Fate's Slave - Shadow Slave X Honkai Star Rail

In the following weeks, the activities of the Ghost-Hunting Squad managed to escape the depths of unproductivity. After their first semi-successful mission, they had ran into the trouble of separating real Heliobus sightings from fake ones, and ended up wasting a week of time. After the incident where Sunny got possessed, however, things changed drasticallly.

Despite the fact that nobody on the Ghost-Hunting Squad changed their tactics, they ended up encountering Heliobi more often, to the point of capturing an average of three a night — the preferred active hours for their team. Guinaifen said it was for higher odds of running into the little rodents. Sunny believes it was for the atmosphere.

As time passed, it was almost like all the Heliobi came out of hiding in order to stir trouble, making their job much easier than before.

This satisfied Sunny. He wanted to get this over with so that he could get the Memories promised to him by Jing Yuan. That was his entire motivation for taking part in this, after all.

With time, Sunny managed to formulate an opinion on the girls he was unfortunate enough to be partnered with.

He didn’t like them, if that wasn’t clear enough.

That didn’t mean he disliked them, though.

Over the course of his life, Sunny has met plenty of bothersome individuals. Just the chronicle of his days in the Outskirts was filled with them — some memorable, some not. He’s met people who wanted to kill him, people who had views he didn’t agree with, and people he simply despised on nothing but pure instinct, like that chicken wing boy in the Dreamscape, or Aventurine.

Sunny wasn’t afraid to admit that he was quick to anger. Quick to hate and quick to obsess. But that didn’t mean his life only existed within those extremes.

Huohuo, Guinaifen, and Sushang were friendly enough — though, the first two seemed a little unhinged. At the same time, he often found himself ridiculing them in the back of his head, thinking them foolish and stupid. They were good entertainment, though. It was like he was watching them from behind a screen.

If someone asked him to list their positive traits, he couldn’t quite say. If he was asked for their negatives, however, Sunny could tell them about how unreasonably cowardly Huohuo was, or that Guinaifen was a pyromaniac who looked to explosives and arson as her first resort, or that Sushang was so clumsy that she was effectively useless.

He didn’t feel wronged by those traits, but they were glaringly obvious.

As for the people he did like, Sunny could talk about how hot it was to get pinned to a wall by March, or that Dan Heng was the sexiest woman alive—

Why did everything come down to sex appeal?

...Anyways, positive traits! The Ghost-Hunting Squad had none, so he didn’t like them much. That was how normal people thought, right?

Right.

As the days went by, they found themselves in a plethora of unusual circumstances. Heliobus there, Heliobus here... they took hold of whatever lifeform had emotions they fancied, and consumed them as sustenance.

Sunny couldn’t say he was content that he was relegated to being a glorified bodyguard, but considering he had to do little work, he couldn’t complain much. Instead, he found himself using his time thinking about that little trick he managed when he was possessed, where he was able to manifest webs of shadow from his wrists.

He tried, and although he could somewhat replicate the substance, he had no idea how he managed to shoot them from his wrists. Somehow, he had become a Spiderman clone for a bit, which was fun, if not confusing.

...Kafka was a Spiderman clone, too, though. So she could suffer the curse of unoriginality as well.

Overall, nothing particularly memorable happened. Except for time when Qingque got possessed in the Divination Commission, and Fu Xuan called them over to deal with it. Maybe he was imagining it, but the petite pink-haired beauty seemed to have been glaring at him with her clamped eyes.

The blame was with Nightmare, of course.

And so, the final week of October came rolling around, and with it, all tomfoolery was thrown out the window...

And war was waged.

***

An ornate guandao cut through the air, making it scream as it cut towards Yanqing’s neck. The assault was not even a blur, slicing through space at a ferocity that managed to reach a percentage of the speed of light.

No mere Master could react to such an attack, let alone block it.

Fortunately, Yanqing was no mere Master.

His sword, a dull, bland thing, was already there before his opponent’s attack was even conceptualized, as if he read the future. He held it at an odd angle, curving his body in an extraordinarily dangerous manner as he risked decapitation.

But, with an unusual, sharp grace, he managed to deflect the guandao away from his person. Fluidly, elegantly, and precisely — his blade flowed from his bastardly defensive stance into a downwards cleave, revealing that his intention hadn’t been to defend in the first place.

It had been to strike, cutting his enemy in two. The deflection of the guandao was merely a bonus.

Before his sword could reach his opponent, however, a fist crashed into his torso at lightning speed, forcing him to gasp as every drop of oxygen was forced out of his lungs. He was blown back, rolling and bouncing across the training field until he eventually flattened against the wall. He hung there like an arachnid for a short moment, his expression dazed, before dropping down to the floor with a grunt.

He weakly forced himself onto his arms, turning to his opponent with a wry smile.

"Ah, General... you wouldn’t happen to be possessed by a Heliobus with murderous tendencies, would you? That would be oh so terrible..."

The General, Jing Yuan, lazily twirled his guandao on his finger, as if it were a basketball, before sending Yanqing a placid smile.

"Hm? No, nothing of the sort. Well, if I were to be possessed by a Heliobus, it would be the sadistic and torturous type, not a cold killer, yes? It would be terrifyingly easy to kill you if that were the case."

Mirth twinkled in his eyes as Yanqing rose to his feet.

"It seems I simply forgot my own strength. Silly me! It couldn’t possibly be because I am annoyed that my student sought guidance from my own mentor. No, that would be preposterous."

Hearing Jing Yuan’s dark chuckles, Yanqing shamefully coughed into his fist.

"O—Oh, about that. Miss Jingliu and... the other one. Did they confess to anything? If it’s not classified, that is..."

Jing Yuan waved his worries away dismissively.

"Don’t be foolish. How could details carrying such importance be hidden from you, the future of the Luofu — nay, the Xianzhou itself? It would be a blunder to leave anything hidden from your gaze, should I one day fall and you are to be my replacement."

Yanqing pursed his lips for a moment, before protesting:

"Please don’t say such morbid things, General. I am sure that, if you were to one day fall, it would be in a time far from the present. Even then, I find the very idea difficult to imagine..."

He scratched the back of his head.

"And, er... please don’t expect too much of me. I doubt I could do even half of what you believe I can— argh!"

In an instant, Jing Yuan managed to appear besides Yanqing, a lingering trail of lightning revealing that he used his Aspect to move so quickly. He pinched his ear with all his Transcendent might, causing the young man — for a Xianzhou native, at least — to wince at his master’s strength.

"Nonsense. If you don’t believe in yourself, who will? Oh, wait, that’s me. See what you did, Yanqing? You ruined my daily quote of great wisdom."

The blonde grimaced, still hurting from the ear.

"Sorry?"

"Too apologetic. Just what has that woman been teaching you?"

Jing Yuan released the poor boy, who sighed in relief as he turned his gaze up to the General. They both dismissed their weapons, with Yanqing’s shattering apart and fading in teal motes. The Saint gestured for Yanqing to follow him, and so he did.

As they left the training room and walked through the great halls of Jing Yuan’s grand estate, he began:

"As I am sure you remember, my former mentor, Jingliu, and her foreign accomplice, who goes by the name of Luocha, have both decided to turn themselves in. You do remember, yes?"

Yanqing deadpanned.

"General, I don’t have dementia. I was literally there."

Jing Yuan nodded in amusement, before continuing.

"Despite accepting their chains, the true reason they came was to send a message..."

For a moment, the snow-haired man shivered, golden eyes trembling as he recalled their words.

It was an impossibility.

An absurdity.

An anomaly, one unseen in the ancient history of the Dream Realm, the dark times of the Nightmare Era, and the tense descent of the Post Nightmare Era...

"They knew of a way to kill the Abundance."