That had been Su Yu, hidden in the shadows, ordering Tesla in the control room to freeze the machine — a window carved open just for her, a chance to break the deadlock.
But right now Sin's mind was running at two hundred percent load.
She understood. There would be only one chance.
Miss it, and every last one of them would die with nothing left to bury.
[Listen up! There are still scattered single-soldier RPGs, high-explosive grenades and anti-tank rocket launchers all over this field! I want every one of you collecting as many of them as you can!]
Sin stared at the seams in the monster's joints and gave the most insane order the comm channel had ever carried.
[The instant you hear my mark, every single one of you opens fire on its front! A shock that violent will lock the thing up stiff for a dozen seconds or so!]
[Are you out of your damn mind?!]
The acting commander shouted over the channel, his voice shaking.
[A dozen seconds! In that time you'd have to land a precision strike on the weak point, cram the explosives in, and clear the blast radius before detonation?! No human being alive is that fast! Unless... unless you're already close enough, and you've given up on running entirely!]
"Who said anything about running?"
Sin Mal let out a cold laugh.
She swung the [Custom Anti-Impact Folding Shield] off her back — scavenged minutes ago from a weapons crate — and slammed it down hard in front of her.
Gears bit together with a run of mechanical clacks, and the heavy special-alloy shield unfolded in an instant.
Thick steel spikes punched out of its base like pile drivers, biting deep into the concrete and locking the shield rigid.
It could absorb the overwhelming majority of a frontal shockwave and its shrapnel.
But at this range, the blast's raw kinetic energy would still drive through the plate and hit her like a sledgehammer.
Ruptured organs. Snapped bones. There was no avoiding that ending.
Sin did not care.
Teeth clenched, she drove her last two military cardiac stimulants and a special recovery serum swiped from a medical crate straight into the vein of her neck, all at once.
"One minute..."
The drugs went off inside her like a furnace, and her eyes filled with threads of blood.
"Even one minute is enough. As long as I get this payload into its joint... I don't need to waste a single thought on how to escape."
In the handful of seconds Sin had spent thinking and setting up—
the veteran elites, every one of them hard-trained, had already taken position.
They dug every missile, gun and heavy weapon they could find out of the rubble, and more than a hundred black muzzles swung as one toward the steel behemoth at the center of the field.
[Sin: Quit dithering! Ready — FIRE!]
[Fire! FIRE!!!]
Sin's scream tore raw across the channel.
A rolling wall of thunder answered it.
Over a hundred RPG rockets and anti-armor grenades slammed into the Battle-Car Class Honkai Beast in the same instant.
The deafening blast sucked every scrap of oxygen out of the arena's center.
A fireball like a miniature sun tore up out of the ground.
A monstrous shockwave laced with a heat wave thousands of degrees hot rolled outward like a tsunami.
Crouched behind the impact shield, Sin Mal spat out a huge mouthful of blood.
Even with the plate between her and the blast, the shock traveling through the earth nearly pulped her organs in a single beat, and several ribs snapped with crisp little cracks.
But at the moment the heat and force began to bleed away, when the smoke hung thickest—
Sin moved.
The instant her foot came down, a sensation unlike anything she had ever known wrapped itself around her whole body.
The world in front of her had turned impossibly slow.
The gunsmoke churning through the air rolled at a visible, slow-motion crawl.
Across the field she could pick out the terror and the hope on her comrades' faces, even the tracks of sweat sliding down their skin.
She could hear her own battered heart beating at an impossible rhythm, like a war drum.
[Bullet Time].
And inside that strange state, she felt it sharply: a gaze locked onto her back, unblinking.
It came from Susannah's direction.
But... did a stare like that really belong to the Susannah who was always sniffling and crying?
Why was it so cold, so absolute, carrying an edge that made even her pulse stutter — pure, undiluted killing intent?
Sin had no time left to wonder.
For reasons she couldn't explain, the organs the blast had pulped and the bones it had snapped now itched with a tearing, maddening prickle, as if they were reassembling themselves at a speed that made no sense at all.
All she knew was that an agony a hundred times worse than burning alive was spreading through every cell in her body.
[First-Stage Genetic Lock: Open]!
With the terrifying bodily control the Genetic Lock granted her, Sin Mal bore that inhuman pain by brute will and never broke stride.
Her speed blew past the human ceiling. She became a smear of afterimage, closing under cover of the smoke on the Honkai Beast that the overload had frozen stiff.
"Now... BREAK!"
Sin loosed an animal roar and pulled a heavily modified high-frequency vibration alloy dagger with her right hand.
The blade shrieked in a piercing hum as she drove it, with every ounce of strength in her body, into the hairline armor seam of the beast's foreleg joint.
Armor split with a crisp, brittle crack.
That shell which had seemed beyond all challenge finally opened up in a jagged gash.
Sin could see straight inside it — sparking clusters of complex electronics and hydraulic lines.
She didn't hesitate for a heartbeat.
Every satchel charge and timed detonator on her body went into that wound, rammed as deep as her arms could push them.
"It worked!"
Wild joy flashed through her eyes.
But she had underestimated the reboot speed of Anti-Entropy's top-tier Titan mech.
Barely a tenth of a second after the last charge went in, the beast's motionless bulk let out a low, heavy roar. System reboot complete.
The massive foreleg swept out.
Sin Mal had no time to guard at all. Like a kite with its string cut, that appalling force whipped her clean off the ground and high into the air.
Blood traced a stark red line across the sky.
At the same moment—
the Honkai Beast's hollow head plating tilted upward, purple high-energy particles gathering furiously inside.
The emitter, capable of vaporizing steel, was aimed dead-on at Sin Mal, airborne with nothing to push off of.
"So... I ran out of time?"
Suspended up there, the sensory expansion of the Genetic Lock stretched her fall out toward infinity.
She watched the purple glow of her own death brighten, and felt the power inside her draining away.
"What a shame... I don't get to watch this thing get blown to pieces..."
The corner of Sin Mal's mouth curved into something almost peaceful.
She closed her eyes and spread her arms like a leaf withering on the wind, waiting quietly for the killing beam.
And then.
In the instant before that purple light left the barrel—
"Behind you, partner!"
A voice — calm, cold, and carrying a resolve beyond anything she had ever heard — came through the tactical earpiece, clear as glass.
A heartbeat later, a super-electromagnetic blue beam a hundred times brighter than the beast's own cannon ripped through the air from somewhere far back in the ruins.
It flew like a divine spear stitching heaven to earth and struck the beast's charging emitter dead center.
Two vast, utterly incompatible energies collided inside the muzzle.
The electromagnetic pulse threw the monster's energy circuits into reverse. The shot aborted, and the backlash touched off a world-ending chain detonation, a main gun bursting in its own breech.
In an explosion loud enough to lift the entire underground arena off its foundations, the head and chest plating of the Battle-Car Class Honkai Beast vanished into a brilliant fireball.
The shockwave flung Sin Mal further through the air and slammed her hard into a barricade far downfield.
Coughing up mouthful after mouthful of blood, she turned her head in disbelief and traced the blue beam's path back to its source.
On a high point in the smoke-choked rubble.
A small figure knelt on one knee, holding a textbook tactical sniping stance.
Braced steady against her shoulder was an absurdly oversized heavy sniper rifle, shedding arcs of deep blueelectricity.
It was the weapon Raven had handed to Bronie, and Bronie in turn to Dr. Tesla for analysis and reproduction — the super-electromagnetic heavy sniper rifle [Pulsar].
Though it had been loaded with exactly one live round.
That was Susannah.
The crybaby. The dead-last washout whose marksmanship scores were too painful to look at.
But there wasn't a trace of timidity or panic in Susannah's eyes now.
They were cold and utterly focused, locked onto the target as though distance itself had ceased to exist.
From her, Sin Mal felt an aura she knew intimately and that still made her heart lurch.
It was proof that in the depths of despair, driven by the obsession to protect a comrade, she had broken the shackles on life itself and torn free of the limits of the human body.
[First-Stage Genetic Lock: Awakened].
The smoke over the center of the arena was swept away in an instant by the blast wave and the wind pressure of the monster's collapse.
The surviving soldiers sat slumped in the rubble in every posture imaginable.
The expressions frozen on their faces bordered on comical.
With that thunderclap, the terror in their eyes melted like snow in spring, and in its place came a joy that erupted like a volcano.
They stared at the Anti-Entropy Titan frame, smoking black and completely dead, and forgot to breathe.
The violent pressure wave became a howling gale that swept the whole rise.
Every other sound seemed to drain out of the world, leaving only that wind roaring in their ears and the fine crackle of micro-current as the [Pulsar]'s barrel cooled.
Susannah's body did not waver by a hair.
She still held that textbook, ice-cold, flawless sniper's form.
Shoulder jammed into the stock, right index finger steady on the trigger — a cold statue weathered by ten thousand years of wind and frost, standing proud amid the roaring gale and her wildly whipping golden hair.
Several minutes earlier.
The distant explosion bucked the ground, and the pressure wave threw Susannah down into that deep crater.
Her insides churned. Something warm ran steadily from her nose and dripped onto her dust-caked tactical vest.
Even with cover between her and that shockwave, a girl as physically frail as she was had taken serious internal injuries.
Susannah forced her eyes open. Her vision swam.
But as she groped around, filthy with grit and ash, her hand struck something hard and metallic.
It was a special alloy case, originally packed inside a weapons Supply crate, that the blast had knocked to the bottom of the crater.
The latches had been jarred open, exposing the outrageous, science-fiction silhouette of the heavy weapon inside, still crawling with faint blue arcs — the super-electromagnetic sniper rifle [Pulsar].
Sin Mal's hoarse shouting still echoed in her ear over the comm channel.
Susannah wrestled with pain and terror, again and again.
Three weeks of hell training that had made her wish she were dead flickered past like a spinning lantern, and with them Sin Mal's face — that mouth full of insults, and the way she always ended up shoving Susannah behind her when it mattered.
In the end, the images stopped on that night bathed in clear, bright moonbeams.
Supreme Commander Su Yu sitting cross-legged on the grass, handing her a warm can of cocoa, speaking in that steady, gentle voice.
"Do you want to be a hero, Susannah?"
"Becoming a hero requires a reason. Once you find that reason, it will carry you further than any amount of special training."
"A reason..."
Susannah bit down on her blood-stained lip.
Almost without hesitation she reached out and clamped both arms around that unreasonably heavy electromagnetic sniper rifle.
Swaying, she hauled herself up over the lip of the crater and propped the heavy barrel on a cracked slab of alloy flooring.
Far off in the smoke, Sin Mal had finished laying out her final suicide plan and was making her last charge at the Battle-Car Class Honkai Beast with explosives strapped all over her body.
Susannah fought to get her eye to the scope, to lock onto the rampaging steel behemoth.
But her hands were shaking wildly, and nothing she did would stop them.
Between the dizziness of blood loss and a rifle whose weight was far beyond her physical ceiling, she couldn't even hold the weapon level. The crosshair pitched like a rowboat in a storm; focusing was impossible.
"Fire like that, and you'll kill Sin before the Honkai Beast ever gets the chance."
A familiar voice, level and steady, carrying an inexplicable calm, spoke quietly behind her.
Susannah froze.
She didn't turn around. She kept her eye pressed to the scope, but the tears spilled over anyway.
"Supreme Commander... is that you?"
"How did you know it was me?"
Su Yu's voice stayed calm.
"Your scent."
Susannah sniffed through her bleeding nose, her voice trembling but certain.
"My country doesn't just produce every kind of brilliant gemstone. It has the finest spices in the world, too. So my sense of smell has been far sharper than most people's since I was little."
"On a battlefield this chaotic, drowning in gunsmoke and blood, you can still pick out my scent?"
"Mm."
Su Yu stood behind her.
He still wore the camouflage of an ordinary veteran, but as he watched the girl at the bottom of the crater — body shaking violently, arms refusing to let go of that rifle — something like admiration settled into his eyes.
"Susannah."
"Yes?"
"That question I asked you... do you have an answer now?"
The question hung in the air a second time.
Out on the far side of the field, Sin Mal had already given her last hoarse order: [Fire! FIRE!!!]
Rockets and high-explosive grenades filled the sky, dragging tails of death behind them as they poured into the Honkai Beast.
Watching that spray of fire, an apocalypse rendered in miniature, Susannah drew a deep breath.
In that moment the deafening explosions and the soldiers' shouting all seemed to recede into the distance.
She felt a warm power quietly connect her mind to the man's behind her.
In a world stretched into slow motion by adrenaline and the will to live, everything in Susannah's heart flowed down that link to Su Yu, and she held nothing back.
"I don't know."
Susannah spoke softly from somewhere deep inside, like a final confession.
"My whole life, I've been running."
"Senior Sin says I'm a rich girl who's had it easy. But she doesn't know — I'm just a deserter who didn't want to face her own life, or her family's expectations."
"I worshipped the heroes in stories. Heroes have the power to rule their own lives, and that's why they're always so bright, so sure of themselves."
"But not until today did I finally learn what becoming a hero actually costs."
It was the terror of being stamped into pulp at any second. The agony of watching comrades die in front of you. The brutality of not even leaving a whole body behind.
"Then — do you want to give up?"
Su Yu's voice echoed in the depths of her mind, weighing her soul directly.
"I thought about giving up."
Susannah shut her eyes. Tears struck the cold stock of the rifle.
"I wanted to run. To get out of this nightmare, to go back to that safe greenhouse full of roses—"
"But."
Her eyes snapped open, her pupils reflecting the small figure in the distance walking into the firelight, choosing death to find life.
"When Senior Sin shoved me away to protect me, when she ran out there with those explosives on her back — I finally understood what you told me."
"Nobody is born a hero, but everyone has the right to choose to become one."
"Even me. Even a Susannah this weak and useless, always dead last, always looked down on, who can't even hold a rifle steady—"
Her voice rose sharply through the Spiritual Link, carrying the resolve of something splitting its cocoon open:
"I want to become someone who can stand in front of her comrades and take the storm for them!"
And a miracle happened.
The hands that had been convulsing from blood loss and crushing weight went perfectly still.
Three weeks of standard firing posture, screamed and beaten into her muscle memory by Sin Mal, sank all the way into her blood and bone.
She held that monstrous electromagnetic rifle steady, right eye to the scope, locked onto the billowing wall of smoke.
"Deep breath, Susannah. Feel the path of the wind."
At some point Su Yu had dropped into a crouch behind her.
She could smell him clearly — gunsmoke mixed with some particular spice — and feel the startling heat radiating from his broad back.
And something else besides: a vast power that did not belong to this world, gathering at Su Yu's fingertips.
At that same instant, deep behind Su Yu's retinas, the pale gold System panel refreshed in a cascading rush.
[Ding! Hidden prerequisite conditions fulfilled!]
[New Tarot sequence: Susannah Manatt activated!]
Tarot Array: The Sun
Bound target: Susannah Manatt
Current Bond level: RANK 4 (Potential Awakened)
Core symbolism: crystalline vitality, unreserved kindness, an innocence that burns away the gloom.
Passive skill acquired:
[The Dummy's Dazzling Warm Sun]
[Skill description]: So long as this target remains standing on the battlefield, the morale of all friendly units around her is increased by one hundred percent, granting partial immunity to the 'mental pressure' and 'aura of despair' projected by any higher-order monster. Allies within the warm sun's radius also gain +100% San value and stamina recovery rate, and when struck by a fatal wound have a certain probability of triggering the miracle effect [Turn Toward the Sun (Temporary HP Lock)].
[Card inscription]: However clumsy, however unremarkable a halo of light may be, so long as it still carries pure warmth, it is enough to melt the bitterest winter of the apocalypse. That is the Sun.
Su Yu looked at the softly glowing card, and the corner of his mouth had barely curved into a gratified, fatherly smile—
when the disreputable System, silent for so long, popped up to ruin the mood entirely, its electronic voice dripping with contempt and passive-aggressive snark as it switched into full commentary mode.
[System notice: Host, today this System has gained a whole new appreciation for the sheer depth of your shamelessness.]
[In tarot, 'The Sun' represents uncorrupted innocence, joy, and unreserved goodwill toward the world.]
[Now take a good look at what you actually did. First you scared the poor girl half to death with holographic projections and gravity fields until she was bawling her eyes out. Then you leveraged your rank as Supreme Commander, crouched behind her, and ran a practiced combo of motivational speech-craft straight into her brain. And to finish it off, you conned the little dummy into boiling over with fighting spirit so she'd break her own limits on the spot and work for you.]
[You dragged a little sun who only knows how to smile like an idiot aboard your pirate ship of lies and black-hearted scheming. Does your conscience not sting even a little?]
Su Yu's smile stiffened, and he fired back inside his own head without a shred of politeness.
"What do you know? This is called placing someone on death ground so they can come out alive! This is a necessary baptism of the soul for the future of humanity! I'm helping her unearth her potential!"
[Not even worth the breath. Marry a chicken, follow the chicken; marry a dog, follow the dog. Your foster father here got saddled with a black-hearted Host like you, so I suppose I'll just see the good deed through to the end!]
[Change detected in a Tarot Social Bond System target. Reversed Awakening initiated — flip target: The Sun]
[Target status scan: intense willpower fluctuations have triggered resonance in the gene chain. The first-stage Genetic Lock is about to loosen.]
[Detected in Host's inventory: [Schicksal Custom Agent Gene Serum (Anti-Entropy Improved Edition)]. Use immediately on target to assist her in breaking through the genetic barrier?]
[PS: Go give Susannah her little shot, Host! Though — one jab and she flushes red to the ears with every sense in her body cranked way up. Are you sure that isn't some kind of weird aphrodisiac?]
"Nobody would mistake you for mute if you kept quiet."
Su Yu shot back.
"Confirm use."
He said it silently, and at the same time his voice sounded softly at Susannah's ear.
"You've already mastered the only thing that works when humanity faces the apocalypse — courage."
"Susannah. This is the reward you've earned."
With those words, Su Yu pressed his fingers lightly to the back of her neck.
The custom gene serum ran down invisible nano-probes and flooded into her veins.
A violent surge of heat, fierce enough to tear a soul apart, swept through every inch of Susannah's body.
Three weeks of a body squeezed past its limits and rebuilt over and over inside the medical pods now received its perfect catalyst.
Snap.
The crisp sound of a shackle breaking somewhere deep in her soul detonated inside her skull.
The gene chain within her threw open its first restrictor valve.
[First-Stage Genetic Lock: Open]!
The next moment, the world changed.
Susannah found herself, exactly like Sin Mal far across the field, dropping into that strange [Bullet Time].
Everything around her turned slow and razor-clear.
She didn't even need her eyes — she could sense straight through that dense curtain of smoke to everything happening inside it.
She sensed the shriek of grinding metal as the Battle-Car Class Honkai Beast came back to life after the short-out.
She sensed the arc of Sin Mal's body as that colossal impact hurled her into the air, the joint packed with explosives behind her.
She even caught the moment Supreme Commander Su Yu, who had been crouched behind her the whole time, vanished the instant the injection finished — moving at a speed that made a mockery of physics, leaving the deed done and his name unspoken.
And the deadliest thing of all.
She saw the purple high-energy beam gathering furiously inside the beast's hollow head plating.
The emitter's angle was locked dead onto Sin, helpless in midair.
And up there, the girl who was forever calling herself 'yours truly' and bristling at everyone like a hedgehog wore a small, unburdened smile in the last moment of her life.
"I won't let you die!"
Susannah bit down on her lip.
"Behind you, partner!"
The whisper was almost too faint to hear, and heavier than a mountain.
Facing that invincible steel behemoth, Susannah pulled the [Pulsar]'s heavy trigger without a moment's hesitation.
A deep blue electromagnetic pulse tore the length of the barrel, and the recoil alone spidered the alloy floor beneath her with dense cracks.
A super-electromagnetic blue beam brighter than the sun crossed several hundred meters in an instant, fast enough to rip space itself.
That beam — human will and human miracle in one — struck the beast's charging emitter with perfect precision.
Two enormous energies collided catastrophically inside the housing, and the breech burst in a detonation that shook heaven and earth.
Under the horrified stares of every soldier in the arena, the head and chest plating of the all-conquering Battle-Car Class Honkai Beast blew apart into a gorgeous purple fireball.
The huge body toppled and struck the ground with a peal of thunder.
…Dead silence.
Dead silence that stretched for dozens of seconds.
Inside the arena, every soldier stared blankly at the fireball as it slowly guttered out.
When the holographic disguise failed completely in the blast and dissipated, exposing the charred, permanently crippled Anti-Entropy Titan frame beneath it—
the blood-red electronic countdown on the wall ticked over to 00:00.
A burst of static crackled through the loudspeakers.
Then Rita Rossweisse's voice rolled out over the entire arena.
[Countdown complete.]
[The Starfire Furnace final test is concluded.]
[Congratulations, all of you. You survived to the end.]
The next moment.
The entire underground arena went off like a lit powder keg, erupting into a wave of cheering wild enough to blow the dome off.
"We won! We actually killed that thing!"
"Damn it, Sin! You're too fucking cool!"
"Susannah, you absolute legend! That shot was divine!"
"What kind of weapon was that just now?! So goddamn cool!"
"Susannah! Susannah!"
"Sin! Sin! Sin!"
Soldiers who had been sprawled limp on the ground, certain they'd already stepped through death's gate, found strength from somewhere.
Delirious and weeping, they ran like madmen toward Susannah and Sin Mal.
The hundred-odd survivors mobbed the two girls who had always ranked dead last in physical training.
Whistles, the raw shouts of people who had cheated death, and roars of praise shook the place to its foundations.
Susannah dragged her exhausted body upright, struggling to keep a blood-soaked Sin Mal on her feet.
A girl raised in a greenhouse her whole life had never seen anything like this.
The sudden storm of fervor left her utterly at a loss, even the cowlick on top of her head turning dazed little circles.
As for Sin Mal, facing all that undisguised gratitude and worship—
she leaned on Susannah's shoulder, spat out a mouthful of bloody saliva, rolled her eyes enormously, and swore at them in a weak but no less arrogant tone.
"Can you people shut your damn mouths already... I didn't get stomped flat by that monster, but I'm about to get killed by you morons screaming in my ear..."
The words had barely left her mouth.
The aftereffects of burning through their life force and forcing open a first-stage Genetic Lock came crashing back on both girls at once, like a tsunami.
Their vision went black. Every scrap of strength left their bodies in the same instant, and they folded sideways together as though their bones had been pulled out.
Just as the crowd cried out and reached for them—
a tall figure flickered out of the press of bodies like a ghost, strong arms extended, and caught both unconscious heroes cleanly.
"Sup— Supreme Commander?!"
The soldiers nearby got a clear look at him, and their eyes went wide with shock.
Su Yu had dropped the [Perfect Maid's Magic Mirror] that had disguised him as an ordinary veteran.
He stood there in his signature black Supreme Commander's uniform, his true face bare before every one of them.
Before anyone could process it—
"Move! Everybody move! Medical team coming through!"
Kiana and Kevin, in full gear, charged in through a side tunnel with a team of Anti-Entropy's finest medics, stretchers and emergency equipment rolling ahead of them.
They eased Sin and Susannah onto specialized stretchers with built-in life support and rushed them toward the deep-level repair pods.
Only once the two girls were safely away did the surrounding soldiers come back to themselves.
The euphoria of survival drained off as they took in the wrecked field, and the ranks around them thinned by nearly a third.
Rage at having been deceived, and raw grief, began to spread through the crowd.
A squad leader wrapped in bandages stepped forward, eyes red, and fixed his stare on Su Yu.
"Supreme Commander! We won that fight. We proved ourselves!"
"But... that doesn't change the fact that you treated our lives like garbage! That was no drill and no test — that was deliberate murder! So many brothers we lived beside every single day, and there wasn't even a whole body left of them!"
"That's right! You owe us an explanation!"
The crowd's fury boiled over.
Faced with these elites who had just walked the line between life and death, faces twisted with grief and anger—
Su Yu wasn't angry at all. If anything, a satisfied smile touched the corner of his mouth.
"An explanation?"
He said it mildly, looking them over. Then he raised his right hand and snapped his fingers, crisp and clear.
"Come on out. Let these good brothers of yours who made it know you're all right."
A hinge groaned.
A concealed alloy door at the edge of the arena swung slowly open.
Under the disbelieving stares of more than a hundred survivors, all of them looking like they'd seen ghosts—
soldiers filed out from behind that door in a line, grimy, still smeared with simulated blood, looking distinctly awkward about it.
They were the very men the Battle-Car Class Honkai Beast had 'crushed into paste,' or 'vaporized' with its energy beam.
Seeing them standing there perfectly whole, every soldier who had passed the test went blank in the head; some wondered whether they were sharing a mass hallucination.
"Sup— Supreme Commander... so, this means..."
The squad leader who had led the accusation stood there, lips trembling.
"Mm. Exactly what you're all thinking right now."
Su Yu brushed the dust off his hands, his tone easy.
"They're all fine. Those deaths were nothing but a little sleight of hand and an application of spatial teleportation technology."
The next moment.
"HOLY SHIT!"
The arena erupted in a roar even more outrageous than the last one.
More than a few big, sentimental men charged forward like maddened bulls, wiping their eyes as they ran, and crushed the brothers they'd thought dead into bear hugs.
"You son of a bitch! I shed actual tears over you back there! I really thought you'd bought it!"
Heavy fists hammered mercilessly into the other man's chest.
"Cough— cough! Your daddy here didn't die in front of that monster... but if you keep punching me that hard, I'm going to die right here..."
The soldier on the receiving end grimaced and complained, but his eyes reddened all the same.
In a heartbeat the whole arena had turned into an ocean of laughter, cursing, tears and embraces.
Su Yu stood off to one side and quietly watched the reunion — one earned through a true baptism of life and death.
Two hundred and fifty scattered sparks, having passed through the deepest despair, had finally been forged together into a single piece of unbreakable steel.
The Kindling had been well and truly lit.
Su Yu raised his head and gave Rita a small nod up in the panoramic control room.
A moment later, Rita's voice, grave and full of authority, rolled out over the arena again and pressed the noise flat.
"All personnel! Silence!"
"We will now begin the results report for the Starfire Furnace final examination—"
"Form ranks!"
At that command, snapped out like a battlefield order, every soldier reined in their emotions.
The survivors who had passed and the 'eliminated' block — those whose fear had broken them before the end and who had been teleported out early — separated cleanly into two formations and lined up in neat rows at the center of the field.
After a battle that had overturned everything they thought they knew about the world, there was no arrogance left in these soldiers' eyes.
Every gaze fixed on the glass wall of the control room, and on Rita and Su Yu as they came down from the observation deck.
They were all waiting.
Waiting for the Chief Instructor and the Supreme Commander to explain this rehearsal for the apocalypse — and to unveil the truth of the world.
____
________________________________________
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! 😉