Kevin's voice cut the strange calm like a blade. "Leave. Now." He planted himself between the white-sword buried in the ground and the woman on the sakura throne, every inch the sentinel who would not allow interference.
Bronya's engines whined, then lifted. "What do we do, Mr. Walter?" she asked, hovering close to the edge of the shimmering sea. She had inherited Law's power, but inheriting a title was not the same as matching a Herrscher. The Fourth's reputation—and the nameless "Snake" standing nearby—loomed larger than any data point.
Walter hesitated. The man in the core had reasons to move; he also had reasons to stay hidden. If the Snake returned, whatever plan the world had might unravel in an instant. If the Fourth Herrscher chose to act now, the stage here would collapse into ash.
"Keep back," Walter decided at last. "We'll withdraw a short distance and watch. Don't leave the Sea, but don't intervene—yet."
Bronya agreed. She brought Hime up into the small guardcraft with her—protective, watchful. The giant sakura tree seemed to shrink until only Kevin and the woman sat beneath it, the world between them narrowed to a breath.
Kevin drew Shamash free with the quiet of one who remembers the weight of pledges. Memory tempered the old resolve: whatever he had been in ages past, the promise was the same—humanity must stand. He would test the Fourth because that was how one learns an enemy.
Wendi watched him with an expression that belonged on little children's tales—interested, without malice; bored only with things that failed to amuse. "You humans… you always make such a show," she said, voice flat as a bell. "Why not bring your helpers and be sensible?"
Bronya's motordrones pulled them away; the duel, then, would be private. Kevin did not flinch. He could feel the old machinations in his bones; even if his body had not fully returned, his purpose was whole. He raised the sword and unleashed the zero-rated power—Shamash: Drawn—and the Quantum Sea burned brighter than an extinguished star.
Flames poured like an apocalyptic tide, consuming false construct and fractal ruin with the appetite of the old wars. The sky above the Sea fractured in light; the very topology of the quantum realm bent under the onslaught. Walter watched in transfixed horror. That single stroke—unleashed by a man who had barely reached his feet—would have shattered whole ages if given time.
The Fourth did not flee. She brushed at the air with a casual hand and sent the conflagration back like a gust blowing at a candle. The fire pinged against her and unrolled harmlessly into vapor. Kevin staggered, astonished—this was not an effect of a trick or flaw; it was the sort of result that redefined meaning.
Walter felt the last of his certainties peel away. The "low" Honkai signature, the way the Fourth's energy read as quiet on every instrument—none of it matched the sight of her sitting there, absolutely clean, unscathed, as if the sea's most terrible light had been nothing more than confetti. If she could shrug off an apocalypse-strike like a pleasant joke, what force had the world couched as a "Fourth" in reality?
Kevin limbered up for another strike. Again: Draw. Again, an ocean of light. Again, a hand, a single breath, and the flames collapsed inward as though they'd been asked politely not to be flames. Wendi's voice sailed down like a kite on a lazy wind: "Enough."
A silence fell heavier than any blast. The battlefield still smoked, but the woman under the sakura remained. No core remained visible on the soil. No wrecked altar or burned relic bore the imprint of her essence. She had neither fled glaringly—nor left a corpse behind. She was simply where she had been, and in that simple fact was a contradiction.
Walter's hands trembled. He had seen terrible things and endured worse—the memory of constraint-type Herrschers and the end-madness of the ancients was carved in his thinking. Yet this… this was something else. A little, horrifying voice inside him wondered whether the old contingencies—laws made to face Herrschers—actually matched what this entity was.
"You almost look interesting," Wendi said, standing now with bare feet on petal-strewn ground. "Not like the others. I'll let you live… for now. Humans are too small to be entertaining most of the time."
She rose and vanished like a thought—no scream, no flicker of travel, only the soft eddying of petals falling in a place the sword's light had made briefly red. Where had she gone? What core had she taken, if any? Had the Snake and she been cooperating, or were they both predators circling the same carcass?
Walter's face was the exact shape of ruin. Beside him Bronya kept Hime steady; Hime's small hand squeezed the plastic of her seat until the knuckles whitened. They had watched an old man's heart, and the man's weapon, fail to touch the thing that had stolen two cities worth of certainty.
"Is she just a Fourth?" Kevin asked aloud, and the question hung like a challenge: if not a Fourth in the sense they knew, then what? A god? A new class of Herrscher? A construct woven by a power that had watched their civilizations rise and marked them as toys?
Bronya's eyes, for once, could not find an answer. Walter believed in possibility and in plans—but not even he could line up the facts into a comfortable strategy. The Sea sighed around them, and somewhere beyond the threshold a new weather took shape.
Wendi had left them with a petal and a smirk. For now she had gone—and the question she left behind was worse than any blow.
She—really—just a Fourth?
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