Twelve fifteen.
The loading screen for Chapter 3 of Honkai Impact 3rd faded off the monitor.
In a stream room that had been filled with cheerful everyday nonsense up to this point, the atmosphere shifted by a subtle degree.
The screen brightened, and it was no longer the sunlit grounds of St. Freya Academy.
What filled the frame were the ruins left behind by the Great Eruption in New Zealand, broken walls and shattered pillars standing stark and cold beneath an overcast sky.
The sound of wind scraping across loose rubble came through the hi-fi speakers, carrying a desolation that felt entirely real.
The playful grin that usually lived at the corner of Elysia's mouth quietly disappeared.
She sat up straighter, pale fingers curling around the edges of the controller.
"So this... is what the world looks like after a Honkai eruption?"
She watched the Valkyries on screen, the ones who charged out to the very front lines to fight the Honkai.
Kiana, Mei, Bronya. All of them sixteen, seventeen years old - the age when a girl should be sitting in a classroom without a care in the world, eating ice cream. Instead they were risking their lives in ruins that looked like hell itself.
The danmaku still scrolled fast, but the content had shifted from "hahaha" to something closer to empathy.
[Watching these little girls fight in a wasteland is honestly kind of heartbreaking.]
[Is this what people mean by the beautiful-tragic-strong archetype?]
[Brother Su really understands the aesthetics of broken things.]
The story pushed forward, and a new character stepped in.
Wendy.
The prodigy once hailed as the girl most likely to become the fourth S-rank Valkyrie.
When Elysia reached Wendy's backstory, her brow drew tighter and tighter.
To run their experiments with the Gem of Desire, Schicksal had implanted the gem into Wendy's legs. She lost all sensation in both legs. She would never stand again.
And after turning a prodigy into a cripple, Schicksal didn't offer anything close to adequate compensation. They abandoned her instead - which led, in the end, to her being eroded by the Honkai and becoming the Herrscher of Wind.
"How could they do that..."
Elysia's teeth clenched.
"Those people at the top of Schicksal - how could they bring themselves to do something that cruel to her?"
The viewers caught the same anger. Comments sympathizing with Wendy blanketed the screen.
But Su Yu had designed the story like a rollercoaster.
Right as the mood hit freezing point, he slipped in a stretch of comedy without warning.
The scene cut over to Theresa.
This Academy Director who looked like a small child had, in order to buy time, leaked Durandal's coordinates - which got Durandal ambushed by Anti-Entropy. Afterward, Theresa fed her Kiana's "Gold Coast sightseeing route" excuse, and Durandal, straight-faced, actually believed every word of it.
The sheer whiplash of the contrast made Elysia burst out laughing.
"Pfft-" She covered her mouth, giggling. "This Miss Durandal is way too literal-minded, isn't she? Academy Director Theresa is terrible, bullying an honest girl like that."
The weight from a moment ago lifted a little in the laughter.
It didn't last.
The plot dropped out from under everyone.
Cocolia, Anti-Entropy's executor, arrived.
Without a flicker of hesitation, Cocolia activated the control chip inside Bronya's brain.
Bronya, who had just finished talking Wendy down, went hollow-eyed in an instant, like a machine with the soul scooped out of it.
She raised Project Bunny's cannon and leveled the muzzle at Wendy.
A roar of fire.
Wendy, feeling herself betrayed by Bronya, flew into a rage again and tangled with the Valkyrie squad.
And before the fight could be decided, Cocolia showed up with Anti-Entropy's forces to break it apart.
Wendy and Mei were dragged away by force. Kiana collapsed to her knees, hammering both fists against the ground in despair, able to do nothing but watch them go.
Elysia looked at Kiana's back, at that refusal to accept it, and drew a deep breath.
She turned to the camera and pulled up a sweet smile - one meant to comfort her audience, and herself.
"It's fine, it's fine!"
She waved her free hand.
"Don't panic, everyone! This is a standard beat in every classic shounen story. The main cast always hits setbacks while they're growing, that's what makes the payback later feel so good, right? Our Kiana is definitely going to get them back!"
She said it with total conviction, completely unaware of how enormous a flag she had just planted with her own two hands.
Chapter 4 opened at a surprisingly light pace.
Kiana and the others broke into ME Corp.
During the infiltration, Theresa and Himeko started dumping every embarrassing story about Siegfried they could remember, purely to cut the tension.
Such as how this deadbeat of a father, back on the Hyperion, had used "combat instruction" as an excuse to grope the backside of very nearly every Valkyrie aboard.
It was, admittedly, only a rumor.
The moment that piece of gossip landed, Elysia's eyes lit up.
"Wow, I'm so jeal-"
The word had barely finished forming on her tongue before she caught herself, swallowed the rest of the sentence whole, and switched tracks.
"-so appalled! How could an adult do something like that!"
She delivered the condemnation with perfect righteousness, but the wild curiosity blazing in her eyes gave her away completely.
The comment section drowned in glee.
[You were about to say jealous, weren't you! I heard it!]
[Miss Elf, have you finally exposed your true nature as a lover of pretty girls?]
[Case closed. Elysia and Siegfried are kindred spirits.]
[Director Su, come rein in your own spokesperson! She's going to corrupt the children!]
The teasing turned the tips of Elysia's ears faintly red. She huffed at the screen and turned her attention back to the game.
The calm before a storm never lasts long.
When Kiana and Theresa finally smashed through every obstacle and reached the deepest level of ME Corp, what waited for them wasn't a satisfying, hard-won victory.
It was Bronya, fully under control.
Cocolia issued an absolute order: Bronya was to kill Kiana and the rest.
On screen, Bronya's small, expressionless face twisted for the first time with something like agony.
Her logic module and her emotion module tore at each other.
To protect the friends who mattered most.
So that Sister Mei wouldn't have to grieve.
That gaming-addicted girl who normally seemed interested in nothing but her console made a decision nobody saw coming.
She overclocked herself on purpose, burning out the control chip in her own brain.
Blinding arcs of electricity burst from the back of Bronya's head.
That small body lost every last bit of support and pitched straight forward like a discarded rag doll.
The smile on Elysia's face froze solid the instant Bronya fell.
"No, that can't..."
The words slipped out before she registered saying them.
What came next gave nobody room to breathe.
Indulging her own cruel amusement, Cocolia let Wendy send one final transmission - and Wendy couldn't even finish saying goodbye.
The girl who had once wanted nothing more than to walk went berserk under the weight of absolute despair and hatred, and died fighting.
The Gem of Desire inside her was torn out with brutal efficiency and slotted into a colossal mech called Wotan.
In the boss fight that followed, Kiana gave everything she had, and together with Theresa she brought Wotan down.
But.
There was no cheering. No triumphant return.
All they carried back was a deeply comatose Bronya, whose survival was uncertain, and Wendy's cold corpse.
The screen faded to black and the Chapter 4 results panel appeared.
The volume of danmaku in the room collapsed.
A stream with tens of millions of viewers, and it had gone terrifyingly quiet.
All those people spamming "hahaha" a few minutes ago had fallen completely silent.
Elysia sat in her gaming chair.
She stared at the results panel for a long, long time.
Then she drew a deep breath, forced her chin up, and faced the camera.
She squeezed out a sweet smile, though it sat a great deal stiffer on her face than usual.
"Everyone, don't panic!"
Her tone came out too bright, almost hurried.
"This is only Chapter 4! There's so, so much main story left after this."
"The plot already told us, right? Theresa and Kiana are heading to the database at the Schicksal cathedral to look for classified files. They're absolutely going to find the miracle that wakes Bronya up!"
She pressed her palms together like she was praying, or trying to convince herself.
"There's no way Big Boss Su would have the heart to keep torturing girls this cute. He promised me before. This is just a temporary low point, and there'll be a happy ending waiting at the end of it!"
A scattering of agreement drifted through the comments.
Everyone was reaching for that last straw labeled "classic shounen storytelling."
The game moved into Chapter 5.
The setting changed completely.
The Siberian plains, scoured by a blizzard.
The timeline had rewound to the battlefield of the Second Eruption.
Kiana found herself standing inside an illusion that felt entirely real.
And here, she met the man she had only ever seen in photographs.
Siegfried.
When Siegfried drew that Greatsword wrapped in roaring flame and bellowed the line that would go on to set the entire internet on fire - "Heavenly Flame, unsheathe!" - Elysia on the other side of the screen finally recovered a fraction of her energy and joined the danmaku in a chorus of admiration.
Then Cecilia stepped onto the field.
White hair, a gaze of impossible gentleness, Black Abyss, White Flower in her hands, like a Valkyrie descending onto the snowfield.
Elysia looked at the Cecilia on screen, her eyes full of wonder and longing.
"Wow... Mother-in-law is really beautiful." She sighed in appreciation. "That maternal radiance is nothing like Kiana's liveliness. So Kiana had a mother this perfect all along."
But as Kiana and Cecilia pushed deeper into the Tower of Babylon, the entire tone of the story broke apart.
Hidden behind those cold steel walls was the filthiest chapter of blood and tears in Schicksal's history.
Restrained yet merciless text laid the human experimentation of the Babylon Laboratory open and bare in front of everyone.
The innocent girls who had been taken.
The children who endured unbearable agony for the sake of the anti-Honkai serum and ended up as deformed monsters.
And the girl who watched her friends die one by one, right in front of her - the Second Herrscher, the Herrscher of the Void, Sirin.
Her hatred.
Her despair.
Why she wanted to destroy this world.
Every cause and every consequence assembled themselves in that moment into one complete, unspeakable portrait of hell.
The mood in the stream reversed entirely.
The comments that had been spamming [I want the Queen to step on me], [Sirin's voice is so nice], [The twin monsters look so cool] at the start - every one of them was gone.
What replaced them was a screen full of suffocated, skin-crawling discussion.
[Is Schicksal actually the good guys? This is a damn slaughterhouse!]
[I finally get why Sirin hates humanity that much...]
[This story is way too dark. Where's the sunny, healing game? This is crushing people to death.]
[I used to think Sirin was too cruel. Now all I want to say is, kill every last researcher in the Tower of Babylon.]
Elysia's hands left the controller.
The smile was gone from her face. Completely gone.
She sat there, no longer trading jokes with the comment section every few seconds, no longer breaking down what made each character adorable.
She only stared at the brutal lines of text on the screen. Her breathing had gone heavy, each inhale like the pull of an old, worn-out bellows.
She couldn't accept it - that behind a story like this lay evil this deep, this poisonous.
The truth of the Tower of Babylon was cruel enough to choke on.
But the battle inside the illusion finally reached what looked like a perfect ending.
Kiana gave everything, pushing her body past its limits.
Fighting alongside Cecilia, she brought Sirin down at last.
In this false dream, she had successfully rewritten the tragedy of her mother's death.
Elysia let out a long, long breath.
The shoulders she had been holding rigid finally dropped.
Tears had already gathered at the corners of her eyes.
"Thank goodness..."
She watched mother and daughter reunite on screen, her voice thick. "No matter how painful the process was, as long as Kiana gets to be with her mom again. As long as that tragedy changes, all of it was worth it. Su Yu... he did show some mercy after all."
And then.
In that warmest moment, the one that made everyone lower their guard, the gears of fate rolled over them without a shred of pity.
No warning at all.
A blade of freezing light tore the quiet apart at the top of the Tower of Babylon.
Fu Hua, clad in the [Shadow Knight] armor.
The Squad Monitor who normally cried in the dorm over her terrible gacha luck. The Squad Monitor who quietly looked after everyone.
"It's time to wake up, Kiana."
With sorrow in her voice, Fu Hua laid out the whole truth for Kiana.
All of it was fake.
As her words landed, the warm snowfield around them, all those tender images, began to fracture pane by pane like glass.
From beginning to end, this had been an illusion woven by Sirin's consciousness.
Cecilia had died more than a decade ago, in the Second Eruption.
Even her body had been reduced to ash in that enormous blast.
There was no miracle.
There was no reunion.
All of it was fake.
Elysia felt like she'd been dropped into an ice pit.
She stared blankly at the screen, lips trembling. "Squad Monitor... why?"
Inside the game.
Kiana, now understanding everything, broke completely.
She knelt in the field of shards, clawing desperately at the fragments of light already scattering away from her.
She remembered the "magic" from the illusion.
The magic words she'd been told would summon a miracle and make everything right, as long as she said them out loud.
A dialogue prompt appeared on screen.
There was only one option.
Kiana lifted her tear-soaked face toward the empty air.
Weeping, throat raw, she spoke the German words.
"Ich liebe dich (I love you)."
No miracle happened.
There was no such thing as magic in this world.
It had never been anything but the incantation that awakened the Second Herrscher.
Kiana, transformed into White Knight Moonbeam, fought Fu Hua, and in the end she lost. Fu Hua knocked her unconscious and carried her away.
On top of that, Schicksal Headquarters had dispatched Durandal to retrieve Kiana as well.
The final image of Chapter 6.
Data space.
Sprawled on the ground, Theresa dragged her arm up and pressed the button on her communicator.
She connected to Ai-chan, the Hyperion's AI.
That adorable Academy Director who liked reading manga, who liked drinking bitter melon juice, who had to stack two dictionaries on her chair to see over the table at meetings.
Her teeth clenched hard.
["Transfer Bronya to the Hyperion."]
Jaw locked, Theresa gave her final order.
["Destination - Schicksal Headquarters!"]
The screen went fully black.
Chapter 6. End.
Elysia sat in front of the computer.
One second. Ten seconds.
Half a minute passed.
She looked drained of every ounce of strength, unable to pull herself back for the longest time.
The danmaku across the entire stream stalled for several seconds too.
Then.
It detonated.
That wasn't ordinary spam. That was a tsunami going off.
[AAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!]
[Su Yu you dog of a writer, you have no heart!!!]
[Get out here!! You get out here right now!!]
[Why couldn't you leave even a sliver of hope!! That was her MOTHER!!]
[March on Schicksal! Tear Otto apart!]
[I'm going to go spend money right now!! I'm pulling the highest-spec Valkyrie there is!! I'll flatten Schicksal Headquarters!!]
The comments scrolled fast enough that the platform's servers started to stutter.
That terrifying flood of emotion traveled down the network and slammed, with perfect accuracy, into miHoYo's studio.
Arc City Tower, main control room.
Su Yu looked at the abusive private messages still climbing exponentially on his backend tablet.
Then he glanced at the number on the left-hand screen, the one steadily converting all of it into Emotion Points.
That number had already blown past his projections and was rocketing upward with something close to violence.
He picked up the Iced Black Tea on his desk and took a long swallow.
Then he sighed.
It was like lighting a fire with his own hands and watching the blaze grow big enough to burn through the roof.
And he not only couldn't put it out, he had to keep pouring gasoline in.
He moved the cursor and opened the audio feed from Elysia's stream.
And found himself looking at the scene he'd started with.
That flawless Miss Pink Elf, hugging a pink cushion printed with a HOMU, shoulders hitching, eye makeup on the verge of running.
"Awful Su Yu..."
Elysia leveled her accusation at the camera, her voice full of hurt.
"You big liar. Miss Pink Elf... swears to be your sworn enemy forever! Waaah-"
Su Yu leaned back in his swivel chair.
Watching the state she was in, he tapped his fingers twice against the desk.
This was a problem.
It wasn't just the tens of millions of paying lords outside who needed soothing.
The biggest tyrant in his own studio had apparently been reduced to actual tears.
"Don't hold it against me, Elysia."
Looking at Elysia with tears shining in her eyes, small and pitiful, Su Yu let out a long sigh - and then:
[Don't worry, this update comes loaded with main story. To find out what happens next, please continue into Chapter 6, "The Rebel Sword Raised to the Heavens"!]
He dropped that superchat into Elysia's stream with absolutely no shame whatsoever.
"Really?!"
Elysia, who had been on the verge of full-blown sobbing, read the message and went wide-eyed.
"Oh, right! I just remembered, everyone! Did you know? Honkai Impact 3rd actually has an official manga! It's been running since before the game went into open beta!"
[We know! It's The Three-Year Sakura and The Third Eruption, right! Kiana at Senba Academy is so unbelievably cool!]
[She still had a bit of that proper Nordic young lady look back at Senba Academy. How did she turn into a Paramecium the second the main story started?]
[All I'll say is, with a woman as gentle as Mei around, anybody would end up spoiled rotten.]
[Kiana: And I'm happy about it!!]
Elysia was a professional streamer for a reason. She snapped right back into rhythm. "The Third Eruption is the story of Kiana saving Mei, so here's my bold prediction - the story after this has to be Mei saving Kiana!"
"If it's a mutual-redemption story like that, then maybe I can forgive you after all!"
The stream filled with [Ellie is too kind].
[Brother Su, you'd better not write anything crazy from here on.]
[We should still trust Brother Su. He said this was a healthy, sunny, uplifting game, so it'll definitely be fine.]
[Exactly!]
Watching Elysia gather herself back together and start into Chapter 7, Su Yu rubbed his face and let out a sigh he couldn't hold in.
Kids, tell me honestly. Am I really such a wicked, black-hearted producer?
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