The lunar surface bore the scars of a battlefield—craters and scorched earth, the remnants of humanity's desperate final stand. Vill-V and Mobius stood amidst the remnants, their gazes fixed on the colossal form of the Herrscher of Finality, who loomed silently in the distance. Vill-V adjusted the weight of the Penrose Lance on her shoulder, its unstable energy pulsing with a rhythm, one that seemed to resonate with the very fabric of reality. The weapon was a culmination of their combined genius, a final gambit against an adversary that defined comprehension.
Mobius was the one who broke the silence. "The calculations are complete. The Lance will destabilize the Herrscher's core, but the feedback will be catastrophic.
Vill-V could only offer a wry smile. "Catastrophic is the theme of the day, is it not?"
They moved with purpose, each step bringing them closer to the launch platform. The lance's containment field flickered, barely holding the energy within. Time was a luxury they no longer possessed. They shortly reached the outer rim of the observation deck. The glass long gone, shattered when Finality descended, but the frame remained—a jagged window to Earth, the stars, and to the end of their dream.
Mobius set down a functional field generator. It hummed to life, casting a veil around them that might give them five, maybe ten seconds of shielding against the Herrscher's awakening.
Vill-V stared out at the stars, thoughts distant.
She didn't speak.
She pulled the Penrose Lance from her back, slowly, reverently. Her hands didn't shake, she didn't let them. The casing was etched with makeshift inscriptions—not prayers, not really. Names. Equations. A fragment of a lyric Elysia had once hummed. She didn't remember writing most of it.
She slotted the Lance into a support structure they'd welded into place. Nothing more than a frame cobbled from drone limbs, a torn down cannon, and whatever scrap metal they could find.
Mobius began linking the last sequence into the control node. "Firing angle is within acceptable deviance," she muttered. "There's no room for a second shot."
Vill-V nodded, half-present. Her gaze was on the Lance. Her mind drifted.
She stood in silence for a while, inside herself.
The Lance rested in her mind the same way it had rested on her back :awkward, humming in wrong frequencies. It wasn't built to be carried. It was meant to be fired, then forgotten.
A weapon that asked no forgiveness, nor permission. Only proof.
Her fingers drummed once along the side of it, the gesture almost absent-minded. She had said it earlier, flippantly, but now it returned with weight.
"This isn't a beam. It's a question,"
What was the question, really?
Was it: Can Finality bleed?
Or: If I throw a contradiction into the end of everything... does it hold?
Perhaps it was simpler.
Maybe it was: Will anyone remember that we even asked?
She didn't know. Not fully.
And that was the point.
The Penrose Lance didn't carry an answer. It carried a refusal – a refusal to accept that this was how things ended.
She believed in questions—the kind that could burn holes in the scripts reality tried to write.
Even if no one read them.
Even if she never saw the aftermath,
'Let them remember the echo' she thought. 'If not the girl who screamed, then the question she dared to ask.'
Mobius finally tapped the control node. "Payload integrity stable. Locking temporal sync. Once the charge ignites, it'll use its own spatial instability to find its mark."
Vill-V turned her gaze away from the starts. She stepped forward and placed her hand on the activation pad.
The Lance began to glow.
Mobius didn't stop her. "We could still evacuate. Get back to the colony hangar. It's not optimal but—"
Vill-V looked at her. "You don't believe that," No accusation, just stating the fact.
Mobius didn't respond. Her eyes returned to the sky. The Herrscher shifted again. Closer. Stronger.
Vill-V exhaled slowly. "Then let us begin! Our Final Act! HERRSCHER, BARE WITNESS! THE MIGHT OF THE ASPIRATIONS YOU'VE CRUSHED! THE WEIGHT OF OUR SHATTERED DREAMS!"
With a grandiose flick, she slammed her fist and triggered the launch sequence
The Penrose Lance surged.
A burst of blue-white light roared from its core, devouring the air in a pulse that wasn't heat, wasn't energy, but something else entirely. Space itself curled like paper, folded into impossible angles.
"Know this, Honkai! Humanity will defeat you! No matter how many times you push us to the brink, we will always. Always come back!"
The Lance screamed.
The sound wasn't audible, yet it moved through space like a sickness, folding it into something unrecognizable. A beam of blue-white impossibility launched through the fabric of space. The metal cradle holding the Lance twisted, then burst apart. But the shot was already gone.
No trail. No arc.
Just absence.
It disappeared from the frame the instant it fired, warping straight into the overlapping dimensional membrane around the Herrscher's form.
And then—
Light. No explosion. No detonation. Just undoing. An error message in the program of existence.
Reality hiccupped.
Like someone had asked it a question so violently that the universe forgot the answer it was giving.
The Lance struck the Herrscher just as she started to move, not as energy, but as a contradiction. The core of her body spasms. Layers of her fractured form twisted outward. Her aura surged. Then recoiled. Then tore.
Light burst from the impact point, it wasn't an explosion—it was an unmaking. Every ring of light that pulsed from her was a version of reality crumbling. Cities. Oceans. Faces.
Memories unspooled like film across the sky.
Mobius fell to one knee, struggling to shield her face from the radiation pulse. Vill-V remained standing—eyes wide, mouth slightly open.
She was seeing them.
All of them.
Elysia, laughing again under the sun.
Kalpas, towering and furious, but still booming with laughter.
Sakura, peaceful. Laying under a Sakura tree with her sister in her embrace.
Kevin, smiling and laughing while hugging Mei.
Eden, performing in front of the world, uplifting everyone who hears.
Pardo, giggling and playing with her cats, Can managing to stay sleeping on her head.
Aponia, smiling gently as she watches children play.
Su, patting a child on the head as he discharges them from the hospital.
Kosma, surrounded by friends.
Griseo, being allowed to be a child and paint as she pleases.
Hua, teaching martial arts to her students in her dojo, smiling proudly.
Mobius, complaining to Klein about her work.
And finally herself. Smiling with all of them once more. One last time.
She couldn't help but smile, a singular tear rolling down her cheek.
They were the ghosts of choices. Visions of paths not taken. Possibilities they were never allowed.
The Herrscher screamed. A deep, layered wail like a choir being torn apart.
Her body split—not exploded—fractured from within, caught in recursive error.
Reality couldn't decide what she was anymore.
And so it stalled.
On Earth, a dozen hidden domes flickered with life as the shot's fallout reached low-orbit detection array.
In the chamber where the cryogenic pods lay, Kevin watched the impact light streak across the sky from a screen. It was silent from this distance, but it illuminated the entire sky.
He turned to the others.
Su, face drawn, exhaled. "They did it."
Eden let out a shaky breath and touched her earpiece. No signal.
"They're not responding," she whispered.
"They're not supposed to," Kevin reminded. "She's still up there."
They stood in silence as the light lingered in the sky. The Earth groaned. The Herrscher was staggered, but not yet finished.
"Cryogenic pod fully charged. Project Sanctuary is ready." Echoed out around facility.
Everyone knew what they had to do now. Humanity shall rise to the surface once more.
Mobius grunted, body shaking as she staggered to her feet.
"Exposure limit breached," she stated numbly, before look up at Vill-V
She was just standing still, reaching out to something that wasn't there.
"Vill–" As she called out to her Vill-V fell to her knees, body covered with bright pink circuit-like patterns.
Mobius could see her face–pink lines encroaching everything. She was crying—the kind of sobs that came not from pain, but the unbearable weight of memory. Her face was streaked with pink-stained tears.
Yet her lips were curled into something that might have been a smile—or perhaps just the final echo of peace. Her eyes were wide, distant. Locked in a memory.
Mobius saw it clearly—there was no light behind those eyes. Vill-V was already gone.
And she could feel herself fading as well. Looking down, she sees her arms covered. Her vision starts to give in, everything blurring until she could no longer see.
But she could still see the light from the Herrscher.
The Judgement they wrought upon her. A twisted, corrupted judgement. Human Judgment.
A Judgement that'll make sure the Herrscher of Finality will reach her end. At the hands of the humanity that she destroyed.
And by the two who bought the rest enough time, at the cost of everything.