The reflection of the red light shattered across the windshield, washed by the rain into a blurred smear of crimson.
No one in the car spoke.
The wipers still swept mechanically left and right.
Siegfried's gaze rested on the dashboard, but he wasn't reading any of the numbers.
The tachometer, the fuel gauge, the speedometer, all those trembling needles and digits slid numbly across his retinas without leaving a single trace.
An S-rank agent of the Schicksal organization.
Internal top-secret agent designation: K-0017.
When those two lines came out of Kevin's mouth, Siegfried's first reaction wasn't shock.
It was cold.
Starting at the back of his neck, running down his spine, all the way down to the base of his tailbone.
He had spent a full twenty years, using countless lies and blood and tears, piecing together brick by brick that high wall around his son, the one meant to keep out the wind and the rain.
Twenty years.
That was every "business trip" excuse he and Cecilia had racked their brains inventing in the dead of night, before he took on another mission he wasn't supposed to survive.
That was every bruise and lethal bullet scar he hid in a restroom, layer after layer of cheap makeup smeared over them, after crawling back half-dead from some brush with the grave.
That was every time little Kevin tugged pleadingly at his trouser leg and asked, "Daddy, why do you have to leave again?"
All he could do was crouch down, ruffle his son's soft hair, and force a smile as he said, "Daddy's going out of town to make big money, and when I come back I'll buy you the newest computer."
A full twenty years of monstrous lies, twenty years of walking on thin ice.
And tonight, in this pouring rain.
By his own flesh and blood, with three feather-light sentences, cruelly… torn down clean.
The red light ahead flicked to a faint, ghostly green.
Siegfried's right foot, still in its steel-toed work boot, felt like it had been filled with lead, nailed to the floor mat, not pressing the Throttle at all.
The car behind, impatient in the downpour, gave a short blast of its horn.
Kevin sat in the passenger seat and didn't say a word to hurry him either.
A few seconds later a second horn came from behind, sharper and longer than the first, thick with the irritation of driving through a rainy night.
Siegfried's stiff right foot finally, slowly, slid onto the accelerator pedal.
The heavy Maybach let out a low growl, rolled slowly through the flooded intersection, and merged into the thin, cold stream of traffic on the elevated overpass.
Siegfried opened his mouth. "When did you find out?"
Kevin didn't turn his head.
His gaze stayed on the passenger-side window, where the city lights beyond had been washed into an indistinct blur by the rain, red and yellow and white all bleeding together.
Like a painting with the paint knocked over.
"Bronie dug it up."
"That hacker girl?"
"Mm."
Siegfried's weathered Adam's apple rolled violently up and down.
"How much… did she find?"
"All of it."
Silence settled over the cabin again.
The rain hammered down on the roof, dense, muffled.
As if tolling a funeral bell for some era about to end.
Siegfried's right hand let go of the wheel and dragged over his face.
His palm slid from his forehead across his eyes, down the bridge of his nose, and finally stopped at his chin, pinching at the stubble he hadn't shaved clean.
What was he thinking?
In that despairing moment of exposure, the first image that flashed through this S-rank agent's mind wasn't how to run. It was Su Yu.
In the restroom, the muzzle pressed against the back of that black-haired kid.
The kid's body had stiffened, but he hadn't turned, hadn't fought back.
The phone still held to his ear, Kevin's voice coming through the earpiece.
Siegfried had seen with his own eyes the kind of monster Rita was, the kind who could snap steel rebar with one kick, and Su Yu could go toe to toe with her, at least on the surface.
A monster with such a terrifying stat sheet, at the disadvantage of a gun to his back, had somehow forcibly suppressed every impulse to strike back, and stood there taking it like an ordinary NPC?
There was only one reasonable explanation:
Because he knew the man pointing the gun at him was Kevin's father.
He wasn't willing to unleash that all-crushing, brutal power in front of his subordinate's old man.
Siegfried lowered his hand and gripped the wheel tight again.
"Kevin."
"Mm."
"You were right." The wiper swept sharply, revealing a stretch of cold, hard guardrail. "These past few days, I've been like some cocky rookie, just causing you all trouble the whole time."
There were no grand speeches from the bar, none of K-0017's decisive killer's resolve.
The man sitting in the driver's seat now was just a middle-aged man who had wrecked everything and was tired down to his bones.
Kevin didn't answer.
He drew his gaze back and let it fall on the thermos in the cup holder.
The goji-berry water had gone cold, a fine layer of condensation beading on the outside of the cup.
So much like some kind of silent tears.
"Son."
Siegfried's right hand let go again and dropped listlessly onto the center armrest.
"Can you tell your old man… what exactly it is you're all up against?"
Kevin looked at that hand.
Thick knuckles, covered in calluses, an old scar on the index finger burned in by a gun barrel, engine oil still caught under the nails.
This was the same pair of hands that had snapped the necks of countless enemies, and had once clumsily changed his diapers.
"Before that." Kevin looked away. "You should tell me first, what exactly you and Mom have been hiding from me."
Siegfried flicked on the right turn signal.
The Maybach dropped from a hundred and twenty to eighty, to sixty.
On this rainy night, enough to shatter a man's twenty years of faith, this battle-hardened agent needed a small, trivial moment to assemble the bloody words.
"The Kaslana surname."
Siegfried finally spoke.
"It was never just a surname. It's a curse carved into our DNA."
His gaze rested on the windshield. The rain ran down from the top of the glass, swept to the sides by the wipers, only for fresh rain to cover it over again.
Just like that cruel fate you could never break free from.
"Starting from your great-grandfather's generation. No, even earlier, the people of the Kaslana family were born bound tight to that colossus called Schicksal."
"Kevin, you have to understand. Schicksal was never some charity that cared about the world, and even less some aboveboard, legitimate military organization."
"It's a net, a net soaked through with blood, spread tight across the darkest corners of this world."
"Intelligence theft, political assassination, subversion and rebellion, even covert protection… as long as it served that so-called greater cause, there was no dirty, grinding job Schicksal wouldn't do."
"Your grandfather was an A-rank agent of Schicksal."
"The year I was old enough to understand things, he died on a top-secret mission where they couldn't even recover the body."
"Your grandmother didn't want me to walk the same road. She took me, still just a child, and fled from Europe to Asia overnight. She even lived under a false name, all so I could have an ordinary life, clocking in and out on time, marrying, raising children."
The corner of Siegfried's mouth twitched.
"But you know, that damned blood in the bones of the Kaslana family just wouldn't let me rest."
"The year I turned fifteen, Schicksal's hounds still came sniffing to our door."
"They dropped a cold physical exam report in front of me and said all my fitness data and combat instinct perfectly met the training standards for the highest tier of agent."
"Your grandmother fought with everything she had to stop me. But I… I just couldn't hold back that stupid fire in my blood, the one that wanted to change the world."
"What happened after that is the part you already know. Endless special training, endless killing."
"Business trips, business trips, always on business trips."
His voice paused here.
"It wasn't just me. Your mother… she was one of Schicksal's people too."
Kevin's fingers stilled on his knee.
"Cecilia Schariac. An S-rank ace field agent directly under Schicksal Headquarters, internal codename White Flower."
"In that era when monsters kept appearing, her overall combat rating held steady in the top three among all agents worldwide."
When Siegfried spoke these words, there was some subtle, hard-to-name emotion mixed into his voice.
It absolutely wasn't him boasting to his son about his wife's strength, nor was it him lamenting the cruelty of the passing years.
It was more like a man trapped in a rainy night, despairingly reciting a line of tragedy he had rehearsed countless times already.
By the end of it, even he could no longer tell whether he was stating a cold, classified fact, or holding a memorial for that cruel, unrecoverable youth.
"When she and I got married, we once swore an oath before the priest."
"That the moment we had a child of our own, we'd hand in our resignations to the higher-ups for good, and leave the ranks of frontline agents forever."
"We wanted our child to live the most ordinary, most normal life. To go to a normal school, to make normal friends he wouldn't have to worry about dying tomorrow."
"When he grew up, he could do whatever he wanted. Even if he wanted to fix bicycles, we'd cheer him on with both hands raised."
"But… Schicksal doesn't let people go so easily."
"Those old foxes up top, craftier than the Devil, could always use some grand cause to trick you into taking on one last so-called routine mission."
"And then there was never a last one."
"Your mom played the full-time housewife at home while I worked myself to the bone out there. I'd wash off the stink of blood, put on a suit, and come back smiling, telling you I'd closed a few deals worth hundreds of millions. I'd come home with a fracture and say I'd missed a step going down the stairs."
His voice sank all the way down, drowned in the sound of the rain.
"Son… it wasn't that we didn't want to tell you the truth."
"It was that we… didn't dare."
"We were afraid you'd lie awake every night in fear. Afraid you'd hate us for being gone all year round."
"And even more afraid that if one day… we both died on some mission, without even a whole corpse left behind… you wouldn't even have the beautiful childhood memories an ordinary child should have."
"Kevin, I know I was never a fit father. All these years… I've always, always been so sorry to you."
Only the rain was left in the cabin.
Kevin sat in the passenger seat, his gaze on the rain-scoured surface of the elevated overpass ahead.
He thought of many things.
In his mind, like a film reeling by, countless distant scenes flickered past at high speed.
The empty villa, the nanny's cooking.
The cream cake burned to a melted mess on the night of his tenth birthday.
The man in a cast the next morning, holding a limited-edition Lego set.
If this had been the self from before he met Su Yu.
If he were still that ordinary high schooler who understood nothing.
Hearing these late, blood-soaked truths, he probably would have stormed off in a rage, slamming the door behind him.
But the person he was now was different.
He had pressed his own fingerprint down and formally joined Anti-Entropy.
He understood, more clearly than any ordinary person in this world.
When that countdown hit zero six months from now, exactly what kind of terrifying, despair-inducing monsters would descend upon this fragile world.
Every night, he watched coldly as that bastard Su Yu drove his own body into the ground, sleeping less than a pitiful four hours a day.
He watched Kiana, the girl who spent her days carefree, loudly hollering about wanting to eat wagyu, sob her heart out in a nightmare on the couch late at night, because she'd dreamed of that person called "Teacher Himeko" dying in battle.
He watched Rita, the maid who always wore a perfect smile and seemed capable of anything, hide in some deserted corner, a lonely look in her eyes masking her endless longing for another world.
And so he understood it completely.
Some things, you'd rather swallow all the fear and blood down into your own gut than let the people you care about most know… he understood now exactly what kind of feeling that was.
Because that was who he was now, too.
He had likewise chosen to keep that ultimate apocalyptic catastrophe, the one that might destroy the world six months from now, sealed tight from Siegfried and Cecilia.
Kevin took the thermos from the cup holder, twisted off the lid, and drank a mouthful of the cold-through goji-berry water. "Dad."
Siegfried's shoulders gave a sudden shudder.
"Thank you."
The Maybach rolled along the overpass, the wipers still swinging mechanically.
Beyond the cabin was the pouring downpour and the blurred city lights.
Siegfried's hands loosened on the wheel.
The overpass railing, the taillights of the cars ahead, the standing water on the road, everything went blurry.
It absolutely wasn't because the rain was too heavy.
Siegfried quickly swiped the back of his right hand across his eyes.
The motion was fast, like he was wiping away sweat.
But when he lowered the back of his hand.
It was wet.
He wiped hard again.
Damn it.
Still wet.
Siegfried ground his back teeth and put his left hand back on the wheel.
Before this overdue confession began, he had already braced himself in his mind for the worst.
He'd braced himself to be cursed out to his face by his son.
He'd braced himself for Kevin to hysterically demand of him, "What kind of sorry excuse for a father are you?"
The one thing he hadn't braced himself for was this feather-light "thank you."
Siegfried sniffed hard.
"You little brat…"
His voice was muffled, like something was clogged in his throat.
"I… I'm not damn well dead yet. What are you doing, this late at night, saying such unlucky things to me… thank you…"
Kevin held the thermos and looked out at the rain-scoured night scene beyond the window.
He didn't look back at Siegfried.
Not because he didn't want to.
It was because he knew that if he turned his head now and saw what was hanging on that stubble-covered face, he probably wouldn't be able to hold it in himself either.
So he made the sensible choice and looked out the window.
Two men swept along by fate sat there quietly in the cabin like that.
After a long while, Siegfried wiped his face with his sleeve and cleared his throat.
"All right. We'll turn the page on the old debts for now. Now, whatever you want to ask, just ask it straight."
Kevin set the thermos back in the cup holder.
"Dad, there's one thing I have to clear up for you. Anti-Entropy is absolutely not the anti-human evil organization you've cooked up in your head."
"Mm." Siegfried tightened his grip on the wheel.
"Everything crazy we're doing in Arc City right now is us making the final preparations for that apocalypse that could fully descend less than six months from now."
Siegfried's fingers stilled on the wheel.
"Apocalypse?"
"Mm."
"The thing that top-secret Schicksal Headquarters intel hinted at so obliquely?"
"Mm."
Siegfried's breath caught for an instant, and he fell silent for two seconds.
"Kevin. You and that black-haired kid Su Yu… what exactly is the thing you're fighting against?"
Kevin opened his mouth, just about to spit out the two words "the Honkai."
"Kevin!" Bronie's voice exploded straight into the earpiece. "A spatial rift is materializing! The coordinates are dead ahead of your front bumper! Now! Right now! Get off that damn bridge—"
Kzzzt—the comm was cut off by force, leaving only the high-frequency crackle of the mic's static.
Kevin's pupils contracted sharply. "Brake!!"
He didn't even need to shout it. Siegfried's right foot had already slammed the brake to the floor. The ABS system kicked in frantically, and the Maybach, like a spooked bull, skidded a good dozen meters across the water, tires shrieking with an ear-splitting screech.
The car stopped.
It stopped in the middle stretch of the overpass.
And in the rain-lashed void less than fifty meters dead ahead of the Maybach's front bumper.
The air up front was undergoing an eerie… distortion.
Crack.
And then that forcibly warped patch of space… split open with a crisp snap.
The rift tore open from the center of the overpass surface, spreading to both sides, like a wound cleaved open by lightning.
The edges of the rift glowed a dark purple. It was a greedy black hole, madly devouring all the light and life around it.
What was even more skin-crawling.
The moment the wildly hammering rain touched that dark purple, it didn't even go through the process of vaporizing and rising as steam. It was simply "erased."
Not even a trace of trivial water vapor was left behind.
Siegfried's fingers hooked into the gap between the driver's seat and the door, finding the grip of his gun.
His gaze stayed locked on the rift ahead.
In twenty years as an agent he had seen bombs, seen biological weapons, seen how much potential the human body could unleash under extreme pressure, and how much suffering humans could endure in despair.
But he had never seen this.
In a single instant, the world beyond the Maybach's windshield was swapped out with the press of a button.
Arc City's neon, the skyscrapers, the rainy-night traffic, all gone.
In their place was an endless, dead-silent overpass suspended in a dark purple void.
There wasn't even a railing on either side, and looking down there was only churning purple fog, as if something alive were breathing.
The rain was still falling, but it had turned an eerie pale purple, and the sound of it hitting the roof was muffled, like someone knocking on a giant coffin lid.
"Kevin."
Siegfried's voice was intensely restrained, every word forced out through his teeth with enormous difficulty.
"Kevin." Siegfried's voice dropped very low, as if afraid of disturbing something. "What the hell kind of map is this?"
"A spatial rift." Kevin clenched the thermos.
"What weapon blew this open?"
"Not a human weapon. It's the Honkai."
Siegfried's brow knit together.
"What exactly is the Honkai?"
Before Kevin could answer.
Something crawled out of that rift ahead.
The first thing to come out was about two meters tall, with four legs and no eyes.
Its skin was a grayish white, the surface covered in some kind of chitinous carapace, dark purple fluid seeping from the joints.
It stepped onto the overpass surface, its claws gouging four deep furrows into the asphalt.
Then a second one crawled out.
A third.
A fourth.
When Siegfried's ice-cold gaze had silently counted to the seventh.
This battle-hardened old soldier stopped counting in despair.
Because.
That dark purple rift was still pouring these creatures out endlessly, like a horrifying swarm in riot, monsters that existed only in absurd nightmares surging madly outward!
The monsters didn't rush right away. Instead they cocked their heads and "stared" toward the Maybach.
Cold sweat beaded on Siegfried's forehead.
It was the base-level terror of a carbon-based organism facing a predator.
His gun hand was still steady, the muzzle locked dead on the headshot point of the frontmost monster.
But his entire back had, in that very short span, been soaked completely through with cold sweat.
The passive radar of an S-rank agent was blaring in alarm.
"Son."
Siegfried's voice dropped very low.
It was the cornered-beast growl a man makes only when facing a lethal, no-way-out situation.
"You don't need to waste your breath explaining to me anymore. I already know."
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