Beneath the same sky.
The world above ground was reveling because of the sudden arrival of a single game.
But beneath an unremarkable office building in the core CBD of Arc City, one hundred and twenty meters deep within a granite stratum, there was only the grinding of rusted gears and the low droning hum of coolant circulation pipes.
No natural light.
Industrial-grade halogen lamps lit the entire underground space a sickly white.
Occupying the center of one's vision was a black-and-red colossus of steel, more than twenty meters tall.
It was like an iron-blooded god abandoned in some ancient temple, half-crouched between enormous load-bearing braces.
The heavy armor plating gave off a cold metallic sheen under the lights, its massive arms hanging at its sides, fingers spread, as if waiting for a command that would never come.
Wotan.
A super-large decisive-battle humanoid weapon.
From blueprint to physical body, from fundraising on the surface to forging in the depths of the earth.
A full ten years.
And at this moment, atop the enormous armor plate at Wotan's foot that had been used as a makeshift workbench, an argument that had lasted forty minutes was finally reaching its end.
"—Enough, Joachim!"
Tesla slammed the wrench in her hand down hard onto the workbench.
That T-shaped wrench, which had been with her for ten years, struck the metal surface with a muffled thud, the echo bouncing back and forth several times through the empty underground space before fading away.
Her coveralls were covered in grease stains and metal shavings.
Her red hair was tied haphazardly behind her head, loose strands plastered to her forehead.
After slamming the table she stood in place, panting several times, her chest heaving violently—but it wasn't rage. It was the kind of exhaustion that had accumulated over far too many years, until at last the very marrow of her bones had been wrung dry of its final scrap of patience.
"Ten years." Her voice was pressed very low, each word as if dragged out of her throat. "Ten years. This money would've been enough for me and Einstein to build three national-level laboratories on the Mu Continent, do you know that? Three!"
Tesla held up three fingers and waved them in front of Welt's face.
These hands had once been the most precise experimental operators to grace the covers of academic journals; now they were as rough as those of an old master craftsman who had toiled a lifetime in a workshop.
"But you? You took all the money, every cent of profit from Anti-Entropy Entertainment, every penny earned from Arahato—and poured it all, all of it, into this hunk of iron!"
Tesla whirled around and drove a fist into the armor plating of Wotan's shin.
Her knuckles struck the cold steel with a dull, muffled sound. She didn't withdraw her fist, just left it pressed there, her shoulders trembling faintly.
"Honkai invasion! Ten years ago you were already talking about a Honkai invasion! But don't you yourself know just how peaceful this world is?! Where's the Honkai? Where's the disaster?"
"Your so-called Herrschers, your so-called Valkyries, your so-called Honkai Beasts—they all exist only inside your head!"
She finally turned back around to look at the man sitting in the folding chair.
Welt Yang said nothing.
He sat on the folding metal chair beside Wotan's right ankle joint, both hands folded over his knees, his back hunched.
He wasn't wearing a suit, only a faded gray pullover that had been washed many times.
His glasses had slid to the middle of his nose, and he didn't bother pushing them back up.
Looking at him like this, Tesla felt as though something had brutally clogged up her chest.
She opened her mouth, wanting to say something else harsh, but by the time it reached her lips it all turned into a long, trembling sigh.
She couldn't bring herself to do it.
She couldn't keep cursing at that face.
Einstein, who had been standing on the other side of the workbench the whole time, quietly leafing through a folder, spoke up at this moment.
"Joachim." Einstein closed the folder.
On that face which always wore a calm expression, her brow was now slightly furrowed, as if she were solving an equation that simply could not be solved.
"The [Star Sea] research team on the Mu Continent sent their tenth invitation this morning." She paused. "The tenth one."
Einstein gently set the folder down on the workbench and pushed it toward Welt.
"Tesla and I are people too. We have our own pursuits, we also want to make real breakthroughs in our respective fields. We've already spent ten years on Wotan—the most golden ten years of our lives."
Her gaze lifted from the folder and settled on Welt's hunched back.
"As things stand, truly activating Wotan is impossible—the most critical energy problem has no solution whatsoever, not at our current level of technology."
Einstein sighed.
"I've run the precise calculations. Even if we drained the entire power reserve of all of Arc City for a single one-time discharge—"
"Thirty seconds." Tesla picked up the thread, her voice hoarse. "At most it could make this hunk of iron move for thirty seconds. What can you do in thirty seconds? It could barely even lift an arm."
The underground space fell silent again.
The fluid inside the coolant pipes gurgled, sounding especially jarring in the vast space.
Welt finally raised his head.
He looked at these two women who had stayed by his side for ten years.
Tesla's eyes were red-rimmed, her lips pressed tightly into a line.
Einstein's expression was still calm, but her left hand gripped the corner of the folder, crumpling its plastic cover into deep creases.
Clearly.
This farce, more than ten years long, had finally come to its end.
"I understand." Welt's throat bobbed. "I'm sorry."
"Don't you—" Tesla's head snapped up, her index finger pointing at him, her lips quivering twice, but in the end she said nothing at all.
She turned her face sharply away, snatched her toolbox from the workbench, and strode toward the elevator.
The sound of her combat boots striking the metal floor grew farther and farther away.
Einstein did not immediately follow.
She gave Welt one last look.
"Sorry."
Then she turned and left.
The muffled thud of the elevator doors closing was like a heavy hammer striking the empty underground space.
The echo circled Wotan's enormous body for a long while before slowly dissipating.
Only Welt was left now.
He sat in the folding chair and tilted his head back.
Wotan's chest armor plate was directly overhead.
Ten years ago, when he first drew the blueprint, he had imagined a miniature sun installed on the inner side of this armor plate—an eternal energy core powerful enough to drive the entire machine.
Now there was nothing there.
Only exposed cables and unfinished couplings, like a dissected, hollow chest cavity.
He lowered his head and looked at his own hands folded over his knees.
When had it all begun.
Those images.
The earliest fragments of memory had appeared in the winter of his seventh year.
On a night burning with fever, he had seen another version of himself.
That self wore a dark long trench coat and the exact same glasses, standing on the bridge of an enormous flying warship.
Beneath his feet lay the ruins of a city ravaged beyond recognition.
The sky was torn into irregular purple rifts, and from those rifts poured countless monsters of twisted form.
That was the Honkai.
He saw himself raise his hand.
"O tyrant of the heavens, behold the way the stars are shattered!"
That self proclaimed something in a tone so calm it was nearly cruel.
Blue light burst forth from his palm, transforming into countless precise geometric constructs that ground the enemies before him into dust.
That was the Authority of the Herrscher of Reason.
Later, the images changed.
The war of the Honkai had ended; that self had left Earth and crossed the Star Sea.
He saw a train racing through the cosmos.
The Astral Express.
There were many people aboard the train.
A pink-haired girl, always grinning as she held up a camera to photograph everything.
A taciturn young man, gripping a long lance, a hidden secret buried deep in his eyes.
And a red-haired woman, sitting in the conductor's cabin brewing coffee, whose presence reminded him of someone distant, someone who was no longer there.
They called him "Uncle Yang."
Later, the train encountered an Emanator of Destruction, Foehn.
That power was too overwhelming—so overwhelming that even with all his strength he could not withstand it.
The train was burning.
His companions were retreating.
He chose to stay behind to cover them.
—I am Welt Yang. I am a human being.
Those were his last words in that world.
Welt took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger.
Fine particles of dust clung to the lenses.
He didn't wipe them, only set the glasses on his knee.
Without the glasses to shield it, the exhaustion on that face was laid utterly bare.
His eye sockets were sunken, the dark circles beneath his eyes nearly seeping down to his cheekbones.
That voice was still there.
Ever since he had that dream, deep in his mind there had always been a voice repeating the same sentence.
The Honkai will descend.
Not today, not tomorrow.
But it will come.
It will rob this world of its peace.
He believed it.
He had no choice but to believe it—because he had seen it.
He had seen cities reduced to ash in purple flames, seen innocent people screaming and dying beneath the bite of Honkai Beasts, seen an entire civilization crushed beneath the wheels of the Honkai.
He would not allow all of this to play out again in this peaceful world.
So with every cent earned by Anti-Entropy Entertainment, he built Wotan deep underground.
He had sought out many people.
Top physicists, materials scientists, energy engineers.
He had tried to explain that threat in the most scientific way possible—he drew anatomical diagrams of Honkai Beasts, calculated the theoretical destructive force of Honkai energy, even worked out mathematical models of a city's collapse.
No one believed him.
"Mr. Yang, your imagination is remarkable, but these things are better suited for your games."
"Joachim, I suggest you see a psychiatrist."
"Have you been watching too many sci-fi films?"
A producer of games and animation.
A madman whose every word was "Honkai," "Herrscher," "the cataclysm of humanity."
In the end, only Tesla and Einstein had been willing to stay.
But now, even they had left.
Welt turned his gaze back to Wotan.
That enormous humanoid weapon crouched silently beneath the dim lights.
Without an energy core, Wotan was nothing more than a twenty-meter-tall hollow shell of steel.
It was an expensive tomb that would never awaken.
Perhaps the dream really should end.
He covered his face with both hands.
Through the gaps between his fingers slipped the droning of the coolant pipes and the mechanical noise of the elevator running in the distance.
Perhaps Tesla was right.
Perhaps those memories really were just a dream, just his own hallucination.
Perhaps—
The phone in his pocket buzzed once.
Welt ignored it.
It buzzed again.
Still he did not move.
The phone began to vibrate continuously.
Notification chimes came one after another, as if someone were frantically flooding his messaging app with messages.
Welt lowered his hands from his face, put his glasses back on, and pulled out the phone.
On the screen was the work group chat for Anti-Entropy Entertainment's planning department.
The group messages had already scrolled past where the top could be seen.
Every single message was discussing the same thing.
A message that @'d everyone jumped to the very top.
The sender was the company's marketing director.
"Everyone!!! Have you seen it??? That PV from miHoYo's new company??? Holy crap this thing is insane, the whole web is talking about it! Eden and Elysia both endorsed them! That studio in the Arc City Tower we looked into before! The quality of this PV is absolutely absurd! Go watch it now, everyone!"
Below the message was a video link.
Welt furrowed his brow.
He had never paid much attention to industry competitors—Anti-Entropy Entertainment's gaming business existed mostly to bankroll the Wotan project, and he himself had no interest in market competition.
At some unknown point, that Welt Yang who loved mecha and anime, who enjoyed games, had quietly vanished.
What clung to a wretched existence in this world was merely a walking corpse, guarding an old dream that would never wake, stubbornly trying to protect humanity in the name of the world.
How many years had it been since he had shown a genuine smile? The last time he had smiled, it seemed, was on the very first day Wotan's construction began.
He had been drawing blueprints, sketching out a grand future with Tesla, while Tesla and Einstein argued over exactly what kind of armaments Wotan should be equipped with—
They had still been young back then. At least the version of him in this world had still been young.
But now.
Those golden ten-some years of his life had become a dream of the past.
Perhaps the dream really had come to the time it should end.
Welt drew a deep breath.
He tapped open the link.
The video's title met his eyes.
The First Teaser PV for Honkai Impact 3rd.
—Honkai.
Those two words were like a red-hot iron needle, stabbing into Welt's eyes until they ached.
His thumb hovered above the screen, frozen.
Then he pressed play.
The prelude sounded.
The clouds were torn apart.
A white-haired girl, her back to the setting sun, leapt from the deck of a warship ten thousand meters in the air—
—That warship.
—That model.
The orange-red energy lines on that suit of armor.
Welt's fingers began to tremble.
The light of the phone screen reflected in his abruptly widened eyes, dyeing his entire pupils a cold blue-white.
That was a Schicksal transport ship.
And that girl descending from the sky—
He knew her.
In those countless fragments of memory from sleepless nights of tossing and turning, he had seen this face.
Seen this white-haired girl who smiled like a fool yet fought with reckless, life-or-death abandon.
She was—Kiana Kaslana.
Welt shot up from the folding chair.
The chair toppled backward, crashing onto the metal floor with an ear-splitting clatter, the echo bouncing back and forth among Wotan's enormous steel frame.
His hand clutched the phone, his fingers blanching white from the excessive force.
The video on the screen was still playing. The Valkyries' combat scenes, the models of the Honkai Beasts, even the way those energy particles diffused—
It all matched.
It matched, down to the last detail, the fragments of memory that everyone had dismissed as the ravings of a madman.
In that dim underground space beneath Wotan's feet, thick with the smell of rust and coolant, the hand with which Welt held the phone could no longer keep itself from trembling.
He tilted his head back, looking up at that steel colossus that had stood silent for ten years.
The droning of the coolant pipes continued.
The halogen lamps still lit everything a sickly white.
Nothing had changed.
Yet he understood—everything had already changed.
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