Honkai: Fire Moth Herrschers

Dark and enclosed, that was Mikael's first impression after landing.

Or rather, this was how it should have been after falling.

The thick ice surface was an abnormal blue-black color. Sunlight could barely penetrate, leaving only an extremely dim glow.

Mikael pointed to the large hole above them, over a hundred meters away, and said to Hua, not without self-deprecating humor:

"Looks like we're really frogs in a well now."

But Hua didn't respond. She frowned, looking around at the mostly dim surroundings, instinctively feeling that something was off.

The cotton blankets that Mikael had created had long disappeared. However, she was still wearing the dog-fur hat. It was surprisingly hot underground, hot enough to make her head spin. She quickly took off the hat and smoothed her sweaty, tangled hair…

That's it! Hot! How could it be hot here!

She quickly pressed her hand against the ice wall beside her, but the wall was still as cold as ice. It was as if the heat only existed in the air.

Mikael could guess her thoughts just by looking at her movements. He closed his eyes, seemingly pondering something, but he didn't forget to educate Hua:

"That stifling heat is what that man emitted while fighting last night. I'm sure of it. So, what you should be worried about isn't the heat, but what caused that heat-- this underground ice cave, the ice city, and the blue-black ice that won't melt even at this temperature... What is the culprit behind all this?"

Hua was startled--that was right! She had been preoccupied with other thoughts, and had lost the most basic battlefield awareness of a soldier. She hadn't even noticed this until now…

"Careful!"

Mikael suddenly opened his eyes. A honeycomb-shaped Void barrier expanded on his right side. The next moment, the ice wall there glowed crimson, melting rapidly in 0.1 seconds.

By the time Mikael's voice reached Hua's ears and the information was processed by her brain, flames surged out like a river breaking its banks, splitting to flow around the sides of the Void barrier.

When the flames subsided, the ice walls around them began to crumble, but Mikael showed no intention of retreating. Instead, he grabbed Hua and jumped into the hole that the flames had created in the ice wall.

This time, the hole wasn't too deep. At least, Hua only counted one second before her feet touched the solid ice surface...

Ice surface?

To be precise, a damp ice surface scorched by flames.

"Not good!"

Her feet kept sliding forward, while her body stayed in place, and her body leaned back due to the movement of her feet...

But that was fine. She had practiced martial arts since she was a child. A mere ice surface was nothing to worry about.

Mikael thought the same thing. He was a Herrscher after all, and his physical abilities far surpassed a superhuman's. A mere ice surface was nothing to worry about.

"Ah!"

"Oww!"

The two figures, one big and one small, slid at the same time, then sat up, rubbing their butts at the same time.

"Boom!"

Hua was just about to get up, when a huge shockwave made her slide again, face-planting onto the ice. However, her eyes remained fixed on where the shockwave had come from--

It was a Honkai beast that was a hundred meters long, and looked like a mixture of a… cow and a pig. Its body was originally supposed to be black with blue patterns, but under the scorching heat of the flames, large patches of the Honkai beast's skin were peeling off, revealing light purple wounds. Countless fragments of Honkai energy were leaking from the wounds.

The shockwave was from the Honkai beast, but not from its own movement:

The man's figure was tall and straight, but compared to the Honkai beast he was holding onto... no, even compared to the beast's fangs, which usually took three or four men to embrace, his body was so small, so easy to ignore…

But the truth was: the small man was tightly hugging the Honkai beast's fangs. He roared in a crazed, muffled manner, slamming the Honkai beast into the ice surface again and again.

The ice crystals that flew up even reached Hua hundreds of meters away, grazing her cheek and nearly drawing a long scratch on her face.

"Kalpas!" Mikael shouted.

His voice echoed in the gradually melting ice cave, already carrying a viscous and chilling undertone.

Kalpas stopped what he was doing, turned his head, and immediately recognized the boy who had fought him last night.

"Kalpas... is he calling me? Hmph..."

The creature that would later be classified as a Emperor-class Honkai beast by Fire Moth, Parvati, took the opportunity to drag its massive body, trying to escape.

"Huh?"

Kalpas just snorted coldly, and Parvati didn't dare make another move—except for trembling.

Mikael took two steps forward, although these two steps looked insignificant amidst the hundreds of meters separating them.

"Kalpas, I think we should talk."

This was what he had wanted to say a long time ago. He had never come to pick a fight with Kalpas... He thought that no one, except maybe Mobius, could win an argument against Kalpas.

He really just wanted to present the facts, reason with him, and then trick the man into coming with him. That's all.

But… but Kalpas had attacked first!

"Oh? Talk? What do you want to talk about? Tell me."

The mocking smile on the corner of Kalpas's mouth was clearly reflected in Mikael's eyes. He sighed, knowing that reasoning was probably too much to hope for… In the end, only fighting would satisfy him! Kalpas!

But he still decided to try. So, with deep emotion and tears welling up in his eyes, he said something that made Hua both confused and goose-bumped:

"Kalpas, come with me, I can give you a home!"

"..."

"..."

Kalpas was stunned for a good three or four seconds, before coming back to his senses. He asked in disbelief, "What are you saying? What are you saying? A home? You want to give me a home?"

"Hahahaha! Hahahaha! Ah hahahahaha!"

He laughed wildly, exaggeratingly, his body rocking back and forth.

The echo traveled through the ice cave and into Mikael's ears, causing his eardrums to ache.

"A home? Hahaha! I had a home—a home that you destroyed! Bastard!"

After saying the last word, Kalpas suddenly threw Parvati.

Parvati's body was too huge, and it immediately filled Mikael's vision.

But he wasn't afraid. He was about to use his spatial powers to shred Parvati, but his expression suddenly changed!

A golden light had just begun to glow around him, but it quickly vanished. He had forcibly suppressed it. At the same time, the Wanderer's giant mechanical arm appeared out of thin air, and a chain sword appeared from its wrist.

The blade sliced Parvati almost in half with a single swing.

"Kalpas, stop it!"

"Shut up!"

His whole body was burning with flames. He rushed out from behind Parvati's corpse, and before the mechanical arm could return to defend, he punched at Mikael's chest.

Even then, Mikael didn't use his spatial powers. Instead, he used his other hand to block the punch, forcefully taking the blow.

"Boom!"

Mikael's feet sank into the thick ice floor, leaving two long scratch marks until the heel of one foot finally reached the wall.

The hand holding Kalpas's fist was stinging from the heat of the flames, already smelling like grilled meat.

"Kalpas, listen to me!"

"Listen to your ass!"

"If we keep fighting, we'll both die!"

"Then let's die together!"

Kalpas was relentless, and his other fist headed towards Mikael's head without any warning.

This time, there was no choice. He could only activate the Third Herrscher's power and turn into a bolt of lightning. He dodged Kalpas's punch by moving to his side, then he quickly picked up Hua, who had been knocked away by the shockwave, and leaped back.

Red... he really hadn't lied. The moment he was about to use his spatial powers, he could clearly feel that if spatial power was like an ocean current, most areas were calm and flowed in an orderly fashion, but some places had "currents" that were too weak, forming a "vortex," that churned and pulled in the surrounding space.

It was at these "vortices" that space was weak, and thus suitable for tearing open spatial rifts, performing phase shifts or phase deflections, or summoning Void lances.

But when it came to the space in this ice cave... there was one large vortex, and a countless number of small vortices were closely packed all around it.

There were barely any gaps between them, and with just a little bit of outside force, they could easily tear a small vortex apart, which would trigger a chain reaction and trigger the largest vortex, forming a huge rift—and with a huge rift like this that wasn't created by him, even with his spatial powers as insurance, he couldn't decide where it would lead...

That external force could be Mikael's spatial powers, or it could be the shockwaves from Kalpas's violent fighting.

Mikael didn't know how this vortex had formed. Perhaps the space in the ice cave was inherently fragile, and then it was violently destroyed by Kalpas, making the entire spatial structure increasingly fragile, and closer to collapsing.

If they didn't escape, and that rift sent them to fight the sun face-to-face, what would they do, wait to die?

Even if he couldn't use his spatial powers, even if he couldn't move at the speed of light while carrying Hua, Mikael believed that with the Third Herrscher's power, his speed would still be faster than Kalpas...

Huh? His ankle was grabbed!

"Crap!"

Mikael quickly hugged Hua tightly, then he felt dizzy. His back slammed heavily into the ice surface.

"Cough!"

A few drops of blood that he coughed up splattered on Hua's forehead. He realized that he couldn't continue like this. He was about to tear open space to escape, no matter the cost.

But the worst thing possible happened.

A huge suction force pulled him in, and in just a split second, Mikael, Hua, Kalpas, half of Parvati's corpse, and large chunks of the ice surface were sucked into an unknown space.