Honkai Star Rail: My Chat Group is Full of Broken Timelines — Chapter 71

Chapter 71: Herta: If I’m Not Cheating, It’s Because I Forgot to Turn Them Off

Kazuki followed Herta into her office, Screwllum trailing silently behind them. A knot of apprehension tightened in his gut.

It was only now, as the doors slid shut, that the full realization struck him. Damn it. Shit.

He’d been played. Herta and Screwllum had worked in concert to corner him.

Of course they had. A duo capable of orchestrating an entire charade just to ban seventy-six of Silver Wolf’s gaming accounts wouldn’t think twice about outmaneuvering a “youngster” in his twenties. It was child’s play to them.

Suddenly, Screwllum’s earlier “apology” on the public platform made perfect sense. The weight behind his words, the subtle inflection—thinking back, it wasn’t an apology at all. It was a cryptic heads-up.

“Sit down.” Herta settled into a plush sofa, crossing her legs. A key-shaped wand spun effortlessly between her slender fingers, and her amethyst eyes were cool and unreadable.

Kazuki lowered himself onto the opposite couch, his posture stiff with tension. He opened his mouth to explain, but she cut him off before he could even begin. “What is there to explain? You don’t honestly think I’m angry, do you?”

She shifted, crossing one leg over the other. The movement was languid, almost lazy, yet it radiated an absolute, unshakable control.

“You’re… not angry?” Kazuki was stunned. This was the complete opposite of the reaction he had braced himself for.

“Why should I be?” Herta raised a delicate eyebrow, a hint of amusement coloring her tone. “We aren’t in a relationship of superior and subordinate. I simply wanted you to properly explain what you said.” Her fingers stilled, the wand tapping lightly against her knee. “I’m not that capricious.”

Looking at her perfectly composed demeanor, Kazuki suddenly understood—the Genius had never been truly enraged. Her “bristling” act had been nothing more than a test, a calculated maneuver to guide him into speaking of his own accord.

As if on cue, Herta’s tone shifted, taking on a new gravity. “Kazuki, you aren’t the only survivor of the ‘Galaxy Silence’ incident, are you?”

To be fair, neither of them had been entirely honest with the other. Her initial, sharp reaction hadn’t been about his deception, but about the incident itself. Kazuki’s words had dredged up the memory of the Remembrance she had experienced before her “death”—a vision of a future where she faced an entity capable of toppling the galaxy and destroying Nous itself, a future where she chose self-sacrifice to ensure the universe’s continuation.

Honestly, she had always felt such a decision was utterly out of character for her. So, when Kazuki began proactively revealing details to Screwllum that hinted at that very event, Herta decided it was time to lay all her cards on the table.

“I’ve gone through every record I could find,” Herta explained, her voice leisurely, as if she could see right through his thoughts. “Your interpersonal relationships on the Xianzhou, the Ming Huo Merchant Guild starship you boarded when you left the Luofu—even the fact that the Guild originally came here to present me with a ‘Curio’ to curry favor. None of that was difficult to verify.”

Her fingers tapped a steady rhythm on the armrest, as precise as a calculating formula. “You didn’t go to all this trouble to find me just because of your Mara-Struck condition.”

Kazuki remained silent for a long moment before giving a single, sharp nod. “Yes.”

“The other survivor is connected to Ruan Mei, isn’t she?” Herta’s gaze fell upon his face, sharp enough to pierce through any facade. “That’s why you’ve been so persistent in asking me about her whereabouts.”

“That’s right,” Kazuki admitted frankly. There was no point in hiding it any longer.

A smile bloomed on Herta’s face, one filled with the absolute confidence of someone who holds all the pieces. “It’s Tingyun, isn’t it?”

She didn’t wait for his answer, her words flowing with the steady, precise rhythm of a master theorist laying out a proof.

“You unleashed a Xianzhou taboo—the Free Will Incarnation. I’d guess the situation went something like this: you encountered an impossible foe, most likely the Antimatter Legion. We’ve detected traces of their march near those annihilated star systems.”

Her fingers traced patterns in the air, as if she were reconstructing the entire scene from memory. “The Merchant Guild was in dire straits. You were powerless to save them all, so you had to find a way to save her. However, you possess a self-destruct method, one eerily similar to the Legion’s own. But you know this attack can’t truly kill you, though it can annihilate anyone else. This power is likely linked to your mysterious teleportation ability.”

“You unsealed the Free Will Incarnation, even accepting the cost of physical mutation, which led to your twenty-something-year-old self contracting the Mara-Struck condition—a malady that typically takes Xianzhou natives eight hundred years to develop. You ‘swallowed’ Tingyun, shielding her very existence with your own. In that all-consuming attack, the two of you became the sole survivors.”

“After accomplishing all that, you used your teleportation ability to reach a friend capable of suppressing your Mara-Struck with overwhelming power. Meanwhile, Tingyun was taken away by Ruan Mei, who just so happened to be on her way to see me at the time.”

“As for why it took you two and a half years to finally make your way back to me, courtesy of that little bird who retired from stardom to become a Pure Beauty Knight… my guess is that you were trapped by Nihility. There’s no other reason a young man in his twenties would be tainted by that particular cesspool.”

There was another piece of evidence that gave Herta the confidence to make such a bold inference. Ruan Mei had been en route to the Space Station back then. But on the very day of the Galaxy Silence incident, she had abruptly messaged, saying she’d encountered something on her journey and had to leave. She had been unreachable ever since. At the time, Herta’s mind had been consumed by the memory of her own “death” and she hadn’t given it a second thought. But now, all the clues intertwined, weaving themselves into a complete and terrifying narrative.

“Ms. Herta…” Kazuki began to clap, his applause slow and deliberate. “No wonder they call you a Genius… you’re absolutely correct.”

Herta was truly in a league of her own. With only the most limited of clues, she had deduced nearly the entire truth. Kazuki was beginning to seriously wonder if she was using cheats.

Herta offered no reaction to his praise. The faint, self-satisfied smile vanished from her lips, replaced by an expression of deep, complex inquiry. She leaned forward, her posture suddenly intent. “Kazuki, I have one more question.”

“Go ahead.”

“That… existence that created the ‘Nihility’ star system… the one that forced both you and the Antimatter Legion to self-destruct…”

The office fell deathly silent.

Starlight streamed through the porthole, casting long, narrow beams across the floor, yet it did nothing to dispel the invisible weight that had settled in the air.

“It was me, wasn’t it?”

Kazuki looked up, his gaze meeting Herta’s clear, bottomless eyes.

He finally understood. He understood why she had brought up the Galaxy Silence, why she had been so sensitive to his every word. From the fragmented clues he had given her, she had long since pieced together the most cruel possibility of all.