Otto watched the star rating on the last of Theresa's battlesuits tick upward on his phone screen until it hit "SSS."
He set the phone down and rubbed his knuckles.
The overhead lights were off. The only illumination in the office came from the daylight leaking through the window, braided together with the cold glow of the screen.
"Perfect."
Maxing out every one of his granddaughter's battlesuits was simply the duty of an elder. It was also one of the few indulgences this man - the man who commanded the largest underground network of agents on the planet - could squeeze out of a punishing schedule.
He picked up the black tea at the edge of the desk, long gone cold, and let his gaze drift idly across the Supply interface.
His finger stopped.
On the right side of the screen sat a new character Supply banner.
Printed on it was a woman with long pink hair and fox ears. Below her name, in very small type, were the words "Goushinnso Memento."
Otto's hand, still holding the coffee cup, froze in midair.
That composure of his, that effortless ease, corroded away the instant the pink-haired woman appeared, as though some hidden chemical had been poured over it.
His brows pressed down. The green light in his eyes sank.
In this world, Otto Apocalypse - holder of Schicksal's authority, hailed by Time as the most farsighted entrepreneur of the twenty-first century - had almost no need to read anyone's face.
The people capable of irritating him could be counted on one hand.
And Miss Yae sat at the very top of that short list.
The reason was simple, if perhaps absurd to an outsider.
In this real world, the woman named Yae Sakura was, in the truest sense, Otto Apocalypse's number one rival in love.
Of course, this Miss Yae Sakura and the Sakura who was Madam Eden's friend were not the same person.
The relationship between the two of them was so distant it barely qualified as one at all.
Otto's eyes left the phone screen and settled on the picture frame at the other end of the desk.
The white-haired, blue-eyed girl in the photo was smiling without a trace of guard.
Kallen Kaslana.
Otto's thoughts were dragged back to a remote village in the Far East, many years ago.
Schicksal's intelligence network had recorded that particular episode.
A young Kallen, cursed with the Kaslana family's incurable sense of direction, had strayed off course during a mission and blundered into a village that still clung to its ignorant sacrificial customs.
At the time, Yae Sakura - the village's shrine maiden - was being forced by desperate, half-mad villagers to kill her own younger sister, Rin, in order to appease the so-called wrath of the gods.
By Schicksal's standard operating procedure, a place that benighted warranted nothing more than a strike team sent in to level it.
But Kallen hadn't done that.
Like a sun that refused to listen to reason, she had charged straight into that altar just as it was about to drown in blood.
She smashed the altar's chains apart with brute force and carried Rin back out.
And on that day, Kallen didn't only save Rin. She severed, once and for all, the shackles bound around Yae Sakura's soul.
From then on, Yae Sakura became the most loyal guard at Kallen's side.
She brought her sister Rin with her to Europe, following Kallen, and adapted to modern society with startling speed.
These days Rin had even graduated from the St. Freya Comprehensive Academy that Cecilia administered, and made a name for herself in the industry as a concept artist.
As for Yae Sakura herself, her formidable skills and cold-blooded methods had carried her all the way to the post of Commander of Schicksal's Supreme Special Operations Unit.
The crux of the problem, however, was that this supreme operations commander never took orders from him, the Archbishop.
In her eyes there was only Kallen.
Which was precisely what Otto found intolerable.
The contest between him and Yae Sakura had never been some glittering struggle over power. It was a childish, covert scramble for favor, waged entirely in Kallen's blind spot.
He would order premium king crab air-freighted in from Alaska for Kallen, and before the plates were cleared Yae Sakura would produce a box of rice balls she'd shaped by hand herself - flawless in form, still steaming.
He would book out the entire revolving restaurant on the top floor of a luxury hotel to have dinner with Kallen, and Yae Sakura would declare that "food from outside isn't clean" and haul Kallen off to spread a picnic blanket on the grass beyond the city.
The worst part was that Kallen was a genuine, certified idiot.
Emotionally she was a block of wood, hopelessly dense.
All she ever thought was, "Otto and Sakura are both my best friends."
She would eat the king crab and praise Otto for his thoughtfulness.
Then turn around, bite into a rice ball, and nuzzle up against Yae Sakura.
She never once noticed the murderous intent hanging over that dinner table, over that picnic blanket, thick enough to condense into something solid.
For the sake of appearances in front of Kallen, Otto and Yae Sakura maintained a tacit agreement: neither ever tore off the mask while she was watching.
Otto lifted the black tea, now merely tepid, and took a sip.
He looked at the Supply banner on his phone, and his finger came back down to the screen.
If this producer called Su Yu could rope in an old stick-in-the-mud like Welt, and could shape Otto's own in-game portrayal so precisely to his taste...
Then he really did want to see what sort of role this Yae Sakura played in the game's story.
He set the cup down and opened the storyline tied to Yae Sakura - Sakura Samsara.
Light and shadow shifted on the screen. Europe's morning slipped quietly away beneath the faint breath of the air conditioning.
Four hours later.
The sun had climbed to its highest point.
The fierce light came through the blinds, filtered into neat bars that lay across the carpet.
Otto's phone screen rested on the results interface of Sakura Samsara's final chapter.
In the story, Yae Sakura had chosen to project the Jizo Mitama into the real world while she herself remained behind in the Stigmata Space, to go on living there with Kallen.
Otto laid the phone face down on the desk and sank back into the wide executive chair.
He didn't laugh aloud, but the curve at the corner of his mouth stretched wider and wider.
"Yae Sakura."
He stared at a fixed point in the empty air, fingers tapping out a rhythm on the leather backing of the chair.
"That's it?"
He looked at the pink-haired shrine maiden on the screen, closing her eyes beneath the cherry blossoms while holding the hand of a phantom Kallen, and his gaze filled with undisguised contempt.
What was this supposed to be?
Inside that false world called the Stigmata Space, clutching a counterfeit Kallen stitched together out of data and memory, she had chosen to simply survive and drown in it?
For the sake of a phantom, you abandoned the fight for the real world. Is that the extent of your resolve, Yae Sakura?
Weak.
Far too weak.
He thought back to how the game had rendered the character "Otto Apocalypse."
A super-villain cold-blooded enough to treat the entire world as a chessboard and countless lives as bargaining chips, scheming for five full centuries, all to resurrect Kallen.
He stopped at nothing. He was abandoned by every ally he had. He ground the word "justice" beneath his heel, all to purchase one solitary miracle.
That was the bearing a true Chess Player ought to have.
Set beside the game's Yae Sakura - that weak, spineless creature wallowing in a fabricated dream - his own characterization stood taller by an order of magnitude!
"Hahahaha..."
Otto finally let out a low laugh.
It echoed through the cavernous executive office, carrying a pleasure and self-satisfaction he could hardly put into words.
In that moment, a powerful sense of kinship rose in him toward this Su Yu he had never met.
The producer was a genius.
Not only had he perfectly seen through Otto's obsession with Kallen, an obsession that crossed time and death itself - he had also aimed with pinpoint accuracy and stomped Yae Sakura flat in the process.
This sort of long-distance bullying, conducted through code and plot, was frankly more satisfying than snatching away the bento that woman made for Kallen in real life.
Otto made a unilateral decision.
The next time he had an opportunity to visit Arc City, he would absolutely sit down and share a proper cup of tea with this Mr. Su Yu.
They were going to become the closest of old friends!
And just as Otto leaned back in his chair, steeped in the double pleasure of villainous superiority and a rival's humiliation -
The internal secure line on his desk flared with a harsh red light, shattering the smug quiet.
Only three people knew that number.
Otto turned his head and glanced at the caller ID.
Theresa.
Transoceanic encrypted holo-call.
He raised an eyebrow, the self-satisfaction not yet fully faded.
He reached out and pressed accept. The air above the desk warped slightly, and a small holographic projection bloomed into being.
"Little Theresa, what are you calling Grandpa about at this hour? It should be the middle of the night over in Arc City."
Theresa's upper body flickered into view.
His voice was warm and doting, switched flawlessly into the mode of a kindly elder.
But the Theresa in the projection had red-rimmed eyes with obvious tear tracks still at the corners, and both small hands were clamped around the ears of a HOMU pillow.
The instant the projection stabilized, Theresa's voice - thick with sobs, cracking with rage - came crashing down on him.
"Grandpa! Have you been hiding something from me? Have you been doing bad things behind my back?!"
The question came out of nowhere, a rusted nail driven straight into Otto's central nervous system.
The air in the office seemed to vanish all at once.
His brain spun wildly in that single second, countless classified files cascading through his mind like a waterfall.
His identity as the head of Schicksal.
The arms deals on the dark web.
The plans to erase certain opposition leaders.
Even the biological laboratories he ran off the books.
Which one had leaked? How had Theresa found out?
Could it be... could Theresa have discovered the true face of the spymaster behind the grandfather?
Was today the day he faced his most humiliating unmasking, right in front of the granddaughter he loved most?
His expression control held perfectly. He only softened his voice further, trying to keep the pressure to a minimum.
"Little Theresa, what are you talking about?"
He let that signature affectionate smile hook the corner of his mouth.
"Grandpa's hard at work right now. Has someone upset you?"
"The thing I told you about before!" Theresa shook a fist in the projection, eyes as red as a rabbit's. "That awful Su Yu person's game, Honkai Impact 3rd! Have you played it or not?!"
Otto's shoulders dropped, his back settling against the executive chair again.
So it was the game.
His heart, lodged in his throat, thudded back down into his chest, and he let out a long breath.
He was a villain in the game, after all. With a temperament as tender as Theresa's, seeing all the evil his character committed, wanting to call him up and "settle accounts" was perfectly reasonable.
That battle-stations tension evaporated in an instant, replaced by the lightness of a man who had just survived a near miss - and by a further surge of appreciation for his "old friend" Su Yu.
See? Even Theresa was hooked on this game.
The smile on Otto's face turned a few degrees more genuine. He leaned back, his tone easy, even faintly boastful.
"Ah, that! Yes, I played it."
He picked up the black tea at the desk's edge, stone cold now, and drank without caring.
"I must say, Mr. Su Yu is a most impressive talent. His command of narrative is exquisite. Particularly his depiction of my character in the game."
"Especially the way he wrote my character - he really emphasized my profound love for Kallen, the kind of love that would set me against the whole world for her sake. That decisiveness, casting aside every worldly morality for the sake of a single goal - it's so faithful, so tasteful."
He smiled at the Theresa in the projection, waiting for his granddaughter to join him in praising this most "perceptive" producer.
"Then..."
Theresa spoke.
The projection's light fell across her face, catching her bitten lower lip and the fine beads of sweat on the tip of her nose.
"Then..."
Her voice dropped abruptly, like the muffled thunder that comes before a storm.
Held down, and right on the edge of breaking.
"You're Schicksal's Archbishop..."
Otto nodded, smiling. "That's the game's setting. Rather imposing, isn't it?"
"You've been secretly... carrying out cruel human experiments, to bring Kallen back..."
Otto's smile paused for a fraction of a second. "That's there to convey the villain's brutality. A form of artistic embellishment."
Theresa drew a deep breath, the red at the corners of her eyes deepening.
"Then - you cloned Cecilia and Siegfried's child! You created K-423!"
She stopped. The tears finally broke loose and slid down her cheeks.
"What about that one? Neither Siegfried nor Cecilia has any memory of Kiana at all, because she's something you cloned, isn't she?"
Bright sunlight poured unimpeded through the floor-to-ceiling windows, spreading a glaring sheet of gold across the carpet.
In the executive office, the faint hum of the air conditioning went on and on.
That kindly, relaxed, faintly showing-off smile on Otto's face froze.
Like a slab of dried plaster.
His mouth opened.
For that one instant, his vocal cords seemed to have forgotten how to vibrate.
A thousand contingency plans, an entire arsenal of cover stories, were blown to powder by those words: "cloned Cecilia and Siegfried's child."
He knew about that genetic test report.
He knew Siegfried had a Kiana who was probably an illegitimate daughter.
But never in a thousand years had he imagined Theresa would take that deranged "him" from the game and that report from reality, and stitch the two together this seamlessly, this uncannily, with this much airtight logic.
The air in the office congealed.
A long time passed.
Otto's mind - a mind capable of calculating the fate of the entire world - blanked into a total system crash, and with great effort forced a single cracked syllable up out of his throat.
"...Huh?"
What on earth was this child talking about?!
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