Rita looked at the white-haired woman's face beside the rock wall. The battle scythe in her hand didn't lower, but the intent to attack had withdrawn.
Cecilia Schariac.
In the Schicksal archives of the Honkai world, this name was sealed away in the most classified of files.
the Second Honkai War. An S-rank Valkyrie. In the end, she died taking the Second Herrscher down with her.
The brightest shooting star in Schicksal's history — and the shortest-lived.
Rita sighed quietly to herself.
She hadn't expected that even here in this peaceful Earth OL, this Lady's isotope would still be someone ruthless enough to carve a bloody path through a pile of monsters, seven times over.
Rita's gaze slid off Cecilia and landed on Kiana beside her.
The hand holding Kiana's gun was trembling.
Not from fear.
Rita knew this kind of trembling all too well.
It was the trembling of someone desperate for something, forcing every ounce of willpower into her legs just to keep from rushing forward.
"Lady Kiana."
"The Honkai energy core is still running at full power. This space could keep expanding at any moment — we need to destroy the core first. The family reunion will have to wait its turn."
Kiana's throat bobbed.
She took a deep breath and nodded.
The muzzle of her gun dropped.
Rita turned to Cecilia and gave a slight bow.
The gesture looked oddly out of place amid the floating debris and purple bloodstains covering the battlefield, but Rita carried it off with perfect ease.
"My name is Rita. This is Lady Kiana. We're the cleanup crew assigned to this illegal construction site — please, don't worry."
She unclipped a gray-green metal case from her waist and tossed it over.
"An Anti-Entropy custom first-aid kit. Hemostatic spray, high-efficacy anti-inflammatory injections, and bone splints. Please, tend to that shoulder wound first."
Cecilia caught the case one-handed.
She didn't open it right away. Instead she ran her thumb over the latch mechanism first, then flipped it over to check the label on the bottom.
She didn't recognize the logo printed on the label.
Not Schicksal's. Not any known military contractor's, either.
She opened the case.
Inside, the medications were sorted neatly into shock-absorbing slots, each injector labeled with precise, finely printed dosage markings.
She recognized the hemostatic spray, but the nozzle design on this model was far more refined than anything she'd seen in military-grade first aid.
The anti-inflammatory injector's casing bore a tiny engraved serial number, ending in a capital "M."
She popped the cap off the hemostatic spray and pressed it against the five ghastly gashes on her right shoulder.
The icy mist settled over the wound, and within two seconds, most of the searing pain had already faded.
This hemostatic effect was absurd.
Cecilia exhaled in brief relief, but the questions churning inside her only multiplied.
She looked up, studying the white-haired girl across from her again.
Snow-white hair spilled over the girl's shoulders.
Heterochromatic eyes — blue on the left, gold on the right.
The shape of that face, the curve of the nose bridge, the angle of the jaw — not identical to her own, but close enough to be unmistakable, seven or eight parts alike.
And that white hair.
The classic Kaslana-family white-hair signature.
Theresa's classified briefing flashed through her mind like a pop-up alert: "Siegfried's illegitimate daughter, Kiana Kaslana."
Cecilia's mental CPU started smoking.
How was this possible?
If this really was some illegitimate daughter that idiot Siegfried had fathered somewhere out there, then who was the mother?
Why did this girl have a Schariac face?
Could it be that she and Siegfried really had had a daughter at some point she didn't even know about?
So was that why Siegfried had gone dark the moment he reached Arc City — because he'd uncovered this earth-shattering secret and was scrambling to handle the PR disaster?
Cecilia's brain crashed, just for a moment.
The next second, the hair on the back of her neck stood on end.
Her body reacted before her mind caught up.
Her gun snapped up, aiming past Kiana's shoulder at a gray-white shape that had silently slithered out from a crack in the rocks three meters behind her.
In the same instant, Kiana spun and raised her own gun.
"Bang!"
"Bang!"
The two gunshots overlapped perfectly into a single note.
The heads of two Zombies that had tried to ambush them from behind burst apart simultaneously, purple fragments spraying across the rocks.
The gunsmoke hadn't even cleared yet.
The two women stared at each other across a few meters of distance.
The corner of Kiana's mouth twitched.
Cecilia couldn't hold it back either.
Both of them laughed at almost the same moment.
After that shot, the whole tangled mess about the "illegitimate daughter" suddenly seemed a lot less important to Cecilia.
Whoever's daughter she was, who cared.
This girl drew faster than a Texas gunslinger and didn't even blink at monsters straight out of a sanity-draining nightmare.
On that muscle memory alone, Cecilia had already decided — this one was a friend worth keeping.
Bzzzzz—
The purple mist churned again. A fresh wave of buzzing Zombies rose up from below.
The three of them fell into formation without a word, backs pressed together, each facing a different direction.
"Names?" Cecilia asked, slapping a fresh magazine into place.
"Kiana."
"Just call me Cecilia."
"Rita."
Cecilia glanced at the mass of gray-white shapes clambering up in the distance.
"Kiana, Rita — what exactly are these things?"
Rita leveled her battle scythe in front of her. "If it's all the same to you, let's save the explanations for after the fight. Lady Kiana, please lend Lady Cecilia your handcannon. She'll handle ranged cover while the two of us hold the front line, each taking a direction."
Out of the corner of her eye, Rita studied Cecilia.
The concentration of Honkai energy in this space had already reached outrageous levels, yet the white-haired woman's body showed no sign of Honkai corrosion at all.
As expected — isotopes shared similar constitutions too.
Kiana handed over the heavy handcannon to Cecilia.
Cecilia weighed it in her hand, turned it over, and located the trigger and safety.
The gun's internal workings were a total black box to her, but pulling a trigger was universal logic.
"Ranged cover's mine." Cecilia raised the handcannon. "So what do you use?"
Kiana pulled something free from a strap on her back.
A silver-gray metal baseball bat.
A few five-pointed stars and a cat's-paw print were spray-painted onto the barrel in fluorescent paint.
Cecilia stared at the bat for a solid two seconds, and said nothing.
"Not gonna lie." Kiana slung the bat over her shoulder, the corner of her mouth curling into a cocky grin. "Times may have changed, but I still like getting up close and personal."
The first Zombie scrambled over the edge of the rocks.
Kiana stepped forward, the bat cutting the air with a shrill whistle, tracing a silver full moon overhead.
"Clang — crack!"
It caught the Zombie square in the neck.
The gray-white body folded into a ">" shape and flew off the cliff like a sack of rags, vanishing into the purple mist below.
On the other side, Rita had become a whirlwind of red and black.
The scythe's arc traced a lethal grid through the swarm of Zombies.
She wasted no motion — every strike found the exact seam in the monsters' carapaces.
Cut, twist of the wrist, withdraw. Before the purple blood could even spray, she was already behind her next target — graceful as though dancing a waltz in Vienna.
Cecilia braced behind an outcropping of rock and squeezed the trigger.
The handcannon's recoil was surprisingly gentle.
An orange-yellow energy round detonated precisely on a Zombie trying to flank Rita.
The recoil on that first shot had been far less than she'd expected, and the accuracy was absurdly high.
This weapon's shots barely spread at all.
But her attention was soon completely stolen by the battle unfolding ahead.
Kiana was flying through the air.
Literally flying.
No ropes. No wings. No visible flight equipment of any kind.
A pale-blue, semi-transparent platform condensed out of thin air beneath her feet each time — she'd step on it, push off, and it would form again for the next jump.
Her whole body moved like a white cannonball flouting all three of Newton's laws, weaving back and forth among several four-story-tall [Battle-Car Class Honkai Beasts].
The cat-paw bat, carrying terrifying kinetic force, slammed into the white-armored skull of a Honkai Beast.
The massive silicon-based head caved in, spraying pink-purple energy fluid everywhere.
Cecilia fired three shots in a row, shattering the leg of a beast lunging toward Kiana.
And Rita.
Rita's fighting style was completely different.
She didn't have Kiana's supernatural power, but every swing of her scythe was precise to the point of taking your breath away.
The scythe's edge always found the weakest seam in a Honkai Beast's carapace, cutting in, twisting, pulling free.
For someone cutting her way through a pile of corpses and purple blood mist, her movements carried an almost elegant rhythm.
Cecilia watched, her hand steady.
But her heart was racing absurdly fast.
Just who exactly were these two?
Boom—
The last large Honkai Beast crashed down under Kiana and Rita's combined assault. Purple blood pooled into little streams across the rocks.
They were safe, for the moment.
Rita planted her scythe in the rock and turned to Kiana.
"Can you sense the location of the central Honkai energy core?"
Kiana closed her eyes.
In this space saturated with Honkai energy, the Herrscher Core dormant inside her for so long stirred back to life.
That familiar energy spread through her veins to every part of her body.
The distribution of Honkai energy density formed a three-dimensional heat map in her perception.
The point of highest concentration sat right at the center of the inverted city below, wrapped in layer upon layer of black mist.
"Found it."
Kiana opened her eyes. She raised her right hand, palm forward.
Golden light gathered at her fingertips, compressed, stretched, and condensed into a spear of light nearly two meters long. The Subspace Lance.
Her arm snapped forward. She threw it.
It shot from Kiana's hand, tore through hundreds of meters of empty space, and pierced straight through the center of that black mist.
A dull crack echoed from the distance.
"Lady Kiana!" Rita's voice jumped an octave. "If you shatter the core, the whole space will collapse on the spot! Dr. Tesla begged and begged us to bring back some sample slices — you should've held back a little!"
Kiana turned her head aside, a faintly guilty look crossing her face.
"Ah, well... my hand slipped. Purely an accident."
Rita closed her eyes and silently ground the collective intelligence of House Kaslana into the dirt a hundred times over.
Rumble—
The entire space began to shudder violently. The floating clusters of rock, as if losing whatever force had held them aloft, started sinking slowly.
In the distance, the inverted city was collapsing, buildings shattering one after another into debris and plunging into the endless void.
Rita turned to Cecilia. "Lady Cecilia, can your aircraft still start? This place is about to collapse completely."
"The engine's not dead! But I don't know where the exit is!" Cecilia was already striding back toward her fighter.
"Leave the exit to me!" Kiana ran toward the emergency landing site. "Wherever the Honkai energy is weakest, that's the way out. The closer to our world, the thinner the Honkai energy gets!"
The three of them crammed into the cockpit of Cecilia's battered fighter.
Cecilia dropped into the pilot's seat, pulled down her harness, and gripped the control stick with both hands.
The engine coughed twice, then roared back to life.
Kiana squeezed into the copilot's seat, one hand pointing off in a direction ahead.
"That way! Fly that way!"
"Hold on tight!"
The engine let out an overloaded shriek, spitting two violent trails of blue flame.
The fighter forced its way upward through the collapsing void.
Behind them, the space was visibly collapsing in real time.
The floating clusters of rock churned as if caught in a giant whirlpool, shattering, crushing together, vanishing.
Purple light burst in blinding flashes along the edge of the collapse.
The aircraft threaded its way through gaps in the falling debris.
Massive chunks of rock scraped blinding sparks off the wing edges.
A beam of light appeared ahead.
It was the faint glow of Arc City's pre-dawn sky, filtering through the crack in the Rift.
"That's it! Ram through!"
Cecilia shoved the control stick all the way forward.
The engine let out another overloaded shriek.
The aircraft burst through the Rift.
Arc City International Airport.
Three in the morning.
"Crash — skreeeee!"
The aircraft's landing gear tore a long trail of sparks down the runway, skidding nearly two hundred meters before it finally stopped.
Every searchlight at the airport was lit, but the runway itself stood empty — only a few black Anti-Entropy ambulances parked at the far edge of the tarmac, their rooftop blue lights flashing wildly.
The canopy popped open.
Kiana was the first to scramble out.
The moment her feet hit the asphalt, she stumbled and dropped to one knee.
The Honkai energy cutoff hit hard and fast.
Like someone had yanked an IV line out of her veins — most of her strength drained away within three seconds.
Rita climbed out right after her, visibly unsteady too, but she found her footing quickly.
Her body had built up some tolerance from the last time she'd come out of a Rift.
"Lady Kiana." Rita hurried over and steadied her shoulder. "Any rejection symptoms from force-activating the Herrscher of the Void's Authority?"
Kiana braced against her knee, pushed herself up, and shook her head.
"I'm fine. Sirin and I struck a deal — as long as there's enough Honkai energy inside a Rift, I can draw on her Authority to fight."
"That's excellent." Rita nodded. "With the Herrscher of the Void's power at our disposal, we'll have much more room to maneuver the next time a Rift incident occurs."
"There's a catch, though." Kiana rolled her wrist. "Honkai energy isn't the same thing as whatever Su Yu uses. Spatial Jump only works inside a Rift. I can't just tear one open to get back to the real world."
"If I forced it, I might end up dropped into some dead-end pocket of space with no Honkai energy and no way back."
Rita nodded again.
"Either way, our part of the mission is finally done for now."
Thud.
A muffled sound came from the cockpit.
Cecilia braced herself against the edge of the cockpit, about to climb out.
Her face had gone deathly pale.
The bleeding on her right shoulder had been sealed by the hemostatic spray, but the combination of massive blood loss and the physical strain of her first exposure to a Honkai energy environment all caught up with her the instant she left the Rift.
"Sorry... I think I'm a bit..."
Her voice trailed off.
The runway floodlights ahead began to spin, double, blur.
Kiana lunged forward.
She moved so fast she barely registered it herself.
Her still-weakened body scraped up strength from somewhere, closing the distance in two strides and catching Cecilia as she pitched forward.
Long white hair spilled over Kiana's arms.
Cecilia's body was light.
Far lighter than Kiana had imagined.
Her body temperature was dropping, her breathing shallow and rapid.
In that instant, something seized hard around Kiana's heart.
She held Cecilia tight against her chest. No tears, no shouting — just her eyes fixed unblinking on that pale face.
Rita had already pulled a Honkai energy neutralizing serum from the med kit.
The needle slid into a vein at the side of Cecilia's neck, the clear fluid drawn slowly in.
"Vitals stable, no signs of mutation." Rita withdrew the needle, her tone back to clinical calm. "Just exhaustion and blood loss. She'll be fine after some sleep."
She pulled out her comm and dialed the Anti-Entropy medical team's channel.
With the Rift gone, the magnetic interference had dissipated too, and the signal was back.
"This is Rita. The airport Rift is closed, the Honkai energy core destroyed. One casualty needs urgent medevac. Name: Cecilia Schariac."
A confirmation came back over the comm.
But right after, a burst of ear-splitting static crackled through.
"Kiana! Are you still alive over there?! How's Cecilia?!"
Siegfried's booming, penetrating voice hit hard enough that Rita jerked the comm half a meter away from her ear.
Kiana glanced down at the unconscious Cecilia in her arms and answered into the comm. "I—I'm fine. She's fine too, she got the serum, she just passed out."
Exaggerated gasps of relief came through from Siegfried's end of the channel.
"Thank god... thank god..."
Then, five full seconds of dead silence.
When Siegfried spoke again, his usual devil-may-care dad-voice was gone entirely.
"Kiana, take a deep breath. There's some bad news. You'd better brace yourself."
Kiana's fingers tightened.
Without realizing it, she'd clenched a fistful of Cecilia's white hair in her palm.
"Something happened to Su Yu."
She didn't phrase it as a question.
Her tone was flat, almost frighteningly so.
Given the circumstances, that was the only "bad news" she could think of.
Welt's voice replaced Siegfried's over the comm.
"Su Yu still hasn't come out of the Spatial Rift at the abandoned recycling plant."
Kiana's breath caught.
"It's been nearly two hours." Welt spoke slowly. "Before he left, he confirmed with me that if he ran into something he couldn't handle, he'd use his Spatial Jump Authority to escape the Rift and return to reality immediately. But even now, we haven't received any signal from him at all."
The runway floodlights kept sweeping at their steady pace.
A white beam of light swept across Kiana's pale face.
Just then, deep in her chest, the [Gem of Conquest] belonging to Raiden Mei suddenly pulsed hard, like a pacemaker firing.
Right after, a scalding surge of heat spread out from the gem along her meridians, as if someone had lit a fuse inside her veins.
As the heat spread, it carried something with it — some kind of information, a signal from somewhere impossibly far away.
Thud!
A scalding rush of heat shot straight up her spine into her brain.
Fenghuang's voice rang out in her mind.
"Kiana."
Fenghuang's voice sounded strained, as if shouting through several thick walls.
"Squad Monitor? Squad Monitor! What's actually going on with Su Yu?"
"Right now I can barely link into Su Yu's location. If it weren't for some kind of connection between you and him that crosses the World Barrier, I doubt I could even manage this much."
Fenghuang paused a beat.
"You need to brace yourself for what comes next."
Kiana clenched her jaw.
"Listen. Su Yu ran into two people inside the Rift."
"Who?"
"Mei."
Kiana's heart clenched hard.
"And..." Fenghuang's voice grew fainter, as if the signal were being jammed by some overwhelming force, "the World Serpent Lord — of that world."
A cold wind swept across the empty runway in the dead of night, snapping at the caution tape.
"Kevin Kaslana."
Kiana's pupils blew wide. She heard, with perfect clarity, something inside her mind snap completely in that instant.
"What did you say?!"
Cecilia, still cradled in her arms, remained deep in unconsciousness.
In the distance, an ambulance approached, its blue lights flashing.
But Kiana felt as though the world beneath her feet was already collapsing.
____
Gift for Everyone: Once we hit 50 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! 😉