"Was A-Cheng playing some kind of spot-the-location game?"
Cyrene stepped right into the conversation, her gaze landing squarely on him. Her soft, delicate body leaned toward him like a willow branch swayed by the spring breeze, and she playfully tilted her little head to one side.
"I'm right here in front of you, A-Cheng~ As long as you want me to, I'll always—always be here~"
What a dazzlingly electric wink.
Electric in the literal sense.
"Rumble—rumble—"
Thunder boomed across the sky, brightening the gloomy world in an instant until it seemed as bright as daylight.
"Mei, why don't you come down first? You're a Herrscher now, so your physical abilities have improved tremendously, but... it must still be cold up there." Jiang Cheng tried to coax her down.
"..."
"Do you need a hotter embrace?"
"..."
"Want to go interrogate Cocolia together? That'll definitely cheer you up!"
"...Oh, I see."
The gloomy sky cleared in an instant, replaced by an endless stretch of cloudless blue. Looking up, they could take in the brilliant sunset without obstruction.
Raiden Mei immediately descended from the sky.
Her imposing, Empress-of-Takemikazuchi-like bearing instantly softened, returning to how she had been at the start.
"Sorry. I had too much confidence in you, Cheng-kun."
"?"
"Don't worry about me. I didn't find anything. I was just thinking aloud a little." Raiden Mei shook her head, her slender, pale fingers lightly pressing against her ample chest. "I suddenly realized that you've been completely honest with me from the very beginning, Cheng-kun. It seems... I'll have to work harder from now on."
"All right. If anything's wrong, please tell me."
That was all Jiang Cheng could say.
Afterward, they interrogated Cocolia again. Having realized that she had been utterly defeated—and how foolish she had been—Cocolia seemed completely broken. All she wanted now was for the pain to stop.
Jiang Cheng easily got every last detail out of her, even the names of the ancestors of some radical faction members going back eighteen generations.
"Ahhh—!"
"Just kill me! The victor is king! There's nothing else to say... At least give me a quick death!!!!"
Jiang Cheng merely looked down at her screams with cold indifference.
That was right.
Stories of defeated enemies earning respect from their victors were common throughout history. Even showing respect after killing an enemy made perfect sense.
"But do you deserve it?"
"Ahhhhhhh—!"
After resting for half a day and recovering her strength, Cocolia started screaming and wailing without end again.
"I shouldn't have thought so badly of you, at first. You were one of the few outstanding, honorable officers of your time, yet you saw your superiors embezzling funds. Then you witnessed a power beyond humanity's reach with your own eyes. You lost heart over it and eventually went down an extreme path—I can understand that."
"Seeking power, opening an orphanage to that end, experimenting on the orphans you took in, and making those with talent who survived into your own faction—I can accept that kind of thing, too. In fact, compared with those bastards from Schicksal who tricked and cheated innocent girls everywhere, at least you let them live. Without your protection, they would have died long ago—before the experiments, in the frozen wasteland of Siberia. It was a fair trade."
"Your struggle with ME Corp was just an ordinary political conflict, too. Infighting between factions within the same organization happens countless times every moment. There's no difference between a major political struggle and a minor one. They're all just human beings tearing each other apart. If Mei didn't mean something special to me, I wouldn't even have glanced at this."
Unlike before, when every word and sentence had dripped with contempt for the arrogant woman before him, Jiang Cheng now seemed to regard Cocolia with a little more respect.
He wasn't simply insulting or belittling her.
Raiden Mei didn't care about his change in attitude. She simply picked out the key words for herself.
—[Mei meant something special to me.]
The girl unconsciously raised her pale fingers, tracing the corner of her mouth before touching her cheek...
So hot—and her lips had curled up, too.
Meanwhile, Kiana, who had joined them midway through, scratched the back of her head after hearing the insults about Schicksal.
So that's why Stinky Old Man never let me get involved with Schicksal.
She didn't doubt Jiang Cheng for a second.
Kiana accepted his explanation without hesitation as the truth.
"...So you did this because of Nagazora..." Cocolia managed to gather what little reason she had left, struggling to lift her head and look at him.
"I'm no hero."
Jiang Cheng shook his head without hesitation.
Even if he had embarked on the path of The Hunt, that didn't mean he would become one of those noble wandering heroes.
Heroes couldn't save him. No Emanator had ever emerged among their ranks, and walking this path would never save Amphoreus.
How Could I Respect You?
"Even your attempt to bury Nagazora means nothing to me. When all is said and done, I don't know this city or any of its people. I don't know how they live, how they study, what they eat, what they do for fun... Nagazora doesn't belong to me, and I don't know it. The size of your world has always depended on how many people you know."
"Because of your stupidity and indulgence, Raiden Mei became a Herrscher. After tearing apart everyone who bullied her—and the entire city that harbored malice toward her—once and for all, she would meet the people she was meant to meet and leave her past life behind. Someone forced into Herrscherization never needed to talk about atonement. Onlookers were accomplices, and how many people in this city were mere onlookers? Didn't they all directly insult her?"
No high school girl could bear having the entire world she lived in hate her.
To be honest, even an adult treated that way would probably only think, Kill, kill, kill!
Adults might think about taking revenge on the world when pushed to their limits. But a young girl whose mind hadn't fully matured might be like those children who had been bullied from a young age, utterly broken by everyone's rejection until she truly believed she was useless, that she wasn't good enough, that she... deserved to endure all of it.
Maybe he was a hypocrite.
Maybe Raiden Mei, who had enjoyed a wealthy young lady's life, deserved to be tormented without restraint when she fell.
But he didn't like it. He simply didn't, no matter what. Just as he could never like any scum who had taken part in bullying at school.
There might have been innocent people in the city, so he didn't mind helping them along the way. But that didn't mean any of them held some indispensable importance to him.
"Didn't every Nagazora resident Raiden Mei saw want to run up and kick her, even from a distance? Like kicking a dog, because everyone else was doing it. Lost in the crowd, they could indulge their cruelty without consequence. Even if Raiden Mei had enjoyed the privileged life of the Raiden Family, there was no reason for a group to treat an underage girl that way. Even if she really were the daughter of a criminal, only the actual victims had the right to torment her—not a mob of nobodies hiding in a crowd."
"And as for whether this so-called crime was even real... Heh. No one understands better than you how innocent Raiden Ryoma was. In the end, he was a researcher! So what if he repurposed the research? So what if he used it without permission?! His plasma development achievements were his get-out-of-jail-free card, even his glory. He could have spent ten times as much money, and nobody would have had the right to deny him that. Some people didn't understand, and some did... but whether they understood or not, they still treated his daughter that way. Then the malice created by the group should be borne by the group. You included."
"So I won't summon a single one of them back from the dead. Even if they really died, I'd have no moral obligation to them. Those things alone would make you an enemy I had to kill, but they wouldn't make me look down on you or mock you."
"But you acted out of hesitation. You were driven by guilt and greed, and it was disgusting and repulsive."
Jiang Cheng looked down at the screen, where the radical faction's leader had been reduced to a pitiful mess.
"...?"
Cocolia seemed unable to understand what he was saying.
Perhaps she simply didn't want to. Understanding her mistakes and shortcomings was painful for anyone.
If people had even the slightest chance to escape, they would turn their eyes away without hesitation, then frantically come up with all kinds of excuses—soft, tolerable justifications that had nothing to do with them—to patch over their mistakes.
"You doubt yourself as an officer, yet hesitate as a leader. You frantically pursue power, but you can't follow through on your responsibility as a mother... You can't escape any of your roles, and each one interferes with you. You regret it, yet keep moving forward. That's why you seem... ridiculous!"
"You clearly opened an orphanage, allowing those girls to undergo experiments more or less willingly. That led to a huge breakthrough in the quantum field. And thanks to the selfless gift of Seele—a girl who fell into the Sea of Quanta because of your experiment, yet still held genuine affection for both you and Bronya—you obtained Project Bunny, technology far beyond its time, and pushed the Titan Mechs' combat power several grades higher."
"But you don't believe in people at all. You don't believe anyone can break free of Honkai's constraints and become a Herrscher with their own will and humanity. You only want everything under your control. Even though the miracle called love had appeared before your eyes countless times, even though you saw that Deep Sea Butterfly Hairpin burned to ashes, you still regarded Raiden Mei as nothing but an enemy, a tool to capture and exploit. And yet you never once questioned whether you—Cocolia—really..."
His voice became measured, one word at a time. His calm tone somehow cut more sharply than any mockery could have.
Cocolia's pupils trembled. She almost desperately wanted to stop him from saying what came next.
"...had the right to oppose a Herrscher?"
"..."
She fell silent, unable to offer even a single response. Not even molten iron falling on her could draw a scream from her.
"Heh..."
Jiang Cheng gave a cold laugh.
He completely ignored her broken expression—indeed, he was openly taking pleasure in it.
Raiden Mei clenched both fists tightly.
[What a roast!]
[That's Jiang Cheng for you!]
Applause already rang out endlessly in the depths of her heart. That voice sounded so excited it was practically about to climax on the spot.
Kiana gritted her teeth as she watched.
Normally, she might have worried, Can someone who can see the future really be this good at roasting people? Then he must have seen me playing in the snow without shoes as a kid, and even when I was taking a bath!
But right now, Kiana was simply furious. Cocolia had received her daughter's love, yet still treated that love so lightly, experimenting on the very daughter who loved her.
The inexplicable anger kept spreading until even Kiana found it strange. It went far beyond ordinary anger.
Her fists clenched with a "crack," as if she wanted to punch straight through the screen and smack Cocolia right in the face.
"..."
The sweet, gentle girl with a mischievous streak once again realized how unpleasant reality was beyond fairy tales.
Cyrene wasn't a poet. She was a girl who only told stories that made people yearn for something better. In her stories, "the world hid its scars and smiled for everyone to see."
But was the real world far too cruel? Even a seemingly beautiful story could be twisted into such a hateful ending by greed and desire.
"You're nothing but a clown. You can't let go of your conscience, but you can't let go of your ambitions, either. All you can do is sway back and forth."
Jiang Cheng looked down at her, his eyes full of contempt.
"You can't see yourself clearly, and you can't see the world clearly. You live entirely in your own delusions. If I don't mock someone like you, who else am I supposed to mock? Otto, who promised Kallen he would save the world, then kept wavering even after taking part in the Black Box experiment, ultimately killing the girl he loved with his own hands? Or Kevin, who commanded the greatest force of violence, yet stood by and did nothing while the higher-ups tore each other apart, watching his girlfriend carry more and more responsibility on her ordinary human body, taking on more authority and more duties... until she worked herself to death?"
"..."
PS: Just killing Cocolia would be too simple. Breaking her spirit while torturing her like this suits her better.
The Ultimate Insult to Raiden Ryoma
The first thing they had to do next was naturally rescue Raiden Ryoma—
The trip to the prison didn't take long.
Cocolia wasn't only foolish. She knew better than anyone that her methods weren't exactly noble, so she would never let Raiden Ryoma out of her sight.
As long as she kept Raiden Ryoma under her watch, any countermeasures the other side had would have to get past her first.
The prison she had prepared for Raiden Ryoma wasn't somewhere just any Tom, Dick, or Harry could break into, either.
Jiang Cheng was certain that even an S-rank Valkyrie like Rita would need to spend a great deal of time getting inside. Those experiments really had pushed her technology forward by a wide margin. Aside from her narrow perspective, she wasn't all that weak.
Layer upon layer of tight security and an excessive stockpile of explosives could easily destroy an entire city block. Clearly, Cocolia had been prepared to flip the table.
But unfortunately for her, all those layers of lockdowns and surveillance were completely insignificant to Jiang Cheng.
—He only needed brute force.
"Who are you? Do you know this is—"
"Bang!"
Jiang Cheng couldn't be bothered to listen to their threats. He killed all the guards, dispatched the many mechs as easily as crushing tofu, then punched through the door.
As the guard's head rolled across the ground like a bowling ball, Jiang Cheng appeared before Raiden Ryoma.
"—!!!"
His eyes widened to their limits.
Before you continue