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ArabicHonkai Star Rail: My Chat Group is Full of Broken Timelines — Chapter 52
Chapter 53: So, After All That, I Have to Piece Him Back Together Myself?
The perspective shifts to another parallel world, to a timeline where Firefly stood waiting.
She was waiting for a visitor who might arrive drenched in the scent of blood, or who might not even be “him” anymore.
She had imagined their reunion countless times—perhaps at a victory banquet after the final overthrow of the Republican Council, or sitting together watching the stars drift by in some quiet, peaceful system. She had never, ever imagined it would be like this, under these circumstances.
“Your Majesty, we’re detecting anomalous activity in the Swarm’s vanguard,” her adjutant’s voice crackled through the comms unit.
“Deploy according to the contingency plan. Handle it yourselves; I have matters to attend to,” Firefly’s voice was as calm and steady as ever, betraying no hint of turbulence.
But only she knew that the hand hanging at her side, hidden from view, was trembling at the fingertips.
Iron-willed, cold, and ruthlessly decisive in the slaughter—these were the labels everyone had attached to “Titania II.” In the time since Glamoth had risen in rebellion under her name, she had personally carved her way through legions of mother-bugs and watched comrades be devoured whole before her very eyes.
She had long ago learned to bury her emotions deep beneath the cold steel of her armor.
But the thought of that young man—the one who would occasionally share snippets of his life and playfully complain about her ideas in the group chat—possibly appearing before her twisted into some unrecognizable horror… it made her heart feel as though it were being crushed by the mandibles of a Swarm leviathan, a dense, throbbing ache that stole her breath.
Just then, the communicator on her wrist suddenly flashed to life, a single notification dominating the screen.
Firefly’s breathing caught in her throat.
He was here.
[Group Owner ‘Cliffhanger King’ requests to enter your world.]
Firefly accepted without a moment’s hesitation. In that same instant, a brilliant flash of emerald flame enveloped her body, and the SAM armor materialized and sealed around her in a heartbeat.
“BOOM!”
The roof of the command tent was violently torn asunder. A mangled figure, trailing a sound like the sky itself ripping apart, slammed into the ground, blasting a half-meter-deep crater into the reinforced floor.
Firefly’s pupils contracted to pinpricks.
That… was not a person.
It was a mass of perpetually writhing, tumorous flesh. Countless eyes opened and closed across its grotesque surface—some were milky and clouded, others burned with a malevolent crimson light.
Innumerable barbed tentacles lashed through the air like venomous whips, their tips dripping a viscous fluid that hissed and sizzled, corroding small, smoking holes into the metal deck.
The most bizarre feature was its “mouth.” At the very center of the fleshy mass, a gigantic maw composed of thousands of tiny, gnashing teeth opened and closed without pause, letting out a stream of meaningless, guttural roars. Saliva mixed with blood, pooling into a foul-smelling swamp on the ground below.
It radiated the unmistakable aura of an Abomination of Abundance, yet it also carried a faint, lingering trace… of Kazuki’s scent.
“ROOOAR—!”
The flesh monster seemed to lock onto its target, lunging at Firefly with ferocious speed. Tentacles whipped toward her face like flails, and the giant maw gaped wide, revealing layer upon layer of fangs within, clearly intending to devour her whole.
“Hah!”
Firefly did not retreat.
She took a sudden, powerful step forward. Scorching green flames erupted from her palm, condensing into a burning, oversized fist. With a whistle that tore through the air, it smashed heavily into the charging flesh monster.
“PFFT—”
The mass of flesh exploded like a grease fire. High-temperature flames licked across every inch of tissue, burning the writhing tentacles to charcoal and scorching the blinking eyes to ash. The monster let out a piercing, agonized shriek as it was sent flying by the force of the punch, crashing into a structural support pillar and shattering into a heap of mangled gore.
Firefly stood her ground, the flames wreathing her armor slowly subsiding. She didn’t lower her guard, her gaze fixed intently on that pile of sludge. She remembered Kazuki’s words.
‘As long as my elixir organ isn’t destroyed, even if I’m chopped into mincemeat, I can recover once I’m pieced back together.’
Sure enough, in the next second, the sludge began to stir.
Beneath the charred tissue, bright red granulation tissue proliferated at a terrifying rate. Severed tentacles regrew in an instant, and the incinerated eyes bulged forth from the fleshy mass once more, flickering with a renewed, greedy light.
In just over ten seconds, the flesh monster had returned to its original state, now even larger than before. Its barbs were longer, its maw even wider.
“ROAR!” It lunged again. This time, the tentacles trailed burning sparks; it had clearly “devoured” the energy from her previous attack and turned it into its own power.
Firefly’s eyes sharpened. She sidestepped the sweep of a tentacle as twin swords materialized in her hands. The blades hummed, glowing with a cold, deadly edge. The moment the monster hurtled past, she unleashed a single, clean horizontal slash—
“SHIIING!”
The flesh monster was severed in two at the waist. Its upper body fell heavily to the ground, while its lower half continued to writhe and twitch, already attempting to reconnect.
But Firefly gave it no such chance. Her warblades became a blinding flurry of light, dicing the severed torso into countless fragments as if it were no more than soft clay. Each fragment was instantly ignited by her energy-infused flames, cauterizing the wounds to prevent regeneration.
“Still not enough,” she whispered, her voice a metallic, cold whisper filtered through the armor’s speakers.
The fragments struggled and spasmed within the flames, yet they still stubbornly proliferated.
Even when chopped into pieces no larger than a fingernail, those bits of flesh were squirming and trying to merge, with fine, thread-like blood vessels sprouting from their edges as they desperately sought to reform into a whole.
Kazuki’s elixir organ had to be hidden in the deepest layer, protected by all that regenerating flesh. As long as it remained intact, this process would never stop.
Firefly took a deep breath. The thrusters on her power armor ignited with a roar, launching her high into the air.
Scorching emerald flames condensed around her, spinning faster and faster until they formed a giant, swirling fireball several meters in diameter. It blazed like a miniature star, illuminating the entire command tent with the brilliance of a new dawn.
“BOOM!”
She slammed downward, the fireball carrying an aura of absolute destruction as it impacted the ground.
The earth cracked instantly, spiderweb-like fissures spreading out from the point of impact. The flames scorched the area into a crater of blackened, glassy earth, triggering a violent, concussive explosion. The resulting high temperature formed a massive ring of fire, enveloping every last piece of mincemeat. The heat was so intense that even the alloy floor began to melt and deform, emitting the pungent, acrid smell of burnt metal.
This time, the writhing of the flesh slowed significantly. The charred tissue no longer flaked away, the bright red granulation lost its vibrant luster, and the tiny bits of flesh gradually shriveled and carbonized in the inferno.
“Bang! Bang! Bang!”
But she didn’t stop. She began throwing punch after punch. The immense power of the armor was channeled through her fists, smashing the mass of flesh along with the warped metal plates beneath it. Each punch tore through the air with a sonic boom, and each one landed precisely on the same spot, as if she intended to punch a hole straight through to the planet’s core.
The flesh constantly deformed and compressed under her fists, making dull, wet, thudding sounds.
Those greedy eyes were extinguished for good. The tentacles went limp and powerless. The giant maw lost the strength to even twitch.
She didn’t know how many times she had punched. She continued long after her arms began to grow numb, long after the mass of flesh had completely lost all signs of movement and had been reduced to a puddle of dark red, motionless sludge. Only then did she slowly, finally, stop.
Firefly deactivated her armor, the emerald plates retracting to reveal the form-fitting combat suit underneath.
She walked to the puddle of sludge, knelt down, and reached out a slightly trembling finger to gently touch it.
It was cold, carrying the residual temperature of scorched metal. There were no signs of life left.
But beneath her fingertip, there seemed to be something hard, something solid, hidden in the deepest part of the sludge. Through layers of charred tissue and gore, she could feel a faint, rhythmic pulsation.
It was the elixir organ.
The elixir organ of a Xianzhou native—the single hardest, most resilient organ in the entire body.
It wasn’t broken.
He wasn’t dead.
Firefly’s finger hovered over the sludge, hesitating.
She remembered what Kazuki had said: ‘I can recover once I’m pieced back together.’
But the scene before her was a tragedy painted in gore. A puddle of mangled flesh, mixed with charred earth and bone fragments—how could she find the shape of a man in this ruin?
A gust of wind whipped her hair, carrying the distant smell of gunpowder from the battlefield. In the distance, the faint roars of the Swarm could still be heard. But in Firefly’s world, there was only this puddle of sludge and that faint, almost imperceptible pulsation.
She took a deep, steadying breath and carefully reached out with both hands, beginning to gather the still-warm fragments together, bit by bit.
Her movements were slow, deliberate, and impossibly gentle, as if she were piecing together the most precious and fragile treasure in the entire universe.