Morning light leaked through Arc City's gray, overcast sky, laying a thin wash of pale white across the tile floor of the rented apartment's living room.
Rin sat cross-legged on the sofa, her phone splayed across her knees, its glow washing over her face and slowly brightening a pair of eyes that had still been heavy with sleep.
Notifications from the [Ordinal Scale Closed Beta Group 1] had been pinging since six that morning; by now the unread count had already blown past 999+.
Rin tapped the group chat open and swiped through it a couple of times.
The nicknames of these first-wave beta lucky draws ran the gamut from bizarre to utterly chaotic.
Someone called themselves "Arc City's Number One Swordsman," yet their avatar was a suspiciously wise-looking Husky.
Someone else went by "Not Changing My Name Until I Grind Past 3 AM"—except this guy had logged off at the speed of light by 12:30 the night before.
There was even someone too lazy to bother with a nickname at all, still stuck with the default system ID, standing out awkwardly amid all the try-hard aliases—like a fresh recruit who'd just made an account and gotten thrown, without mercy, straight into a pack of high-ranked wolves.
Rin's own group nickname was [Fried Tofu], number 1533.
The chat was buzzing—someone was frantically reposting screenshots from last night, of "Jiahao" and his provocative video bragging about taking on the entire server solo.
Underneath, naturally, followed a long string of furious insults, heavy on maternal slurs and steeped in Arc City's finest local profanity.
Rin scrolled up through several pages of messages, her fingertip pausing on one without moving.
The sender's avatar was a peppy cartoon girl giving a thumbs-up, nickname: "Carole's Gonna Give It Her All Today."
Carole—a student at Arc City University, daughter of Commissioner Lewis, and also—Shenzhou Tablet, no wait—Fu Hua's junior schoolmate.
Rin's impression of Carole was someone bursting with energy, always lively, dreaming of becoming a special police officer just like her mother, taking down criminals for a living.
What Carole had posted in the group was a long block of voice-to-text, the punctuation used with unusual force:
"That Jiahao guy is way too much of an attention-seeker! Who does he think he is, the Schicksal Archbishop? That arrogant? Does he really think nobody can put him in his place?!"
"This lady comes from a proper, pedigreed family—I've been using sandbags as rag dolls since I was a kid! I always aced PE with my eyes closed! For a stamina game like this, farming newbies at the tutorial zone is a walk in the park for me!!"
Instantly, a long row of gleeful, drama-loving emojis and enthusiastic cheering followed from the rest of the group:
"Go get 'em, Sister Carole!"
"Give that Jiahao guy a little Arc City shock and awe!"
"Backing the top spot to grab that downtown penthouse—don't forget us little people when you're rich!"
A soft laugh escaped Rin.
She opened her private chat with Carole, where last night's conversation was still sitting there.
Carole had said her mom thought she'd had too much pent-up energy lately, worried she'd go cause trouble again, so she'd gotten Senior Su Yu to land her a beta slot.
Carole's summary of the whole thing: "A blessing in disguise—total profit on this one!"
She'd then asked eagerly: "Want to team up and run a dungeon together? This game has a party system—officially, kill credit gets split by damage output, more effort means more reward!"
Rin had replied that she was just playing casually, and since she still had classes after the weekend, she might not be able to drop everything on call, so she wanted to explore on her own first.
Carole had replied: "Sure! Whatever happens, just call me—I'll be on my scooter and there in no time!"
End of flashback.
Rin tapped out a quick "good morning" and sent it over.
Less than three seconds later, a reply came back.
"Rin!! You're up!! I've been awake since six! I've checked my gear three times already!!"
"Rin, it's your first day of beta today, don't forget to go live! I studied these glasses all night—they pair with your phone, built-in recording and streaming, and officially there's a big cash reward for reporting bugs!"
"Senior Su Yu's money is capitalist money! If we don't milk it, we're fools!"
Right after that came a "frantically counting cash till my hand cramps" derpy sticker.
Rin's ear twitched.
She looked away from the word "money" and typed back: "Let's skip the livestream, I'm just playing casually... but I'll try to report any bugs."
"Aw, going live saves you a ton of hassle! And if you happen to fluke into some godly play by pure luck, you can rack up tips in your stream! Overnight riches, not just a dream!"
"Fine, I'll hop in and poke around in a bit."
Carole immediately sent back an OK-hand emoji, then added: "Ugh, it'd be so great if we could drag Senior Sister Fu Hua into this. If she joined, wouldn't topping the leaderboard be as easy as breathing?"
Rin recalled Sakura once mentioning that Fu Hua had already become a martial arts grandmaster at a very young age.
If she joined this game, she really would leave everyone else Outclassed by None.
But when Carole typed that line out, she clearly had no idea—not the faintest clue—that she herself was also one of the people getting Outclassed by None.
"Sister Hua's official core staff at miHoYo, right? Internal staff can't compete, so that's off the table. But I heard she and a few senior sisters are heading to the offline test site today to help keep order—you could try running into her there."
Carole fired off another bombshell right after: "Actually, let me tell you a secret—the person I most want to team up with is that white-haired Vigilante! You've heard the legend around our city, right?"
Rin's thumb paused over the screen.
The white-haired Vigilante was practically Arc City's answer to Batman, a full-blown urban legend.
About half a year ago, she'd suddenly started showing up in the city at night like a superhero, beating down criminals with a baseball bat, striking fear into local gangs—and the crime rate in that district had plunged like it fell off a cliff.
But for some reason, over the past few months she'd vanished without a trace, and no one had heard a thing since.
Everyone on the forums speculated about why she'd shown up in the first place—surely it wasn't just to buy some scalper-priced, sky-high graphics card for whatever unlucky owner had taken her in?
"The white-haired Vigilante... is she actually real?" Rin typed.
"Of course she's real!"
Carole's reply shot back instantly, every word dripping with fangirl fervor.
"She literally saved my life once! I was chasing a knife-wielding robber into a dead-end alley and nearly got shot—she came out of nowhere and tackled me down! If it weren't for her, I probably wouldn't even be lying here typing this to you right now!"
Rin stared at the words on her screen, unsure what to say back.
Carole added another message on her own: "As for why she suddenly disappeared... maybe fighting crime got too exhausting and she switched to being a mukbang streamer? Honestly, probably for the best—thank god she's not in this beta test, or the second she showed up, everyone else might as well take their hands off the keyboard and just watch her perform."
Rin sent back a "same" sticker.
She had no idea, of course, that the so-called urban-legend Vigilante was that very white-haired girl who'd once shown her face on miHoYo's official livestream—and who was, at this exact moment, most likely sprawled across Su Yu's couch eating potato chips.
Before the screen went dark, Carole sent one more sticker of a little tiger throwing a punch.
Rin got up and padded barefoot toward the fridge.
A sticky note was stuck right above the fridge handle, Sakura's handwriting graceful yet firm: "Have a safe trip today."
She looked over at the breakfast waiting on the table—the fried egg's edges browned to a crisp golden, the fried tofu still faintly steaming.
She lifted her chopsticks from the rest, pressed her palms together, murmured a quiet "thanks for the meal," and popped the whole egg straight into her mouth.
A while later, having washed the dishes clean, Rin changed into a set of lightweight athletic wear.
She tied her pink hair back into a ponytail, checked herself in the full-length mirror by the entryway, then walked to the middle of the living room and picked up the AR glasses from the coffee table.
She gripped the interactive controller in her right palm; the metal cylinder was cool to the touch, and as its sensor panel picked up the warmth of her palm, a ring of pale blue light flared up around its rim.
Rin took a deep breath and squeezed the controller tight. It was the ultimate incantation every otaku dreamed of shouting.
"Link Start!"
The logo for [Honkai: Ordinal Scale] surfaced across the lenses of her AR glasses.
A streak of white, like a sword scar, cut diagonally through the center of the logo and shattered into countless pale blue light particles, scattering outward.
Right after came the identity-verification chime, a stream of scanning UI flowing along the edge of her vision.
Rin felt a faint vibration at the temple of the glasses—the eye tracker calibrating her pupils.
A few pale green scanning beams swept across her retinas, and a confirmation screen popped up.
[Ding! Identity verification passed.]
[Welcome back, first-beta player number 1533, codename: Fried Tofu.]
The in-game UI arranged itself along the edges of her vision, never once blocking her line of sight.
In the upper left, a health bar and level indicator; in the upper right, a radar-mode map thumbnail.
[System warning: please use this device only in open, obstacle-free areas to avoid physical collisions.]
Rin stood in the middle of the living room and gave her head a tentative turn, left and right.
The UI panels moved as if they'd grown right onto her retinas, tracking her gaze with perfect smoothness—not even a millisecond of lag she could detect.
This level of technology was frankly terrifying.
"Ding-dong~"
The tutorial window popped open right in the center of her vision.
At the same time, a small pink streak of light drifted out from the edge of the pop-up, spun twice in the air, and resolved into a palm-sized, chibi fairy.
"Hi, hi~ Nice to meet you! Hello to all you lucky players~ I'm your holographic guide, Elf Elysia~"
"Detected: you're currently in an open area, environment safe—perfect for the beginner tutorial!"
"So then, are you ready? Let's kick off a wondrous adventure together!"
She snapped her fingers.
On the ground in front of Rin, the air twisted, and light rapidly condensed.
A low-level, Level 1 Zombie emerged from the stream of data.
It was smaller than Rin had pictured—about one meter seventy, grayish-white skin, its limb joints bent at unnaturally awkward angles, a red health bar and level marker hovering above its head.
"Ta-daa! Here's the very first enemy you'll face—the Zombie, Newbie Special Edition (the kind with literally no brain)!"
Elf Elysia floated over and gave the Zombie's shoulder a little tap.
"Don't worry, don't be scared! As a starter monster, its attack pattern is super, super simple—like a broken record that can only babble: raise its arm, lunge forward, repeat the loop. Now go on, bravely grab your very own weapon—"
Rin glanced down at the cylindrical controller in her hand.
The touch panel on the grip glowed faintly; her thumb swiped lightly across it, and a weapon selection wheel opened before her eyes: tachi, dual pistols, greatsword, lance...
Her gaze lingered on the icon for the tachi.
The icon enlarged, revealing a line of description: "A balanced melee weapon, medium attack speed, medium damage. Perfect for players who want to make a name for themselves."
She chose the tachi.
As she confirmed the selection, a faint vibration ran through the controller in her hand.
Blue-white streams of light extended from both ends of the cylinder, sketching the shape of a tachi in the air.
Rin closed her hand around the hilt, and the data stream solidified fully; the weight and center of balance of the tachi transferred into her palm through the controller's force-feedback module.
She'd held a real blade before.
This virtual sword was a shade lighter than a genuine forged-steel tachi, but the sensation of swinging it—that clean, perfect feel of cutting through the air—already came startlingly close to the real thing.
The moment her hand closed around the hilt, a wave of dizziness surged up without warning.
The edges of her vision began to darken.
It wasn't the physical strain that came with VR gear—it was memories, sealed away for countless days and nights, forcing their way back up from the depths of her mind.
She saw it.
That ancient, decaying old estate somewhere in the Far East.
That oppressive hall with its dark wood floors, one that never let a single ray of sunlight through, year after year.
That high seat of honor, cold and merciless.
Those dense, trembling shadows of people kneeling below the dais, too terrified to even breathe hard.
And... that stench in the air, thick enough to gag on, a smell no amount of washing could ever scrub away.
It was the smell of blood.
And—her own hand.
That small, childish hand that had once been forced, over and over, to hand down execution verdicts.
"Kill."
The child's voice from the memory overlapped with her breathing in the present.
She clenched her jaw hard, her face going paper-white in an instant, fine cold sweat beading across her forehead.
"Whoa there, whoa there, easy, don't panic—a little dizziness right after connecting is completely normal~"
Elf Elysia's voice suddenly drew close; her two tiny hands traced a circle in the air, and a pale green glow spread out from within it.
Rin felt a faint electric tingle at both temples, as if someone were pressing warm fingertips gently against her pressure points.
The dizziness didn't vanish, but it was pushed down to a level she could just barely ignore.
"Our AR device comes with a top-of-the-line, personal doctor module built right in, you know! Right now it's running a full-body scan on your physical condition—"
Elf Elysia's voice bounced back to its usual chipper energy.
"Scanning—please hold—ding!"
She paused for a beat, then rattled off a string of stats in a tone dripping with surprise:
"Physical Stats rating: B-! Hmm... a touch stronger than your average frail college student! Still plenty of room to grow on muscular endurance and cardio, though."
"But by ordinary high-schooler standards, that's already upper-middle-tier quality goods! And now for the second stat... huh? Wait, what?!"
Rin drew deep, heavy breaths, refocusing her scattered vision on the little pink fairy.
Elf Elysia was tilting her head, poking her own chin with one finger, wearing the look of someone who'd just stumbled onto something fascinating:
"Reaction Speed: S-rank?! Whoa!! That's way too crazy! Is that even a reflex speed a human can have?!"
"Miss Fried Tofu, what on earth did you eat growing up? How does someone end up with B-rank Physical Stats but Reaction Speed that shoots clean through the roof to S-rank?!"
Rin let the tachi hang at her side, looking down at her own hands.
Reaction Speed, S-rank?
She vaguely recalled having glanced at the game's official announcement earlier.
The developers had stated clearly that a player's overall physical performance broke down into two dimensions: "Physical Stats" and "Reaction Speed."
Physical Stats determined whether you could pull off high-difficulty techniques at all—it set the ceiling on what your body could do.
Reaction Speed, meanwhile, directly governed your skill judgment in life-or-death moments, the timing window for dodge invincibility frames, and the sheer precision of your attacks.
Her Physical Stats rating was only a B-, which, among these five thousand first-beta lucky players, put her somewhere in the unremarkable middle of the pack.
But... her Reaction Speed—among those same five thousand people, she could easily place in the top three.
So it turned out she wasn't entirely without something to offer, after all.
"Well, well! Regardless, congratulations on your superhuman reflexes! Your body data's all been recorded now!"
Elf Elysia clapped happily and floated back over to the Zombie, which was still standing there babbling to itself.
"Now then, let's officially kick off the hardcore beginner tutorial! Follow my red guideline and land your very first flashy attack on this poor punching bag!"
She raised a hand and pointed at the Zombie.
Rin leveled the middle of the tachi in front of her body, trying to summon back techniques someone had once taught her—ones she'd sealed deep within her own memory.
She steadied her breathing, feeling the electric tingling at her temples still holding steady, pressing back down the blood-red shadows that were clawing and screaming their way up out of the cracks in her memory.
The blade tip angled toward the ground.
—She took her first step.
____
Gift for Everyone: Once we hit 10 Powerstones, I'll release +1 bonus chapter
________________________________________
If you want more chapters, please consider supporting my page on (P). with 50 advanced chapters available on (P)
👻 Join the crew by searching Leanzin on (P). You know the spot! 😉