September 1st.
The sun rose as it always did.
Morning light spilled over Arc City's jagged skyline of steel and concrete, refracting off countless glass curtain walls into a harsh golden glare, and finally settling over streets clogged with rush-hour traffic.
Today was the first day of the new term. In theory, every university student in the country should have been sitting in a classroom, listening to their first lecture.
In theory, of course.
Arc City University.
Men's dormitory, Room 307.
The curtains were drawn shut so tightly not a sliver of light got through.
Four monitors glowed dimly, their light falling across four unwashed faces.
Nobody was going to that cursed eight A.M. class.
The instant noodles on the lower-left bunk had finished steeping fifteen minutes ago. The noodles had swollen into a single congealed lump, a film of cooled grease floating on the broth, the fork standing in it without so much as a twitch.
The phone alarm on the upper-right bunk had been going off since eight. Six times. Nobody turned it off. It finally died on its own when the battery ran out.
The only sounds in the room were heavy breathing and the drone of case fans.
Four pairs of bloodshot eyes were nailed to four screens.
All four showed the same image: the login screen of Honkai Impact 3rd.
That classic elevator login screen.
The guy on the lower-left bunk dragged his cursor onto the grayed-out button and clicked.
[Hyperion is docked for maintenance~]
Nothing.
He clicked again.
Still nothing.
He started mashing it like a man possessed.
Click-click-click-click-
The rapid-fire snap of the mouse's microswitch was startlingly loud in the quiet dorm.
"Quit clicking," said the guy on the lower-right bunk without turning his head. "Ten more minutes."
"I know. My hand won't listen. I just want to snag a low UID."
The guy on the upper-right bunk was curled up under his blanket hugging a pillow, with nothing visible but a pair of eyes and two hands holding a phone.
His screen was open to the forums, the thread refreshing so fast the page shook.
[Forum - Honkai Impact 3rd Board - Pinned Hot Thread]
[Title: Brothers, the pre-download package is fully unpacked! Why are my hands shaking like I've got Parkinson's?!]
Reply 1: Hurry hurry hurry, I am the King of Impatience!
Reply 15: Ten minutes left! miHoYo, open the door! I know you're in there! Let me in!!!
Reply 23: This game has Elysia as its spokesperson AND Eden pouring her heart into the music, and it's FREE. Give me one reason not to dive in. Honestly, just getting to hear Eden's live-recorded BGM and I could die with no regrets.
Reply 31: Wake up, guy above me. If you die you can't hear it.
Reply 48: Anyone else skip the first class of the semester? My academic advisor is already doing roll call in the group chat. I'm pretending my internet is out.
Reply 52: All four of us in my dorm skipped. Does the eight A.M. professor seriously think he can compete with Kiana?
Reply 67: Friendly heads-up from the front row - the servers are probably going to melt at launch. Prepare yourselves emotionally.
Reply 68: Shut your mouth, 67. Say that again and I'll crawl through the network cable and mash your face into your keyboard.
The reply count climbed at a terrifying thirty per second. The app's cache couldn't keep up; the page stuttered so badly you had to keep pulling down to force a refresh.
At that same moment.
Rush-hour Subway Line 3.
Bodies pressed against bodies, the air hot and stale, thick with the smell of a dozen different breakfasts.
Hand straps swayed overhead, and every braking turn sent the whole car leaning in unison.
But look down, and at least a third of the passengers had the same image glowing on their phone screens.
Through the shifting light and shadow: a girl with white hair, a braid, and a pair of clear azure eyes.
The promotional CG for Honkai Impact 3rd.
A man in a plaid shirt who looked like a programmer hung from a strap with one hand, phone raised in the other.
His thumb had hovered above that grayed-out button on the screen for three full stations without moving.
The man in the suit beside him glanced at the screen, then quietly pulled out his own phone.
The same image.
The same elevator.
Two strangers exchanged a look of perfect mutual understanding in the crowded car.
The train reached the station. Neither of them got off.
09:30 AM.
A top-tier domestic game publisher.
Headquarters, seventeenth floor, the largest conference room.
Eleven people sat around the long rosewood table.
No one spoke.
Dead silence.
The central air conditioning was locked at a steady twenty-two degrees, cold air whispering out of the vents.
Yet a fine sheen of cold sweat had broken out across the forehead of the project director at the head of the table.
He yanked irritably at his silk tie, twice. The knot went crooked, and the top button of his shirt popped off with a sharp snap and rolled onto the carpet.
Two trend graphs hung side by side on the projector screen.
The one on the left showed pre-registration data for their own company's turn-based anime-style flagship title, hundreds of millions invested, launching next month.
The line looked like a dying old man's heart monitor, tracing feeble troughs.
The one on the right showed pre-download data for Honkai Impact 3rd.
It was a line that defied common sense.
It started climbing in early August, went nearly vertical in the middle of the month, and after the livestream on the twenty-ninth it simply took off.
By today, that red line had barged straight past the chart's preset maximum on the Y-axis.
The operations team had scrambled to triple the axis ceiling, and only then did the line barely fit inside the edge of the screen instead of punching through the ceiling.
The project director stared at that line, eyes webbed with red.
"What rock did this monster of a studio crawl out from under?"
His voice echoed through the cavernous room, tremor bleeding through despite himself.
No one dared answer.
"Full 3D free camera? Console-grade action combat? A real-time physics engine? Character models with higher fidelity than the pre-rendered CG we outsourced and spent three years finishing?"
With each item his voice climbed another notch.
"And this thing runs flawlessly, buttery smooth, on a phone?!"
The lead programmer sat in the corner with a leaked gameplay capture playing on the laptop in front of him.
On screen, the white-haired girl, Kiana, was running an impossibly fluid combo chain.
Time Fracture triggering off a dodge, a charged heavy strike, particle effects detonating on ultimate release.
Every frame of animation transition, every flutter of her coattails, every pass of light and shadow rendered so seamlessly it raised the hair on the back of your neck.
And the frame counter in the upper right corner read, plain as day: 120 FPS.
Stable.
This was live gameplay.
No dropped frames.
No stutter.
This was live gameplay.
This was not a CG.
The lead programmer wearily closed the laptop.
"Outclassed by None," he said softly.
He raised both hands, scrubbed hard at his face, then drove his fingers deep into his hair.
"That thing isn't even from the same era as us. What we're building is industrial garbage standing next to it."
His voice came out muffled from behind his palms, carrying the specific despair of an engineer whose faith has collapsed.
"Pass the word down. Our game is delayed."
"Delayed how long?" the operations director asked carefully, mopping sweat.
The lead programmer lowered his hands and looked around the room.
"Indefinitely. Launching now is suicide."
The conference room stayed quiet for a long time.
The air vents hummed evenly.
On the projector screen the two lines still hung side by side - one lying flat on the floor playing dead, one blowing through the sky.
At that same moment.
Something spectacular happened to the front-page recommendation slots of every major streaming platform.
It didn't matter whether you clicked into console, online games, outdoor, the beauty category, or even the normally tranquil cooking and ASMR sections.
All those wildly varied recommendation cards on the front page had, over the past twenty-four hours, been branded with the same prefix, as if brainwashed by some irresistible collective will.
[Launch Day Showdown - Honkai Impact 3rd Open Beta! A Free-to-Play Player's Road to Glory!]
[Maxed-Out Whale Standing By - Not Logging Off Until I Pull an S-rank!]
[Ex-Pro Player Takes You Through Console-Grade ACT! The Feel Is Insane!]
[Waiting for Launch With You! Chatting, Hanging Out, Merch Giveaways!]
Huge streamers, mid-tier streamers, small streamers, micro-streamers so obscure they'd sunk to the center of the earth.
Every last one of them had piled onto the same track.
All the traffic, all the fever, at this hour on this day, converged with absolute finality on a single name.
miHoYo.
miHoYo Studio.
Ten minutes remained until the full-platform public beta of Honkai Impact 3rd.
Up on the top floor of the Arc City Tower, Anti-Entropy Entertainment's studio had reached a level of chaos rivaling a high-speed rail waiting hall during New Year travel season.
"Beep-beep-beep-beep-!"
The server room's cooling was cranked to its lowest setting, and Bronie's forehead was still beading with sweat.
She popped the pink bubblegum in her mouth - chewed flavorless long ago - with a sharp snap, ten fingers hammering the mechanical keyboard fast enough to blur.
"Do these Earthlings not have school or jobs?! The pre-download ports are about to burst!"
Bronie glared at the load curve rocketing vertically up her screen and snarled through her teeth.
"Push every backup node live, now! If anybody's code chokes today and takes the servers down, I will hang them upside down from the Arc City Tower's lightning rod and let them dry out!"
At the other end of the hallway, Kevin - white hair, immaculate suit - held a phone to his ear, his cold profile sharp enough to shed ice chips. Facing a final probing offer from one of the country's biggest distribution platforms, he didn't so much as blink.
"Fifty-fifty split? You'd have better luck robbing a bank." Kevin's voice carried no inflection at all. "Rules are rules. Either you accept our port integration agreement, or you sit there and watch this wave of traffic feed your competitors instead."
The line went dead with a clean click.
His whole philosophy in a nutshell: dignity exists only at a sword's edge, and truth exists only in the traffic numbers.
In stark contrast to the wage-earners striking sparks off their keyboards was Elysia, ensconced in her private luxury dressing room.
The pink-haired pixie sat before a ring-lit vanity mirror, blending a glossy sheen of lip tint at the peak of her lips with a fingertip.
She winked playfully at her own flawless reflection and hummed a happy little tune. "Ahh~ it's my very first proper meeting with the cutest players on all of Earth, so of course a pixie has to make her entrance looking absolutely, positively perfect~"
Out in the main office, the empty energy drink cans had piled into a small mountain.
Nuwa, sporting dark circles that could rival a giant panda's, gripped her stylus and kept blasting away at a celebration illustration for the launch campaign.
"Faster, faster, faster! This Kiana piece needs one more highlight pass! Even a farm mule gets more rest than this! Su Yu, you black-hearted capitalist, exploiting your poor employees-!"
Beside her, an art team member slid out of his chair and climbed back into it for the third time.
"Nuwa, I've been working twenty-six hours straight."
"Thirty-two for me. You're young. You'll survive."
The noise from the corridor seeped in through the door cracks - footsteps, shouting, keyboards, like a pot of porridge at a rolling boil.
But when the soundproofed door of the Director's Office swung shut, all of it was severed in an instant.
The holographic display floated there, glowing softly, and dead center on it a string of harsh red numbers ticked down without mercy.
00:08:42
Kiana wore a soft white set of loungewear.
She stood in front of the screen, those mismatched eyes locked onto the falling numbers, fingers twisting together without her noticing.
As the seconds bled away, her steady breathing turned shallow and quick.
She didn't - she didn't know.
Wasn't sure.
Taking everything that had happened to all of them in that world of death and betrayal and despair, laying those bloody scars bare, packaging it as a "game" for the people of this peaceful world to look at... what would they think?
Would anyone find all that struggling laughable?
Would anyone mock Mei for her weakness? Would anyone fail to understand Aunt Himeko's sacrifice?
Would anyone... decide that she, the Herrscher of the Void who had once brought catastrophe, was just a monster who dragged everyone else down with her?
Would they-
A hand settled over hers.
Gently enclosing her cold, faintly trembling fingers.
Kiana's body went stiff.
Su Yu stood beside her.
He wasn't looking at the countdown that would decide all of their fates.
His gaze rested on the side of her face.
Kiana turned her head and met his eyes.
Su Yu was watching her.
She knew that expression far too well.
It was the expression he'd worn when he pulled her back from the rooftop ledge.
The one he'd worn when he called her back inside the consciousness space.
The one he'd worn when she jolted awake from a nightmare and he held her hand and said, "I'm still here."
As if no matter what happened, he would always find a way to stand in front of her and keep every uncertainty on the other side of him.
"Don't be afraid." Su Yu's voice was quiet, yet it carried a strange power to settle the heart. "Whether what's waiting outside that door is flowers or curses, whatever the future brings, I'll face it with you."
Kiana went blank.
The red countdown still flickered in her eyes, the numbers still falling, but somehow they didn't sting anymore.
The tangled knot of anxiety and fear churning in her chest felt as though a hand had been laid gently over it.
It hadn't vanished. But it stopped roiling.
A faint flush rose in her cheeks. Her long lashes fluttered twice, and she managed a very small, "Mm."
She even worked up the nerve to turn the tables and squeeze his hand back.
The warmth passing palm to palm worked like the strongest sedative ever made.
As if, so long as this person stood beside her, it wouldn't matter much even if the world really did end tomorrow.
"Besides, think about it. Like the saying goes, an ugly bride has to meet the in-laws sooner or later."
Su Yu squeezed Kiana's hand with a completely straight face.
"All those starving players out there are basically the ones putting food on our table, right? So this move? This move is entirely reasonable and proper!"
Snap.
That was the sound of the nerve labeled "moved to tears" breaking inside Kiana's head.
The soft pink filter from a moment ago shattered across the floor.
Kiana's face flushed crimson all the way to her ears. Her eyes flew wide and she shouted, half-mortified, half-furious, "Wh-what?! What is going on inside your head! Can't you be serious for even one second!"
She tried to yank her hand back in a fluster, but Su Yu held on and refused to let go.
"Give this young lady back every ounce of that emotion, exactly as it was! And - and what ugly bride! Who's your bride! Stop misusing idioms, you idiot!"
Watching the spitting, bristling cat in front of him finally come back to life, Su Yu's smile deepened, his eyes full of open affection.
"That's better, Kiana."
"Huh?" Kiana stopped struggling, caught off guard.
"Compared to the grim-faced Paramecium from a minute ago who bottled up every last fear and said nothing..."
Su Yu reached out with his other hand and casually ruffled her white hair into a mess.
"Yeah, the Kiana who puffs up and gets furious over one sentence is definitely the cuter one."
"Y-you just think winding this young lady up is entertaining, don't you! Hmph!"
Kiana's face was hot enough now to fry an egg on.
She wrenched her head to the side in full tsundere fashion, striking the pose of someone who is angry and cannot be consoled.
But the hand Su Yu was holding, her body more honest than her mouth, curled back and gripped his a little tighter.
The office was quiet for a moment.
Before long Kiana spoke again, and this time there was less embarrassment in her voice and more careful, cherished hope.
"Su Yu."
"Mm?"
"Will everyone... will they like this story? Will they like the people in it who fought and struggled?"
Su Yu looked at the girl's uneasy profile reflected in the glass.
He didn't hesitate for a heartbeat. With the morning sun pouring into the office behind him, he broke into a brilliant smile.
"They will. I promise."
Like is putting it mildly, Su Yu thought privately. Once a few knives go in later on, those adorable players will be lining up in their dreams to mail razor blades to the front door of miHoYo Studio.
With Su Yu's flat, unwavering promise given, the public beta entered its final thirty seconds.
Thirty seconds left.
In the streams of every major broadcaster, the volume of comments had reached what could only be called a physically catastrophic level.
The danmaku scrolled so fast the text became solid bands of white light streaking across the screen, completely unreadable.
Server load curves began wavering visibly while technicians worked the backend like madmen, balancing traffic.
In that dorm room reeking of instant noodles, four young men shot to their feet at the same instant, faces nearly pressed to their monitors, blue light reflected in their eyes.
In that packed, sweltering rush-hour subway car, an entire row of hunched passengers went rigid in unison, thumbs hovering dead still above the exact same spot.
In that cold conference room at the rival publisher, the project director closed his eyes, drained of every last bit of strength.
Outside the door of the game director's office came the muffled sound of the staff counting down in unison, unable to help themselves, voices shaking a little: "Ten! Nine! Eight..."
Kiana's palms began to sweat from the sheer tension.
She turned her head on instinct, wanting to draw a little more strength from Su Yu's face.
She looked at his profile.
Su Yu was staring at the numbers on the holographic display.
Following his gaze downward, Kiana froze.
Su Yu's free left hand was clamped around the armrest of the office chair, knuckles digging in hard.
Her heart clenched.
It hit her all at once - this man who kept teasing her into laughing, who kept telling her not to be afraid, wasn't nearly as relaxed as he pretended.
What he carried wasn't just the success or failure of one game, wasn't just the livelihoods of a few hundred people in this studio.
It was the apocalypse less than six months away, the Honkai that would sweep over all of humanity.
This game was the only lifeline they had for gathering Cognition and fighting the end of the world.
The pressure on him was a hundred times, a thousand times heavier than anyone else's. The truth was, he was more afraid of failing than she was.
And yet this idiot still forced out that carefree, sunny grin in front of her, purely to chase her fear away.
"You idiot, Su Yu..."
Kiana bit down hard on her lower lip and tasted the faintest trace of blood.
In the next moment, every trace of confusion, nervousness, and self-doubt vanished from her eyes.
She lifted her head, looked past Su Yu's shoulder, and fixed her gaze on the red digits sliding toward zero on the holographic display.
"You're right. No matter what the future holds-"
"Three!"
"-I'm going to face it together with you."
"Two!"
Su Yu looked at her profile.
Morning light streamed through the window, falling on her long white hair, on the burning red tips of her ears, into her eyes.
And in those eyes there was no confusion left at all.
"One!"
The numbers on the holographic display hit zero.
00:00:00.
The floodgates opened.
Hundreds of millions of IPs poured into the servers like a released reservoir.
[Honkai Impact 3rd - Now Running]
Blue light lit the entire office - the rosewood desktop, the reflections in the floor-to-ceiling windows, and two hands clasped together.
Outside the door, the whole floor erupted into a deafening cheer.
The Honkai Impact 3rd public beta had officially begun.
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