Chapter 212: Crashing the Party
Seele swung her scythe again — same result as before. The blade passed straight through the orb as if it simply didn't exist in this space.
It wasn't Quantization. She couldn't feel any trace of quantum energy. Which meant...
"An Imaginary Space?" Seele stared at the orb hovering before her, then looked down at the plaster Honkai Beast that was slowly pushing itself back upright under the orb's control.
She set her scythe swinging in a rapid sequence of slashes, carving through the Honkai Beast's body from top to bottom — every joint, every limb severed clean. The thing was in pieces. At that point, surely there wasn't much left worth using.
As expected, the moment her blade came down on that last joint, the phantasmal orb solidified dozens of thin threads and shot them outward, connecting to every fragment, pulling them back together from the middle.
Seele's eyes sharpened. Her scythe traced an arc through the air and cut straight through the orb itself. The mechanical debris clattered to the ground in a heap.
"Heh. Not as hard as I thought."
At that moment, the other Honkai Beasts surged in together. A flicker of blue light ran along Seele's scythe blade — then she swept it sideways in a single brutal arc. The blue slash tore through every Honkai Beast in the sweep simultaneously.
Against ordinary Honkai Beasts, that wouldn't have been so easy. Their Honkai energy barriers could block that level of attack without much trouble. But these things were less like Honkai Beasts and more like plaster sculptures.
Their true selves were just those orbs on top. The Honkai energy coating their bodies existed only to move their limbs — outside of raw offensive output, their defenses weren't worth mentioning.
Not that it mattered much to them. Even when their bodies were split in two, the orbs kept them dangling in midair, and they just kept attacking.
Still, now that she knew how to handle them, it wasn't too difficult to manage. The problem was the sheer number.
If this kept up, things could get hairy. She wasn't about to let Seele get hurt on her watch. Which meant there might be no choice but to gamble — and Sirin was nowhere to be seen.
[The only option is to try diving into the Sea of Quanta and bet on it.]
[But... won't that cause problems? What if Sister Irene and the others don't notice?] Seele listened to Black Seele's suggestion with some uncertainty. Quantization itself was simple enough — as long as she didn't go fully quantum, returning to the real world was perfectly manageable.
At least, it was manageable for Seele. Back in the old days, her only option had been to use it as an escape — phase out to dodge an attack, then re-materialize for the counterattack. But after spending time training alongside the catgirl senior that Sister Irene's transformation produced, things were different.
Now Seele could do what that senior did: stay in a Quantized state and keep attacking at the same time. She could even Quantize her weapon along with herself, leaving only the cutting edge anchored in reality.
Dr. Tesla had found this absolutely fascinating — extremely fascinating — and had wanted to study it, to see if it could be integrated into Titan's existing Quantization-based stealth system.
The results, however, had been disappointing. The way Seele and Pardo could selectively Quantize only the parts being attacked while keeping their attacking limbs solid in reality — Titan simply couldn't replicate it.
Talent, probably. Seele felt like she had a natural gift for toggling between states, to the point where she could use it almost instinctively.
Though it hadn't been a complete dead end. Tesla had still managed to use the concept as a basis for building a Titan that could blink-dash forward. Its deterrence factor was significantly higher than before — though the cost of production was astronomical, so only a handful had been built.
The last time she'd fallen into the Sea of Quanta had been because she'd fully Quantized, and then couldn't find her way back. How was she supposed to have known to leave coordinates back then?
But fully Quantizing and then returning was still a bit of a hassle. She could only hope this place wasn't too far from the Eye of the Deep — otherwise she'd be drifting through the Sea of Quanta for a while again.
Still, with that prior experience under her belt, it wasn't beyond her.
[I don't think this place only has a couple of puppets and a bunch of fakes that don't even qualify as real Honkai Beasts. Since there's no conventional way out, we'll have to go unconventional.]
[Understood. I'll leave it to you, other me.] Seele gave a small nod. If her other self had already made up her mind, then so be it. She absolutely could not drag Sister Bronya down.
"Oh my, where does our little honored guest think she's running off to?" The puppet's suspended body dropped down in front of Seele at that moment. "You haven't agreed to join our troupe yet — you can't just wander off."
"Hmph. I don't have time to keep playing around with you lot." Seele gave a cold snort. Blue light began rising from her body again — but this time, the areas it covered grew dimmer and dimmer.
As if she were fading out of existence.
The puppet immediately sensed something wrong. This girl could actually escape? That wasn't right — weren't they the ones who controlled the Theater of Domination, who decided who came and went?!
This wasn't how it was supposed to go.
But they couldn't just let Seele walk out of here. They had spent enormous effort and hadn't managed to capture a single important figure from Anti-Entropy — not one of the Doctors had been caught.
They'd gone to so much trouble just to learn that there was a Seele — sitting in the Medical Bay, a place anyone could visit — and that she was just a C-Rank Logistics Valkyrie on top of that.
They'd figured she'd have at least some access to the higher-ups, and rumor had it she had no small connection to certain key people. That was why they'd targeted her. But who could have guessed this C-Rank Logistics Valkyrie could fight like this?
Was this right?
They'd spent so long accumulating that plaster stockpile, and Seele had demolished a huge chunk of it in two or three swings. Fine — plaster wasn't exactly precious.
But now their target was still uncaptured and about to flee. That was absolutely not acceptable.
The puppet lurched forward in a panic, moving to intervene personally. Seele saw it coming and didn't flinch — she hoisted her scythe and prepared to deliver a direct headshot. If she didn't pop its skull open, she wasn't Seele.
The skull-popping technique was one Seele and Black Seele had practiced on countless quantum crabs drifting through the Sea of Quanta.
But at that exact moment, a second voice rang out from Seele's own body.
"Found you at last." A Chakram materialized from somewhere in that deep blue space and smashed straight into the puppet's face, launching it backward.
Seele looked down and saw a hand reaching out from her own chest — and then a shadow in the shape of a cat slipped free from her body and landed on the ground, stepping in front of her protectively.
"Sister Irene?"
"Sorry, sorry — got here late. This place was genuinely hard to pin down." Irene offered Seele an apologetic look. After Sirin's warning, she had rushed over immediately — but it was obvious the Herrscher of the Legion had anticipated the Herrscher of the Void.
So there had been no entrance to the Theater of Domination to be found at that location. They had clearly grabbed their target and bolted, and once you moved even slightly within an Imaginary Space, pinpointing a location became far from easy.
Especially with this bunch, who had almost certainly been running for all they were worth. The Herrscher of the Legion — their power was too fragmented. Even gathered together they were still just one Herrscher.
Without any growth, without having seized any Authority, getting individually kicked around by the assembled Herrschers in Irene's group was a death sentence. They knew it too.
They represented human malice, sure — but that didn't make them idiots.
The whole affair with the dual Herrscher of Ice and Rock had made enough noise that any Herrscher of the Legion paying the slightest attention would have done the math. Even without knowing the details, anyone who ran the numbers understood: get into a brawl with Irene's crew of Herrschers, and you're finished.
So running after stirring up trouble was inevitable.
That was also why, even knowing something had gone wrong, finding them had been tricky for Irene — though this time, thankfully, the one taken was Seele. So Vill-V had come up with a solution.
Use Seele's likely voluntary Quantization as a vector — when she entered the Sea of Quanta, she would leave a marker. Then, using Pardo's Quantization, pass through that marker.
That would allow them to reach the Theater of Domination at the quantum level.
The only question had been whether Seele could manage it before the Herrscher of the Legion put her down. Fortunately, Seele hadn't let them down.
At the sight of Irene, the puppets took a step back — the ones that were a step too slow got pushed to the front by a wall of Honkai Beasts.
The lead puppet shot a furious glance backward, then turned to face Irene.
"You — how did you find this place?"
"Through... hmm, the power of genius intellect." The appearance of Pardo faded from Irene's form. "Though I genuinely didn't expect the Herrscher of the Legion to show up this quickly."
"Hmph. That's because we've been lurking in this world for a long time," the Herrscher of the Legion said, staring at Irene. "Even earlier than the Herrscher of Ice."
"Oh." Irene looked at the Herrscher of the Legion and gave a small nod. A fairly useless piece of intelligence, all things considered — if they'd known beforehand, they could have taken preventive action, but now that the Herrscher of the Legion had already emerged, it didn't mean much.
It wasn't as if they were going to stop and fuss over the order of appearance now.
The succession of Herrschers in this era was already a complete mess. One more early arrival hardly registered.
"Since you've decided to come looking for trouble on your own," Irene said, fishing a golden crystal from her pocket and crushing it hard in her palm, "don't mind if we don't stand on ceremony."
The shattered crystal began to drift upward, gradually assembling itself into a ring nearby. Honkai energy gathered within it, and a deep violet portal snapped into existence.
"Oh ho, a brawl!" Little Senti shot out like a gust of black wind and slammed directly into a Honkai Beast. "You lot seriously can't go five minutes without causing trouble, can you."
Little Senti glared at the Herrscher of the Legion. Thanks to Fu Hua's memories, she had zero fondness for these creatures who worked their destruction from the shadows and had already caused considerable harm.
Through the portal, the others began stepping through one by one.
"Sirin, can't you make this portal even a little bigger?" Mei stepped through, her platform heels making the passage just slightly awkward for her. She was already taller than everyone else to begin with.
With those platform heels on, she was taller still — and then there were her wide Ghost Armor arms. The result was that a doorway perfectly adequate for everyone else became just a bit snug for her.
"Mm..." Sirin scratched her head with a touch of embarrassment. "I'll pay attention next time."
"Alright, enough chatting." Irene watched the puppets backing away. "Time to get to work."
[You. Have her let me out. I have some things I'd like to discuss with these people.] At that moment, Kalpas's voice rumbled in the depths of Irene's mind.
Irene heard the voice and raised an eyebrow. Seemed like Brother Kalpas had caught sight of the Herrscher of the Legion and stirred up some unpleasant memories. As for his request —
That was definitely getting fulfilled.
Glitching, data-corruption-like light flickered at Irene's side, and Kalpas's form gradually took shape with the help of the Corruption virus.
Kalpas flexed his fist. This temporary body was reasonably solid. The strength felt unfamiliar, but... it was enough.
The moment the puppets registered the sight, they immediately wanted to flee. There were far too many people here. If not now, when? Were they supposed to wait around to get beaten down?
But just as they moved to use their control over the Theater of Domination to slip away to another part of it and then exit — they were met with a shock.
"Damn it — those cowards ran." As the puppets looked back, the surrounding darkness began to dissipate. The vast Theater that should have been connected in one piece had shrunk down to nothing but a stretch of crumbling ruins.
"Ah." Irene regarded the puppets' horrified expressions. "Looks like you've been abandoned. What terrible timing."
"So it seems we can't clean this up all in one go," she continued, advancing slowly toward the remaining puppets alongside the others, the aura radiating from their group every bit as ominous as a villain's entrance. The Herrscher of the Legion, whose puppet forms had looked terrifying moments before, now somehow resembled the victims.
"No — no, don't come any closer!"
And so, in that abandoned stretch of corridor, thunder and storm coexisted, flames erupted through black mist, and ice and gravity ground the hallway to rubble.
— Schicksal HQ · Overseer's Office —
"Oh, Amber — you're saying there are several individuals from Anti-Entropy who wish to defect, and are willing to give up Miss Irene's location along with the defensive schematics of the facility there?"
Otto set down the handheld console beside him and fixed his eyes on Amber with an expression of idle amusement.
"That is correct, Lord Overseer." Amber gave a small nod. "They have already sent over a portion of the defensive schematics as a show of good faith."
"How interesting." Otto lifted his wine glass and took a gentle sip, a trace of amusement flickering in his eyes. "And what reason did they give?"
"They claim to have suffered persecution and have therefore decided to transfer their allegiance to us, in hopes of securing a quiet, safe position." Amber held her tablet against her chest, her expression perfectly composed.
"A quiet, safe position, hmm..." Otto gave a slow nod. The red wine swirled gently in the glass, catching the light and reflecting the calculating gleam in his eyes. "And where are they now?"
"They are currently being held under supervision." Amber held her tablet. "How would you like to handle them, Lord Overseer?"
"Dispose of them," Otto said, draining his wine. "And forward this information to Anti-Entropy while you're at it — give them a heads-up. Oh, and one more thing — prepare the Cosmic Juggernaut before they're dealt with."
Defectors appearing on Irene's side — defectors who then walked straight into his hands? How was that even conceivable?
Setting everything else aside, there was the Herrscher of Corruption to consider. She would never allow anyone to pull something like that off so easily. Nine chances out of ten it was a trap. Better to handle it first and think later.
Then figure out what manner of ghost was pulling the strings.
"Make absolutely certain every last one of them is detained — whatever they are. And that includes anyone who has had any contact with them whatsoever. All of them are to undergo a thorough examination."
"Understood, Lord Otto."
____
________________________________________
🌸 Help Love Bloom!
Our girls need a little push... and you can help!
💖 Gift for Everyone: Once we hit 100 Powerstones, I'll release +1 bonus chapter to warm your hearts.
🚀 Community Reward: If we reach 20 supporting members, we'll have a +5 chapter marathon across all stories! The romance won't stop.
👻 Come to our secret corner: Search for GirlsLove on (P). You know that's where the magic happens... 😉