Honkai Double Traverse, Taking Cyrene to Honkai Impact 3rd Chapter 48

"Then tell me those things when you think I can handle them."

Kiana cut off his promise once again. She smiled brightly, her clear eyes, like the sky after rain, reflecting him just inches away.

"I..."

"Don't look at me like that, mister. I'm not that stupid. A prophet like you has definitely thought things through more than someone like me, who knows nothing."

Unlike her tears from earlier,

Kiana seemed to have returned to her usual self. She raised her head, full of energy, and pointed a thumb at herself.

"Don't worry about me, mister. This is enough. Having a good cry after so long has washed away all the sadness I'd been holding inside."

"Having someone always watching me from behind, feeling sad about the things I do..."

She blinked rapidly.

"—That kind of thing puts pressure on me too."

"Okay." Jiang Cheng nodded.

"That's our second promise."

As long as everything he did now didn't go against his heart, then he would never regret it.

He turned around without setting Kiana down to prove his innocence. Instead, he walked back the way they had come, one step at a time.

This girl had held him when he was in the most danger and shielded him from an oncoming air gun. He couldn't simply let her go.

The scene also fell clearly into Raiden Mei's eyes, making her fingers twist together unconsciously.

—She had nothing to say, after all.

The girl who had spent half the morning arguing with Cyrene over who would feed Cheng-kun now watched indifferently as Jiang Cheng approached with Kiana in his arms.

Even Raiden Ryoma, standing farthest away and separated from them by the greatest differences in gender, age, and status, could feel that unending, twisted bitterness spreading outward.

"Mei?" He turned his head and looked at her with concern.

"I'm a little jealous," she said softly.

"..."

Raiden Ryoma furrowed his brow, unable to keep the worry from his eyes—

For Raiden Mei, who was clearly jealous and upset, her hands tightly entwined, yet hadn't taken a single step forward. She was contradicting herself completely.

This wasn't normal. No one would keep watching while feeling miserable. Even if some reason stopped them from going over, they would at least choose to leave.

"If I'd acted like this from the start, maybe Cheng-kun would be holding me like that too. Hmm..."

"Though Cheng-kun might not have been able to carry me back then."

"But now I finally understand why Kiana stood in front of me and said all those things. They should have meant nothing to her... She had nothing to do with any of it..."

"Do you know?"

She sounded as though she were asking a question, yet also talking to herself.

"For the rats in the sewers, even getting to peek at someone else's happiness through a crack in the door is a pleasure."

"Looks like..." Cyrene bit her lower lip, hard enough to turn the tip red. "I wasn't wrong to empathize with Kiana before, after all~ She didn't suffer through an arranged marriage, but in the end, she lost the reason to believe her father loved her."

Jiang Cheng finally reached the girls, Kiana's limp body nestled in his arms.

—His eyes met theirs.

"Cyrene, Mei, I'm sor—"

"Let's go first. I'm not ungrateful. Miss Kiana helped us a lot earlier."

Raiden Mei cut off everything he had wanted to say, her gaze settling on Kiana in his arms.

"Testing our strength is what matters most. Also, are you really going to shamelessly stay in Cheng-kun's arms forever?"

"..."

The white-haired bundle burrowed even deeper into his arms.

Raiden Mei narrowed her eyes, but...

—It didn't feel strange.

If it were her, she would have pretended not to hear and kept enjoying the warmth of Cheng-kun's embrace too, even with her father right there.

So she walked over and, as naturally as stroking a stream, grabbed Kiana's hair. Silky silver strands slipped between her fingers, and then...

"Ow, ow, ow! Mei-senpai—"

"Let go! I'll get down from Little Cheng's arms."

"—!"

Raiden Mei's fingers pulled mercilessly at the girl's soft, silver hair. The rough tug made Kiana, curled up in Jiang Cheng's arms like a newborn kitten, go rigid. She could only let Raiden Mei drag her out of his embrace, her long, straight legs kicking wildly in the air as she tried to find solid ground again.

Once she was sure Kiana had been separated from Jiang Cheng, she looked at the clearly displeased girl.

Raiden Mei finally let go, and the clear, stream-like strands slipped from her palm.

"If nothing's wrong, don't burden Cheng-kun."

"I know. I have my own pace. I'll only stay another three or four minutes at most." Kiana patted her chest. "Think of it as training for Little Cheng too."

"Your clothes... are dirty."

Raiden Mei's peripheral vision drifted casually over the damp patch on Jiang Cheng's chest.

Was it tears? Or...

"What do you mean, 'Little Cheng'?"

Her gaze returned to Kiana.

Even after her feet touched the ground again, the girl didn't immediately go back to acting silly. Instead, she seemed more serious than she had when they first met.

She didn't look at Mei as she spoke. Her gaze stayed fixed on Jiang Cheng from beginning to end.

"It's the nickname I gave Jiang Cheng." Kiana shrugged as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "Don't you all have your own nicknames for him?"

At first glance, it seemed like a perfectly reasonable request. Everyone else had one, so she should have one too.

However—

"No."

Raiden Mei's voice was cold.

She rejected Kiana's request without the slightest attempt at tact, even as the girl puffed up her cheeks like a pufferfish.

"No."

She repeated herself, her words sharp.

The standoff between the two girls, with one firmly refusing, seemed like a scene from the past repeating itself—

People could never empathize with their past selves. Now the young lady known as the Thunder Queen stood where Cyrene had once stood. Her seemingly calm solemnity was like thunder roaring overhead, allowing no room for doubt.

"Why not?"

Kiana's gaze finally tore itself away from him.

She wiped her eyes with a small hand, drying her tears before meeting the thunder with her clear, sky-blue eyes once more.

—The two girls faced off.

"Does this lady need your permission to give Little Cheng a nickname? You didn't ask Cyrene's permission either."

"Is that really the same?"

She almost blurted out the words.

The confession she had made at the cost of her life could never be rejected by anyone, at any time.

By comparison, Kiana had nearly been hit by a truck, and Jiang Cheng had swooped in to play the hero.

There was no mutual devotion or moving moment there at all.

Giving Cheng-kun a nickname for no reason was as bizarre as a hot-blooded manga protagonist inexplicably gaining a new form after sleeping with someone.

—Of course, she didn't say any of that.

Without an explanation, she would seem like a hypocrite. But if she explained, the confrontation would probably become even more brutal.

Raiden Mei was still a green young girl. She had only been out of school for two days and hadn't been enlightened into a master of palace intrigue.

So all she could do was look to Cyrene.

As Cheng-kun's guardian and an onlooker who knew everything, she could make the judgment.

Was risking her life to protect Cheng-kun and confessing to him while fighting Bronya a reasonable basis for a nickname?

Or was running headlong toward a distant road, nearly getting hit by a large truck and pointlessly causing Cheng-kun trouble more reasonable?

So the two girls turned their heads...

Cyrene, inexplicably swept into the eye of the storm, immediately found herself on the receiving end of two pointed stares—

But no matter how much she looked and acted like a little girl who loved clinging to Jiang Cheng and acting spoiled, she had never been as weak as she seemed.

If she could, she would have crossed her arms in front of her chest and declared that no one else was allowed to have a special nickname—only she could call A-Cheng by one.

—But she couldn't.

At the beginning of this story, A-Cheng had given up the comfortable, peaceful life in their village and come to another world, where he met Raiden Mei amid the erosion of Honkai Energy, all to gain more power and protect her and the village.

In that situation, how could she possibly reject the girl who had protected A-Cheng and naturally deserved to enjoy the fruits of her efforts by entering his life?

So she could only shift her gaze.

Of course,

the considerate, obedient, and gentle girl—or rather, the guardian—would never dump the problem on Jiang Cheng.

She simply looked at Raiden Ryoma—

the only mature adult here.

"—!"

I'm dead, I'm dead, I'm dead, I'm dead, I'm dead!

Raiden Ryoma felt like cold sweat was about to break out across his forehead.

Even though one of the girls was his daughter, and his daughter had gotten caught up in what could probably be called a love triangle, he absolutely didn't want to get involved!

As the purest bystander, he saw things far more clearly than Jiang Cheng did. He could also feel the terrifying pressure and the unbelievable force of the storm. It was like an iron-gray sky blotting out the world. If he so much as stepped into it, that dreadful low pressure would tear him to pieces!

It would!

It had to!

If he favored no one, everyone would hate him at once—especially his daughter, Mei.

—He couldn't even imagine it!

But if he sided with his daughter, Mei, he could feel an inexplicable sense of danger creeping over him, as if something were crawling up his spine. His instincts warned him every moment that if he used his authority as an adult to take her side, something truly terrifying and dreadful would happen.

"Let's go to the testing room first. I've prepared a chamber capable of withstanding Honkai fusion missiles with a yield of over a hundred million tons. It can definitely measure all your strength."

Raiden Ryoma carefully raised a finger.

"—"

The three girls' expressions didn't change at all. Under their razor-sharp glares, he could only anxiously change the subject again.

"Besides, Otto's a real piece of work, isn't he? I never expected big brother Siegfried to have defected from Schicksal to stop him from experimenting on Kiana. She wasn't even seven at the time! How could he experiment on a seven-year-old child? Did he really have no shame at all?"

"Father..."

"Uncle Ryoma..."

"Mr. Ryoma..."

It looked like he hadn't changed the subject at all. This time, even Raiden Mei had dropped the "sir" from how she addressed him.