When Su Yu came sprinting out of the far end of the corridor, his dress shoes skidded across the marble floor and he nearly pitched straight into a flower stand in the waiting area.
In his earpiece, the broadcast director's voice had gone from its original frantic nagging to a full-blown, despairing sob.
"President Su! Grand Ancestor Su! I'm begging you, get on that stage now! Miss Elysia has already wrung dry every single promotional topic she could possibly talk about! She's literally up there teaching the audience finger exercises right now! Finger exercises! Hundreds of millions of viewers across the entire net, watching a gorgeous girl do finger exercises! We're about to lose control of the whole thing!"
Su Yu drew a deep breath and refastened the buttons of his suit.
"Tell the lighting tech, start the lift."
"Copy, copy, copy! Thank the heavens!"
The lift on the side of the stage let out a low hydraulic hiss and slowly descended to the spot beneath Su Yu's feet.
He stepped on, planted himself steady, arms hanging at his sides.
The lift began to rise.
The metal floor plate trembled faintly beneath him, and the glow of the main stage overhead poured down through the seams, brighter and brighter, more and more blinding.
The deafening wall of sound from the audience surged against the metal plate like a tsunami crashing onto shore.
The cover plate at the top of the lift opened.
The light slammed down.
Three thousand spotlights locked onto the center of the stage at once, and the instant Su Yu rose up out of that pillar of light, the cheers erupting through the arena nearly blew the roof off.
The bullet-comments exploded in the same second.
[Brother Su!!!!!]
[Alive! Brother Su is alive!]
[A whole twenty minutes we waited! You finally deigned to crawl out from under your blankets!]
[Brother Su, what on earth were you doing back there? Was someone holding a gun to your head backstage, kidnapping you?!]
Su Yu stood at the center of the stage, the spotlights blazing down on him.
He lifted the microphone off its stand and tapped it lightly twice.
"Thump, thump."
Two dull knocks came through the speakers, and the arena went quiet for a heartbeat.
Su Yu raised the mic.
"Apologies, everyone. Thank you all for waiting so long."
He paused, the corner of his mouth twitching.
"Honestly, I won't lie to you. Just now, in the men's room backstage, I lived through a dual ultimate debate on par with World War Three, one that fused physical assassination with family ethics."
"The fact that I walked out alive to stand before you all is already a miracle."
The arena stayed silent for half a second, and then, starting from one corner, laughter spread out like falling dominoes, until the whole venue was roaring with it.
The bullet-comments were instantly flooded.
[A godsdamn dual debate of physics AND ethics! Brother Su's off doing his standup routine again, hahahaha!]
[I'm dying of laughter, his talent for improvising excuses on the spot is genuinely grandmaster-tier!]
[I'll put down fifty cents, on record! Brother Su was absolutely in the men's room with the runs and no paper!]
Su Yu waited for the laughter to die down a little before he spoke again.
"Alright, enough chatter. Let's get down to business."
He turned around with composure, facing the massive LED screen behind him.
On the screen, the Honkai Impact 3rd logo, brimming with that blend of high-tech and ruin, was slowly rotating against a deep black background.
"I know all of you have waited a very long time for this day."
"From the first pie-in-the-sky livestream I ran out of that cramped little rental apartment, all the way to today, standing here on this stage for real, flesh and blood… a lot of things happened in between, things beyond imagination."
"There's some surreal inside information I still can't tell you yet. But there's one thing I can guarantee to all of you, on my honor as a person—"
Su Yu turned back around, his gaze fixed straight into the highest-definition broadcast lens directly ahead.
"Honkai Impact 3rd is, without a doubt, a healthy, sunny, positive, uplifting game."
His expression in that moment was sincerity taken to the absolute extreme, and there was even a glimmer in those eyes of something near a Holy Father's compassion and radiance.
"The ultimate purpose of us at miHoYo is to bring pure love and hope to every single player in this world."
The tone of the bullet-comments shifted in an instant, surging into a second climax.
[Love and hope! The second those four words dropped, Brother Su's vision cracked wide open!]
[Waaah, why do I feel a little like crying! Brother Su is just too sincere!]
[Something's off! My gut is telling me this game absolutely has a giant pit in it! Brother Su's face is too pure, so pure it scares me!]
In the server room backstage, Bronie sat cross-legged on a swivel chair, staring at Su Yu's "love and hope" face on the screen, and quietly rolled her eyes.
She chewed her bubblegum a couple of times and muttered under her breath.
"Boss, that peerless pie you're painting is real damn round. A few months from now, when that crowd of innocent players is bawling their eyes out over the main story and scouring the earth for your address to mail you razor blades… I sure hope you, you old fox, can still smile this sunny and healthy."
The moment Su Yu's voice fell, the big screen cut to a new image.
A brand-new, budget-burning, never-before-released real-machine character PV thundered to life.
In the footage, a girl with dazzling white hair and heterochromatic eyes, clad in white battle armor bursting with futuristic tech, wove nimbly out of the burning, collapsing ruins of a city.
The stubborn ahoge atop her head, as if it had a mind of its own, swayed wildly through the gunsmoke and howling wind.
The girl completed a dazzling spin in midair, turned to face the camera, and, entirely without guard, flashed a brilliant, spirited smile bright enough to make a heart skip a beat.
The final frame of the PV froze on a set of characters ablaze in flame—Kiana Kaslana.
Before the screams in the arena even had time to erupt, a figure came charging out of the passage at the side of the stage.
Kiana wore a promotional outfit custom-made for today.
She didn't even ride the lift out.
This "Valkyrie" with off-the-charts stamina simply leapt up from the side stage and hauled herself bodily onto the main one.
Kiana struck her pose, facing the three thousand frenzied spectators below and the tens of millions of players behind the screens, and without a shred of stage fright thrust her right hand high, forming a huge, energy-packed "V" gesture.
"Hi everyone! I'm Kiana! The Little Junior Sister that big fibber Su Yu is always going on about!"
Her voice was crisp and ringing, carrying a sunshine and excitement that needed no faking and couldn't be hidden if she tried.
"From now on in the game, please take good care of me!"
In that moment, the bullet-comments across the entire net plunged into a catastrophic, total meltdown.
[Holy crap holy crap holy crap!!! This is the Little Junior Sister herself?! This is way too damn cute!]
[White hair! Heterochromia! And that perfectly recreated ahoge! My old man's maiden heart has been utterly pierced through! I'm dying on the spot!]
[I protest! I solemnly protest! On the left stands the nation's first-love, Miss Pink Elf Elysia, and on the right stands the spirited white-haired Little Junior Sister! Su Yu, you shameless bastard of a boss, what right do you have to be this blessed by fortune?! Brothers, draw your swords!]
[Wait, don't just lose your minds! Did any of you notice the move she just pulled leaping onto the stage? Was that a real jump or was she on wires?]
[Who cares if it's wires! Fly free, Little Junior Sister, Mama's chasing right behind you!]
[No boy-mamas, no boy-mamas, no boy-mamas!]
Kiana stood beaming beside Su Yu, and in the gap while the camera crane swept past, she shot him a smug wink and lowered her voice to claim credit. "How'd this young lady do?"
Su Yu said nothing, only reached out with a smile and, the way you'd soothe a cat, gently pressed down the ahoge that was thrashing wildly on her head from all her excitement.
Just as the atmosphere had hit its boiling point, every light in the venue died at once.
Three thousand people's breaths stopped in the same instant.
In the darkness, a single note flowed out of the speakers.
Piano. A single note. One after another, like raindrops falling on the surface of a lake.
Then the strings joined in.
The low tones of the cello welled up from beneath the floor, the high tones of the violin scattered down from the ceiling, and the two currents of sound met, intertwined, and climbed in the air.
At the very back of the stage, a beam of golden light fell.
This world-class superstar, renowned across the globe, simply stood there quietly in the dead center of the pillar of light.
She didn't say a single word of warm-up chatter.
She merely stood there like a true divinity, quietly waiting for the symphonic prelude to blanket every last inch of the arena.
And then, she parted her lips ever so slightly.
"Befall."
This single track, with Eden serving personally as music director, composed and sung in collaboration with Su Yu with heart and soul poured into it for Honkai Impact 3rd.
In this moment, it made its first stunning voice before the whole world.
The bullet-comments across every major stream, in the very second Eden opened her mouth, eerily and utterly froze.
Everyone watching the broadcast, in that moment, was so shaken they forgot how to hit their keyboards.
Bronie sat in the server room, staring at the six monitors before her, screens that had been scrolling like a mudslide moments ago now dead-still as if someone had hit pause.
She forgot to chew the gum in her mouth, gaping in stunned silence at the woman blazing with radiance on the screen.
"…This woman, where the hell did a monster like her come from."
The length of a single song isn't long.
But when the last note dissolved completely into the scorching air of the esports center.
The applause, the screams, and the near-berserk roars that erupted through the whole arena were ten times louder than the combined sound of every segment before it.
Amid the deafening fervor, Eden walked gracefully from the depths of the stage to the very front edge. She came to stand at Su Yu and Kiana's side.
At the same time, Miss Pink Elf Elysia, smiling, stepped lightly forward from the other side.
The four of them, on this night destined to be written into gaming history, stood shoulder to shoulder at the very front of the stage.
Su Yu drew a deep breath, raised the microphone high in his hand, his voice steady and full of force.
"Honkai Impact 3rd."
On the massive LED screen behind him, a countdown date that had been blurry snapped, in a burst of visual effects, into razor-sharp clarity.
"September first."
"Bang! Bang! Bang!"
Countless dazzling ribbons and gold foil blasted furiously out of the heavy confetti cannons on either side of the stage, swirling across the sky.
"Worldwide! Official open beta!"
With Su Yu's final proclamation, the frenzied wall of sound in the arena, threatening to overturn the very dome, tore clean through the horizon of the night.
Five minutes later.
Backstage.
After the launch event ended, the online stream also played a pre-recorded short video.
The gacha segment demonstrated by the lucky-goddess Kiana, with the terrifying luck of ten pulls netting five golds, once again set off a small burst in the bullet-comments.
Su Yu walked down off the stage, and the moment his foot touched the carpet of the backstage passage, he got an update from Bronie through his earpiece on Kevin's situation.
After learning that Kevin had been taken away by Siegfried, before he could get out more than a few words of comment—
A sheet of crimson burst across his retina.
[Warning.]
[The concept of "Honkai" has been fully detonated through large-scale media transmission.]
[Public awareness threshold has broken past the critical point.]
[World barrier stability: sharp decline.]
[A Spatial Rift has materialized!]
[Dangerous positioning coordinates have been automatically marked!]
Su Yu's footsteps halted dead, as if nailed to the ground.
"What do you mean?"
[As always, Host.]
[Just like how, in order to extract Kiana Kaslana's memories, you would inevitably stimulate the Herrscher of the Void, Sirin, in her erosion of Kiana.]
[After Honkai Impact 3rd fully detonates across the entire net, in the moment the concept of "Honkai" becomes widespread, the turbulence triggered by the two singularities will accelerate.]
[In fact, if the factor of declining stability between world barriers weren't a concern, you would originally have had roughly a year to prepare.]
[The calculation of 180 days is the worst-case result given on the premise of Honkai Impact 3rd blowing up.]
[This is still a race against time, a blood-and-guts marathon running side by side with death.]
Su Yu clenched his fist, and the tiny sliver of joy born from the launch event's success vanished in that instant.
A double-edged sword.
The familiar double-edged sword, yet again.
The release of the Honkai IP could stabilize Kiana's existence, could become the channel for Kiana to return to that world, become the fuel for her to fight cruel fate in that world.
And yet, it would also become the key that brought the Honkai to this world.
[Ding!]
[An epic-tier high-risk emergency quest has been triggered: Rainy Night, Maybach, Overpass.]
Su Yu's eyelid twitched violently.
What was this oncoming sense of déjà vu, as if it came bundled with some specific work of literature's copyright warning?!
The System's quest description was surfacing before Su Yu's eyes, line by line, in a flashy typewriter effect.
[In this world, is it that every dimwit of a dad who's gotten used to burying his secrets in his gut just loves driving a black Maybach, on a sealed overpass in a pouring downpour, forcibly cramming those heavy truths about saving the world and life-and-death farewells onto his stone-faced son sitting in the passenger seat?]
[That rainy night, the Maybach's wipers sliced across the windshield like they'd gone mad. Black clouds crushed down over the city, lightning flashed and thunder roared. At the far end of the overpass, the crossroads of fate had already quietly opened that eye radiating the breath of destruction.]
[The boomerang of destiny has already been thrown. When the shadow of the Spatial Rift descends, will this man called Siegfried, like a certain man surnamed Chu who wishes not to disclose his name, draw that Murasame fated never to sever fate, and with his own flesh and blood carve out a path of survival for the son in the passenger seat?]
[Quest objective: Prevent the Spatial Rift from fully unfolding! Shatter this godsforsaken sense of destined déjà vu! Ensure that both father and son Kaslana inside the Maybach survive!
[Quest reward: Phased settlement (should the quest fail, the Host will earn the permanently out-of-print achievement: Witnessing With Your Own Eyes the Iconic Dragon Raja Scene, Arc City Remake Edition).]
[System's kind reminder: Run faster, Boss. One step too late, and that man called Siegfried might just pull his Murasame out through the crack in the car door… ahem, I mean his large-caliber custom pistol.]
He stood rigid in the crowded backstage passage.
All around him was the clamor of staff embracing one another to celebrate the launch event's success.
Someone was hauling heavy speakers, someone was shouting to coil up cables, someone was yelling right by his ear, "Lighting crew, get over here and help!"
But Su Yu heard none of it anymore.
He stared at the blinking red coordinate point on his retina.
The coordinates were on the third-ring overpass of Arc City.
"Screw you and your rotten, no-good System!!!"
A godsdamn rainy night, Maybach, overpass!
Did your crappy System just secretly download the complete ebook collection of that Old Rascal Jiangnan backstage?!
At a critical juncture where someone could die at any moment, you actually have the mood to play the deadly-hell meme of Chu Zihang and his dead ghost of a dad on me?!
He crossed the distance in three strides, bursting into the temporary server room, and the little bunny jumped in fright at the boss barging in.
"Bronie."
"Plot me the shortest route from the esports center to the third-ring overpass, right now! And hack every single traffic light blocking the way into green for me!"
"Then get me the fastest vehicle the whole company has! Faster is better!"
"At the same time, sound the highest alert, activate the emergency plan, and tell Welt to prepare for cleanup!"
Watching Su Yu's grave expression, Bronie realized this was no joke, and her hands flew across the keyboard.
"The route's already been sent to your terminal! But Boss, it's a torrential downpour out there right now, speed limits across the city, even helicopters can't take off. How are you going to get there before the Spatial Rift erupts?!"
"By flying!"
Su Yu yanked off the custom silk necktie in his way and flung it hard onto the chair. He no longer had the luxury of changing into something easier to move in.
The terrifying power of the second-stage Genetic Lock began to churn wildly inside him like boiling magma, and even the air around him warped visibly.
He slammed open the server room door, moving fast enough to leave almost nothing but an afterimage, and hurled one murderous line back into the corridor.
"Today, even if I have to tear this overpass apart with my bare hands… I will absolutely not allow that old rascal's kind of melodramatic tragedy to be re-staged on my turf!!!"
Torrential rain.
On the third-ring overpass of Arc City, the rain fell as if the sky had sprung a leak.
The black Maybach's wipers were cranked to the highest setting; the instant they swept across, you could make out the road for a dozen meters ahead, and by the time they swept back it was smeared over again with fresh rain.
In the sheet of rain, the headlights could only cast two blurry halos of light, like two eyes about to flicker out.
Inside the sealed cabin, the dead silence was almost unbearable.
No music of any kind, not even the white noise of the car radio—it had been strangled dead.
Neither man spoke.
The sound of the wipers filled the whole cabin.
Squeak, squeak, squeak.
Siegfried's fingers tapped the steering wheel twice.
"Ahem."
He cleared his throat.
"Kevin."
Kevin didn't move.
"This car… actually, it's something your old man specially had custom-made a few years back, meant as a coming-of-age gift for you."
Siegfried's gaze bit hard into the asphalt ahead, washed completely blurry by the rain, the corner of his mouth straining to tug upward into an easy arc that belonged to a "loving father."
"Its central locking has the world's top-tier voiceprint recognition system installed. In this whole world, only three people's voices can start it."
"One is me."
"One is your mom."
"And the last one… take a guess who?"
From the passenger seat came only the terrifying white noise of rain hammering madly against the window in reply.
The wipers again swept across the windshield in a frenzy.
Squeak.
Siegfried grimly endured a full three seconds of dead silence.
"It's you. Of course it's you, you little brat."
He gave a dry laugh and began answering his own question, that voice trying to liven the mood cutting a sorry figure in this empty, sealed cabin.
"I'd planned to hand you the key as a coming-of-age gift when you turned twenty… but you know how it is, your old man's had a lot of work trips these past few years, and I never found the right chance…"
"Siegfried."
Kevin finally spoke.
He didn't call him "Dad."
Kevin turned his head.
The cabin was dark, and only the blue glow of the dashboard and the occasional headlights of cars passing in the opposite lane cast alternating flickers of light and shadow across his face.
"Exactly how many things have you kept from me?"
This wasn't a question. It was the cold verdict that comes after utter disappointment.
The smile Siegfried had barely been holding onto scattered.
He fell silent for a few seconds, drawing his gaze back from Kevin's face to settle it once more on the road ahead.
The wipers swept past, revealing a small stretch of clear view, then it was covered over by fresh rain again.
"And what about you."
Siegfried's voice, in that moment, changed completely.
That middle-aged dad from a moment ago, trying to mask his awkwardness with forced laughter, heart full of guilt, vanished without a trace.
What remained.
Was a genuine ace veteran who had rolled through mountains of blades and seas of fire, who had lain in wait in the darkness for a full twenty years.
"And how long exactly do you intend to keep things from me? Do you have any idea what that so-called miHoYo Studio is really doing behind the scenes?!
"Do you have any idea what that good buddy of yours, Su Yu, really is?! And that white-haired girl of unknown origin—"
"I know all of it." Kevin cut him off without mercy.
Siegfried's right foot, almost on the pure instinct of an agent facing a lethal crisis, stamped down hard and violently on the brake!
The heavy, bulletproof Maybach jolted savagely on the slick overpass surface, its broad custom tires rolling through the deep standing water with a muffled, hair-raising roar.
"It's exactly what you're thinking."
Kevin felt no physical panic whatsoever from that slam of the brakes.
His gaze fell calmly on the overpass railing ahead, ceaselessly scoured by the violent rain, as if he were stating the simplest of truths.
"I am, indeed, a formal member of the Anti-Entropy organization."
The already thin air in the cabin seemed to be sucked utterly dry in that instant by a massive vacuum pump.
Siegfried's hands gripping the wheel clenched tight.
He jerked his head around and, as if looking at a total stranger, stared hard at this son who from childhood on had barely exchanged a single word with him in a day, his dry lips writhing violently twice.
But Kevin gave him no chance to digest the information, let alone to open his mouth and question it.
"Dad. Can't you sober up, just a little. Anti-Entropy is not your enemy at all."
"Did you really think that all that self-satisfied dodging and hiding, that disguise and infiltration of yours during your time in Arc City… could get past a top-tier hacker on Bronie's level?"
"The truth is, the very first day you were crouched like an idiot behind the substation box on the base perimeter, holding up your binoculars to spy, she'd already spotted you."
Siegfried's pupils contracted.
"And another thing."
Kevin's pace of speech didn't pause for a beat.
"You think that just now in the restroom, with Su Yu's strength, if he'd truly wanted to kill you, he couldn't have seized your gun in a tenth of a second and then snapped your neck?"
Kevin's voice still held no fluctuation, as if he were coldly reading out a verdict written long ago.
"He didn't make a move. Because he calls you 'Uncle Siegfried,' because he's sparing you your dignity as my father."
The wipers swept madly across the windshield.
"If, even after I've spelled it out to this extent, you still refuse to believe it."
"Then why."
Kevin turned his head, staring hard into Siegfried's blue eyes, already threaded with bloodshot lines.
"Don't you just make a phone call and go ask Uncle Welt yourself?"
Siegfried's hands, frozen on the wheel, congealed utterly into two lifeless blocks of stone.
"Weren't you always going on about how 'me and Welt are lifelong brothers'?"
Kevin's final strike shattered every last psychological defense the old agent had.
"You've actually come to distrust even him?"
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