Time rewound to one minute earlier.
At home, Su Yun was lying in bed, making a video through the system. He froze, then immediately sat up, his brows knitting tightly.
He turned his gaze toward a certain direction—the place where Artoria was.
As the girl he cared about most, Artoria had been taken away by an official agency after he publicly exposed her. There was no way he would simply do nothing. He had long since used the system to keep tabs on her.
If she ran into danger, he would sense it at once.
After probing through the system, Su Yun's brows furrowed even deeper. He sensed the presence of Mystery and immediately understood that the danger the girl faced came from it.
The headquarters of the Supernatural Disaster Countermeasures Office had been attacked by Mystery!
Now that Mystery Resurgence had begun across the world, everyone knew the situation was dire. An organization like the Supernatural Disaster Countermeasures Office, which existed specifically to deal with Mystery, could hardly keep itself hidden.
To give the public confidence, agencies like this were open about their existence. Even if they kept many secrets within their walls, the people still had to know they were there. And whenever they achieved anything, it had to be trumpeted far and wide.
The reason was simple: if there was truly no hope, and people felt they had no protection, human society would descend into chaos and collapse from within.
Thus, Su Yun knew all about the Supernatural Disaster Countermeasures Office and had been keeping an eye on it.
He had thought Artoria would be safe after the Strategy Room took her away. He hadn't expected a crisis to hit right off the bat.
But since Artoria was in danger, he had no choice but to intervene.
Seeing that he had fewer than three thousand points of Fantasy Power left, Su Yun reluctantly spent two thousand of them to activate another system function.
[Fantasy Manifestation]
This was a function Su Yun had added to the system as an emergency measure. It consumed a great deal of Fantasy Power, yet the returns it offered were far from guaranteed.
With the situation so urgent, he couldn't afford to worry about that.
As the name suggested, Fantasy Manifestation turned fantasy into reality.
It was an ability that directly interfered with reality—in other words, it could alter reality itself. Naturally, the Fantasy Power it consumed was staggering.
If it weren't for that, Su Yun could simply have manifested a whole host of powerful girls from the world of anime and manga, then steamrolled every Mystery Calamity. He wouldn't have needed to create a Light Screen broadcasting to the entire world just to gather Fantasy Power!
In fact, even now, the Fantasy Power Su Yun currently possessed wasn't nearly enough to manifest anything.
What he was really relying on was the effect of today's livestream. It had led people all over the world to imagine Artoria as King Arthur, causing Fantasy Power associated with King Arthur to cling to the girl.
All Su Yun had to do was combine the two sources of Fantasy Power and achieve Fantasy Manifestation.
However, making a manifestation work wasn't as simple as having both sources of Fantasy Power.
To succeed, Su Yun also needed the target's favorability—in other words, he had to raise their favorability to a certain level before he could use the Fantasy Power attached to them. Otherwise, the two sources of Fantasy Power couldn't resonate.
It was an incredibly complicated and troublesome process.
Su Yun wasn't making things difficult for himself or deliberately making the system he had built so complex. Rather, the more precise the corresponding "settings" were, and the more thoroughly their details were fleshed out, the less Fantasy Power they consumed.
The system itself was a mindless artificial idiot. If Su Yun didn't give it detailed enough instructions, bugs could easily occur and waste Fantasy Power.
If he thought of his situation as developing a game, then Fantasy Power was the project team's budget. As the project lead, he had to spend it where it counted.
As everyone knew, the more detailed a project's plans were, the more costs could be saved.
What Su Yun had been doing was continually refining and specifying the system's functions, adding every detail he could think of.
That was how he could make every bit of Fantasy Power count.
At the root of it all, he was just broke.
If he had hundreds of billions of points of Fantasy Power, Su Yun wouldn't bother sweating over every detail. He'd just give the system a goal, then let it fill in the details and carry out the plan on its own by spending a huge amount of Fantasy Power.
When Su Yun activated Fantasy Manifestation, the scene before him changed. A mouse, a keyboard, and a massive fifty-inch monitor appeared in the empty space in front of him.
But only he could see or touch them; the system had manifested them.
The image displayed on the huge screen showed the place where Artoria was.
He could clearly see a strange, transparent woman approaching Artoria, who sat slumped on the ground. Several horribly mutilated bodies lay scattered nearby.
At the sight, Su Yun narrowed his eyes, a chill in his gaze. Then he placed his hands on the mouse and keyboard and activated Fantasy Manifestation.
As if controlling a character from a third-person perspective, he watched as the Fantasy Power on his side attached itself to Artoria and merged with the Fantasy Power already on her.
The Fantasy Power within her had initially resisted. But when it realized the outside power came from Su Yun, it stopped fighting, thanks to Artoria's high favorability toward him, and joined with his Fantasy Power.
In an instant, a Maiden Knight appeared in the air, looking exactly like Artoria but dressed in blue-and-white armor and a skirt.
Su Yun clicked the left mouse button, and a fierce attack instantly cut through the Mystery's assault.
Facing the stunned Artoria, the Maiden Knight spoke on her own.
"I ask you: are you my reincarnation?"
Su Yun hadn't made her say it. The Maiden Knight had asked of her own accord.
That was the result of the character settings.
It was the same principle as before—the more complete the settings, the less Fantasy Power they consumed, and the better the manifestation turned out.
To Su Yun, the manifested character was like a game avatar he was controlling. Every word she said and every aspect of her personality had been set in advance.
Without a doubt, the Maiden Knight was the image of the holy King Arthur in Su Yun's mind—in other words, the famous Saber from the world of anime and manga.
It was a good thing Su Yun had worked as a game developer before transmigrating. Otherwise, he really wouldn't have known how to handle such complicated system settings.
There was no trick to it. He was simply well-practiced.
At that moment, everything would have been perfect if only there had been a BGM.
At least, Artoria couldn't help hearing a beautiful, ethereal melody ring out in her mind. Paired with the scene before her, it was breathtaking.
Then Artoria saw the girl across from her—the one who looked exactly like her—suddenly swing her right hand backward. It seemed she was holding something, and even the light in that area warped.
A sharp swish rang out, as though something invisible had been cut apart, sending a gust of air surging through the space. The terrifying Mystery, the Songstress, visibly froze.
It seemed... she couldn't understand why.
Then the Maiden Knight glanced back at the Songstress. Her expression was icy, and her eyes filled with unmistakable disgust. "What a revolting fiend! Even those man-eating monsters never disgusted me as much as something like you!"
As she spoke, the Songstress's killing mechanism triggered again. But the Maiden Knight blocked and cut away every attack with the indistinct weapon in her hand. Not one managed to hurt her.
Mystery was a terrifying force humanity couldn't fight. But once its method of killing was directly neutralized, its terror diminished considerably.
Just then, under Artoria's wide, beautiful eyes, the Maiden Knight suddenly sprang forward and charged at the Songstress with peerless force.
Then a slash, swift enough to far exceed the speed of sound, burst forth.
Amid the violent rush of air, the Songstress was cut in two. The raging currents shredded her body in an instant.
The entire process was clean and decisive, as if she had slain an insignificant little monster.
The battle had only just begun, and it was already over.
A Level Four Mystery, something humanity couldn't fight, seemed so weak in the face of the Maiden Knight, born from human fantasy.
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