The concentration of Honkai energy in the air spiked off the charts in a heartbeat, so thick and cloying it felt ready to smother a man alive.
Siegfried clawed at the steering wheel and heaved dryly.
It wasn't just carsickness — it felt like someone had clamped a hand around his throat, crammed a whole tin of fermented herring down his mouth, and let it churn back up from his stomach.
Kevin didn't waste words.
He drew a pre-filled syringe from the inner pocket of his suit and handed it over. "Anti-Entropy's custom Honkai energy neutralizer. Intravenous. Takes effect in three seconds."
Siegfried took it.
One glance.
He didn't ask what was in it.
Didn't ask about side effects.
Didn't hold it up to the light to check for bubbles.
Rolled up his sleeve, found a vein, pushed the plunger all the way down.
The syringe was empty.
Kevin's eyes narrowed a fraction.
The whole "believe it or not, your call" spiel he'd prepped died in his hands.
A man who'd spent twenty years as an agent, whose paranoia could've been written up in a medical chart, had just shot an unidentified fluid his son handed him straight into his own vein.
That act alone weighed more than any words could.
The surging nausea ebbed away like a receding tide.
Siegfried let out a stale breath, worked his neck a couple of times, and turned his head to look out the window.
One look, and his expression leapt from plain "physical discomfort" straight to "what the hell is this."
Both ends of the overpass had been sealed off tight at some point.
Swarms of scythe Zombies poured in from every direction like flies drawn to the smell of blood.
Their grayish-white bodies writhed in the downpour, each dragging two disproportionately long arms tipped with bony scythes.
Farther off, several larger Chariot-class Honkai Beasts wheeled through the mid-air, letting out grating, metal-on-metal shrieks now and then, as if clearing the way for the ravenous feast to come.
Siegfried tapped the steering wheel twice.
"…Can we back up?"
"Escape in the physical sense is already impossible." Kevin's tone was no different from a weather forecast. "These low-tier individuals are just pawns meant to seal the route. The spatial curvature at both ends of the bridge has already gone abnormal, and all navigation signals are cut."
He paused.
Those eyes, betraying nothing, met Siegfried's gaze head-on.
"Which means — you can't sacrifice yourself to hold the rear and let me drive off alone in the Maybach."
Siegfried's hand froze on the gearshift.
Two seconds of silence.
"…When did you get so hard to handle, brat?"
He didn't deny it.
Because that was exactly what he'd been thinking: shove Kevin into the driver's seat, get out with his gun to cover the rear, tie up those monsters, and buy Kevin time to run.
It was his instinct as an agent, and his instinct as a father.
But Kevin had sealed off that "self-sacrifice" road with a single sentence.
A sealed space.
No exit.
A dead end.
Siegfried drew a deep breath and tucked the gun back at his waist.
He shoved the door open.
The downpour poured over him.
"Then don't blame your old man for playing rough."
Siegfried circled to the back of the Maybach and popped the trunk.
Kevin came over and took a look.
— Well, damn.
No spare tire in the trunk, no warning triangle, not even that bottle of mineral water supposedly standard in every Corolla.
In their place: two suppressor-modified HK416 assault rifles, a Barrett M82A1 anti-materiel sniper rifle, six M67 fragmentation grenades, a crate of custom high-alloy armor-piercing rounds, and a black trench coat hung all over with magazines and tactical gear.
And — a high-alloy baseball bat gleaming with a cold sheen, clearly not a civilian product.
Kevin reached out and hefted the bat.
The moment it was in his grip, he felt the abnormal weight.
The thing was at least three times heavier than an ordinary aluminum bat; a blow to the head would do a lot more than raise a bump.
"It was meant to be your birthday present, actually." Siegfried spoke flatly, his tone giving nothing away. "Shame I never got the chance to give it to you before."
"You drive a Maybach on the highway with an armory in the trunk?"
Pulling on the trench coat, Siegfried didn't so much as turn his head. "Work requires it."
He fastened the last magazine clasp.
The hem of the coat, soaked through by the rain, clung to his calves.
And in that very instant —
The rain stopped.
Ten million raindrops hung suspended in the dark night, big and small, dense beyond counting, as if someone had hit pause.
This was the truncating effect of high-concentration Honkai energy on local space-time.
Siegfried fished a cigarette from his pocket and set it between his lips.
His thumb flicked the lighter alight with a rasp.
The flame burned steady in the frozen curtain of rain, its orange glow lighting the old scar at the corner of his right eye.
He took a deep drag.
The smoke threaded through the hovering raindrops, drawing out a strange grayish-white trail.
"Heh."
Siegfried turned around.
"Never showed you this before, did I, Kevin?"
He racked the bolt.
The clash of metal rang crisp as a struck bell in the dead-still rain.
"The true strength of a Schicksal S-rank agent."
A single suspended raindrop slid slowly across his scar.
"Can you keep up with me, son?"
Kevin propped the bat on his shoulder.
The corner of his mouth curved.
"You're the one who should be keeping up with me."
The words barely left him before Kevin had already shot forward.
The bat tore through the stalled curtain of rain, kicking up a string of bursting suspended droplets, and slammed into the skull of the nearest Zombie.
The skull shattered.
Grayish-white fragments and dark purple fluid sprayed out, checked for a moment by the frozen raindrops before punching through, scattering thinly across the overpass surface.
Siegfried clamped the cigarette firm and raised both guns.
The left-hand gun barked.
A hole opened in the head of a Zombie mid-snarl; its body, still locked in its lunging pose, skidded forward two meters before crumpling to the ground.
The right-hand gun barked.
Another Zombie's knee was blown apart; its whole body lost balance and toppled, and before it could scramble up, Siegfried's third round had already punched through the back of its skull.
Three shots, three hits.
Every one struck a vital spot.
Siegfried's marksmanship wasn't the flashy, showboating kind.
No sideways shots, no rolling fire, not one wasted motion. He simply stood there, feet nailed to the ground, upper body leaning slightly forward, arms raised, left and right hands squeezing the triggers in alternation.
The interval between each shot was under three-tenths of a second.
Every bullet struck its target's core dead on.
Back to back, father and son tore a bloody path through the tide of Zombies.
Siegfried handled the long-range sweep; the rate and precision of his twin guns turned any Zombie that tried to close from the front into a moving target.
Kevin handled the close-range intercept; his bat swung with terrifying force, every blow smashing a Zombie's upper body into chunks.
But there were too many monsters.
Kill ten, and twenty more surged out of the rift.
Kill twenty, and forty more surged out.
By the time Siegfried loaded his third magazine, his fingers were covered in blisters scalded up by the barrel's heat.
Kevin's bat was coated in a thick layer of dark purple fluid, flinging off a spray of viscous droplets with every swing.
Then the ground shook.
Something heavy had set foot on the overpass.
Siegfried and Kevin turned their heads at the same time.
The Zombie horde, as if spooked by something, receded to both sides like a tide, opening a corridor.
At the far end of the corridor, two things walked out of the rift.
They were more than three times the size of the Zombies.
Their lower bodies were four thick legs sheathed in gray carapace; their upper bodies were humanoid torsos, each hand gripping a silicon-based lance nearly three meters long.
The lance tips glowed dark purple, the air warping and distorting around them.
"Knight-class Honkai Beasts."
Kevin's voice came from behind, still calm enough to make you want to hit him.
"The silicon carapace can stop most conventional ammunition. The core sits center-left in the chest cavity."
Siegfried pulled the cigarette from his lips, dropped it, and ground it out under his heel.
"Can I punch through?"
Kevin gauged the power of the weapon in Siegfried's hands, recalling the Honkai Beast crash-course trivia he'd crammed. "With your gun? Barely. But you'd have to hit precisely enough."
Both Knight-class Honkai Beasts moved at once.
The way they charged was nothing like the low-tier Zombies that only knew how to swarm in a mob.
This was tactics.
They launched a crossing attack from left and right at the same time, the lance tips carving two lethal, interlocking arcs through the air that sealed off every dodge route open to Siegfried and Kevin.
Siegfried's twin guns fired together.
Clang clang clang clang! Clang clang!
Six rounds struck the chest plate of the Knight-class on the left, spitting sparks; a web of cracks spread across the carapace, but nothing punched through.
"Tough bastard," Siegfried cursed.
He fished a high-explosive grenade from his coat's inner pocket, bit out the pin, and hurled it at the feet of the Knight-class on the left.
The blast wave flipped the Knight-class onto its back, its four legs kicking wildly in the air.
But the one on the right didn't stop.
Its lance had already thrust to within reach of Kevin.
Siegfried's body moved before his mind did.
He stepped right, putting himself in front of Kevin.
The lance tip grazed his left shoulder, tearing open the coat and the work uniform beneath, slicing a long gash across the shoulder.
Blood welled from the wound, staining the left half of the coat red.
The impact sent Siegfried flying.
His back slammed into the overpass's concrete guardrail, splitting it with a crack.
Siegfried slid down to sit on the ground, the wound in his left shoulder pouring blood.
He braced his right hand against the ground to stand; his knees buckled twice, and he couldn't hold himself up.
The searing pain and blood loss began to darken his vision.
But he got up anyway.
Gritting his teeth, he turned his body to face the Knight-class Honkai Beast that was already swinging its lance around for a second charge.
Both guns rose again.
He stood in front of Kevin.
Kevin stood three meters behind him.
He looked at Siegfried's back.
The left half of the coat was soaked through with blood, red from shoulder to waist.
Siegfried's left arm was trembling, his muzzle no longer as steady as before.
His breathing was heavy; with every breath, another surge of blood pushed from the wound.
"Kevin."
Gunfire and thunder chopped his voice into fragments.
But Kevin heard every word crystal clear.
"Sorry. Your old man's been a real bastard, a lousy father his whole life."
With a flick of his wrist and a click, he slid in the last magazine.
"But at least this one time, today —"
The muzzle rose, trembling, locked dead on the Knight-class Honkai Beast building its run-up.
"Just stay behind me like a good boy and let me protect you."
Kevin didn't answer.
Not because he agreed.
It was because, in that instant, something had jammed his brain down hard to quarter speed.
Images began flashing back wildly.
Siegfried's back.
Many, many versions of Siegfried's back.
The back that hoisted him onto its shoulders at six to watch the fireworks; the back that drove the old Accord to pick him up from school at twelve; the back that stooped to fetch beer from the fridge in the yard the summer after his college entrance exams.
Cecilia's smile.
Standing in the kitchen doorway in her apron, hair tied up high, laughing as she called the two of them to wash up for dinner.
Auntie Theresa's furious roar.
The kind of high decibels that could make Siegfried shrink his neck even over the phone.
Mei's face.
Quiet, gentle, giving him a soft little smile in the library.
And then —
miHoYo Studio.
Afternoon.
Sunlight streamed in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, casting a patch of warm yellow light across the floor.
Su Yu lounged in a swivel chair, a can of iced tea in hand, the backrest tilted forty-five degrees, feet propped on the desk.
Kevin stood across from him, holding a thermos.
"Su Yu."
"Hm? What is it? If it's another 'Coach, I want to learn basketball,' forget it — I don't know how."
"What does it feel like when a Genetic Lock opens?"
The iced tea stopped at Su Yu's lips.
He set the can on the desk, pulled his feet down, and swiveled the chair half a turn to face Kevin.
It was the first time Kevin had seen this bastard Su Yu sit so straight, his expression so serious.
"Like being stripped naked and thrown into a crematorium, burned alive to ash, then having the ash pieced back together to burn again… over and over, three times."
Su Yu's gaze fell to his own right hand.
He turned it over, palm up.
The hand looked no different from an ordinary person's — no calluses, no scars.
But Kevin knew that in the course of opening a Genetic Lock, every muscle fiber and every nerve in this hand had been torn apart, then forced to grow back.
"It goes beyond the limits of the human perception of pain. And the mortality rate is sky-high. Opening the lock is basically clubbing in front of the King of Hell."
Kevin looked at him.
"Then why would you still do something like that?"
Su Yu turned his hand back and braced it on his knee.
He looked at Kevin and gave a little smile.
A smile with a touch of helplessness, and a touch of something else.
"Because of you, Kevin."
Kevin's thermos paused in his hand. That line carried an extremely high dose of ambiguity, and he was about to snap back, "Get lost, I'm the one who loves Mei."
But Su Yu went right on:
"For you, for Mei, for Eden, Elysia… and of course, for Kiana."
Su Yu rose from the chair and walked to the floor-to-ceiling window; the sunlight struck the side of his face, tracing a blurred outline.
"It was her arrival that gave me the courage to protect all of this. Even if the price is one I might not be able to pay."
He turned around, his back to the window.
Backlit, Kevin couldn't make out his expression — he could only hear his voice echoing through the quiet studio.
Kevin looked at him. "You're not afraid of dying?"
Su Yu slid his hands into his pockets and tilted his head slightly.
"How could I not be afraid of dying, Kevin? I'm scared out of my mind, okay — I haven't even lived to see Left 4 Dead 3 yet."
"But real courage was never about fearing nothing."
Su Yu's smile reflected in Kevin's eyes. That guy who was always slacking off, always cracking memes, never serious about anything — his whole body looked ready to melt into the sunlight behind him.
"It's that even when your legs are shaking like a sieve, even when you're so scared you're about to throw up your own stomach acid… in that most crucial second, you still dare to grit your teeth, face the fear head-on, and not retreat half a step."
The sounds of the world came roaring back, deafening.
Gunfire, beast roars, the patter of rain falling once more and slapping against metal.
That Knight-class Honkai Beast had finished its final run-up.
The tip of the silicon lance was aimed dead at Siegfried's utterly unguarded back.
It could even feel the air compressing ahead of the tip.
Its four equine legs kicked out to a terrifying full-sprint speed.
Kevin's fingers tightened around the bat.
So tight that his knuckles creaked.
"Su Yu, you giant fraud…"
Deep inside his body, something was trembling violently.
Like a door chained shut from the inside for twenty years with rusted iron, its hinges warped, its bolt bent — and in this very second —
"Like hell I'll… stand here and watch you play the hero."
It shattered with a roar.
First-stage Genetic Lock — unlocked.
Pain.
Searing pain that burned outward from the marrow.
Every muscle fiber, in the same instant, was stretched to its limit, then snapped, then reassembled.
The blood in his veins seemed heated to its boiling point, raging from his organs all the way to his extremities.
His heartbeat rocketed from seventy beats a minute to over two hundred, every pulse like someone swinging a sledgehammer inside his chest.
Su Yu had been right.
This thing really did hurt more than being burned alive three times over.
Kevin's vision changed amid the agony.
All color drained away.
Red blood, purple slime, black coat — the world became geometric shapes rendered in black, white, and gray.
But against that black-white-gray backdrop, every moving object was marked out with a striking, pale-blue outline.
The silicon lance thrusting toward Siegfried's back became, in his eyes, a slowly moving band of blue light.
First-stage Genetic Lock — Bullet Time.
Slow.
Too slow.
Kevin's foot pressed into the ground, and the overpass's asphalt shattered beneath it.
Siegfried didn't catch it.
A veteran who'd lived forty-seven years and served twenty as a Schicksal S-rank agent — he couldn't follow his own son's movement.
He only felt a gale sweep past.
Kevin's figure became a blue afterimage in an instant, driving straight into the Knight-class Honkai Beast's charge line.
Clang! Clang! Boom!!!
A rapid string of blunt impacts with almost no gap between them.
Each swing of the bat carried the ripping crack of air torn apart.
The first blow landed on the lance's shaft; the silicon-based haft snapped in the middle, its two halves flying to either side.
The second blow struck the Knight-class's chest plate; the carapace shattered like glass, exposing the dark purple core within.
The third blow struck the core.
The core burst.
Dark purple fluid and shards of carapace scattered in all directions; the Knight-class Honkai Beast's massive body toppled backward, crashing onto the overpass and shaking the ground.
Kevin stood amid the debris.
His breathing was ragged in the extreme, faint threads of blood seeping from his seven orifices — the sign of the Genetic Lock's terrifying backlash on his body.
But he didn't stop.
The other Knight-class Honkai Beast stood frozen in place, hoisting a scavenged scythe-arm.
Its companion, there just moments ago, was now nothing but a heap of pieces that couldn't be put back together.
Some instinct made it take half a step back.
Kevin didn't give it the chance to finish that half step.
An afterimage flickered.
The bat swept in from the side, striking the Knight-class Honkai Beast square at the waist — where the humanoid torso joined the equine body, the most fragile spot.
Crack!
The entire upper body, scythe-arm and all, was hurled away, spinning twice in midair before slamming into a distant streetlight pole and bending it clean into a V shape.
Behind him.
Siegfried's eyes were wider than the Maybach's headlights, one single thought in his mind:
Was this real? Was he seeing things? Or was he hallucinating from blood loss? Was the one standing there really his precious eldest boy Kevin, and not some Humanoid Tyrannosaurus? Was the food at Anti-Entropy really that good?
Kevin didn't stop to wait for anyone's praise.
Not even praise from his old man, whose composure had finally cracked.
With his Genetic Lock fully open, his body was a killing machine precise enough to chill the blood.
The bat in his hand was no longer a blunt weapon — it was a sixth finger extending from him.
The angle, force, and speed of every swing had been calculated with a precision beyond the level of conscious thought.
The Zombie horde before him wasn't "the enemy" — it was "obstacles to be cleared with maximum efficiency."
Within thirty seconds, the number of Honkai Beasts on the middle stretch of the overpass was cut in half.
Purple fluid pooled into shallow puddles on the bridge deck, mixing with rainwater and rushing, jostling, toward the drains.
And yet.
The rift overhead shuddered.
The dark purple light grew more intense.
Then a huge shadow squeezed out of the rift.
With each section of its body that emerged, the overpass shook in turn.
When it landed, the entire overpass swayed, groaning under a weight it could barely bear.
Kevin looked up.
His Genetic Lock-enhanced sight let him make out a silhouette in the deepest part of the rift.
Big.
Very big.
It wasn't even in the same weight class.
One foot reached out from the rift.
More precisely, a pallid-white column wider in diameter than the Maybach's body, ending in a three-toed claw structure.
Each toe-claw was as long as a grown adult was tall.
Then a second foot. A third. A fourth.
A Battle-Car Class Honkai Beast.
Its entire body was clad in thick, pallid-white silicon carapace, its size like a three-story building forcibly brought to life.
Kevin had heard it explained in Anti-Entropy's crash course on emergency Honkai knowledge.
["Even elite soldiers, when they run into a Battle-Car Class without heavy firepower to blast the core, are advised to simply cover their heads with both hands, find a comfortable position, and wait to die."]
"Tch." Kevin tugged at the corner of his mouth; the blood trickling from his seven orifices made him look like an asura back from hell. "Heavy firepower… huh?"
With his Genetic Lock fully open, his brain was processing a torrent of information at a terrifying speed that simply didn't belong to a human.
On his retinas, the Battle-Car Class Honkai Beast's four thick limbs had just crashed down onto the ground.
The silicon joints of its two front legs hadn't fully locked yet; its enormous center of gravity was in the brief stiff moment of transition from a high fall into a standing stance on the ground.
One and a half seconds.
The stiffness lasted only one and a half seconds.
Kevin threw away the bat.
He stooped and picked up the Barrett sniper rifle from the ground.
Nearly a meter and a half long, over fifteen kilograms unloaded. The manual's correct usage for this thing was: mount the bipod, go prone, measure the wind drift.
But now Kevin, carrying it like a fire poker, broke into a mad sprint.
Siegfried's dynamic vision crashed on the spot.
In the old agent's field of view, Kevin's figure became an unreasonable blue blur, hugging the road surface, driving straight at the Battle-Car Class still stuck in its wind-up.
The Battle-Car Class's front leg lifted.
It was going to stomp down.
In the instant before that pillar-like leg came down, Kevin, at full speed, wrenched his sprint trajectory in a way no human body should manage.
He didn't choose to meet it head-on; instead, like a phantom, he slid to the Battle-Car Class's right side.
There, a white seam in the carapace ran from the leg joint all the way to the abdominal cavity.
The seam was extremely narrow — enough to fit an adult's fist at most.
But for Kevin, with Bullet Time active under his first-stage Genetic Lock, that was enough.
Bang!
Kevin's left foot slammed hard onto the joint ridge of the Battle-Car Class's right foreleg, and off that savage recoil, he tore straight up along the rough silicon carapace!
One-handed, he hauled the fifteen-kilogram Barrett up with fierce force, muzzle pointed straight upward.
The Battle-Car Class sensed something.
Vents on its head instantly blasted out three-hundred-degree superheated exhaust, trying to scorch off this annoying little attachment.
Hsss—
The scalding gas struck Kevin's left arm head-on.
The pale-blue lines on his skin that marked the Genetic Lock snapped apart in an instant, and the reek of charred flesh spread out.
But Kevin didn't so much as furrow his brow.
Let alone let go.
His right hand surged with force, ramming the thick barrel deep into that seam in the armor!
Thirty centimeters, all the way down, until the muzzle pressed against a layer of soft internal tissue.
"Checkmate."
His index finger squeezed the trigger.
The savage recoil of a point-blank shot flung Kevin off like a cannonball.
He flipped twice in the air, his back slamming into the road and skidding seven or eight meters, leaving a long streak of blood behind him.
But that custom high-alloy armor-piercing round had been delivered, solid and true.
A muffled blast came from deep in the Battle-Car Class's abdomen.
The round punched through the inner layer, and the high-energy charge detonated instantly.
A cavity of thousand-degree heat and pressure forced itself open inside it, grinding the fragile core and the surrounding organs into pulp.
All four legs lost power at once.
The massive body collapsed with a roar, slow and irreversible, like an abandoned building brought down by a controlled demolition.
Boom—! Crash!!
As it hit the ground, the whole overpass shook three times.
Pallid-white shards of carapace mixed with great gushes of dark purple slime splashed across the ground like a downpour.
Kevin lay on the road, his chest heaving.
His left arm was scalded, at least four ribs were broken, and blood was leaking from the corner of his mouth and his nostrils.
The pale-blue lines that had covered his body now flickered on and off, like a faulty bulb about to go dark at any moment.
But he was still alive.
The Battle-Car Class Honkai Beast had been beaten.
The leaderless Zombies around him scurried about like headless flies.
Kevin braced one hand on the ground and tried to sit up.
What he coughed up was all bloody debris.
He didn't look down at his gruesome injuries.
He only lifted his head with effort and glanced at the sky overhead.
The rift was still there.
But the Honkai energy concentration around him seemed to have dropped.
Kevin tugged at the corner of his mouth, about to force out a mocking sneer.
The next second.
A scream came out of the rift.
Kevin's pupils contracted to their absolute limit.
The Genetic Lock's danger-precognition system, buried deep in his subconscious, went off with a roar in his mind!
This was no longer the simple "high energy ahead" warning he'd felt facing the Zombies or the Knight-class.
This was a despairing scream rising from the deepest gene chain of carbon-based life.
Run. Run now.
Run this instant.
Kevin silently drew the two Glocks at his waist.
Spare rounds? He hadn't counted.
Probably fewer than ten between them.
Using these against what was coming next was basically picking a tyrannosaur's teeth with a toothpick.
But he didn't retreat.
Because Siegfried stood behind him.
That old man who'd just planted a "let me protect you" flag now stood beside the Maybach clutching two empty guns, left arm bleeding, as bedraggled as a miserable Office Slave fresh off overtime.
Retreat a single step, and that thing would trample over him, over Siegfried, over the Maybach, and then stomp its way into the world behind the rift.
That world with its convenience stores and its instant noodles — the world Su Yu sleeps only four hours a day desperately trying to protect.
Kevin flicked the safeties off both Glocks again.
His hands were shaking.
The Genetic Lock's strain had begun eating away at his nerve endings, and the fine control in his fingers was slipping.
The rift split wide open.
What drifted out of it turned Kevin's mind blank in an instant.
Bigger than the Battle-Car Class, it was practically a small mountain of amethyst bearing down on them.
A dozen or so lethal ring-blades, each half a meter across, hovered around it, every one of them venting a stream of high-energy particles.
A Honkai Emperor.
The pinnacle of the lower Honkai Beasts, an existence second only to the Emperor-class Honkai Beast.
Kevin had heard Welt talk about it.
Without a "Honkai energy antibody" or an "anti-Honkai weapon," the minimum price for a human army to destroy a Honkai Emperor was:
a fully manned modern heavy combined-arms battalion as ground bait to pin it down, paired with a squadron of fighter jets overhead delivering heavy precision-guided bombing.
And the ground force had to be mentally prepared to be wiped out to the last man.
And right now, he was alone.
Two little handguns.
The Honkai Emperor didn't pounce and bite like a beast; instead, as if just waking, it lazily "stretched."
The ring-blades around it switched in an instant from a slow orbit to high-speed spin, so fast that only a blurred halo remained.
An energy pulse rippled outward like water.
The custom high-alloy bat Kevin had thrown to the ground earlier was lightly brushed by the pulse.
No sound of impact, no spark.
The bat parted smoothly into two halves down the middle, its cut face flatter than a mirror.
The pulse spread on and swept right over Kevin.
Kevin felt like he'd been rammed by a dump truck.
Every inch of his skin took physical damage far beyond its limit in that single frame.
Muscles disconnected, pain shut off — his nervous system began force-closing non-essential programs to preserve the brain.
The Honkai Beast's snarl, Siegfried's voice calling his name in the distance, the howl of wind rushing into his ears — all of it grew distant and blurred, as if heard through a wall.
The colors in his vision were fading.
The dark purple light turned gray-purple, then gray.
The overpass's outline, the Honkai Beast's form, the raindrops suspended in the air — everything was losing saturation, becoming a black-and-white photograph.
Kevin closed his eyes.
In the darkness, an image surfaced.
Not Siegfried's back, not Cecilia's smile, not the profile of Mei turning a page.
In the image, of all things, was a sun-drenched basketball court.
Afternoon.
He'd spent two miserable hours practicing his shot alone; the last one clanged off the rim, and he collapsed onto the scorching rubber track.
Sweat stung his eyes.
A hand held out a can of iced tea.
"Kevin, that's not how you shoot."
Following the hand, there was Su Yu's face, forever wearing that faint carelessness that made you want to punch him.
"You've got to build a rough coordinate system in your head first… Or how about you say to me, 'Coach, I want to learn basketball,' and I'll teach you?"
Kevin was dumbstruck.
In this grand finale where he could go offline at any second, his head was full of this bastard's punchable little face.
What did that even count as? A workplace injury?
The image shattered.
In the darkness, Kevin's rapidly plummeting consciousness stopped sinking.
It simply hung there, neither rising nor falling, suspended in some deep, dark dimension.
Then it began, slowly, to float upward.
This was no medical miracle granted by a god.
It was because, in the dimension of reality, a powerful hand had seized him tight!
Into that grayish-white filter of despair, a face forced its way in.
A face he knew better than any other, one he could draw with his eyes shut.
Su Yu.
Ordinarily just a plain shut-in nobody would spare a second glance in a late-night convenience store, agonizing over whether to buy seafood noodles or Red Braised Beef noodles.
But now, he was completely different.
Those black eyes that always looked half-asleep now flowed with liquid gold.
His pupils narrowed into vertical slits under the extreme pressure, the patterns of his irises like burning apocalyptic magma.
Golden eyes.
The symbol of the Herrscher of the Void's Authority.
Su Yu gripped Kevin's wrist, standing on a transparent platform hovering in midair, condensed out of spatial Authority.
The platform's edges glimmered with faint golden lines, like cracks in glass.
He hauled Kevin back from midair and set them both firmly down on the overpass.
Kevin's knees went weak, and he nearly dropped to them.
Su Yu's other hand steadied his shoulder, letting him lean against him.
At such close range, those burning golden eyes were all the more soul-shattering.
Golden light even brimmed over from his pupils, casting a faint halo of divine, oppressive presence around Su Yu's eyes.
But Su Yu smiled.
The corner of his mouth still curved in that familiar way — harder to keep down than an AK's recoil after he'd screwed someone over at the office.
"I'm not late, am I, my precious boy?"
Kevin leaned on his shoulder and coughed twice.
A thread of blood seeped from the corner of his mouth, and he licked it away.
"Screw you…"
Kevin's voice was faint, faint enough to be nearly swallowed by the wind.
"You unfilial brat… nearly… got your foster father killed…"
Su Yu didn't answer.
Half-dragging, half-carrying, he hauled Kevin over to the Maybach fifty meters away.
Siegfried stood there like a statue.
Empty guns clutched in his hands, stubble caked with blood, he stared at Su Yu's golden eyes, at the spatial platform now dissolving away.
The old agent's mental CPU let out a shrill whine and crashed straight to a blue screen.
Su Yu dumped Kevin into Siegfried's arms, fished a syringe from his pocket, and tossed it over.
Siegfried caught it on reflex.
"Tesla's special-formula recovery agent. Straight into the vein — thirty seconds and he won't die."
With that, Su Yu turned to face the Honkai Emperor looming high above.
Without so much as glancing at the complicated German instructions on it, Siegfried pulled the cap and drove the needle into Kevin's vein.
Then he stared at Su Yu's back as if looking at a monster.
Su Yu had already walked a dozen steps forward, over the wreckage and standing water covering the ground.
Alone, he stood in the center of the bridge amid the driving rain and howling wind.
And directly before him, that despair-inducing Honkai Emperor still hovered high in the air.
Those terrifying ring-blades still radiated a dazzling glare around it.
Just then, to Su Yu's right, space was pulled open like a zipper.
Out of the faint golden light, a high heel stepped onto the shattered road with a crisp "click."
Rita Rossweisse.
In an impeccably tailored dark maid uniform, she gripped a silver-gray Pseudo-Soulsteel great scythe, its icy blade carving a lethal arc through the purple glow of the Honkai energy.
To Su Yu's left, another rift tore open.
Kiana leapt out.
The ahoge on her head swayed stubbornly in the airflow.
Her two eyes — one a deep blue, the other exactly like Su Yu's, a flowing, liquid gold.
In each hand she carried a large-caliber hand cannon lovingly forged by Anti-Entropy Heavy Industries — [Firmament Tearer].
The two of them stood before Su Yu, one to each side.
Siegfried opened his mouth and found that his twenty years of S-rank agent vocabulary was, in this moment, pitifully, tearfully inadequate.
"Su— Su Yu… I… you all…"
Su Yu didn't look back.
He reached up and grabbed the collar of his bespoke suit jacket.
And tore it off in one motion.
He tossed the jacket carelessly onto the broken road, where it landed in a pool of dark purple blood.
His white shirt billowed in the raging wind of the Honkai energy, its hem pulled loose from his waistband, snapping and cracking in the gale.
His back shielded Siegfried and Kevin, standing between the Honkai Emperor and the peaceful world behind him.
His golden eyes burned in the night.
Su Yu's voice wasn't loud — the downpour hammered his shoulders, kicking up tiny splashes — but every word came through clearly.
"Mr. Siegfried."
His right hand rose.
Spatial Authority gathered in his palm into a spinning golden point of light.
Rita held the great scythe across in front of her.
The blade's surface mirrored the Honkai Emperor and the sky full of ring-blades behind it.
Kiana flicked her thumbs, and the safeties on both hand cannons snapped off at once.
"Hmmmm—"
A grating charging whine burst through the downpour, and ghostly blue pre-heat beams tore through the rainy night.
"Welcome to —"
Su Yu clenched his fist hard.
The golden point of light exploded with a roar, becoming an Absolute Force Field that swallowed half the overpass.
"the cruel workplace of Anti-Entropy."
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