The deathly silence of the lunar surface was torn open by a violent, bursting ripple in space.
Vast Honkai energy turned into a visible torrent of violet-gold and poured wildly into that slender body.
Sirin absorbed the enormous energy left on the Moon, and the six Herrscher Cores inside her linked into a flawless circuit.
Slowly she straightened up from the flat meteorite platform. Her gaze lingered one last time, long and still, on the face of the sleeping man.
She took the peach-sweet candy, wrapped in clear paper, and pressed it carefully against her chest, as though it were the most inviolable relic in the world.
Sirin raised her hand.
Space shattered at her fingertips like thin ice, and an Imaginary rift to Earth thundered open.
She did not summon the meteor rain that could have battered the whole planet into ruins.
She stepped through the crack, and the scene before her switched in an instant to the boundless snowfields of Siberia.
Babylon Laboratory, a building like a gigantic steel coffin, stood rigid in the howling snowstorm.
Sirin hovered above the cold structure, the violet-black cloak behind her churning wildly in the blizzard.
There was no vengeful fervor in her golden eyes, only a godlike, icy mercy.
Countless golden doors split open one after another in the void at her side.
The Strength of Imaginary Space spread out under her control, precise to the hair's breadth. The children huddled in the lowest levels of the laboratory were lifted by invisible hands and transferred in an instant to a perfectly safe shelter hundreds of kilometers away.
Inside the laboratory, deafening alarms blared.
The researchers, who had once held syringes and scalpels and branded countless marks of despair onto Sirin's body, scrambled in terror to flee in every direction.
Sirin's fingertip twitched slightly.
Invisible shackles of space fell from the sky.
Under the absolute pressure of her Authority, every researcher in a white lab coat went limp as though their spines had been pulled out, collapsing on the frozen corridor floor.
She lowered her head and looked at the candy in her palm. The corners of her mouth slowly curved upward.
It was the first smile she had shown since becoming a Herrscher who wielded world-ending Strength.
Of course, this was merely the tip of the iceberg of Schicksal's vast laboratories.
But at least she was truly trying her best, fighting for that person's dream.
Just then.
The howling blizzard around her froze for half a second.
Then the whole sky twisted into a sickening, murky dark red.
This was the underlying logic of this layer of the dream.
It had sensed that a world meant to play out an apocalyptic script was straying from its one and only track.
In a dream saturated with the utmost malice, the Second Herrscher could never be a benevolent soul who brought salvation.
A vast, turbid malice, like a tsunami without warning, seized every law of the world in an instant.
The smile on Sirin's lips froze.
Her gaze crossed the distance and fell on the shelter where she had just placed the test-subject children.
Moments ago those children had been wide-eyed and uncomprehending, giddy with relief at breathing free air again. The instant they touched the cold wind outside, agonized screams tore from their throats.
Their frail bodies swelled and mutated like inflated balloons, sprouting pale bone spikes and hard carapaces.
In only a few seconds, the children had been twisted by pain into mindless Zombies and Honkai Beasts.
Meanwhile, the researchers sprawled on the floor shed their terror and put on faces of grief and outrage.
Facing countless emergency global news broadcasts, they accused the Herrscher of the Void hovering above Babylon through tears and sobs, describing her as a vile demon who had cruelly turned innocent children into monsters.
To correct the erring dream, the world had even thrown away its own most basic logic. Ordinary people who should never have known the truth about Honkai were forcibly warped into part of the dream's malice.
That malice kneaded Sirin's clumsy kindness by force into the most vicious of massacres.
Otto, Bishop of Schicksal, stood atop a soaring tower and issued the highest-level kill order to the entire world.
On television screens, on the radio, across the network, the panic of all humanity gathered into curses as solid as stone.
The voices were like poisoned blades, sweeping across the void and driving viciously into Sirin's ears.
Sirin hung in midair and watched helplessly as the world she had botched came apart.
The malice evidently felt this was still not enough.
To crush this unruly variable completely, the will of the dream began to pour out the strongest forces it could muster.
The snowstorm outside Babylon grew fiercer.
Three figures trudged through the deep snow and slowly emerged from the depths of the white curtain.
The man at the front pushed the glasses up the bridge of his nose.
Herrscher of Reason Welt.
He offered no opening words.
A miniature Mimic Black Hole burst open in his palm.
The terrifying gravity field of the Star of Eden instantly enveloped the whole stretch of sky where Sirin hovered.
Sirin felt as if a collapsing mountain peak had struck her shoulders, and she plummeted straight out of the air.
With a heavy "thud," she was pinned hard against the frozen ground, snow and mud spraying up around her.
Then.
Two more figures sealed off every path of retreat, one on her left and one on her right.
Siegfried, gripping the Greatsword of the Cleaver of Shamash.
And Cecilia, wielding the Abyss Flower.
Watching it all, Kiana's eyes went wide, filled with anxiety and unease.
Fenghuang's phantom appeared at her side, one hand resting lightly on her shoulder.
"Kiana, don't panic. Look closely at their eyes."
Kiana followed Fenghuang's prompt and stared. In the sockets of the figures standing in the snow there was only a void of empty chaos, none of the ripples that belonged to a human being.
"Those aren't the real Siegfried and Cecilia, and certainly not Welt."
"They're phantoms fabricated by the dream's malice, false things that merely borrow their appearances."
"Having human heroes sit in judgment of the wicked Second Herrscher is the original history. But clearly, this dream has started to stop at nothing."
Kiana clenched her fists without meaning to.
"Squad Monitor, do you think Sirin will lose?"
"If things are corrected according to the original history, the Second Herrscher Sirin's defeat is fixed." Fenghuang paused. "The final curtain of this world will still fall with the Second Herrscher's disappearance."
"But when the dream ends, will Sirin return to reality?"
"I don't know." Fenghuang watched the two sides facing off. "But I still believe that human will can change the whole world, just like what Su Yu did."
"The resolve to protect someone else's wish might just spark a miracle. Or have you heard this saying, Kiana?"
"What saying?"
"Those who believe in miracles are just as remarkable as miracles themselves."
"That doesn't sound like something you'd say, Squad Monitor."
"Yes, if it were before, I'd think so too." A rare trace of a smile rose in the depths of Fenghuang's eyes. "Perhaps it's because I've been changed by Su Yu as well."
"Mm."
Kiana gazed toward the distant battlefield.
"Then I'll believe in miracles too."
In the blizzard, the phantom wearing Cecilia's skin walked up to Sirin.
She looked down on the purple-haired girl, who was pressed so hard by hundredfold gravity that she couldn't lift her head.
"Do you see now?"
The phantom's lips moved, spitting out words as cold as bone-deep frost.
"A filthy monster like you doesn't deserve any hope, let alone anyone's salvation."
Siegfried's phantom raised the blazing Shamash Greatsword high overhead.
The scorching heat evaporated every flake of snow around them.
A strike of Destruction capable of erasing everything, heavy with the weight of judgment, came crashing down.
On a field of snow filled with persecution and misunderstanding, Sirin bit through her lip, and blood ran down her chin and dripped onto the white earth.
She did not close her eyes in resignation as she had in the depths of Babylon. Nor did she sink into the mad hatred that those voices tempted her toward.
Her right arm shook violently under the hundredfold gravity.
Her fingers dug desperately into the frozen soil and ice, and in her palm, bloodless white from the strain, she still clutched that crumpled peach-flavored candy wrapper.
In her mind flashed the image of that man smiling at her outside the ward corridor, and the heavy thud of him hitting the snow after he took a bullet for her.
"Su Yu…"
Sirin gritted her teeth.
"You said this world is terrifying, but there is still light in it…"
"You threw away your own life just so I could see that light."
She drove her fingernails into her palm.
"How could I… give up here?!"
Sirin lifted her head with a jerk.
Her golden eyes, which had dimmed, blazed again with dazzling radiance.
It was not the Destruction bestowed by the will of Honkai, but a fierce will that refused absolutely to yield to this vast malice.
"I promised him I'd get those children out."
"You fakes, who only know how to cower in the mud, don't even think about blocking my way!"
As the fear of the world and the loathing of herself in the depths of her heart were wholly replaced by this near-mad determination to protect,
the entire dream world let out an ear-piercing crack.
Spiderweb fissures spread across the murky dark red of the sky.
Watching it all, Kiana's eyes went wide, and she couldn't hold back a cry.
"She did it!"
Fenghuang watched the girl rise inch by inch against the gravity.
"The malice that sustains this dream was born from her deepest fear in the first place."
"Once she no longer fears the world's malice and no longer resents herself, the invisible cage that held her loses its source of power entirely."
On the snowfield, the gravity field around Sirin twisted and collapsed at once, like thin paper thrown into a furnace.
The invisible vines that had bound her limbs withered inch by inch amid a shrill howl of wind.
As Sirin shattered the fear buried in her heart with her own hands, the absolute restraint the dream's rules had placed on outsiders crumbled too.
That meant that even if someone used his extraordinary Strength here, it would no longer touch the root of Sirin's being.
In that thousandth of a second, when the blade of the Cleaver of Shamash, heavy with destructive heat, hung motionless in midair from the violent upheaval of the rules,
a blinding glow burst from the crumpled candy wrapper clutched in Sirin's palm.
It was the spiritual Anchor Su Yu had left her, to guide her way, before he died.
Space around them shattered with a roar.
A hand wreathed in terrifying currents of air thrust out by sheer force from the broken void.
Its five fingers spread, then clamped down hard on the Heaven's Fire blade that phantom Siegfried had brought down!
That divine weapon, forged by the dream, burst under the monstrous grip of that hand into a sky full of fiery sparks and fragments!
Su Yu stepped out from behind the shattered space.
The terrifying pressure around him, almost solid in its weight, now blanketed the entire storm-lashed Siberian snowfield.
He paid no mind to the dazed phantoms standing rooted in place, their weapon lost.
He turned and walked straight up to Sirin, bent down slightly, and gently pulled the girl, still gasping for breath, up out of the snow.
His gaze fell on her blood-smeared little face, then slid down to her right hand, which still gripped the candy wrapper for dear life.
Su Yu raised his hand and softly wiped the blood from her cheek with his sleeve.
"Well done, Sirin."
He looked into her golden eyes, bright again.
"You did great. Leave the rest to me."
Sirin stood frozen where she was, large tears splashing down.
Su Yu turned and shielded the small, thin girl firmly behind him.
His gaze swept coldly over the so-called "human heroes" fabricated from pure malice.
With the dream's rules no longer protecting them, in his senses these phantoms were not even worth a heap of scrap metal.
Su Yu slowly raised his hand and let his fingers close into a fist before him, his knuckles cracking sharply.
He looked out over this absurd, false heaven and earth. In a world not bound by the physics of reality, he could at last borrow, without any restraint, a weapon that belonged to a true [Hero].
[Tarot card: The Chariot loaded.]
[Reversed-Awakened Concept Armament: Cleaver of Shamash activated.]
A blazing greatsword condensed in Su Yu's palm. The moment he gripped its hilt, the frigid wind of the Siberian snowfield caught fire.
The scorching flames sent the surrounding temperature soaring, and the snow melted fast, turning into countless wisps of steam.
He raised the greatsword and pointed it at the dark-red sky.
The twisted malice let out a shrill shriek, and countless phantoms were fabricated. The clouds in the sky were torn apart, and the colossal Demon Dragon Benares appeared, copied even it by this world steeped in malice.
The hundredfold gravity of the black hole field, the Honkai-Beast-turned "Siegfried," the Black Abyss unleashed in full to steal lives, and even the man in the clown mask who held the Void Archives.
The dragon's breath blanketed heaven and earth, and the entire world raged to swallow the small girl whole.
But in the next instant—
Within that endless, hopeless darkness, a single spark of fire burst out.
"Heaven's Fire—unsheathe!!"
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