The chaotic school sports day finally drew to a close with Griseo's family taking first place.
Once the awards ceremony was over and the principal had finished his speech, Su Yu and Kiana headed for the broadcast room.
The instigator of it all, the Pink Piggy-Cat, had long since vanished without a trace. All she'd left behind was a note with a cute winking emoji doodled on it.
It read: "No need to thank the pretty Fairy Miss. But if you really want to, bring me back a limited-edition strawberry mousse cake from the shop downstairs on your way back~"
Clearly, the culprit had bolted long ago.
Su Yu didn't drive Griseo straight home. Instead, the three of them went to the dessert shop they'd visited before.
"Seriously, at the baton handoff I was afraid you wouldn't be able to brake and would plow right into the sandpit."
Su Yu leaned back against the soft booth cushion, stirring the ice at the bottom of his glass with his straw.
"At that speed, didn't you scare those parents who actually train in sports half to death?"
"It wasn't that bad!" Kiana took a huge pull of blueberry milkshake and thumped the glass down on the wooden table. "That was tactics! Do you even know what tactics are?"
"This young lady studied everyone's stride frequency before I took off." She smacked her chest, pride impossible to hide in her voice. "Besides, a relay is all about catching up the places the rest of you lost."
"Good thing you've learned to hold back. If you'd set some human-limit world record, I think we'd have been sliced up for research the next day."
"Hmph, quit laughing at me! Griseo was amazing during the quiz, and you, a grown-up, just stood there glaring at the questions!"
"I was giving the young ones a chance to shine." Su Yu shrugged. "Besides, in a family event, somebody has to bring up the rear."
"Excuses! That's a total cop-out!" Kiana's eyes went wide, and she turned to look for backup. "Griseo, you be the judge. Isn't he dodging responsibility?"
Griseo had been quietly biting her pink plastic straw, the level of her strawberry milkshake sinking little by little.
At Kiana's words, the little girl stopped sipping.
Her eyes, as clear as pure Crystals, settled on Kiana's face.
"Sister Kiana," Griseo blurted out of nowhere, "you look much prettier now than you did back then."
The cheerful pop song in the shop had just slipped into its instrumental break.
Su Yu's hand stilled on the ice. Kiana's retort caught in her throat.
Following the girl's clear gaze, their minds were pulled back to an afternoon several months ago.
The very same window booth.
The very same people.
The white-haired drifter girl, dragged here against her will, had been like a wildcat backed into a corner.
Back then, she'd bristled with thorns, her eyes frighteningly hollow, wary of everything around her, as if ready at any moment to pull a gun from her pocket and take the world down with her.
The humiliation of being forced to stay within a meter of Su Yu, and the trauma Himeko had left behind, were written all over that pale face.
Griseo gently set down her glass.
In a little painter's world, color was everything.
Back then, the color on Sister Kiana had been a dusty, cold gray.
Griseo had thought at the time that if she could paint a touch of sunny orange over that gray, it would look wonderful.
"Mm." Griseo nodded very seriously. "Just as I thought. Sister Kiana looks the prettiest when she smiles."
Kiana froze, her expression stiffening.
"Can I draw you a picture?" Griseo gave her no time to react and pulled a sketchbook and charcoal pencil straight out of her little backpack.
The last time she'd been asked to sit for a drawing, Kiana had resisted with her whole heart.
That had only been because Su Yu, to lure this genius painter into his organization, had shoved her forward as a model and bargaining chip.
But now.
"Sure," Kiana said, snapping back, her tone light and easy. "But hold on. You can't draw just me."
"What do you want to add?" Su Yu asked.
"Let me think."
She looked around the shop, and her gaze finally came to rest on the two people in front of her.
"Let's just draw our makeshift family of three too, the way we looked under the camphor tree on the field earlier!"
Griseo nodded hard, and her pencil began to scratch across the paper.
The mood settled into quiet.
From behind the counter came the steady, low hum of the milk tea machine.
Kiana turned her head to one side.
Out on the sidewalk beyond the big floor-to-ceiling window, elementary schoolers in uniform walked past in clusters, holding freshly bought grilled sausages.
Parents pushed bicycles and held their children's hands, chatting idly about what to cook for dinner.
The traffic light at the corner cycled through its colors. These ordinary scraps of everyday life stitched together the plainest of evenings in Arc City.
If… there were no Honkai, no mess of any kind, and she were truly an ordinary girl.
Maybe she'd marry Su Yu in this world.
Every day, like today, they'd go hand in hand to pick up their child from school.
She'd overcook the noodles in the kitchen while Su Yu complained and helped clean up the wreckage, and on weekends the three of them would idle away an afternoon in this very shop.
Her mind was full of scenes like these that she longed to make real.
But.
The countdown was like a blade hanging over her head.
The threat of Honkai's invasion, the limit on her time in this world, the mission she was fated to return to.
All of those burdens reminded her that the peace in front of her was only a stolen, time-limited dream.
The setting sun outside was warm, yet Kiana suddenly felt a chill.
Would all this stolen happiness and ordinary routine become the knife that cut deepest on the day the parting finally came?
"What are you thinking about?" Su Yu's voice cut through her thoughts. "You've been poking the air with that straw for ages."
"Nothing." Kiana hurriedly lowered her head and pretended to drink.
"The glutton who yells about noodles every day finally has something on her mind. I'm honestly touched." Su Yu curled a finger and rapped the table. "But today I'm a qualified temporary parent. So go on, what math problem has you stumped?"
"…Su Yu."
"Just say it. Skip the tragic-backstory opening."
"Sometimes I wonder about something." Kiana ignored his deflection, her gaze returning from the window. "People only live a few decades. No matter how strong someone is, they'll inevitably meet death or parting in the end."
She stared at the man she'd made her only Anchor.
"If everyone's ending is losing everything anyway, then why live this life at all?"
"That line is terrifying," Su Yu couldn't help but remark. "When did you ditch your manga and start studying existentialism?"
"Quit joking around! Never mind how I got there. Just tell me what you think!"
"What I think?"
Su Yu leaned back in his seat.
"Probably this: work yourself to death earning money, eat well while you're young, and when you're old, leave the ledger to the next generation to keep paying off the loan. Round and round. That's an ordinary person's workhorse life."
"Don't fob me off with lines from some prime-time soap opera! That's not what you really think! I want a serious answer!"
Seeing the earnestness in her eyes, Su Yu stopped messing around.
"You really want to hear it?" He sat up straight. "I used to think the same way. But the conclusion I reached is that life, at its core, has no meaning at all."
Kiana's mouth fell open. She hadn't expected an answer like that.
"Isn't that way too pessimistic?" she mumbled. "That's not what you usually lecture me with."
"How is that pessimistic?" Su Yu countered. "I'm just stating an objective fact. Zoom out far enough, and the whole history of human civilization isn't even a speck of dust in the universe."
He pointed at the setting sun outside.
"Even that sun up there will swell up and swallow the Earth in a few billion years. If even the universe has a day when the servers shut down, what chance do ordinary people with a few decades of life have?"
"So?" Kiana pressed.
"So, instead of lying in bed with your eyes open, fretting over some rotten future that hasn't happened yet, or clutching the mess of the past and torturing yourself, you might as well be a blind man who only cares about the present." Su Yu pushed the barely touched blueberry milkshake toward her.
"Don't take anything to heart. Eat when you should eat, drink when you should drink, and if the sky falls, use it as a blanket."
"Precisely because these few decades of lousy life are meaningless, the experiences we give them ourselves are what count."
"Even if the Earth blows up into rubble at noon tomorrow, at least right now, this double-sugar blueberry milkshake tastes pretty damn good."
Kiana looked at the milkshake.
A few months ago, when she'd been on the verge of collapse, crushed breathless by guilt.
This same guy had hauled her back from the cliff edge with a bowl of instant noodles and some offhand nonsense.
Thinking about it now, being afraid of the pain a future parting would bring wasn't really so different from running from responsibility and seeking death back then.
The warm sunlight, the delicious fried chicken, and the sense of safety this person gave her had all been real, cherished things.
Right.
Who cared what happened tomorrow!
"Smack!"
Kiana slapped both cheeks hard with her palms.
The sharp crack startled the customers at the next table.
"Right! This young lady has decided!"
Rubbing her stinging cheeks, she raised her voice several decibels.
"I'm doing exactly what you said! Cosmic doomsday, parting, whatever, I'm throwing it all out of my head!"
"Even if the world falls apart tomorrow, I'm going to make sure I die with a full stomach!"
She shoved her empty glass forward.
"Boss! Another milkshake! The jumbo size! And add three scoops of fruit bits!"
Kiana turned to Su Yu.
"You're paying!"
"Who was it just now agonizing over the fate of the world?" Su Yu shook his head with a smile and resignedly pulled out his phone to scan the code. "Fine. As long as you can finish it. Don't expect me to buy you stomach medicine if you burst."
——————
The last glow of the sunset slowly faded.
Griseo finally put down her charcoal pencil.
She turned the sketchbook around and slid it between the two of them.
On the page, Su Yu held Griseo's hand in his left and Kiana's in his right.
Everyone's smile was a warm, sweet orange.
Just as Kiana was staring at the drawing,
"Heh, so you've had quite a pleasant day."
From a dark corner deep in her consciousness, the voice of the Herrscher of the Void rang out.
"What's this?" Sirin taunted in her usual contemptuous tone. "A few sweets, a few foolish human words, and you've achieved enlightenment?"
Holding the jumbo milkshake she'd just been handed, Kiana answered her.
"Stop talking nonsense. I honestly still don't know what I should do."
Kiana bit down hard on the plastic straw.
"You were right before. Even if I stay in this peaceful world, even if I can pretend to be an ordinary person, I can't abandon the duty I'm bound to."
She looked up at Su Yu, who was discussing the details of the drawing with Griseo.
"But instead of living in fear every day like a coward, dreading a parting that hasn't happened yet and afraid of getting hurt, I'd rather pour all my strength into the present."
"I'm going to give everything I've got to every day, every minute, every second I have in this world."
"Even if every day I spend on this peaceful Earth without Honkai is just a brief dream I could wake from at any moment."
She clenched the fists resting on her knees.
"I'm going to shamelessly cling on and dream this dream to the very end."
"And even if I have to go back and face a wrecked reality again, I'll find another way. I'll find a way to step into this dream again!"
In the deepest space of her consciousness,
Sirin, seated on her throne, felt that resolve flowing through their spiritual link.
She didn't flare up in a rage as she usually did.
Instead, after a brief silence, she let out a cold laugh, thick with disdain yet tinged with a trace of seriousness.
"Ha. Kiana, you're finally more than a worthless wretch who only knows how to run away."
Sirin rose to her feet and looked down from on high.
"As you are now, you barely qualify to be my rival."
"Heh heh. Struggle with everything you have, fight to the last second, Paramecium."
Beneath that lofty declaration, beyond the dominant hunger, lay something extremely dangerous: obsession.
"This body of yours will belong entirely to me sooner or later. As for that bastard out there called Su Yu…"
"He'll be nothing but a trophy at my sole disposal."
The voice in her mind vanished completely.
The air around her came alive again.
"Spacing out?" Su Yu tapped the back of her hand with his phone. "Can't finish the second one already? Want me to share the load?"
Kiana snapped back to herself and pushed the milkshake away in one motion.
"I just suddenly feel like drinking only sweet stuff is making me queasy."
She shot to her feet.
"I'm hungry! Let's not drive Griseo home yet. There's a barbecue stall at the back of that street, and today I'm absolutely eating every last lamb skewer they have!"
Su Yu looked at the pile of empty dessert plates on the table, then at the jumbo milkshake he'd just bought.
He gave a wry laugh.
"Where did all the calories you just put away go? You've packed in this much and you're still not full?"
"What would you know! A girl's stomach automatically separates into layers!"
Kiana shot back with total confidence, then grabbed Griseo's small hand.
"One of the layers is reserved just for the main course! Let's go, let's go! Griseo's coming too!"
"Yes, yes, milady."
Watching Su Yu's back, his face full of helplessness as he stacked all the empty plates and headed for the counter to pay,
Kiana couldn't help laughing.
Outside the window,
the sun had set and night had arrived.
Streetlights flickered on one after another.
Someday she would have to say goodbye to everything here.
But at least tonight, someone was standing in line to pay the bill, and someone was waiting to share barbecue with her.
Even if it was only a fleeting stay, she held this warmth and happiness firmly in her hands.
____
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