Inside the Schicksal organization, every A-rank Valkyrie earned the right to carry a codename. The tradition ran deep. More than ten years ago, the Snowwolf Squad had fielded an entire roster of A-rank fighters beneath their S-rank captain Cecilia Schariac, and each one carried a name tied to how they killed. Frost Swordsman Cheng Lixue. Floating Prominence Shigure Kira. The Ablutionist Salome Jokanaan. The codename was a mirror of the method.
Edelweiss Even was no exception. Her combat style leaned nimble and varied, a pair of ring blades wielded with genuine skill, so the name they gave her was Spirit Butterfly.
Inside the Dominion Theater, Ling Ke browsed her file through the synchronized senses of a puppet stationed in the now-suppressed main control room. Confidential intelligence on the Silver Lotus Squad, laid open for him to read at his leisure.
'Spirit Butterfly. Those who don't know would think Marvel sent one over from next door.'
He was not worried about the hundred puppets currently engaging her squad. Not even slightly. In HI3's original plot, the protagonist group had thrown nearly everything they had at Dominance Puppets that hadn't even seized any Herrscher authority yet, and it still cost them dearly. That group included Fu Hua after Crossing Dust, Seele of the Other Shore Twin, Kiana with preliminary control over the Herrscher of the Void's power, and Bronya carrying the Herrscher of Reason core. Four fighters whose names alone outweighed anything the current era's rank system could measure.
Against that scale, what was one A-rank Valkyrie?
The archives confirmed it. Among all currently active A-rank Valkyries in Schicksal, Edelweiss Even's strength placed mid-tier at best. Even after a decade of iteration since the Second Honkai, even with the addition of the Time Fracture System to modern Valkyrie Armor, her combat rating still fell well below the strongest A-rank of that generation, Cheng Lixue. If she couldn't match Cheng Lixue, there was no point even thinking about someone like Fu Hua whose bodily functions had already fully recovered.
Ling Ke closed the file in his mind and turned his attention to the corridor where it was happening.
Edelweiss Even was drowning.
Her two B-rank teammates were already dead. That part had been immediate. A hundred Dominance Puppets at initial baseline each carried combat power comparable to B-rank, and a hundred of them arriving at once left no room for anything except dying quickly. The two subordinates had gone down in the first wave while Edelweiss was still processing what she was looking at.
Now she fought alone, drenched in sweat, her ring blades carving arcs through the air as she leaped and pivoted through the press of identical short-haired girls. She would slash one across the neck with a spinning horizontal strike that should have sent the head flying, but instead the wound only flickered with iridescent light before closing over. Then the puppet she had just cut traded a chopping counterstrike that forced Edelweiss to abandon her follow-through and dodge sideways.
She clicked her tongue as another slash whipped past her ear, close enough to feel the displaced air, then pulled back from engaging because the ring of puppets around her was already tightening again. More short-haired girls. Same face. Same outfit. Same blade. Same dead expression behind the same pair of eyes, repeated so many times in every direction that the sheer visual repetition started crawling under her skin before the fear did.
But the fear came too.
What Edelweiss Even did not know was that the overwhelming majority of those hundred puppets were not actually fighting her.
Ling Ke watched the whole thing from the Dominion Theater with the particular satisfaction of a man running an experiment. What she experienced as a nightmare, he saw as a clean demonstration of the game character templates at work. The HP mechanic meant the puppets absorbed damage as numbers rather than wounds, only stopping when the value hit zero. Their equipment never degraded no matter how many times blade met blade. They were not human opponents, they were game constructs wearing human faces, and every tactic she had built her career on assumed an enemy that could be wounded in ways that mattered. At any given moment only two or three puppets actively engaged while the rest maintained the perimeter, arrayed on all sides to cut off escape routes but making no move to attack. It looked like a Hollywood action scene where a hundred enemies politely wait their turn, except in this case the restraint was deliberate and the director was taking notes.
He was using her as a sparring partner to test the game character templates, and she hadn't even noticed.
'This woman still hasn't figured out that after the first assault, most of them have been standing around watching.'
He sent two puppets at her simultaneously and she adapted, barely, her ring blades catching both strikes in a cross guard that held for exactly long enough. He sent three and her breathing changed, each exhale sharper than the last as the tempo outpaced what her body wanted to give. He sent four and the adaptation stopped altogether, her form deteriorating into wide desperate swings that her training would have never allowed on a good day.
'Only four and already falling apart?'
'You are at least an A-rank Valkyrie, right?'
He could have kept going. Five, six, however many it took to bury her under sheer volume. But dragging this out further had no meaning, because from the very first exchange there had been something else at work. Every hit she absorbed, every clash she weathered, every graze that slipped past her guard had been feeding a threshold she could never see, a bar filling silently above her head. The game called it Daze. Once it completed the body would lock entirely, every muscle paralyzed while incoming damage multiplied across the board. Anby's template carried a Stun Characteristic that pushed the accumulation faster with each strike, and if all hundred puppets had rushed her at once or if any of them had been above Lv. 1, she would have frozen in the first thirty seconds. But Ling Ke had held the pressure calibrated just below the tipping point while he ran his tests, letting the bar climb at the pace he chose rather than the pace the system allowed.
Now the tests were done.
He split his attention across the link to check on the rest of the base and found what he expected. The other four guests had all been located and secured.
'Then perfect.'
He grinned from the Throne.
'Accept my invitation, Miss Edelweiss Even. You have no right to refuse.'
The bar filled.
Something burst beside Edelweiss Even's ears and every muscle in her body seized at once. Her arms locked. Her legs froze mid-step. Her ring blades hung in the air, still gripped but no longer moving, while her eyes darted wildly in a skull that would not turn.
Two Dominance Puppets entered the corridor at speed, bending low as they blurred past her on either side. She did not react. She could not react.
Then her field of vision dropped.
It took her a moment to understand why everything looked lower than it should, why the ceiling seemed further away, why her body was tilting backward with nothing beneath it to stop the fall. She hit the ground and the sharp pain answered every question at once as she raised her head and looked down at what remained.
Two legs ending halfway, the cuts so clean they looked surgical.
The scream that came out of her filled the corridor and kept going, raw and wretched and continuous, the kind of sound that comes from a person discovering in real time what has been taken from them.
Not one of the hundred faces around her changed expression.
They looked down at her with the same cold indifference she had once worn standing outside a cell in the underground prison, watching a boy curled up on the floor, calling him a cockroach.
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