The man did not answer. He merely turned around and stepped aside at the doorway.
"Please look. The criminals have been subdued. You're safe now."
Machida Sonoko and Utaha Kasumigaoka looked utterly helpless—night had fully fallen, and with no electricity at home, they could not see anything in the darkness.
"Sorry, I forgot your eyes can't see in the dark." The man who could be called either Heinz Guderian or Hans von Hohenzollern casually flipped the light switch beside the bedroom door.
With a click, the bedroom lights came on. Incredibly, every other light in the house lit up as well.
But Machida Sonoko and Utaha Kasumigaoka had no time to dwell on that anomaly. At last, they could clearly see the man and woman before them.
The man was nearly 1.9 meters tall, built like an iron tower. His crisp suit was stretched taut over his body, making it obvious that he was a muscle monster. The head on his thick neck bore a square, righteous-looking face, and his sunglasses made him look less like a police officer than the suited thug protagonist of a classic Hollywood film.
There was no doubt about it—he was a foreigner.
And the kind of fierce man who could knock out a kid with one punch and fire a six-barreled minigun at full blast one-handed without even trembling.
So he absolutely could not be the police they had called!
"Could he be from the U.S. military stationed in Japan?" Utaha Kasumigaoka murmured.
"No, no, Uta-chan, he's German~" Machida Sonoko quickly refuted her, but then she realized something else was off—there were plenty of people of German descent at West University too.
At that moment, the woman who had spoken earlier walked past Hans and entered the bedroom.
Compared to the iron-tower-like Hans, this woman looked much slimmer. Though she stood noticeably taller than the average Japanese woman, and her fitted women's suit carried the grim aura of a soldier, she was clearly far less oppressive to the two of them.
That made Utaha Kasumigaoka and Machida Sonoko relax slightly.
The woman swept her gaze over them and said bluntly, "My name is Christina. Please rest assured, the intruders have been subdued. However, you two need to come back with us for a detailed investigation."
The woman named Christina also had a typically Western face. Beneath her long golden hair, her blue eyes showed no emotion at all on her fair face.
She hardly seemed human.
Though they dearly wanted to ask who these two were, after cautiously glancing at Christina and Hans behind her, Utaha Kasumigaoka and Machida Sonoko felt a chill in their hearts and could only nod with intense unease.
As they followed them out of the bedroom, Machida Sonoko and Utaha Kasumigaoka saw that three unconscious "perverts" were lying on the living room floor, piled atop one another.
They wore strange earth-yellow cloaks that covered their heads along with their hoods.
But Machida Sonoko's pupils suddenly contracted when she recognized the face beneath one of the hoods.
Ignoring everyone else, she crouched down, pulled off the man's hood, and cried out, "Editor Yamada!!!!"
"How could it be him!?"
Utaha Kasumigaoka stepped beside Machida Sonoko and looked down at the man called Editor Yamada.
He was slightly plump, wore glasses, and looked like a typical office worker who spent his days sitting behind a desk.
He was the sort of person who would quickly disappear into any crowd, no matter where he was placed.
Only after Hans and Christina led her out of her own home did the deeply shocked Machida Sonoko come back to herself—her front door was still open, and three cloaked perverts were still lying inside!
"Don't worry. Our people will handle them."
Christina's sidelong glance made Machida Sonoko and Utaha Kasumigaoka fall silent instinctively.
The location was inside a building in Ginza, Japan's most prosperous commercial district.
In municipal records, the building was registered as "Ginza Argentum Tower."
Argentum, the academic Latin term for "silver," symbolized Belfast's protective will, like a silver Holy Sword.
Tower: the vertical structure metaphorically represented the capital matrix built by the maid, reaching through humanity's political and economic spheres like the Tower of Babel.
This was the central headquarters of the enormous conglomerate Belfast had established single-handedly to fulfill Jiang Lianqiu's utopian living conditions as the sole Master of the Mecha Servant Civilization.
Outsiders only knew that the building belonged to a global-level financial conglomerate that surpassed national boundaries, but no human knew that its interior and underground had long been filled with countless tendrils of an interstellar civilization beyond human comprehension.
Even the genuine native Earthlings who worked inside had already had chips implanted in their brains, ensuring absolute loyalty.
In the eyes of the Mech Servants, aside from Jiang Lianqiu, the highest-authority entity, every other human could be classified as "alien trash."
At this moment, in a laboratory deep beneath the Ginza Argentum Tower, Jiang Lianqiu pressed his palm against the manuscript of Manuscript Volume Two of Love Beat, which he had brought from Shizuka Hiratsuka, under the tense watch of Belfast and a group of Mech Servants.
In another world, on the Yaoqing Xianzhou, Su Shang stood in her family courtyard with her little face flushed red, doing her best to cooperate with Jiang Lianqiu in mobilizing her not particularly powerful Destiny Power.
After an unknown length of silent stillness, Jiang Lianqiu vaguely felt that some barrier deep within his mind had cracked open a fissure.
At the same time, more than four hundred light-years from Earth, at Ophiuchus ζ Central Starport, the central AI spoke in a cold mechanical female voice.
"Absolute-authority entity detected. Natural Authorizer 'Ω-12 Hertz' signal received. Resonance coordinator authorized..."
In an instant, within the Honkai: Star Rail Universe, the questioning gaze of a certain deity turned toward the Yaoqing Xianzhou.
By a method no one—not even the Aeon of the Hunt herself—could understand, that gaze was pulled across the barrier between worlds and descended upon Jiang Lianqiu.
Before you continue