Five people in the West Asia Branch that Ling Ke kept filed away, not out of anger. Anger had a shelf life and his expired years ago, so he simply remembered them the way a man remembers debts.
Three were doctors.
Dr. Antonio never smiled, only read numbers like heart rate and blood pressure and cellular decay thresholds, while what the body on his table felt as he pushed it past those thresholds did not register as data worth collecting. If Ling Ke had been anything less than irreplaceable, Antonio would have killed him half a dozen times over without once looking up from his clipboard.
Dr. Egas was the one who kept pulling him back from the edge, though not out of mercy. Egas needed the subject alive the way a farmer needs a cow alive, and every time he stitched Ling Ke back together he said the same thing.
"Your suffering serves a purpose, you know. My research through you is what gives humanity its chance against Honkai, so persist. Not everyone gets to contribute under the care of someone like me."
Famous last words from a man who spent his off-hours muttering about why someone of his caliber was rotting in a branch office instead of working at Schicksal headquarters. He talked about the Valkyries like they were personal insults, where Durandal, the most celebrated of them all, was just a naive little girl "riding her bloodline to fame" in his estimation.
Some of those evaluations Ling Ke did not disagree with, though that did not make him hate the man any less.
Dr. Moniz was a middle-aged woman, a loving wife and devoted mother who wanted her children to live well, and she had found a way to make that happen.
The scientists at the West Asia Branch had known for years that Anti-Honkai serum synthesized from Ling Ke's blood outperformed anything the other branches produced. Moniz used her access to skim from the top, high-grade serum diverted and resold to the powerful, politicians along with executives and military brass. Naturally, she kept a healthy reserve for her own family.
Ling Ke knew this because he had learned to wake early from sedation. His body adapted to the drugs faster than they expected, and sometimes he came to while they were still talking. He lay still and listened as every word became another entry in the file.
Because of her side business, the rate at which they harvested him had increased by a measurable margin. She loved her family that much.
For these three, Ling Ke had already decided how to entertain them.
Then there were two more.
The Branch Commander, a Sethian who ran the entire operation.
And the captain of Silver Lotus Squad.
Two active Valkyrie squads were stationed at the base, Silver Lotus along with Crimson Wings, each led by an A-rank captain while B-rank members filled out the roster. Standard deployment.
Silver Lotus was captained by Edelweiss Even.
Beautiful girl with golden hair and blue eyes, skin like porcelain, the kind of angelic face and figure that made people forget to think. Top-class by any measure of appearance alone.
She and the Branch Commander were the ones who had found him, identified what made him special, then kept him.
Ling Ke later learned they had done this before, many times over. The methods varied between tricks and lies and outright abductions, though the results were always the same. People disappeared into the underground floors, got moved to rooms beside his, and then one day the room was empty while someone new sat in it.
The neighbors changed every few days and the cycle never stopped.
Once, Edelweiss Even came down to his floor. He never knew why, boredom or curiosity or something less than either. She stood outside his cell and looked at him the way someone looks at a stain that won't come out, then the first thing she said was:
"You're still alive? Like a cockroach."
She laughed, bright and genuine like something had actually delighted her, then lost interest just as fast as her eyes caught a dead cockroach on the corridor floor. She kicked it through the bars of his cell without breaking stride.
"Go sleep with your friends."
As she left the corridor Edelweiss imparted her last words to him in a mocking derogatory tone.
"Cockroach."
Inside the Dominion Theater, on the Throne that tethered nine hundred and ninety-nine puppets to his will, Ling Ke sat with his arms resting on cold stone as air left his nose.
He had lived long enough inside this world to know its dark side was not an aberration but load-bearing architecture, the cruelty structural, and all of it something he had experienced personally.
The memory of that word still sat where she had left it. He narrowed his eyes as something behind them shifted, because if that woman wanted to call him a cockroach then he would prepare some cockroaches of his own. Since he was entertaining guests after all, a proper banquet needed proper preparation.
It shouldn't be hard to catch.
The words had barely settled in his mind when the space door opened outside his former cell.
They came out one at a time, Dominance Puppet: Anby, each one identical except for the three-digit number on her back. They did not pause or cluster, every unit splitting toward a different corridor the moment her feet touched the floor.
Then more doors opened. Every hallway the first wave passed through spawned another exit point as more Anby units filed out in neat succession across every floor and every wing until the base filled with them like water finding level.
Ling Ke was not conserving anything, because the Dominion Theater's infinite revival meant he didn't have to. Nine hundred and ninety-nine Anby units, each at baseline while each remained comparable to a B-rank Valkyrie.
For one branch base, it was more than enough.
Through the entanglement link he fed the order across all nine hundred and ninety-nine bodies at once, five targets marked to live because those belonged to him and he wanted to take his time with each one. Everything else from the bottom floor up died clean. The thought of the prisoners surfaced somewhere in the hivemind and he answered it himself, because they were guests too, and it would be rude to leave them out.
Nine hundred and ninety-nine confirmations hit him at once, a single pulse of synchronized obedience collapsing into his awareness like a wave breaking against rock. Understood, understood, understood. The word lost meaning somewhere around the three-hundredth repetition before becoming pure signal.
Then it began.
He didn't see it clearly, because the link gave him flashes instead of footage. A guardsman cut in half at the waist before his rifle cleared the holster. A surgical stroke that took a head clean off the neck. A skull caving inward. A hallway painted red in the time it took to blink. The images layered over each other faster than he could separate them, each Anby unit feeding back a split-second frame before moving to the next target.
Charge, draw, slash. The sequence was the same every time while only the targets changed.
Security personnel died with guns half-raised as civilian staff died on their knees with their hands over their heads. Ling Ke did not sort them, because innocent or guilty, the categories required a conscience and his had been riddled with holes years ago. What remained was simple arithmetic.
He preferred fighting evil with evil, though the World-Destroying Player could not afford preferences right now. He needed to grow and he needed templates.
The points climbed.
1+ 1+ 1+
He tracked the number the way a man tracks a loading bar, waiting for it to reach a threshold that mattered.
1+
'280 points for a single pull.'
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Anyways, how was the changes i made? Because i found the system to be too repetitive and rewrote that part into ling ke's pov rather than you reading the system.
Did it make it sense? I did a bunch of changes tbh.