"What are you doing?"
Yama floated on the sea. Her tightly closed eyes slowly opened at someone's call. Her slender eyebrows trembled, revealing her vibrant, multicolored iris.
"...None of your business."
"Er, Little Yama, could you stop showing so much hostility toward me..."
"Don't add 'Little'." Yama rebuked coldly. "Can't you see the distance between us? Oh right, someone with no eyes, no ears, and no face really can't see."
Her sharp words left him not knowing how to respond for a moment.
"Er... haha..." He chuckled dryly and muttered softly, "Our relationship really can't compare to the relationship where you two were making out. What is that, self-kissing?"
"Shut up."
"Fine, fine, I'll stop. I just wanted to ask what you're doing now? Didn't you say you no longer held any hope of changing the established ending?" He sounded somewhat teasing. "Then right now..."
Yama didn't answer him. She closed her eyes. In front of her, a feather quietly emerged...
...
"To be honest, even your vibe at that banquet didn't hit me as hard as that sentence just now."
Spaciel smiled indifferently, but there was no mirth in his eyes. Like cold glass beads, they silently reflected the distorted world.
"What vibe?" Lin calmly clutched his abdomen, watching the red light of the operating room.
"A feeling that the whole person has changed from the inside out."
"...You've said that."
"I know, but what you just said makes me feel you've become..."
More like a human.
Spaciel didn't say the words out loud. In his estimation, it was expected that Lin would agree to Su's surgery, but he should have used a comparison of Spaciel's and Su's respective values to persuade Spaciel. Instead, he refuted Spaciel with the argument that "Su is volunteering."
Moreover, Lin was talking more.
"...If I never change, then I certainly won't be able to do what I want to do."
If one cannot even change oneself, how can one speak of changing the future?
...
"Am I... very useless?"
Dystopia sat dejectedly on a chair, her hands clenched on her thighs. Her expression under her golden hair was exceptionally lost.
Kosma stood beside her. Hearing her words, he looked down at the back of her head, wanting to speak but hesitating.
"If I could have hacked into the Eighth Herrscher's consciousness world, would that person not have needed to undergo the surgery?"
"...You also underwent the Project Soldier surgery."
"But didn't we volunteer for it so that others wouldn't have to?"
"..."
What Kosma actually wanted to say was that she shouldn't treat others' sacrifices as sacrifices while treating her own as nothing. But he opened his mouth and said nothing. He didn't know how to express it properly. He was the person closest to Dystopia; whatever he said would be taken as perfunctory comfort.
He also wanted to say—wasn't he also useless? When Dystopia was enduring unimaginable pain, Kosma could only watch her from the outside, powerless.
"If that's what you think, then I suggest you shouldn't go to the front lines anymore."
Another ice-cold voice came from nearby. Kevin stood by the wall, arms crossed, looking at them.
"If you fight, then others don't have to." Kevin freezing tone questioned Dystopia. "Then are you negating the others who fight?"
"That's not it—"
"No, regardless of what you say, that's what you think deep down—that it only needs to be you. Then have you considered Kosma? Have you considered the others who underwent the Project Soldier surgery? Did they do it just so they could endure it alone to save others, like you?"
"That's not it."
Kevin pointed at Kosma and said slowly, "They did it to contribute their strength to humanity, to be able to fight alongside their comrades, not to fulfill some hero fantasy they built for themselves."
Dystopia stared blankly at Kevin. Soon, she lowered her head like a deflated balloon.
Kevin was right. She used to educate Kosma, telling him to tone down that heroism, but wasn't she—his childhood friend who grew up with him—also a hero-worshiper? Anyone who had seen the chaos of their hometown would likely have the same thoughts.
"Kevin..." Kosma hesitated to say something, but in the end, he sighed softly and shook his head in silence.
"Rest well."
Leaving those words, Kevin departed. He walked down the silent corridor, his face flashing in and out of the shifting shadows.
Why could Kevin say those things? Because... he was the same. Lin was the same. All of them... were the same.
...
"Forty-eight hours left."
The Eighth Herrscher stared at the decryption screen, waiting patiently.
She was working with other hackers whose consciousness she controlled to crack the national defense systems of various countries. It would take about forty-eight hours to completely invade the most prosperous regions of humanity and spread memetic contamination.
At that time, human society would completely collapse. To destroy humanity, one didn't necessarily need to rely on powerful destructive force to attack city by city; she could use this method to make humanity crumble from within.
"It's been four hours since the twenty-sixth attack." The Eighth Herrscher sneered, picking up a Coke from the table and shaking it. "The interval between attacks is getting longer. The consciousness of the MANTIS responsible for the attacks must be reaching its limit, right?"
Consciousness invasion carried extreme risks. If the consciousness strengths of both sides didn't match, the stronger side could toy with the weaker side at will. Even without any contact, the stronger side could snatch away the weaker consciousness, turning the body into an empty shell.
"But they're probably trying to figure something out. My Honkai Beast was killed, so they should be creating a new MANTIS to counter me."
The Eighth Herrscher pondered for a while. She looked at the slow progress bar on the computer screen, considering whether to use consciousness transfer to return to someone at Fire Moth Headquarters to investigate how far they had progressed.
In the end, she didn't do it. Because... it wasn't necessary.
"But even if you really can enter my consciousness world, you'll probably..."
She revealed a hair-raising smile.