"So? Feels good, doesn't it?"
"It's passable, I guess. Same old suggestion as always—if it could be just a little bigger then… holy crap, when did you log in?!"
The abruptly cold voice caught Caelus utterly off guard, jolting him into a shiver. He sprang backward in a tactical retreat to open up distance. The brown-haired girl before him moved in a way befitting a puppet's settings, her neck creaking and twisting jerkily, click by click.
"Right when you walked over and started rapping on the puppet."
Caelus's reflection was mirrored in those amethyst pupils, while the other eye, hidden behind her bangs, glimmered with a red glow. The corner of her lips hooked up into an eerie arc, giving off the vibe of a vengeful ghost from a horror film—utterly nuclear-grade malice.
The instant Caelus appeared on the space station's monitoring feed, an automated puppet had reported it to her, but at the time Herta had something on her hands, so she'd just grunted an acknowledgment and ignored it.
Then Herta suddenly remembered there was something she needed to inform Caelus about, so she connected to the puppet nearest to Caelus.
However, the moment the connection succeeded, that familiar figure beside Caelus left Herta stunned.
Why was the smug little brat whose 76 game accounts she'd banned here?
Was that firewall attack just now, launched from inside the space station, her doing?
How dared she?
In the two seconds Herta spent dazed, Caelus strode right up in front of her and, like a melon farmer thumping a watermelon, started rapping bang-bang on the puppet's chest, along with a few more remarks.
Was she so insecure about being too small that she didn't even dare fantasize by installing a bigger one on the puppet??
"Brat!"
The puppet girl leapt up and grabbed Caelus's collar, yanking him in front of her, while the pocket-sized hammer in her other little hand expanded, through a transformation full of sci-fi flair, to the same size as the Herta puppet:
"Any last words?"
"Heh, even if I die for the Truth, my corpse nailed inside a coffin, I'll still cry out with a rotting voice—Herta really is flat! It feels just like my good bro Hax… Silver Wolf!!"
Caelus was like an Earth scholar from the world of The Three-Body Problem, determined to puncture the falsehood and expose the laws of physics that had been locked away by the Sophon.
He practically shouted it, forming a heavy echo in the empty surroundings.
In an instant, with this space as the center, you could hear a pin drop within a radius of several hundred meters.
A clerk hugging documents and a laptop halted in his hurried steps; another clerk holding a coffee pot wore an expression as if he'd seen a ghost, brownish-black liquid overflowing the cup, soaking the documents, dripping onto the floor.
The entire area instantly fell silent—not a peep, not a chirp.
People held their tongues like cicadas in winter and scattered like startled birds and beasts within seconds—except for Haxxor Bunny, who stood there blankly with her little mouth slightly agape.
Her thoughts were still stuck on it.
"Brat, you're really something…"
When Herta heard Caelus's words, her pupils instantly flared with red light, her exquisite pretty face slightly contorting, yet the corners of her lips hooked eerily upward:
"I'll gift you another Diamond, even bigger than the last one!"
The purple prism crystal of the mechanical giant hammer blazed brightly. Herta swung the great hammer and leapt up high; after Caelus dodged the first hammer strike, her calf seized the opportunity to lock around Caelus's neck.
A Diamond at the tip of the giant hammer swelled, growing bigger, bigger, and bigger still, until the hammer face stretched to five meters before stopping.
The shadow of the amethyst hammer loomed over Caelus like a small mountain.
"I know you're thrilled that I point out your flaws to help you fix them, but there's no need to be so polite between us. If you absolutely insist on giving me a gift to make me happy, then I'll give you a good thing too."
The enraged Herta wasn't listening at all to whatever lewd nonsense Caelus was spouting now. Just as she gripped the hammer handle with both hands, ready to smash it down—
Two spherical candy pieces appeared out of thin air between the gaps of Caelus's curled fingers; with a slight motion he tossed them into his mouth and chewed them up forcefully, crunch, crunch.
Both hands seized the collar of the hammer-wielding Herta and abruptly yanked her over, and under Haxxor Bunny's shocked gaze, he fiercely aimed his mouth at the puppet girl's cherry-moist red lips and kissed down.
In this instant, the faint click-click of phone and camera flashes lit up at the corner at the far end of the corridor.
No matter where you go, there's always some daredevil with a death wish!
Being able to capture this kind of big news that would shock the entire space station—even if it got you promoted to senior clerk and then immediately fired, it'd be worth the price of admission, ya!
"You!"
Herta's pupils constricted for a moment, but oddly there wasn't any abnormal emotion.
After all, this was just a puppet.
She'd gifted so many puppets to Caelus as payment, so of course she knew what Caelus had done with the puppets—there was even one time when she came over and ran into two Gray-hairs cleaning the white worms from between a puppet's toes.
Herta could understand it—who told her to be Herta: perfect, beautiful, peerlessly gorgeous.
If Nous hadn't laid eyes on her first, she would have been a purely beautiful Emanator!
Caelus, being a male, faced with someone as ravishingly gorgeous as her—even if it were only her puppet—doing that kind of thing was perfectly normal; just mutter and grumble about an adolescent brat, that's all.
But doing this kind of thing while she herself was controlling the puppet undoubtedly qualified as an offense.
"No, wait, this is—!"
Just as Herta was about to bite down hard and bite off this guy's tongue, to teach the brat who'd offended her a little lesson—
The puppet's built-in analysis system detected an unknown component in the liquid Caelus had transferred from his mouth.
An unknown component!?
You have to understand, the puppet was connected to the master database located in Herta City, set up personally by her main body, which recorded research data as vast as the ocean—and yet there was no match!
Caelus had often pulled out all sorts of strange and curious interesting items before, like that thing earlier that could manipulate water flow, called the Water God Pearl.
The ability was quite ordinary, but what mattered was the principle and the underlying mechanism. Pity the samples were too few, so the research that could be done was limited—yet even so, Herta could glimpse the tip of the iceberg of an entirely new system.
The mountain-like hammer abruptly stalled in midair, the spreading aftershock making Haxxor Bunny's ponytail sway slightly. She stared dog-jaw-dropped at the figure beneath the hammer, a surge of admiration suddenly welling up in her eyes.
Because the puppet girl not only stopped her attack and gave no reciprocation to Caelus's kiss—she actually began to actively seek it out!
No way, dude!
You've got cheats on, haven't you!?
Haxxor Bunny was spooked; at this moment, content from doujinshi like affection-stat tampering and mind-control apps flashed through her mind.
"These are clearly normal elements, yet I can't analyze out the molecular structure. Hey, brat, what is this thing?"
Having collected enough samples, Herta pursed her lips—to Haxxor Bunny it looked like she was savoring the kiss, but in reality she was conducting a spectral analysis.
Before Caelus could even answer, Herta's little face abruptly changed, her expression surprised with a tinge of something subtle.
Her body—this puppet's body—was actually slowly growing, getting bigger!
The roughly-fourteen-year-old figure shot up like a sprouting willow branch, the black dress straining taut as the body grew, the originally flat areas curving out into heart-stopping waist hollows, her slender waist trembling lightly and narrowing under the constraint of the black dress.
The hem that had only covered her thighs abruptly shrank to the base of her legs, exposing simulated skin glowing with a soft pearly luster.
The split at the small of her back beneath the dress burst open, the top of the cleft of her backside faintly visible amid translucent white stockings.
When her figure froze in a lush, gorgeous posture of eighteen or nineteen years old, Herta sized up the puppet's body and, quite vainly, tossed her lovely hair, showing off her beauty.
"It actually granted the material extensibility? No, not granted—the body material's properties haven't changed…"
The puppet body's material was specially made by Herta, with extremely excellent properties, yet it possessed no extensibility.
That is, it couldn't grow like a biological organism, yet at this moment an abnormal phenomenon of 'growth' had appeared.
"What I fed you is Grow-and-Shrink Candy. With your intelligence and talent, I imagine I don't need to explain it to you in detail, right? The name alone tells you the effect."
Caelus sized up the enlarged Herta without the slightest courtesy.
"Ohh~ Interesting~!"
Herta's research desire had been hooked, and she directly ignored Caelus's earlier offense against her and his presently unrestrained gaze.
Her gaze inadvertently swept over the gray-haired twin-tailed girl, and Herta paused, asking:
"Hey, what's the deal with that little brat? Why'd you haul her over here? Cash in your bounty at the IPC—what're you doing bringing her to me?"
"Li-, little brat?"
A '#' mark instantly popped out on Haxxor Bunny's forehead:
"Is this old woman going through menopause?"
She knew Herta had lived through several Amber Eras—a pure old hag through and through.
Even if it's the Genius daring to talk back at her, Miss Haxxor Bunny will snap right back without the slightest cowering!
"Old woman..."
Herta smiled and narrowed her eyes.
Caelus's gaze drifted between the two, his expression full of interest—looked like dashing-type hacker ducks such as Silver Wolf and Haxxor Bunny were naturally astrologically incompatible with Herta.
"She's not Silver Wolf, she's a new member of our Astral Express, Bronie—she just looks rather similar to Silver Wolf."
"Oh?"
Herta knew well that certain worlds in the universe would produce similar people, which made her give Haxxor Bunny a couple of extra glances.
"By the way, the puppet is your appearance from when you were little, and now that it's grown up, this is what your main body looks like, right?"
Caelus circled around Herta, scrutinizing her:
"I admit it's pretty impressive, but it still can't compare to Stelle. How do you have the nerve to brag about being pretty all day long? At most you're just no longer a short-legged shorty—your chest is still that flat."
"Also, your panties seem to have split open."
"Heh, brat, do you think such tender provocation tactics would make me care?"
Perhaps it was the change in figure—the state resembling her main body made Herta's words and conduct far more restrained than Little Herta's, lacking that bit of the charm that cuteness brings, and more elegant and composed.
She put one hand on her hip, the corner of her mouth tracing out a proud smile:
"What, are you so eager to have an audience with my flawless, moon-shaming-and-flower-abashing, fish-sinking-and-geese-falling main body?"
As for the split panties… in any case, the puppet didn't have that kind of part installed, so it didn't matter.
"I really am curious."
Caelus didn't hide it—he really was quite curious about what Herta's main body looked like.
"Let big bro take a looksie!"
"I gave you candy, didn't I, so don't be stingy~"
Caelus's tone was like a big brother coaxing a little loli to come home to see the whales.
"Hehe, since you're begging so piteously, then I'll be magnanimous and let you see my true form~"
With that, Herta raised her hand and snapped her fingers, and a holographic projection unfolded accordingly.
Amid a sea of violet hyacinth blossoms, a bench was steeped in the soft light of stardust, where a brown-haired woman, eyes lowered, leafed through a quaint, ancient tome, the brim of her witch's hat engraved with golden patterns and adorned with purple balloon flowers.
That face, seventy-percent similar to the Herta puppet, had shed its childish form, the tips of her brows lifting with a mature allure that set even her amethyst-glass pupils rippling with light.
Her figure was tall, slender, and willowy; her witch-style black dress complemented by purple, with lotus-mouthed princess sleeves that bared shoulders of ivory-white skin, her long legs set off by dark-patterned stockings until they shone lustrous as mutton-fat jade.
A staff leaned beside the chair, its prism-crystal head refracting the flowing light of the violet hyacinth sea—at first glance it looked even more like a hammer than a staff, the kind that worked magic through physics.
"This is the complete Herta, the complete Emanator of Erudition, the complete me! How about it, gorgeous, right~?"
Herta proudly raised her head: "Young, beautiful, adorable, lovely… enough to make countless words of praise pale in comparison."
"…Considering your narcissism, I won't bother snarking at the other adjectives, but are you sure about 'young'?"
Caelus cut to a dead-fish stare, an eerie light glinting in his eyes as he looked at the big Herta.
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