Otto Apocalypse.
The man who moved heaven and earth in the real world, who juggled the planet's finance and espionage networks like toys in the palm of his hand.
In this moment, his brain locked itself into an infinite loop of blue-screen crash.
Theresa, my dear granddaughter… what was it you just said?
Cloning… Siegfried and Cecilia's child?
Otto was roaring inside, and behind his retinas an endless stream of code and intelligence files flickered past like images on a revolving lantern.
He had, admittedly, done plenty of terrible things in his life.
Archbishop this, secret manipulation of the world that - in reality, every last bit of it was hard, verifiable fact.
But no matter how much of a bastard Otto was, he had never been bored enough for THAT!
Why on earth would he go to all that trouble to clone a child of Kaslana and Schariac blood?
Did he have nothing better to do than clone another troublemaking Kaslana idiot and crank up the difficulty on himself?!
He had never dreamed it. He'd been sitting comfortably in his leather chair in Europe, all set to enjoy some delicious gossip about his old friend Siegfried's "illegitimate daughter."
And then the boomerang carved a bizarre arc through the air and buried itself dead-center in the crown of his own skull! Now he was one of the accused in this colossal scandal himself!
Otto forced a perfect, benevolent-elder smile onto his face - though from where Theresa sat, that smile looked like the last, desperate squirming of a guilty man.
"Theresa, you need to calm down. It's only a game… yes, it's only the free-flying artistic imagination of that young man named Su Yu."
"Reality and fiction must never be confused with one another. You have to learn to tell where the line between them lies."
His tone was gentle, an attempt to use cold reason to haul himself back out of the Abyss labeled "Archbishop of Schicksal."
In the holographic projection, Theresa let out a cold laugh and turned his own blade on him without mercy. "Grandfather, weren't you just bragging a minute ago about how faithful the game was, how respectfully it handled your character?!"
The smile on Otto's face cracked straight down the middle.
Grass.
A green plant was growing wild all across his heart.
He wanted to slap himself across the face.
Genuinely.
Otto, brilliant his whole life, decades of flawless scheming - and now he had face-planted into a pothole made of the cheapest, most elementary information gap imaginable.
Why had he opened his big mouth to praise that Su Yu?
Why had he played along with the plot just to savor a little villainous superiority?
Truly, a man must not let it go to his head. Float too high and even the Kaslana family's built-in IQ-draining aura could bury you alive.
"Ah… Grandfather only thought you were discussing details of the game with me just now."
Otto shifted in his seat, his fingers rubbing unconsciously along the edge of the communication terminal as he groped for an explanation with even a one-in-ten-thousand chance of working.
"Grandfather was pulling on the gacha, in fact. Look - Grandfather has already maxed out every single one of your battlesuits to the highest rating! Theresa really is very cute. Grandfather simply likes the design of the game, that's all…"
Theresa wasn't swallowing a single one of those sugar-coated shells.
She clamped down on the core question and kept pressing about Kiana and the truth of the clone, like a small, furious lioness.
Otto howled silently inside: I'd like to know what's going on too! You're asking me - who am I supposed to ask?!
"Why are you so stubbornly convinced that I know anything about this girl called Kiana?" Otto massaged a temple that had begun to throb, trying to talk sense.
Theresa's teeth ground together, and the anger was practically spilling out of her voice.
"You and Siegfried are so close, soaking in hot springs together every other day, going out to play billiards together… and you wouldn't know what's on his mind? You wouldn't know about Kiana?!"
At the words "hot springs," Otto's foot slipped, and the polished shoe resting on the footstool nearly slid right off.
He remembered.
Back before Theresa had left for Arc City, whenever he'd needed to cover up the secret operative missions he had to run behind her back, he had absolutely used Siegfried as an excuse. Constantly.
"Theresa, Grandfather is going to discuss the international situation with Siegfried today… and we'll stop by the hot spring hotel afterward. The waters there are very good for the joints."
Lame excuses of that flavor - he'd used them well over a hundred times in the past few years.
And now, as a result, in his granddaughter's eyes he had become the diehard partner in crime of that scumbag Siegfried, helping him hide an illegitimate daughter!
Theresa's "Kaslana-brand" great-detective mode was now running at full power.
"You and Siegfried are that close - how could you possibly not know he had an illegitimate daughter out there?!"
"And another thing! Before all this, you sent me all that money, completely out of character, and told me to invest it in that Su Yu's miHoYo Studio - "
"That's obviously because you, Su Yu, and Siegfried - all three of you awful men - have been thick as thieves from the very beginning!!"
Otto felt he might be in need of a fast-acting heart pill.
Thick as thieves? With whom?
Yes, he and Siegfried had once shared intelligence across the same table. Yes, they had trusted each other with their backs on the battlefield.
But this illegitimate daughter business - until he had laid eyes on that genetic report two hours ago, Otto hadn't dreamed of anything that outrageous, not once!
And Su Yu… that young man he had never so much as met in person - when exactly had the two of them become accomplices?
"No… little Theresa…" Otto raised a hand and pressed it wearily against his temple. "Could you tell Grandfather… why you think that Mr. Su Yu and I… are in this together?"
Theresa gave an indignant snort and crossed her arms tightly over her chest.
"Didn't you already blow your own cover just now? You said the Otto in the game respected the character, that it was faithful to reality!"
"If Su Yu doesn't know you, then how could an ordinary game producer possibly know the private affairs of the President of the Schicksal Foundation in that much detail?!"
"No! This isn't even about whether you know each other anymore! Don't tell me you and Su Yu have had something going on for ages, some terrible deal being cut in the shadows?!"
"And another thing - I contacted Cecilia, so why did Cecilia say she was away on assignment? You sent Cecilia out to run interference, didn't you?!"
Otto had run completely out of words.
He looked at the Theresa on the screen, shaking with rage yet so internally consistent in her reasoning that he had nothing left to say, and the fans inside his skull spun up to their critical threshold.
The Kaslana family really did come with an innate talent called "Closed Logic Loop."
Listening to that airtight chain of reasoning - a chain that had thoroughly convinced even Theresa herself -
Investment = protection money.
Written too accurately = old friends.
Cecilia delayed by fifteen days = buying time to cover for Siegfried.
Laid out end to end, that logic was flawless! Even Otto himself had nearly nodded along and confessed!
But now a far larger question finally surfaced in his scorched, smoking mind.
That was right.
Why?
Who exactly was Su Yu?
Why did he understand Otto so thoroughly, down to the marrow?
Otto slowly let the bitter smile fade from his face.
In the early stages of the game, he had assumed Su Yu had simply gathered material from Theresa.
After all, as his granddaughter, Theresa knew a great many of his personal habits.
But he had just run the calculations carefully, and the portrayal of that "Otto Apocalypse" in the game went far beyond simple lifestyle details.
That pathological hunger for control over power. That madman's willingness to destroy the entire world for Kallen's sake. That absolute, glacial cruelty hidden beneath an elegant surface…
Those were things not even Theresa could have seen through completely.
There were even moments when he himself wondered whether, faced with the matter of Kallen, he would truly become the deranged figure from the game.
This was a Gordian knot that no amount of computational power he threw at it could untie.
He and Su Yu had never met. Before today he hadn't even known how many employees miHoYo had.
"Stop for a moment, Theresa." Otto lifted his head, his tone turning serious. "I think there is something more important for us to verify than whether or not Grandfather has been doing bad things."
"Hasn't it occurred to you that this Mr. Su Yu… knows a little too much, and a little too completely?"
He pointed at the long list of names in the data copy.
"…You. Me. Kallen. Siegfried. Cecilia. And that Lady Yae, and even her younger sister, Rin! Eleanor and Octavia are on there as well!"
Otto's gaze cut through the holographic projection and fixed sharply on Theresa, trying to shake his granddaughter's reason awake.
"The Schicksal Foundation has tens of thousands of core personnel. He is an outsider - how can he name, with perfect precision, exactly which specific individuals' authorizations he requires? Have you truly… never felt even the faintest flicker of doubt about that?"
By now Otto had already sketched out countless possibilities in his mind.
Was Su Yu a spy sent by some competitor?
Was he the supreme leader of some resistance cell inside Schicksal?
Or was he… not from this world at all?
Otto waited for Theresa's answer.
He hoped his good granddaughter could offer even a sliver of a clue about Su Yu's background.
On the other end of the line, Theresa fell briefly silent.
She lowered her head, picking at the collar of her pajamas with her fingers, apparently giving her grandfather's "serious proposition" earnest thought.
It was a long while before she slowly raised her head again.
That little face, still thick with the nasal congestion of crying, now wore an expression that was… the most strength-sapping thing Otto had seen in his entire life, tinged with more than a little of the haughty air of "I saw through all of this long ago."
"Why would I have any doubts?" Theresa gave a cold sniff, her eyes brimming with contempt for his petty little maneuvering.
"Grandfather, honestly… you really don't have to keep hiding it from me. In the whole Schicksal Foundation, top to bottom, who doesn't know you're a hopeless Kallen-obsessive?"
"All these years, as Schicksal's supreme authority, what kind of woman haven't you met? And yet you've stayed devoted to Lady Kallen alone, the entire time."
"Everyone in Schicksal, without exception, praises you enviously behind closed doors - they say Lord Otto is a man of matchless, undying devotion!"
"So when Su Yu brought out this game, every single clue in my head strung itself together at once!"
"You deliberately had Su Yu create a super-villain Otto who would stand against the entire world for Kallen's sake… isn't that the ultimate love letter, your way of expressing that deep, deep affection to Lady Kallen?!"
"Even if that Otto is a villain, even if his sins run deep - in that story, every one of his motives is for Kallen."
"That kind of madness, the kind that doesn't care if the whole world burns to ash - who besides you, Grandfather, could write it with a realism that makes people shiver?!"
"So every faithfully reproduced character in that game, all those secrets only Schicksal's inner circle could know… all of it is because of you!"
"You, the President, gave the instructions from behind the curtain. You took all the words you've never dared say to her face all these years, wrote them into a script, and handed it to Su Yu! You had him announce it to the world this way!"
Otto felt his heart give one violent kick against his ribs.
Not from being moved. From sheer terror.
This deduction was, quite simply…
Damn well reasonable!
Put himself in her place: if he were Theresa, or anyone at all with inside knowledge, the first suspect upon seeing a script like that would absolutely be Otto.
After all, that particular brand of "obsession only I can understand" was very much his trademark.
"Or is it…" Theresa's speech slowed, her voice dropping to freezing point.
"Grandfather, are you telling me that this game's story, which perfectly captures your willingness to destroy the world itself for Lady Kallen… actually has nothing whatsoever to do with you?"
She stared into Otto's eyes, and those normally clear irises had gone so dark and deep it was frightening.
"Are you going to stand there in front of me… and deny with your own mouth what you feel for Lady Kallen? Deny with your own mouth the love that the Otto Su Yu wrote holds for Lady Kallen?!"
Dead silence.
The President's office sank into a silence as terrible as the inside of a tomb.
Outside the window, cloud cover swallowed the sun and threw shadows across the magnificent room.
Otto Apocalypse, the overlord who summoned clouds with one hand and rain with the other across this world, felt at this moment as though he had been nailed to a cross named "Sincerity."
So this was what it meant to take the blade whether you stuck your neck out or pulled it back?!
If he said, "Yes, this game has nothing to do with me" -
Then not only would he be cravenly denying that "love that stands against the world" he held for Kallen, shattering with his own hands the perfect filter of "man of matchless, undying devotion" through which his granddaughter saw him.
He'd also get crowned with the shameful label of a man who lacked even the courage to admit his own feelings!
For a hopeless Kallen-obsessive, that was ten thousand times worse than being killed outright!
But if, to defend that great love, he nodded and confessed, "That's right, I'm the one who had Su Yu make this game" -
Then he would, as a perfectly natural consequence, be confirming beyond all doubt the furious accusation Theresa had opened with:
The brutal human experiments in the game, the plan to clone Siegfried and Cecilia's daughter (K-423)…
All of it, every damn bit of it, done by Otto Apocalypse himself!!
Admit it and die. Refuse to admit it… and suffer worse than death!
A dense film of sweat beaded across Otto's forehead.
He looked at Theresa's relentless, pressing eyes, then at the quiet photo frame on his desk.
Su Yu.
He ground the name out between his teeth.
You. You bastard.
There's no grudge between us. We have never even laid eyes on each other!!
Just what manner of being are you, that from ten thousand miles away, across oceans and layers of screens, you could lay down a checkmate like this to trap me?!
Watching Theresa in the holographic projection wearing that look of "let's see you wriggle out of this one" -
This flawless strategist, Schicksal's Chess Player, the dark emperor of the underworld.
After a full thirty seconds of despairing silence.
He finally let loose one shrill, anguished wail from the bottom of his soul: "Su Yu, your mother - Shenzhou's national art of profanity!!"
A certain someone's dear old mother was launched, hard, straight up into the highest reaches of the sky.
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