Honkai Star Rail: Summoning the Chrysos Heirs — Chapter 37

Chapter 37: The Proper Use of Memory Imprint

A deafening explosion shattered the night, ripping up the asphalt just inches from Cyrene’s boots. Countless jagged fragments of gravel rode the shockwave, scraping across her cheeks like shrapnel and leaving a searing, stinging burn in their wake. A massive, deformed fist had buried itself deep into the street, sending spiderweb fractures racing outward in every direction. Had that strike landed a few centimeters closer, the sheer kinetic force would have reduced her to a bloody stain on the pavement.

Cyrene did not bother looking back. Adrenaline flooded her system, driving her heartbeat into a frantic, heavy rhythm. She rode the residual shockwave of the blast, tucking her shoulders and rolling forward. The friction of her soles skidding against the ruined road emitted a sharp, ear-piercing screech.

Heavy, wet breathing echoed from behind. The creature had missed its mark, and it clearly had no intention of letting its prey escape.

Just as the beast wrenched its fist from the crater, its thick leg muscles bunching up to launch another leap, several fluid streaks of pitch-black shadow violently darted out from the surrounding darkness.

“Stop right there!”

The young girl’s voice, usually crisp and clear, cracked with a hoarse desperation.

Those shadow tentacles whipped forward like hunting pythons, snapping precisely around the monster’s thick ankles and waist. With a sudden, vicious jerk, they hauled the hulking creature backward.

The beast’s forward momentum abruptly died. Its massive frame swayed heavily under the conflicting forces of inertia and the shadow bindings.

Seizing that fleeting window of stiffness, Cyrene drove all her strength into her legs. Her slender body shot forward like an arrow loosed from a bowstring, instantly putting a safe distance of over ten meters between herself and the foul, fishy stench radiating from her pursuer.

“Roar—!”

Enraged by the sudden restraint, the obstructed monster unleashed a deafening bellow.

Its grotesque muscles instantly expanded, tearing through its skin as blue-black veins squirmed beneath the surface like buried earthworms. With a violent outward thrust of its thick arms, it forced its body apart.

Snap! Snap!

The seemingly durable shadow bindings shattered like brittle hemp rope, dissolving into a fine black mist that rapidly dissipated into the cold night air.

Having broken free, the beast completely ignored the pale young girl standing off to the side. Its bloodshot, bulging eyes remained locked dead onto Cyrene’s retreating figure. Taking massive, earth-shaking strides, it resumed its wild pursuit.

‘As expected, the aggro is entirely locked onto me.’

Cyrene regulated her breathing rhythm, her peripheral vision tracking the heavy movements trailing her.

This creature’s attack patterns were laughably primitive, no different from low-level mob enemies programmed with nothing but brute force. While its raw speed and physical strength far surpassed any normal human, its attack wind-ups were painfully long and telegraphed.

Her mind worked at a terrifying speed, breaking down and analyzing every twitch of the beast’s anatomy. Raising a hand meant a ground smash. Bending its knees meant a forward dash. As long as she predicted the directional flow of its muscle tension and executed evasive maneuvers in the opposite direction, this kiting tactic was flawless—especially when paired with the crowd-control support from that Apostle of Condemnation girl.

Just as Cyrene braced her legs to welcome the next sequence of attacks, the Anomaly Detector glowing in the bottom right corner of her retinal UI suddenly updated. The aggressive red dot that had been biting relentlessly at her heels came to a dead halt.

The heavy, thudding footsteps behind her vanished.

Warning bells screamed in Cyrene’s mind. She immediately dug her heels into the dirt, skidding to a halt, and glanced back in sheer confusion.

‘What is that big idiot trying to do?”Did the aggro shift?’

“Watch out for the sto—!”

Before her eyes could even process the shifting shadows, the young girl’s terrified, voice-cracking scream pierced the night sky.

The absolute second the words “watch out” registered in her ears, Cyrene abandoned all hesitation. Even though her physical eyes had not yet captured the trajectory of the incoming threat, her brain had already issued the highest-priority override command.

A familiar, resonant buzzing echoed from the deepest depths of her mind. A brilliant golden ribbon of light instantly condensed within her consciousness, weaving itself into a radiant page inscribed with complex, ancient symbols.

Cyrene reached out with her mind and, without a single second of doubt, tore open this Remembrance page representing the present moment.

The crisp, clean sound of tearing silk echoed through her soul.

In the very next fraction of a second, the howling wind, the girl’s desperate scream, and the monster’s heavy breathing were entirely erased from existence.

An intense, suffocating sensation of weightlessness swallowed her body whole, mimicking the feeling of sinking into the abyssal depths of the ocean.

When Cyrene opened her eyes again, she was standing perfectly still within that familiar, absolute darkness.

On the colossal screen suspended directly in front of her, the chaotic reality of a millisecond ago was perfectly frozen in time.

The pale-faced young girl stood with her mouth stretched wide in a scream. Far in the distance, the grotesque monster was locked in the apex of a throwing posture, the terrifying muscles of its right arm bulging to their absolute physical limit.

“Let me see what kind of gift this enthusiastic guest decided to send me.”

Cyrene let out a long, slow breath. Her tightly wound nerves finally found a brief sanctuary of relief within this absolute time-frozen domain.

She raised a slender finger and gently swiped across the empty void, manipulating the space exactly like a touchscreen.

The frozen image on the giant monitor began to flow forward at her command.

She watched as the beast’s impossibly thick arm swung forward with explosive violence. A jagged chunk of concrete, easily the size of a basketball, ripped out of its grip. Carrying a terrifying amount of kinetic energy, the projectile flew on a flawless, lethal trajectory aimed directly at the exact spot Cyrene had been standing.

Scattered around the monster’s heavy feet lay the broken remnants of black tentacles. It seemed the young girl had desperately tried to intercept the attack, but the sheer disparity in physical strength was simply too vast. She had possessed no means to halt that living cannonball.

“So it’s a long-range throwing attack…”

Cyrene narrowed her eyes, her sharp gaze tracking the exact flight path of the massive stone.

With a subtle shift of her thoughts, the screen instantly transitioned from a fixed angle to a sweeping God’s-eye view.

From this elevated, omniscient perspective, the battlefield became a sterile grid. She could perfectly calculate the stone’s exact landing coordinates, its parabolic flight arc, and its total area of destructive coverage.

It was no different from solving an open-book physics exam.

“Linear trajectory. Extremely fast, but zero mid-air directional shifts.”

Cyrene rubbed her chin, her mind rapidly constructing a flawless evasion model.

‘If I move two steps to the left… No, the kinetic splash of the shattered gravel will still catch my legs.”Back up? Too late. The initial velocity of the throw is far too high for a reverse dash.’She stared unblinking at the screen, running the physical simulation through her head several times until she finally locked onto the perfect sequence of movements.’As long as I drop my center of gravity to the absolute minimum and execute a forward-right roll the exact millisecond the concrete leaves its hand, I can use that ruined flowerbed as hard cover…’

Cyrene physically rehearsed the muscle memory of the action within her mind, confirmed the timing was flawless, and nodded in quiet satisfaction.

This was the true, terrifying nature of Memory Imprint.

It was never just a tool for looking back at past Remembrance. It was an all-powerful tactical sandbox that granted her infinite thinking time in the middle of a life-or-death crisis.

“Plan confirmed.”

Cyrene snapped her fingers, her voice a soft whisper in the dark.

The colossal screen in front of her instantly shattered, dissolving into countless motes of golden light that surged forward and drilled directly into the center of her forehead.

The comforting darkness rapidly receded, and the chaotic, deafening clamor of the real world crashed back against her eardrums like a violent tide.

“…ne!!!”

The tail end of the young girl’s desperate warning had barely finished leaving her throat.

Cyrene’s physical body moved before her conscious mind even needed to issue the command.

There was not a single trace of panic in her execution. The exact millisecond the monster’s arm snapped forward, she lunged aggressively to the front-right. Tucking her knees to her chest, she curled into a tight ball and rolled nimbly across the dust-choked asphalt.

Whoosh— Boom!

A fraction of a second after her silhouette cleared the impact zone, the massive block of concrete whistled through the empty air where her torso had just been. It slammed with devastating force into the brick wall directly behind her.

The structural integrity of the wall instantly failed, collapsing into a violent shower of pulverized brick and blinding white dust.

Cyrene had already used the kinetic momentum of her roll to pop back onto her feet. Aside from a thin layer of gray dust clinging to the hem of her skirt, she was completely unscathed.

She even possessed the sheer audacity to casually pat the dirt off her sleeves before resuming her steady, calculated sprint.

Standing far in the distance, the young girl witnessed the entire impossible sequence. Her hand, which had been frozen mid-air clutching a glass test tube, began to tremble violently. Her knees finally gave out, and she slumped heavily against a nearby wall, looking entirely drained of life.

“Th-thank god… she actually dodged it…”

With shaking hands, she tipped the recovery potion into her mouth. The violently bitter liquid burned as it slid down her throat, forcing a faint, desperate hint of color back into her pale, exhausted face.

“Does this woman… have eyes on the back of her head?”

The young girl muttered to the empty air, her wide eyes tracking Cyrene’s fluid, almost artistic evasive maneuvers with absolute disbelief.

If she had been the one targeted by that last strike, she knew with absolute certainty that she would have had no choice but to take the lethal impact head-on.

Yet Cyrene seemed to possess the terrifying ability to foresee the future itself, executing every single twitch of her muscles with millimeter precision.

Gritting her teeth, the young girl forcibly swallowed down the agonizing fatigue burning through her veins and pushed her remaining Ability to the absolute limit.

“No. I refuse to be dead weight here…”

Fresh clusters of shadow tentacles violently erupted from the cracked pavement. While the sheer volume of the summons was noticeably thinner than before, the angles and precision of their strikes had grown far more vicious and unpredictable.

Running effortlessly at the front of the chase, Cyrene heard the heavy, thudding sounds of pursuit resume behind her. The corners of her lips curled upward into a faint, highly amused smile.

‘Memory Imprint really is entirely too useful.’She maintained a perfectly steady jogging pace, silently reviewing the flawless execution of her previous maneuver.’When observing Remembrance, not only can I smoothly swap between a first-person view and a God’s-eye perspective, but I am also granted near-infinite processing time within that isolated space.’

She still had absolutely no idea why she possessed such a logically broken, rule-defying function as a God’s-eye perspective. How could a physical human being possibly perceive the exact details of an attack originating from their own blind spot?

But a lack of understanding was never going to stop her from abusing this ability to its absolute maximum potential.

Since it was her ability, its existence was perfectly reasonable.

In the span of just a few short minutes during this chaotic chase, she had already triggered Memory Imprint at least four or five times.

Every single time the beast raised its heavy arms to strike, and every single time the environmental variables shifted, the entire sequence was violently paused, broken down, and carefully analyzed within her frozen space-time domain until she extracted the absolute optimal solution.

In this brutal, unforgiving game called Reality, she had successfully enabled an official, system-sanctioned cheat code: Pause and Think.

“As long as my stamina holds out, you are never, ever going to catch me.”

Cyrene threw a casual glance over her shoulder at the exasperated, roaring monster, a flash of cunning, predatory light dancing in her eyes.

In this deadly game of cat and mouse, the absolute rhythm of the hunt was already resting comfortably in the palm of her hand.