A second of silence.
"Mhm."
Kiana held the stuffed doll back up to her eyes, nodding seriously as she evaluated it like an experienced connoisseur. "Very good. It has details. Good civilization!"
She didn't stop to think why a stuffed doll needed such meticulous "details," nor did she find anything strange about it.
In Kiana's simple and straightforward worldview, exquisite craftsmanship equals good item, and having details equals more effort equals a better item.
"Whatever, I'll ask who put it here tomorrow."
She shrugged, casually placing the stuffed doll beside her pillow before crawling under the covers. "Anyway, I checked it, and there's nothing wrong with it... Hmm, it smells quite nice?"
The stuffed doll carried a faint fragrance, like the scent of some night-blooming flower mixed with old book pages—not strong, but reassuring.
Kiana yawned and reached out to turn off the bedside lamp.
In the darkness, she turned onto her side, facing the stuffed doll, and quickly fell asleep, her breathing becoming steady and deep.
She didn't notice, or rather, even if she had, she wouldn't have cared—after she fell asleep, the stuffed doll's purplish-black eyes briefly flashed with a nearly imperceptible sliver of light in the darkness.
Perspective shift.
Kiana opened her eyes with an extremely surreal feeling.
One second ago, she had been holding that somewhat cute, fragrant, purplish-black stuffed doll, sinking into sleep on her soft bed.
The next second, the cold sensation beneath her and the overly vast and silent surroundings made her jolt awake and sit up instantly.
"This is... a training room?"
Kiana rubbed her eyes, her azure pupils filled with confusion.
What met her eyes was an extremely vast, enclosed space. The floor and walls seemed to be constructed of some high-strength alloy.
The space was so high she couldn't see the ceiling, and the distance was obscured by a faint mist.
There were none of the usual equipment or targets found in the St. Freya Academy training grounds, only a heart-stopping emptiness, so quiet that she could hear her slightly hurried heartbeat and breathing.
Although the style was different, Kiana was all too familiar with the cold, hard atmosphere specifically designed for "tormenting people."
"What the heck... did I sleepwalk into the Academy's secret training ground? Wait, I don't have that problem..."
She muttered as she stood up, dusting off non-existent dirt from her body and looking around. "Mei? Bronya? Aunt? Is anyone here—"
Before she finished speaking, an extremely sharp disturbance of airflow came from the side.
Kiana instinctively leaped sideways, turning her head as she did so.
About twenty meters away, a tall man stood silently, having appeared at some unknown point.
His figure cast a long shadow on the vast floor.
Most striking was his short silver-white hair, reflecting the cold light almost like ice shards.
He was standing sideways to Kiana, seemingly stretching his wrists, and wasn't fully looking in her direction.
From Kiana's perspective, she could vaguely make out the outline of his stern profile, but most of his features were shrouded in the backlit shadow.
She breathed a slight sigh of relief—at least it was humanoid, not a Honkai Beast.
"Hey! You, whoever you are!"
Kiana waved her hand, trying to get his attention, her voice echoing in the vast training room. "Excuse me, where is this? Did you bring me here?..."
Her words, to Kevin's ears, were just meaningless interference noise.
This training space was set up by the Black Herta with extremely strong information filtering and interference to simulate a pure combat environment.
In Kevin's perception, the target before him was just a "simulated entity" newly generated by the system for sparring, just like the previous gray-haired "entity."
Kevin tilted his head slightly, looking in Kiana's direction with his ice-blue eyes.
Locked on.
Then, he moved.
There was no warning, no wind-up.
He simply took one step forward, his right hand suddenly gripping a baseball bat that was plain in appearance but exceptionally sturdy. He swung it horizontally toward Kiana's location at a speed that surpassed the limits of her dynamic vision capture!
It wasn't a martial arts move; it was more like... swatting away a speck of dust.
"Wai—?!"
Kiana's pupils suddenly contracted. She hadn't even seen how the opponent moved or how he took out the weapon.
The baseball bat rapidly expanded in her field of vision, and the wind pressure it generated already made her cheeks sting.
She couldn't dodge!
This was the desperate conclusion her brain reached in a tenth of a second.
"BANG!!!"
A dull, teeth-grindingly loud crash.
Kiana felt as if she had been hit squarely on the side by a speeding heavy truck; an irresistible force erupted from her waist and abdomen.
She only managed half a cry of pain before her entire body turned into a blurry white streak and flew off the ground.
The world spun.
Kiana felt like she had been thrown into a high-speed washing machine. The scene before her became blurry color blocks and streaks of light, accompanied by the whistling sound of wind in her ears.
She tried to control her body, but the rotation caused by that force completely defied common physics.
She didn't know how many degrees she had tumbled in the air—seven hundred twenty? Fourteen hundred forty?—she had completely lost her sense of direction.
Finally, with a "splat," she landed face-down on the cold floor dozens of meters away, in a humiliating, prone posture.
"Ow ow ow ow—!!!"
Kiana let out a series of wails, feeling as if all the bones in her body had come loose.
Struggling, she propped up her upper body with her arms. Her white pigtails were askew, making her look miserable yet comical.
But the next second, she froze.
"Huh?"
Kiana blinked, moved her arms, and twisted her waist.
It definitely hurt; the soreness from the massive impact and the dull pain of the collision were crystal clear.
But... that seemed to be all?
Given the power of that last blow and the distance she flew, under normal circumstances, paralysis or seven or eight broken ribs would be the minimum price.
But now, aside from the pain, her physical movement wasn't significantly hindered, and her internal organs didn't feel like they were churning.
"What's going on... Does this training room have pain and damage regulation? That advanced?"
Kiana sat on the ground, rubbing her throbbing side abdomen with a bewildered expression.
She had participated in simulation combat systems before, but technology that could precisely adjust an "instant kill" force to the level of "painful but harmless" was unheard of.
On the other side, Kevin let out a soft "Tsk."
He retracted the baseball bat, a faint trace of confusion crossing his ice-blue eyes.
The feel was wrong.
This new "simulated entity's" resistance threshold seemed to be more than one level weaker than the previous one, and its reaction after being hit seemed... very amateurish, even panicked.
But the system's instruction, or rather, the default rule of this space, was "existence equals opponent."
He flipped his wrist, tightening his grip on the baseball bat again, and began walking toward Kiana, who was still sitting on the ground in a daze, moving neither fast nor slow.
The soles of his boots struck the alloy floor, emitting regular, cold "clack, clack" sounds that resonated like a death countdown in the silent space.
Kiana watched the white-haired man approach step by step. Although the man's face was expressionless, she could clearly sense the cold will that existed purely for "combat."
Explaining? Communicating?
The opponent clearly had no such intention.
"Hey! Wait! I really didn't come here to fight! Listen to me! Where exactly is this? Who are you?!"
Kiana scrambled backward, using both her hands and feet, attempting one last effort to communicate.
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