The blizzard seemed to ignite in that very instant.
Siegfried in his half-Honkai Beast form. Otto in his clown mask. Cecilia wielding the Black Abyss White Flower. Welt with the Star of Eden hovering at his fingertips.
Four phantoms embodying the strongest fighting power humanity had to offer, and they didn't even have time to raise a defense.
Flames erupted like a tidal wave and swept outward in every direction, with Su Yu at the center.
The blinding heat scorched the ice field beneath their feet into glowing red glass.
That world-shattering strike vaporized every phantom, along with the blizzard itself, into drifting ash.
A charred trench several kilometers long had been carved across the snowfield, still belching thick black smoke.
Hundredfold gravity? The Black Abyss's aura of death? Before this ultimate destructive force, those shoddy data phantoms were like plastic models dropped into a furnace. They didn't even get a scream out before they were ignited, melted, and reduced to ash in the wave of fire.
The terrible heat turned the snowfield for hundreds of meters around into scorched earth.
But the calm lasted only a few seconds.
In midair, the vaporized ash did not disperse. Like iron filings drawn by some magnetic field, it began to whirl backward and reassemble.
The dream's underlying logic, the world's malice converging on Sirin, would never allow an outsider to flip the board so easily.
The ash coalesced into the outlines of the same four phantoms. This time, though, their faces were twisted and hideous, as if they wore mourners' masks.
Countless voices, men and women, old and young, shrill and low, blended together and roared from every direction.
They were the resentment of those who had died on the Siberian snowfield, of everyone who had lost everything in the Honkai disasters.
"Why defend a villain?!"
Phantom Siegfried's voice was thick with violence.
"Who do you think you are? An outsider who doesn't belong here at all! Do you really believe she's some little girl who deserves sympathy?"
Phantom Otto stepped forward, his tone dripping with that lofty, condescending pity and mockery.
"She is the Second Herrscher, and her hands are stained with blood beyond counting! Since you know what she truly is, you ought to understand that smothering her here is the greatest responsibility we owe to all of humanity!"
"Calamity! Death! How many families have been destroyed because of her? A sin like this should be smothered right here, and she should suffer in endless darkness. That is the greatest comfort we can offer the dead!"
Phantom Welt raised a hand.
"You are betraying your own race. You are aiding a tyrant in his cruelty. You are an accomplice to all the evil in this world."
Phantom Cecilia said nothing. She only looked at Su Yu with a gaze full of grief and reproach, as though accusing him of being a cruel executioner.
Every word of it stood on the absolute moral high ground.
They were using the life and death of all humanity to crush a madman who dared interfere with the script.
They meant to nail Su Yu to the pillory of shame as a "traitor" and a "heretic."
Sirin stood behind Su Yu.
She gripped the candy wrapper in her hand so tightly it crumpled, and tilted her head back to look up at that back, which was not particularly broad.
Su Yu did not retreat half an inch.
He listened to the deafening denunciations, and suddenly let out a soft laugh.
"Champion of justice?"
He drove the Heaven's Fire Greatsword into the ground. The tip sank into the scorched earth.
"Hero of humanity?"
He tilted his head, his gaze sweeping over the phantoms closing in again. He looked like a man who had just heard a terrible joke.
"Don't make me laugh."
Su Yu's right hand slowly tightened around the hilt of Heaven's Fire.
"You, the so-called will of the world, seem to have had a ridiculous misunderstanding about me all along."
He looked at those hollow shells.
"I'm not the great man you imagine."
"Whether all of humanity lives or dies, whether this rotten world gets destroyed or not, none of it has any direct bearing on me."
"And I've never been some champion of justice with the whole world in his heart."
"The reason I'm willing to fight to the death for this damned world was never that I love the place."
His gaze flicked half an inch backward.
"It's because of how much the people I care about love it."
The flames leapt up along the blade again, hotter than before.
"For the sake of the world they love and work so hard to live in, I'm willing to give everything I have."
"So don't pin any trash titles like 'savior' or 'hero' on me. I'm just an ordinary man, nothing more."
"Nothing more than a game producer! Remember that!"
The instant his words fell, Su Yu's arms surged with power.
He swung the Cleaver of Shamash around in a full arc once more.
Flames even wilder than before swallowed the entire field of vision. The phantoms, only half reformed, were torn to pieces in the heat yet again.
The world's malice began to seethe violently. It seemed even angrier now.
That formless voice had become a shrill, piercing wail.
"Are you saying that even though you know the blood of countless innocents is on this Herrscher of the Void's hands, even though you know millions, even tens of millions of people died in agony because of her, even though you know she is the very embodiment of Honkai's arrival..."
"You would still make an enemy of the entire world for a monster like this?!"
———
Watching as a spectator, Kiana had gone slightly pale.
The question seemed to condemn Sirin's unpardonable sins.
But to Kiana's ears, wasn't it also a verdict on her, Kiana Kaslana?
She and the Herrscher of the Void were two faces of a single soul, stretched apart by extreme suffering.
The bloodstained crimes, the families shattered by Honkai, were ties she could never truly shake off either.
In the eyes of a world tormented by disaster, her very existence was undoubtedly a colossal "mistake."
In the eyes of ordinary people she was, without a doubt, The Devil, the original source of all sin.
Kiana clenched her teeth and stared at the back on the screen, standing amid the wind and fire.
In the dream.
Faced with a question that seemed airtight, one that stood on the absolute moral high ground, Su Yu gave his answer.
"I heard something once."
Su Yu hefted the sword onto his shoulder.
"Over the course of a lifetime, a person truly grows up three times.
"The first time is when you learn the difference between right and wrong."
"The second time is when you learn that a lot of things in this world aren't just a matter of right and wrong."
He looked at the churning, dark red sky.
"And the third time is when, even after you understand that things are more than right and wrong, you're still willing to walk the road you believe in all the way to the bitter end."
Su Yu gripped the hilt with both hands and raised high the greatsword of flame, a blade that looked ready to set the whole sky ablaze.
"If you insist on calling yourself the will of this world, if you insist on forcing me into this either-or question..."
His eyes turned cold.
"Then my answer is: that's right."
"Since you know the origin of this sword so well, you should also understand one basic truth."
"Every time the Cleaver of Shamash is drawn, it is only ever to protect the ones I love."
The flames stained his white lab coat a bright orange-red.
"A love that you all see as blind, childish, and not even understood by mainstream values is exactly what makes up the whole of 'my' world."
"To me, their existence is my world."
Su Yu brought the greatsword crashing down.
"I'm not fighting the world. I'm simply protecting my world!"
Against a rebuttal this shameless, one might even say outrageously biased, the malice of the whole dream turned completely savage and frenzied.
It shrieked and writhed over the scorched earth.
"That's a bait-and-switch! You're twisting words to defend a sinner!"
Faced with its accusation, the corner of Su Yu's mouth curled into an infuriating smirk.
"So what if it is?"
The malice realized that words alone could no longer break this man's spine.
So it played the card it considered the deadliest, one that could shatter his mental defenses outright.
The wind and snow in the sky suddenly froze into huge mirrors of ice.
Within the ice mirrors, harrowing scenes began to flicker wildly.
They were the past.
In another, far deeper consciousness space, Su Yu was dragged in by the Herrscher of the Void, and the two tore each other apart.
A full one thousand and twenty-four times.
In those scenes, Su Yu was run through the heart by the Subspace Lance, his limbs crushed by raging space, then pinned to the floor and tortured to death in humiliating ways.
Deaths of every unspeakable kind were magnified by the ice mirrors without restraint and played on an endless loop.
"This..."
Fenghuang stared at the blood-soaked images, and a storm of raging waves surged in those eyes, usually still as an ancient well.
She instinctively turned her head toward Kiana, seated beside her.
Deaths gruesome enough to make even a bystander's heart pound. How would Kiana react to seeing them?
Yet Kiana just sat there.
She didn't break down in tears the way Fenghuang had expected, nor did she hysterically demand to know whether the images were real.
She watched the images, and her face held a stillness that frightened even Fenghuang.
Fenghuang looked at her profile.
"Could it be... that you already knew?"
Kiana didn't turn her head. Her gaze stayed fixed on Su Yu's back.
"Squad Monitor," she said softly. "Su Yu's always calling me an idiot. But I'm not so dumb that I can't tell reality from a dream."
Su Yu did often tease her with "Paramecium," but in his heart he had never truly treated her as a fool.
Kiana knew exactly what she was doing.
Whenever she went to Su Yu to confirm something, she had usually already braced herself for the real answer.
"You know what?"
There was little rise or fall in Kiana's voice.
"What really made me sure it wasn't just an ordinary nightmare was what happened with Griseo."
That time.
Griseo had caught a glimpse of the terrifying truth of the coming Honkai invasion, and nightmares clung to her until she nearly broke down.
Su Yu had risked everything to enter the depths of Griseo's consciousness and dragged her back by sheer force.
"Actually, it was even earlier than that."
Kiana finally pulled her gaze from the screen and glanced at Fenghuang.
"Back in the Tai Xu Illusory Realm, when I was training Tai Xu Sword Qi with you, Squad Monitor. By then I'd already faintly pieced together a lot of the details from that 'dream.'"
She looked back at the screen.
"If it were just a nightmare, it'd be way too real."
From that day on.
Something buried deep in her bones had quietly begun to sprout.
Fenghuang was silent for a long moment.
"Since you'd already guessed the truth," she said, studying Kiana's profile, "why have you never asked?"
Kiana laughed at the question.
That smile held too much helplessness, and also an indulgence born of long habit.
"What good would asking do?"
She leaned back in her chair.
"That guy's always been like this, hasn't he?"
"Even if I grabbed him by the collar and yelled at him to stop doing these dangerous things that could get him killed at any moment, the next time the same situation came up, he'd jump right in without a second thought."
Fenghuang looked at Kiana for a few seconds.
In the end, even her ever-straight shoulders eased a little.
She closed her eyes and let out a very soft sigh.
"You're right."
———
The raging snowfield of the dream.
Su Yu stood before the flickering ice mirrors, each showing one of his thousand-odd deaths.
All around him, the malice poured down its mockery and abuse.
Far from drooping, the corners of his mouth slowly pulled upward into a thoroughly sarcastic curve.
"Looks like you, the so-called master of dreams, know pitifully little about me."
Su Yu looked straight at the version of himself in the mirror, the one with a punctured lung.
"How rare."
"Since you were drawn from the Queen's memories, don't you know why she, of all people, came to fear an ordinary man like me?"
"A full one thousand and twenty-four brutal fights in the mental space."
Su Yu's shoulders began to shake slightly.
"Isn't that proof enough of one very simple fact?"
His laughter slowly grew louder, until it finally turned into full-throated howling in the storm.
"Because I'm sick in the head!"
Su Yu flipped the sword into a reverse grip and pointed it at the huge ice mirror.
"And I'm very sick! Hahahahaha—!!!"
That familiar line instantly set Kiana's memory ablaze.
Back then, in that dim consciousness space, Su Yu, covered in blood, had faced the Herrscher of the Void, who loomed above him and could crush him at will, and said the very same words in the very same tone.
"That wasn't a lie."
Fenghuang spoke at that moment.
"There's no exaggeration in what Su Yu said, and it certainly isn't bluster to bolster his courage."
Fenghuang watched the man laughing wildly in the storm.
"Under extreme pressure and the threat of death, everyone reveals the base color they were born with."
"And Su Yu's base color is..."
Fenghuang paused, then spoke two words.
"A death wish."
Kiana's breath caught.
"A thousand deaths by being torn apart didn't make him flinch or feel fear even once."
"That agony, enough to crush an ordinary person's mind, became his best stimulant instead, driving him to throw his fists at his opponent even more madly and recklessly."
"If you think back over everything that has happened these past few months, you'll understand, Kiana."
Fenghuang's gaze was heavy.
"He has never once put his own life first on the scale."
"For Su Yu, the threat of death simply can't bring him down."
"That kind of pressure only makes him harder to deal with. The more he fights, the braver he gets."
"Because from the very start of this whole game, he's held only one attitude."
"Which is: it doesn't matter if I die."
Kiana's hands, resting on her knees, clenched hard, and she squeezed her eyes shut.
"That idiot..."
On the screen.
The storm of pure malice faltered and stalled under Su Yu's nearly feverish laughter.
In this dream space, where the laws of strength were ruled entirely by spiritual force.
Su Yu's will, a madness that didn't even care about death, was not crushed.
Instead, it split this chaotic malice open by sheer force.
____
Gift for Everyone: Once we hit 20 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! 😉