Two hours earlier.
Arc City, District Seven, an abandoned metal recycling plant.
The night wind poured in through gaps in the rusted sheet-metal walls of the plant, stirring up a layer of dust that carried the tang of heavy metal.
The air reeked of pungent ozone and the stale stench of old machine oil.
Su Yu stood in the open space at the center of the plant.
Thirty meters ahead of him, where several scrapped hydraulic presses had once stood, a massive purple-black rift had swallowed the space whole.
The air at the rift's edge warped violently under the intense radiation of Honkai energy, like the breathing lungs of some living monster.
The comm channel in his earpiece had died completely two minutes ago.
Just a moment before, Bronie had still been typing away furiously, reporting anomalous magnetic field readings to him. The next second, all that remained on the channel was teeth-grating white noise.
"Fighting this one alone, huh."
He drew a deep breath.
The cold, ozone-tinged air filled his lungs, clearing his mind in an instant.
He closed his eyes, letting the Tai Xu Sword Qi's technique quietly circulate through his body.
It flowed along his meridians like an invisible net, binding every muscle fiber, blood vessel, and nerve ending in his body into one tight web.
His perception surged to its absolute limit — within a ten-meter radius, even the faint hiss of dust sliding off an old discarded tire became audible in his mind.
At the same time, the second-stage Genetic Lock deep within him idled in a half-active state, primed to push his body into overclocked overload the instant it was needed.
Unlike last time, there was no Kiana here. No Rita.
Just him.
"Su Yu."
A voice rose without warning from deep within his mind.
Su Yu opened his eyes, the corner of his mouth curling up on its own.
"Squad Monitor, hearing your voice at a time like this really does put me at ease."
"Don't get cute." Fenghuang's voice lacked its usual calm; instead it carried a distinct edge of sternness. "Once you're inside the Spatial Rift, remember — do not engage head-on."
Su Yu patted the spare magazines in his pocket, producing a soft metallic clink.
"Until your armor is finished, you're still nothing but flesh and blood," Fenghuang's voice went on echoing in his head. "The Genetic Lock can push you beyond human limits, yes, but it's borrowing against your own life to do it. Don't be reckless."
Su Yu raised the assault rifle mounted with a holographic sight and checked the chamber.
"Squad Monitor, you really don't trust me much, do you."
"I can't help it." Fenghuang sighed, and there was even a trace of helplessness in her voice. "Every step of the way you've taken, has there ever been a single victory that didn't cost you blood for blood? You don't value your own life at all. I've told you — your life matters far more than you think."
Fenghuang paused, her tone turning grave.
"You're Kiana's Reality Anchor in this world — the bridge connecting the two worlds. If something happens to you here, Kiana will vanish, and this world's last line of defense against Honkai will collapse instantly. So promise me."
"Whatever happens, protect yourself first, above everything else."
Su Yu flicked the rifle's safety to ready.
"I know." He looked at the churning purple rift before him. "Worst case, I just run. If I can't beat them, can I at least outrun them? Even if an Emperor-class Honkai Beast comes crawling out of that thing, worst case I just bolt, get outside, and call Kiana over. Even an Emperor-class beast can't take more than a couple of her punches, right?"
In his mind, Fenghuang seemed momentarily struck speechless by how brutally pragmatic — even shameless — his answer was.
Two seconds passed before she finally replied: "Very well, then."
"Alright, I'm heading in."
Su Yu didn't hesitate any longer. He strode toward the rift.
The purple-black light swallowed his silhouette in an instant.
The sensation was hard to describe.
It wasn't the dazzling wormhole effect from the movies — it felt more like stepping into empty air and plunging into a deep well full of viscous liquid.
Weightlessness and violent vertigo tangled together as the space around him folded, compressed, and unfolded again and again.
When his feet touched solid ground once more, his knees instinctively bent, absorbing the shock of the fall. He opened his eyes.
The scene before him was still the abandoned metal recycling plant, but he knew this was no longer the real world.
There was no perpetual haze in the sky, no flickering neon lights.
In their place hung a thick gray-purple fog, and at the far edge of the horizon, a crack that seemed to split the entire sky in two.
The mountains of scrap metal in the plant now floated in midair, defying every law of physics he knew.
The ground was coated in a layer of purple crystal that crunched crisply underfoot.
"Squad Monitor?" Su Yu called out tentatively in his mind.
"Mm." Fenghuang's voice came back quickly. "The link is holding steady."
She sounded somewhat relieved.
"I'd expected that with you and Kiana this far apart, and this place being a crevice within Honkai space itself — sitting at a different dimensional frequency — Yu Ducheng's link would break."
"But it seems the channel of your Reality Anchor bond with her is far more stable than I imagined. Even with the dimensional barrier in the way, it's still functioning."
That was an unexpected bonus.
Su Yu nodded.
"That means, when Kiana eventually goes on her mission back into the Honkai world, as long as the Anchor doesn't break, the two of you should be able to communicate over long distances through me."
With Fenghuang as a "human relay station," even if the Honkai world's electromagnetic environment turned so hostile that not even quantum communication could punch through, they'd still be able to stay in contact.
That was a strategic-level advantage, plain and simple.
"Unfortunately," Fenghuang said, a note of regret in her voice, "the power I've recovered so far can only sustain a link between the two of you. In my current state, I can no longer leave a feather of Yu Ducheng inside anyone else's body."
"That's plenty. Can't ask for the moon."
Su Yu smiled, about to tease her further, but his eyes suddenly changed.
His perception net, amplified by the Tai Xu Sword Qi, brushed against a mass of chaotic, violent energy fluctuations roughly eighty meters away. Those fluctuations were closing in on him fast.
"Here they come." Su Yu lowered his voice.
He quickly drew his perception net in tight, locking onto the area blocked by a pile of floating scrapped cars ahead.
"Quite a lot of them." Su Yu's mind processed the perceptual feedback rapidly. "Low-tier Sickle Zombies — twenty of them. High-tier elite dual-blade Zombies — three."
He tilted his gaze upward.
Atop several of the hovering scrapped stamping presses, a few blurry humanoid silhouettes were gathering energy.
They were the kind of presence invisible to the naked eye, but under the Tai Xu Sword Qi's perception, they stood out like torches in the night.
"And Deep-Soul Zombies too," Su Yu muttered, curling his lip. "Quite the lineup. And the unit composition is pretty sensible, too — melee cannon fodder for cover, elite strike units, plus ranged casters for damage. Is there a commander behind this?"
He didn't dwell on the question, because the first Sickle Zombie had already lurched out from behind the pile of scrapped cars.
Its gait was unsteady, but its speed was ferocious.
Its ashen-gray skin was covered in purple Honkai energy veins, and it dragged a rusted, absurdly oversized scythe that threw sparks against the ground.
Su Yu glanced over his own gear.
An assault rifle hung fully loaded across his chest; two large-caliber submachine guns sat in thigh holsters.
On his belt, besides spare magazines, hung four high-explosive grenades.
A one-handed sword was strapped to his back — something Tesla had scrounged up from Anti-Entropy's weapons vault for him to make do with.
The most vicious piece was the revolver-style grenade launcher strapped to the outside of his right thigh.
"Can't exactly be expected to go melee every single one of these bottom-tier cannon-fodder Zombies by hand."
Su Yu checked over his ammunition.
"That'd take forever to clear the field, and I need to save my stamina for the bigger ones coming later."
He patted the grenade launcher.
"Shame, though — had to prioritize mobility and lightweight gear, otherwise I'd have made Tesla rig me up a couple of six-barreled Vulcan cannons to lug around. Heavy firepower is a man's true romance."
Complaining as he was, his movements didn't slow for a second.
Su Yu kicked aside a chunk of purple crystal at his feet and threw himself hard to the right, sliding in behind the treads of an abandoned excavator.
Right where he'd been standing, a ball of dark-purple energy detonated with a roar, blasting a two-meter-wide crater into the crystal-coated ground.
A Deep-Soul Zombie's ranged attack.
Bang, bang, bang!
Su Yu didn't poke his head out from cover — he simply raised the assault rifle above the tread.
Under the Tai Xu Sword Qi's perception, he didn't even need his eyes to aim.
The second-stage Genetic Lock's perfect mastery over his flesh kept his arms as steady as mechanical limbs, pressing the rifle's brutal recoil into a dead-straight line.
Three three-round bursts.
The bullets curved around the floating obstacles with precise angles, drilling clean into the foreheads of three Sickle Zombies attempting to flank from the left.
The ashen-white bodies collapsed and dissolved into purple motes of light.
"Nine o'clock, forty-five meters, count seven."
Su Yu's brain worked like a high-powered biological computer.
He calculated the Zombies' movement trajectories while shifting positions rapidly between cover.
He burst out from behind the excavator, tucked into a forward roll to dodge two bone arrows laced with Honkai energy, drew a submachine gun from his thigh holster mid-motion, and sprayed a burst toward his forward-side flank.
The dense hail of bullets tore through the bodies of the four leading Sickle Zombies like a metal storm.
He fired, flicked his wrist, and the spent magazine dropped free.
His left hand swept across his waist; a fresh magazine clicked into place with a snap. The bolt slid forward.
The entire motion flowed seamlessly, unbelievably fast, without so much as a tenth-of-a-second pause.
He wasn't drawing on the Genetic Lock's terrifying tens-of-tons output — instead he was channeling that absolute physical mastery into precision.
Every contraction of every muscle, every held breath, all in service of the single instant his finger squeezed the trigger.
"Good. Keep this up."
Fenghuang's approving voice rose in his mind.
"Win at the smallest possible cost, without clinging to any one form of weapon. This will be a lesson you need to practice for a long time — your body can't afford meaningless expenditure."
"I know, Squad Monitor."
Su Yu pressed his back against a massive concrete pipe, pulled a high-explosive grenade off his belt with one hand, and yanked the pin free with his teeth.
He listened to the footsteps outside growing denser.
Honkai-energy arrows fired by Archer Zombies struck the concrete pipe, producing a teeth-grating hiss, corroding the surface with a foul, scorched smell. Overhead, Deep-Soul Zombies kept up suppressive fire.
None of it troubled him.
Su Yu counted silently to three in his head.
Then he hurled the grenade — not toward the mass of Zombies, but at the edge of a massive, precariously balanced sheet of steel floating overhead.
BOOM!
Flame roared skyward.
The blast wave flipped the multi-ton steel plate, sending it tumbling through the air until it slammed precisely into the Archer Zombies hidden in the shadows, crushing them and their cover alike into pulp.
At the same moment, Su Yu had already slid out from the other side of the concrete pipe.
He raised the grenade launcher and fired three rapid rounds — thump, thump, thump — straight at the energy convergence point of the Deep-Soul Zombies hovering overhead.
The high-explosive rounds burst in midair, and the scorching shrapnel and shockwave shredded the Deep-Soul Zombies' fragile energy defenses instantly.
A few dark silhouettes let out shrill screeches as they plummeted from the sky and crashed to the ground.
Under Su Yu's masterful, almost artistic coordination of firearms, the vanguard force of twenty Sickle, Archer, and Deep-Soul Zombies was wiped out clean in a mere five minutes.
But the battle wasn't over.
Clang!
A sharp, screeching clash of metal.
A tremendous force knocked the barrel of Su Yu's assault rifle aside, nearly wrenching it from his grip.
He rode the momentum and leapt back three meters, putting distance between himself and his attacker.
It was a massive double-edged long blade.
Purple Honkai-energy light flowed along the edge.
A high-tier elite Zombie.
A dual-blade warrior.
Its speed was leagues faster than the cannon fodder before it.
It hadn't merely dodged the point-blank burst he'd just fired — it had used the blade itself to precisely deflect the bullets.
Su Yu glanced at the deep gash carved into his rifle's barrel.
The gun was done for.
He tossed it aside without a second thought.
"Looks like firearms won't cut it for the rest of this fight."
The three remaining high-tier Zombies weren't the mindless, headlong-charging type of monster.
Deeply enhanced by Honkai energy, they retained not only the terrifying muscle memory of warriors in life, but had even had their combat intelligence elevated.
They didn't rush to attack. Instead, they spread out into a triangular formation, boxing Su Yu in at the center.
Su Yu reached back and gripped the hilt of the sword on his back. He slowly drew the long blade free.
The sound of metal sliding against the scabbard rang unusually clear in the eerily silent plant.
The blade was broad, unadorned, forged from Anti-Entropy's latest ultra-hard alloy.
Though it was more than a full tier below his White Dwarf, it would more than suffice against these things.
For someone trained in the Tai Xu Sword Qi, no weapon felt more grounding in a moment like this than a sword.
"Come on, then."
Su Yu spun the blade in a flourish, tip angled down toward the ground.
Under his control, the second-stage Genetic Lock quietly raised its output.
The nearest dual-blade Zombie moved.
Fast as a bolt of gray lightning.
Its two long blades trailed purple afterimages, striking high and low in unison, sealing off every avenue of retreat, driving straight for his carotid artery and his flank.
Su Yu didn't retreat.
He stepped forward instead.
In this instant, a month's worth of memories from being pinned down and ground into the dirt every single night by Rita began paying off in a rush.
Rita's war scythe was far faster than these two blades, and far more unpredictable.
If he couldn't parry an attack this straightforward, this past month of beatings would've been for nothing.
Su Yu's long sword sliced through the air in the simplest of straight lines.
No wasted motion, no flashy technique.
Just the plainest possible block.
But that single, simplest stroke landed exactly on the most vulnerable juncture where the two blades crossed.
Clang!
Sparks scattered.
The tremendous recoil left the dual-blade Zombie's arms briefly locked stiff.
Now was the moment.
Su Yu's wrist twisted sharply, and the long sword slid down along the Zombie's blade, thrusting straight for its chest.
But the Zombie's reaction proved shockingly fast — it wrenched its body around, dodging the fatal strike to the heart.
The sword only opened a shallow gash along its ribs.
It used the momentum to leap back, opening distance.
Su Yu didn't press the pursuit.
He furrowed his brow.
Something was off.
Brief as that exchange had been, he'd clearly sensed something wrong in the Zombie's movements.
Too calm.
Its strikes had been sharp, even carried a hint of... testing.
Realization struck him suddenly.
A moment ago, three high-tier Zombies had encircled him.
Now only two stood before him.
The one running the frontal feint, and the other circling at his flank.
Where was the third?
The third had vanished.
Su Yu's perception net instantly expanded outward, but the surrounding scrap was warped by Honkai energy, the magnetic field chaotic, his perception badly disrupted.
The dual-blade Zombie in front of him resumed its attack stance, crossing its two blades before its chest.
It didn't rush in immediately, instead shifting its footing slowly, as though waiting for something.
A cold smile suddenly curled at the corner of Su Yu's mouth.
In his mind, he said:
"Squad Monitor, you know what?"
Fenghuang stayed silent, sensing Su Yu was concentrating.
"That perfectly-smiling maid taught me a very important lesson over this past month."
Su Yu's fingers brushed lightly over the sword's hilt, his body still holding the frontal stance, but his right foot shifted outward by an imperceptible half-inch.
"And that lesson is: never turn your back to anyone."
"Unless you're setting a trap for them."
The instant the words left him.
A vicious gust of force came whistling in from behind his head.
The vanished third Zombie.
By some method, it had concealed every trace of its presence and slipped around behind Su Yu like a true assassin, leaping down silently from the towering pile of scrap metal.
Its two blades crossed in a brutal scissor shape, aimed straight at Su Yu's neck.
Its calculation was flawless.
At this moment, Su Yu's attention was fully fixed on the Zombie in front of him, and his body couldn't complete a full 180-degree turn to defend in time.
This strike — a certain kill.
Just as the crossed blades were about to touch Su Yu's neck.
A pinpoint of dark-crimson light suddenly flared to life on his back.
The light wasn't large, but it carried a terrifying pull capable of swallowing everything.
Star of Eden — partial deployment.
The ambushing Zombie had no chance to react at all before its two blades, along with both its arms, were seized instantly by that terrifying gravitational vortex.
It was like an insect crashing into a spider's web — instantly losing all balance and momentum, pinned helplessly to Su Yu's back, unable to move.
"Gotcha."
Su Yu didn't even turn his head.
His left hand still gripped the ultra-hard alloy sword, staying wary of the Zombie in front still poised to rush in and rescue its ally.
His right hand, meanwhile, reached crisply into the System's weapon inventory at his waist.
White Dwarf.
Su Yu gripped the hilt of White Dwarf backward and snapped his wrist back with force.
A wet, splitting sound.
The blade slicing through bone and flesh.
White Dwarf pierced effortlessly through the Zombie's faceplate.
A high-frequency shockwave detonated within the blade, and the Zombie's head burst like a watermelon rigged with an internal charge, exploding into a mist of purple blood.
The headless corpse slid off Su Yu's back and slammed heavily to the ground.
Su Yu flicked the purple residue off White Dwarf and turned to face the remaining dual-blade Zombie, now frozen in brief shock at the death of its companion.
But just as he prepared to press the attack —
The headless corpse on the ground suddenly began to change.
It didn't dissolve into purple motes of light like the lower-tier Zombies before it.
Instead, the high concentration of Honkai energy in the surrounding air seemed to answer some kind of summons, rushing madly toward the corpse.
Under Su Yu's stunned gaze, the purple Honkai energy coiled around the severed neck like living tendrils.
Flesh writhed. Bone knit back together.
In the span of a few short seconds, a new head began regenerating at a visible speed, catalyzed by the Honkai energy!
And that wasn't all.
Su Yu focused his perception and, through the Tai Xu Sword Qi, saw a thread of pure Honkai energy — a red line — binding this regenerating corpse to the dual-blade Zombie standing before him.
"There's a blood-bond gimmick too?"
The corner of Su Yu's eye twitched twice.
What kind of insane mechanic was this? Was this the Infinite Abyss from the game showing up in real life?
"If this were the game, it'd be missing a bleeding debuff on top of it."
Su Yu couldn't help grumbling internally.
"Squad Monitor, tell me when this Spatial Rift is getting an Abyss-style bleed mechanic added. If it really has one, the first thing I'm doing when I get out is finding a tattoo parlor and getting Lier Red inked on my back."
Fenghuang clearly had no idea what any of that gaming jargon meant.
"Su Yu, don't get careless. This is a mutation that occurs when Honkai energy is highly concentrated. As long as one of the two Zombies survives, the other can restore itself endlessly using the Honkai energy."
"Figured as much."
Su Yu let out a long breath.
He kicked off the ground hard, his body blurring into an afterimage.
"If I can't kill one of you..."
White Dwarf let out a low hum in his hand, a gravity field wrapping around the blade's edge — the very air warping wherever it passed.
"...then I'll just shred both of you to pieces at once!"
The dual-blade Zombie in front swung its blade to meet him.
But this time, Su Yu didn't parry with an ordinary swordstroke.
Second-stage Genetic Lock — one hundred percent release!
His muscle fibers groaned under the crushing strain, but in exchange he gained speed and strength beyond all reason.
White Dwarf smashed directly into the two long blades.
With the massive kinetic force compounded by the gravity field's crushing pressure, the Zombie's blades couldn't withstand even a single second of that absolute violence before shattering.
Su Yu followed through with a single stroke, cleaving diagonally through its shoulder, splitting it in two.
Almost in the same instant, the pistol in his left hand had already risen, spitting fire from its muzzle.
Those were Tesla's custom high-explosive armor-piercing rounds.
Three rounds struck precisely into the chest of the Zombie that had just clawed halfway up from the ground, its head only half-regrown, hitting the energy core dead-on.
BOOM!
A violent explosion kicked up a shockwave through the ruins.
This time, the strange red thread finally snapped.
Both mangled corpses turned to purple ash in the firelight and dissipated completely.
Su Yu lowered his gun, breathing in heavy gasps.
The second-stage Genetic Lock's overload had spiked his body temperature sharply — sweat evaporated into white vapor the instant it hit the cold air, swirling around him.
"Well done."
Fenghuang's voice remained calm.
"It's fortunate those two Zombies only formed the link on instinct, without enough intelligence to fully exploit it," she analyzed. "Had you faced an enemy with actual cunning — one stalling you while playing hide-and-seek, the other regenerating endlessly in the shadows, wearing you down through repeated waves — you wouldn't have gotten off nearly this easy."
Fenghuang paused.
"I'm sorry, Su Yu. I have to always prepare for the worst-case scenario. That fight just now truly was harder than I'd expected."
Su Yu wiped the sweat from his forehead and stored White Dwarf back in his inventory.
"It's fine, Squad Monitor, you're right. When it comes to Honkai, you can never be too careful."
He watched the purple motes of light gradually fade before him, but his brow slowly began to furrow.
His heartbeat was steadily settling.
The tension of the fight was gradually receding.
His body was in decent shape overall — a month of intensive training had pushed his baseline abilities up substantially. Compared to the encounter on the overpass, he could now sustain a full Genetic Lock release for far longer.
Even a few more waves like this would be well within his capacity to handle.
But some indescribable sense of wrongness sat lodged in his throat like a thorn.
"Something's not right, Squad Monitor."
"Mm." Fenghuang seemed to have been waiting for exactly this. "You noticed it too?"
Su Yu looked around.
The abandoned recycling plant. The floating scrap metal. The purple fog.
"A Spatial Rift on this scale, with Honkai energy so concentrated it's even spawning mutations like these blood-bonded Zombies —"
His tone grew heavier.
"— and yet, from the moment I stepped in until now, nearly half an hour has passed. I've cleared over twenty Zombies and three elites."
He looked at Fenghuang's ethereal form surfacing in his mind.
"So why haven't I seen so much as the shadow of a single Honkai Beast?"
This didn't fit any reasonable pattern.
In a typical Honkai incursion, Honkai Beasts were the main force.
Zombies were merely peripheral creatures corrupted by Honkai energy — cannon fodder.
Sure, some cannon fodder could possess special abilities or formidable strength, troublesome in their own right.
But compared to actual Honkai Beasts, they were still a tier below.
This place felt like a carefully curated breeding pit.
Only the highly mutated Zombies were present — none of the great beasts that Honkai itself should have spawned.
"Settle yourself." Fenghuang didn't answer his question directly. "Feel the flow of the air. Extend your five senses and the Tai Xu Sword Qi's perception as far as you possibly can."
Su Yu closed his eyes as instructed.
He breathed deep.
True qi rippled outward from him in expanding rings.
Ten meters.
Fifty meters.
One hundred meters.
Five hundred meters.
He could see the broken brick and shattered tile hidden behind the scrap piles, the purple crystalline dust drifting on the wind.
But then —
When his perception net tried to extend further, it met with a strange resistance.
The feeling was like plunging a hand into a vat of thick glue.
The farther out it reached, the greater the resistance, until finally his mental force slammed into an unyielding wall.
He found that, at his current perceptual strength, he simply couldn't cover this entire rift-space.
"Blocked?" Su Yu opened his eyes, somewhat taken aback.
"Try condensing your perception down to a single point," Fenghuang guided. "Don't cast a wide net. Aim it like a needle toward wherever the Honkai energy concentration is highest."
Su Yu drew a deep breath.
His perception net instantly contracted, coalescing into a thin thread, aimed directly at the purple-black fog at the deepest heart of the recycling plant.
Thud.
A dull, jarring rebound echoed from deep within his mind.
A sharp pain lanced through the space between his brows; he nearly saw stars.
His mental probe had been forcibly bounced back.
"That should be what we call the World Barrier," Fenghuang's reminder came at just the right moment.
"The same invisible wall that appeared between you, Kiana, and that World Serpent lieutenant Raven, when the three of you clashed last time."
Su Yu rubbed at his throbbing brow.
"Your mental force can't penetrate the barrier," Fenghuang continued. "But that's actually good news. It means the Honkai energy core has already appeared. Just as we predicted before — wherever a Honkai energy core forms, it's always at the point of highest concentration, which is also the boundary between the two worlds."
She paused.
"Has the System notified you? How much time do you have left?"
Su Yu pulled up the System panel projected on his retina and checked the mission countdown.
[Time Remaining: 3 hours 24 minutes]
"A little over three hours." Su Yu stared at the ticking number. "This time we've got a lot more breathing room than last time."
Which made things even more suspicious.
No Honkai Beast.
Only elite blood-bonded Zombies.
An impenetrable World Barrier.
An unusually generous countdown.
Every sign pointed to this rift not being some simple burst-point.
"There's definitely something off here."
Su Yu strapped the one-handed sword back onto his back.
He found a few relatively clean scraps of metal on the ground and used them to re-secure the spare magazines on his rifle harness.
"Looks like this fight isn't going to end nearly as easily as we thought."
He raised his head, looking toward the thick fog at the deepest part of the abandoned plant.
The purple-black light flickered within the mist, like the eye of some colossal beast.
"Stay sharp," Fenghuang said. "There's likely still a hard fight ahead."
Su Yu drew a deep breath of the rust-tinged air.
He set off, walking toward the depths of the fog.
Before long.
The open ground at the center of the abandoned plant was more spacious than the outer areas; the mountains of scrap piled here had been cleared away, leaving a large, flat expanse.
Overhead, through gaps in the shattered corrugated roofing, several beams of the rift's distinctive purple light filtered down, making the oil-stained patches on the ground glisten.
Su Yu stood in the shadow of a massive abandoned crane control cabin.
He stopped advancing.
Peering past the rusted edge of the control cabin, the open ground below was packed with Zombies.
Dense masses of ashen-white bodies drifted slowly, their numbers at least triple those he'd encountered outside.
No sign of any Honkai Beast.
Su Yu slowly crouched down.
He reached one hand toward the tactical belt at his waist, fingers brushing in turn over the spare ammunition pouches on the grenade launcher.
Two high-explosive rounds, one Flashbang, one white phosphorus incendiary round.
He needed to take full stock of every card left in his hand.
The rhythm of the Tai Xu Sword Qi circulating through him shifted.
No longer radiating outward for perception, it drew inward instead, suppressing every trace of his bioelectric signal to the absolute minimum.
At the same time, he activated the skill granted by Rita Rossweisse's Tarot card — Shadow Stalk.
His breathing slowed and lengthened, his heartbeat dropping to around forty beats per minute.
His entire body seemed to dissolve into the steel shadows behind him — even someone standing a mere meter in front of him would have trouble noticing a living person was there.
"Definitely something wrong here."
Su Yu murmured in his mind.
"Squad Monitor, I haven't seen a single Honkai Beast."
It took Fenghuang's voice about five seconds to respond.
"There's another possibility," Fenghuang said, her voice steady. "Those Honkai Beasts have been drawn away by something else."
Su Yu's eyelid twitched.
"Drawn away?"
"Honkai Beast attacks have clear directionality," Fenghuang explained. "Objects with high-energy signatures, or dense concentrations of Honkai energy, pull them in like powerful magnets."
Su Yu shifted his gaze toward the center of the open ground.
He recalled the floor plan of this recycling plant he'd seen before, back at Old Yang's place.
The whole plant was divided into two main structures, east and west. He was currently at the edge of the eastern section.
And spanning the divide between the eastern and western sections was that same invisible barrier that had blocked his mental probe earlier.
The World Barrier.
The barrier was invisible and intangible, but under the Tai Xu Sword Qi's microscopic perception, he could detect faint ripple-like distortions in the air ahead.
Dozens of Zombies were pressed against that rippling wall of warped air, their withered claws scraping madly at the barrier, bone blades hacking uselessly against empty space, not even a single spark thrown off. They couldn't get through.
"There's something with high energy present in this building," Fenghuang's voice continued. "Something that doesn't belong to the world you're in — you can't perceive it directly."
Su Yu stared at the rippling wall of distorted air.
His perception had been cut off here.
But he still had eyes.
In that very instant, a blinding streak of blue-white light exploded from the far side of the barrier. The light pierced through the warped wall of air, bathing the entire eastern half of the plant in stark white.
Lightning.
That was the physical manifestation of raw, ferocious electrical discharge.
Su Yu's pupils contracted sharply.
"Exactly the same as when Raven showed up last time," Su Yu said through gritted teeth. "Someone from the Honkai world has come through this rift."
Fenghuang went silent.
"Has someone from the World Serpent come back again?"
Su Yu kept his eyes fixed on the direction the lightning had flashed.
"Possible. But right now, in Arc City, there aren't many people capable of producing that kind of power."
He'd already guessed who it was.
At this particular moment, in Arc City, only one person could generate lightning discharges on that scale.
BOOM!
A deafening crash echoed from beyond the barrier.
Immediately after, a Battle-Car Class Honkai Beast — a creature two stories tall — went flying backward through a passage on the other side of the plant like a torn sack of rags.
Its massive body slammed into a load-bearing column, snapping the half-meter-thick concrete pillar clean in two, chunks of broken concrete raining down onto its carapace.
Before the giant beast could even scramble up from the ground, a net-like web of blade-light had already swallowed it whole.
Lightning coursed wildly through the tangle of blade-light.
The Battle-Car Class Honkai Beast's hardened silicon-based carapace offered no protection at all against the blades, instantly sliced into over a dozen flat, even fragments.
Purple blood sprayed out, splashing across the surrounding scrap metal.
The beast's carcass began dissolving into purple motes of light.
A figure emerged amid the dissolving light.
A blue-and-white battle suit clung to a slender, well-honed body, its armor plating scorched and scratched from battle.
She gripped a long, elegant katana in one hand, crackling electric light still lingering on its blade.
Her long, purple-black hair was pulled up into a high ponytail, swaying with her movements.
She snapped the katana sharply at her side, flinging a diagonal line of purple blood droplets across the ground.
She didn't sheathe the blade right away.
Her chest heaved violently, each breath trailing a cloud of white vapor.
Clearly, the fight to reach this point had cost her tremendous stamina.
"That's..."
In his mind, Fenghuang's voice carried a rare tremor.
"Mei."
Su Yu spoke the name in his mind.
"Raiden Mei."
"Mm." Su Yu tapped his fingers lightly against the grip of his grenade launcher. "She doesn't have the Gem of Conquest in her, but the lightning power still lingering inside her is still considerable. That Striker Fulminata armor... is the handiwork of Doctor Tesla from the Honkai world."
"So your guess was right, Squad Monitor. All those Honkai Beasts really did go running toward her."
Seeing Raiden Mei appear here didn't surprise Su Yu much.
In the original game storyline, during Kiana's time as a Void Drifter, Mei had spent ages relentlessly searching for her. And this was exactly the rift over Arc City.
"Squad Monitor."
Su Yu crouched down behind the control cabin and began pulling spare magazines out of his tactical harness, slotting them into the pouches on his belt within easy reach.
"Next up, I'm going to go trade information with her."
He ran through the calculations quickly in his mind.
"She's not going to trust me easily — I'll need your help."
There was a long silence from Fenghuang's side.
A full half-minute passed before her voice returned.
It sounded as though she were suppressing some emotion.
"Will she really... trust me?"
There was an unmistakable weariness threaded through Fenghuang's words.
"Whatever the case, for Kiana to have ended up in that state... some of the blame rests squarely with me."
Su Yu slotted a fresh magazine into his assault rifle and racked the bolt; the crisp click of the round chambering echoed unusually loud in the shadows.
"But you also gave everything you had to help Teacher Himeko," Su Yu consoled her. "Don't worry, Squad Monitor. Even if you can't convince her, I've got another way."
He raised his left hand.
His palm opened upward.
Golden light gathered above his palm. The air began to fold subtly, an unstable cube-shaped space spinning and taking form in his hand, its edges radiating a dangerous, cutting sensation.
Herrscher of the Void Authority.
"This," Su Yu said, staring at the space-cube in his palm, "is the most convincing proof there is."
He closed his fingers, crushing the space-cube; the golden light dissipated into the air.
"But first —"
Su Yu stood, leveling his assault rifle, its muzzle pointed down at the crowd of Zombies still scratching at the wall below.
"Before the talks can begin, I need to clear the field first."
On the western side of the World Barrier.
Raiden Mei was breathing hard.
She'd driven her katana into a gap in the steel plating on the ground, leaning both hands on the hilt to support her weakening legs.
The Striker Fulminata armor's life-support systems were pumping anti-fatigue compounds into her muscles, but the sustained, high-intensity fighting had pushed her nerves to their breaking point.
She lifted her head and looked around.
This was the other half of the abandoned plant's open ground.
A dozen or so meters ahead stood a dense mass of Zombies.
They packed together like a wall of ashen-white flesh.
Mei drew her katana, planted her feet apart, and settled into the opening stance of Hokushin Itto-ryu.
Lightning danced back to life along the blade's edge.
But she quickly noticed something odd.
The Zombies weren't charging.
They stretched their arms out, bone blades slashing wildly through empty air, yet they could never cross some invisible line.
It was as if a transparent wall stood between her and them.
Mei frowned.
She swung a backhand strike. A crescent of lightning-charged sword qi tore through the air, streaking straight toward the Zombie horde.
Bang!
The sword qi struck something five meters short of the Zombies, shattering instantly into countless fragments of crackling electric sparks that faded into the air.
An invisible barrier.
Mei held her stance, katana still raised, and slowly stepped back two paces, opening a safe distance.
Once she'd confirmed the Zombies truly couldn't cross the barrier, her tensed shoulders relaxed slightly.
She sheathed the katana at her hip and walked to a relatively clean precast concrete slab, sitting down.
No new Honkai Beast had appeared for the moment.
She needed to use this time to let her body recover some strength.
She lowered her head and looked at the small cuts scattered across her palms.
She thought back over everything that had happened before entering this bizarre rift.
A few hours earlier, in an abandoned industrial zone at the edge of Arc City.
She'd settled Alvitr and the other wounded members of the Immortal Blades into a hidden safe house.
Before leaving, Alvitr had grabbed at the hem of her coat.
That B-rank Valkyrie of Schicksal, after a moment's silence, had told Raiden Mei the news Schicksal had gathered about the Herrscher of the Void — as a way of repaying her for saving their lives.
"She went to the overpass area."
Alvitr's voice had been faint and weak.
"The patrol report said... someone spotted a white-haired girl there, saving a mother and daughter... and then she vanished."
White-haired girl.
Those four words struck Mei's heart like a live steel needle.
She hadn't stayed in the safe house a single second longer.
She'd left all the emergency medical supplies for Schicksal's squad and plunged straight into the Arc City night.
The area beneath the overpass had been utterly devastated.
Concrete piers smashed by tremendous force, rebar twisted upward like weeds toward the sky.
The ground was covered in scorch marks and deep craters.
Mei had searched there for a long time.
She'd dug through the rubble even as jagged rebar tore her uniform, even as broken glass cut into her fingers and drew blood — she hadn't stopped.
She'd wanted to find even the smallest clue about that fool.
A scrap of burnt cloth, a single strand of white hair — anything would do.
But there had been nothing.
Only endless ruins and a suffocating silence.
Just as she was preparing to widen her search radius —
The sky had changed.
Without warning, a purple-black rift had torn open above her head, its enormous pull dragging every scrap of debris and trash around her into it like a tornado.
Mei hadn't had time to react at all — the ground had vanished beneath her feet, and she'd been dragged straight into that purple abyss.
When she'd regained consciousness, she'd already been here, in this recycling plant full of floating metal.
She'd tried to contact the Hyperion.
Nothing but static hissed back through her comm.
The passage behind her had sealed shut completely the moment she'd come through, and the concentration of Honkai energy in this region had spiked sharply.
Honkai Beasts had appeared.
Waves of lower-tier Honkai Beasts, mixed with several Battle-Car Class ones, had swarmed toward her like sharks scenting blood.
Mei hadn't chosen to hide.
A Valkyrie's instinct told her that the core of this space — the place where Honkai energy concentrated most densely — must hold something capable of ending all this.
She'd carved a bloody path forward, cutting apart every monster in her way, all the way to this open ground.
Mei raised a hand and rubbed at her throbbing temples.
The situation was getting stranger by the minute.
This rift's structure, this bizarre transparent wall, and the way the Zombies just now had seemed to be blocked by something.
Just as she was rapidly sorting through all this information in her head —
BOOM!
BOOM-BOOM!
A series of violent explosions suddenly erupted from the other side of the transparent wall.
The flash of the blasts lit up half the plant.
Even through the World Barrier, the shockwave of the massive explosions was enough to send tremors through the concrete slab Mei was sitting on.
Mei shot to her feet, her right hand reaching back for the hilt of her katana.
She stared fixedly at the direction of the explosions.
In the middle of that warped, heat-distorted inferno, the Zombies that had been massed at the barrier's edge were being slaughtered one-sidedly by terrifying firepower.
She saw bullet trails flickering through the flames.
Extraordinarily precise.
Every single round seemed calculated to a fraction, drilling accurately into the most vulnerable point of each Zombie's neck or skull.
This was no natural phenomenon, and certainly no infighting among Honkai Beasts.
Someone was using firearms.
Mei tightened her grip on her katana's hilt.
At the heart of the inferno, a blurred figure was moving with incredible speed.
The figure's movements were unnaturally fast, flickering in and out of visibility amid the flames and smoke.
Every time it appeared, a fresh burst of gunfire and grenade blasts followed.
Mei pushed her eyesight to its absolute limit.
She strained to make out the figure weaving frantically through the mass of Zombies.
But she couldn't.
The figure seemed wrapped in some eerie, dark field.
That field neither absorbed nor reflected light — it simply blended perfectly into its surroundings.
If not for the muzzle flash betraying his position each time he fired, she wouldn't have been able to distinguish his outline from the burning scrap metal and Zombie corpses at all.
Advanced optical camouflage? Or some kind of specialized stealth armor?
Mei's breathing turned controlled and measured.
She adjusted the Striker Fulminata armor's output to combat-ready standby.
So there was someone else here besides her.
And judging by the combat proficiency and the ruthless efficiency with which this person was clearing the field —
This was no ordinary person.
The gunfire and explosions gradually died down.
The last high-tier dual-blade Zombie collapsed with a dull, wet sound of a blade sinking into flesh, dissolving into purple motes of light.
On the other side of the barrier, only a still-smoldering ruin remained on the open ground.
The figure came to a stop.
He made no move to keep hiding.
The camouflage effect seemed to deactivate voluntarily, and a human silhouette began sharpening into focus amid the firelight.
He stood atop the roof of a half-buried old truck.
In one hand he held a long sword still dripping purple fluid.
His other hand hung at his side, gripping an assault rifle with an empty magazine.
He turned, facing her direction across that invisible World Barrier.
And began walking toward where she stood.
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