Honkai Star Rail: Summoning the Chrysos Heirs — Chapter 25

Chapter 25: Investigating the Scene

Black smoke coiled lazily above the skeletal remains of the chemical plant. The air hung heavy with a nauseating, acrid stench—the unmistakable odor of protein carbonizing under extreme pressure and blistering heat.

“Lord Thunder, the interior inspection is complete.”

A soot-stained soldier picked his way through the debris. His heavy boots crunched loudly against the scorched earth and shattered glass. He stopped in front of An Ning, throwing up a sloppy, hurried military salute. A distinct tremor of fear bled into his voice.

“We found no signs of the Revenant’s activity. We only located some unidentified, completely charred chunks of flesh near the center of the factory floor.”

“You can’t find the Revenant?”

An Ning paused. The fingers massaging her temples went entirely still. She lifted her gaze, staring past the soldier’s shoulder toward the gutted skeleton of the facility.

‘Could that thing… have actually been killed?’

The question was meant entirely for herself. An Ning clearly remembered the last time the Authorities authorized the use of a man-portable rocket launcher against a Revenant. When the smoke had cleared that day, the monster had a massive, gaping hole blown straight through its torso. Chunks of flesh and blood had painted the street. Yet within minutes, those grotesque granulations had wriggled frantically like conscious maggots, knitting the wound back together in perfect, horrifying synchronization.

That unnatural vitality still sent a cold chill down her spine whenever she thought about it.

As for an explosion of this catastrophic magnitude…

The Authorities had certainly never attempted anything close to it. Detonating a payload of this scale within city limits would trigger a bureaucratic nightmare, and frankly, the Revenant’s threat level had not yet warranted such extreme collateral damage.

Pushing the grim memory aside, An Ning turned around. Her gaze fell on Chen Lang. The SWAT captain was leaning heavily against the armored plating of a special service vehicle, desperately gulping down water from a plastic canteen. He looked exceptionally disheveled. His tactical protective suit was caked in a thick layer of gray dust and scored with fresh scratches. The hand gripping the canteen trembled slightly, spilling water down his chin.

“Captain Chen.” An Ning closed the distance between them, dropping her voice to a low, serious register. “Are you absolutely certain the factory detonated without any prior warning? Did the bomb disposal unit fail to detect any buried explosives during their sweep?”

“Absolutely not.”

Chen Lang lowered the canteen. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed hard, shaking his head with vigorous certainty.

“After the Revenant lost control this morning, we executed a carpet search of the entire perimeter according to the highest-level contingency protocols. Forget hidden explosives; we swept the place so thoroughly we wouldn’t have missed a single stray rat.”

He paused, a flicker of lingering dread flashing through his bloodshot eyes.

“Even the perimeter electric fence was operating at maximum capacity. There were zero signs of intrusion or external sabotage.”

“That makes no sense…”

An Ning furrowed her brow, her thumb unconsciously rubbing the metal button on her cuff.

A young man wielding a massive, flaming greatsword.

That was the exact description Chen Lang had given her when he first stumbled out of the blast zone. Upon hearing those words, the concept of a high-tier fire-type Ability User immediately surfaced in her mind.

But the math did not add up. Although this was a chemical plant, all volatile, flammable, and explosive materials had been evacuated the moment the area was cordoned off. Just how terrifying would a single fire-type Ability User’s energy output need to be to instantly generate a heaven-shaking explosion capable of melting reinforced steel bars into slag?

Before An Ning could spiral further into her thoughts, a burst of hurried footsteps broke her concentration.

“Lord Thunder!”

A communications soldier sprinted over, clutching a military-grade tactical tablet to his chest. He skidded to a halt in front of her, panting heavily.

“The surveillance data has been recovered. The final few seconds are heavily corrupted by the blast interference, but we managed to extract the core footage. You can view it directly.”

He offered the device to her with both hands.

“Good work.”

An Ning took the heavy tablet. Her fingers swiped across the reinforced glass screen, opening the encrypted video file labeled [Top Secret].

The footage flickered to life.

In the center of the dim, cavernous factory floor, the Revenant lay prone against the concrete like a massive, grotesque lump of dead meat. It was completely motionless. Time ticked by in the corner of the screen, but the image remained as static as a photograph.

Then, without a single frame of warning, the stillness shattered.

A streak of golden-red light tore through the top-left corner of the camera feed. The illumination was so violently intense and impossibly fast that it left a stark white, overexposed scar across the digital recording, looking as though it had physically cleaved the dim space in two.

An Ning subconsciously held her breath. Her finger hovered over the screen for a split second before she slammed the pause button, dragging the progress bar back to review the anomaly frame by agonizing frame.

The image froze.

There, standing directly upon the broad, previously empty back of the Revenant, was a figure.

The blinding glare and sheer speed of the entry rendered the person’s facial features an unrecognizable blur, leaving only the vague, athletic outline of a young male. But the weapon in his hands was unmistakable. A massive greatsword, wreathed in raging, apocalyptic flames, was driven deep into the Revenant’s spine.

Where the molten blade entered the flesh, the monster’s pitch-black, hardened skin instantly turned a translucent, glowing crimson. It looked exactly as if a miniature sun had been forcibly detonated inside the creature’s internal organs.

An Ning felt her pupils constrict.

She advanced to the next frame.

The young man did not linger for even a fraction of a second. He wrenched the greatsword free, his silhouette retreating like a phantom, instantly vanishing into the camera’s blind spot.

Immediately following his departure, the Revenant’s maw unhinged in a silent, agonizing roar—silent only because the sheer atmospheric pressure had already shattered the facility’s audio receptors.

Then came the devastating shockwave.

A blinding white flash swallowed the entire factory, and the surveillance footage abruptly dissolved into a storm of dead static.

“It seems our mysterious young man with the greatsword is indeed the culprit…”

An Ning let out a slow, shaky breath, feeling a heavy tightness constricting her chest. She dragged the progress bar back to the exact moment before the detonation, watching the sequence play out again and again.

‘But the source of this explosion… was actually the Revenant itself?’The concept was simply unbelievable. Previously, when she had used high-voltage electricity to shock this exact monster, it had merely twitched violently and attempted to flee. It had never exhibited any signs of catastrophic energy instability.’Could it be that the monster’s internal biological structure acts as a pressurized powder keg? Does it require a highly specific, targeted elemental attack to trigger this kind of self-destructive chain reaction?’

An Ning scratched at her scalp in sheer frustration. The metaphorical string in her brain felt stretched to its absolute limit, throbbing with a dull ache. This entire scenario was rapidly exceeding the scope of her tactical understanding.

“Forget it. I am not going to figure this out standing here.”

She simply switched off the tablet screen, allowing that familiar sense of bureaucratic powerlessness to wash over her.

“I am not one of those obsessive lunatics down in the R&D department. Since the Revenant has been effectively reduced to roasted meat and our mysterious young swordsman has vanished into thin air, there is no reason for me to keep wasting my time in this ash pit.”

Let the big shots sitting in their comfortable offices upstairs worry about cleaning up this mess.

An Ning shoved the tablet back into the communications soldier’s waiting hands and turned on her heel, marching toward the outer perimeter cordon. Her heavy boots crunched rhythmically against the gravel road, though each step felt strangely leaden.

She had barely made it a dozen paces when the encrypted smartphone in her tactical pocket suddenly vibrated. The urgent, high-pitched ringing sounded particularly jarring against the dead silence of the ruined factory.

Stopping in her tracks, An Ning pulled out the device and glanced at the caller ID.

The screen read: Special Bureau of Xinhai City – Officer Lei.

She took a deep, steadying breath, adjusted her posture out of pure habit, and pressed the answer button.

“Officer Lei. Are there any new instructions?”

A low, intensely serious male voice crackled through the receiver, delivering information at a rapid, clipped pace. As An Ning listened to the briefing, her originally calm, professional expression gradually fractured into open astonishment.

“What? Cyrene’s Ability test?” she asked, her voice subconsciously rising in pitch. “Wasn’t that evaluation officially scheduled for tomorrow afternoon? How is the testing apparatus ready so quickly?”

The man on the other end of the line offered a brief, uncompromising explanation.

As he spoke, An Ning slowly turned her head, her gaze drifting back toward the smoldering, blackened ruins of the chemical plant. A sharp glimmer of contemplation flashed through her eyes.

“…All right. I understand the directive,” she finally replied, her tone hardening. “I will notify Cyrene to report in immediately.”

She ended the call but remained standing there, motionless, her thumb resting heavily against the side of the phone. The pale glow of the screen illuminated the deep lines of thought etched into her face.

Just a few short hours ago, the bureaucratic administration had explicitly stated that because Cyrene’s Remembrance reading ability was far too unique and unmatched, it required the deployment of specialized anomaly testers and elite psychological experts. The evaluation was supposed to be delayed until tomorrow at the absolute earliest.

How could such a massive logistical process have been greenlit and expedited so quickly, rocketing through the chain of command in a mere matter of hours?

‘Could it be…’

An Ning turned her head fully now, her sharp gaze locking onto the charred, skeletal remains of the chemical plant once again.

Are the higher-ups in such a frantic rush to evaluate Cyrene because they suspect she is somehow connected to this catastrophic explosion involving the Revenant?

The timing was entirely too suspicious to ignore. Cyrene had only been officially linked to the Revenant incident this morning. Now, barely an afternoon later, that exact same Revenant had met with a violent, highly irregular end.

Or is it… because they suspect a connection to that mysterious Flame Swordsman?

“Forget it. None of this political maneuvering is for me to worry about anyway.”

An Ning shook her head firmly, forcefully casting the complex web of conspiracies and suspicions out of her mind. She was a soldier, not a detective. Lowering her head, she tapped the screen and began to dial the number to summon their newest anomaly to the Bureau.