Honkai Star Rail: Summoning the Chrysos Heirs — Chapter 31

Chapter 31: Battle Outside the City

“So that explains it. No matter how flawlessly I played my part, they kept circling back with questions. The flaw was right under my nose the whole time.”

Inside the quiet apartment, Cyrene sighed, venting her mild frustration to Phainon regarding the afternoon’s interrogation.

“When I was reading the Remembrance, it felt like an eternity inside my own head. But out here in the real world? Barely a fraction of a second passed.” She leaned back against the counter, crossing her arms. “From their perspective, I absorbed a terrifying volume of data in the blink of an eye. It looked highly abnormal.”

If she hadn’t maintained absolute lucidity through their little hypnosis routine—and caught the exact phrasing of Su Zhiwei’s probing questions—she would still be in the dark. She had read too many web novels and played too many games where accessing a system menu or reading lore simply paused time. She had treated it as a universal law of physics, completely forgetting how suspicious it looked from the outside.

To cover her tracks, she had hastily applied a verbal patch: claiming she suffered from Hyperthymesia. It was a bit of a stretch, sure. True photographic autobiographical memory was incredibly rare, but in a world dealing with supernatural anomalies, a rare neurological quirk was the perfect mundane shield.

“Whatever. Let’s drop it for now.”

Cyrene shook her head, tossing the lingering annoyance aside, and shifted her attention to the translucent interface floating in her peripheral vision.

[Memory Trace: 43]

“At least the currency keeps flowing,” she murmured, a satisfied smile curving her lips as she watched the counter tick up by another ten points.

Ever since she dropped the fabricated Hyperthymesia excuse, the Memory Trace had been steadily trickling in. Clearly, her little performance had left a lasting impression on the Supernatural Investigation Bureau.

“Let’s call it a night. We need to rest up and prepare for whatever hoops they want me to jump through tomorrow.”

Glancing out the window at the deepening twilight, she hummed a light, cheerful melody, pulled a few fresh ingredients from the refrigerator, and set about preparing dinner.

Miles away, the tranquil night was violently ripped apart.

Out in the desolate wilderness, a towering earthen wall—several meters thick and reinforced with supernatural energy—shattered into oblivion. Countless jagged clods of dirt and concrete exploded outward in a blinding cloud of dust. The muffled, thunderous boom of the impact sent violent tremors racing through the soil.

Before the debris could even settle, a massive silhouette tore through the smoke.

It was a hulking monstrosity, standing nearly four meters tall and encased in a thick armor of blackish-green cuticles. Every muscle on its frame bulged like carved granite, glistening with a nauseating, oily sheen beneath the pale moonlight. It didn’t even pause to engage its attackers. Reeking of rotting fish and stagnant water, the beast charged frantically toward the distant glow of the city lights, its massive footfalls cratering the earth with every stride.

“Cough, cough… Ptui! What the hell is this thing made of?!”

Amidst the ruined foundation of the shattered barricade, several boulders weighing thousands of pounds were violently shoved aside. A burly man dragged himself out of the rubble, completely caked in dirt. He wiped the grime from his face, revealing wide, shaken eyes.

The sheer kinetic force of the collision had rattled his internal organs, leaving him feeling as though he had been run down by a freight train. He stared at the receding behemoth, his chest heaving as he screamed into his comms.

“Captain! Its physical strength is off the charts! My Stone Wall folded like wet paper! I can’t hold it back!”

“Even if you can’t hold it, you still have to try, Old Shi,” a lazy, youthful voice drifted through the wind.

The young man addressed as ‘Captain’ was already standing at the very peak of a towering pine tree, though neither his subordinates nor the monster had noticed his arrival. Amidst the chaotic battlefield, he looked as relaxed as a man taking a midnight stroll in his own backyard. Both hands were shoved deep into the pockets of his tactical trousers, his lean frame swaying gently with the bending treetop.

He frowned. Not out of fear, but out of sheer, unadulterated annoyance.

“If I let this ugly bastard run into the city limits, those old fossils at the Bureau are going to dock my hazard pay again.”

Before his sigh even faded into the night air, the youth vanished from the canopy. A faint afterimage blurred across the sky. He didn’t rush in for a blind attack. Instead, he leisurely tailed the sprinting behemoth from above, tapping his earpiece.

“Thorn. Give me something with a bit of kick. Trip it up. Don’t let it build any more momentum—this big guy makes way too much noise when it charges, and it’s disturbing the peace.”

“Received.”

The moment the cold, clinical female voice cut through the channel, the barren ground ahead of the monster violently erupted. Dozens of dark brown vines, each as thick as a man’s wrist, shot from the soil like vipers striking from the shadows. They calculated the beast’s trajectory perfectly. The instant its massive, heavy soles slammed into the dirt, the vines lashed out, coiling viciously around its thick ankles.

The monster, sprinting at maximum velocity, suffered an immediate, catastrophic stall.

Its immense forward momentum betrayed it. The creature lost its footing, and its mountainous body crashed face-first into the earth with a deafening boom. Several century-old pines were snapped like twigs beneath its bulk, showering the air with splinters. Its terrifying mass plowed a trench over ten meters long through the forest floor, churning up soil and obliterating the underbrush.

“Roar!!!”

A furious, deafening bellow erupted from the trench, the sheer acoustic force shaking the dead leaves from the surrounding canopy. The monster planted its massive hands into the dirt and violently wrenched its upper body upright. Its exaggerated musculature swelled as it reached down to grab the bindings on its legs.

Snap! Snap!

With two sharp, echoing cracks, the vines—which possessed the tensile strength of industrial steel cables—were effortlessly torn apart like cheap cotton thread.

“Yo, quite the temper on this one,” the captain remarked, still floating effortlessly in pursuit. A playful smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Thorn, I think it looks down on your little grass ropes.”

“Those were high-strength active vines!” Thorn’s silhouette flickered out from the dense treeline, her usually icy tone cracking with genuine irritation.

She slammed both palms toward the earth. A brilliant, emerald-green flash of Ability energy erupted from her fingertips.

Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!

This was no longer a preliminary test. Four massive, obsidian-black vines, heavily armored with razor-sharp barbs, drilled out of the bedrock. They lunged upward like striking pythons, instantly coiling around the monster’s thick arms and throat, suspending it tightly in mid-air. The jagged thorns pierced straight through the beast’s hardened cuticles, burying deep into its mutated flesh.

Yet the creature’s raw physical power was entirely unreasonable. Its dark green hide suddenly pulsed with a sickening, radioactive red luminescence. With a guttural snarl, it violently jerked its arms outward.

Accompanied by the agonizing, teeth-grinding screech of snapping plant fibers, the reinforced vines—strong enough to crush a military tank—were ripped out by their very roots. Corrosive green sap sprayed wildly from the severed ends.

From the moment it hit the dirt to the second it tore itself free, less than ten seconds had passed.

The beast violently shook the remaining dead foliage from its forearms. Its scarlet eyes burned with feral killing intent, yet, bizarrely, it completely ignored the strike team. It simply adjusted its footing and leaned forward, preparing to resume its mad dash toward the civilian sector.

“Alright, playtime is officially over.”

The youth hovering above the canopy let out a long, exaggerated sigh and finally pulled his right hand from his pocket.

“Since you refuse to listen to reason, just lie down and stay there.”

There was no grand incantation, no devastating buildup of energy. He simply raised his hand and snapped his fingers.

A piercing shriek of displaced air ruptured the night sky.

Swish!

A massive metal spike, gleaming with a terrifying, absolute zero chill, tore down from the heavens. It whistled through the atmosphere, carrying an apocalyptic amount of kinetic energy. Its velocity was so extreme that it left a scorched, white-hot vapor trail in its wake.

The beast didn’t even have time to flinch.

The metallic javelin punched cleanly through the monster’s reinforced skull, meeting zero resistance. The sheer, overwhelming impact carried the massive corpse backward for several meters before driving it deep into the bedrock with a sickening thud, pinning it immovably to the earth.

Thick, dark green blood began to pool, dripping slowly down the cold metal column and hissing as it corroded the soil beneath.