"Hey you from HQ? Intelligence?" The commander asked me while gesturing to the Alloy Dominator, which had the safety on and was sitting in my lap.
My Alloy Dominators were a Schicksal weapon, Kiana's dual pistols were a custom order from Siegfried and Cecilia for the original Kiana, and Mei's shotgun was a civilian model, both did not use Honkai. Bronya was not visibly armed with Project Bunny stored in its quantum sheath.
I don't know why the Valkyrie thought I was from Intelligence, maybe from the fact that I was not wearing a Valkyrie battlesuit. Or maybe the Alloy Dominators were only issued to Intelligence agents, which didn't seem likely given how conspicuous of a weapon it was.
Saying yes in response was undoubtedly a terrible idea, since a quick communication with Schicksal HQ would prove it false, and I really didn't know anything about intelligence Valkyries. Saying no could potentially get them taken away. Which might actually not be that much of a problem now that I had my 'basic attack' and was now theoretically safe in Schicksal custody, so it's probably fine.
"No." I said simply, I was going to expand on that before realizing that silence was a good tool in this situation. Don't give up any information unnecessarily, that also applies to Kiana and Mei, I needed to get them to shut up and not talk for now. Mei was easy but Kiana, even trying to get her to discreetly shut up is more likely for her ending up being confused, and drawing even more attention. As for Bronya, I was less concerned.
"Whats the story?" The Valkyrie seemed concerned. Of course, she was probably concerned that some agent was still in the city, or had died.
I didn't really know what to say, I could always blame it on Siegfried, but in a way that implied I didn't really know them.
I gestured to the display in the air in the middle of the patrol ship.
"They gave me this gun, didn't say anything about it really. I had to figure it out myself." I pretended like the second Alloy Dominator in my backpack didn't exist. I really should have put this one in the backpack with the other.
The commander took the Alloy Dominator from my hand, then handed it to the Valkyrie next to her.
"Scan the tag and figure out who it was issued to." The commander spoke.
After a moment, they also decided to take Mei's shotgun and Kiana's pistols, which she attempted to object to.
The other Valkyrie turned the gun over and scanned the bottom tag with their HUD cameras.
"Last issued in 2013, no name listed on the requisition form, no mission details either. Marked as lost." They reported.
Probably some poor intelligence Valkyrie from Schicksal HQ that got tasked with monitoring Siegfried's actions at one time or another, and ended up getting disarmed.
The commander suddenly spoke up. "New orders from Central just came in, we are to attempt to eliminate Siegfried, orders from Eastern states to try and acquire information about the Herrscher from Siegfried and attempt to capture him. Hyperion says to try and acquire information from Siegfried first, and only attempt to eliminate Siegfried on their go-ahead."
Kiana, sitting next to me, opened her mouth, obviously about to go off on them about how Siegfried was her dad, and that nobody was going to kill him besides her. "Hey! That's my…"
I kicked her in the leg.
"OW! What the hell did you do that for?" Kiana said, obviously not realizing that it was probably not a very good idea to tell a shuttle full of people that the person they were just ordered to eliminate and one of Schicksal's most wanted was your dad.
I just stared at her with an annoyed face, since I couldn't exactly say to shut up out loud.
She started to speak up again and this time Mei, who seemed to sense my intentions, elbowed her politely, getting her to stop talking, before smiling at her and pulling Kiana's hand into hers.
This drew even more attention from the Valkyries than Kiana yelling at me had, everybody in the patrol ship looked at Kiana and Mei holding hands and ooded a bit before the Valkyrie next to the commander elbowed the commander a couple of times, causing her to blush slightly.
We were now hovering just above the Hyperion, the pilot of the patrol ship touched down on the carrier's surface, a few seconds later the door was opened and we were pushed out of the patrol craft and onto the deck, before several of the Valkyries lined up in formation.
Looking back towards the ruined city for a few seconds, I looked around to see nobody else on the deck of the Hyperion.
Honestly the deck and the size of the Hyperion was much smaller than I had imagined.
The doors on the far end of the Hyperion's deck slowly opened up, revealing Murata Himeko dressed in a much more mechanical looking battlesuit than shown in the game.
The Valkyries saluted Himeko as she approached. She turned to us before saying, "These are the survivors?"
"We found them on the rooftop nearby the source of the distress signal, which vanished right before we were within visual range." The commander spoke.
"Well, good job surviving, someone will be out here in a moment to help you." Himeko said before boarding the patrol ship.
A few seconds later the patrol ship took off vertically, flying back towards the city. Looking around the deck again, I saw someone approaching from the direction of the hanger that Himeko had exited from.
She was wearing a suit and tie along with heels, she had black hair and square glasses. I didn't recognize her.
"Follow me," She said simply, before turning back around and walking back towards the hanger.
The four of us started following her, as we entered the hangar I saw a couple more small landing craft. Looking even smaller and more cramped from the outside than it had felt on the inside.
I thought we would continue down the middle of the hanger towards the large cargo elevator at the end of it, but instead we turned near the entrance and through a side door in the hanger, leading to a small hallway that ran parallel along the hanger wall, walking down the hall to the 'back' of the hanger, there was a more normal sized elevator.
The person we were following, whose name I still didn't know, asked, "Are any of you injured?"
"We are fine! I am super strong!" Kiana proclaimed.
They looked at Kiana skeptically after that proclamation, and scanned each of us to confirm her words.
"We did not come under attack while we were waiting for rescue, all the beasts in the entire city seemed to beeline away from us, towards the center of the city." I explained.
The elevator arrived, and we entered. She pressed deck 3 on the elevator's touchscreen, and the elevator started to descend.
Nobody said anything, and I still thought that remaining as silent as possible was a good idea. I also didn't want to go to medical for a check-up, since that might expose the fact that my body contained 0 Honkai energy, which wasn't really possible even with Scharic blood.
The elevator opened on the second deck, and we entered out into an identical looking u shaped hallway, however the long ends of the u now ran the length of the ship, not just the hanger, so it was longer, and there were more doors on each side.
We continued to follow the person-whos-name-I-didn't-know until we reached another seemingly random door, this one with the label, "Temporary Storage 3C". She opened the door, and motioned for us to enter the storage room. Walking inside, it was surprisingly large, and almost completely empty. The person-whos-name-I-didn't-know said "Wait here for now. Someone will come in a little bit to check up on you and make sure you are alright."
She left and shut the door, leaving us inside.
Well, I guess that was that. I expected something… a little more?
I expected to either be brought to a medical room as a survivor of a Honkai eruption, or be brought to someone for interrogation/debriefed on our experiences. But we were just getting shoved into a temporary supply closet.
However I noted that this room did have cameras, and possibly microphones on those cameras. While they seemed completely unprepared they might be monitoring us in our "natural" environment, without anyone else around.
Kiana was the first to speak, "So they are just going to leave us in the supply closet? What the hell man!"
I decided that it was a good time for floor time, and sat down on the floor with my back to the wall, before saying, "They might be completely unprepared for rescuing survivors, or maybe they have bigger things to deal with, like this Herrscher they mentioned."
"What do you mean…" Kiana looked at Mei, then at Bronya, then stopped talking.
Looks like she didn't think about the cameras, but she did at least know how to shut the fuck up infront of Bronya, who supposedly didn't know.
Bronya had presumably also noticed the cameras, and was also remaining silent, or just had nothing to say. She also decided to lay down on the floor.
Schicksal and the crew of the Hyperion were probably trying to figure out exactly who we were right now, lucky for us the far Eastern Branch wasn't exactly Schicksal intelligence when it came to funding information about people, but they undoubtedly had identified all of us through our records. Hopefully, unlike Bronya, they hadn't noticed that all my identity documents were updated exactly 6 days ago at the same time, and that I didn't have any historical records that weren't in the form of official documents.
So, Otto wanted Siegfried dead, that was no surprise. The Far East Branch, presumably Theresa Apocalypse, didn't really want Siegfried dead, but couldn't really do anything about it, besides attempt to delay giving the order to eliminate him.
I didn't expect them to actually succeed in killing Siegfried. Him destroying nearly ¾'s of the entire city was a testament to his newfound strength. He was a S rank Knight after all.
I was a bit worried about what would happen when they found out that Siegfried hadn't actually killed the Herrscher.
In the original Escape from Nagazora states that the Hyperion was ordered to attempt to capture the Herrscher alive.
Well they technically had the Herrscher in captivity in this random supply closet, but didn't know it.
How long would they stay here, working on trying to identify survivors and trying to find the missing Herrscher?
The best bet was probably to inform Himeko, or someone else trustworthy, that Mei was the Herrscher, and tell them that they were human, or as human as they could be. They would then interrogate Mei, who would suggest the whole dumb heart bomb thing, proving that she cared about not killing everyone more than her own life. The kind hearted Himeko would then take pity on Mei, and probably attempt to get her into St. Freya, just like in the original.
That way, and after failing to eliminate Siegfried, the Hyperion would leave Nagazora and start heading back to St. Freya Academy.
I didn't really trust anyone on the Hyperion more than Himeko, and given the kind of person she was, she would probably attempt to comfort us in person as the Captain of the Hyperion after it was all over, which gave me a chance to inform her about Mei.
Looks like I was in for a long and boring wait. Who knew how long the confrontation with Siegfried would last, and when Himeko would come back to the Hyperion.
I still had my backpack, with the Alloy Dominator in it, and the 2 baseball bats, which was probably the best disguise for the fact that my backpack had a gun in it, and my laptop, which presumably got fried by Mei's EMP blast.
I didn't really want to open my backpack to confirm, since I didn't want to get my other gun confiscated as well. So for now, I had to accept the fact that it was dead.
Luckily all my game saves were cloud based.
A.N Early chapter today for hitting the #8 power stone ranking and not because I accidentally hit upload while trying to schedule it.