The hand held out before her was rough and smelled of gunpowder smoke, the knuckles fresh with scrapes.
Sirin laid her own bony little hand in it.
The iron fence fell away behind them.
The shrill alarms and the guards' bellows were buried by wind, snow and gunfire inside the thick concrete walls of Babylon Laboratory.
The escape route was far from smooth, but after shaking off the first wave of pursuers, they hid in a dilapidated little town on the edge of the Siberian wilderness.
The snow came down heavy, nearly swallowing the squat wooden houses whole.
The streetlamps flickered, buzzing and crackling with overloaded current.
Su Yu held Sirin's hand as they stood outside the window of a grocery shop long since closed for the night.
Behind the glass, an old brass music box was turning slowly, driven by its spring, a tiny metal figure performing a stiff ballet.
Sirin's eyes were glued to the little dancer. She didn't blink, even as snowflakes settled on her eyelashes.
Su Yu stepped into the bakery next door, which was still open.
When he came out, he was carrying two fresh-baked loaves of Russian bread wrapped in a brown paper bag.
Steam rose from the mouth of the bag and turned to white mist in the minus-twenty air.
He pressed one of the loaves into Sirin's hands.
The bread was a little burnt, and it was so hot it almost hurt to hold.
In this hellish world, it was the first time Sirin had ever felt a warmth that traveled from her palms all the way down into her stomach.
Night deepened.
The inn's sign was hanging on by a thread.
The room was so bare it held only a bed and a rusty tin fireplace.
Pine logs crackled in the hearth, and the orange-red firelight made the whole room flicker between bright and dim.
Sirin, wrapped in a wool blanket washed stiff, had fallen into a deep sleep on the floor near the fire.
Even in her dreams, her brow stayed tightly knotted, as if men in white lab coats holding syringes might spring from the shadows of the corners at any moment.
And against her chest, her thin little hand was clutching two of Su Yu's fingers for dear life.
Su Yu sat on the edge of the bed.
His coat lay discarded to one side, his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow, exposing the bullet graze on his arm, freshly stitched.
He didn't pull his hand away.
He lowered his head, his gaze passing over the dancing flames to land on the girl's grubby face, his eyes full of tenderness.
Meanwhile, in the surface layer of space that wrapped around this small dream—
Kiana watched all of it through the soul's Anchor.
She knew very well that she and the Herrscher of the Void were, at their root, nothing more than two sides of the same tragic soul.
And wasn't saving Sirin in this moment also saving herself?
Her eyes were fixed on the man sitting by the bed, patiently letting the girl clutch his fingers.
A ring of red slowly crept along the rims of her eyes.
The rain-soaked night, the puddles and the mud, rose again in her mind.
Back then, it had been these same hands that dragged a Herrscher vessel, bristling with thorns in her despair, straight out of the mire.
He was willing to give everything even for a soul fated to become a world-ending monster. To force a lamp alight in this cold world, he would throw his own life into the brazier as firewood without a moment's hesitation.
Faced with a fool like that, one who never listened to reason and only ever filled the pit with his own life, how could anyone not fall for him?
Just as this brief calm was about to lull her into forgetting where she was—
Fenghuang's figure appeared at Kiana's side, her gaze calm as she watched the pitch-black snowfield outside the cabin.
"The underlying logic of this dream is the purest malice of the world."
"What Su Yu is fighting isn't just Schicksal's pursuit team. It's every bit of suffering the whole world has heaped upon the individual called 'Sirin.'"
"That malice has locked onto Su Yu, the foreign body that barged in uninvited. It will use every means at its disposal to correct a history that was never meant to exist."
Kiana's breath stopped short.
In this dream, to avoid provoking an even more violent backlash against Sirin's consciousness from the entire space, Su Yu couldn't use any of his original powers.
Right now he was nothing more than an ordinary man with special training and some tactical know-how.
No matter how polished his assassination techniques or how skilled his hand-to-hand combat, with a mortal's body, how could he survive an entire fully armed force of Schicksal elites and a Babylon silencing squad?
"He can't win."
Fenghuang turned her head to look at the back of the man by the fireplace.
"The dream's timeline is collapsing faster and faster. Sirin is destined to awaken as the Herrscher of the Void here. That is causality that cannot be changed."
"Su Yu's interference can't change her fate of ascending to godhood."
Kiana was bewildered. "Then what's the point of everything he's doing?"
Fenghuang was silent for a moment.
"He can't change the fact that she will ascend in the end. But everything he's doing now can completely change... the reason she draws her sword against this world."
Kiana's breath caught. Change the reason she draws her sword against the world?
What did that mean?
She didn't understand. Yet she chose to believe, to believe in the man who always managed to create miracles.
And just as Fenghuang had said—
the dream's timeline was savagely compressed by the correcting force of malice.
The surroundings suddenly began to peel away and reassemble like a shattered mirror.
Night.
A blizzard raged through the conifers.
Dazzling searchlight beams swept back and forth between the snow and the tree trunks.
From the high-frequency loudspeakers of the Schicksal pursuit team came mechanical, emotionless search commands.
Sirin lay deep inside a hollowed-out heap of thick snow.
A camouflage blanket with excellent optical-stealth and insulating properties covered her completely.
Beneath this layer, neither thermal imaging nor infrared night-vision scopes could detect a living person hidden under the snow.
Her whole body shook with spasms she couldn't control.
The voices from those loudspeakers, the boots crunching closer through the snow, were the tolling of a funeral bell announcing that the gates of hell had opened once more.
Minutes ago, when the first searchlight beam swept across the treetops,
Su Yu hadn't shown the slightest panic.
He'd dug out this snow hollow with an entrenching tool, pushed her inside, and pulled the blanket over her head.
Through the blanket, he pressed down hard on her shoulder.
"Be good. Stay here, and no matter what happens, don't make a sound and don't move..."
Sirin grabbed his wrist.
"Where are you going?"
Su Yu pulled his hand free and racked the slide of his gun.
"I rigged plenty of surprises in these woods ahead of time," he said, checking the magazine. "Once I switch on the jammer, their thermal imaging goes blind."
He glanced at the swaying glare of the lights.
"I'll be right back."
The man's footsteps melted into the night until they vanished.
Fear ballooned wildly in the endless dark.
All Sirin could do was prick up her ears and catch the faint sounds outside.
The sharp, clipped three-round bursts of a suppressed pistol.
The muffled blast of a Claymore mine hidden behind a tree going off.
The scattered clatter of heavy boots stampeding in panic, crushing the snow.
And the grating sound of a sharp combat knife slicing through body armor and windpipes in an instant, followed by a spray of liquid.
In that dark, freezing snow hollow, time stretched out long, so long it was almost despair.
The gunfire in the distance gradually thinned out.
The storm grew stronger, almost drowning every sound.
Sirin lay in the freezing snow, her limbs frozen numb long ago.
Over and over she repeated a prayer in her mind, her head full of the image of being dragged away by men in white lab coats.
She was afraid the snowbank would never be dug open. She was afraid she would never hear that familiar heartbeat again.
The hunt in the depths of the snowfield dragged on for who knew how long.
The storm seemed ready to smother even the thinning gunshots.
Just as she no longer had the strength to blink the frost from her lashes,
heavy footsteps stopped beside the snowbank.
Then came a run of ragged breaths, rasping like a leaking bellows.
The camouflage blanket that had blocked her sight was yanked away.
The cold wind rushed in.
Sirin forced her eyes open, and her pupils contracted violently.
The Su Yu before her was barely recognizable.
His black tactical suit hung in rags.
Bullet wounds, large and small, all clean through, covered his shoulders, abdomen and thighs.
Blood seeped down the hem of his clothes and his fingertips, melting the snow beneath him into horrifying dark-red pits.
And behind him,
the entire conifer forest had caught fire in the explosions, the blaze painting half the sky a blinding orange-red.
"Su Yu..."
Sirin scrambled out of the snow hollow in a panic, stumbling and crawling on her knees as she threw herself at him.
Her frozen hands shook as she pressed them over the largest hole in his abdomen.
Her tiny palms were soon soaked in warm blood, and no matter how hard she pushed, it wouldn't stop.
"What do I do... what do I do..."
Her mouth hung open, tears and meltwater mingling as they washed her filthy face.
She tried desperately to cry out louder, but all that squeezed from her throat were broken sobs.
Su Yu's body dropped heavily to its knees in the snow.
He coughed up mouthfuls of bloody foam, his vision starting to blur.
He lifted a hand slick with blood and set it on top of Sirin's head. His strength was faint, but it halted her near-hysterical wailing.
"Sirin." He said her name. "Look at me. Look at me."
Sirin froze. Tears still fell, but the crying stopped.
She stared blankly into eyes that were gradually losing focus.
"I know... you stopped expecting anything from this rotten world long ago." Su Yu strained to tug up the corner of his mouth. "Telling you to let go of that hatred would be bullshit."
He coughed twice, and a mouthful of blood welled up, running down his chin to drip on the back of Sirin's hand.
Sirin panicked and wanted to cry again, but Su Yu held her head firmly in place.
"Listen to me, Sirin."
"There are still a lot of... a lot of kids out there like you, stuck deep in the dark."
"If... if you really do make it out of this hell alive, and if you really want to do something for me..."
He looked at her, his gaze piercing through the blizzard.
"Take my stubbornness with you... and go pull them all out."
"Sorry about this..."
The corner of his mouth twitched with effort.
"Guess I'm still an irresponsible bastard of a grown-up... even at the very end, shoving a damned wish like this into your hands..."
The last light in Su Yu's eyes began to fade.
He reached out toward Sirin, his fingers curled slightly, as if to touch the girl's tear-streaked cheek one last time.
But just a few centimeters from her face,
the hand lost all strength and fell heavily into the deep snow.
A peach-flavored candy, wrapped in clear candy paper and held in his palm until now, slipped from between his fingers and rolled into the snow.
That faint spot of pink, set against the glaring crimson of the blood, stabbed at Sirin's eyes.
"Ah—"
Sirin stared blankly at the candy.
Her mouth hung open.
From deep in her throat came a few dull, hollow sounds.
So it was true.
In the depths of grief, a person truly couldn't make a sound.
Watching all this, Kiana's eyes went wide. Yet through her link with Su Yu, she clearly sensed that he was still there.
Su Yu hadn't died.
Knowing this, Kiana finally breathed a little easier.
"Trust Su Yu," Fenghuang said, standing at her side. "All we can do is hold on to the rope that tethers his consciousness and wait for him to return."
The dream's time began to flow again.
From the woods in the distance came another burst of chaotic footsteps.
It was the reinforcements, a squad of Schicksal Valkyries.
"This is Ragna. Target confirmed."
A woman's voice, calm but laced with fatigue, sounded over the comm channel.
"But the target is only a girl of about ten. Is she really the extremely dangerous test subject you keep talking about?"
On the other end of the line, there was a long silence, as if a heated argument were underway.
"I'll reserve my doubts."
Ragna's voice dropped.
"If fighting Honkai and saving the world means locking innocent girls in labs and torturing them into monsters, then maybe what ought to be wiped clean is this world."
Right behind the Valkyrie squad, Babylon Laboratory's armed personnel, in Schicksal-issue protective suits, quickly closed in.
"Captain Ragna, watch your words."
The captain leading the armed team stepped forward, rifle raised.
"She is our most important vessel. Against any attempt to interfere with her recovery, we have authorization from above to use lethal force on the spot."
Sirin didn't look at the black muzzles. She didn't listen to the argument over her fate.
She simply lay quietly on the ground.
Her arms clutched Su Yu's body, already cooling.
Her cheek pressed against his chest, as though that alone might hold on to the last bit of warmth the man had left.
The quarrel grew more heated.
"Stop! She's lost all ability to resist! She's just a child!"
Ragna whirled around and threw up her Greatsword to block the armed men behind her.
Fierce shouting erupted between the two sides on the spot.
But the armed men, their heads addled by fear and orders to silence witnesses, were clearly not going to heed the advice of an assault team captain.
One of the lab staff had bloodshot eyes.
He raised his rifle, took aim past Ragna's line of defense at Sirin, whose back was turned to them, and pulled the trigger without hesitation.
"Bang—!"
The gunshot cracked abruptly across the snowy night.
At the very instant the bullet was about to tear through that slight back,
Su Yu's corpse, utterly lifeless and kneeling before Sirin,
was suddenly shoved by an invisible hand.
Driven by the last twitching of residual muscle and nerve,
that tall body toppled forward, miraculously, and his broad back shielded Sirin from behind.
With a dull thud,
the lethal bullet drilled unimpeded into Su Yu's back, already riddled with holes.
A spray of scalding blood splashed across Sirin's pale face.
Curses and the clack of rifle bolts wove together into a harsh din over the snowfield.
In that second, time stopped completely.
The rusted iron locks and bloodied syringes on the lowest level of Babylon Laboratory.
The faces of the companions who could no longer be woken in the dead of night.
And the face of the big brother who had kicked open the cell door in the dark and held out his hand to her, all of it collided in Sirin's mind like a spinning lantern of memories.
Their despairing cries and Su Yu's last blood-soaked entrusting.
In this instant, they exploded through Sirin's mind like a tidal wave.
—"Take my will with you, and save those kids."
Sirin stayed where she was, quiet.
She didn't tremble. She didn't cry.
A terrifying Strength was slowly awakening in the deepest part of her body.
Within it lay the deepest hatred for this world, and a mad malice capable of grinding everything to dust.
It was the Will of Honkai, calling to its most promising vessel.
It tempted her to accept the Strength that could wipe all of this away.
To crush the world that had taken her hope again and again.
Sirin gave that voice no answer.
Slowly, she raised her head.
Facing malice enough to shatter any mind, she could no longer feel even a trace of fear.
In that moment, Sirin's eyes turned fully into burning dark-gold crosses.
She reached out and accepted that Honkai energy without resistance.
But the power that flooded in no longer carried the savage urge to vent her fury in vengeance.
She took up this royal power only to build a high wall with it, to guard to the death the wish that man had made in his final second.
Wind howled and surged backward across the snowfield.
The suffocating spatial fluctuations set every Honkai energy detector within a hundred miles shrieking off the charts at the same moment.
Sirin's figure slowly rose into the air.
Noble purple-black silk and ornate metal fittings wove themselves anew in the light into the gown that belonged to a Herrscher alone.
She hung there, her long hair whipping wildly in the wind.
Her golden eyes slowly opened.
Below,
the lab staff who had inflicted countless tortures on her had already collapsed to the ground, terrified by this godlike pressure, unable even to hold their guns steady.
Ragna's eyes widened, pinned in place by the overwhelming airflow, unable to move.
Sirin only glanced down at them.
In those dark-gold cross-shaped pupils there was no anger, no cruelty.
Only the most absolute indifference and contempt, the look one gives a roadside insect that could be crushed at any moment.
That gaze chilled them to the marrow, far worse than any violent punishment.
She called down no divine wrath, and paid no heed to the humans who had lost their nerve.
She turned in midair, her body slowly descending, and settled again onto the blood-stained snow.
The raging wind around her gentled in that moment into a soft breeze.
She crouched down.
As if lifting the most fragile treasure in the world, she carefully gathered Su Yu's ruined body, now riddled with bullet holes, into her arms.
Her movements were so light, yet it was as if she were lifting the only world she had.
Above her head, space tore open into a vortex like a black hole.
The next second,
in a blinding streak of light,
she rose from the ground with the man in her arms, shot toward the endless black sky, and was gone in an instant.
The Second Herrscher, the Herrscher of the Void, Sirin.
Was born right on schedule, in this dream-world built from endless malice.
But what threw all of Schicksal's high command and researchers into frenzied disbelief was this:
the Honkai that should have swept across all of Siberia, even triggered a global catastrophe, was inexplicably confined within the ruins of a snowy forest of less than ten square kilometers.
After repeated overloaded scans, the deep-space detection radar of Schicksal Headquarters
arrived at a conclusion that left everyone speechless.
The signal of the Herrscher of the Void, a power capable of crushing several continental plates,
had already crossed the atmosphere and now lay 380,000 kilometers away—on the Moon!
The lunar surface.
On that dead, desolate expanse pocked with craters,
a translucent shield, built from pure spatial Imaginary energy, shut out the vacuum and cosmic radiation.
At the shield's center, on a patch of uneven moon rock,
Sirin used her spatial Authority to carve out a smooth meteorite platform.
She laid Su Yu gently upon it.
Bit by bit, Sirin had cleaned the blood from Su Yu's face and even changed him into clean clothes.
Wrapped in her Imaginary Authority, neither the temperature nor the vacuum here could erode him in the slightest.
His body was frozen forever in the moment of his death, with no decay, no change at all.
His tired face looked as peaceful as if he'd just finished a grueling day of work and slipped into a deep sleep here.
No more Schicksal pursuers.
No more endless experiments.
And no more of the world's malice trying to drag them into the mire.
Sirin leaned against the edge of the stone platform.
Her chin rested on her folded arms as she quietly gazed at the sleeping man before her.
In those dark-gold eyes, the savagery and coldness she'd once worn looking down on all living things had long since faded.
What remained was a tenderness as deep and endless as this starry sky, and a longing that threatened to spill over.
She slowly raised a hand.
Her fingers were curled slightly, and in her palm she clutched that peach-flavored candy, wrapped in clear glass paper.
She pressed the candy gently against the left side of her chest.
As though, through the wrapper, she could still feel the faint warmth left on it, the warmth of another person.
"Good night, Su Yu."
Her voice was very, very soft in the empty space.
"The kids still trapped in the labs... I'll bring them all back."
She closed her eyes and laid her face against the back of the hand that had lost its warmth.
"And then..."
"I'll sit right here until you've slept enough... until you wake up."
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