Su, Kevin, and Su Yu doubled back from the explosion site, but instead of heading straight to Anti-Entropy, they ducked into Cioara's bar tucked away in the back alley.
The door swung open, and warm yellow light spilled out along with the sound of jazz.
Behind the bar, Cioara was polishing a glass, unhurried.
She heard the doorbell chime and only glanced up once, not the slightest bit surprised — as if she'd already known the three of them would show up tonight.
"What'll it be?"
She asked it so casually, as if no one had nearly died in a bomb shelter earlier, as if no one had just crawled out of an explosion.
Su stood in the doorway, dust still clinging to his coat, dark circles of exhaustion under his eyes.
He shot Cioara a suspicious look first, then turned to Su Yu and Kevin, who were already pulling out chairs and sitting down with the ease of men walking into their own living room.
His brain short-circuited for two full seconds before the words burst out of him.
"Cioara's one of yours too?"
Over at the bar, the hand polishing the glass paused.
Su Yu had just dropped onto a barstool when that lethal line hit his ears, and his mouth twitched.
"What do you mean, 'one of mine'?" He raised a hand to press against his throbbing temple, pained. "Don't go saying things like that. If that internet-wired spirit Bronie hears you, my browser history's getting livestreamed to the entire net tonight."
Cioara set the glass back on the rack, steady, and finally let a smile curl at her lips.
"That shameful little history of yours probably wouldn't survive a deep dive either."
"Hey!"
"I'm just stating an objective fact."
Kevin sat off to the side, saying nothing, just pulling out a chair for Su to sit.
But Su didn't move. He kept his eyes fixed on Su Yu, his usually mild face now tight as a slab of iron.
"I'm not joking."
His voice was pitched low, but anyone could tell Su was strung tight to the breaking point.
"Su Yu, exactly how much do you know about my business?"
This time it was Su Yu and Kevin's turn to exchange a look.
The look was brief but dense with meaning — roughly a silent "you tell him" followed by "no, you tell him."
In the end, Su Yu let out a long, resigned sigh and dragged over the chair Kevin had pushed out.
"Fine, I'll come clean."
He reached out and rapped his knuckles on the bar top.
"Before that rickety plane of yours even landed in Arc City, I already knew exactly why you'd come back this time — down to the color of your underwear."
A muscle jumped hard at the corner of Su's mouth.
"Then my identity, and—"
"Your identity's classification level really is pretty high — that much I'll give that old fox Otto credit for," Su Yu said, pointing a thumb at Cioara. "Under normal circumstances, a peripheral contact like her would never get near core intel at your clearance level. But the fact that she can receive cooperation orders straight from Schicksal Headquarters concerning you — that says plenty."
He paused there, and the playfulness drained a little from his tone.
"And even frontline executives like Siegfried and Cecilia were kept in the dark. That pretty much seals it — you and that old coin Otto are tangled up together, no way around it. Honestly, a Paramecium could figure this one out."
Su's legs finally gave out, and he dropped heavily into the chair.
Whatever breath he'd been holding onto by sheer will drained out of him completely.
He slumped against the chair back, and the sheer absurdity of it pulled a bitter laugh out of him.
"So you're saying you two already saw through all my secrets?"
"Not quite that impressive," Su Yu said, shaking his head, uncharacteristically sincere for once. "At least before you parachuted back in, I genuinely thought you were sitting honestly in some lab somewhere, cutting slides and writing papers."
"Your cover really was airtight. If Otto hadn't suddenly had a stroke of impulsiveness and sent you back here with a mission shoved on top, I'd probably still be in the group chat sending red packets, begging you to come home for a raid."
At this point, Su Yu looked at him, and the last trace of his usual slackness slowly faded from his face.
"So."
"Why did you take on a deathtrap like this?"
"Su, you're a man who wields a scalpel. What, did you suddenly realize medicine can't save all of humanity and decide to throw down the books, pick up a weapon, and play lone hero?"
The moment the words landed, the bar fell silent for two full seconds.
By the door, the wind chime swayed faintly.
Su's head snapped up, his eyes locked on the bastard in front of him who'd suddenly gone dead serious. The tangled knot of emotion already sitting in his chest shot straight up to his throat. For once, a flicker of real heat kindled in his usually mild voice.
"If we're talking about hiding things, you and Kevin haven't exactly been forthcoming yourselves, have you?"
Su Yu shrugged it off, mouth twisting indifferently.
"There's still an order of operations to respect. Even if we pulled the security footage, you're the one who snuck off to take side jobs behind our backs first."
Su opened his mouth.
And discovered, in despair, that he genuinely couldn't argue with that.
Because that shameless logic was, infuriatingly, airtight.
He sighed in resignation and rubbed furiously at his throbbing brow.
"That mouth of yours... I really can't out-argue you."
"Fine then — leniency for confession, severity for resistance."
He raised his head, his gaze pausing on Su Yu, then Kevin.
"Since we're laying it all out, both sides clear the decks completely, OK?"
"Anytime."
Su Yu answered fast.
Cioara hadn't said a word this whole time.
She simply slid a glass of ice water across to Su with brisk efficiency, then poured two shots of hard liquor for the other pair of scheming rascals.
She kept idly polishing glasses while listening with great interest to the three brothers airing out their own dirty laundry at the bar — the amused curl at her lips was harder to hold down than an AK on full auto.
Su picked up his glass, took a sip, and steadied himself.
Then he began telling his own story.
It started from the moment he received that invitation letter from Otto, one that seemed laced with poison.
Using academic research as the perfect cover, he'd traveled far to Europe and plunged headlong into Schicksal's vast, rotting system.
Everything he touched was locked away in top-secret archives and labs buried where sunlight never reached — forbidden things.
On the surface, he was the medical department's rising super-genius, the Bishop's prized protégé, a participant in cutting-edge advanced research.
But in truth, few of the projects his hands had touched could ever survive being dragged into the light of day.
And then, later, came this assignment sending him back to Arc City.
Under the high-profile cover of a lecture, he'd investigated underground smuggling and mutagenic drugs in Arc City. But he hadn't expected the smuggling to be connected to someone inside Schicksal itself — and someone of no small rank at that.
As Su spoke, the jazz kept playing in the bar, and Cioara quietly kept polishing glasses behind the counter. No one interrupted.
Only Su Yu's brow twitched now and then at certain keywords.
As for Kevin, he leaned against the back of his chair the entire time, arms crossed, as silent as an emotionless stone statue.
By the time Su had, like squeezing toothpaste, wrung out every last bit of the mess he'd been through these past years, the ice water in his glass had run dry.
He set down the glass and rubbed his battered brow again.
"That's all of it."
"I've turned my underwear inside out for you. Beyond that, there's really nothing left I'm hiding."
He looked up, his eyes fixed hard on Su Yu.
"Now, it's your turn."
Su Yu and Kevin exchanged another look.
This time their expressions were, for once, aligned — both hard to describe.
Like they'd always known this day would come eventually, but now that the moment of truth had actually arrived, it still gave them a headache.
Finally, Su Yu sighed.
"This is a long story."
He shot Su a pitying glance first, then a meaningful look at the tall, slender barstool beneath him.
"I strongly recommend you wrap your legs around the stool legs and brace yourself. I'm honestly worried you'll topple right off once you hear this."
Su gave a disdainful snort.
"After the show I've been through tonight, you think there's anything left I can't handle?"
Ten minutes later, Su would learn exactly how deadly a flag he'd just planted with those words.
Su Yu's version was far more direct than Su's had been.
He barely bothered with a lead-in — he opened straight with that rainy night.
In the flattest tone imaginable, he explained how, on that rainy night, he'd picked up a cat from another world — one named Kiana.
She'd looked pitiful, like a white stray on the verge of dying, drenched in blood and still bristling and hissing at the entire world.
He also said that, absurdly enough, he'd become her sole Anchor in this world.
The two of them had to stay within a set distance of each other at all times, or the young lady in question would literally cease to exist.
Su, who'd been holding his glass, had already frozen by this point.
Then came the System.
The reason he had to make the game.
How Honkai Impact 3rd had gone from "just another game project" to "an Anchor for the world, stabilizing the existence of otherworldly Valkyries and preparing for what was to come."
After that, the Spatial Rift that tore the sky open.
The world-ending calamity called Honkai.
And the cold, merciless six-month countdown to annihilation hanging over the entire world.
And now, that countdown had fewer than a hundred days left.
With each nuclear-grade piece of information landing on him, Su's eyes widened, bit by bit.
And it wasn't over yet.
Su Yu kept going.
He described, vividly, how the moment the rift first cracked open, he'd wasted no time linking up with that pack of old monsters at Anti-Entropy Entertainment — Welt, Tesla, Einstein.
How, riding on Eden's seemingly bottomless funding pipeline, he'd built miHoYo up by brute force into a colossal enterprise.
How he'd fought Shenzhou's officials to the limit across the negotiating table.
How he'd forced Arc City — once just an ordinary city — into becoming a special defense administrative zone armed to the teeth.
And how, with reckless abandon, he'd used Honkai Impact 3rd to harvest Emotion Points from players across the world, then poured them like a bottomless pit into absolute shields to protect the world and all manner of monstrous armaments to fight Honkai.
Starfire Furnace. The Skyward Shield. The Vaccine Program. Valkyrie armor. The Titan Project · Mass-Production Type mech docking project. The full-personnel Genetic Lock enhancement program.
Piece by piece, item by item, it all pieced together into a grand scheme no ordinary person could ever hope to comprehend.
By the second half, Su no longer even had the strength left to be shocked.
All that remained was numbness.
It spread from his scalp all the way down to his toenails.
He didn't even notice when the empty glass in his hand got swapped out for hard liquor.
All he knew was that the second Su Yu's last word left his mouth, something in his brain snapped, and he tipped his head back and drained the full glass in one go.
That wasn't enough to steady his nerves.
Like a man gone half-mad with drink, he raised a hand at Cioara behind the bar.
"Fill it up. Keep them coming."
Cioara arched an eyebrow in surprise, and for once actually complied, silently filling three glasses in a row for him.
Under normal circumstances, this kind of reckless, life-endangering, late-night binge drinking would have been outright suicidal for a health-conscious doctor who normally never shut up about red dates and goji berries.
But Su, at this point, couldn't care less about wellness.
There was simply too much information.
So much that his rational, materialist analytical framework — twenty-some years in the making — had been smashed to bits in mere minutes, beyond any hope of reassembly.
"The apocalypse?"
"Valkyries descending from another world?"
"A Spatial Rift?"
"A Genetic Lock?"
"The Sea of Quanta?"
"Collecting Emotion Points to save the world?"
Any one of those terms, taken alone, was enough to get a person committed.
And now Su Yu had mercilessly bundled them all together and dumped the whole load straight onto the crown of his skull.
Su kept his head down, eyes locked on his glass.
He drank cup after cup.
He didn't say a single word the entire time.
Sitting beside him, Su Yu watched his best friend on the verge of falling apart, and for once, a flicker of guilt actually stirred in him.
Right then, on the System panel, a shady quest notification labeled [Bro Hug It Out] was flashing frantically.
Emotion Points from Su were spiking upward at a visibly terrifying rate, entry after entry, the surge nothing short of insane.
Su Yu's original plan had been to play the long game — cast a long line, catch a big fish, and slowly fleece this particular sheep.
But who could've guessed the plot these past few days would spiral this wild.
Su, first of all, had used his overactive imagination to stage an entire melodrama of "my brother is suffering" all on his own.
Then tonight he'd gotten a full, real-life dose of extreme survival in that bomb shelter.
On top of that, he and Kevin had just openly flaunted their capabilities right in front of him without holding back —
All of it combined to send the efficiency of this heart-baring confession session through the roof, harvesting Emotion Points at maximum output.
From a quest-reward standpoint, he was absolutely crushing it.
But from the standpoint of brotherly feeling...
This whole scene was, frankly, a little inhuman of him.
Finally.
Su set down his fourth empty glass with a heavy thud.
His fingers lingered stiffly on the rim of the glass for a long while before he slowly lifted his head, which felt ready to burst.
He looked at Su Yu, then at Kevin.
After holding it in for a long moment, he finally forced a single word out through gritted teeth.
"Damn."
The word alone made even Cioara glance up at him.
Su laughed, more furious than amused, and with a trembling hand gave the two bastards a forceful thumbs-up.
"You two are seriously something else."
"I always thought I was hiding deep enough, thought I was taking the hits for you. And now you're grinning at me telling me there's something bigger behind it. And once you dig that up, there's something even bigger underneath!"
"The end of the world... a full-scale Honkai invasion... this damn world doesn't even have three good months left..."
He gave a short, snorting laugh at his own words. But there wasn't a trace of ease in that laugh — it sounded more like the despairing sigh of a man shoved right up to the edge of a cliff.
"Now I get it. No wonder you kept something this terrifying locked down so tight — not even a punctuation mark leaked out."
"If this ever got out, the world wouldn't even need Honkai to show up — order would collapse completely by tomorrow."
"And at that point, who'd have the mind to sit down and play your Honkai Impact 3rd? Who'd willingly hand over Emotion Points? Then this world really would just be waiting to die."
After saying all that, Su fell into a long silence.
And then, something remarkable happened.
He calmed down with startling speed.
That was Su.
That was why he was the team's indispensable strategist.
No matter how absurd or worldview-shattering the meteor dropping on him was, after a brief collapse he could always dig the single core truth out of the rubble.
And once he grasped that truth, everything clicked into place.
He finally understood why that shut-in Su Yu, the one who used to talk nothing but nonsense and beg daily to be kept by some sugar mommy, had transformed so completely in just a few short months.
It wasn't some sudden epiphany.
It definitely wasn't some awakened business genius.
And it certainly wasn't dumb luck catching some top-tier sugar mommy's eye.
It was because... that guy named Su Yu was carrying, for real, the countdown to the entire world's destruction on his shoulders.
The only one who could save this godforsaken world — at least as things currently stood — was him, and him alone.
Su's throat bobbed with difficulty.
He looked at Su Yu through the dim light of the bar, his eyes reddening bit by bit, beyond his control.
Then he bit out a harsh curse.
"You bastard."
When the curse landed, the bar went completely silent instead.
Because everyone could tell he wasn't actually angry.
It was the raw ache of a good brother discovering you'd caught some incurable disease and hidden it from him.
"Screw it."
Su snatched up his glass, downed the last dregs in one gulp, and slammed the glass down hard on the table.
"Screw Schicksal, screw advanced gene recombination. The world's about to blow up, so what the hell's the point of researching any of that garbage?!"
For a man whose composure was normally impeccable, Su was swearing up a storm tonight — proof that he'd truly, completely lost it.
He snapped his head up, his eyes more resolute than ever, his tone final.
"Starting tonight, I'm officially joining that damn world-saving outfit of yours too."
"If you dare let so much as half a 'no' slip out of your mouth, I'll put that recording of you sleep-talking in college — screaming about eloping with a sugar mommy — on repeat across the entire internet tomorrow."
Su Yu froze completely.
"Wait, wait, wait, when did you even record that?"
Beside them, Kevin — who'd been playing it deep and mysterious the whole time — picked this perfect moment to twist the knife, deadpan.
"It was my idea."
"Because back then you camped out in the dorm every day, refusing to budge, making Su bring you food no matter what."
"I told Su, spoiling a kid is the same as killing him — this couldn't go on. So we agreed on the spot to record some of your dark history, as a strategic weapon to eventually force you to crawl to the cafeteria and get your own food."
Su Yu buried his face in his hands in despair, groaning in agony.
"Kevin, you are seriously the most backstabbing teammate a guy could have."
Kevin remained utterly unmoved.
"Takes one to know one. You're worse than me anyway."
"Thanks a lot, to your whole family!"
The three of them tore into each other at the bar, oblivious to anyone else, trading insults with wild abandon.
And yet, it was exactly these pointless jabs that blew away much of the suffocating apocalyptic weight from before, right along with the alcohol.
A few rounds of drinks in, a few courses down, and between brothers, words no longer needed to be spelled out so plainly.
A few shots down the hatch, a couple of insults hurled, some old secrets dug up — the kind of trust where you'd hand your life to the other man was already there, folded into every drink.
Only once the chaos had run its course did the grin on Su Yu's face slowly fade.
He drew in a slow breath of cold air and pushed his empty glass a little farther away.
"All right, that's enough."
He lifted his eyes, gaze sharpening as it locked onto Su.
"Now, power it on. Contact Otto."
Su's expression turned complicated.
He clearly still wanted to push back, and his voice dropped without him meaning it to.
"Professor Otto, he's... actually..."
"I know exactly what kind of ruthless, means-justify-the-ends person he is."
Su Yu cut off his attempt at whitewashing.
"So this call — I'm making it to hold him accountable."
"First, he forced you back to Arc City. Whether or not he's directly connected to the banned-drug smuggling operation that nearly killed you tonight, as the boss who handed out the mission, that blame is his to carry, full stop."
"My brother nearly died tonight in a bomb shelter because of a mess he left behind — who else would I settle that score with?"
"Second..."
He paused, his eyes turning cold.
"The rot infesting Schicksal from the inside — the maggots in there — looks a lot worse than I imagined."
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend. On that front, maybe I can use this as an opening to strike a solid, can't-lose deal with that old fox."
Su said nothing for a long while.
But in the end, he closed his eyes and gave in.
He pulled a communicator from the inner pocket of his coat and dialed up the secret channel he'd normally never touch lightly.
As his finger pressed down, even he could feel the heat building in his palm.
Kevin said nothing, only leaning slightly forward.
Behind the bar, Cioara, ever perceptive, stopped everything she was doing — even pausing the jazz track halfway through.
Beep. Beep.
After the third tone, Otto's voice finally came through.
"So late, Su. Did the sweep in Arc City turn up something to surprise me?"
Su pressed his lips shut and said nothing.
He simply set the communicator down gently on the bar top, understanding passing wordlessly between them, and slid it slowly toward Su Yu.
Su Yu reached out and pressed a hand over it, his fingertips pausing for a moment on the cold metal edge.
Then he spoke.
"Long time no see, Professor Otto."
On the other end of the line, the air seemed to freeze for a single beat.
Even across thousands of miles of network, you could feel that lofty Overseer of Schicksal go visibly still.
But in less than a second, that voice had regained its composure at an almost frightening speed.
There was even a trace of meaningful amusement in the tail of it, like the laugh of an old friend reunited.
"Oh? I truly didn't expect this. So glad you still remember an old friend like me, Student Su Yu."
It was only the first, tentative opening line.
And yet, right then, everyone in the bar felt a simultaneous chill.
A suffocating whiff of gunpowder collided head-on in the air.
This was a duel across thousands of miles of communication lines — a clash between the highest wills of opposing camps.
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