Honkai Star Rail: Summoning the Chrysos Heirs — Chapter 22

Chapter 22: Like a Deity Descending into Purgatory

Two o’clock in the afternoon brought the most blistering heat of the day.

Outside the Hongda Chemical Plant, the stagnant air hung heavy with a pungent, synthetic stench. It was a noxious blend of industrial runoff and the faint, lingering odor of scorched earth—the unmistakable scars of the fierce battle that had torn through the area that very morning.

In a blind spot cast by the sharp angles of an adjacent building, a space where the punishing direct sunlight could not reach, Phainon slowly materialized. He leaned his shoulder against the rough concrete wall. His golden pupils constricted slightly against the blinding glare reflecting off the pavement as he calmly surveyed the perimeter.

The main factory gate, blown wide open hours ago, was now cordoned off with layers of yellow and black caution tape. The bright plastic strips looked particularly jarring under the midday sun. Several freshly erected signs barricaded the intersection, their bold red letters warning: [Construction Site, No Entry].

Scattered around the perimeter were seven or eight workers clad in heavy blue overalls and bright yellow hard hats. Some huddled over unrolled blueprints in feigned discussion, while others casually wiped sweat from their brows. Yet, despite the oppressive noon heat, these men lacked the sluggish, bone-deep fatigue typical of actual manual laborers.

Phainon only needed a single glance. A knowing, quiet curve formed at the corners of his mouth.

Even with sweat darkening the backs of their thick uniforms, their postures remained impeccably upright. Their center of gravity was perfectly balanced between their feet, muscles coiled and ready to break into a sprint at a fraction of a second’s notice. Though they appeared to be shielding their eyes from the glare, they were expertly using the brims of their hard hats to mask their sweeping gazes, remaining hyper-alert to every shifting shadow. More tellingly, a few of them kept brushing their right hands against a subtle, unnatural bulge at their waistlines—the exact placement for a quick-draw holster.

‘Special Police disguised as a construction crew, I see…’Phainon made the silent deduction.’Standing guard in full tactical gear beneath heavy overalls in this heat is quite the punishment. The security level has spiked drastically following this morning’s loss of control.’

He tilted his head upward to observe the blazing sun, then lowered his gaze to the razor-sharp, high-contrast shadows painted across the cracked asphalt. For an ordinary infiltrator, attempting to breach a secured perimeter in broad daylight was pure suicide. There was simply no darkness to offer sanctuary.

But to a hunter of his caliber, this blinding, extreme light birthed the absolute purest form of darkness.

“The brighter the illumination, the deeper the abyss it casts,” Phainon murmured to himself.

The very second the words left his lips, a passing cumulus cloud drifted across the sun. The brilliant glare washing over the industrial zone instantly dimmed by a single, crucial shade.

The sudden shift in ambient light forced the disguised guards’ pupils to instinctively dilate, triggering a microscopic delay in their visual processing.

Phainon tapped the toe of his boot against the concrete. His physical form dissolved into a blurred, weightless afterimage. He did not skirt around the edges of the light; instead, he danced directly through the fragmented black shadows cast by the industrial debris, using the dark patches as stepping stones. He moved like a phantom leaping across the keys of a piano made of light and void.

He displaced no air and made no sound. Even the microscopic friction of his movement was perfectly masked by a sudden gust of wind rustling through the overgrown weeds. In the exact span of time it took for a guard to blink away a drop of sweat, he slipped past the caution tape and vanished entirely into the massive, sprawling shadow stretching beneath the factory’s towering exterior wall.

Gliding under the absolute cover of the darkness, Phainon breached the interior of the main facility.

‘It seems this is the place.’

The atmosphere inside the cavernous, dimly lit workshop was utterly foul. Phainon raised a gloved hand to cover his nose and mouth, his brow furrowing in mild disgust. The stench was a suffocating cocktail of high-voltage ionized ozone and rotting, charred flesh. It clawed at the back of his throat. He needed no internal navigation; this physiologically repulsive odor was a beacon leading straight to the target.

He lightened his footfalls. Even as his heavy boots traversed the grated iron catwalks of the chemical plant, they produced zero acoustic feedback. His golden gaze swept over the rusted safety railings, and the scene on the ground floor crashed into his vision.

Directly in the center of the first-floor processing area lay a bloated, grotesque mass of deformed flesh. It was slumped against the cracked tiles, surrounded by a chaotic web of thick, severed industrial cables that looked like black veins.

The pitch-black monster was curled tightly into a fetal position within the gloom. Its entire exterior was coated in a thick crust of carbonized scorch marks—the brutal aftermath of countless high-voltage electrical strikes. The authorities clearly believed this creature had been beaten into a suppressed, dormant state, temporarily neutralized by the morning’s onslaught.

However, through Phainon’s golden pupils, the reality of the situation was entirely different.

Beneath that lifeless, blackened shell, a dense network of blue and purple energy was frantically coursing through the creature’s internal structure. The glowing currents moved like a swarm of industrious hornets, aggressively reweaving torn muscle fibers and repairing necrotic tissue from the inside out. With every microscopic pulse of energy, the monster’s deep-seated flesh grew denser, heavier, and more lethal.

It was not screaming. It was not struggling. It was simply lying in wait, silently gorging itself on the overflowing power flooding its system.

“Using the carbonization of your own skin to mask your vital signs, completing a metamorphosis under the guise of a corpse…”

Phainon curled his fingers inward, his golden eyes turning freezing cold.

“A remarkably deceptive, yet utterly despicable method of survival.”

As his quiet voice faded into the stagnant air, the ambient temperature around him violently spiked.

Countless specks of blinding golden light began to violently converge within his open palm. It was a terrifying, divine heat, infinitely purer and more destructive than the crude electricity that had scorched the beast earlier.

A low, resonant hum vibrated through the metallic bones of the factory.

The massive two-handed greatsword, Morning Invader, materialized in his grip. The complex, flowing patterns etched into the heavy blade looked as though they had been violently peeled from the surface of a dying star. It radiated a scorching, majestic brilliance that demanded averted eyes.

“While I am not entirely familiar with the core operating principles of your biology, I believe it is time for a simple experiment.”

Phainon rotated his wrist, the heavy tip of the greatsword angling downward to lock onto the dormant abomination below. His tone remained perfectly flat, devoid of malice but heavy with absolute authority.

“If a foreign probe burning with the Fire of the Blazing Sun is forcibly injected into a core already overflowing with unstable energy… what kind of reaction will you produce?”

He did not bend his knees to charge. He did not telegraph his strike.

In the span of a single heartbeat, Phainon vanished from the catwalk.

The oppressive gloom of the workshop was violently bisected by a blinding golden line!

Up on the second-floor observation corridor, Captain Chen Lang had been monitoring the Revenant through a pair of heavy tactical goggles. Without warning, every hair on his arms stood on end.

His retinas failed to process the trajectory of the falling figure. He only registered a terrifying, instantaneous blur, as if a miniature sun had spontaneously detonated in the dead center of the factory floor.

It was too fast. It completely shattered the biological limits of human dynamic vision.

By the time Chen Lang’s brain caught up to the visual data, that golden stream of light had already plunged straight through the monster’s armored core. There was zero resistance. The only sound was the sickening, high-pitched hiss of a superheated blade instantly vaporizing dense biological matter.

“Roar!!!”

The monster, which had been playing dead mere seconds ago, violently arched its massive spine and unleashed an ear-piercing, agonizing shriek.

The sheer acoustic force of the roar carried a physical shockwave. It slammed into Chen Lang, rattling his teeth and causing his eardrums to scream in pain. The specialized heavy handgun he had been gripping nearly slipped from his numb fingers.

“What… the hell is that?”

Chen Lang clamped his hands onto the rusted railing, his pupils shrinking to pinpricks.

Down below, the monster’s carbonized armor began to fracture wildly. Violent arcs of blue electricity exploded from the widening fissures, only to be instantaneously devoured by a terrifying, expanding crimson light. Deep within the creature’s ruined core, the conflicting red and blue energies clashed like a ruptured dam. The chaotic forces ricocheted inside the beast’s anatomy, bloating its physical form like a pressurized balloon pushed past its breaking point.

An aura of absolute, unadulterated destruction saturated the factory air.

‘Not good!’

Those two words were the only coherent thought Chen Lang could form.

The very next fraction of a second.

Boom!!!

The blinding light obliterated the monster’s physical shell, violently venting the hyper-compressed energy outward. A colossal sphere of fire erupted from the epicenter, instantly swallowing the surrounding heavy machinery. Thick steel support beams melted and warped like cheap wax under the apocalyptic heat.

A wall of pure thermal force roared upward toward the second floor. Chen Lang squeezed his eyes shut against the blinding flash, his mind going entirely blank. In the face of this cataclysmic, world-erasing power, human flesh was as fragile as wet paper.

He braced for incineration.

But the agonizing heat never touched his skin.

A microsecond before the expanding plasma could swallow the observation corridor, a firm hand clamped onto the back of his tactical vest.

Chen Lang felt his boots leave the grated floor. He was hoisted backward into the air with terrifying, effortless strength.

The roar of the explosion was drowned out by the wind screaming past his ears as he was hurled out of the building like a discarded sandbag.

In the brief, disorienting moment his body sailed backward through the blown-out factory doors, he forced his stinging eyes open. Through the blinding glare, he caught a single, fleeting glimpse.

Standing dead center in the raging sea of apocalyptic fire was a pristine white figure.

The man held a colossal, burning greatsword in one hand. Framed against the backdrop of melting steel and sky-high flames, he looked exactly like a martial deity descending into the depths of purgatory.

“Cough! Cough, cough, cough!”

Chen Lang slammed into the gravel lot outside the chemical plant, rolling violently across the sharp stones to bleed off the kinetic momentum. He finally skidded to a halt, lying flat on his back, gasping desperately for oxygen. His mouth tasted of copper, dirt, and the grit he had just swallowed.

“Captain Chen! Captain!”

“What the hell just happened?!”

The disguised Special Police officers finally snapped out of their shock. They abandoned their cover, sprinting toward him with their assault rifles raised, their faces pale with panic. The explosion had hit with the force of a localized earthquake, violently shaking the concrete beneath their boots.

They swarmed Chen Lang, reaching down to haul him to his feet.

“Get off me! I’m fine!”

Chen Lang aggressively shoved their hands away. Ignoring the blood trickling from his scraped forehead and the dirt caked on his uniform, he scrambled upright. He locked his bloodshot eyes onto the Hongda Chemical Plant. The entire facility had been transformed into a roaring, multi-story torch.

“We had a breach! Someone got inside!” he roared, his voice cracking from the smoke and adrenaline. “Go pull every piece of surveillance footage from the surrounding grid! Now! Move!”

His hands shook violently as he jammed a finger against his tactical earpiece.

“Grizzly to Command! Grizzly to Command Center, do you copy?!”

“The Revenant containment zone has been violently breached by an unknown hostile! The target was forcibly detonated. We have a massive thermal explosion on-site, and the structural fire is completely out of control!”

A burst of harsh static hissed through the earpiece, quickly replaced by the dispatcher’s grim, rapid-fire response.

“Command copies, Grizzly. Sitrep on the Revenant’s current status and the intruder’s physical profile.”

Chen Lang sucked in a ragged breath of hot, smoky air, forcing his racing heart to steady. He squinted into the blinding inferno, desperately searching the dancing flames for any sign of that white coat.

“Revenant status… presumed destroyed. Intruder identity is unknown. Suspect possesses terrifying mobility and high-yield thermal weaponry. I need a heavy fire support team deployed to lock down the entire district, right now!”

“Copy that. QRF reinforcements are five minutes out.”

The channel clicked dead.

Chen Lang could still feel his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He whipped his head around, glaring at the handful of operatives who were still staring at the fire in paralyzed awe.

“What the hell are you standing around for?! Did you not hear the order?!”

“Set up a hard perimeter around the plant! Use the concrete barriers! I don’t want a single damn fly leaving this grid!”

“Yes, sir!”

The thunderous command shattered their daze. The operatives instantly scattered, moving in tactical pairs to establish chokepoints using the surrounding industrial debris.

Watching his men fan out, the last of Chen Lang’s adrenaline finally evaporated. His knees buckled slightly, and he slumped against a heavy concrete barricade, his muscles screaming in exhaustion.

He turned his gaze back to the towering inferno. His hands curled into tight fists, his fingernails biting deep into his calloused palms.

He could not scrub that image from his mind.

Amidst the blinding, world-ending flash of the detonation, that solitary white figure had remained perfectly, impossibly clear.

And he remembered the sensation. The exact moment that hand had seized his collar and launched him to safety. There had been absolutely zero killing intent radiating from the man. The intruder had actively gone out of his way to… save him?

‘If he was an enemy, why not just let the blast incinerate me?’Chen Lang muttered under his breath, his brow locking into a severe frown.’Wielding a burning greatsword, possessing physical attributes that shatter human limits, and directly targeting the Revenant… Could it be a high-ranking fanatic from the Divine Advent Cult?”No. Impossible.’He instantly crushed his own theory.’Those cultist lunatics are obsessed with capturing the anomalies alive, no matter the body count. They would never launch a lethal strike to obliterate their prize, and they sure as hell wouldn’t waste a fraction of a second saving a cop from a blast wave.’

“Just who the hell… are you?” Chen Lang whispered to the roaring flames, searching for an answer that the fire refused to give.

But what the veteran captain did not know was that he was not alone.

Less than a hundred meters away from the newly established blockade, hidden deep within the pitch-black shadow of a collapsed brick wall.

A crisp white hem, lined with elegant gold embroidery, fluttered gently in the passing thermal drafts.

Phainon stood perfectly still within the darkness. His glowing golden pupils calmly tracked the frantic movements of the armed officers and the battered, exhausted Chen Lang. His handsome face was entirely devoid of emotion.

“It appears the yield of that strike was quite satisfactory,” he whispered to the empty air.

Without another word, he turned his back to the inferno. Like a single drop of water effortlessly merging into a vast, dark ocean, he melted into the sprawling network of narrow alleyways, vanishing without a trace.