Delta gritted her teeth, stuffed the guidebook she had just folded into her clothes, then tore free of the seat belt through brute force and jumped out.
"Watch out."
The moment Delta poked her head out, she heard Yae Kasumi, who had just jumped from the plane in front of her, speak... along with the nearly inaudible sound of a blade slicing through the air behind her.
There was no time to react. Her body moved before her brain did, and two greatswords, one red and one blue, instantly appeared in her hands.
Her tail hooked around a seat to stabilize her body. Delta turned and crouched halfway on the plane, crossing her two greatswords to block Xuanyuan as Kaino slashed at her.
"Quick reactions, and you're pretty strong too... You held back when you fought that Parvati earlier."
Feeling strength through the blade that rivaled even his own monstrous power, Kaino raised an eyebrow.
"Ha, I should be the surprised one. Forget your ability to suddenly get onto a plane—there haven't been many enemies I've met who could match my strength."
Delta refused to back down verbally as she increased the force in her hands.
The blades gradually pressed toward Kaino.
Then...
"Hiss!"
Delta suddenly winced in pain and lost her footing. She stared wide-eyed at Kaino, disbelief all over her face. "Using such childish tricks, have you no shame?!"
"No."
Calmly withdrawing the foot he had placed on Delta's tail, Kaino seized the moment when she had no strength left and forcefully shoved her away.
At the same time, several ice spikes condensed out of thin air beside Kaino and shot toward Delta.
The Mortal World Was Hard to Cross
Delta frowned and swung her blue greatsword, instantly shattering all the ice cones.
She wasn't a child... at least not mentally. An attack like stepping on her tail would not make her curl into a ball and roll around on the ground. Aside from that instant of distraction, it would have no further effect on her.
But Kaino had never expected that attack to hurt her. He wasn't that naive.
The dozens of ice cones turned to powder the instant they touched Delta's greatsword. The icy blue crystal dust reflected the sunlight, blocking Delta's vision and making her eyes ache from the glare.
"Heh. Tell me, are these petty tricks all you know?"
Quickly bringing the pink greatsword before her to block the ancient Xuanyuan sword thrusting through the mist of ice crystals, Delta gave a disdainful snort.
"For a warrior, catching someone off guard only works once. Show me the same spirit you used against that Honkai Beast, and let's have a proper fight!"
"This is the first time I've heard someone ask to be treated like a Honkai Beast."
Kaino gripped Xuanyuan with both hands and exerted force, locking into another stalemate with Delta.
"My main goal is to take you back. If I got serious, I'm afraid I might accidentally fail to hold back and beat you to death. If that happened, wouldn't Liliya fight me to the death?"
"From how you acted before, you and Liliya seem very close. Are you really willing to leave your sister behind all alone? Or were all your past interactions, all those feelings, just an act—"
"What does it have to do with you? Shut up!"
Kaino must have struck some nerve, because Delta instantly bristled. Red and blue substance like dye emerged across the two greatswords, and Delta violently knocked Kaino several steps back.
She glared coldly at Kaino and raised both greatswords high.
"You'd better pray your body is as tough as your mouth."
With that, she swung both heavy swords down with all her strength, cleaving the barely airborne plane in half and causing it to explode with a thunderous boom.
Delta gritted her teeth as she watched Kaino get swallowed by flames. She released her tail from the pilot's seat, rode the blast wave downward at high speed, then plunged headfirst into a pile of dirt.
Before she could exert any strength, a pair of hands pulled her out.
"Lady Delta, your luck is quite good. If the plane had flown a little farther before you destroyed it, you might not have landed in mud, but on the stone bricks near the center of the island."
Yae Kasumi placed Delta on the ground, her voice devoid of emotion.
"Cough, cough... ptooey."
After spitting out several mouthfuls of dirt, Delta glared indignantly at Yae Kasumi. "Are you making fun of me?"
"I was merely stating the facts."
"Fine, fine. It's not like I can argue with you anyway."
Delta waved her hand irritably, then looked around.
"Where are the plane wreckage? He hasn't caught up yet. That kid isn't dead, is he?"
"The Ferryman's assessment of him was..."
"You don't need to explain it in that much detail. Just tell me the result."
"There is a high probability that he is unharmed and has not attacked us for some reason. There is a small probability that he has fainted somewhere on the island and will awaken soon."
"Ha, he really is something. Who knows where he came from."
Stretching lazily, Delta put away her two greatswords. After scratching her hair, she asked impatiently:
"What kind of place is this? Why is it so creepy?"
The place where they had fallen was a forest. No one knew what kind of trees grew there; they were bare and grotesquely shaped, and countless bats fluttered chaotically through the woods.
It was broad dayli... huh?
Watching the clouds in the sky suddenly thicken, Delta curled her lip.
"Why did it suddenly turn like this? Was that her doing again?"
"It is highly possible, but we cannot rule out the possibility that another person capable of interfering here did it."
Yae Kasumi nodded. After observing their surroundings and determining the direction, she began walking one way.
"This is an island in the middle of the sea. It is where the final venue of the tournament you participated in is located, and also the key to leaving this place. Follow me. We will be able to leave shortly."
"Wait."
Delta took her copy of the guidebook from her clothes and gently placed it beneath a tree with a complicated expression. She wiped away the raindrops falling onto her face, took a deep breath, and followed Yae Kasumi.
"Let's go."
Drip.
Kaino recreated a huge parasol, sheltering Rozaliya and Yae Sakura—oh, according to how they addressed each other in the Illusion Realm, they should be Delta and Yae Kasumi—from the rain as they lay sprawled on the ground with vacant eyes. He then raised his head to look at the dark, cloud-filled sky and sighed helplessly.
"It's only because I'm kindhearted. Otherwise, you two would've been soaked through."
Leaning against the completely undamaged plane behind him and creating a patch of vacuum around himself that the rain could not enter, Kaino idly played with the Feather of the Underworld in his hand.
It had to be said that this really was a divine artifact. It was even more useful to Kaino than Judgement of Shamash.
After all, Kaino possessed quite a few Authorities. Even without Judgement of Shamash, he still had formidable combat power—in fact, he currently only used Judgement of Shamash's dual-pistol form occasionally and had never once unsheathed it.
But the Feather of the Underworld was different. Like this time, if it had not existed, even if Kaino had knocked the two of them unconscious, tied them up, and interrogated them through force and threats, he probably would not have gotten any information. He might even have earned a round of complaints from Liliya.
Although they had not interacted much, he did not know how to deal with children who politely called him big brother.
In contrast, he had not used the Feather of the Underworld to search their memories. He had merely created a brief Illusion Realm, yet he had already obtained quite a bit of intelligence.
"The Ferryman... and that woman who can barely be called human..."
Kaino narrowed his eyes, then sighed.
Unfortunately, Delta's temper was too explosive, and she had little patience. If she had not interrupted Yae Kasumi, he could have gotten even more information.
Still, judging solely from Delta's strange behavior in the Illusion Realm, the person who had spoken with Rita back then was probably not her.
"Forget it. I'll just go take a look at their so-called exit. Maybe there'll be some clues there."
Kaino brought the Feather of the Underworld close to his mouth and softly said:
"Seele? Can you hear me?"
"...How are things on your end?"
After a while, Red Seele's voice came from it.
Yes, her voice was still quite distinguishable from Blue Seele's.
"I stopped them all. I'll keep moving forward and see what their real objective is."
"Oh, and remember to calm Liliya down later. De... Rozaliya's condition looks a little off. It seems like she knows the person who abducted her."
Not only that, they had even teamed up to beat me... but there was no need to mention that.
"Got it!"
Xiao Shi's voice suddenly came through.
Kaino:?
"How can you butt into the conversation too?"
"My power comes from the same source as the feather you use to communicate. By the way, how exactly was this feather made? Why have I never heard of it before?"
"For the sake of your mental health, it would be better if you didn't know."
Kaino sighed.
"That's enough. I'm leaving."
Phantom, Vanishing
There were quite a few things in the conversation between Yae Kasumi and Delta within the Feather of the Underworld's Illusion Realm that caught Kaino's attention.
For example, the rain clouds in the sky. According to the two of them, they had been created by someone capable of interfering here. Creating rain clouds was nothing special; if he wanted to, Kaino could easily make them himself.
What Kaino cared about was the word they had used: interference.
Even though he was not highly educated, he understood what that word implied—forcing one's way into something without permission.
...There was a high chance that this World Bubble had a nominal owner. Unless Yae Kasumi's education was so poor that she used words extremely inaccurately, that possibility was very likely.
Kaino did not know what it meant to be the owner of this place. But his intuition told him that merely reverse-integrating a World Bubble into his body did not make him the owner of Fu Hua's World Bubble.
The Book of Cang Xuan had never told him about this either. Did she not know?
Thinking of this, Kaino could not help sighing.
That feeling when everyone around him knew everything while he was like some clueless idiot who knew nothing was really unpleasant.
And was this really the final venue of the tournament?
Kaino looked over the facilities around him, utterly baffled.
A Ferris wheel, roller coasters, a carousel... No matter how he looked at it, this was an amusement park.
Forget any tournament organizers or the like—it did not even have an open arena. How did this look anything like a final venue?!
And what kind of ridiculous design was this? Plant a ring of extremely bizarre trees around the island, then build an amusement park in the center?
Wouldn't they be afraid of going bankrupt?
"The closer I get to the center of the island, the more strange things there are. I only came here to have fun, so why did I run into so much trouble?"
After thinking for a moment, Kaino gave up and took out the Feather of the Underworld to ask for outside help.
"I should ask Xiao Shi after all. She has to know somethi... What is that?"
Kaino abruptly turned his head toward a nearby shadow.
Amid a series of tick-tock sounds, like the mechanism of clock hands turning, a huge black-and-gold robot that had been lying sprawled on the ground seemed to be granted life. The pink crystal on its top began glowing red. At the same time, its entire body started convulsing and trembling before it slowly rose...
It did not rise.
Kaino decisively drew Judgement of Shamash and blasted its legs. The unsteady robot immediately lost its balance and fell back down before it could stand properly.
Without giving it a chance to recover, the Heavenly Fire Pistols instantly transformed into the Greatsword of Heavenly Fire. Kaino rushed forward and struck the pink crystal atop it, which might as well have had I am the fatal weak point written across it.
Perhaps because it had only just awakened and was weak, sparks flashed, the crystal atop the robot returned to darkness, and it stopped moving completely.
Kaino did not lower his guard. He quickly severed its limbs, eliminating any possibility of it moving again.
Only after finishing all that did Kaino finally breathe a sigh of relief and carefully examine the robot before him—the Honkai Beast encyclopedia had long been memorized by him, and it contained no information on this thing.
It had a round head like a clock face and an elongated, enormous body. Though he did not know its exact strength, it looked extremely dangerous just from its appearance alone.
Especially the glittering black-and-gold greatsword in its hand. It looked incredibly powerful at a glance.
Its dark body was made of some unknown material. In any case, Kaino found it difficult to cut with Heavenly Fire.
"A sudden attack... Is this part of the finals too? But this robot looks so dangerous. Wouldn't it really risk injuring or even killing the contestants?"
Before you continue