Honkai Star Rail: My Death Feeds Their Madness — Chapter 90

Chapter 90: She Must Return Alive to See Her Master

Sipusa Star.

The sky above was bruised with a sickly, unnatural dusk. The once-crisp air of this verdant world had been entirely stripped of its oxygen, replaced by the suffocating, iron-heavy stench of spilled blood and the acrid smoke of charred fur. Across the scarred earth, the shattered husks of Borisin Beastships and the ruined hulls of Cloud Knight starskiffs lay hopelessly intertwined in their final, violent resting places.

Sipusa Star was a world defined by its rampant, primeval vitality. Its landmasses were smothered beneath endless oceans of ancient forests, where colossal trees pierced the heavens, their canopies towering thousands of meters into the sky. Beneath their sprawling roots, human beings were reduced to the significance of mere ants. Following a catastrophic loss of air superiority against the Borisin Beastships, the surviving Cloud Knights had been forced to abandon the open plains and retreat into the suffocating depths of this primordial woodland.

Yet, even a forest of such staggering scale could not mask the desperate movements of an army numbering in the millions. The crushed undergrowth, the lingering heat of their march, and the inescapable scent of human fear were beacons to the keen, predatory senses of the Borisin. These bloodthirsty wolves stalked their prey with dogged obsession, clinging to the Cloud Knights’ trail like shadows bound to the setting sun.

The expeditionary force scoured the treacherous terrain for a defensible stronghold, but the hourglass was rapidly emptying. Outside the forest’s perimeter, the howling masses of the Borisin horde swelled with every passing second, their numbers surely eclipsing a billion. Having seized total dominion over the skies, the wolf-pack deployed endless streams of reinforcements from their Beastships, weaving an inescapable net around the woodland. The encirclement was vast, but its links were forged of iron. Not even a field mouse could burrow its way to freedom without triggering the pack’s ravenous attention. Once that suffocating ring tightened, it would spell the absolute annihilation of the Cloud Knight army.

But fate had not entirely forsaken the desperate soldiers. Amidst the retreat, Jingliu discovered a geographical anomaly—a solitary, towering peak severed from the surrounding landscape by a seemingly bottomless abyss. From above, the terrain resembled the innermost ring of a massive concentric formation, as though the very earth had been hollowed out by the strike of an ancient god. The summit was not perfectly flat, but its gentle slope and dense cluster of giant trees provided vital cover. So long as they could bridge the chasm and establish a perimeter, the Borisin—stripped of their aerial transports in this dense canopy—would be forced into a devastating bottleneck.

Racing against the closing jaws of the encirclement, the Cloud Knights deployed military climbing grapples to traverse the sheer drop. Countless soldiers offered silent, fervent prayers of gratitude to the master craftsmen of the Artisanship Commission; it was these very traversal tools, forged for the most unforgiving battlefields, that now tethered them to life.

What followed was a crucible of unimaginable slaughter.

For days, the solitary mountain became an altar of blood. The Borisin cared nothing for the enemy’s high ground. To the pack, lives were merely currency, and they possessed an inexhaustible treasury of expendable flesh.

“Hold the line!!!”

At the absolute vanguard, the hoarse, tearing roar of a Cloud Knight commander shattered the air, only to be instantly swallowed by the deafening, blood-crazed howls of the wolf horde.

Jingliu stood firmly at the precipice of the defensive line. The exquisite longsword in her grip—a masterpiece forged by the legendary artisans of the Zhuming—had long since been chipped and blunted by the endless friction of bone and armor. Its gleaming steel was now stained a permanent, sickening purple by countless layers of dried gore. She took shallow, measured breaths, her crimson pupils reflecting the endless, surging tide of wolves launching themselves at the cliff face.

Lacking the sophisticated ascension gear of the Xianzhou, the Borisin resorted to the most primitive, suicidal tactic imaginable: sheer, kinetic leaps. Mid-air, they were little more than target practice. Wave after wave threw themselves into the void, only to be pierced by arrows and sent plummeting into the lightless abyss below.

Yet, they did not stop.

As the agonizing hours bled into days, the expeditionary force’s greatest geographic advantage—the bottomless chasm—began to betray them. The Borisin were driving their enslaved artifact beasts and cannon-fodder thralls into the gorge in a frenzy of mass suicide. The shattered corpses of those gunned down by the Cloud Knights became the mortar and stone of a grotesque new foundation. In a mere five days, a towering ramp of crushed bone, ruptured organs, and mangled fur rose from the depths. Dark, viscous blood cascaded down this mountain of the dead, pooling into a foul, sluggish river at the bottom of the abyss.

The Xianzhou’s munitions were finally running dry. The devastating volleys of Lithe-rock Arrows and the searing bolts of Blazing Crossbows ceased.

Seizing the silence, the surviving Borisin trampled over the rotting, gelatinous remains of their own kin and enslaved beasts. Digging their jagged claws into the cliffside, they scrambled upward. Their eyes were blown wide and injected with blood, thick drool swinging from their snapping jaws. Like demons clawing their way out of the deepest hell, they began to devour the Cloud Knights’ defensive perimeter, inch by bloody inch.

“Madmen… these lunatics!”

Beside Jingliu, a frontline soldier’s hands trembled violently around his spear. He did not fear a warrior’s death, but this absolute, terrifying defiance of biological instinct shattered his resolve. How could this be called a war? It was a mechanized slaughterhouse, a mutual harvesting of flesh where the reaper swung his scythe indiscriminately.

Jingliu offered no words of comfort. She remained a silent, deadly phantom, her body moving on pure, lethal instinct. She swung her ruined blade, cleaving a leaping Borisin cleanly in twain. Steaming entrails and hot blood washed over her armor, burying its original pristine colors beneath a thick layer of carnage. Foregoing the standard flourish to clear her blade, she pivoted on her heel, executing a brutal backhand thrust that shattered the windpipe of a flanking Wolf Soldier. With a sharp, explosive twist of her wrist, she severed its head entirely.

How many had she killed? The number had lost all meaning.

“Captain! Defense Line Seven’s armaments are completely exhausted!”

“Captain! Defense Line Three’s energy shield has overloaded! It’s shattered! The wolves are breaking through!!”

“…Argh!!!”

“Fight them to the death!”

The once-disciplined, tactical reports flooding the comms channel rapidly dissolved into a chaotic cacophony of agony—guttural screams, the sickening crunch of snapping bones, and the wet sounds of tearing flesh. Despair swept through the surviving ranks like a virulent plague. The desperate hope of holding out for reinforcements evaporated in the face of such suffocating numbers. The Borisin required no grand strategy; they were perfectly content to trade ten, or even a hundred of their own lives to drag down a single Cloud Knight. It was only a matter of time before they chewed this expeditionary force down to the marrow.

A deafening explosion rocked the plateau as several colossal Longbo artifact beasts slammed into the right flank, smashing a massive breach in the defensive wall.

Through that jagged wound, the Cloud Knights witnessed a sight that froze the blood in their veins. Beyond the gap, the wolf pack surged forward like a bursting dam, pouring across the grotesque bridge of corpses. And further out, at the distant edge of the primeval canopy, fresh Beastships were descending from the bruised sky. Other Borisin packs had caught the scent of the slaughter and were rushing to the feast. The prey was meager, but the hunters were multiplying. To claim even a single mouthful of Xianzhou flesh, these beasts would tear themselves into an unmatched frenzy.

Jingliu’s heart constricted in her chest.

Sweeping her gaze across the battlefield, she saw the once-impenetrable phalanxes in ruins. Comrades were falling in droves, their bodies disappearing beneath the surging tide of fur and claws. The weapons of those still standing were battered beyond recognition, stripped of their lethal edge. Some soldiers had already lost the light in their eyes, parrying and striking with the numb, mechanical motions of the dead, simply waiting for the inevitable fatal bite. Others surrendered entirely to their primal rage, throwing away their broken spears to tackle the Wolf Soldiers in desperate, tearing hand-to-hand combat.

Hold out for another ten days?

Watching the beast tide eclipse the horizon like a suffocating black storm, Jingliu tightened her white-knuckled grip on her shattered sword. A flicker of deep, icy despair pierced her stoic facade. Under the sheer attrition rate of the Borisin’s suicidal charges, equipment wear defied all logic. Swords, spears, halberds—everything was ruined. She had personally ground down every spare blade she carried. To dream of seeing reinforcements was a luxury; she likely wouldn’t even live to see the sun set on this blood-soaked peak.

To compound the nightmare, the immense psychological trauma and the suffocating stench of death were triggering the deepest curse of their long-life species. Around her, veteran Cloud Knights were succumbing to mara affliction. Their bodies twisted, their minds fracturing as they lunged at their own comrades in a state of mindless, agonizing madness. The soldiers who retained their sanity were forced to weep as they enacted the Cloud Knight Iron Law, driving their blades into the hearts of their fallen brothers and sisters to grant them a merciful end.

In this hellscape, Jingliu finally understood.

She understood why Kagashi had always forbidden her from joining these massive, planetary expeditions. Compared to the apocalyptic meat grinder before her, the skirmishes she had fought in the past were nothing more than children playing with wooden swords. The speed at which lives were extinguished here was unfathomably cruel—ten, a hundred times faster than anything she had ever witnessed.

A sharp, resonant crack echoed over the din of battle.

Jingliu’s hands went numb. The remaining half of her Zhuming longsword had finally shattered into useless fragments against the reinforced skull of a towering Borisin.

The massive beast roared, a deafening sound that shook the air, and lunged. Its jagged claws tore through the wind, aimed directly at Jingliu’s exposed throat. In its feral, bloodshot eyes, a Cloud Knight stripped of her weapon was nothing more than a tender cut of meat waiting to be devoured.

But it was wrong.

It was dead wrong.

From the depths of Jingliu’s crimson eyes, a terrifying, suffocating killing intent erupted—cold and absolute, like a glacier that had slumbered for ten thousand years.

If she had no sword, then she would forge her very flesh and soul into the blade.

She had to survive. She had to carve her way out of this hell.

She must return alive to see her Master.