Honkai Star Rail: Summoning the Chrysos Heirs — Chapter 60

Chapter 60: Total Collapse

“The defensive line of the Western Ruins is about to collapse completely?”

That single sentence struck Lei Zheng’s taut nerves like a physical blow. He whipped his head around so fast his cervical vertebrae let out a sharp crack. His pupils trembled as he stared across the table, his Adam’s apple bobbing with immense difficulty. He wanted to open his mouth and question the sheer absurdity of such a conclusion, to demand evidence, to laugh it off as a grim joke.

But out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of the man seated beside him.

Chen Su sat upright in the seat of honor. His face, which usually commanded absolute respect without ever needing to show anger, was now so dark it looked ready to summon a thunderstorm. A sudden chill raced up Lei Zheng’s vertebrae straight to the crown of his head. He forced himself to swallow the question burning on the tip of his tongue, his stomach clenching into a tight knot.

The private room fell into a deathly silence. Even the artificial chill blowing from the central air conditioning seemed to freeze mid-air, thickening the atmosphere until breathing became a chore.

Chen Su neither refuted the claim nor admitted to it. He simply stared fixedly at the elegant woman sitting across from him, his eyes narrowed like a fierce tiger whose innermost territory had just been casually trampled. That gaze carried a literal, physical weight. An ordinary person would have been trembling under the sheer pressure of his scrutiny long ago, begging for permission to leave.

Aglaea merely looked down at the tea leaves floating gently in her porcelain cup. She watched the swirling green patterns with mild interest, acting as if the suffocating low pressure radiating across the table did not exist at all.

“Dr. Lin. Director Lei.” Chen Su finally broke the silence, his voice raspy and dangerously low. “I will have to trouble you two to step out of the room for a moment.”

Lei Zheng felt as if he had just been handed a royal pardon. He stood up so fast his knee slammed into the heavy chair leg, but he ignored the stinging pain. Lin Bowen pushed up his glasses, his gaze darting briefly between his superior and the unfathomable woman before he composed his features and followed closely behind.

The two men quickly exited the room. The heavy mahogany door slowly swung shut behind them with a solid thud, sealing the impending storm inside.

Seeing the interlopers leave, Chen Su leaned forward, drawing a breath to speak and wrest control of the conversation back into his hands.

A light, airy chuckle rang out abruptly.

Aglaea set down her teacup. The fine porcelain clinked crisply against the matching tray, a delicate sound that somehow overpowered the heavy silence. She tilted her head slightly, her golden eyes shimmering with an amused light. Her gaze did not land on Chen Su. Instead, it swept meaningfully over an empty, shadowed corner of the ceiling.

“Since the unrelated personnel in the light have made their exit,” Aglaea murmured, raising her hand to lightly tap the empty air with a slender fingertip. “Should we also ask those two listeners in the dark to leave first?”

Chen Su’s fingers, which had been resting casually on the armrest, locked into place.

The security level of this specific room was classified as top secret. The positions of the hidden sentries were calculated with architectural precision, their breathing and thermal signatures completely masked by specialized equipment. Even top-tier Sensory-type Ability Users would struggle to detect a single trace of them. Yet this woman not only knew they were present, she had pinpointed their exact blind spots without even looking.

A faint, imperceptible cold light flashed in Chen Su’s eyes. He did not panic. Instead, he forced his breathing to steady, brutally suppressing the rising turmoil in his chest as he re-evaluated the terrifying entity sitting across from him.

“No need.” Chen Su leaned back against his chair. His voice was steady and powerful, carrying the unquestionable authority of his station. “Since Miss Aglaea has already discovered them, their presence or absence makes no fundamental difference.”

It was a flat refusal, a silent demonstration of power. Even if she could see through his defenses, this was still his territory, and he made the rules.

“I see.” Aglaea nodded slightly, her tone indifferent. She did not press the issue.

Seeing that she was no longer pestering him about the guards, Chen Su’s taut nerves did not relax. If anything, he became even more vigilant. He picked up his own teacup but did not drink, using the rising curtain of steam to mask his scrutinizing gaze.

“Miss Aglaea, you just used a supposed crisis at the Western Ruins as an opening to demonstrate your intelligence capabilities.” Chen Su set the cup back down. His tone was level, completely devoid of personal emotion, projecting a businesslike certainty. “While I admire your environmental perception, it seems there is a rather large discrepancy in the timeliness of your military intelligence.”

“Discrepancy?” Aglaea repeated the word softly. Her tone remained as flat and unbothered as before, lacking even a fraction of nervousness. “What makes you say that?”

Facing this seemingly ignorant question, Chen Su did not show any contempt. On the contrary, he spoke as if reciting a long-settled historical document, his words rigorous and composed.

“I will not deny that a week ago, a serious energy fluctuation did occur at the Erosion Rift of the Western Ruins.” His fingers tapped lightly on the table, the rhythm as steady as a precision clock. “A high-level Abomination tore through the blockade, forcing the front line back three kilometers. That was indeed a rare moment of crisis for us in recent years.”

At this point, Chen Su looked up. His gaze burned with intensity as he looked directly into Aglaea’s golden eyes, searching for a single ripple of doubt in those calm waters.

“However, this crisis came to an end in yesterday’s Decapitation Operation. The Task Force successfully killed the Alien Species Mother Body. According to the battle report finalized as of this morning, the defensive line has been pushed back to the very edge of the rift, and all energy readings have returned to normal.”

He leaned forward slightly, interlacing his hands on the tabletop, speaking with the absolute control of a man who held the world in his palm. “So, Miss Aglaea, if the total collapse you mentioned refers to that concluded battle, then your intelligence is indeed somewhat outdated. The Western Ruins are currently in perfect order.”

Chen Su waited.

He waited to see a hint of shock from the woman after her grand bluff was dismantled. He waited for the panic that came when a negotiator realized their primary bargaining chip was entirely invalid.

He was disappointed.

Aglaea remained in her elegant, detached sitting posture. Not a single fold of her skirt was out of place. In those golden eyes that seemed to see straight through the fabric of the world, not even an eyelash flickered. She looked at Chen Su the way a seasoned director might look at an actor on stage who was deeply invested in his performance, yet had been reading from the wrong script since the curtain rose.

“Director Chen.” She spoke, her voice soft yet possessing a strange, piercing quality, as if the words were echoing directly in the deepest corners of his mind. “The defensive line of the Western Ruins has collapsed completely.”

That exact sentence again.

Chen Su’s brow furrowed. He tapped his knuckles against the table twice, producing a dull, heavy thud. He did not get angry, but his eyes held a touch of genuine helplessness toward someone so stubbornly clinging to a failed lie.

“Miss Aglaea, I thought we had reached a consensus on the matter of tense. Yesterday’s action report…”

“I heard you.” Aglaea interrupted him, her voice light as a feather.

She tilted her head, her gaze passing right over Chen Su’s shoulder to look out at the gray, overcast sky beyond the window. Her eyes did not focus on the glass or the clouds. It was as if she were looking through hundreds of kilometers of concrete and earth to witness some horrific scene currently unfolding in real time.

“The Decapitation Operation was a brilliant tactical victory. It is much like using an exquisite, beautifully embroidered patch to temporarily cover an ant colony that is about to burst through a rotting dam.” She withdrew her gaze and looked back at Chen Su, whose face had grown slightly stiff at the casual dismissal of his authority. “But what I am describing is not the peril from five days ago, nor the victory from yesterday.”

Aglaea raised her hand. Her slender index finger pointed directly toward Chen Su’s secure phone, which rested on the top right corner of the mahogany table.

“I am giving you a preview. A glimpse of intelligence that is currently being transmitted through the airwaves, and is about to arrive on your desk.”

“Absurd.” Chen Su snorted coldly. He leaned back, clearly having lost the last dregs of his patience with this charlatan and her theatrical prophecies. He reached his hand under the table, his fingers brushing against the concealed dismissal bell to call the guards.

Buzz.

A sharp, ear-piercing vibration exploded without warning in the silent room.

The black secure phone vibrated violently against the hard wood, the screen lighting up with blinding intensity. On a glaring, blood-red background, a line of bolded emergency communication codes flashed frantically, casting a crimson glow over Chen Su’s rigid face.

His finger froze inches from the hidden bell. His pupils contracted instantly to the size of pinheads.

A Level 2 Combat Readiness Alert.

It was a specific, terrifying signal triggered only under two conditions: the complete fall of a primary front line, or a catastrophic, large-scale monitoring anomaly.

In an instant, Chen Su felt as if his heart had been seized by an invisible, crushing grip. He snatched the phone off the table, his knuckles turning stark white from the sheer force of his grip. He took a sharp, ragged breath and slammed his thumb against the answer button.

“Speak.”

There were no screams of dying men, as he had braced himself to hear. Instead, a massive wave of chaotic background noise surged from the receiver. It was a cacophony of absolute institutional panic—dozens of phones ringing endlessly, the frantic, machine-gun clatter of keyboards, and voices shouting over one another in rising hysteria.

Then, the head dispatcher’s voice broke through the static.

The man spoke with terrifying speed, his words laced with uncontrollable anxiety and raw shock, yet he desperately tried to maintain the rigid orderliness of a military report.

“Director! Something has happened! Just a minute ago, all vital sign monitoring signals at the Western Ruins… they dropped to zero simultaneously!”

There were no desperate cries for reinforcements, only a deep, shuddering terror in the face of the unknown.

“It is not an equipment failure. We have already checked the primary and backup systems. At that exact moment, all data streams from the front-line positions and the outposts around the rift were completely severed! We cannot contact a single unit of the garrisoned troops!”

The dispatcher’s voice cracked, revealing a terrifying coldness that bled through the speaker.

“It is as if… it is as if everything there just vanished from the radar into thin air. The entire Western War Zone has become a total blind spot!”

Beep. Beep. Beep.

The communication had not been cut off, but Chen Su could no longer process the frantic reports spilling from the device. The monotonous, rhythmic tone of the alert system in the background was like a rusty saw, dragging back and forth across his fraying nerves.

Total silence across the line.

If it had been a fierce, losing battle, there would at least be the chaotic spikes of energy fluctuations. If it had been a crushing defeat, there would at least be scattered distress signals from the survivors.

But there was nothing. Only a deathly, absolute silence that had swallowed thousands of lives in an instant.

Chen Su remained frozen in his seat, the phone pressed tightly to his ear. He looked as if his spine had been surgically removed. His usually steady, majestic face was now completely drained of blood, turning the sickly, hollow gray of dead ash.

The private room fell back into a deathly silence.

In the midst of this suffocating, world-ending quiet, Aglaea gently blew the gathering steam off the surface of her tea. She brought the rim to her lips and took a slow, appreciative sip of the fragrant brew.

The curling white vapor drifted upward, slightly blurring her flawless features. From the very beginning to this exact moment, her expression had not changed at all.