[Honkai: Star Rail – The Universe]
"Heehee, haha, heeheehee."
Having been launched by the Galactic Baseball Bat Hero's seesaw, the Aeon of Elation, Aha, was now freely flying through the cosmos.
In theory, he could stop himself.
But the question was: why should he?
"Whatever I crash into" was part of the surprise. Last time he had been launched, he crashed into a gluttonous behemoth that devoured planets. This time, who knew what it would be?
Aha was looking forward to it.
In truth, everything just now had been his own little performance.
The goal was to make Stelle naturally forget the dark history of "Aha playing on a seesaw and getting launched by Akivili."
Now, in Stelle's memory, the story had shifted from "Aha playing a strange seesaw and getting launched by Akivili" to "Jin Lajitzde being assassinated, and Tatalov defeating Haki-Aha with a strange seesaw."
Haki-Aha was Haki-Aha, the villain in the story.
Aha was Aha, the Aeon of Elation.
Haki-Aha getting launched by Tatalov had nothing to do with me, the Aeon of Elation, Aha. In short, he had used the might of an Aeon to cleanly excise his own embarrassing slip of the tongue.
A master strategist!
To scheme to this extent, Aha was already one of the master tacticians among the Aeons. He might even be more suited to the Path of Erudition than Nous! Aha was very satisfied with his performance.
Boom!
Steam erupted. The massive butter-like wall at the edge of the universe was smashed open with an enormous hole by the freely flying Aha.
Boiling mist billowed like a construction site run by overworked laborers. From within that seething fog emerged the one who gathered countless materials to build walls for all realms of the universe, the subspace crystal barriers.
Preservation. Qlipoth.
Aha: (⊙▽⊙) Whoa, it is that blockhead from Preservation!
Qlipoth: (╰_╯) My wall!
…
[Jarilo-VI – The World of the Emperor's Scepter]
"I… trash… hraaah!"
Facing the sudden rampage of ice-attribute manifested creatures, two indescribable mechanical behemoths seized the opening. With the metal blades in their hands, they directly swatted away the monster formed from the Stellaron and Cocolia.
Seated atop the Throne of Gears, Kiyono Inori remained calm.
"φ-ln7, report on her Stellaron assimilation status."
[Target Cocolia Stellaron assimilation progress at 79.37 percent. Note: cognitive functions are already severely damaged. Estimated that around 90 percent assimilation, Cocolia's consciousness will completely dissipate.]
"Already at 79.37 percent? Honestly, how many extra lives has this woman picked up? The activation of the Creation Engine made such a huge commotion. Why has the Express crew still not arrived?"
Kiyono Inori was growing bored.
She had already tested the combat style of Destruction Blessings plus Erudition Blessings plus various buffs thoroughly. She had even deliberately let Cocolia beat her to the brink of death just to test Destruction Blessings.
The Savior Trash Can No. 360, though it carried traits from Elysia and Stelle, still relied primarily on blessings for its core combat methods. As a result, its skill set had extremely high overlap with hers.
In other words,
During her prolonged fight with Cocolia-Tatalov, Kiyono Inori was effectively studying how the AI-controlled Savior Trash Can used its items and skills in different situations.
And the conclusion she reached was that she was not cut out to be a frontline warrior.
Because the Advent: Terminus modifier reduced her resistance by 70 percent and increased her intelligence by 140 percent, she completely overwhelmed her opponent in raw stats, but if she got hit, she would take massive damage.
Her correct role was heavy artillery.
Blanket the battlefield with heavy fairy magic firepower, fabricate the Emperor II's killing machines using the data stored in the scepter, and coordinate everything through the Emperor's Scepter. As long as she was not dragged into close-quarters combat, her power level was frankly excessive.
[Mass-Produced Extermination Unit – Alpha 13]
[Mass-Produced Dismantling Unit – Zeta 7]
In the Emperor's Scepter database, these were anti-celestial superstructures. Extermination Units were mechanical weapons specialized against biological targets, while Dismantling Units were specialized against planets.
Put simply,
They were super soldiers from the Second Imperial War era. Extermination Units cleared mobs, while Dismantling Units pushed towers.
Relying on Trailblaze plus Erudition Blessings plus the Rupert III achievement, Kiyono Inori replicated them within the Emperor's Scepter world.
Their power was certainly inferior to the originals, since they were constructed purely from data without raw materials. But as summons tossed into the Scepter world to stall Cocolia, they were more than sufficient.
[Command: Annihilation Beam]
[Command: Redeploy]
Kiyono Inori controlled the two super soldiers as they danced around Cocolia.
The only things to keep in mind were, first, copying their code before they were scrapped so she could throw out another one, and second, not killing Cocolia outright, saving her so Stelle could awaken the Path of Preservation.
All in all, it was painfully boring.
If the automated AI could reliably contain the Stellaron plus Cocolia, she would have already gone to the Underworld to shout for the Express crew.
But… with Cocolia already in this state, could Stelle still comprehend the will of Preservation and receive an Aeon's glance? Kiyono Inori had her doubts.
After all,
Cocolia had already abandoned her daughter Bronya after being attacked by trash cans and ran off to Everwinter Hill to fuse with the Stellaron. There was no way Stelle's trailblazing journey could match the original storyline anymore.
With the timeline altered, if Stelle failed to grasp the will of Preservation, would this Honkai: Star Rail universe head straight into some kind of IF destruction route?
The girl was starting to feel uneasy.
Just then, the normally functioning Emperor's Scepter suddenly flooded the administrator screen with lines upon lines of red text.
[Warning! Warning! Warning!]
[Firewall anomaly detected: unidentified individual unit intrusion.]
[Absolute Safety Equation – full purge initiated. Searching. Data capture failed. Target ID not detected. Marking target as malicious visitor. Executing expulsion. Expulsion failed.]
"?" Kiyono Inori typed out a question mark.
Jarilo-VI was basically a backwater even by Star Rail standards. How could anyone possibly break into her Emperor's Scepter?
Unless the Express crew had brought Herta along. But even if they did, with the Absolute Safety Equation being unknown, there was no way she could crack it on first contact.
The Emperor's Scepter was a colossal system dedicated to simulating countless paths of civilizational destruction. Even if the Absolute Safety Equation was somewhat abstract and unfinished, it was still an equation capable of destroying civilizations.
Unlock its self-replication limit and deploy it on a planet, and the effect would be like installing a full security suite on every machine worldwide.
It would consume 70 percent of their processing power, lagging everything to hell.
At the same time, it would protect every machine from being damaged by other equations.
Since its targeting included all machinery, from starships and spacecraft to intelligent machines and high-tech constructs.
On a poor, underdeveloped planet, the impact would be minimal. At worst, games would drop from sixty frames to twenty, and scrolling short videos would lag.
But on a highly advanced planet, the fun would be immense. The entire planetary system would likely collapse until the Absolute Safety Equation was deleted.
And that thing was notoriously hard to delete, basically the cockroach of equations. Even simulated Emperors could not fully erase it.
It had little direct lethality, but extremely extreme characteristics.
In the real world, the genius Herta could remove it cleanly, no problem.
But not this fast.
At minimum, the standard flow would be: enter the Scepter world, encounter the equation, get killed on first contact, then understand the situation.
"Command: retrieve data on Paths."
Kiyono Inori issued the order.
If it was Erudition,
She planned to run immediately. Freely controlling the Emperor's Scepter was far too suspicious, and with Stelle not around to vouch for her, being mistaken by Herta as some third Rupert would be disastrous.
[Detec… abnorm… Elat… Path fluctuation detected.]
The Emperor's Scepter was already lagging badly, its output fragmented, but Kiyono Inori caught the key word.
[Elation]
After all, Jarilo-VI did have Sampo. Rumor had it he was quite capable, even said to be an Emanator of Elation.
A flash of realization struck her.
Yes, that had to be it!
As long as it was not someone from Erudition, even an Emanator would not immediately identify this as an Emperor's Scepter on first sight.
This thing was absurdly obscure in the galaxy.
All of them had been written off by the Corporation after the war. After dozens of Amber Eras, you could not find a single one in the entire universe.
It had to be that old Sampo noticing the Creation Engine's disturbance, heading to Everwinter Hill to investigate, and accidentally stumbling into the Emperor's Scepter!
Finally! There was hope!
She just needed to pretend to be a passing alien friend who happened upon someone abusing a Stellaron and stepped in out of righteous indignation.
Now she could not defeat a Stellaron-powered Cocolia no matter how hard she tried, and could only stall. Just as she was about to lose control, someone finally arrived. All she needed was help finding a few capable allies!
Sampo would definitely bring the Express crew.
Kiyono Inori relaxed, confidence returning to her face.
Still, to be safe, she decided to negotiate using a mechanical body. If talks broke down or something went wrong, her true body could always return to her own world at any time.
…
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Let me know if I got a name wrong. I know basically nothing about MyGO.