Early in the morning, winter sunlight slipped through the gap in the curtains and spilled lazily across the floor.
Su Yu swiped his phone screen awake. The harsh glare made him squint.
In the group chat "Kiana's Birthday Party in Preparation," which Miss Pink Elf had created, the unread messages had quietly climbed past 99+.
He scrolled back up, and his eyes settled on the last message he'd seen before falling asleep last night.
[Elysia: Kiana might not care, but as her friends, WE have to! Especially you, bad Su Yu. If your gift is lame, I will absolutely make you cry with my inflatable hammer!]
Reading that threat, which seemed to come with its own voice and a cloud of pink bubbles, Su Yu shook his head.
A birthday party for Kiana.
In truth, Elysia had been secretly weaving a grand surprise party for Kiana since several days before the seventh arrived.
[Author's Note: I adjusted the timeline in earlier chapters. Attending the sports day has been moved to the sixth.]
That also explained why nobody had seen hide nor hair of Miss Pink Elf from morning till night these past few days.
It wasn't that she had finally lost interest in the pretty-girl illustrations from Nuwa's pen. She had poured all her energy into this "far more important matter."
"A gift, huh…"
He turned his head slightly. His gaze fell on the girl sleeping soundly beside him.
Her white hair lay scattered across the pillow, and that signature ahoge still rose and fell with her breathing.
Ding-dong, ding-dong.
His phone buzzed again. Elysia was frantically tagging Su Yu in the chat.
[Anyway, you have to act like you know NOTHING! Don't you dare walk up and tell Kiana you're throwing her a birthday party! It'll dilute the surprise, got it?!]
[Su Yu: Understood. A classic operation plan.]
[Elysia: No! Since this is Kiana's very first birthday with us, it has to be grand and surprising enough!]
Right after that, a file titled "Arc City Battle-Royale-Grade Surprise Plan" landed in the group.
Staring at the densely packed designs in the proposal, Su Yu's mouth twitched.
[Su Yu: Are you sure this is a surprise and not a scare?]
*
Was being born into this world a stroke of luck, or an unsolvable misfortune?
In the hushed, silent depths of the night, Kiana had turned that heavy question over in her mind more than once.
Long ago, she hadn't thought of her birthday as a day worth surrounding with flowers and applause.
Because whenever that day came, it didn't bring pure joy. It brought a shadow she couldn't shake.
It meant a vessel carrying The Devil's genes had come into the world. It meant that someday she might turn into an Abyss that brought endless disaster upon it.
That bleak, suffocating thought had always lingered quietly in Kiana's heart, impossible to chase away.
Today was December 7th.
Her birthday.
Only a few days ago, she'd been gasping under the pain of the parting that seemed destined to come between her and Su Yu, still struggling through hardships she couldn't put into words.
So when Su Yu had called her away alone that day, her heart skipped a beat. She'd been sure he was going to talk about the birthday party.
But he had only told her that her permitted range of movement had been expanded again.
He'd looked at her, and his eyes seemed to hold a thousand unspoken words. But before they could be said, she had cut him off in a flustered rush—
And then Elysia had shown up as if she'd dropped from the heavens.
Thinking back calmly now, why had Elysia turned up on the rooftop at that exact moment?
Nuwa was still in the studio rushing a deadline. With Elysia's love of lively company, she should have been perched beside Nuwa, chattering away and tossing out all kinds of wild suggestions.
Yet that day, unlike her usual self, she'd vanished from the morning on. Where had she gone? What had she been planning?
Kiana wasn't stupid.
With a grand birthday party waiting for her the very next day, Elysia had probably been behind the rooftop door and sharply sensed the argument about to erupt between her and Su Yu.
She might not have known what Kiana was so afraid of, what she dreaded. But she had stepped forward without hesitation and, in that breezy tone of hers, forcibly pushed Kiana and Su Yu into being Griseo's "temporary parents."
She had defused the coming storm in the gentlest way possible.
Birthdays, huh.
In the winter morning light, Kiana's thoughts drifted far away.
The earliest and warmest memory she had of a birthday went back to the days when she and Siegfried wandered and fled across the ice and snow.
Life was hard and unsettled then. They often couldn't even find a safe place to stop.
But on the night of December 7th, Siegfried would always pull a small cake out of his coat like a magic trick.
When that single lonely candle was lit, its faint but warm glow lit Siegfried's face, weary yet still beaming, and it lit Kiana's little cheeks, red from the cold.
As the cream melted in her mouth, she always felt that as long as family was beside her, even a sky full of wind and snow couldn't keep her heart from feeling warm.
Then, later.
The Siegfried who bought her cakes was gone.
Through long years, she began wandering alone, searching the whole world for that stinking old dad who had left without a word.
On those birthdays, the north wind always bit especially cruelly.
She might huddle beneath the awning of some convenience store, gnawing on a cold sandwich, watching her lonely reflection in the shop window and the warm scenes of families gathered together in the distant lights of countless homes.
Those birthdays were always passed in a hurry, accompanied by endless loneliness and confusion.
Until, finally.
She came to St. Freya Academy.
There, she finally had a home in the truest sense, and a group of companions who lit candles and sang birthday songs for her on this day.
Even now, whenever she closed her eyes, Kiana could still clearly recall those birthday parties at St. Freya Academy—
She could almost smell the thick soup Mei simmered with her own hands.
She could almost hear Bronya's flat, deadpan voice spitting out disdainful remarks, while secretly pressing the latest game cartridge into her hands.
And Aunt Himeko, always raising a beer can with a hearty laugh and ruffling her hair.
The Squad Monitor would quietly hand over a bowl of longevity noodles topped with a fried egg. And Auntie? Auntie would sneak bitter melon juice into her drink.
All that laughter, all those colorful balloons, all those gifts, maybe clumsy but filled with sincerity…
For Kiana, they were the brightest and most precious treasure-trove of memories in her life.
And yet.
The scenery remains, but the people are gone, and everything has ended.
Another year, another birthday arriving right on schedule.
But she was in this strange other world, separated from her companions by an entire world. Even the speed at which time flowed was different.
"Mei, Bronya, Auntie…"
Kiana silently murmured those names in her heart.
They probably didn't even know that she had reached another birthday in this faraway world, did they?
Kiana slowly opened her eyes.
The heater in the room was humming quietly, producing a faint "hum."
Kiana slowly turned her head.
The first thing that met her eyes wasn't a cold, empty wall. It was Su Yu's profile, right there within arm's reach.
He had clearly been awake for a while. He lay on his side, one hand propping up his chin.
Kiana's brain crashed for a full three seconds.
Last night's memories flooded back like a opened sluice gate.
Out of unease and a sense of crisis, she had not only forced her way into Su Yu's blanket, but also whispered a line by his ear, brimming with jealousy and a declaration of war: "I won't lose to her."
And then… and then she'd just fallen asleep in a flash, completely defenseless?!
Seeing how close the two of them were now, nearly pressed together, Kiana's face flushed red all at once.
"Morning, Miss Kaslana."
Looking at the fully ripened white-haired Paramecium before him, Su Yu's smile kept widening.
"Last night, someone swore up and down she couldn't sleep, and then fell into deep sleep in under ten seconds."
"Not only did she hog most of the blanket, she also subjected me to half an hour of unconscious 'chokeholds' and 'octopus-style strangling' in the middle of the night…"
"I have to say, your combat power asleep is far more impressive than when you're awake."
"Who, who's an octopus?! It was… it was you who moved closer on your own!"
Kiana wanted to die of embarrassment. She snatched the pillow beside her and clamped it over her face, trying to hide cheeks so red they were about to drip.
"I, I was just afraid you'd kick off the blanket and catch a cold in the middle of the night! It's bad enough that you're ungrateful, and you dare laugh at me too!"
Watching her stubbornly refuse to admit anything, the amusement in Su Yu's eyes deepened.
He didn't argue back. He simply reached out and gently ruffled her hair.
It was a comfort, and also a silent indulgence.
But just as the sweetness of this morning routine was about to heat up further—
"Beep, beep, beep—!"
The personal terminal on Su Yu's bedside table suddenly blared a shrill, top-priority red alert.
The piercing sound instantly tore apart the pink bubbles that had been slowly filling the room.
Su Yu pulled his hand back at once and pressed the terminal's answer key.
Bronie's holographic image popped up in midair.
The cyber hacker, usually so unflappable, now had two huge dark circles under her eyes. Even the bubble gum she usually chewed was nowhere to be seen, and her expression was graver than ever.
Bronie's gaze swept quickly over the two of them, clothes rumpled.
"Boss, and the white-haired dummy over there, I really, really don't want to interrupt your morning time, but…"
Bronie's hands hammered wildly at the virtual keyboard, and a waterfall of crimson corrupted data cascaded down the holographic screen.
"We're in big trouble. miHoYo Studio's underlying servers are under a super-powered hacker attack from an unknown dimension. Their methods are completely beyond conventional understanding."
"Get to the operations room, right now!"
The call was cut off from her end, leaving only a faint crackle of static in the air.
The two exchanged a look without wasting a word, and both understood how serious things were.
After dressing, they walked side by side into the operations room of the Spark Training Base.
But the scene inside made Kiana freeze for a moment.
The air pressure in the room was so low it seemed about to condense into water.
Welt Yang stood frowning deeply, staring grimly at the holographic sand table flickering rapidly before him.
Bronie's holographic image hovered in midair, her fingers on the virtual keyboard leaving a dizzying blur of afterimages.
Fu Hua stood against the wall with her arms folded and a cold look on her face.
And Rita the maid stood to one side. She kept her graceful posture, but her eyes were full of utterly convincing "worry" and "self-reproach."
Every face wore the same grim expression, as though Arc City were about to be flattened by Honkai Beasts in the very next second.
Everyone present had pushed their best-actor-caliber craft to the absolute limit.
"What on earth happened?!" Kiana hurried to the conference table, her eyes sweeping anxiously over the group. "Bronie said there's big trouble?"
The room went quiet for a moment.
"Early this morning, the deep-layer servers of Spark Studio suffered an unprecedented hyper-dimensional hacker intrusion."
In the end, it was Welt Yang, the elder among them, who stepped forward.
"Their technique completely surpasses what modern network security can comprehend. They even bypassed every physical firewall."
Bronie, floating in midair, snorted with great cooperation and blew a pink bubble until it burst.
"Don't even get me started. I couldn't even trace their real IP. That guy's like a ghost swimming freely through a sea of data."
"What about the core data?" Su Yu asked.
"That's the worst part." Rita picked up the thread at exactly the right moment. "Master Su Yu, they've hijacked the core source code of Honkai: Ordinal Scale, along with control of every holographic base station we deployed across Arc City."
At those words, Kiana's heart clenched.
She knew all too well what Ordinal Scale meant to Su Yu. If that data were destroyed, everyone's efforts these past days would be wiped out completely.
Just as Kiana was so anxious she was about to start steaming—
"Crrrzzt—!"
The holographic projection screen at the center of the room let out a harsh burst of static.
The map of Arc City on display collapsed in an instant, dissolving into a mass of crimson corrupted data.
Then, to the dull grinding of gears, a figure appeared in the center of the screen.
He wore an exaggerated Spiral top hat, and most of his face was covered by an ornate half mask.
"Pleased to meet you, everyone at miHoYo Studio, and…"
On the screen, The Great Magician made a theatrical bow, doffing his hat.
"The scheming Grand Producer, Su Yu, and that beautiful young lioness on the verge of a roar, Miss Kiana Kaslana."
"You did this?" Fire seemed to ignite in Kiana's eyes. "Hand back control of the servers! Or I'll smash you and your terminal into scrap metal!"
"Ha ha ha! What spirited words! But if you want your control back, talk alone won't do."
The Great Magician let out a laugh of villainous arrogance and slammed his gear-topped cane down.
"Let's play a game, shall we? You wouldn't want the Grand Producer's life's work to go up in smoke, would you?"
As The Great Magician finished speaking, a hidden mechanism on the conference table clicked open and two high-tech silver briefcases rose up.
The cases opened by themselves, and inside lay two pairs of translucent AR glasses: the [Skyward Eye].
The Great Magician looked at the two of them with mocking amusement.
"It all depends on how the two of you perform. I hear you're the most in-sync partners in Arc City? Then prove it to me!"
The moment he finished, the image on the screen flickered and called up the vast underlying code repository of Honkai: Ordinal Scale.
At the very center of the repository, a conspicuous "DELETE" progress bar was ticking forward.
"Put on those two pairs of glasses, and use your vaunted Strength, plus your woefully meager wits, to break through the layers of trials I've set along the way. Only by clearing them can you save this game!!"
"If you give up halfway out of fear, or try to cheat with any shameful little tricks… then you can get ready to say goodbye to Ordinal Scale forever!"
"Good luck, my dear actors. And now I declare it: the show begins!"
____
Gift for Everyone: Once we hit 80 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! 😉