Where's the Promised Third Honkai?!!

Heaven knew, Little AI absolutely had not been mocking her host.

When the entire Far East branch had been wanted, Fu Li had taken in the gravely wounded, dying Kiana right under Schicksal's nose. He had practically been gambling with his life!

Not to mention that he had even nursed the girl until she was fair and plump. In some martial arts fantasy version of this story, it would have been unreasonable if she did not passively offer herself to him in return!

"We all came from Changkong City. We should support each other somehow. The others wouldn't get this kind of treatment from me." Fu Li did not think he was being excessively kind. "Besides, it wasn't just me. Other survivors, like Raiden Mei and Bronya, were pretty good to me too."

Having unlocked new characters, Prometheus expressed considerable interest.

"There's not much to say. They were the two Changkong City survivors who joined St. Freya with Kiana back then. We ran into each other several times during missions. Once they heard I had also escaped the Third Honkai in Changkong City, they became incredibly enthusiastic."

"How enthusiastic?"

"Bronya often taught me the hacking techniques she was best at. Whenever I had difficult problems related to the dark web, she would help solve them without a second word. Mei was even more enthusiastic. She actually wanted to give me her family's ancient swordsmanship, Hokushin Itto-ryu, for free."

At that, Fu Li revealed a regretful expression. "Unfortunately, I had absolutely no talent for hacking, and for various reasons, I only learned the basics of swordsmanship in the end."

"By the looks of it, Host is quite popular with girls too."

Prometheus was genuinely happy for him.

"Unfortunately, that isn't necessarily a good thing."

For some reason, the Fu Li who had just been reminiscing suddenly had dark clouds gathering across his face.

After years of ups and downs, Fu Li rarely displayed such intense emotional fluctuations. Yet whenever he recalled those damned Babar bastards, he could not help wanting to draw his blade and cut something apart to vent his rage.

"The Herrscher of Domination..."

After Kiana left without saying goodbye, Fu Li continued living his lonely king life.

His strength steadily rose through his experiences, and before long, he had reached a point only one step away from Critical.

Normally, after accumulating strength for a while longer, Fu Li would have evolved from an A-rank who "freely rewrote the surrounding environment during battle" into a Critical-level fighter who "redrew the map whenever he fought."

However, just like those bizarre little countries and hardcore maniacs fit for the Tongliao series, since things had already been said this way, an accident was naturally inevitable.

Fu Li was kidnapped by a group of small Puppets of Domination who called themselves Rabble.

It sounded embarrassing, but it really was not embarrassing at all.

Rabble, whose true name was the Herrscher of Domination, was the tenth Sequence Herrscher of the current civilization. With a thousand independent clones, she was an absurd existence that broke the bounds of S-rank.

To them, let alone the A-rank Fu Li of that time, even if he had been Critical, tying him up would have been effortless.

S-rank and everything below S-rank were entirely different concepts. The former had already transcended the sea of suffering, while the latter still struggled bitterly among all living beings.

But the question was, if the gap between them had been so vast, why had the Herrscher of Domination insisted on kidnapping a minor character like Fu Li, someone who could wipe out piles of small fry with a wave of his hand?

The answer was simple.

An icy chill like ten thousand years of frozen ice filled his eyes. As he rubbed the cool hilt of Crescent Moon, his tone remained indifferent. "They captured me to use my life to threaten their enemy."

"Wah!!!"

The driver in the bus's front seat suddenly felt a chill. He rubbed the back of his neck, where his hairs had stood on end, and suspiciously glanced behind him through the rearview mirror.

A young mother holding a child was comforting her wailing baby. On the other side, a man in a suit leaned drowsily against the window, dozing off.

Several workers were gathered around playing cards. An elderly woman who noticed the driver's gaze gave him a kindly smile. Everything looked so peaceful and prosperous.

An illusion, perhaps?

He did not think much of it and raised the temperature of the bus's air conditioning.

Breath Concealment, a byproduct of cultivating the Human Immortal Path, was a special skill that could hide and sever one's aura for covert operations.

Its initial level was D-rank, and it continuously leveled up alongside cultivation of the Human Immortal Path.

As a status-type skill, Fu Li could actively control whether Breath Concealment was activated or deactivated.

Moreover, the skill's energy consumption was so low that, even now, no one had noticed the person at the very back of the bus holding a cool-looking bat.

Unfortunately, a D-rank skill ultimately had its limits. At the very least, it had failed to completely conceal the killing intent that Fu Li had suddenly released earlier, frightening the baby in the pregnant woman's arms.

"The Herrscher of Domination captured Host... to threaten other people?"

The baby's crying and Prometheus's murmur calmed Fu Li down. He suppressed his killing intent. "Yes. They captured me to threaten someone."

"When I first heard that from those Rabbles, I thought they were just joking. With my relationships, where those close to me were delighted and my enemies even more delighted, who could they possibly threaten by taking me?"

"Host, that is not something to say with a proud expression..."

Little AI held her forehead, but she quickly thought of something.

She cautiously said, "Could it be that the Herrscher of Domination wanted to use Host to threaten Miss Kiana?"

It was an entirely logical guess. The famous Russian playwright Chekhov had once proposed the well-known theory of Chekhov's gun:

If a gun hangs on the wall at the beginning of a film, then it must fire by the end.

Likewise, since Fu Li had talked about Kiana for so long, she was bound to appear at a crucial moment.

And the boy's next answer confirmed Prometheus's guess.

"That's right! Those damned scum covered my eyes with black cloth, gagged my mouth, and took the helpless me into a domain created by Herrscher authority, a dimensional space called the Dominion Theater."

"It was there that I heard Kiana's voice... the voice of Kiana after she reached S-rank."

"S-rank?"

"Yes, exactly, S-rank!"

Even after experiencing plenty of storms and waves, Fu Li's tone still carried a trace of absurdity and disbelief.

"Heaven knew how that girl had leveled up. She carried a crimson broken sword and slaughtered her way through the Rabble... I vaguely seemed to hear someone helping her too?"

Under normal circumstances, for someone like Fu Li, even having his vision obstructed would not have greatly hindered his judgment of the battle.

Unfortunately, perhaps to add some dramatic flair, the malicious Puppets of Domination had used a few little tricks to block most of his perception of the battlefield.

With her companions' help, Kiana quickly wiped out more than half of the puppet army and pressed directly toward Rabble's true body.

And so, at that moment—clang clang!

The beautiful Fu Li, coerced by villains, made a dazzling entrance before everyone!

His condition back then had not been miserable at all. The puppets had treated him fairly well.

He was the ultimate trump card meant to turn the tide at the critical moment. Naturally, they had to protect him carefully in case anything happened to him.

But not being miserable did not mean he looked respectable.

Wearing an eyepatch matching the Domination style was not excessive, right? Wearing a matching skintight outfit was not excessive either, right?

Just as the puppets expected, the instant Kiana saw Fu Li, her heart truly wavered—far more than they had imagined!

Thinking about it from Kiana's perspective:

A boy had traveled alone from a foreign land to the Far East in pursuit of her. He encountered a cataclysm like the Third Honkai, where death was all but certain, and even his fate changed. After the Final Lesson, he had brought her, who had been determined to die, home and cared for her attentively. Yet after recovering, she had turned and left without even saying goodbye—or rather, she had not dared to say goodbye!

Most importantly, every one of Fu Li's goals had been tied to the name Kiana Kaslana. From beginning to end, the one he had pursued was Kiana Kaslana.

But what about herself? She was not!

She had never been the Kiana Kaslana who had made a promise with him as a child. She was merely the experimental subject K423, a cuckoo occupying another's nest!

Shamelessly taking the identity of someone else's moonlight, then using this face and these words again and again to make him hurt and disappointed—Kiana had already felt immense guilt over that. And now, Herrscher of Domination, you dog bastard actually dared to push A Li out as a shield?

I'm going to kill you!

I'm fucking going to kill youuuuu!!!

And just like that, a flaw appeared in the flawless state of mind of the Herrscher of Flamescion.

The Herrscher of Domination's true body sharply seized that opportunity and used invisible threads imbued with the power of domination to suspend the rampaging girl in midair!

The Herrscher had prepared long ago. In the blink of an eye, threads containing all her remaining power cut through the skin on Kiana's neck!

"She'll die!"

That word surfaced in the hearts of both Kiana, who had reacted in time, and everyone else watching the battle!

"I'll win!"

Rabble could not help wanting to burst into laughter—or rather, she had already done so. But the sound traveled far slower than the lightning-fast shifts of the battlefield!

Yet no one had expected that, at this most crucial instant, a sacrifice nobody had cared about would change everything.

When a person's pride and everything else had been broken, when he realized he had become a burden holding others back—

No matter how normal he usually looked, he would still lose his temper.

Fu Li extended his right hand and slowly clenched it.

"I broke through then. The seventh revolution, to Critical."

Nine Revolutions of Unrivaled had been jointly created by Su Mei, Fairy Wushuang of the Seven Swords of Taixu and a disciple of Immortal Crimson Vulture, and Ma Feima, wielder of the Galloping Horse Sword. Its contents had little remaining connection to the Void Sword Qi that had served as its reference.

It used the dantian as a medicinal primer and the meridians as a medicinal cauldron, guiding true qi—Honkai Energy—throughout the body to strengthen the flesh and organs.

The internal art had nine levels, known as the Nine Revolutions;

With every breakthrough, one would undergo a complete transformation and gain greatly increased power.

(The above came from Honkai Impact 3rd's official visual novel, Record of the Broken Sword of Shenzhou.)

This was the cultivation method gifted to Fu Li by the people who had truly led him into the Honkai side of things.

With his cultivation technique breaking through and making up for the final weakness in his physical attributes, Fu Li's overall evaluation finally reached Critical.

That was right. Critical could not cause even the slightest ripple in a battle between S-ranks.

But that depended on both sides' condition.

More than ninety percent of the Puppet of Domination clones had been destroyed. The battle had reached its fiercest point, and all remaining power was being used to restrain and eliminate Kiana and the others who had destroyed the puppet clones.

Even a tiny Fu Li could overturn the heavens at such a critical moment.

"I wiped out the remaining Puppets of Domination, then walked in front of Kiana." He said, "I wanted to kill her."

"?"

"Come on, Prometheus, that was the Herrscher of Domination." Fu Li complained with half-closed eyes. "I had been kidnapped by them the whole way. It was perfectly normal for them to secretly tamper with my mind and body, right?"

Little AI felt that her host's argument made so much sense that she was speechless.

Other Herrschers might disdain doing something like that, but if it was that bitch Domination?

Then it was completely normal!

What happened afterward was simple. Fu Li, whose mind was filled with "kill Honkai kill Honkai writing is so tiring kill Honkai kill kill kill kill kill kill kill!!!," only felt his body burn and his mind grow hazy. When he opened his eyes again after being stabbed straight through the heart, he had already heard his obnoxiously loud landlady pounding on the door.

"Weak Draws His Blade, Slashes at the Weaker"

With a hiss, the bus doors slowly closed in front of Fu Li.

Watching the bus leave, Fu Li glanced at the stop sign beside him, tightened his backpack, and headed southwest according to his memory.

"Breath Concealment really is useful. It's just a little hard to handle when it nearly makes you miss your stop."

Why had he nearly missed his stop?

His presence had been so faint that the driver had not noticed there was still someone on the bus.

Fu Li complained in a boastful tone, but after a while, he received no response from Little AI.

"Prometheus?"

"...Mm, I'm here."

Prometheus snapped out of her absorbed imagination.

Fu Li had described it simply, but in her mind, the pitch-black Dominion Theater, Kiana hanging in midair from invisible threads, Fu Li transformed into a beast and killing wildly, and finally Fu Li standing before a teary-eyed Kiana, roaring hoarsely while desperately suppressing his killing intent as he let the equally teary-eyed girl plunge the Flamescion Greatsword into his chest—

Under the simulation of a top-grade Soul Steel chip produced in the Previous Era, every scene was vividly lifelike.

"Host, do you not blame Miss Kiana?"

In the end, she could not stop herself from asking that question.

"Huh? Blame her?" Fu Li froze. "Oh, you mean getting happily on my way, only to suddenly be captured and used as a hostage?"