The first wave of attacks came seven minutes after she left the crash-landing site.
First came the sound.
A continuous droning hum rose up from the direction of the inverted city below.
It didn't sound like machinery, nor like wind.
It was closer to the frequency of countless insect wings beating together, but duller, carrying a resonance that triggered instinctive unease.
Purple mist began to roil.
Cecilia crouched behind an outcropping of rock, braced her submachine gun against her shoulder, and studied the ground ahead through the scope.
She saw them.
They crawled out of the purple mist.
The first wave were humanoid.
Cecilia first mistook them for soldiers in some kind of protective suit, but when the "soldiers" clambered over the rock's edge, her scope showed her their true faces.
Ashen gray skin, and set within desiccated eye sockets, two points of dark red light.
What covered their bodies wasn't a protective suit at all, but some kind of hardened carapace that had fused with their skin.
Bone blades a dozen-odd centimeters long extended from their fingertips, gleaming cold in the dim light.
Zombies.
Cecilia had no way of knowing that name, of course.
But she could tell from their movement patterns: these things weren't human, had no independent will, and had only a single attack pattern — a straight-line charge.
She squeezed the trigger.
The muzzle flash flickered and died in the darkness.
The first Zombie's head was punched through; its ashen body toppled backward and fell from the rock's edge into the void below.
Cecilia's firing rhythm stayed impeccably steady, the interval between each pair of shots almost identical.
Spent casings ejected and clinked crisply against the rock.
But there were too many of them.
More and more Zombies crawled out of the mist, as if something below were pouring out an endless anthill.
The first magazine ran dry.
Cecilia fell back tactically, flicking the empty magazine free with one hand. The fresh magazine tumbled through the air in a half-turn and clicked into place.
She racked the bolt and leveled the muzzle again.
But that was when something bigger arrived.
A massive shape squeezed out from the gap between the rock formations.
The thing wasn't carbon-based life at all.
Its entire body was sheathed in pallid, silicon-based armor, its surface coursing with dense, pinkish-purple energy patterns.
A massive, hoof-shaped foreleg slammed down onto the ground, splitting the rock in a web of cracks.
It had no face, only a cold, shield-shaped mask, radiating a suffocating pressure.
[Battle-Car Class Honkai Beast].
It roared toward Cecilia's direction, a sound loud enough to shatter eardrums.
Cecilia's scalp prickled in that instant.
Her submachine gun's rounds wouldn't punch through that carapace.
Her assessment took less than half a second.
She discarded the submachine gun and drew the silver-white sniper rifle from her back.
The first armor-piercing round struck the Honkai Beast's left foreleg joint.
Purple fluid burst from its knee, and the leg bent at an unnatural angle.
But it didn't fall — instead it accelerated on its remaining three legs.
Cecilia slid back, working the bolt to eject the spent casing.
The second round punched straight into the glowing purple core lit up on its chest.
The core shattered.
The massive silicon body lost power instantly, sliding along the ground under its own momentum, spraying Cecilia with purple crystalline dust.
This weapon, developed by Schicksal's highest Research Institute and at the world's cutting edge, paired with her own uncannily masterful marksmanship, had barely been enough to take down one of these hulking things.
And every specialized armor-piercing round was extraordinarily expensive, typically meant not for killing targets but for destroying high-density cover and shields.
But now, those two costly rounds hadn't bought Cecilia nearly enough breathing room.
The Zombie horde behind her had already circled around her firing line, flanking her from both sides.
She abandoned long-range fire and drew the pistol from the holster on her right thigh.
For the next sixty seconds, this floating slab of rock held nothing but gunfire, the sound of bone blades striking stone, and the occasional clang of metal — Cecilia's tactical knife deflecting the Zombies' bone claws.
Moving among the horde were higher-order Zombies with an eerie combat instinct, lurking within the swarm and waiting for Cecilia's guard to slip.
And unlike the low-tier Zombies, their strength was far more terrifying than she'd imagined.
Cecilia assessed their combat capability: if not for their lack of reasoning, every one of these higher-order Zombies would have matched her own strength.
And that was the most impossible part.
Schicksal's genetic research on the human body led the world; no one was more authoritative on unlocking the human body's potential.
Among the enhancement serums Schicksal had custom-developed for its agents, Cecilia's had produced the most pronounced effect — ranking near the top even among the handful of S-rank agents.
Otto had said it was a form of innate talent, one that could even rival Kallen Kaslana's.
Even against Siegfried, a fellow S-rank agent, Cecilia was absolutely confident she could take him down within three moves.
Because their physical abilities simply weren't on the same level.
But these humanoid monsters, clearly "elites" at a glance,
each one possessed strength no weaker than her own.
When the sixth magazine ran dry, a Zombie lunging from her flank clawed her right shoulder.
Five deep gashes ran from her shoulder blade down to her upper arm, the seeping blood staining her white flight suit a dark red.
Cecilia clenched her teeth.
She drove the knife backhand into the Zombie's eye socket, twisted, and pulled it free.
She retreated to a higher outcrop, her back against a jutting stone wall.
All her magazines were spent.
Only three rounds remained in her pistol.
Purple mist churned, and the silhouette of a second white-armored giant emerged.
It was a full size larger than the last one.
Cecilia pressed her forehead against the rock wall and closed her eyes for a moment.
Her breath echoed ragged inside her mask.
She opened her eyes, chambered the last three rounds, and raised the gun.
But the instant the Honkai Beast charged, a brilliant flare of white light burst above its head.
An orange-yellow energy round, plunging from the sky, struck the seam in the giant's back armor with pinpoint accuracy.
The silicon shell shattered to pieces, and the sheer force of the impact slammed the creature's charge to a dead stop.
The Honkai Beast's charging posture froze mid-stride.
Right after, a shadow flashed past overhead.
It was a Genome Reaper.
The crescent-moon blade sliced precisely through the gap between the Honkai Beast's neck armor and flesh.
Purple blood sprayed out.
The figure used the recoil of the strike to flip once in midair, landing steadily on a rock some dozen meters to Cecilia's right.
Rita Rossweisse turned the scythe's blade downward and gave it a light flick, letting the purple blood slide off the edge.
"Clean-up complete," she called out into the distance.
From behind a higher rock formation, another figure dropped down.
No sooner had the words left her mouth than a second person slammed down from above.
"Slammed" in the literal, physical sense.
Debris flew, dust billowed.
A white-haired girl hit the ground on one knee, her left hand braced in a textbook superhero landing pose.
In her hands she gripped two exaggeratedly-styled hand cannons — these were what had delivered the orbital strike a moment ago.
Kiana straightened up, sweeping her gaze over the scattered Zombie remains and the Honkai Beast's corpse.
"More than expected," she said to Rita.
"Agreed. Though the target aircraft should be nearby—"
Rita didn't finish her sentence.
Because both of them noticed, at the same instant, the figure leaning against the rock wall.
A woman in a white flight suit, a large bloodstain spreading across her right shoulder, held a pistol raised in their direction.
Her mask had been shattered half away in the fighting, revealing half a face streaked with dust and blood.
Long white hair spilled down through the cracks in her broken helmet.
Her muzzle held perfectly steady.
Cecilia's index finger rested on the trigger.
Her clawed right arm trembled faintly, but the muzzle didn't waver a millimeter.
Two armed individuals of unknown identity.
One wielding a scythe, one a gun.
Their combat ability far exceeded any ordinary human — they could parkour across rock formations a dozen meters apart, land superhero-style from such heights.
Physical capability like that could no longer be explained by carbon-based biology.
Most crucial of all —
neither of them bore any insignia of any nation or organization.
Her mind raced through calculations.
Kiana raised her gun as well.
Her finger rested outside the trigger guard, not pulling it.
The two of them faced off at a distance of a dozen-odd meters, gun to gun.
"Drop your weapon," Cecilia said in English, her voice muffled and fractured by the broken mask. "I'm—"
Her words stopped short.
Because through the shattered mask, she'd finally gotten a clear look at the white-haired girl's face across from her.
Heterochromatic eyes.
Blue on the left, gold on the right.
Short white hair spilled over her shoulders, dusted with grime and streaked with purple blood.
That face.
Cecilia had seen that face before, in a photo Theresa had sent her.
Her name was — Kiana Kaslana.
The muzzle drifted a fraction of a millimeter.
Her breath caught, missing a beat.
And a dozen-odd meters away.
Kiana's gun hand froze in midair.
She'd seen the face behind the shattered mask.
Gentle features, firmly drawn.
It was a face time had been kind to — matured by more than a decade, yet still holding traces of her girlhood.
Kiana knew that face.
She could recognize it even in her dreams.
Back when she was still a student at St. Freya Academy, that face had existed only in a faded old photograph in Principal Theresa's office.
It existed in the shadow she desperately reached for in the dark after every nightmare, a shadow she could never touch.
That was Cecilia Schariac.
Her mother.
The gun in Kiana's hand sank, little by little.
Her lips parted, but no sound came out.
A wind like the void swept across the floating island.
Below, the inverted city still glowed with its otherworldly purple light.
Overhead, the sky remained a despairing black.
But in this rift that belonged to no world, for this one second, it was as though someone had forced a mute button down.
No monster's shriek, no roar of gunfire.
Only two women, separated by a dozen-odd meters of rubble and gunsmoke,
staring fixedly into each other's eyes.
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