By the time Arc City's night was being torn apart by police sirens and the growl of a Maybach engine,
Europe, on the far side of the planet, was only just easing into a bright, clear morning.
Apocalypse Consortium headquarters. Top floor, the president's office.
Beyond the enormous panoramic windows stretched a sky so clean it held not a single wisp of cloud.
A few white doves swept past the bell tower of the spired cathedral, the faint beat of their wings against the air stopped dead by three layers of bulletproof soundproof glass.
Sunlight poured into the spacious room, cutting a hard, distinct border of light and shadow across the carpet.
On the desk lay the latest issue of Time.
A man's half-length portrait was printed on the cover.
Blond, young-featured, wearing an impeccably tailored bespoke suit, with something unreadable hiding at the back of his eyes.
The headline beside him read: [The Twenty-First Century's Most Farsighted Sword Bearer - Otto Apocalypse].
In the public sphere, it was a flawless resume.
Top-tier medical journals carried surgical papers under his name.
His name sat rock-steady in the top five of the global wealth rankings.
At any society dinner, the moment he appeared, every socialite in the room recalibrated her coordinates toward him.
But beneath that magazine lay another document, one with no cover.
The paper was a specially made anti-surveillance stock, and it carried the latest mediation results for an armed conflict in a war-torn region of the Middle East.
No signature. No official seal. Only a hidden crest stamped in gilt foil, shaped like a two-pronged trident.
Schicksal.
An intelligence organization no government would publicly acknowledge, yet one whose tendrils had burrowed into every corner of the globe.
For as long as anyone could remember, Schicksal had moved like a leviathan lurking in the deep sea, devoted to quietly defusing the deadliest conflicts between nations and in war zones.
In the shadows they had already secured the backing of several superpowers, and that terrifying intelligence network had long since rooted itself like capillaries into every corner of this world.
That was the true weight of Otto Apocalypse.
If anyone ever asked why a capitalist commanding limitless wealth would secretly build such an enormous apparatus, all to hold together a world peace riddled with holes, and dirty his own hands doing it,
probably no one could guess the answer.
Otto leaned back in the broad president's chair, lifting his gaze from those dry international conflict reports to a photo frame on the right side of the desk.
The frame held no documents deciding the fates of tens of thousands. Only a photograph.
In it, a white-haired girl was laughing brilliantly, a stray cat cradled in her arms.
The photo had some years on it, but the colors had been preserved beautifully.
Thanks to Schicksal's crushing lead in biological telomere technology, he, like the girl in the photograph, had permanently frozen his biological clock somewhere in his twenties.
The long years had left no mark on either of their faces.
He spent untold money, calculation and blood keeping this world running smoothly, and the reason was simple.
The girl in that photograph, Kallen Kaslana, had once made a wish on the stars as a child.
She wished for world peace. No wars. No displaced children.
Since she wished it, then the world had no choice but to become the shape she wished for.
As for who shoveled the sludge in the sewers along the way, who played executioner on the dark web - none of that mattered.
All he needed to be was the believer who stood between her and every drop of filth.
The internal comm on the desk chimed.
His secretary's report came through.
"President, the proposal for Schicksal Entertainment's fourth-quarter acquisition of two South Korean idol agencies requires your signature."
"Understood. Leave it there."
Otto didn't look up.
He turned his chair.
Directly behind him, on the wall where a world map or some master's oil painting ought to hang, was a poster a full two meters tall.
Its style clashed violently with the minimalist chill of the office.
A girl in an outrageously puffy pink dress, a cross-shaped bow bigger than her own face perched on her head, holding up a rhinestone-studded microphone and aiming a performance smile at the camera with sweetness levels well past the legal limit.
Theresa Apocalypse.
His adopted granddaughter.
And to bankroll the monstrous research and operating costs of that behemoth called Schicksal,
Otto not only swam through the financial world hoovering up fortunes, he had also sharply extended his tendrils into the obscenely profitable entertainment industry.
Schicksal Entertainment was one of the enterprises under his name.
Except that this entertainment empire, which could summon storms across the whole industry, had been founded for one reason only: because his adopted granddaughter Theresa had, one day, cutely wheedled at him that she "wanted to be an idol who sparkles on stage."
That was all.
Theresa wanted to be an idol.
So he bought her the entire stage.
But that still wasn't enough.
Otto's gaze slid down from the poster and settled on a standalone server tower beside it.
That machine held the latest progress submitted by Schicksal's core game development team.
Kallen Fantasy.
His ultimate private indulgence.
He wanted to turn Kallen's story into a fully immersive virtual world.
But Schicksal's tech tree had every point sunk into biology and weaponry, and the bottleneck lay precisely in brain-computer interfaces and motion engines.
The last few test builds they'd brought him had character animations so stiff the cast looked like they were doing the robot.
Then, a month ago, a rather special investigation report landed on his desk.
From Arc City.
A newly registered studio called "miHoYo."
The report had been triggered by Theresa's sudden demand to join that no-name amateur outfit.
Otto opened the report he had already read several times over.
The photo on top was a candid shot of Eden attending some gala.
The note beside it was perfectly clear: this superstar, whose net worth and fame both sat at the tip of the pyramid, was miHoYo's angel investor.
That was interesting.
Eden never invested in anything without value.
She was a weathervane all by herself.
But what truly decided Otto to start pushing from behind the curtain was the name on the report's second page.
Welt Yang.
Anti-Entropy Entertainment.
Otto's thumb rubbed once across the page.
More than a decade ago, at that international special forces training camp whose existence only circulated on the dark web, he had met Welt.
That man's calculating mind, and a composure in hopeless situations far beyond his years, had once made Otto wonder whether he'd gotten his hands on some anti-aging technology too.
Later Welt retired and started an animation company.
The secondary screen in the corner of the desk was still lit, paused on the ending of Arahato's third season.
A red-and-blue mech stood on the ruins, a white dove of peace perched on its shoulder - a weapon powerful past belief, capable of erasing a city without effort, set against that dove in the starkest possible contrast.
Welt called for peace through animation; Otto preserved peace through espionage. Different roads, same destination.
All roads led to Rome. As long as the purpose served Kallen's dream, he had no objection to a variety of methods.
And now this Welt, extraordinarily clever, rigidly principled, a man who normally did nothing but mech anime, had actually bought into miHoYo.
A table where both Eden and Welt had placed bets absolutely concealed chips of serious weight.
So Otto had employed a few small maneuvers.
An equity swap between several shell companies, a few soundless injections of capital.
Theresa had become miHoYo's third-largest shareholder in name and in fact.
It wasn't merely indulging his granddaughter's whim. It was a venture investment that couldn't lose.
And not long ago, over a transoceanic call, Theresa had used that soft, sticky tone nobody alive could refuse to pester him into signing a likeness authorization agreement.
Along with it went Kallen's data and likeness, Siegfried's, even Eleanor's and Ottovera's - all bundled up and shipped into miHoYo's servers.
Otto had treated the whole thing as an idle side investment.
Until today.
European time, five minutes past ten in the morning.
The heavy soundproofed oak door was shut tight.
The office lights were off; only natural light spilled in through the vast windows, carving a bright island out of the wool carpet.
Otto sat in the broad president's chair.
He was not sitting in the light.
The chair had been turned away from it, and two long legs sheathed in fine suit trousers were crossed and propped up on the mahogany desk in front of him, a desk expensive enough to buy an apartment.
The heels of his shoes carried not a speck of dust.
His left hand rested on the armrest. His right held a phone.
Those green eyes, the ones that always made people feel they were standing too close to something dangerous, were fixed with total concentration on a six-inch screen.
On that screen, the Supply interface of Honkai Impact 3rd was flickering.
He had just gone through the game's open beta content.
Console-grade visuals, perfectly fluid controls, that impact feedback exploding under his fingertips - it made him understand exactly why Welt had joined the table.
The technical walls that had blocked his own Kallen Fantasy for three years, these people had knocked down every single one.
And then there was the model of himself inside that game.
That elegant man in an Apocalypse suit, wearing a soul-steel body, holding up a mimetic Divine Key - the fidelity was high enough to make even him raise an eyebrow.
This producer named Su Yu had something to him.
But that was a matter for later scrutiny.
Right now, the president had more important business.
Otto's index finger hovered above the "10x Supply" button.
He pressed it.
A supply crate dropped down the center of the screen.
Purple light. Fragments. Press again.
Purple light again.
Otto's expression did not shift a millimeter.
For a man who treated the stock market as a numbers game, this sort of probability trick stirred nothing in him.
He knew only one thing.
Today, even if he had to pull this game's banner until the servers crashed, he would take every single battlesuit bearing Theresa's name all the way to SSS-rank.
His finger came down again.
Click.
On the screen, the hatch of the supply crate was slowly opening, golden light beginning to flicker across it.
And in that brief window while the pull animation loaded,
the brain of Schicksal's supreme commander was processing, at high speed, another piece of classified intelligence capable of overturning the world order entirely.
It concerned a mission he had personally handed to Siegfried Kaslana one week ago.
As the largest intelligence organization on the planet, Schicksal's network had long since rooted itself like capillaries into every dark corner of the globe.
Not long ago, the intelligence division had caught a thread of abnormal activity - a covert transaction between Welt Yang, the man at the helm of Anti-Entropy Entertainment, and the upper echelons of the Shenzhou authorities.
On that document, encrypted to the absolute limit, was written a name that stabbed at the eye: [Starfire Crucible Project].
The so-called "doomsday in six months" the file mentioned.
And those precision blueprints - the [Titan], the [Godfather], and even the terrifying [Wotan] mechs, designs decades beyond humanity's current tech tree…
All of it delivered one lethal message, coldly, to Otto the spymaster.
This boring world was about to undergo a very great change indeed.
So Otto had decisively dispatched Schicksal's S-rank agent, Siegfried Kaslana, to infiltrate Arc City and investigate.
For the first few days, Siegfried filed his routine daily reports right on schedule.
But partway through, the head of the Kaslana family dropped out of contact for a stretch.
Not until the small hours of August thirtieth
did Siegfried's voice come through Schicksal's top-secret channel again.
In that transoceanic transmission, Siegfried gravely told Otto: Anti-Entropy was secretly developing some weapon of enormous destructive power in Arc City.
And his own son, Kevin Kaslana, had been "deceived" by Anti-Entropy's sweet talk and had strayed onto the wrong path by joining that organization.
Therefore, to save his son and to expose Anti-Entropy's conspiracy,
Siegfried solemnly requested that Otto activate the highest-level Silent Protocol, permitting him to go in alone and burrow into Anti-Entropy's interior to uncover everything.
"Heh…"
Looking at the glaring purple pity result that popped up on his tablet screen, Otto not only failed to get annoyed, he let out a pleased little laugh.
He took an elegant sip of black tea.
At the time, he had agreed to Siegfried's request without hesitation.
But… absolutely not because he had been moved by that display of "magnificent fatherly love."
It was because the lie Siegfried had cooked up was simply far, far too clum-sy.
The Kaslana family were a pack of single-celled idiots who couldn't even lie properly.
Whether it was that impulsive Siegfried, or - a flicker of tender longing passed through Otto's eyes - even Kallen, whose gaze would wander adorably all over the room whenever she tried to tell a fib.
Still, as Schicksal's Chess Player, Otto had always been lenient with Siegfried.
After all, Siegfried was genuinely excellent.
As an S-rank agent of the organization, as blood of the Kaslana line, the base color running through his bones was that sense of justice willing to burn everything to protect the world and protect the weak.
Even if the fool wanted to lie to an old friend, there was no chance he would ever do anything that harmed humanity.
As for betraying Schicksal?
That was even less likely.
Kaslana, Apocalypse, and Schariac.
The lifelines of these three great houses had long ago been chained together by history.
They rose together and fell together.
If Schicksal collapsed, Kaslana and Schariac went down with it.
Calling them superiors and subordinates missed the point entirely. They were helmsmen welded onto the same warship.
And honestly, Otto had always rather admired Siegfried.
Even if Siegfried was another one of those headache-inducing Kaslana-brand fools.
But what could he do, when Siegfried was… Kallen's family?
Otto was hopelessly fond of that hot-blooded idiot temperament of Kallen's.
Love the house, love the crows on its roof - which was why his tolerance for the entire Kaslana family ran absurdly high.
However.
Tolerance was tolerance.
But since you, Siegfried, dared to feed this trusting "old friend" of yours such a clumsy lie… as Schicksal's Archbishop, he would still feel "a little hurt."
Otto set the teacup down with grace.
On the tablet, he decisively hit a second ten-pull.
In the gap between flashes of golden light, a gleam of amusement passed through those deep green eyes.
That night, he had made a truly exquisite decision.
Namely: to dispatch Schicksal's strongest agent, Siegfried's lawful wife, Cecilia Schariac, to Arc City to "support" her husband in his lonely one-man campaign.
What? You want to know why this spymaster, buried under a thousand daily crises, would suddenly issue a transfer order like that?
Because, of course… just a few days earlier, his adorable granddaughter Theresa had gone sneaking off with gene samples from Siegfried and from some white-haired girl, straight to the Apocalypse family's private hospital for a comparison.
Theresa believed she had done it flawlessly.
But she had no idea that inside this colossus called Schicksal, not even the flight path of a single fly escaped the Archbishop's eyes.
And so, as Schicksal's master, Otto had naturally come into possession of a very interesting paternity report.
He had discovered, to his astonishment, that big-browed, wide-eyed Siegfried had been hiding a biological daughter in Arc City, one by the name of [Kiana Kaslana]!
"Now this is… simply too delightful, isn't it?"
Otto settled back into the chair, watching the S-rank Theresa battlesuit that had finally jumped out on the screen, the corner of his mouth curving into a pleased smile.
Who could have guessed that Siegfried, so thoroughly henpecked in ordinary life, would blow open such an entertaining little scandal for him out in Arc City?
Just picturing Cecilia arriving in Arc City and knocking on Siegfried's door with a smile on her face…
Otto found it more refreshing to body and soul than three golds in a single ten-pull.
Still, as an old friend of many years, Otto had been magnanimous enough to leave Siegfried a small sliver of room.
He had "considerately" scheduled Cecilia's flight for fifteen days later.
He was giving Siegfried a full fifteen days.
Fifteen days for this S-rank agent to claw at his own scalp in agony and think very hard about how to explain this preposterous mess to the lady of his house.
"Don't blame me, Siegfried."
Otto lifted the black tea with elegance and raised the cup toward the empty air in a distant toast.
The sunlight plated his blond hair with a halo of something almost holy.
The supply crate dropped, and the last fragments of Theresa's battlesuit, [Celestial Hymn], fell into place.
In those slightly narrowed eyes glittered a fox's sly, wicked delight.
"After all… you were the one who first told an old friend such an unbeautiful lie."
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