The name "Starfire Furnace" involved no figure of speech whatsoever. It was a meat grinder in the most literal sense of the word.
Over the past three full weeks of hellish special training, Susannah Manatt felt as though she had died a hundred times over.
Thirty-kilometer weighted cross-country marches, run until her stomach cramped and she knelt in the mud vomiting up sour, bitter bile.
Unrestricted close-quarters combat with no protective gear, where those grizzled old veterans slammed her into the concrete again and again until there wasn't a single unbruised patch of flesh left on her body.
And yet, propped up by that almost pigheaded obsession lodged in her skull — I want to be a hero — she swallowed her own broken teeth and never once, not a single time, shouted the codeword for quitting: "Abandon."
But the reality of the battlefield has never had any patience for hot-blooded fairy tales.
In the last brutal combined tactical evaluation, Susannah had thrown her very life into it — and still, her wretched baseline fitness and dismal tactical instincts hung on the squad like a slab of pig iron, dragging the entire assault timetable to a crawl.
The final scoresheet was cold and glaring.
Squad [Sin Mal & Susannah], by an absolute margin, ranked dead last out of the two-hundred-fifty-trainee formation.
On the raised platform at the head of the formation.
Rita Rossweisse stood in a dark instructor's uniform, a thin scoresheet pinched between her fingers.
That impeccably elegant smile was still on her face, but in the gentlest voice imaginable she delivered the cruelest ultimatum:
"I'm afraid I have bad news, Private Sin, Private Susannah."
Rita's gaze swept over the two mud-caked figures standing at the tail of the line.
"If your squad finishes last again in the final examination, then under the joint-responsibility rule, both of you will be stripped of your training qualification and sent straight back to your original units."
The dismissal whistle had barely sounded when Sin Mal, who had been bottling it up all day, finally blew.
Bang!
Her heavy tactical helmet smashed into the hard concrete, the visor shattering across the ground.
Sin whipped her head around, those crimson eyes fixed on Susannah, teeth grinding audibly.
"I must have the worst goddamn luck in eight generations!" Sin roared into Susannah's face, spit practically flying onto her cheek. "If you want to play make-believe hero games, then get lost and do it somewhere else! Quit dragging me down with you!"
Susannah stood rooted in place, filthy fingers clenched tight around the hem of her camo fatigues.
Facing Sin's fury, she didn't argue back, and she didn't cry out loud.
She only bit down hard on a lower lip drained of color, a bottomless self-loathing churning behind her eyes.
She really had staked her whole life on this.
So why… why was she still incapable of doing anything right?
Late that night, the searchlights of the Starfire Base swept back and forth across the sky.
Aching all over and sunk to the very bottom of her spirits, Susannah couldn't sleep at all.
As she had every night for the past three weeks, she slipped quietly out of the barracks and tucked herself into the thick grass at the edge of the parade ground.
At this hour every evening she hid here, secretly watching Supreme Commander Su Yu push his body through its limits.
Under the moonlight, the man was stripped to the waist, drenched in sweat.
He was running some kind of high-pressure weighted training no ordinary person could even comprehend. Every swell of muscle, every crack of bone came paired with the staggering heat radiating off his opened second-stage Genetic Lock.
Watching that back — a man already so strong, still wringing every last drop of potential out of himself — had been Susannah's single greatest pillar of support through three weeks that were worse than dying.
She sat hugging her knees, chin resting on her arms, quietly nursing her misery.
Then a gentle, level voice came from ahead of her.
"No need to hide, Susannah. Come out and talk."
Susannah jolted so hard the stray tuft of hair on her head stood straight up.
Face burning, she shuffled out of the shadows like a rabbit caught in the open, hands fluttering uselessly as she stammered that she'd head right back to the barracks.
Su Yu picked up a towel, wiped himself down without much care, then walked over and sat cross-legged on the grass.
He patted the spot beside him and held out a warm can of cocoa.
"Sit. Rough day? Want to talk to your supreme commander about it?"
Faced with this man who was so approachable, without a shred of airs about him — and feeling the warmth of that hot cocoa spreading through her palms — the wall Susannah had spent all day propping up burst all at once.
She lowered her head, and fat tears splashed one after another into the dirt.
In broken fragments, she told him about the impractical "hero dream" she'd carried since childhood, the one everyone had always laughed at.
She told him about her admiration for Su Yu, and about the deep guilt of having dragged Sin Mal down today.
"Supreme Commander… I really am useless. I thought that if I just tried hard enough I could become a hero, but I was too naive. I never had any business trying…"
Su Yu listened in silence.
To Susannah's surprise, he didn't laugh at her. Instead, the corner of his mouth curved into a soft, nostalgic smile.
"You want to be a hero? I actually know someone just like you. Head stuffed full of the exact same idiotic notions."
Seeing the astonishment in Susannah's eyes, Su Yu let the smile fade.
"Listen, Susannah. Nobody in this world is born a hero."
Su Yu pointed at himself.
"And I'm nowhere near as great as you imagine. Not long ago I was deadweight too — someone who couldn't even steer his own fate, just drifting wherever the current took him."
"Saving the world. That's an awfully grand phrase."
Su Yu looked her straight in the eye.
"But the reason I claw my way toward strength is that a lot of people helped me. All I want is to do everything I can to protect the people close to me. That's all."
He paused, then put the question that cut straight to the soul.
"People admire heroes because they long for strength. But what actually holds a person up long enough to become one is a reason."
"Susannah, you have a reason too, don't you? Something that makes you need to get stronger no matter what, something you want to protect no matter what. Go back and think that reason through properly. It'll serve you better than any amount of physical training."
Meanwhile.
Sin Mal stalked irritably back toward the barracks.
The room was pitch dark.
That clumsy crybaby somehow still wasn't back.
"Tch. Where'd she go to bawl her eyes out this time."
Sin stomped over to her bunk — and froze mid-step.
There, on her nightstand.
Several cans of expensive muscle-recovery drink were lined up in a neat row, along with a tube of imported ointment for bruises and sprains.
And pinned beneath the ointment was a pink sticky note decorated with an ugly little stick-figure doodle.
The paper was crammed edge to edge with Susannah's exhaustive self-criticism of every tactical mistake she'd made that day.
On the last line, the pen had been pressed so hard it tore through the back of the page:
[I'm so, so sorry about today! I swear I'll work myself to death to catch up! I absolutely, positively will not hold Senior Sin back again!!!]
Looking at those few lines of silly, guileless, painfully sincere handwriting, Sin Mal felt as though an invisible hand had closed hard around her heart and squeezed.
She'd grown up in an orphanage, where survival had meant stealing and fighting.
She believed in fists and nothing else. She had never once been on the receiving end of kindness like this — unreserved, unguarded, even a little stupid-looking in its earnestness.
Sin raked a hand roughly through her hair, crushed the note into a ball — then very carefully smoothed it flat again and shoved it into her pocket.
"Tch. Annoying idiot…"
Sin muttered through gritted teeth.
"It's not like yours truly is touched or anything! I just don't want to get cut, that's all!" Lights-out was closing in fast, and Chief Instructor Rita's line — "anyone who doesn't sleep properly will learn tomorrow what real hell feels like" — was still fresh in her mind.
Sin glanced at Susannah's empty bunk, clicked her tongue in irritation, and turned to charge out into the dark to go find the troublesome fool.
Starfire Base, the abandoned warehouse district at the far edge of the grounds.
Susannah had said goodbye to Su Yu, her head full of nothing but the question of what her reason for becoming a hero might be. She had just reached the empty lot when she ran headlong into Sin Mal, who came storming up with murder in her stride.
"Where the hell have you been in the middle of the night?!"
The moment Sin saw her, relief loosened something in her chest — but her mouth opened up with all guns blazing out of pure habit. "Lights-out is any second, do you not have a brain in there?! You want that devil maid to skin you alive tomorrow, fine, just don't drag me down with you!"
Susannah's nerves were already raw, and the small patch of peace Su Yu had just mended in her was torn open again by Sin's words.
"I never wanted to drag you down!" she shouted back through her tears. "I just feel useless! I'm just trying to figure out how to get stronger!"
"Shut your mouth, you scrawny little chicken!"
"You're the mad dog who only knows how to curse at people!"
A month of accumulated pressure snapped in both of them at the same instant.
They slugged each other across the cheek, hard — and then collapsed onto the grass side by side, strength gone, chests heaving as they gulped down air.
Everything around them went completely quiet.
"Senior Sin." Susannah lay on the grass, looking up at the night sky.
"Spit it out." Sin rubbed her bruising cheek and answered sourly.
"I've been nothing but trouble for you this whole time… I'm sorry."
"Heh. At least you know it."
A moment passed.
"Senior Sin."
"What now?"
"Do you think… we can pass the final examination tomorrow?"
"…"
Sin Mal didn't answer right away.
She lay back on the turf, looking up at the stars out here far from the city lights, and suddenly asked a question of her own.
"Why do you want to pass? Why do you… want to be a hero?"
Susannah blinked. "Because I've looked up to heroes since I was little. I want to become one and protect people."
"Just because of some pie-in-the-sky wish you had as a kid? Strength you got out of cartoons?" There was a thread of mockery in Sin's voice.
"Is that… not allowed?" Susannah shot back.
"…"
Sin stared into the deep sky and slowly let out a long, stale breath.
"My life wasn't as bright and shiny as yours."
Her voice dropped lower.
"I was taught from the start that the strong eat the weak. If you want to live, your fists have to be harder than anyone else's. If you can't beat somebody, you get ground under their heel, and then you starve."
"Senior Sin, I—"
"Hmph. Don't get the wrong idea. I'm not whining to you about my tragic backstory."
Sin sat up, folded her legs, and looked at the idiot in front of her with her nose red from crying.
"I just think… you're kind of amazing."
"Huh?" Susannah went blank.
"For some unrealistic hero dream, a pampered desk-job princess who couldn't wring a chicken's neck had the guts to show up at a devil's boot camp where people actually die." Something complicated moved through Sin's eyes. "You could've coasted on that cushy family of yours and lived out a comfortable life. You never had any reason to come suffer in this furnace."
"Are… are you praising me?" Susannah looked half overwhelmed.
"I just think you're a complete moron, that's all." Sin looked away and snorted. "But at least you're a whole lot better than those sanctimonious types up on their high horses who only care whether they live or die."
Sin got to her feet and looked down at Susannah sitting in the grass.
She held out her right fist.
"Hey. Idiot Susannah."
"H-here!"
"Tomorrow is the final examination. The one that decides whether we live or die."
"Yes!"
"The instructors didn't say what's in it. But you and I both know perfectly well it won't be some easy little drill."
"Yes!"
"But you've already worked hard." Rare acknowledgment crept into Sin's voice. "There was a gulf between you and those big beefy bastards from day one. Lasting this long without getting cut is already a miracle."
And no one knew better than Sin Mal that, given Susannah's originally pitiful physical baseline, everything she'd achieved so far had been a godlike overperformance bought by burning her own life as fuel.
"The instructor said tomorrow's final examination is extremely dangerous. There's a real chance the only standard for passing is… staying alive."
Sin Mal's gaze burned as she stared down at Susannah.
"Yours truly stays here selling her life because I'm chasing the greatest power there is, because I want the right to put the whole world under my heel."
"So what about you, Susannah?" Sin's eyes sharpened to a blade's edge. "For that unrealistic dream of yours, protecting the world — are you willing to put your own life on Death's scales as the wager?"
Susannah looked at Sin Mal.
And in her mind rose the image of Supreme Commander Su Yu, always silently grinding himself through inhuman training, preparing for some terrible crisis no one had named.
Three weeks of this program had already given Susannah a vague understanding.
The Starfire Furnace was absolutely not something as simple as a program to forge one elite special-operations unit.
The enemy waiting for them was, in all likelihood, some unknown monstrosity a hundred, a thousand times more terrifying than terrorist cells or warlord conflicts.
But—
Remembering the words Su Yu had spoken to her just a little while ago, Susannah drew a deep breath, and the last trace of timidity vanished from her eyes.
"Nobody is born a hero. That's what the person I respect most in the world taught me just now."
"But… we do have the right to choose to become one."
Susannah rose to her feet.
A reason for becoming a hero?
Sorry, Commander.
I still don't know what mine is.
But right now there was one thought and one thought only in Susannah's heart —
to pass tomorrow's final examination together with Senior Sin, and not let three weeks of both their efforts come to nothing.
She brushed the grass off her uniform and held out her own scraped, battered fist.
"Senior Sin. I'm ready."
Looking at this reborn Susannah, Sin's mouth slowly curled into an arrogant, feral grin.
"Good."
Sin's fist came up to meet hers, hard.
Their knuckles collided solidly under the cold, clear moon.
"Tomorrow, my life is in your hands, Susannah."
Sin paused, then let out the word that carried her highest possible approval. "No… partner."
Susannah's eyes went red again, but this time she laughed through the tears.
"Understood, Senior Sin. No — partner!"
And not far away, in the shadow of an abandoned storehouse.
Su Yu and Rita, who had been silently watching the whole thing, spoke in low voices.
"Well. It seems the squad that gave us the biggest headache — our dead-last pair — doesn't need us worrying over them anymore."
Rita stood in the darkness, watching the two girls bump fists under the moon, an elegant smile at the corner of her mouth.
"Hoho. That little speech of yours earlier really was quite moving, Lord Su Yu. Even a heartless assassin-maid like me found her blood running a bit hot listening to it."
Su Yu watched Susannah and Sin Mal walk shoulder to shoulder back toward the barracks, and something deep and expectant flickered in his eyes.
Outside the abandoned warehouses, the moonlight was slowly swallowed by a thick bank of cloud.
Once they'd confirmed that Susannah and Sin Mal had returned safely to the barracks, Su Yu and Rita walked side by side into the Starfire Base master control room, buried deep underground.
In the vast monitoring hall, only the screens of a few Anti-Entropy-built supercomputers still gave off their faint blue glow.
Clack.
Rita set two freshly brewed cups of black coffee on the metal console and turned toward Su Yu, who stood before the holographic sand table.
"Lord Su Yu, I've finished drafting the full psychological-induction script for tomorrow's final examination."
Rita's voice echoed through the empty room, carrying the cold precision that belonged to a top-tier assassin.
"Those veterans carry a blind sort of pride. If you want to remake them from the inside out, you'll need absolute despair to shatter their dependence on modern firearms completely."
She lifted her coffee, wine-red eyes fixed on him.
"But even the finest cook can't make a meal without rice. No conventional weapon or beast currently on this planet can produce the Outclassed by None level of terror we need. That special performer you promised me earlier… is he ready?"
"Of course."
Su Yu took a sip of coffee, the bitter liquid sliding down his throat and sharpening his mind another degree.
He tapped rapidly across the holographic control panel.
The main screen switched at once, showing the sealed alloy arena on the base's lowest level.
"Doctor Tesla and Einstein pulled an all-nighter yesterday to finish this little [work of art]." Su Yu hit the enter key.
As the command went through, a massive metal cylinder rose from the center of the arena on screen.
The hibernation hatch slid slowly open — and there in the frame stood a hulking, ghastly beast the size of an armored vehicle, pale all over, plated in pink armor.
The cold pressure it radiated made the heart stutter even through a screen.
"A Chariot-class Honkai Beast?" Rita's eyes sharpened instantly. "Impossible. Where would you get a living Honkai Beast?"
"Just sleight of hand."
Su Yu gave a quiet laugh, fingers gliding across the keyboard.
"Kill the optical camouflage and the holographic projection."
On screen, ripples of current suddenly washed across the monstrous beast's surface.
Then its pale shell and pink armor dissolved like a mirage.
What stood revealed before Rita's eyes was a stripped-down chassis, its outer coating removed, its interior packed with intricate mechanical drive shafts and hydraulic lines — a custom-built Anti-Entropy Titan mech frame!
"This is…"
Rita leaned in toward the screen.
"Thanks to the polymer composite material Bronie procured for us."
The corner of Su Yu's mouth curved with pride.
"Doctor Tesla blended in Pseudo-Soulsteel techniques and produced armor that not even armor-piercing rounds can punch through, then tailored an exoskeletal shell out of it for this Titan frame."
Su Yu turned around and laid out the core logic of the deception for her. "Tomorrow, in that arena, paired with Anti-Entropy's top-grade solid holographic projection tech, what those recruits will see is a monster immune to every kinetic weapon mankind has."
"Every hot weapon they're so proud of will hit it and not leave so much as a scratch."
"And that's not all."
Su Yu raised his right hand, a sphere glowing with faint red light rolling across his palm — the Divine Key, Star of Eden.
"To make the fear feel real, I'll be hidden nearby when the exam begins, using the Star of Eden to lay a gravity field around the machine. That crushing pressure, the kind that feels like it's about to pulp your internal organs, will perfectly simulate the suffocation of Honkai energy radiation."
Having heard out this thoroughly deranged plan of technological forgery, Rita fell silent for a full five seconds.
Then the elegant maid let slip a low, helpless chuckle.
"Newly developed armor plating, wrapped around an Anti-Entropy Titan frame, draped in a coat of holographic projection, and finally a Divine Key to fake the aura…"
There was genuine awe now in the look Rita gave him.
"Lord Su Yu, all this trouble just to give two hundred and fifty rookies one unforgettable lesson in real combat. You really have taken scientific fraud to its absolute pinnacle."
"Nothing to be done about it."
Su Yu shrugged, his gaze returning to the mechanical behemoth on the screen.
"I can't gamble these Kindlings' lives on a real monster. But I have to let them taste true despair at least once."
His eyes turned keen in the dim light.
"The stage is set. The props are ready."
"Tomorrow morning, the show begins. Let's see whether, standing before a doomsday nightmare they genuinely cannot beat, these self-proclaimed elite veterans wet their pants — or whether they do what I'm hoping for, and carve a road out with nothing but flesh and blood!"
[Ding!]
[Starfire Crucible Project: Final Test has begun!]
[Description: The final examination is now open. Host is requested to do everything in his power during tomorrow's test to make these green recruits taste despair. Rewards will be settled on a tiered scale according to the number who pass the final test. Good luck, Host.]
[Note: In the face of the doomsday that will inevitably come, the only power humanity has with which to oppose it is — courage.]
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