"This isn't a goddamn test! This is a massacre!!"
"Instructor! You're killing us! You lunatics are going to answer for this in court!!"
Desperate roars and wails poured through the comm channel.
Behind the one-way glass of the main control room, Rita Rossweisse simply held her black tea with elegant poise and watched it all unfold below without a flicker of feeling.
For an S-rank Valkyrie of Schicksal, dying in the line of duty on the battlefield against the Honkai was nothing more than a cold number.
And she knew perfectly well that this was only a "simulation test" designed to break their bones. Not a real meat grinder.
But the Shenzhou elder standing behind her wore an expression graver than any he had shown before.
He watched the thing below - immune to conventional firepower, harvesting the lives of elite soldiers the way a scythe takes wheat.
"Mr. Yang..." The elder drew a deep breath, his voice tight. "That thing... is that the doomsday you people keep speaking of? The one due to descend six months from now?"
Welt Yang pushed the glasses up the bridge of his nose, studied the casualty figures on the screen, and slowly shook his head.
"I'm afraid not, sir. Set against the true apocalypse, a monster of this grade is little more than a pawn sent ahead to scout the road."
The elder's pupils contracted sharply.
"That game you produced, the one called Honkai Impact 3rd... all those hopeless settings inside it-"
"Exactly what you're thinking right now," Welt cut in calmly. "None of it was invented to shock an audience. It is the blood-soaked truth of another world."
"Those monsters will genuinely descend on this world six months from now."
The elder's hands clamped down on the railing as he watched the formation below thin out under the trampling of the Battle-Car Class Honkai Beast.
He understood, of course, that throwing flesh and light weapons at a creature weighing dozens of tons was no measure of humanity's real combat strength.
If they scoured the ground with heavy ordnance - bunker-buster missiles, thermobaric bombs, or, at the furthest extreme, nuclear weapons...
But the bitterness caught up with him fast. He knew exactly what it would mean to drop nuclear weapons on densely populated home soil.
It would be humanity executing its own destruction.
"I know what you're thinking." Welt seemed to see straight through him. "It's true - a high-yield warhead is more than enough to wipe out low-tier Honkai Beasts and Zombies like these. But against an Emperor-class Honkai Beast, or worse, a Herrscher who commands an Authority..."
"The nuclear arsenal humanity takes such pride in becomes utterly meaningless. Worse, the contamination and radiation left by the blasts would breed mutated horrors with even greater adaptability."
The elder's head snapped around, and he stared with something like astonishment at this bespectacled, mild-mannered president of Anti-Entropy Entertainment.
"Mr. Yang, how do you come to know all this so precisely?"
Old Yang took a silent sip of black tea, his gaze passing through the glass as if it reached the distant snowfields of Siberia.
"Because..."
His voice was soft, yet it carried a weight beyond words.
"Once, I stood for all of humanity and issued a challenge to a god."
Cut back to the slaughterhouse below.
In the five minutes that conversation had taken, the two-hundred-fifty-strong formation had lost close to fifty men - a horrifying figure.
And that was only because the wide-open arena let them spread out fully, the veterans fighting a desperate hit-and-run action to drag out the clock.
Against a monster no bullet could pierce, the remaining two hundred could only grind their teeth to powder and plug the gaps in their line with bodies and grenades, holding on to buy the artillery crew every second they could.
"It's done! Load it, fast!"
At a terrible cost, in the blind corner beside the armory, the twin-barreled rapid-fire cannon had finally been salvaged and assembled.
"Everybody get the hell out of my way!!!"
Face streaked black with soot, Sin Mal shoved the loader aside and dropped into the gunner's seat herself.
Her eyes locked onto the monster in the distance, and her roar carried across the entire arena.
That roar sounded like music from heaven.
The soldiers barely holding on saw the first light of hope; the despair on their faces gave way to wild elation.
"Get down! Everyone down!"
The acting commander screamed the order until his voice tore.
Sin Mal slammed the firing button without hesitation.
"BOOOOOM-!!!"
Two high-explosive armor-piercing shells shrieked across the open ground and struck dead center on the broad chest plate of the Battle-Car Class Honkai Beast.
The blast rolled through the whole sealed underground space.
To soldiers on the edge of collapse, that firelight - the very emblem of death and destruction - was more beautiful in that instant than the most brilliant fireworks.
Thick smoke boiled across the center of the arena.
The ground stopped shaking. The heavy footfalls were gone.
"Did we get it?"
"A direct hit with that kind of yield would flip a heavy tank, wouldn't it?!"
The hollow, weak-kneed relief of survivors swept through the fewer than two hundred still standing.
Wrung out in body and mind, more than a few veterans felt their legs give the moment they confirmed the monster had fallen, and sagged onto the cold alloy floor, dragging in huge lungfuls of air.
"Holy shit!"
"Beautiful work! Sin! Susannah!"
"Dead last in the rankings every single day, but when it counts she handles heavy weapons like a pro!"
Praise poured across the comm channel toward the gun position, every word of it heartfelt.
As far as they were concerned, this murderous, inhuman test was finally over.
And then.
Sin Mal sat at the gun, the arrogant grin not yet fully spread across her lips, when her animal instincts screamed a frantic warning of death.
Deep inside the smoke, a hair-raising, high-frequency energy vibration was climbing fast.
"No - that thing isn't dead!"
Sin Mal's pupils shrank to pinpricks.
The next instant-
A blinding purple high-energy particle beam tore through the dense smoke like the reaper's scythe and swept straight toward the gun position, unstoppable as a landslide.
"Run!!!"
That one shrill cry was all Sin Mal had time for.
She launched herself up and hurled the still-dazed Susannah Manatt into the cover pit beside them.
"BOOM-!!!"
The searing beam scraped past just above their heads, and the gun position was blown into a heap of scrap iron.
Farther out, the soldiers still slumped on the floor had no time to run.
A thousandth of a second before the beam reached them, Su Yu - hidden among the ranks - worked the Authority of the Herrscher of the Void with absolute precision.
A miniature Spatial Rift split open beneath their feet and "swallowed" them whole, teleporting them into the safety of the medical bay.
But to the survivors watching-
All they saw was that terrible purple light sweeping past, and comrades who had been laughing and joking a heartbeat earlier were vaporized on the spot. Not a pinch of ash. Not even a scream left behind.
Despair.
This was true despair, the kind with no bottom to it.
The smoke cleared completely.
Su Yu offered no mercy. He dialed the crushing gravity of the Star of Eden up another notch.
And the Battle-Car Class Honkai Beast, its pale body untouched, not one plate of armor so much as cracked, ground the last sliver of luck in every heart present into dust.
"Impossible... A direct hit from heavy artillery can't even leave a mark on it?!"
"This has to be a lie... That's not a monster flesh and blood can fight!!"
"How much time is left?! It's only been ten damn minutes?! There's no way we hold out!"
"Hold it together! All we have to do is last until the clock runs out! All squads, abandon the fixed line - break into small units and fight independently!!"
The commander shouted himself hoarse trying to steady the ranks.
In truth, after that beam had dropped them from heaven straight into hell, the fewer than two hundred left were a hair away from total psychological collapse.
Instinct and the raw will to live were the only things still holding them up.
Anyone could see it. This unit's morale had been shattered by a monster it could not beat.
And what followed was stranger, and crueler.
The Honkai Beast behaved as though it had been given human intelligence.
It began deliberately singling out the squads that had surrendered to fear - the ones who only wanted to run and hide, who had stopped firing, stopped looking for a way to break the deadlock - and "cleared" them away with beam after beam.
Meanwhile, the soldiers whose legs shook but who still fought desperately to organize a counterattack, who kept squeezing their triggers, somehow got "lucky" again and again, always slipping outside the monster's kill zone.
Behind the ruins of the gun position.
Susannah Manatt looked at Sin Mal's left arm - badly dislocated by the impact when she had thrown herself over her - and the tears finally broke through.
"Senior Sin! Your arm-"
"Shut up, Susannah! Quit sniveling!"
Sin Mal leaned against the barricade, jaw clenched, cold sweat sheeting her forehead.
She gripped the dislocated arm with her right hand, let out a low growl, and with a hard click forced the joint back into place.
Then she bit the cap off a military-grade high-potency adrenaline shot and drove the needle into her own thigh without hesitating.
Feeling the drug boil through her veins and take the edge off the pain, Sin fought down the spasms, leaned out from cover, and fixed her stare on the Honkai Beast tearing the arena apart not far away.
"Damn it... That madwoman Rita really doesn't have a scrap of feeling in her. This is a mission nobody could complete. Every one of us is going to die here today..."
Susannah looked at the strained line of Sin's profile and tugged helplessly at the hem of her uniform. "Then what do we do, Senior Sin? Are we going to end up like them... with not even ashes left?"
"Run, Susannah."
Sin Mal turned her head, and her eyes were oddly calm.
She stood up, pulled the last two Flashbangs from her belt, and pressed them into Susannah's hands.
"Do everything you can. Use that small frame of yours - hide, keep moving, stay out of sight in this arena. Don't draw that thing's attention."
As she spoke, she turned away, her gaze settling on the blasted weapons crate beside them, on the high explosives and anti-tank grenades scattered across the floor, and on a custom-built high-alloy blast shield.
Susannah went still as a strong wave of unease rose in her chest.
"What about you, Senior Sin? Aren't you going to hide with me?"
"Ha..."
Sin drew a long breath, a bitter, self-mocking smile curling at the corner of her mouth.
"Susannah, you and I are not the same."
"I'm a stray that grew up in an orphanage, a mad dog that'll bite anything to keep breathing. Nobody's waiting for me to become a hero. Nobody's left a light burning at home for me."
Sin looked back at her, and for once something close to tenderness flickered across her face.
"But you're different. You have a family that loves you, a comfortable home, and a whole good life you're supposed to go and enjoy-"
"You're an idiot whose idea of an apology is a stick figure scribbled in a notebook. And I'm not going to stand here and watch a fool like you die in some godforsaken hole that doesn't even have a name."
Susannah understood exactly what she intended.
She was going alone to fight that monster to the death.
"But Senior Sin! Have you lost your mind?! Even artillery couldn't dent that thing - what are you going to beat it with?!"
Susannah clung to her arm, sobbing, refusing to let go.
"Listen to me, Susannah. I'm not throwing my life away for nothing."
Sin inhaled deeply, her gaze turning as sharp and cold as a blade's edge.
"That last exchange showed me one fatal detail. The monster's movements... they're stiff. That's right - there's a lag to them, nothing like a living creature. More like mechanical joints."
Sin pointed at the fine seam where the Honkai Beast's foreleg met its body.
"That white shell on the outside is freakishly hard, I'll give it that. But the armor at the joints? There's absolutely a chance that can be punched through!"
"If I can close the distance, break the defense at the weak point of the joint, and jam these high explosives straight into the gap before setting them off... maybe we can actually kill the thing."
"At the very least, that much yield will cripple one of its legs and buy the rest of you the time to stay alive!"
Susannah's eyes went wide with shock. "But how are you supposed to get near it?! It's enormous - even the wind pressure off a careless swing of its foreleg would throw you halfway across the arena!"
"That's not for you to worry about-"
Sin shoved her hard, sending Susannah sprawling into the safe cover beside them.
"Run, Susannah. And then... you go on living. Properly."
With her back to Susannah, Sin lashed several large packs of high explosive tight against her tactical vest.
"...Heh." She laughed at herself. "Shame. Never did get to see that room you told me about, the one back at your house with a whole wall of jewels in it. That's a bit of a regret..."
The next moment.
Sin Mal armed herself to the teeth.
She knew the RPG launcher and fragmentation grenades in her hands couldn't punch through the monster's frontal armor. But when the twin cannon had hit it, the thing hadn't fired its beam back right away - which proved that the "shock" delivered by a powerful kinetic impact absolutely worked.
And she was right. When the Titan mech Tesla was piloting took a high-intensity impact, its internal attitude-sensor system suffered a brief lag and dropped out.
That was Sin's one and only chance to get in close.
"She's insane! Who is that?!"
"Sin! Have you lost your damn mind?! Get back here! You're running straight to your death!"
Not far off, the veterans still working their hit-and-run pattern stared in shock at that small figure.
With enough explosive strapped to her back to blow an entire building into the sky, she wasn't backing off. She was charging the colossus head-on, a charge she never expected to return from.
"All of you shut the hell up!"
Sin Mal screamed it into the comm channel at the top of her lungs as she sprinted.
"If you don't want to die, then come with me! The armor at this thing's joints is weak - hit it with enough shock and it can be broken through!"
That roar landed.
The hundred-odd veterans still alive watched that back charging without the slightest fear of death.
And the terror and despair packed inside them underwent a strange chemical reaction.
The shame of having their pride as men trampled into the dirt boiled over into towering resentment and fury.
[Damn it! I've been a soldier half my life! I'm not cowering behind some little girl to scrape out a few more breaths!]
[Screw you and everything you crawled out of, monster! There isn't a single coward among the soldiers of Shenzhou!]
On the comm channel, a squad leader drenched head to foot in blood roared, eyes bloodshot:
[Sin! The plan! What's your damn plan?! Say it! We're following your lead! Even if we have to use our teeth, we'll tear a layer of hide off this monster for you!]
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