Arc City, Old District. Cioara's bar.
For Ms. Cioara, who had been offline for very nearly a triple-digit number of chapters - and who, on top of that, was a former mercenary whose screen time had been stolen clean away by her isotope in the Honkai world - the current mood was, let us say, complicated.
If she had any say in it, she would rather have made her grand reentrance on a battlefield thick with gunsmoke, or in some underground deal turning volatile by the second. Not here, babysitting a short white-haired drunk.
The glass in her hand had been polished seventeen times by now. Her eyes stayed fixed on the far end of the bar.
Theresa.
Six empty glasses stood in front of her, and the seventh was already in her hand. A sip, a curse. A curse, a sip. Round and round, like a perpetual motion machine.
"Bastard Siegfried… bastard Otto… bastard Su…"
Theresa poured the seventh whiskey down her throat and slammed the glass base onto the bar with a bang. "Another one."
Cioara didn't move. She simply watched her.
"You've had seven already."
"I know."
Theresa buried her burning cheeks in her folded arms, her voice muffled and thick with a stuffed-up nose.
"Another one."
"You started three days ago."
"I know that too."
"Your phone has rung forty-seven times."
"It's off."
"Otto called twenty-three times, Su Yu eleven, and someone named Elysia eight. The other five were promo texts from a food delivery app."
Theresa lifted one bloodshot eye with great difficulty through the gap in her arms.
"…The delivery app called five times?"
"Mm. Last day of the discount event. They want you to order."
Theresa deflated like a punctured ball and buried her face again.
Cioara sighed, set down the glass and the rag, planted both hands on the bar, and looked down at the alcohol-scented white ball of fluff.
Three days.
The famous idol teriri, eldest daughter of the Apocalypse family, had spent three entire days curled up in her bar like an ostrich.
No calls answered. No messages returned.
The only route she traveled each day was the twelve unsteady steps from the bar to the restroom.
As a former mercenary, Cioara had seen every possible variety of person come to this bar to drown their sorrows.
Bankrupt gamblers. Dumped unfortunates. Middle-aged men thrown out of the house by their wives.
But someone drinking herself blind because "my first kiss was forcibly assigned to a game producer who might be an evil scientist, by my niece's split personality" -
Theresa was absolutely the first of her kind since the dawn of creation.
"How long are you planning to live at my place?" Cioara crooked a finger and rapped the bar.
"Until the world ends."
"And the rent and the bar tab?"
The silver ball of fluff was silent for a full three seconds.
"…Put it on Siegfried's account."
Cioara shook her head, fished her phone out from under the bar, and dialed a number with practiced ease.
Two rings, then the line connected.
"Hello? What do you want, old hag? I'm in the middle of -"
"Come back. Now."
"Huh? I just started a ranked match, I'm about to -"
"Bronie."
Cioara's voice didn't rise an octave, but the furious hammering of keys on the other end cut off all at once.
"…Fifteen minutes."
"Ten."
"Hey!!"
"Eight. Every extra word out of your mouth costs you another minute."
"Tch. Fine, fine."
The call ended.
Cioara slid the phone back into her pocket, picked up the rag again, and began wiping the glass for the eighteenth time with a perfectly blank face.
Theresa exposed one red, swollen eye through the gap in her arms again, like a wary rabbit.
"Why are you calling Bronie here?"
"She's a core member of Su Yu's studio." Cioara didn't even look up. "All that garbage you want to know about, she knows it better than I do."
Theresa's eye brightened for a moment, then dimmed again, as though a film of ash had settled over it.
"…I don't want to know anymore. What good would knowing do?"
She raked a hand through her tangled white hair, her voice heavy with helplessness.
"There's a lunatic living inside that white-haired brat's head, Su Yu is running who-knows-what unspeakable experiments, and that bastard Siegfried abandoned his own flesh and blood… This world rotted through a long time ago."
She shoved the empty glass forward.
"Another one."
Cioara pushed it right back, expression unchanged.
"After Bronie gets here."
Seven and a half minutes later.
A dull thud, and the bar's heavy wooden door was kicked open.
Gray spiral twintails cut a messy arc through the air. Orange tactical goggles sat crooked on her forehead. Her jaw was still working furiously at a wad of bubblegum.
The laces of Bronie's sneakers hadn't even been tied. She braced herself against the door frame, hauling in huge gulps of air, her face broadcasting a single irritable message: I sprinted the whole way here from the internet cafe, so this had better be good.
Then her gaze traveled past the dim lighting and landed on the sad silver lump slouched at the bar.
Pop.
The gum burst and plastered itself across half her face.
Bronie didn't hesitate for a heartbeat. She executed a flawless hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and started walking.
"Run, and your allowance for this month is gone."
Cioara's cool voice drifted after her, light as air.
Bronie's soles might as well have been nailed to the threshold with ten-centimeter steel spikes.
"…And next month's game top-up cards get canceled too."
Bronie turned around slowly, wearing an expression more sour than if she'd swallowed an entire unripe lemon.
She dragged her feet to the bar like a condemned prisoner and climbed onto the stool beside Theresa.
Out of habit she crossed one leg over the other and folded her arms, striking a defensive pose.
"Okay, what's so important that it has to be right n-"
Theresa lifted her head and fixed her with a pair of bloodshot eyes, red as a rabbit's, staring straight through her.
Bronie quietly uncrossed her legs.
It absolutely wasn't out of sympathy.
It was because the look in Theresa's eyes right now was far too much like Bronie's own, back when she was little and the old hag confiscated every device she owned for pulling all-nighters gaming - that specific despair of "the whole world is out to get me" and "I'm so wronged I might actually die."
Cioara poured three glasses of warm lemon water and slid one to each of them.
Then she stepped back, leaned against the liquor shelf behind the bar, and folded her arms with unhurried patience.
"Bronie, Theresa has a few things she wants to ask you - about Kiana, and about Su Yu."
Bronie's chewing visibly slowed.
"…Ask what?"
Theresa straightened up.
The alcohol had left her gaze unfocused, but the words came out with a clarity that could only come from gritted teeth.
"That day, in Su Yu's office. Kiana's eyes suddenly turned gold, and her whole personality became someone else entirely. She called herself 'Sirin' like she was looking down at us from a throne, and then… she ordered me to kiss Su Yu."
Bronie's jaw stopped moving completely.
"But right after that she changed back. Back into that idiot Kiana, who had no idea any of it had happened."
Theresa stared her down, both hands clamped around the water glass.
"You're one of the people closest to Su Yu. Tell me honestly - what is wrong with Kiana? And what kind of unspeakable experiment is that pervert Su Yu running on her?!"
Bronie didn't answer right away.
That freakishly brilliant brain of hers was overclocking at a terrifying three million calculations per second.
Can't mention the Honkai world.
Can't mention Herrschers.
Absolutely cannot mention transmigration or the System.
And she definitely couldn't say that Sirin really was the Herrscher of the Void!
So what was left to say?!
Bronie's eyes swept over Theresa's face without giving anything away.
The swollen red rims. The lower lip marked with the prints of her own teeth. And that fragility, right at the edge of collapse.
It hit Bronie then: this woman wasn't interrogating her.
She was begging for rescue.
She was desperately praying for a reasonable answer - an answer that would let her stop seeing her grandniece as a monster, an answer that would let her go on being a "good Auntie" with a clear conscience.
Bronie flicked a glance from the corner of her eye at Cioara, still leaning against the liquor shelf.
The old hag's expression was calm as still water, but Bronie read the subtitles underneath it in one look.
If you screw this up by talking nonsense, get ready to kneel on a motherboard when you get home tonight.
Bronie drew a deep breath.
She slowly spat the gum out, wrapped it up neatly in a napkin, and set it on the bar.
"Theresa. Have you ever heard of DID?"
Theresa blinked, slow and dull. "…What?"
"Dissociative Identity Disorder." Bronie reached up and nudged the goggles on her forehead. "In medicine, they call it - multiple personality disorder."
Two full seconds of dead silence fell over the bar.
"You mean…"
Theresa's voice began to shake beyond her control.
"Kiana and Sirin are actually the same person."
Bronie looked her straight in the eye.
"She isn't possessed by some filthy thing, and Su Yu didn't drag her off for body modification experiments. She's just… ill."
Theresa's fingers, clenched white around the glass, went slack all at once.
"This kind of psychological illness usually originates from trauma suffered in childhood - the kind that never heals."
Bronie kept making things up… no, kept educating her.
"When a young child endures pain beyond what her mind can bear, her brain activates an ultimate self-protection mechanism - it forcibly strips away those painful memories and negative emotions and hands them to a brand-new personality, split off to carry the load."
Bronie paused, watching Theresa's reaction.
"Kiana is the host personality, the one that kept all the innocence and kindness. That's why she can't remember any of the painful things, why she grins like a fool every day, like a numbskull without a care in the world."
"And Sirin…"
Bronie's gaze drifted down to the napkin-wrapped gum on the bar.
"Sirin is the alternate personality who bore all the suffering in her place."
"Rage, fear, extreme aggression, and a bone-deep hostility toward this world - Sirin shouldered every bit of it alone, in silence."
"That's exactly why, whenever Sirin surfaces, she comes off so volatile, so arrogant, so… unlike a normal person."
In the bar, nothing was left but the tick, tick of the old wall clock.
Theresa's lips trembled violently, but not a sound came out.
Bronie gave herself a silent thumbs-up.
Stage one, held.
Keep the output flowing.
"Then…" Theresa's voice was as faint as smoke that might scatter at any moment. "What was the trauma?"
That was exactly the question Bronie had been waiting for.
But she didn't answer right away.
She only looked at Theresa for a long moment, then turned her eyes away as though she couldn't bear it, brows knitting faintly, like there was some cruel truth she couldn't bring herself to speak.
That "I can't bear to say it" pause was a stroke of genius. It punched clean through Theresa's last line of psychological defense.
Because Bronie didn't need to invent anything at all. Theresa's brain, a champion at filling in blanks, had already closed the logical loop on its own.
Childhood trauma.
Siegfried's illegitimate daughter, left out in the world.
Abandoned without mercy from the time she was small.
No father to protect her, growing up the hard way through loneliness, scorn, and pain.
And to survive, she had no choice but to split off a personality covered in thorns to protect herself.
Theresa's eyes went so red they might have dripped blood.
"It was Siegfried…" Her voice shook itself apart, tears whirling wildly in her eyes. "That son of a bitch abandoned her, and that's why she… isn't it?!"
Bronie didn't nod. She didn't shake her head either.
She only sighed, heavily.
It was a sigh of true mastery - it neither admitted that Theresa was guessing wildly nor denied her reasoning.
But to Theresa, already fully committed to writing the story herself, that sigh was the most eloquent confirmation of all.
"That bastard!!!"
Theresa's fist slammed into the heavy solid-wood bar hard enough to make the water glass in front of her jump.
"He actually… how dare he do that to her…"
Her tears finally broke the dam.
Inside Theresa's head, a tearjerking short film had already finished playing itself through -
A freezing winter night. Tiny Kiana curled up in a cold corner, hugging her knees with all her strength, waiting in despair for a bastard father who would never come for her.
Day after day of bullying and waiting, until the pain finally crushed her limit.
And so "Sirin" was born.
That snarling, clawing personality who called herself Queen from on high, who armored herself head to toe in arrogance and violence -
was really just a little girl covered in wounds, raising the last pitiful shield she had against endless darkness.
Theresa scrubbed the tears off her face with the back of her hand and sniffed hard.
"Then what about Su Yu?"
She lifted her head, those bloodshot eyes locked on Bronie, one last trace of wariness in her voice.
"Does Su Yu know about this? What exactly has he done to Kiana?! That game, Honkai Impact 3rd - all those soul-crushing storylines, all that Herrscher business, all that Honkai business - what does any of that chaos have to do with Kiana's illness?!"
Under the bar, Bronie quietly tightened her fists.
Deep breath.
This was stage two.
"Of course Boss Su Yu knows." Bronie's gaze turned utterly sincere. "In fact, he was the first person in the world to discover that Kiana had this condition."
She picked up the warm water and took a small sip, using the act of swallowing to buy herself two precious seconds of thinking time.
"Miss Theresa, why do you think the Boss threw away a perfectly comfortable life and poured every last cent he had into making Honkai Impact 3rd - a game guaranteed to get him cursed out?"
"…To make money?" Theresa hesitated, then found the words a little absurd herself. Su Yu could go out drinking with Eden one-on-one; was he short of money?
"If it were only about money, with the Boss's skills he'd have a hundred methods ten thousand times easier than this." Bronie set the glass down, her eyes going deep. "You've played the game, right?"
Theresa nodded before she could think about it.
Not only had she played it, she'd spent real money pulling her own "Theresa" character to max level.
"Then you know how the Kiana in that game goes from a Paramecium who understands nothing, step by step through loss, betrayal, and despair, and finally finds the meaning of her own existence in the ruins - ah, that last part's a spoiler for content that isn't out yet, pretend you didn't hear it, or the Boss will have my head for leaking."
Bronie coughed a few times and pressed on.
"Theresa, that isn't an ordinary game script at all. That's a psychological treatment plan Su Yu tailored specifically for Kiana."
Theresa froze, still as a stone statue.
"The core of treating DID - multiple personality disorder - is getting the different personalities to gradually recognize each other, accept each other, and finally achieve complete integration."
Bronie deployed her ultimate academic theory.
"Su Yu wove Kiana's two personalities - 'kind Kiana' and 'savage Sirin' - into the game's main storyline with incredible care."
"He made players all over the world understand their suffering, love their imperfections, and witness them go from fighting to the death all the way to reconciliation."
Bronie looked straight into Theresa's eyes.
"He isn't running some evil brainwashing experiment. He's using every drop of his heart's blood and every ounce of his talent trying to heal a girl who was shattered to pieces as a child."
Theresa's hands began to shake beyond her control.
"Then why… why didn't he just send Kiana to a professional psychiatric hospital?"
"Because at the start, Kiana had no legal identity at all," Bronie said with a sigh. "What legitimate hospital would dare take her in?"
"And even if one did - once she got labeled a 'severe multiple personality psychiatric patient' and locked in a ward, would she ever get to live in the sunlight like a normal girl again, for the rest of her life?"
Theresa's mouth worked, but no rebuttal came out.
"It was Boss Su Yu who pulled strings to get her a legal ID Card. Who found her a safe, high-end place to live. Who arranged a respectable job for her."
Bronie counted them off on her fingers like a family inventory.
"Lead motion-capture actress. Room and board covered, full social insurance and housing fund, triple overtime pay on holidays."
"The Boss treats Kiana as a normal person with dignity - not as a monster that needs to be quarantined."
Bronie paused, letting exactly the right amount of weariness enter her voice.
"Theresa, do you have any idea how hard that is? The 'Sirin' personality inside Kiana could jump out and wreck everything at any moment, like a time bomb."
"The Boss walks a tightrope over a bottomless Abyss every single day."
"He has to guard constantly against Sirin losing control and hurting someone, and at the same time carefully protect Kiana's fragile pride, absolutely refusing to let her learn the brutal truth that she's sick."
Theresa's tears broke loose again, past all control.
But this time it wasn't for Kiana. It was for the man she had misunderstood down to the marrow.
"Then… then what about that day?"
Theresa's voice was thick with sobs.
"Sirin, she… she forced me to kiss Su Yu… what… what was that about?!"
Bronie gave herself a fierce mental round of applause.
The final stage.
Time to land the killing blow.
She stayed silent for a full five seconds, as though weighing words too difficult to speak.
"Theresa." Bronie's tone slowed, and carried a thread of pity. "Have you ever tried putting yourself in her shoes… and asking why that extreme alternate personality, Sirin, would force you to kiss Su Yu?"
"…Because she's a lunatic you can't reason with?"
"No." Bronie shook her head. "Sirin's behavioral logic really isn't like ours. But she has her own stubborn code of conduct."
"In Sirin's worldview - warped by never having been loved - Su Yu is the person who has been kindest to her. The best of all. The one and only harbor in this world who isn't afraid of her, doesn't reject her, and is even willing to talk to her patiently."
Bronie looked at Theresa, long and hard.
"And you, Theresa. You're Kiana's Auntie. In her subconscious, you're the closest family she has in this world, the elder she most longs to be close to."
Theresa's breathing stopped for a beat.
"So within Sirin's twisted, yet utterly simple system of understanding, she did something that seemed to her completely right and natural - something she was even proud of -"
Bronie's voice went as light as a feather, and landed on Theresa's heart like a hammer.
"She shared the most precious treasure she had in this world, holding nothing back, with the elder she respected most."
The bar was so quiet that the metallic grind of the wall clock's gears was audible.
On Theresa's face, tears, cold sweat, and the alcohol flush all ran together.
Her expression shifted from the initial shock into blankness, and from blankness into disbelief.
And finally it locked, rigid, into something close to a total breakdown of guilt.
"You're saying…" Her lips shook violently. "Sirin making me kiss Su Yu… was her way of… of showing filial respect… to me, her Auntie?!"
Bronie said nothing.
She only nodded, slowly, once.
Crash!!!
Theresa shot up out of her seat!
The heavy stool toppled backward and smashed into the wooden floor with a deafening bang.
"What have I… what have I done…"
Theresa clamped both hands over her face, her body swaying on the verge of collapse.
"I treated Su Yu like some irredeemable pervert… I bit his lip until it bled… I even threw a tantrum right in front of him and stormed out slamming the door…"
"He's been carrying all that pressure alone to protect Kiana, taking abuse he never deserved, and I… and I…"
Theresa dropped her hands.
"I'm supposed to be Kiana's Auntie, and Su Yu's elder, and what have I actually done? I - I've been nothing but a burden to Su Yu -"
But it didn't last.
In those rabbit-red eyes, the tears evaporated in an instant.
What remained was a burning, blinding light Bronie had never seen there before.
It was the blood of the Kaslana family, showing its edge the way it only did when its bearer had made a decision with no road back.
"Bronie."
"Uh, y-yeah?"
"Thank you. For telling me all of the truth."
Theresa bent down, lifted the heavy overturned stool one-handed as if it weighed nothing, and set it squarely upright.
Then she dug a crumpled large-denomination bill out of her pocket and slapped it down on the bar.
"For the drinks. Keep the change."
She spun around and strode toward the door.
Her steps were fast and steady. Three days of drunken ruin seemed to have been slapped clean out of her by the truth.
"I'm going back to the Company."
Theresa shoved the heavy wooden door open, stopped at the threshold, and tilted her head slightly back.
"I'm going to apologize to Su Yu in person. Properly."
"And then…" There was a bitter, frigid killing intent in Auntie's voice. "I'm going to drag that wife-abandoning, daughter-abandoning bastard Siegfried back from the other side of the planet, break both his legs, and make him kneel in front of Kiana and knock his head on the floor a hundred times!"
"You should probably go take a shower first."
Bronie whistled.
"Show up at the Company reeking of booze and anyone who doesn't know better will think the Boss dumped you and you're moping about it."
"I know that without you telling me!"
Theresa shot her a withering look.
The wooden door slammed shut behind her with a bang.
From the alley came the quick, resolute click of high heels on flagstones, fading fast into the night.
____
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