"I didn't teach you for nothing."
Setsuna pinched Haruhi's cheek, rather amused.
It gave him the strange feeling of raising a little girl and having her come back to repay him.
After gaining control of the Suniaster and the authority of the Herrscher of Reason, he was usually the one fulfilling other people's wishes. This was the first time someone had asked him to make a wish instead.
"Commander, make a wish! Didn't you say I'm really amazing? Whatever you want, I can make it happen!"
Haruhi Suzumiya refused to let it go, even imitating a pose from an anime as though flexing her muscles.
She was extremely confident in her superpowers and desperately wanted Setsuna's approval, eager to show him what she could do.
"Ha."
Setsuna thought Haruhi was actually quite cute when she wasn't acting so crazy.
He picked her up and played with her for a moment.
"It's rare for someone to ask me to make a wish. Let me think..."
"Turn every girl in the world into a catgirl and make them fall in love with you?"
Gudako raised her hand.
Bonk—
She immediately received a knuckle to the head.
"Something like that only has meaning if I do it myself. Besides, if I want catgirls, the Life Sciences Department can modify some for me."
"Commander, if you want a huge spaceship, want to become Superman, or want to meet aliens... I can help you with all of it!"
Haruhi poked his chest repeatedly with her little fingers.
"Superman? Superman is way too weak."
Setsuna thought for a moment, then suddenly had an idea.
He raised a hand and gestured toward the starry sky overhead before looking seriously at Haruhi.
"Use as much of your power as you possibly can to expand the size of this universe, then try to recreate the Starsea Empire you've seen."
"Huh?"
Little Haruhi blinked, failing to understand what he meant for a moment.
"Haven't you seen a lot of records and historical material about the Starsea Empire? Try using your ability to construct the things from there."
"That includes the Starsea Empire's home universe, the Solar System, the capital, as well as every building and every piece of equipment inside the city. The more accurately you can reproduce them, the better."
Setsuna explained a little further, then opened a holographic interface and pulled up the relevant data for her to use as reference.
"Um... expand the universe, then create another Starsea Empire?"
Haruhi Suzumiya looked somewhat confused, but did as she was told.
She had Setsuna put her down, closed her eyes, and concentrated on constructing her "wish" inside her mind.
For ordinary information manipulation, all she needed was the thought 'I want it to be like this' and it would be done, but Setsuna's request was vastly more complicated.
"Creating the Starsea Empire" was not something she could accomplish with a single thought. That empire spanning countless worlds contained technology and magic drawn from innumerable other worlds.
Just as Nagato had explained before, she had to issue precise instructions for every individual "thought."
For example, 'create a city in Constantinople with an area of XXX, create an antigravity building capable of floating in the air,' and so on...
Boom!—
The moment Haruhi agreed, the starry sky overhead began to change.
The distances between the stars stretched to an extreme degree. The sky full of stars instantly became sparse, while many of those stars shot away toward every direction of the heavens.
"Has something gone wrong with the structure of the universe?"
Herta froze for a moment, hurriedly opened her observation instruments, and immediately received another shock.
"No! The universe is expanding!! Space itself is being stretched!!"
Pocket Universe No. 15 was one of the smaller universes carried aboard the Eternal Snowfall, measuring only around thirty light-years in diameter.
Under Haruhi Suzumiya's interference, the entire pocket universe rapidly expanded at an unimaginable speed. The celestial bodies within were like grains of sand resting on the surface of an inflating balloon, growing farther and farther apart as the balloon expanded.
Within the span of a few breaths, the sun and its planets had been separated by tens of thousands of light-years, completely tearing the entire star system apart.
The surroundings became pitch-black, and the temperature plunged to nearly absolute zero. Setsuna simply fashioned a small star by hand and hung it in the sky.
Countless new celestial bodies rapidly formed in the next instant.
The Milky Way, the the Large Magellanic Cloud, the Andromeda Galaxy...
Star systems and galaxies that were intimately familiar from their original world were created one after another.
"Whoa!—"
The miraculous sight left everyone stunned.
"Commander, are you having Haruhi create an entirely new universe from nothing, along with a new Starsea Empire?"
Herta stared in astonishment at the starry sky gradually lighting up around them.
She thought of the Magic Gods mentioned in the records, those monsters capable of creating and destroying universes with a mere thought.
"A second Starsea Empire?!"
Gudako's eyes nearly popped out of her head.
"No."
Setsuna gazed with great interest into the depths of distant space.
"I want to test the limits and scale of Haruhi's abilities."
"Huh?"
"Having her expand this universe as much as possible will show us the maximum range her power can affect. Recreating the Starsea Empire is to confirm whether her information manipulation can interfere with power systems originating from other worlds."
He answered casually.
Haruhi Suzumiya's reality-warping ability was far too dependent on thought, making the actual level of her power difficult to estimate.
As it happened, the Starsea Empire was an amalgamation of causality, technology, and magic from countless worlds, including many extremely complex existences.
Even Setsuna could not perfectly reproduce every single thing within it using the authority of the Herrscher of Reason. He wanted to see just how far Haruhi could go.
"Oh..."
Herta and the others suddenly understood. With growing anticipation, they continued watching Haruhi Suzumiya perform.
Hum...
Whoosh—
The pocket universe's diameter rapidly expanded from thirty light-years to thousands, tens of thousands, millions, and then tens of millions of light-years.
Considering that constructing every pocket universe required several times its own volume in raw materials, the cost would have been astronomical if the Bulins and Angeloids had been ordered to build one of this size themselves.
They would have needed to dismantle several massive galaxies, perhaps even an entire universe.
The number displayed on the control panel changed again and again, accumulating more and more zeroes.
At last, it stopped at nearly one hundred billion light-years. This was approximately the limit of the currently observable universe, as well as the boundary of spacetime...
It was comparable in scale to the entire universe Haruhi Suzumiya had once distorted.
"Mm..."
Haruhi kept her eyes tightly shut as she continued trying to use her thoughts to create a new "Starsea Empire."
Recreating the Solar System took less than a second. Back in the universe, Haruhi had been capable of casually resetting the entire world.
On Earth, countless magnificent complexes modeled after the Starsea Empire's capital rose into existence, bearing a considerable resemblance to the capital's original appearance.
This step did not pose much difficulty for Haruhi Suzumiya either.
Then, when she attempted a deeper level of creation, she encountered a problem.
Space twisted and deformed, shaping itself into bizarre, grotesque structures in midair as shrill sounds of space fracturing repeatedly echoed around them.
Fine beads of sweat appeared on her forehead. She gritted her teeth, seemingly struggling to think through something.
Her body trembled slightly, while the surrounding environment underwent minor distortions due to the unconscious loss of control over her information manipulation.
"Ugh..."
After several minutes, Haruhi suddenly went limp and collapsed to the ground.
"What happened?!"
Setsuna helped her up and touched a finger to her forehead. Only then did the girl slowly open her eyes again.
"I can't imagine it..."
Haruhi rubbed her aching head.
"There's too much stuff there. I... I don't think I can do it."
Unwilling to give up, she tried again, only for another stab of pain to shoot through her head, making her grimace.
"The complexity of the Starsea Empire's information exceeds Haruhi Suzumiya's maximum information-processing capacity."
Yuki Nagato reached a conclusion within several minutes.
"Her ability to distort the world is fundamentally a form of manipulating information concerning matter and the environment. When her thought entity is incapable of processing information that is excessively complex, this is the result."
"If Haruhi Suzumiya is the god of this world, then in other worlds, she can only manipulate information whose complexity is lower than her own."
In the Data Integration Thought Entity's explanation, "information" referred to the various parameters of matter, such as molecular composition, size, temperature, spacetime coordinates, and so forth.
Information manipulation was equivalent to modifying the code of the material world. Altering the parameters of ordinary people and conventional objects was effortless for Haruhi and Nagato, but matters became entirely different once magic and gods from other worlds were involved.
"Mm... She can independently create universes and alter or distort the structure of a universe, but she can't interfere across worlds with gods and constructs of a comparable level..."
Setsuna now had a relatively clear assessment of Haruhi Suzumiya's abilities.
He patted little Haruhi.
"Not bad. You're already very impressive."
"Mm..."
Haruhi was still disappointed that she had failed to fulfill Setsuna's wish.
She looked toward the Express crew watching the spectacle and blinked.
"Commander, why don't you pick something else? If you like catgirls, I can try making some for you?"
"???"