Honkai Star Rail: My Chat Group is Full of Broken Timelines — Chapter 62

Chapter 62: The Empress and Her Prince Consort

Morning light filtered through the carefully carved window lattices, casting a dappled pattern of shadows across the brocade quilt.

Kazuki propped himself up on one elbow, gazing down at Firefly, who was still clinging to him like a limpet, refusing to stir from her slumber. A fond smile touched his lips, and he couldn’t resist gently pinching her cheek. “Babe… how about we discuss something? Why don’t you go inspect the Imperial industries with AR-214 today?”

After all, Firefly was famously hands-off. During the Glamoth Empire’s critical rising phase, she had once set a record by being effectively AFK for two and a half years, entrusting nearly all internal operations to AR-214. The poor Chancellor had been so frustrated at times that she entertained thoughts of running away from her duties—a bitter irony, considering she had been caught and conscripted by Firefly in the first place during one such escape attempt.

Firefly rubbed her eyes, her iridescent pupils still glazed with the soft haze of sleep. She snuggled deeper into Kazuki’s embrace, her voice a muffled murmur against his chest. “Inspect the industries?” A flicker of realization crossed her face; she truly hadn’t performed much ‘proper work’ since her coronation. She hesitated for only a moment before nodding. “Alright then.”

Once they had both finished preparing for the day, they went together to see AR-214, the Imperial Chancellor who seemed to be single-handedly holding the empire together through sheer willpower.

Seeing the two of them enter, the Chancellor was momentarily stunned. She set down her datapad, and her voice, when she spoke, carried a faint but unmistakable undercurrent of grievance. “Her Majesty the Empress is finally willing to grace us with her presence? Since your succession, aside from the coronation ceremony itself, you have hardly appeared before your subjects. It is indeed time you took a look at the Empire’s industries.”

“Who says I haven’t shown my face?” Firefly retorted instinctively, straightening her back and patting her chest with a hint of bravado. “It’s obviously because Kazuki’s health needed my constant care that I stayed by his side!”

Despite her confident words, the tips of her ears flushed a tell-tale crimson. She knew she had, in fact, focused an inordinate amount of her energy on Kazuki, barely even setting foot in the Government Affairs Hall.

‘I don’t have the heart to call your bluff,’ Kazuki thought, a silent laugh in his eyes.

AR-214 pushed the glasses up the bridge of her nose, her tone returning to its usual, unshakable steadiness. “In any case, regardless of how wonderful the relationship between Her Majesty and the Prince Consort is, you should still understand your own Empire. Even if it is only for appearances.”

Firefly nodded. It wasn’t that she was incapable of taking good advice; it was just that her fundamental nature had been suppressed for far too long. As a Pathstrider of Propagation, what was so wrong with a little indulgence in life, now that she finally could?

She cleared her throat, the playful girl vanishing in an instant. Her expression became stern, her posture regal. She was the Empress once more. “Enough talk. What specifically needs to be done?”

“It is already prepared for you.” AR-214 handed over a holographic itinerary. “Your Majesty only needs to maintain your imperial bearing, take a walk through the production lines and the New Recruit Camps, and offer a few words of encouragement to the Iron Cavalry. Most of them have only heard the legends and seen the archival footage of you shattering a planet-class Mother Queen with a single blow. They have rarely had the chance to see you in person.”

Indeed. To the Iron Cavalry of Glamoth, Titania II was a figure of myth—the invincible leader who had annihilated a gargantuan Swarm matriarch, who had kicked down the defensive lines of the old Republic, the first rebel to tear down the banner of lies that had enslaved their people.

“Up next on the history lesson: ‘Her Majesty Titania II Smote a Vermin Queen with but a Single Stone’…” Kazuki couldn’t help but mutter from the side, his tone dry.

To the current generation of Iron Cavalry, Firefly, their crowned Queen, was the most sacred and noble being in existence. Her ascension had even altered their very biology. The genetic trait that caused the Iron Cavalry to unconsciously emit pheromones that attracted the Swarm—a tragic flaw inherited from their creation—had been completely shut down by Firefly’s power.

In its place, she had gifted them with a new kind of pheromonal signal, one akin to the territorial markers of the great Sand Kings of the Swarm. It was a clear, galaxy-spanning message to all insectoids: ‘This is my domain. Trespassers will be annihilated.’

So, to say Firefly had only been concerned with intimacy lately would be a gross slander. She had, at the very least, handled the most critical biological imperatives of her people during her coronation.

When Firefly stepped off the starship, her hand held firmly in Kazuki’s, a deafening, earth-shaking cheer erupted from the factory floor below.

To get a better view, some of the more zealous soldiers directly activated their armor, their silver-white forms launching into the air. They circled like loyal comets under the vast factory dome, each one desperate to be just a little closer to their Empress.

Looking at the fanatical devotion of the Iron Cavalry, a completely random and inexplicable melody rang in Kazuki’s head—a jingle for some long-forgotten brand of instant noodles from his past life.

In a nation that had mastered the technology of artificial suns, someone might still debate the merits of one luxury over another. But here in Glamoth, among the Iron Cavalry, there was no debate. There was no other choice.

For these soldiers, who were biologically not so different from the Swarm they fought, the existence of Firefly—their Queen—was absolute. A false empress, a fabricated Titania I, had been enough to make them willingly throw themselves into the fires of war. What, then, would they not do for their true, living Empress?

Firefly stood on the high platform, looking down at the dense sea of silver-white figures below. She took a deep breath. She used no flowery words, no grand rhetoric. Her voice, clear and steady, rang out across the assembly. “You are the foundation of the Empire. Without you, there would be no Glamoth today, and there would certainly be no tomorrow.”

A simple sentence, yet it plunged the roaring crowd into an instantaneous, reverent silence. A heartbeat later, the silence was shattered by an even louder, more passionate shout that shook the very structure of the building.

“FOR HER MAJESTY THE EMPRESS! ETERNAL LOYALTY!”

Standing by her side, Kazuki suddenly understood why AR-214 had insisted on this visit. These Iron Cavalry, who had previously known only how to fight, were now learning to adapt to production, learning to become ‘builders’instead of mere’war machines.’ Firefly’s presence wasn’t just a morale boost; it was the ultimate assurance, the firmest anchor for their new reality.

After inspecting the production lines, the pair proceeded to the New Recruit Camp. There, young Iron Cavalry who had just emerged from their incubation pods looked upon Firefly with eyes full of pure, unadulterated longing.

They were the first generation of new citizens created for the Glamoth Second Empire after Firefly’s coronation. The Iron Cavalry lacked the ability to reproduce naturally; for their race to thrive, they had no choice but to reactivate the old production lines.

However, compared to the flawed and restrictive production methods of the old Republic, these newborn soldiers carried the most earnest hopes of all their predecessors. They were the embodiment of a prayer: that they might live in a better era—an era without false lies, without being used as cannon fodder, and without an endless, all-consuming Swarm.

As for the majority of the old Republic’s citizens, they had believed the propaganda fed to them by their Council, treating the Iron Cavalry as beings no different from the Propagation’s vermin. When the invasion occurred, many had truly made the choice their leaders had indoctrinated them with: “Fight to the last moment, then take one’s own life to return to the heavens.”

The few who survived harbored an intense, burning hatred for the Iron Cavalry as a people. At the time, Kazuki had privately felt that those people had already sealed their own doom.

After all, legally speaking, Glamoth was his country now, too. Although he had been a ‘carried’ winner throughout the entire campaign while Firefly was the undisputed MVP, that didn’t change the fact that Kazuki was now a ruler of this nation, sharing its power with her.

It was with this in mind that he had a quiet discussion with AR-214. He had proposed a chillingly pragmatic solution: secretly release a specialized pheromone targeting the remaining Republic holdouts, a biological agent that would render them unable to reproduce, allowing their civilization to undergo a slow, quiet extinction.

The iron-blooded Imperial Chancellor had given him a surprised look, her eyes sharp behind her glasses. Then, she had simply nodded and agreed.

The pheromones of the Swarm possessed near-infinite applications. Before the Star Rails of the Trailblaze spanned the cosmos and long-range psionic communication was developed, these biological signals were the most efficient means of information transmission in the entire galaxy. They could cross countless light-years in an instant, spreading to any corner of the universe. Before Firefly’s coronation, this power had never been properly researched or developed, becoming the root cause of the tragedy that forced the Iron Cavalry to fight the Swarm endlessly. Now that they had a chance to study it, it could be put to some truly wondrous—and terrible—uses.

Today, the Glamoth Empire could be said to be flourishing. The plan was simple: once they finished cleaning up the last remnants of the Swarm in their star sector and gradually reclaimed the twenty-thousand-light-year territory the old Republic had boasted of at its peak, they could finally attempt to officially integrate with the rest of the galaxy.