Chapter 70: I Told You, I Am Here to Save You. Do You Understand?
However, what made the Stellaron feel even more desperate was that Cocolia not only refused to restrain herself, but instead raised her spear, leveling the bladed tip directly at Leon.
"What do you know!"
Her expression darkened into something feral. Biting cold air surged around her, violently condensing ambient moisture into jagged ice crystals that hung suspended in the air.
"Seven hundred years of struggle. The sacrifices of generations of Supreme Guardians..." Cocolia's voice cracked, bordering on a hysterical scream. "Belobog is already beyond saving! The new world promised by the Stellaron is our only way out!"
Since her disguise had been thoroughly torn away, the Supreme Guardian simply stopped hiding her madness.
Bronya stood off to the side, her face deathly pale. Her voice trembled uncontrollably as she looked at the woman who raised her. "Mother... do you really believe that? Do you truly believe those Silvermane Guards who turned into Fragmentum monsters on the battlefield... can be reborn in this so-called new world?"
"Of course!" A fanatical light, bordering on absolute paranoia, flickered wildly in Cocolia's eyes.
"Alright, I am not here to listen to you preach your twisted philosophy," Leon interrupted, his calm voice slicing through the heavy standoff between mother and daughter. "I told you, I am here to save you."
He really did not enjoy watching melodramatic family tragedies play out in front of him.
also, Leon was already intimately aware of the ins and outs of this entire disastrous situation.
Simply put, the first Supreme Guardian, Alisa Rand, had made a desperate wish to the Stellaron to defend her people against the invading Antimatter Legion. That wish triggered the Eternal Freeze, fundamentally altering the climate of Jarilo-VI.
While the apocalyptic blizzard successfully repelled the Antimatter Legion's invasion, it also made survival within the last bastion of Belobog excruciatingly difficult.
Generations passed until Cocolia succeeded the throne. Worn down by the continuous, maddening whispers of the Stellaron, and having failed to receive even a sliver of response from Qlipoth, the Aeon of Preservation, a desperate Cocolia gradually abandoned her faith.
Facing the relentless erosion of the Fragmentum and the rapid depletion of underground resources, she eventually succumbed to the Stellaron's seduction—the promise of a perfect, painless new world.
To achieve this, she did not hesitate to apply ruthless policies, severing all contact between the Overworld and the Underworld. She exacerbated the suffering of her own people, all to pave the way for this promised utopia.
Just as her grand plan was nearing completion, the arrival of the Astral Express crew threw a wrench into the gears, though it failed to shake her core resolve.
In the original timeline, her plan ultimately failed. She dissipated into the ice and snow, her treacherous actions covered up by Bronya in the name of Preservation to maintain the city's fragile hope.
Simply put, Cocolia Rand was a Guardian consumed by absolute despair. She was a tragic pawn seduced by cosmic lies, a villain who paved the road to hell with the best of intentions.
She was completely different from the genuinely stupid and purely evil Cocolia from Honkai Impact 3rd.
"Ridiculous! Who do you think you are? An outsider of unknown origin!" Cocolia retorted angrily, her grip tightening on her lance.
But in the very next second, she was completely crushed by an invisible, suffocating force.
Cocolia's pupils constricted to pinpricks.
In that instant, she felt as if she were being swallowed whole by a monstrous, abyssal tidal wave. Her body trembled uncontrollably, and a bone-chilling terror followed her like a shadow. It was a cold that bypassed her physical resistance entirely, freezing her very soul.
She felt as if she had been violently dragged back to a specific winter night in her childhood—a night where she was small, frail, and utterly powerless to resist the bitter, biting frost.
"What... exactly do you want to do?"
Cocolia struggled just to lift her chin, her gaze locking onto Leon with a mixture of incredulous shock and primal fear.
She had never imagined that this seemingly casual young man would possess such unfathomable power. Just the passive release of his aura made it impossible for her to even muster a single thought of resistance.
"I told you, I am here to save you. Do you understand?" Leon repeated, feeling a bit helpless.
As expected, trying to reason with a fanatic like Cocolia was a waste of breath.
Fortunately, he was not only good at reasoning with his words, but he also knew a thing or two about reasoning with overwhelming force.
Cocolia gritted her teeth. 'Reasoning? From the moment you walked in until now... have you spoken a single word of actual reason?!'
"You... this..." Bronya was momentarily speechless, caught in an agonizing dilemma.
On her right stood Leon, an unfathomably powerful anomaly who easily suppressed the Supreme Guardian while repeatedly claiming he wanted to save Belobog.
But kneeling on her left was her adoptive mother, the woman she had depended on for survival since she was a small child.
"Now, can you listen to me properly?" Leon asked, casually waving his hand to release the crushing suppression on Cocolia.
At the exact same time, he reached out his right hand and made a grasping motion toward the empty air.
Deep within the frozen core of Everwinter Peak, the Cancer of All Worlds was violently uprooted. In the blink of an eye, the Stellaron was directly summoned into his open palm, pulsing with a weak, golden light.
Yes, at this specific point in time, Cocolia had not yet physically merged with the Stellaron. In the original game's storyline, she only took that desperate step during the final climactic battle.
Watching Leon so effortlessly snatch away the Stellaron—the divine entity she regarded as her absolute last hope—Cocolia's breath hitched.
The sheer, absurd strength displayed by this outsider was indeed sufficient to support his arrogant declaration of saving Belobog.
But witnessing this scene left Cocolia drowning in mixed feelings.
That was the Stellaron. The cosmic entity she had pinned all her hopes and dreams on. The godlike existence that promised her a flawless new world. How could it fall into someone else's hands as easily as a plucked apple?
What was even harder for her shattered mind to accept was the entity's behavior. The Stellaron, which she had worshipped with religious fervor, was now floating obediently beside Leon like a sycophantic, groveling servant.
Even though it looked like nothing more than a pulsing ball of golden energy, Cocolia inexplicably associated its current posture with the word 'lackey'.
At this moment, her centuries-old faith was on the absolute verge of total collapse.
"You are quite interesting," Leon chuckled, casually conjuring a transparent, impenetrable container to seal the trembling Stellaron inside.
He planned to hand this little toy over to Ruan Mei for her life science research first. It was a promise he had already made to the genius scholar, after all.
If this Stellaron could somehow manage to retain its consciousness after surviving Ruan Mei's undoubtedly rigorous and terrifying experiments...
Leon's lips curved upward as an incredibly amusing idea formed in his mind. It would be a massive pity to just destroy Phantylia's Ambrosial Arbor body once he got his hands on it. Why not leave that immortal flesh vessel for this Stellaron to inhabit?
Inside the transparent box, the Stellaron pulsed excitedly, transmitting a desperate, sycophantic thought directly into his mind. 'Adoptive father! Is that true?!'
Leon ignored the cosmic cancer's shameless bootlicking. He continued pondering. And how exactly should Phantylia be dealt with? Stuff her arrogant soul into Tingyun's fluffy tail? That should definitely count as avenging the Foxian beauty, right? He just did not know if Tingyun would mind having a Lord Ravager as a tail accessory.
Of course, Leon always acted on a whim. He was a fun-seeker at heart, and he had not made any concrete decisions just yet.
"How... how do you intend to save Belobog?" Cocolia spoke in a trembling, hoarse voice. She gritted her teeth as she forced herself to stand up, her gaze fixed intently on the transparent container in Leon's hand.
"The Eternal Freeze... cannot be lifted."
She took a shaky breath, the cold air biting at her lungs. "Once the ice is unlocked, the frozen Antimatter Legion will awaken, and the Fragmentum will expand once again. The Legion will invade Belobog endlessly, and we have absolutely no military capability to resist them."
Facing Leon, a monster whose strength so far exceeded her own comprehension, Cocolia finally let go of all her Supreme Guardian pretenses. The heavy, crushing burden of her office spilled out.
"If you only contain the Stellaron, you cannot save Belobog," she stated bitterly. "Once the Eternal Freeze is lifted, this world will simply return to how it was seven hundred years ago. A slaughterhouse."
The ultimate paradox of the Eternal Freeze was placed directly before Leon. At the same time, this was also Cocolia's desperate explanation to Bronya.
If the Eternal Freeze continued, Belobog would eventually be completely consumed by the cold due to extreme energy depletion, and human civilization on Jarilo-VI would be extinguished.
But if the Eternal Freeze was lifted, Belobog would likewise be utterly annihilated by the waiting Antimatter Legion.
This was the exact reason why, even though Cocolia vaguely understood the treacherous, destructive nature of the Stellaron, she preferred to believe in its lies.
Because the Stellaron was the only thing that promised her a future. She could only pin her hopes on it, praying it possessed the power to solve this impossible equation.
"Mother..."
Hearing Cocolia's broken explanation, Bronya's eyes widened. The anger and betrayal in her chest gave way to a suffocating realization. She finally understood just how much crushing, impossible pressure her adoptive mother had been enduring all these years.
For the people of Belobog, this was already a guaranteed dead loop.
The Eternal Freeze cannot be lifted, meaning not enough energy, meaning Belobog is doomed.
The Eternal Freeze must be lifted, meaning they cannot withstand the Antimatter Legion, meaning Belobog is doomed.
"I had no other path to take..." Cocolia whispered, her shoulders slumping in defeat. "Perhaps the Stellaron was lying to me. Perhaps countless people would have to be sacrificed..."
"But at least... the Stellaron gave Belobog a way out. A singular possibility for a future."
As her sanity gradually returned, washed clean of the Stellaron's maddening whispers, Cocolia lowered her head. Her voice was hollow, filled with an ocean of helplessness.
Once upon a time, she had also stubbornly, fiercely resisted the whispers of the Stellaron. She fought it for years, until that illusory, poisoned hope became her one and only solace in the freezing dark.
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