Chapter 261 — Ideal Fluid
"S! H! I! T!"
The instant his consciousness snapped back into reality, C.C. body was already floating behind Nagami, cosplaying as his emergency substitute.
Well, this trip through space-time wasn't wasted after all.
So the "Honkai God" was nothing but a fake program—and behind it, the truth turned out to be another puppet-like existence?
Seriously, could this world not be a mess for once?!
Were there any gods out there who weren't just slacking off?
And the strangest part of all was… Honkai Will's attitude toward him.
For some inexplicable reason, Nagami couldn't make sense of it at all.
Add to that C.C.'s face—which carried a very particular meaning for him and it left him completely off-balance.
For the first time ever, Nagami had been cornered in a conversation from start to finish.
Teased until he was speechless, toyed with as if not by a human, but by a god's whim.
The only thing that gave him the slightest comfort was that beating Honkai Impact's "main story" here should be a breeze now.
All he had to do now was keep scaling up while holding the line.
Once he hit full build—six divine items—the teamfight would be over.
One match, 9 vs. 1. How could you possibly lose that?
From the way Honkai Will had put it, the Honkai God installed in this "leaf world" had already been modified to the bare minimum required to satisfy the big boss, the Imaginary Tree.
Any further downgrade was impossible. Which meant she couldn't provide any more help.
In reality, nothing had changed at all.
Yet deep down, Nagami felt a subtle relief. Because now, he knew Honkai Will was actually on his side.
It was like Itsuka Kotori realizing that the Date A Live world was secretly just a rom-com harem manga all along.
With that thought, his sense of crisis crept back—just a little.
Shaking his head to clear it, Nagami turned his focus back to the present.
Four Herrscher gems shimmered before him—Conquest, Desire, Tranquility, and Pestilence.
Still in Sirin's guise, Nagami snapped his fingers casually.
A gate of Imaginary Space opened, and the four gems floated behind him before slipping inside with his violet silhouette.
"Next stop: an archaeological dig through the Previous Era."
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Meanwhile, C.C. headed toward the lowest level of the ruins, tasked with collecting soulium samples and securing the technology to seal Honkai energy—something she would later hand over to Anti-Entropy.
As for the "original" timeline, where Anti-Entropy launched a lunar expedition and fought a Herrscher on the moon—that part was basically optional now.
'Sirin''s battle in Siberia against Welt was just to leave traces of a fight and recreate the "atomic explosion" at the end of history.
But the moon? Totally unnecessary.
Nobody was ever going to land there just to confirm if a fight happened.
The lunar surface was already scarred with craters anyway.
All Nagami needed was for Schicksal's database to record that a major battle had taken place.
Human memories, meanwhile, had already been rewritten into "feathers" by Nagami.
All it would take was activating the feather before leaving, and everyone who knew the truth about the Second Eruption would instead remember the version of the story Nagami knew.
The catch: the scale was too large.
Rewriting the consciousness of that many people could only be done once.
Permanent and irreversible.
In other words, no one would ever regain their true memories—except Sirin, who would be bound to the feather in the end.
Stepping out of the widening Imaginary Gate, Nagami gazed at the Judgment-class Honkai beast resting before him and waved a hand.
The massive dragon, over a hundred meters long, flapped its wings and obediently lowered itself before him—docile as a white-and-blue kitten.
At his command, the Conquest Gem—gleaming like a crystalline shard—shot forward like a meteor and hovered before Benares.
Tiny as dust compared to the dragon's bulk, yet containing power that far outstripped it.
In an instant, countless icy-blue motes of light surged over Benares' body, snaking across its surface like living serpents, like the mana of ancient myth.
The colossal frame, hundreds of meters long, shrank in moments until it stood the size of a human.
"Alright then—character creation time!"
And not just "face customization"—this was the full deal.
Every detail of the body had to be crafted with precision.
As a gamer, Nagami knew the drill.
When a game offered full character customization, he'd spend two hours making the avatar's face… and then play the game for five minutes.
And the reason he quit so fast? Obviously because the game sucked.
On the other end, C.C. stored the technology for sealing Honkai energy into a replicated device, tossed it into Imaginary Space along with the honkai-steel samples she'd gathered, and go to the moon's surface.
Meanwhile, Nagami on Sirin from was still completely absorbed in character creation.
"…We'll need three more clones on this side too." She laced her fingers under her chin with a thoughtful smile. "Now, what should I make them look like?"
In the manga, Sirin had modeled her three pseudo-Herrschers after friends who had died in experiments.
Cruel as it sounded, their faces and names didn't really matter.
After all, aside from Sirin herself, no one even remembered them anymore.
"In that case…"
As if struck by an idea, she raised a slender finger and pointed at the Desire Gem.
Starlike blue particles gushed forth from the void, quickly shaping into a lithe human form—
Black mid-length hair, two green-gradient braids framing her face, and a baroque-style dress in deep celestial teal.
This appearance, in another world, would be called Barbatos.
The pseudo Herrscher of Wind—Wendy.
A male could never become a pseudo Herrscher, but with Venti's appearance… once he put on a dress, only a blind man would think he was still male.
Similar transformations appeared around the Gems of Serenity.
The pseudo Herrscher of Death—Hu Tao.
A perfect match for the role, no issues at all.
As for the final pseudo Herrscher of Flames…
Since this form would be recorded in the history of the Honkai world, it had to be a fire-type character that was at least presentable.
He had thought of shaping it as Klee, but worried that if the pseudo Herrscher of Flames looked like her, the Valkyries fighting it might hesitate to strike.
So, she considered changing it into Guoba.
Unfortunately, pseudo Herrschers had to take on human form.
In the end, he reluctantly settled on a weakened version of Guoba—Diluc.
As for genderbending—Nagami was already an expert.
Lengthen the hair, give the body curves, soften the facial features…
And thus, the final pseudo Herrscher of Flames was born—Genderbent Diluc!
"So this is the authority of the Herrscher of Wind…?"
Flying high into the sky, the green-haired girl's eyes spun with six-pointed stars.
From the moment she created the clones and accepted the core, she had gained the corresponding authority—the power to create ideal fluid.
The core itself would remain, of course.
But first and foremost was analyzing the ability, so that even without the Desire Gem, she could still wield the power of the Herrscher of Wind.
She raised a slender white finger.
Around its tip coiled an invisible gas—the ideal fluid that should never exist in reality.
Then… she gently drew a line through the air.
And a terrifying sight unfolded.
Across the entire horizon, everything above the level of her fingertip—on the far side of the moon—was cut neatly in two, as if by an invisible blade with no length limit.
The sundered mountains tilted and collapsed, avalanches of rock sending boundless dust into the air.
"…I suddenly wonder how exactly the original Venti pulled this off."
She brushed aside the drifting dust before it could reach it, her mind full of doubts.
An ideal fluid ignored viscosity, heat conduction, and mass diffusion.
If wielded to its fullest, it would become the ultimate weapon of physics—the strongest spear and the strongest shield.
The strongest spear: able to slice apart stars themselves—planets, suns, white dwarfs, anything.
The strongest shield: able to block physical attacks, energy blasts, radiation of every kind—even gamma rays.
So how had anyone ever thought of using such power merely to make wind?
Even a tornado was just air!
And fluids weren't only gases—liquids were fluids too!
To call it the Herrscher of Wind… was that just ignoring half of reality?
And control over the surrounding fluids wasn't limited to the fluids themselves.
One could also manipulate the energies transmitted through them—light, sound, and more.
With her Alpha Stigma Eyes, she could analyze and master this authority even more deeply.
But even so, Wendy was simply too outrageous.
Even if she didn't have these eyes, she could still admit—
"…Forget it. There's no point in comparing."
She lifted the severed crater, turned, and casually hurled it toward Earth.
The residents had already been evacuated.