-screen crash state, utterly unresponsive to this summons.
"Sieg-fried!"
Theresa's voice shot up an octave in an instant, carrying an undisguised, aggrieved sob and rage.
"Just how many years did you and Cecilia hide this from me?! Have you four in your family been treating me like an outsider this whole time?!"
Siegfried finally forced a successful reboot out of his crashed state. He opened his mouth and let out a meaningless, dry syllable.
"I…"
He whipped his head toward Kevin, his eyes full of the will to survive.
"Kevin, what you said… is it all true?"
Kevin nodded expressionlessly.
"The gene report is right there."
He jerked his chin at the tattered A4 sheet on the floor.
"99.99%. Science doesn't lie."
Siegfried slowly crouched down, his movements as stiff as a rusted tin man.
He picked up the report trampled into wrinkles and flipped to the final conclusion column.
Black words on white.
Official seal bright red.
He stared fixedly at that line of text, reading it over and over a full three times.
Then he stood up, carefully folded the report neatly, and, with the utmost solemnity, tucked it into the inner pocket of that worn labor uniform, right against his chest.
At this moment, his expression was complicated to the extreme.
"Cecilia…"
He murmured his distant wife's name almost as if talking in his sleep.
Then he abruptly turned his head, his sharp agent's gaze bearing straight down on Su Yu.
"What exactly is hidden behind all this? And how much do you know?"
Su Yu still kept his back pressed tight to the cold marble wall, meeting Siegfried's blue eyes now rekindled with sharpness.
He rapidly calculated the current surreal situation.
That unruffled "origin confession" Kevin had just delivered was obviously a life-or-death PR script fed to him in real time through the earpiece by Bronie in the server room.
Say what you will—Arc City's Number One Hacker really did have a fast-turning brain.
This story ingeniously exploited the rigidly System-tampered gene report to perfectly package the "transmigrator from another world" truth—one capable of triggering a sci-fi cataclysm—as a family ethics drama of "a long-lost biological daughter."
The absolute upside of this whopping lie was that it could, in an instant, simultaneously and physically anesthetize both Siegfried and Theresa.
Siegfried no longer had to agonize over the lethal question of "illegitimate daughter" versus "biochemical cyborg," because the answer had become "flesh-and-blood own child," thicker than water.
Theresa no longer had to hunt down a "cheating scumbag" all over the world, because the vile affair had turned into "a secret both spouses kept together out of some unspeakable difficulty."
But this lie also had one fatal downside:
That was—it absolutely required the very party herself, Cecilia, to personally cooperate with this epic cross-server grand swindle!
And Cecilia, far away overseas, was currently completely oblivious to the fact that she'd suddenly gained a sixteen-year-old biological daughter in Arc City!
Su Yu silently chalked up a merit-and-demerit-mixed great achievement for Bronie.
This girl—the rescue was a real rescue, but she sure dared to dig the pit to the death too.
"Mr. Siegfried." Su Yu drew a deep breath and finally straightened himself off the wall.
"This is a long story, with too many secrets tangled up in it. Now is absolutely not a good time to discuss it at length standing here."
He raised his hand and pointed at the micro-earpiece glimmering faintly in his ear.
"Outside, right now, over two hundred million people are waiting for me to take the stage."
Su Yu met the two murder-capable gazes and drew another deep breath.
"Give me fifteen minutes. Once the launch event is over, I'll explain the whole story of everything to you, exactly as it happened. But right now, I have to go out and save the show first."
He turned his head to look at Kevin standing to the side.
"Kevin, help me keep an eye on them. Don't let them tear down the remaining stalls in this men's room too."
Kevin lifted his red-lettered thermos and unhurriedly slurped a mouthful of warm goji-berry water.
"…I'll do my best."
Su Yu didn't waste another syllable.
He charged into the hallway in great strides.
Sprinting toward the front stage with wind under his feet, he quickly straightened the hem of his suit while snarling low into the earpiece.
"Bronie! Tell Elysia immediately—I'll be storming the stage in two more minutes!"
"Copy that, Boss." Through the earpiece, Bronie's voice carried the relief of someone who'd survived a catastrophe.
"By the way, a heads-up: the main livestream's online concurrent count just broke past the two-hundred-fifty-million mark. If you still don't show up, the load-bearing server rooms of these domestic streaming platforms are really going to stage a literal, physical explosion."
Su Yu clenched his back molars.
And in that VIP men's room behind him.
Siegfried still stood in place like a wooden stake, his rough fingers unconsciously stroking, over and over through the fabric of the labor uniform, that folded-up test report against his chest.
Theresa leaned weakly against the cold wall, arms crossed over her chest, staring fixedly at the pile of shattered solid-wood door panel on the floor, her eyes as hollow as if her soul had been lost.
Kevin held his thermos, standing quietly like an emotionless door-god between the two elders whose worldviews had been utterly destroyed.
As for Himeko in the corner…
She silently stuffed the last charcoal-grilled squid strip from the packaging into her mouth, smacked her lips twice with lingering appetite, and contentedly licked the seasoning powder off her fingers.
This internal melodrama of the Kaslana family was way more thrilling than any soap opera.
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