[What kind of absurd world bubble is this? Since when is this bastard a priest who adopts orphans?]
[Calm down, everyone calm down! This is a world bubble! Anything can happen in a world bubble!]
[Even a stray dog can show a little kindness passing by — what's wrong with Otto being a kind priest? Makes perfect sense.]
[If Cocolia can be a responsible Valkyrie instructor in the First World, why can't Otto be a good man who takes in orphans?]
Elysia watched the comments scroll past at breakneck speed, then let her gaze drift back to the screen.
"Yeah. In this completely different parallel world, even the things that look absurd on the surface have their own logic for happening."
Elsewhere.
"Heh. A kind priest?"
Sparxie's red mask lay tossed carelessly on the corner of her desk. She stared at the danmaku monitor for her own stream, clicking her tongue in a string of undisguised mockery.
"The way you single-celled organisms think is pathetic enough to be funny."
She grabbed a lollipop off the desk and bit straight through the wrapper, crunching it with a sound that set teeth on edge.
"What do you mean, 'he's a good man here'?" Sparxie leaned closer to the mic, her voice dropping low, laced with a malice that wanted to grind every pretty illusion into dust. "Have you already forgotten the monster back in reality — the one who used countless lives as stepping stones without so much as blinking?"
"Just because the old scammer dressed him up in a ratty priest's robe in this fake little world and threw in a few homeless orphans as garnish, you're all moved enough to think he's been washed clean?"
A dense wave of pushback swept through the danmaku, people shouting that this was just one possibility among many in a parallel world.
"Fine. Let's keep watching, then. Let's see just how noble your precious lumberjack priest can really get."
The game's story pressed forward amid the howling wind and snow.
The scene shifted to a warm interior, firelight dancing in the hearth.
Bronya and Seele stood inside the orphanage the priest had built, asking Theresa about her past.
She said she didn't remember her own past. Her earliest memory was lying against the priest's shoulder in a blizzard.
It wasn't until she grew up that Theresa understood — every brick and beam of this place had been raised by that one man.
She hadn't been the first child to arrive. But she'd stayed the longest.
The moment that clue dropped, the livestream turned into a full-blown detective session.
[No trace of any dark-history experiments! This Otto is definitely clean!]
[No experiments means Theresa can't be a clone. Factor in Otto's age... wait, was she actually born normally?!]
[Holy crap, my fellow scholars, you've found the smoking gun! Could she be his and Kallen's kid?!]
[Wait, if she's Kallen's kid, where's Kallen?! I don't see her anywhere in the orphanage!]
[Why is Otto the only one playing miserable nanny here?]
Watching the viewers spin these wild theories, Sparxie let out an internal "huh."
What a gorgeous information gap.
Toss a few plausible-sounding clues into this fictional little corner, and a million people would spin an entire million-word epic of grudges and romance in their heads.
That man's hand kept getting steadier.
Bronya didn't stop asking questions.
Her focus shifted to another key figure — the boy named Joachim.
As Theresa's account unfolded at an unhurried pace, a bloody truth dropped onto everyone's retinas like a bomb going off.
Joachim's father, in his attempt to resurrect his wife, had dabbled in forbidden knowledge and even reached out toward homeless orphans — a monster.
And the one who stopped it all, who personally carried out justice with his own hands, was this very priest — the man Joachim called his teacher. Otto.
Sparxie sat in her gaming chair and let out a laugh loud enough to nearly blow the ceiling off.
"Hahahahahaha — cough, cough cough."
She laughed so hard she choked, slamming a fist against the desk, tears nearly streaming down her face.
"You see that? Do you see that now, you poor little things?"
Sparxie pointed at the cold line of text on the screen, her voice suddenly turning ice-cold.
"In reality, the human experimentation that bastard ran to try to bring Kallen back was hundreds, thousands of times more insane than this! But who ever judged him for it? No one! He sits high up in the Schicksal Bishop's chair, sipping his red tea!"
Her words came fast, machine-gun fire hammering into every viewer's eardrums.
"But in this world bubble you call a utopia, he wraps himself in a hypocrite's robe and stands up, radiating righteousness, to pass judgment — using that same unforgivable crime — on a man who went mad for love!"
"What a magnificent comedy! Your all-powerful Producer up there is holding a champagne glass, slapping reality's rotten face as hard as he can, telling everyone just how extreme this irony really is!"
Only now did the danmaku start to surface, struggling, like something finally clawing its way up from beneath frozen water.
[The sinner in reality judges someone in the fiction who carries the same sin as him — that's...]
[How painful must this be for Joachim. His father's killer is also the man who saved him...]
And clearly, the Joachim in the game harbored deeply complicated feelings toward Otto.
On screen, the boy's character portrait kept cycling through different expressions.
He was flinching away.
He understood his father's cruelty, but that didn't erase the fact that they shared blood.
The priest hoped he would take over the orphanage, continue sheltering the drifting children.
A woman named Lieserl wanted to adopt him. He chose to run instead.
Bronya thought he was running from it.
But the boy was simply afraid.
He was afraid that if he stayed, sooner or later he'd be strapped into that moral chair called "justice," forced, like the priest, to pull the trigger on the next person.
He didn't want to slice that soul-tearing pain and hand it, unaltered, to another child.
The story's momentum left little room for anyone to wallow in melancholy.
A CG of darkening skies flashed by. The priest still hadn't come home.
Bronya led the orphanage children out to search, and finally found Otto collapsed, unconscious, on a hillside behind the house.
But along the path back, dark violet light bloomed out — Honkai Beasts, embodiments of destruction and chaos, cut off their retreat.
A crimson glow flared, and a feather radiating searing light hung suspended in the air.
Yu Ducheng.
The instant that feather scattered the monsters, it also handed Bronya a heavy piece of the past.
It was the priest's old debt — he had once done a great kindness for Yu Ducheng's master, and so she had left this feather behind.
The reason the orphanage had managed to limp along through this chaotic age was this fragile Kindling, liable to go out at any moment.
But the priest's time was running out.
When this man's life reached its end, Yu Ducheng's barrier would collapse too.
The only one who could take up that power and protect this home was the successor he'd chosen — Joachim.
If Joachim chose to leave, it would become a knot neither of them could ever untangle, right up until death.
Otto was carried back to the orphanage, and in a room thick with tension, his eyes slowly opened.
Weak as he was, Otto forced a smile, trying to give Joachim his cross — the one that had protected him so many times before. He hoped that same luck would follow Joachim now.
["Does killing in the name of good earn you God's protection?"]
Amid the heavy sound effect of a door slamming, the boy fled the room. Bronya ran after him.
The battle triggered right after.
Honkai Beasts swarmed in, wave after wave.
Bronya had to protect the terrified Joachim while clearing out the flood of monsters.
The moment the combat interface ended, a CG cutscene played.
One creature that had slipped past the fight, hidden in the shadows, suddenly lunged, jaws wide, straight at Joachim, who sat frozen on the ground.
The mechanical click of a gun cocking shook the speakers in that instant.
Bang!
Along with it came a blinding muzzle flash.
A golden bullet cut precisely past the boy's ear and punched straight through the creature's skull.
The man who should barely have been able to get out of bed had dragged his ravaged body out into the snow.
His blond hair, damp with cold sweat, clung to his forehead. The golden pistol in his hand still held the exact position of the shot he'd just fired.
The priest's body slid straight down, slipping back into unconsciousness.
Bronya rushed to support Otto, and told Joachim to lend a hand.
But the boy didn't move. He curled up on the ground, shoulders shaking wildly, like some pitiful sieve.
Elysia watched the boy huddled there and let out a quiet sigh.
When the entire weight of everything comes crashing down onto shoulders that thin all at once, flinching away is the most natural response in the world.
A sharp clang of metal cut through the awkward silence.
On screen, Bronya picked up the cross lying on the ground and, without a moment's hesitation, hurled it straight at Joachim.
["What are you running from? Your past? The priest and everyone at the orphanage?"]
["Neither! You coward, always making excuses for yourself — you're running from yourself!"]
The danmaku exploded.
[Ducky told him off good!]
[That cross-throw was so satisfying, now wake him the hell up already!]
[Wait a second... I feel like Ducky isn't just yelling at him. She's yelling at herself too, isn't she?]
[Right, now that you mention it — doesn't Bronya have the exact same knot with Cocolia? Back in Chapter 10, Bronya avoided a real conversation with Cocolia too.]
[Running from Cocolia... damn, that's a real double meaning.]
Things can be right or wrong, but people aren't. Everyone has to bear the consequences of their own choices — don't wait until everything's already lost to regret it.
Bronya was shouting at the hurdle inside herself she couldn't get past — the one named Cocolia.
This journey of hers, drifting through one bizarre world bubble after another, wasn't only about finding Seele. It was also about pulling out, one by one, the thorns lodged in her own heart.
Staring straight into the rotting flesh at the bottom of the abyss of one's own past is a hundred times, a thousand times more painful than facing death itself.
In front of her screen, Sparxie silently whistled — and, uncharacteristically, said nothing snide at all.
Time moved on to the next day.
Joachim was gone.
He left without a word, as if his name had never once existed in this worn-down courtyard.
Theresa pushed the door open and called Bronya and Seele inside.
The man lying in bed turned his face toward them.
A crimson line — an omen of Honkai corrosion — spread out from his neck like some eerie spiderweb.
It looked as though the slightest touch would make his whole body fall apart.
He gripped a golden badge tightly in his hand.
It was the one remaining keepsake of someone who had mattered to him.
When the conversation turned to the boy's departure, something unmistakably like loss and regret surfaced in those eyes that were usually so unreadable.
Theresa tried to comfort Otto.
But Otto shook his head. Even now, his voice held onto a kind of stubborn calm.
["Right and wrong can't answer every question in this world."]
["I always ask myself whether there was some other way, back then, to save his father."]
["But no matter how I look at it, that day, I still chose to kill him."]
["Maybe it's because I saw myself in him — the past self I've always wanted to put to rest."]
With a slow, deeply sorrowful piece of music playing underneath, the priest's history was finally revealed in full.
At this fated turning point of his own, he too had touched something forbidden, swept down the wrong path by a force of pure malice.
And back then, a woman — a Saint — had stepped between him and that fate.
He had fled the organization's prison with the Saint at his side, sealed that power away, and finally hidden himself in this place of nothing but wind and snow.
But barely two years later, the Saint, still bearing that curse, quietly passed away in this remote corner, leaving Otto alone.
The truth finally came together, whole, in that moment.
[He didn't lose his mind... He accepted that Kallen had died.]
[He'd rather run a run-down orphanage for drifters in this godforsaken place, taking on Honkai corrosion, than ever open that black box again to reverse such an absurd fate.]
[I think I might actually understand the old scammer's blade now. Maybe his despair and madness in the main world was never about being unable to accept that Kallen died — maybe it was about being unable to accept that a woman who once shone so brightly died so pathetically, because of his own ignorance and weakness.]
[But here, Kallen died halfway down a path she chose to walk — a clean death, a death that meant something. Maybe that's why Otto found peace here?]
In the dim light of the screen.
The priest remembered Kallen's final days. He'd once asked her whether she regretted it — giving up her family and her faith, taking on infamy, throwing her life away in this ruined place.
Her answer back then was now being passed on, by a dying man, to the last child left to hear it.
["A person goes through three stages of growth in their life."]
["The first is understanding right from wrong."]
["The second is understanding that some things go beyond right and wrong."]
["The third is, after understanding that some things have no right or wrong at all, still choosing, resolutely, to do what you believe in — and taking full responsibility for it."]
He seemed to be speaking to the boy, and also to everyone watching, frozen in front of their screens.
The priest understood Joachim's flight, his confusion.
Because he'd once been just as lost — and so Otto respected the choice Joachim had made.
["Children, I can't go back and undo what I've done. I made too many mistakes. All I can do now is answer for my past."]
["But thank god I had all of you. Thank you for letting me discover, looking back, that I still have memories of warmth and happiness."]
Just as all that emotion built to its peak, as if a single straw would finally snap something under it—
The door burst open.
Joachim staggered in, gasping for breath, his chest heaving violently, one hand clenched white-knuckled around the cross that had just been thrown to the ground.
He had heard everything.
He stumbled forward and dropped to his knees at the edge of the wooden bed.
Even though Joachim still felt lost, still had no idea how to move forward, there was one thing he needed to say no matter what.
He wanted to tell Otto: I'll take that step. I'll take over the orphanage, take over your duty. So please — keep being my family. Don't let me walk down the wrong path.
In that instant—
["I believe in you, Joachim. I believe you'll find your own way."]
The priest tightened his grip on the pendant in his hand, and the light in his eyes seemed to burn a little brighter.
["I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith..."]
A single tear fell onto the wooden floor and dissolved into white light, swallowing the entire world.
As the scene shifted, it arrived at a gravestone standing in the snow.
Joachim and Theresa sent Priest Otto off, each having found their footing on their own path. The orphanage's doors would, from that day on, stay open.
Then the System loaded, cycling back to the level-select screen.
The main screen fell completely silent. Elysia didn't rush to click through to the next chapter. She just sat there, staring blankly at the frozen game image, not even realizing when her face had become wet with tears.
____
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