Kafka stretched, letting her graceful curves show completely. Even Xuan Qiu, whose visual standards had become incredibly high after spending so much time around an idol as beautiful as Robin, found his eyes drawn to her for a second. The two women simply possessed entirely different styles of charm, both beautiful in their own unique ways, making it impossible to rank one above the other.
Silver Wolf noticed exactly where his eyes were drifting and smirked. "Careful there, or Kafka might decide to gouge your eyes out."
Xuan Qiu replied with a smooth, unbothered grin, "You don't understand, kid. This is pure, harmless appreciation for something beautiful."
Hearing that, Kafka merely gave a faint, elegant smile, and Xuan Qiu smiled right back in response.
"You certainly have a way with words, Julian," she said softly.
Silver Wolf rolled her eyes, stepped up next to Kafka, and tapped her device to open a glowing neon portal, preparing to leave the floor.
"By the way, here is a friendly reminder," the hacker added, pausing right at the edge of the spatial tear. She looked back at Xuan Qiu, her expression turning a bit more serious. "There is a massive mountain of trouble waiting for you in a little bit, so keep your guard up. I am still waiting for you to finish coding that next game, so don't go getting yourself deleted."
Before Xuan Qiu could even voice a reply, she stepped straight into the portal with Kafka and vanished, leaving the elevator bay completely silent.
"I seriously hate riddle-makers," Xuan Qiu grumbled, crossing his arms. "But trouble? What kind of trouble could she be tracking? Is an active Lord Ravager actually going to show up?"
He ran the calculations in his head, feeling that the only things capable of posing a genuine threat to his current strength would be an Emanator-tier entity. But would a general of Destruction really come to the Herta Space Station just to stir up a fight for no reason? It didn't make any sense. This facility was the personal home of a member of the Genius Society; who knew what kind of terrifying, planet-cracking countermeasures Herta had hidden away in her vaults? Unless an iron curtain dropped right now to completely ban all high-end technology, which was practically impossible, no sane enemy would jump into that trap.
Unable to figure out the logic, Xuan Qiu stopped overthinking it. He glanced down at Yanqing, who was still resting flat on the silver tiles. Reaching into his reservoir, he called down a gentle thread of a Pokémon's healing ability, directing the warm light to wash over the boy's bruised body.
Within a few moments, the young swordsman let out a soft groan and slowly opened his eyes.
"You back with us?" Xuan Qiu asked, offering a hand to pull him up. "How does the alignment feel?"
"She was incredibly strong," Yanqing muttered, his voice dropping into a deeply dejected tone. "I was completely outmatched from the opening turn."
Though his opponent had claimed to be trying her best, and he had obviously absorbed a swift defeat, the boy's martial instincts told him that Kafka had been holding back a significant amount of her true capacity; otherwise, his blade shields wouldn't have lasted a minute.
"Yeah, she's an elite unit," Xuan Qiu nodded, dusting off the boy's jacket. "Though it might sound a bit harsh, recognizing a massive power gap early on is a good thing for a prodigy. The next time you encounter a high-level foe in the wild, don't just blindly charge forward with your sword raised. At least take a second to check the enemy's strength first."
Xuan Qiu patted his shoulder, a mischievous glint returning to his eyes. "If you ever run into a monster your forms can't handle, just open your communications link and call your master, Jing Yuan. Trust me, the general would be more than happy to drop his paperwork and flatten the target for you. He would even be pleased that you actually learned how to use your brain."
"Please do not address the General so casually by his name," Yanqing corrected automatically, his brow furrowing.
Xuan Qiu just rolled his eyes. Leaving aside the fact that he was a transmigrator who viewed the galaxy through a completely independent lens, he always followed his own heart when it came to addressing others. He couldn't care less about grand titles or social standing. Of course, if Jing Yuan were standing right in front of his face and their relationship hadn't cleared the familiarity checks, he would still grant the man a proper margin of respect and call him General. But once they became close friends? Maybe he would start calling him Jing-yuan-yuan just to see his face twitch.
Yanqing stood silent, carefully weighing Xuan Qiu's words. The developer's advice ran completely counter to the traditional, fearless attitude the Cloud Knight academies had drilled into his brain, leaving him entirely torn between two philosophies. He silently resolved to ask his master for an official answer once they returned home.
"Can you manage a stable stride?" Xuan Qiu asked, gesturing toward the shaft. "Our schedule demands we keep moving."
Yanqing gave a firm nod, and the two stepped back inside the express lift, quickly arriving at the Master Control Zone.
"Mr. Xuan Qiu! Thank the stars you are safe!" Asta gasped the exact microsecond the lift doors unlatched. She sprinted toward them, her fingers tightly clutching her clipboard. "Our sensors completely lost your location parameters a few minutes ago, and I was worried sick."
"I told you clearing any anxiety over this guy was a total waste of bandwidth," Stephen's digital projection sighed from a nearby monitor, throwing Asta a thoroughly flat, look. "If this artisan actually decided to go all out, the physical bulkheads of this space station wouldn't even be big enough to contain his antics."
Asta felt completely helpless. It was easy for a detached genius like Stephen to stay relaxed; he was a high-tier member of the Society and possessed the legal right to be as whimsical as he pleased. But Xuan Qiu carried an official cultural title from the Xianzhou Alliance on top of his close ties to the station's primary partners. If a high-profile guest suffered an accident under her watch, her standing as the Station Master would vanish overnight. She certainly held zero desire to be fired and forced back to her family's corporate headquarters to inherit their massive real estate empire yet.
"My apologies for causing a hitch in your operations," Xuan Qiu said gently, deliberately ignoring Stephen's teasing to comfort the young woman. He could deeply resonate with her fierce desire to break free from the suffocating borders of a wealthy family dynasty. Of course, the main reason he could feel that empathy so cleanly was because his own bank accounts were currently overflowing with trillions of credits.
"Thank you for your concern," Asta breathed, calming her breathing. "When the spatial rift erupted across our outer rings, we were incredibly fortunate that the Astral Express crew arrived just in time to provide heavy frontline support. Combined with the defensive patterns deployed by our security teams, the general sectors have successfully stabilized."
"The single critical threat remaining is a massive Doomsday Beast orbiting the main docks. The pioneers are currently locked in a fierce trade against it on the lower platform."
Asta tapped her tablet, expanding a cluster of floating holographic screens right in front of Xuan Qiu's face. The live camera feeds showed the Express crew engaged in high-intensity combat against a colossal dragon of destruction. Looking at the operational meters, the match had barely cleared its opening turns.
Xuan Qiu's eyes locked onto the screen, instantly picking out the familiar silhouette of the Trailblazer. So the main character of this specific timeline printed as a female, he noted, tracking Stelle's movement.
"Let's head down to the platform and lend our allies a hand," Xuan Qiu decided, pivoting toward the exit bay alongside Yanqing.
Though his mouth claimed he was moving forward to provide structural support, his heart was entirely focused on securing a front-row seat to watch the opening act of the universe unfold. More practically, establishing a high-affinity relationship with the Express crew right now would yield an exceptional return on investment down the line. If he left a flawless first impression before his starskiff set sail for Jarilo-VI, the pioneers would be far more willing to put in a good word for his studio when he tried to trade the locals for their hidden Stellaron, making the entire transaction smooth and clean.
Asta raised her hand to shout a warning, but she lacked the authority to restrict a guest of his tier, leaving her to watch helplessly as the two departed the command deck.
"Let your mind rest, Miss Asta," Arlan spoke up quietly from her shoulder, his hand resting securely on his blade. "Mr. Xuan Qiu's capabilities are absolute. If a monster materializes that his skills cannot delete, our own security forces wouldn't be able to alter the balance sheet anyway."
"I pray the equations run true," Asta sighed, her fingers gripping her tablet as she watched the elevator lights count down.
Yanqing's physical bar had completely stabilized under Xuan Qiu's healing wave, so his boots kept a perfect, eager pace right behind the developer. He had never locked steel against an authentic Doomsday Beast before, and his competitive soul was hungry to test the creature's combat patterns.
The moment they cleared the final airlock doors, the entire scope of the battle lay completely bare across the open platform.
The colossal titan hovering outside the docking ring was massive, its real-world physical dimensions far outscaling the tiny, compressed model Xuan Qiu had fought on his flat monitors in his past life. Standing before its towering, shadow-milled chest plate, the members of the Astral Express crew genuinely looked like microscopic ants. Perhaps that was a minor exaggeration; at most, their silhouettes matched the size of tiny kittens or puppies against a massive wall. Their physical weapons simply lacked the surface area to cover its bulk.
Because the scale was so completely lopsided, Dan Heng and Stelle were forced to execute a continuous series of high-velocity aerial leaps just to land a clean blow against its glowing weak points. Meanwhile, Himeko and March 7th maintained a steady rhythm of ranged laser strikes and ice arrows from the rear lines to draw the titan's focus.
But constantly blocking and dodging the creature's sweeping limbs was siphoning their physical stamina at a terrifying velocity. The pioneers' movements were already showing distinct signs of heavy frame lag and deep physical exhaustion.
Just as Xuan Qiu's tracking lenses locked onto the grid, the Doomsday Beast executed a sudden, untelegraphed offensive strike. A blinding, high-density beam of pure entropic destruction violently erupted from its central core, screaming straight toward March 7th, who had just burned her movement points to dodge a heavy claw swipe and was desperately gasping for breath on the metal grating.
"March!"
Dan Heng and Himeko shouted in absolute panic, their positions far too locked down by secondary targets to cross the floor in time.
In that split second of absolute crisis, Stelle didn't hesitate. She threw her body straight past the safety markers, planting her boots directly in front of March 7th to absorb the full, unbridled impact of the beast's laser breath with her own physical chest plate.
Although the elevator exit and the main battle platform were within clear line of sight, the physical metal scaffolding between them formed a long, winding path. Recognizing the urgency of the frame, Xuan Qiu chose to bypass the ground terrain entirely. He reached out, grabbed Yanqing's collar, and manual-triggered his teleportation capability.
The two materialized right on the edge of the blast zone, arriving at the exact microsecond the white-hot laser energy swallowed Stelle's silhouette. It was a piece of perfect, unvarnished theatrical timing.
Suddenly, a familiar, deep-space weight violently locked down the local gravity field.
Xuan Qiu's vision violently shifted. The metal platforms, the roaring Doomsday Beast, and the screaming pioneers completely evaporated from his grid. He found himself standing right inside that familiar, timeless void separating the paths of reality.
Floating right beside his shoulder was Stelle's physical form. Her gray eyes were completely glazed over, her consciousness trapped inside a hazy, near-fatal daze that left her entirely blind to his presence.
Directly ahead, looming over the absolute horizon of the cosmos, was a colossal, scarred silhouette. The ancient entity was entirely constructed from dark, cracked gold, and a continuous stream of glowing golden blood flowed freely from the massive, unhealed wound split across its chest.
The cold, world-ending gaze of Nanook the Destruction slowly turned downward, its supreme awareness locking straight onto their coordinates.
Xuan Qiu stood frozen in the timeless space, his mouth twitching as a wave of utter confusion cleared his brain.
Wait... hold on a second. Why on earth are you looking at me?
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