Bronie's voice came through the earpiece. After that line out of nowhere, she let out a sigh and began, unhurriedly, to lay out everything that had happened the day before.
"First, you need to understand this: there is more than one world."
At the entrance of the Raven Bar, the old exhaust fan turned with a dull, laboring drone.
Bronie sat on a barstool and spread the truth out in front of Cioara piece by piece, peeling away layer after layer of concealment.
She started three months ago, with the meteor that had punched into Arc City's Old District, and the Valkyrie who had come down with it from another world - Kiana.
She moved on to the countdown hidden behind the glittering skyline: in less than six months, the Honkai calamity would descend in full, and the world would be reduced to scorched earth.
She spoke of the top-secret cooperation Anti-Entropy Entertainment had quietly reached with the Shenzhou authorities, of how Arc City had already been designated, in the highest chambers, as a Special Strategic Defense Zone.
And finally, she spoke of the training base buried deep underground, the one screening humanity's last Kindling by brutal methods - the "Starfire Furnace."
Bronie did not rush. Every word came out clean and distinct.
She had braced herself for doubt, for shock, even for Cioara laughing in her face and telling her she had lost her mind.
None of that came.
Through twenty full minutes of explanation, Cioara simply sat in the chair beside her, quiet.
Her gaze rested calmly on the scratches in the bar's wood grain. Her breathing never faltered. Her fingers never tightened around her glass. Not even those fine eyebrows of hers bent so much as a millimeter.
The whole time, she looked about as rattled as someone listening to a late-night radio show about urban legends.
Bronie stopped, licked her dry lips, and glanced sideways at the woman next to her.
"That's everything."
Cioara set her lemon water down on the bar. She turned her head and looked at Bronie in silence.
"Bronya." When Cioara finally spoke, her voice carried no ripple at all. "Honestly - if the fragments of intel I've been collecting off the dark web this past while didn't happen to fit what you just told me into one complete chain of logic..."
She paused, and the corner of her mouth curved in wry resignation.
"I would seriously be wondering whether the one with severe schizophrenia was you."
The heart Bronie had been holding somewhere in her throat dropped back into place.
She rolled her eyes, enormously. "Old hag, I've laid out every card I had. End of the world, Valkyries from another world - believe it or don't."
"I believe you."
Cioara stood and walked over to stand in front of her.
"I used to think that putting you in Su Yu's respectable-looking little game studio as technical director, tapping away at code all day, would at least guarantee that a restless rabbit like you could spend the second half of her life in peace and quiet, without stirring up any more disasters..."
Cioara sighed, and something self-mocking flickered through her eyes.
"But the way things look now, that wish of mine is thoroughly dead in the water."
She reached out and patted Bronie's shoulder, lightly.
"Still - you did the right thing, Bronya. If this world is facing annihilation in six months, then a stable future, a beautiful tomorrow, a quiet ordinary life - all of it is empty talk. When the nest tips over, no egg survives intact."
Cioara's gaze deepened. She looked at the girl in front of her, already grown tall enough to reach her shoulder, and for once there was real gravity in her voice.
"I'll be blunt. I doubted you before. I thought you were only chasing the thrill of hacking, that you helped Su Yu develop those dangerous weapons and went dancing on knife edges just to feed that vanity of yours - the one that wants Arc City's entire network under your heel."
Cioara tilted her head down slightly, looking straight into the eyes hidden behind those goggles.
"But now, I owe you an apology for how narrow that was of me."
Bronie froze.
In all her memory, this hard-edged woman - her ex-mercenary foster mother, who threatened her with cuts to her allowance as a matter of routine - had never once spoken to her in that tone.
"Bronya, you've grown up."
Cioara raised both hands and gently straightened the collar of Bronie's jacket.
There was pride in her eyes that she made no effort to hide, and beneath it, a faint ache.
"You're still green when it comes to dealing with people. But I honestly never imagined that the rabbit hacker who used to do exactly as she pleased, who only ever wanted to crown herself king of the network - that she'd choose to fight for this broken, riddled world, for people she's never even met."
Cioara's fingers smoothed out the last crease in the collar, and a gentle smile lifted the corner of her mouth.
"That kind of figure only ever shows up in cheesy old hero movies... but on you, it looks really cool."
"..."
Bronie's breath stalled for a beat.
Then heat came surging up her neck, flushing her ears scarlet in an instant, spreading until even her cheeks carried an obvious red.
"Old hag... tch!"
Bronie wrenched her head to one side and started shouting, stammering, trying to bury her panic under irritation.
"Wh-what are you getting all sappy for at a time like this! It's disgusting! Who wants to be some world-saving hero, I just - I just don't want to hear one day that you got flattened by a Honkai Beast while walking down the street!"
Watching that textbook display of tsundere behavior, the amusement in Cioara's eyes only deepened.
She didn't tear away the thin disguise the girl had wrapped herself in. She simply drew her hands back while she was ahead.
"All right, the sentimental portion of the evening is over. Since you've shown me your cards..."
Cioara turned and walked toward the massive liquor cabinet behind the bar, stocked wall-to-wall with expensive imports.
"...then it's about time I showed you how much of a dowry I've saved up under this dump of a bar over the years."
Her fingers found a dust-caked bottle of Romanee-Conti on the third shelf and gave its base a light half-turn.
Click.
A faint sound of mechanical gears meshing came from inside the wall.
Then, while Bronie stared, the enormous solid-wood cabinet split slowly down the middle and slid apart to both sides, revealing a small metal elevator with room for exactly two people.
"Come on in. Let me show you what the real adult world looks like."
Cioara stepped in first.
Bronie hurried after her.
There were no buttons in the elevator, only a retinal scanner.
A band of red light swept across Cioara's pupil, and then the car dropped toward the depths at a speed that left the stomach behind.
A good ten-plus seconds passed before the weightlessness faded.
The doors slid open.
Bronie took a deep breath and stepped out. The moment she took in what was in front of her, the eyes behind those goggles went perfectly round.
This was no bar's underground storeroom.
This was a small military base, and one built to a terrifying standard.
More than five hundred square meters of underground space, lit up bright as day.
The left side was an unbroken row of weapon display cases, all of them giving off the cold gleam of metal.
Standard assault rifles, tactical submachine guns, large-caliber anti-materiel sniper rifles - and behind blast-proof glass, stacked in neat rows, even a few miniature high-explosive armor-piercing rounds stamped with Schicksal's special markings.
But what actually made Bronie's scalp prickle was the area on the right.
It was a large underground intelligence terminal, assembled from dozens of high-resolution curved panels.
Data streamed down the screens in dense torrents, like waterfalls.
Every major traffic artery in Arc City, every core commercial district, even surveillance feeds from inside certain government agencies - all of it flickering across those panels in real time.
Countless cursors representing "deep-cover lines" crawled over the city map. Day after day, an unbroken flow of information funneled through every manner of encrypted channel into this basement that never saw the sun.
"You..." Bronie pointed at the screens and turned to Cioara, her voice actually shaking. "You told me you were just a peripheral informant who took money for jobs!"
A peripheral informant, building a branch terminal beneath Arc City this vast - vast enough to rival the Shenzhou authorities' own intelligence network?
Cioara walked to the main console, picked up a cup of coffee that had been sitting there for who knew how long, and took a sip.
"Peripheral personnel are still people, and people need managing." She smiled at Bronie. "However loose a network of outside informants is, somebody has to sit at the top of it, run the whole picture, sort the real intel from the fake. Wouldn't you say?"
Bronie sucked in a cold breath.
"Upstairs you were swearing up and down that you'd washed your hands of all this! That the most dangerous job you'd pulled recently was tailing Theresa to a dessert shop!" Bronie couldn't hold back the tirade. "Old hag, your talent for bluffing is getting more masterful by the day!"
Cioara ignored the complaint entirely and walked to a metal operating station in the center of the hall.
She typed in a thirty-two-character string of scrambled key code, fast.
There was a hiss.
With the whoosh of hydraulic valves venting, the metal cover at the center of the station slid open to either side, and a long silver display case rose out of the floor.
Cioara lifted the case and dropped it onto the table in front of Bronie with a thud.
"Open it."
Bronie swallowed and reached out to flip the latches.
The lid sprang up.
Two things lay inside. On the left, a set of deep black tactical soft armor, folded with precision.
Bronie reached in, and the instant her fingertips brushed that deceptively thin fabric, she knew something was off.
The feel of it overturned everything she thought she understood.
It was soft and light as silk in the hand, but when she tried pulling at it with real force, she found the molecular structure inside packed as tight as diamond. Not a fraction of a millimeter of deformation.
"This is..."
Bronie's head snapped up.
"The latest result out of Schicksal's top research institute."
There was a trace of wariness toward Schicksal's technology in Cioara's voice.
"A polymer composite material. It masses one-tenth of the same volume of steel, but its hardness and toughness far exceed any known titanium alloy on the market. It can perfectly stop a direct hit from a large-caliber round, and it dampens the impact force enormously on top of that."
Bronie's breathing turned quick and shallow.
A polymer composite material!
Just days ago, Tesla had been complaining to her that Pseudo-Soulsteel output was too low, that a materials-science bottleneck had the gravity pistol project completely locked up.
And now the key to breaking that deadlock lay right here in front of her, quietly waiting.
If they could analyze the weaving process behind this polymer composite, Anti-Entropy's tech tree would leap forward by an entire stride overnight.
With a new molecular combination worked into the material, Tesla might genuinely be able to combine it with Pseudo-Soulsteel and forge a barrel capable of surviving the "Neutron Star's" gravitational acceleration - and maybe even mass-produce combat armor to protect all those new recruits.
"Don't just stare at the clothes. Take a look at the old friend on the right."
Cioara lifted her chin slightly.
Bronie shifted her gaze to the right side of the case.
Lying there in silence was a heavy sniper rifle - long, lethal, and shaped like something out of science fiction.
The body was a deep, dark blue throughout, with several precision superconducting coils wound around the barrel.
There was no conventional magazine. In its place sat a miniature high-energy battery array giving off a faint glow.
"It's called Pulsar."
Cioara looked at the weapon, and something nostalgic passed through her eyes.
"Another piece Schicksal poured every resource into - a super-electromagnetic sniper rifle. The designer was Changguang. It draws power from that miniature battery array and uses electromagnetic rails to accelerate a specially made armor-piercing round to Mach three. Effective range, four thousand meters. Inside that distance it ignores any conventional armor there is. But it needs enormous electrical support, and with current energy-storage technology, two shots is already the limit."
Bronie ran the comparison charts for Tesla's Neutron Star design through her head. That weapon required Su Yu's extraordinary power to fire at all, and it was very likely single-use.
The Pulsar was different. It didn't need its user to wield a Divine Key like the Star of Eden, something far beyond human comprehension, to drive it. It only needed energy. A great deal of energy.
And as it happened, that kind of energy was something they - or rather, Anti-Entropy - had.
The controllable power source that could keep a hulking frame like Wotan fighting at full output for thirty minutes straight.
Cioara set her coffee cup down and pushed the entire silver case toward Bronie.
"This polymer soft armor, plus this Pulsar. That's the highest-grade loadout I can get my hands on as an S-rank agent."
She looked at Bronie, her tone turning serious in earnest.
"Now I'm handing them to you. Take this technology back with you. Help Anti-Entropy. Help that Starfire Furnace of yours."
Bronie stayed rooted where she was, making no move to take the case.
"You're giving me all your gear -" Bronie's brows knitted tight, her eyes full of worry. "- so what about you? Things in Arc City are only going to get uglier from here. Without a weapon to defend yourself -"
"Have you gone stupid, little rabbit?"
Cioara laughed softly, as though mocking how stubbornly literal Bronie could be.
She turned, crossed to a metal locker on the other side, and pulled the door open.
"I'm a mercenary. An assassin. A cleaner who harvests lives from the shadows. Squaring off against monsters on an open battlefield has never been my strong suit."
Cioara took out what looked like an ordinary black tactical watch and fastened it around her wrist.
"Optical camouflage is obsolete. This is a jammer. Once it's running, it doesn't just lower my presence in a crowd - it completely masks my heart rate and thermal infrared signature from detection. As long as I don't expose myself on purpose, not even military radar can find me."
Next she pulled out a night-flight wingsuit, black as ink.
"Nanoscale light-absorbing coating. Put this on in the dark, with no light source around, and I am the shadow itself."
Last came a small but intricately built grappling hook gun.
"High-pressure pneumatic grapple. Fires thirty meters of carbon nanofiber line in half a second. Enough to let me move between Arc City's skyscrapers like a spider."
Having displayed each piece in turn, Cioara turned back to the locker and, from a temperature-controlled box at the very back, carefully lifted out a glass reagent vial filled with pale blue liquid.
The vial refracted the lamplight into a lovely halo, but what Bronie felt coming off it was something dangerous, something animal.
"And finally, this."
Cioara pinched the vial between two fingers and waved it in front of Bronie's eyes.
"Schicksal's highest research achievement in developing human potential - a gene enhancement serum. Injected, it dramatically raises muscle fiber density, neural reflex speed, and skeletal strength."
Cioara's expression grew complicated, as if some distant memory had surfaced.
"There are actually several versions of this. The more dangerous the version, the more terrifying the strength it produces - at the cost of an extremely high fatality rate and mental breakdown."
"But..." She paused. "Under Lady Kallen Kaslana's forceful demands and intervention, Otto ultimately destroyed all the data on the dangerous variants. He kept only this one - the most stable, the least harmful to the body - and rolled it out to agents like us."
"This serum is the real foundation that lets ordinary people like us possess physical abilities far beyond the human norm."
Bronie listened, dumbstruck.
She had always assumed that with Su Yu's stack of "black technology" blueprints, Anti-Entropy already stood at the front of this world's tech tree.
But what Cioara had shown her today shattered that naivety completely.
Polymer composites, super-electromagnetic sniper rifles, stealth technology, and gene enhancement serums that pressed right up against the forbidden zone of life itself.
This world's Schicksal, even without the help of Su Yu's mysterious "System," had used nothing but its own accumulated depth to develop technology this terrifying, this advanced.
No wonder Schicksal had become the colossus that held the entire world in balance.
"That's all the sincerity I have to offer."
Cioara handed the pale blue vial to Bronie and shut the locker door.
She turned, folded her arms, leaned back against the cold metal, and fixed her gaze squarely on Bronie, who was still reeling.
"Bronya, take the equipment. Take the technology back with you."
Cioara's tone hardened again, edged with the absolute steel of a woman defending her young.
"But right now, it's time you got hold of that boss of yours, so he and I can have a proper talk."
She let out a cold snort, and something dangerous glinted in her eyes.
"Dragging my little rabbit - who was still sitting there tapping at a keyboard - into a war between gods where you can lose your head at any second, and not saying one word about it to me..."
"As her parent, he and I have a very large account to settle."
Bronie looked at her and shook her head.
"Tomorrow, Mom. I think that boss of mine has a whole pile of other things waiting to give him a headache tonight."
____
________________________________________
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! 😉