Honkai Energy System Laboratory [Helheim], the airspace above the southern outer passage.
Wind howled. The Hyperion, that colossal airborne battleship, was pouring out thick black smoke like a dying beast of steel.
Conditions inside the ship had deteriorated past the breaking point.
Mei's heart had been critically damaged when the [Gem of Conquest] was torn out of her, and she was now in the emergency ward undergoing surgery with no guarantee she would survive it.
Theresa's injuries had barely been stabilized, but she remained deep in a coma.
And outside the Hyperion, Honkai Beasts were swarming in numbers that blotted out the sky.
In the entire Far East Branch, the only one still standing and able to fight was Bronya, who had just woken up.
"Project Bunny... Fire!"
Bronya clenched her teeth, working the Star of Eden, hammering shell after shell into the Honkai Beasts pouring onto the deck.
But there were simply too many of them. Under wave after wave of impact, the Hyperion's armor let out a metallic wail of a structure being pushed past its limits.
With a deafening roar, the engines blew, and the Hyperion lost all power, dropping into an emergency crash landing toward the earth below.
The inertia sent Bronya tumbling across the deck again and again until she slammed hard into a bulkhead and finally steadied herself.
She lifted her head with effort, vision blurred from the impact.
All around her lay a battlefield swallowed by darkness and gunsmoke, the air so thick with despair it was hard to breathe.
Then, in the next moment.
A thread of light reflected in Bronya's gray eyes.
The darkness ahead grew brighter and brighter, and the temperature around her climbed at a terrifying rate.
Fire. Something was burning.
"Bronya, you've done well enough."
In front of her, Murata Himeko gripped the [Godslayer Sword] in both hands, its blade wrapped in towering flames, standing between Bronya and the enemy like a god of war.
That armor, red as fresh blood, radiated a heat in the darkness fierce enough to melt despair itself.
"Get back to the medical bay. I've got this."
Himeko did not look back. Her eyes stayed locked on the tide of Honkai Beasts surging toward them.
She had already felt it - that unbearably terrifying pulse of Honkai energy belonging to the Herrscher of the Void, closing in fast.
What waited for her next would be a genuine, brutal fight.
"Whoa! Auntie Himeko is so cool!"
In the stream, Elysia jumped straight out of her gaming chair, pink eyes full of little stars of adoration.
"I knew it! With that new armor, Teacher Himeko is absolutely unbeatable!"
The danmaku exploded along with her:
[Here she comes! Safety meter at maximum!]
[Vermilion Knight! Burn every last one of these Honkai Beasts to ash for me!]
In the game, under Himeko's cover, Bronya successfully pulled back inside the ship.
And against the sky-blackening tide of Honkai Beasts surging up again, Himeko's approach was simple and brutal.
She swung that burning greatsword and turned into a crimson storm, incinerating every single Honkai Beast that dared come near the Hyperion.
With Himeko in the fight, the pressure on the Hyperion eased enormously.
But the sharper players watching the stream slowly began to sense something unsettling underneath all that satisfying mob-clearing.
The enemy count kept climbing. The Herrscher of the Void's power seemed to have no bottom at all.
Himeko had already cut down more Honkai Beasts than anyone could count, and still they poured out as if there were no upper limit.
And worse than that...
As Elysia fought with Himeko, the players could see it clearly: with every swing of the Greatsword, with every skill she released, her movements were getting slower.
At the edges of the screen, a dark red halo signifying "erosion" had even started to appear.
[Hold on... look at Himeko's status, something's wrong!]
[How is she already gasping for breath after such a short fight?]
[Oh no! Fu Hua said it before - the Gem of Haste erodes the user's body! That power is a double-edged sword!]
[It's over, it's over. Just clearing these trash mobs has already burned through more than half her stamina. How is she supposed to fight the Herrscher of the Void after this?!]
The blindly optimistic danmaku of a minute ago was replaced by something that could only be called dread.
Everyone finally understood. The Vermilion Knight was mighty, yes - but Himeko's mortal body, already broken to begin with, could not hold that divine power for long.
And then, just as Himeko cleared the last wave, her stamina gone, leaning on her Greatsword and heaving for air where she stood -
A flash.
Two cold gleams cut through the darkness.
An elite Zombie wielding twin blades materialized out of empty air, striking from behind at a vicious angle, a killing blow aimed at Himeko's back.
"Drip. Drip."
Blood fell onto the searing deck and turned instantly into scarlet vapor.
At the last possible instant, Himeko turned, blocked, and swung.
The motion was seamless, and the elite Zombie came apart in two halves.
But before she could catch her breath, a voice reached her ear - cruel, arrogant, laced with amusement, and horribly familiar.
"Oh my. You actually blocked it? The performance really shouldn't stray from the script, you know."
The sky tore open with a roar.
The chaotic heavens were ripped apart by a raw, overbearing power.
Amid violent lightning and warping space, the Herrscher of the Void descended slowly through the rift.
High above her, she looked down at the gasping Murata Himeko the way one might look at an ant crawling on the ground - mildly irritating, nothing more.
To her, killing Kiana's companions was no more than an entertaining little sideshow after waking up.
"Perfect timing! I've been wanting to smack you for ages!"
In the stream, Elysia gritted her teeth, fingers flying across the keyboard.
"Teacher Himeko, show her what you're made of!"
The game cut straight into the boss fight.
And what nobody - not the players, not even the Herrscher of the Void - had expected was this:
The Vermilion Knight's burst damage was absolutely monstrous.
Her pursuit range carried such crushing pressure that she could cross the distance of space itself in an instant and catch up to the Herrscher of the Void no matter where she darted.
And then came a head-on, utterly unreasonable [Burn to ash!].
[Good, good, GOOD! Cut her down hard!
Do you know the legend of how Murata Himeko once took two watermelon knives and carved her way from one end of the street to the other?!]
[Herrscher of the Void! Auntie Himeko's sword is very big! You'd better take it!!!]
Watching the Herrscher of the Void eat a flaming greatsword to the face while her health bar plummeted, every viewer in the stream felt the satisfaction shoot straight up through the top of their skull.
All the frustration and helpless rage this Herrscher had inflicted on them was swept away in an instant.
And yet, in the story cutscene, the Herrscher of the Void still held the upper hand through her Authority over space.
But under Himeko's reckless, berserk sword qi, a line of blood was actually opened across her face.
"You... you're bleeding. So even a god who looks down from on high can be wounded?"
Murata Himeko wiped the blood from the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand and looked at the stunned Herrscher with open, undisguised mockery.
"Why? I should have killed you dozens of times over by now!"
The Herrscher of the Void glared down at Himeko in fury.
She could not accept it. A mere mortal, an insect she should have been able to crush without thought, had drawn blood from her noble body?
"Sorry about that."
Himeko raised the heavy Greatsword in both hands, its tip pointed at the god in the sky. "I'm just... a difficult woman to deal with."
Rage boiled up in the Herrscher of the Void.
"Insolent human!"
Himeko snorted, wine-red eyes burning with unbroken defiance.
"Human, human, human. Doesn't that get tiresome?"
"I have a name, you know. Remember it well. The one you're facing -"
"- is Murata Himeko!"
The storm whipped up by the flaming blade burned every one of the Herrscher's attacks to cinders.
Consumed by rage, the Herrscher of the Void's face twisted. She lost all reason, wanting nothing but to erase the woman in front of her at any cost.
But she overlooked one important thing.
There was more than one person on this battlefield.
On the bridge of the Hyperion.
Anti-Entropy's Executor, Einstein, had already locked her targeting reticle firmly onto the Herrscher of the Void.
"Born in the twentieth century, proposed and researched by Edison - the greatest civilian invention in human history!"
"Anti-Entropy's ultimate weapon, the strongest Honkai energy conversion device on Earth!"
"After more than fifty years of secret development, in this moment, it declares its existence to the world -"
"This is the weapon built by humanity, a weapon that carries our ideals and our will!"
"This is the Moonlight Throne!"
A roar split the world.
An enormous beam of light that pierced heaven and earth erupted from the Hyperion without warning and struck the completely unguarded Herrscher of the Void square in midair.
In the blinding rain of light, the Herrscher of the Void screamed. The Honkai energy in her body was forcibly stripped away, scattering wildly in every direction like something driven mad.
Terrified and gravely wounded, the Herrscher of the Void could no longer hold her arrogant posture. She tore open a rift into Imaginary Space and fled the battlefield like a stray dog.
"We won! We actually won!"
Elysia cheered and bounced in her seat, and the danmaku drowned instantly in [MOONLIGHT THRONE NUMBER ONE UNDER HEAVEN] and [The hymn of humanity is the hymn of courage].
But at that exact moment, when ten million players thought the crisis was over and the happy ending was about to arrive -
Inside the miHoYo office.
Kiana was biting down hard on her lip, tears falling like beads from a snapped string.
Because Fenghuang, inside her mind, let out the cruelest sigh of all.
"Kiana... look closely."
"This so-called victory... she bought it by overdrawing what little life she had left, one second at a time."
When the stream lit up again.
The scene had shifted to a dim corridor on the Hyperion's lower deck.
A mournful cello began to play.
That Vermilion Knight who had just stood unmatched on the battlefield, who had made a god bleed -
Now she looked like a withered leaf, slumped weakly against the steel railing outside the medical bay.
"This time... things really got out of hand."
Blood ran down her shattered armor and dripped onto the floor, and she could not stop it.
Nobody answered her.
Only the [Godkiller Spear], stored in the containment pod on her thigh, flickered faintly, its glow illuminating Himeko's bloodless face.
And then.
The shrill crimson alarm lights began flashing wildly down the corridor once more.
The Judgment-class Honkai Beast Benares had launched a fresh assault.
As every player's smile froze, as Elysia stared in disbelief -
Murata Himeko straightened up and started walking, each step heavy.
Down a corridor packed with people fleeing for their lives.
She walked against them all.
Step by step, toward that deck called death.
"They're all a bunch of kids who never grow up, but I've come to like this place quite a lot."
"There's still a long road ahead of you, isn't there?"
"..."
"Good luck to all of you."
People from the Far East Branch. People from Anti-Entropy.
People who remembered her, people who didn't.
One after another, they passed her by.
At the elevator, Himeko stopped.
She looked back at the corridor she had walked down countless times, and something flickered in her eyes - a lingering attachment to the world of the living.
"I really would... like one more drink."
In that moment, the screen went completely black.
"No..."
Elysia's voice trembled like a leaf in an autumn wind.
Her hands clenched the edge of the desk, tears already blurring her sight.
"Don't go... Teacher Himeko, you've lost so much blood, please don't go... just rest here, okay...?"
Beside her, Himeko slowly closed her eyes.
The beer can in her hand crumpled slightly under her grip.
That wasn't going into battle.
That was going to die.
The animated short Final Lesson began to play.
The elevator doors slid open onto the deck.
Wind screamed. The Hyperion's deck was already a field of wreckage.
Himeko used a trick to slam a destroyed gun turret down onto the head of the Judgment-class Honkai Beast Benares, pinning the giant creature for a moment.
She raised the Godslayer Sword, ready to finish it in one strike.
But a twisting gate of Imaginary Space opened in front of her without any warning.
By the time Himeko came back to her senses, she found herself standing in a strange, motionless expanse of Imaginary Space.
The Hyperion beneath her feet had become a dead sculpture suspended in darkness.
A laugh that chilled the blood came from above.
The Herrscher of the Void, that insufferable god, walked gracefully across empty air.
"Did you think you could run away?"
She looked down at Himeko with the contempt one reserves for an already-dead thing.
The gulf in power between them had never been more starkly displayed.
The Herrscher of the Void did not even use her full strength.
She simply extended her right hand, and an invisible force of space seized Himeko by the throat and yanked her violently into the air.
"Struggle. As hard as you can."
With a crack of impact, Himeko's body was fired like a cannon shell into the hard barrier of space.
Before she could even slide down, countless cubes formed of spatial power locked her in place.
Then Subspace Lances came like laser blades, cruelly carving that already-ruined vermilion armor again and again.
Blood sprayed.
Armor shattered.
"Is this really all you had?"
The Herrscher of the Void clasped her hands behind her back, eyes full of boredom and disdain.
She turned away, ready to leave a hunting ground that had already ended.
In the stream, ten million players stared at their screens, not one of them daring to breathe.
Not a single danmaku drifted past.
Every one of them clenched their teeth, eyes burning red.
They refused to believe that Teacher Himeko, the one who always stood in front of everybody else, had fallen just like that.
And at the very instant the Herrscher of the Void turned her back -
A blade came screaming through the air at her from behind.
It was the Vermilion Knight's standard-issue Greatsword.
Shock and fury on her face, the Herrscher of the Void threw open a portal and displaced the sword that had nearly struck her.
She whipped her head around toward the crater below -
"Thud."
A heavy footstep rang out in the dead silence of Imaginary Space.
"Thud."
Every step carried the weight of a mountain. Every step struck hard against the hearts of ten million players.
Murata Himeko - the woman everyone had believed already dead.
Her armor had been broken past all recognition.
And across her exposed skin crawled horrifying death marks, the final-stage sign of Honkai energy erosion.
There was no question left. She had reached the absolute end of her life.
And still she staggered forward, step by step, climbing out of the crater.
Both hands locked around that enormous Godslayer Sword, her eyes two burning fires fixed on the god above her.
"Your attack... is that it?"
Himeko raised her head. Blood still ran from the corner of her mouth, but her voice carried an arrogance fierce enough to make the soul shiver.
"Then it's my turn now - any objections?"
The instant that line landed.
An intro exploded into the headphones of ten million players.
Nightglow.
The Herrscher of the Void covered her own face, her features contorted with absolute rage.
She could not understand it.
This mortal in front of her was already a dying woman with nothing left to burn. Why would she stand up again?
Why could she still look at her with eyes like that?
"Heh heh heh... DIE!"
Countless gates of space opened all around Himeko, and Subspace Lances rained down on her in a dense downpour.
But Himeko only lowered her stance slightly.
And then, as Nightglow surged into its soaring chorus -
"Never let you go -"
Himeko called back the Greatsword she had thrown and fused it with the Godslayer Sword.
Flames that seemed ready to burn the darkness itself and light up all creation erupted from the blade.
Himeko swung with everything she had, raising a crimson storm of world-ending force that incinerated every last Subspace Lance in the sky like dry leaves before a fire.
That single strike, fueled by the last of her life, drained the color from the whole of Imaginary Space. For one instant the world became nothing but pure black and white.
And in that interwoven black and white light and shadow, Murata Himeko's voice - infinitely gentle - pierced the barrier between dimensions and reached everyone's ears.
"Kiana... when you wake up, you'll find that everything has changed."
"You'll find that this world is no longer beautiful, and those ordinary everyday days are never coming back."
"But... don't give up. Never give up."
Inside the miHoYo office.
The moment she heard those words, Kiana broke completely.
She threw herself into Su Yu's arms, fists knotted in his shirt, sobbing until her voice tore.
"Auntie Himeko! I heard you! I really heard you!"
She was like a drowning child in the abyss of despair, answering with everything she had the teacher who had paved a road for her with her own life.
In the game, the fight had reached its most savage white heat.
The spatial cubes the Herrscher of the Void was so proud of tore like paper before the Godslayer Sword.
Dragging a ruined body, Himeko rolled through the air and threw herself at the god again and again in suicidal charges.
The Herrscher of the Void panicked outright. She poured all her power into a pitch-black spiral cone, trying to grind Himeko to nothing in midair.
The thrusters of the vermilion armor screamed under a load they were never built to bear.
Driven forward by one crimson burst ring after another, Himeko bore pressure enough to crush bone and forced the black Spiral to collapse, plunging into that bottomless darkness.
And inside that darkness, white curtains of light rose before Himeko's eyes, like a revolving lantern.
They were the treasures she had cherished most in her life.
Theresa, arms folded, wearing a smug little grin.
Mei, gentle and serene. Fu Hua, watching in silence.
Bronya, hugging her HOMU doll.
And... that white-haired girl who turned around and beamed at her.
"Auntie Himeko, I'm going to become the strongest Valkyrie!"
Every Bond, every memory, all of it turned in that instant into Murata Himeko's strength.
The raging power of the Herrscher of Flame gathered behind her and formed a terrifying pair of fire wings vast enough to blot out the sky.
"It's why I did them all -"
At the highest, most soaring note of Nightglow -
Himeko, fire-winged, carrying a heat extreme enough to burn away every falsehood, fell like a blazing meteor toward the Herrscher of the Void below, who had nowhere left to dodge.
"Kiana! Lift your head! Keep moving forward!"
"Go and turn this imperfect story into the one you want it to be!"
The impact roared.
Blinding white light swallowed the whole of Imaginary Space in an instant.
Then the light slowly faded.
And the soaring music dissolved into a hauntingly beautiful echo.
The Herrscher of the Void's eyes went wide with terror. She gasped for breath in great heaves, staring at what was in front of her.
That red-haired woman, scorched and withered like dead wood, stood quietly before her.
That world-ending strike, the one that should have cut the Herrscher of the Void down for good -
In the end, it had gone wide.
The huge Godslayer Sword was buried deep in the ground behind the Herrscher of the Void.
"So this is... the final lesson."
As the Godslayer Sword burst apart into fragments, Himeko's shattered life came to its absolute end.
All her strength left her. Her body tipped forward and fell against the Herrscher of the Void.
"You...!"
The Herrscher of the Void finally shook off her terror and shoved Himeko's body away in fury.
But.
In the very instant their bodies separated.
The Herrscher of the Void saw it.
The corner of Himeko's mouth was turned up, wearing a smile of boundless gentleness.
Something clicked in the Herrscher of the Void's mind, and her dark gold pupils contracted to pinpoints.
The camera panned slowly around behind her.
There, in her back.
A tubular device glowing crimson had already sunk deep into her flesh.
It was the [Godkiller Spear].
The moment Himeko fell, that serum - carrying Anti-Entropy's hope, carrying Himeko's life - had followed its programming and injected every last drop of its contents into the Herrscher's body.
A mortal had killed a god in the gentlest way possible.
"AAAAAAAHHH!"
The Godkiller Spear's power detonated at once. The Herrscher of the Void felt her very soul being torn apart, and her scream rose into something unbearable to hear.
As her power dispersed, the Imaginary Space sustaining this domain began to crumble inch by inch.
Himeko lay on a shattered fragment of the Hyperion's deck.
Her eyes were already closed.
Her expression was as peaceful as though she had sunk into a long sleep where there would never again be gunfire or smoke.
The space collapsed, and warm light from the outside world poured in through the cracks, into that pitch-black Abyss.
But.
That cold, broken body did not rise toward the light.
It went the other way, away from the light, toward that endless Abyss whose bottom no one would ever see...
Like the last burning red leaf of autumn.
It fell, without a sound.
Until it vanished completely into the endless dark.
The screen went black.
In Elysia's stream.
Dead silence.
A full minute of absolute, unbroken silence.
In front of ten million screens, nobody typed. Nobody made a sound.
Elysia had gone limp in her gaming chair.
Her mind, in that moment, was one blank white expanse.
Every last shred of wishful thinking, every self-deception, every fantasy about a happy ending had been crushed to powder by that one image of a body falling into the Abyss.
"Ah..."
And then, like a dam giving way.
This Miss Pink Elf who had always brought people joy and laughter buried her face in her hands in front of ten million cameras and wept, openly, wretchedly, with no dignity left at all.
Beside her sat Himeko.
She turned slowly away, putting her back to the camera.
Both hands pressed hard against her cheeks, her broad shoulders shaking violently, beyond her control.
Fat tears spilled through the gaps between her fingers and struck the floor.
One minute later.
The stream's servers met the most terrifying, most despairing, most destructive traffic tsunami they had seen since the day they were built.
There were no angry curses. There was no rational analysis.
Ten million players whose psychological defenses had been utterly shattered typed out, with trembling fingers, enough tears to drown the entire internet.
The screen filled edge to edge with danmaku, and it was all the same handful of words, scrolling frantically, desperately:
[Teacher Himeko...]
[Rest well on your journey.]
[TEACHER HIMEKO! AAAAAAAAAHHH!]
[Su Yu... give Himeko back to me... give her back to me!]
Grief past all bearing turned into a physical stream of data.
In that moment, the streaming platform's highest-grade load-bearing servers let out one final wail of a system pushed past its limit.
With a pop, the stream of ten million people crashed outright, dissolving into a black screen.
And inside the miHoYo office.
Outside the window lay the bustling sprawl of Arc City, streets thick with traffic.
Inside the room, it felt like a cold mausoleum.
Kiana had cried herself nearly senseless, still gripping Su Yu's shirt, her tears soaking a wide patch of the fabric.
She sobbed on and on in despair, like a child who had lost everything.
And deep in her mind.
That faintly red-glowing Yu Ducheng was dimming too.
Fenghuang's voice, carrying the profound respect and boundless sorrow of fifty thousand years, made its final farewell in the depths of Kiana's soul:
"Class is dismissed, Kiana."
"Do not waste... the fire she burned her life away to light for you."
Su Yu stood quietly where he was, patting Kiana's trembling back, gently, over and over.
He raised his head, looked at the dark computer screen, then out the window at a real world that knew nothing about the apocalypse coming for it.
Su Yu's eyes were faintly red-rimmed, but in those deep eyes burned a resolve that bordered on cruelty.
He knew.
From today onward, from this moment on.
Honkai Impact 3rd would no longer be merely a game people played to pass the time.
It would become a blade, driven deep into the soul of every player in this world.
It would become a scar in countless hearts - one that would never heal, and yet would shine in the dark.
And that woman called Murata Himeko.
She would live forever in this world's memory.
____
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