"Do you mean you want me to spare her life, and even tolerate her 'little bit of dissatisfaction' as much as possible?" Persephone gently tugged at her collar. "Fine. That can count as part of the compensation for obtaining the intelligence earlier. After all, that thing called Rhodes Island must need me because it values my ability to strategize. In that case, handling personnel matters reasonably is also a skill a manager ought to demonstrate."
"Anything else you need?" she asked.
Miss Surtr had always felt that something was off—not the kind of wrongness that would harm her, but the kind that meant certain people besides herself were about to suffer terribly. Yet no meddlesome KP had come to give her an Inspiration check. So she could only tuck this feeling away in her heart, treating it as wariness and apprehension toward Persephone. Beyond that—
—Ah, after all, she had already drawn inspiration from so many things in the Mudflat Encore. Could developments that seemed to meet all the prerequisites perhaps manifest?
"W now belongs to a mercenary group. And the leader of those Sarkaz mercenaries should currently be using the surname Garson." She hesitated, but in the end, she still gave that name. After all, the female Doctor, Xi, who had a character setup similar to Persephone's in that Mudflat Encore post, had been killed twenty-two times in succession by a Sarkaz centurion while escaping from the Sarcophagus.
—Although that was only an encore post, a fanfiction setting. But...
"That person has a problem. If you encounter him, don't give him the chance to act."
"You know him?" Persephone tilted her head slightly.
"It's just a feeling." Miss Surtr shook her head. "That person may somehow counter you... Forget it. Pretend I said nothing. Just be careful. Don't let yourself be sunk by a leak in the ditch."
She nodded at Persephone and took a step outward. Accompanied by a sonic boom and a sudden blast of rising air, her figure completely vanished from the enormous mechanical installation hall.
She had left.
Inside the hall, the lavender-haired unappointed Doctor fell into thought.
—No wonder you were willing to tell me your secret when the time was right. Indeed, someone like you could never keep any secret from me. Just the words you said to me moments ago had already exposed far too much information.
—But you don't care. You have the confidence to defeat me even after revealing your trump card. Absolute 'power'...?
She walked to the window and looked at the gloomy sky outside. The Cataclysm's arrival was already inevitable in the near future, while the chaos within the city was intensifying.
She had not seen Theresia's face within the Cataclysm cloud as Surtr had.
But...
—You can see through my Death Return, and on that basis you're still worried that I'll be sunk by a leak... Is your ability precognition? Or observation of parallel worlds? Or perhaps you can directly observe 'fate' itself?
She shook her head.
Oh, well. The information she currently possessed could be used to deduce many interesting things. But interesting and useful were two different matters. To have any effect on someone like her, the accumulation of information would surely have to increase by at least three or four orders of magnitude. But before that...
"Kill every Sarkaz mercenary in this city. Then, I suppose the object of her concern will turn into a concrete subject suitable for analysis." Persephone reached her conclusion.
The unappointed Doctor, no longer hiding her intentions, immediately leaped forward. Like a fallen leaf, she drifted lightly down from the towering building.
She had already found her first target.
Meanwhile, atop the central main control tower in Chernobog's core city.
Talulah made a gesture, signaling her personal guards to leave and deploy defenses in the lower levels of the tower. Under her gaze, she looked through the observation platform and saw a pillar of flame suddenly surge up from the distant black ruins. Accompanied by the overwhelming force of a falling meteor, it slammed into the ground at the very base of the main control tower.
She had come.
She had given Talulah time to face her—or flee.
She would climb upward from the very bottom of the tower, clearing away every obstacle until she stood before Talulah.
She had always been like this.
She was always like this.
Always appearing unbidden in unexpected places, bringing hope to others without permission, just as she had once ridden fire and sulfur down onto the road where Alina was about to be attacked—
—But Alina was not here.
—She could not appear here at this time.
"Even now, you are still trying to show me 'mercy.' You think my resolve is insufficient. You think I was deceived by someone else. You think I merely took one wrong step in a moment of weakness..."
"...But you are wrong."
"Everything I have done came from my own heart, for this moment and this place alone."
"Only to wait for you here."
She murmured as she felt the tremors beneath the tower and the steadily approaching heat. She smelled the sulfur spreading through the air and saw the clouds beyond the observation platform dyed the pure color of Twilight.
Twilight, Twilight, the Twilight of the ruler.
Yet if Twilight truly descended, how many times more than the rulers would the dead, mediocre masses number? Even if they were the rulers' claws, even if they served the rulers, when an extinction-level disaster descended, what real difference was there between a city's worth of wealth and a body clothed in rags?
The white-haired Dragon Girl held her sword and gently gathered the strand of hair falling beside her temple.
She would not hide, nor did she intend to flee.
She remained stationed here, waiting for the Twilight that was about to pounce at her head-on.
ps: I played until after two in the morning without sleeping... Sister 42 really did get nerfed intellectually. The plot development is quite explosive, but that's what fanfiction exists for—to erase regrets!
ps2: To hell with the timeline and everything else! Alina is alive in this worldline, anyway! A mere butterfly effect—if I say 42 made it in time, then she made it in time!
ps3: I never expected Arknights to give us a wife in Chapter Eight... Theresia is just a lofty-minded coworker. Kal'tsit is just a foul-mouthed lynx. Only Precise is the true wife who makes straightforward advances in the main story!—But this Doctor wants them all—and Sister 42 even wants the Doctor too.
ps4: So what if there are too many established couples? At worst, I'll become a many-winged angel... I can love you and your wife at the same time.jpg.
Section Twenty-Five: The Girl Climbs the Tower
The Flame Sword burned.
Molten fire flowed and scattered in every direction.
Yet the steps ascending the tower never stopped.
"You're doing something foolish."
On the first floor of the main control tower, all sixteen great swords had been broken. The fallen greatswordsmen lay on the ground, their bodies wreathed in heat as they struggled weakly, soon falling still.
Before you continue