Honkai Impact 3rd: My Days as a Captain in Schicksal

It wasn't because the room was very tidy.

It wasn't because two zombies, seemingly completely dead, were lying quietly on the bed in what appeared to be a bedroom.

It's because... it's too quiet.

This house was so quiet, it was as if there had never been an explosion, and as if there wasn't a single summoned assassin lying in ambush inside.

But Keng Huo could sense the unique aura of the summoned assassins, an instinct cultivated through years of hunting.

She seems to be in... the room across the street, very close to me.

·

With a solemn expression, Keng Huo drew his knife. This eerie house always made him very uneasy. He would rather face a Honkai Beast that would start fighting right away than face this scene that seemed like something out of a horror movie.

Keng Huo quietly walked to the door across the street.

The door was spotless, as if it had been recently wiped down; there wasn't a speck of dust. Above the door hung a small sign with the following written in the language of the Far Eastern tribes:

"Ryota's room."

Keng Huo swallowed hard, carefully placed his hand on the doorknob, and gently pushed the door open.

The room was quiet, but he could feel a gaze fixed on him.

Keng Huo's gaze was fixed on the wardrobe by the window. He could feel something peeking at him through the gaps in the louvered wardrobe. Knowing that he didn't have time to hold out any longer, Keng Huo tightened his grip on the knife hilt, and with a sudden burst of power, he charged towards the wardrobe like an arrow released from a bow.

But just as he rushed halfway there, the wardrobe door suddenly opened, revealing a pale, sickly face with an eye patch covering its eyes among the clothes racks.

As expected, summon the assassins!

The summoner seemed to be startled and suddenly screamed. The rolling sound wave, carrying the unique telekinetic power of the summoner, rushed towards Keng Huo. Keng Huo felt dizzy from the sound wave, and the strong telekinetic power pushed him, preventing him from getting closer. It even slowly pushed him towards the door.

Just as Keng Huo was struggling with the telekinetic power, a coffin suddenly flew out from the clothes next to the summoner and smashed hard towards Keng Huo.

Keng Huo had no choice but to dodge immediately, using his telekinesis to push himself backward and hide in the corridor.

To Keng Huo's surprise, the summoner made no further move, and her screams and telekinesis abruptly ceased.

Without time to think too much, Keng Huo knew this was an opportunity to avoid a lot of trouble. He stomped against the opposite wall and used the recoil to rush back into the bedroom. In an instant, the willow-leaf knife in his hand flashed with countless blades. Amidst the chilling light, the coffin that was blocking Keng Huo and the summoned assassin was pushed aside by Keng Huo with one hand, enveloping the terrified summoned assassin under a barrage of blade shadows.

"Seven Ripples... Flash!"

The knife seemed to possess an unstoppable will, easily breaking through the telekinetic barrier of the summoned assassin, tearing the assassin's defenses apart as easily as tearing a piece of paper.

Throat, skull, heart, joints, arteries—every vital organ was pierced by Keng Huo with the ease of taking candy from a baby.

Keng Huo deftly shook the blood off the knife, his strange feeling growing stronger.

This summoning of assassins... gave Keng Huo a very strange feeling.

Actually, he was already nervous when he first launched the surprise attack on the summoned zombies. Because the combat area was small, if the summoned zombies unleashed a Honkai energy shockwave at that moment, he would probably be reduced to the most basic particles and dissipate into the air within a second. His initial thought was to forcibly interrupt the opponent's attack before they could unleash the Honkai energy shockwave, but...

The summoner simply pushed him out using telekinesis.

It's like... a young girl whose home has been broken into, screaming in terror, throwing everything she can grab at the intruder, trying to get him out of her room, as if she'll be safe as long as he doesn't enter.

But how can this make sense? All the information so far regarding this race of summoned assassins indicates that these assassins prefer to live alone and always wander around by themselves...

Keng Huo suddenly recalled the action of the summoned assassin who threw the grenade he had thrown in out the window, and his disbelief deepened.

He couldn't help but start looking around the room.

The room wasn't big, and you could tell it originally belonged to a little boy. On the desk was a photo frame with many children wearing baseball caps and smiling happily with their arms around each other's shoulders. On the bookshelf were elementary school workbooks and Gundam models. There was also a Kira Yamato poster on the door. Next to the bed was a skateboard and a baseball bat, and on the windowsill was a small potted plant. You could tell that the original owner of this room was probably a little boy who loved sports and had a passionate fantasy.

But apart from that, the room's decorations and furnishings seemed rather eerie... or perhaps more accurately, terrifying.

Next to the photo frame was a zombie head, which was slightly rotten and emitted a foul odor.

Besides the Gundam model, there was a bottle full of water on the bookshelf. The bottle, which had been tightly capped, had fallen over due to the aftershocks of the battle. Inside the bottle, several white eyeballs were bobbing up and down.

The soil of the small potted plant on the windowsill smelled foul, like blood. Next to it was another flowerpot, which contained soil and a severed hand that was not stained with any blood.

Not to mention the zombie corpse firmly nailed to the wall next to the door. The zombie's eyes had rolled back, revealing large areas of white, its head drooping limply, and its hands and feet nailed into a strange position.

This scene could be placed in any 18+ horror game without any post-production editing and become a classic scene.

At this moment, Keng Huo, who was in the middle of it, felt increasingly terrified.

He silently crouched down, watching the summoner he had just killed. Her body was slowly disappearing, vanishing into the air like snowflakes. This was the common phenomenon after all summoners died, leaving no remains behind.

This phenomenon further confirms that Keng Huo had indeed killed a summoned assassin.

But...this room...it's just...

Keng Huo felt uneasy; a chilling sense of dread had been with him ever since he began to look around the room.

Chapter 80: The Nest of Summons...or Home?

Keng Huo leaned against the wall with a solemn expression, as if deep in thought.

He wasn't impatient; instead, he gradually searched for the most primordial starting point from the tangled mess, and then developed his ideas from there.

Keng Huo picked up his personal data terminal and started organizing his thoughts from the very beginning of the battle, recording several important points of doubt.

"First of all, the way a summoning mage summons inside the abyss is by the coffin splitting open, not by the Honkai energy vortex summoning used by this suicide soldier just now."

"If my guess is correct, then summoning mages use two different summoning methods: summoning inside the abyss and summoning in our world. Obviously, summoning inside the abyss is more convenient."

"Then why is that...? Could it be that the special environment in the abyss made it easier for the summoning mage that Kiana and the others faced to create zombies? But were the zombies really created by her?"

"Assuming... assuming that in our world they use the skill of [summoning], then in the Abyss it's more like... they were created on-site..."

"Can this really be explained by the high concentration of Honkai energy inside the Abyss, which makes it easier for them to create suicide zombies? I don't agree with that view."

"But where exactly did things go wrong..."

Keng Huo felt extremely annoyed; the impatience of having a puzzle before him that he couldn't solve made it difficult for him to calm down.

But since there are so many mysteries surrounding the summoned assassins that even destiny cannot explain, there's no point in speculating here. It's better to get down to business.

And there's something else that needs explaining...

Keng Huo looked around the eerie room, his sense of unease growing stronger as he gazed at the strange decorations.

He jumped out of the window and stood in front of the fence gate in the yard. He tried to pull the gate, but found that the lock was rusted and he couldn't pull it at all.

Keng Huo looked around the house. It was clean and tidy. The lawn in the garden had been mowed, but it was obviously done by a novice. Some parts were uneven, and some soil was even exposed, like scars on the grass.

Beside the path leading directly to the door was a dog kennel, and a dirty paw was sticking out of it.

Keng Huo slowly walked over, squatted down, and dragged the puppy, which only had half a body left, out of its kennel, examining it carefully.

The eeriness in his heart intensified. He couldn't tell how long the dog had been dead, but judging from the degree of decomposition, it shouldn't have been long, or rather... was it a zombie dog?

Many animals in Changkong City have been corrupted by Honkai energy and turned into all sorts of strange creatures, but they have not died. Obviously, this dog with scales on its head is one of them.

Keng Huo put the dog's body down and pushed open the half-closed door.

The arrangement in the porch was strange; the shoe cabinet not only had shoes, but also many other odd things.

Soy sauce, cosmetics, packaging boxes—these seemingly similar-sized items filled the shoe cabinet to the brim.

Keng Huo walked through the corridor and into the living room, only to find a scene almost identical to that of a normal home. Neatly arranged sofas and cushions sat on floors that looked as if they had been carved by a knife and axe. The trash can was half-filled with rotting human parts, and the coffee table was littered with many things that shouldn't be there: shoe boxes, face wash, pot lids, and even a withered foot...

There were large patches of bloodstains on the sofa and walls, which had been wiped clean.

Keng Huo silently opened the refrigerator, staring blankly at the unrecognizable food and other inappropriate items inside. The refrigerator, long since out of power, had stopped working, and some of the contents were rotting and stinking, even producing stringy residue…

Keng Huo slammed the refrigerator door shut, his face ashen. He deeply regretted his impulsive action; the scene inside the refrigerator was truly indescribable, and he probably wouldn't even be able to eat his energy bars afterward…

Suppressing his nausea, Keng Huo, holding onto the handrail, went up to the second floor to check the bedroom where the assassin had been staying once more.

This time, he made a new discovery. On the bed covered by the blanket, there was the corpse of a small zombie. It was obvious that it was a child before it became a zombie. Judging from its size, it was only six or seven years old. In a daze, Keng Huo remembered the small sign hanging on the door: Ryota's room.

Ryota, it sounds like a boy's name.

So, could this severely decomposed corpse be Ryota?

Suddenly, Keng Huo finally understood where those strange feelings came from.

He hurriedly jumped out of the window again, went into the yard, carefully looked around, then squatted down and rubbed the marks on the bluestone slabs by the lawn that looked like they had been slashed by a sharp blade.

All the clues were reassembled in his mind, then strung together with all sorts of incredible phenomena, finally piecing together what he thought was the story closest to the truth. His eyes were fixed on the gate, as if looking at something that didn't exist in the air.

He seemed to see a figure, a figure using telekinesis to drag a bunch of strange but beautiful and interesting things to the door.

Keng Huo squatted down and touched the obvious marks on the path where a hard object had struck.

...She used telekinesis to throw the things into the yard, then used teleportation to enter the small yard, happily picked up the pet puppy, played with it for a while, and then put it back in the kennel so that it could rest well.

Keng Huo pushed open the door, whose handle had been violently twisted off.

...The figure's hands were bound by the straitjacket on its body, and it was unable to manipulate such an exquisite object with telekinesis. Perhaps due to some oversight, the doorknob had been unscrewed.

Keng Huo walked into the living room.

...The figure casually arranged today's spoils according to her own aesthetic sense, and then threw some rotten corpse parts into the trash can.

Keng Huo slowly walked up the stairs, his right hand absentmindedly stroking the clean handrail.

...The figure looked at the dusty house, seemingly dissatisfied. The two coffins that had been hovering beside her flew out and summoned two servants who obeyed her every word.

Keng Huo's hand touched a broken handrail, and he suddenly remembered a strangely dusty rag he had seen in the bedroom where the summoned assassin was located.

...But these servants were clumsy and would break things in the house, so in the end I had to do it myself, using telekinesis to grab a rag and clean the house. At first I was not used to this kind of work that required precise control of force and angle, but after I got used to it I did a great job.

Keng Huo gently pushed open Ryota's door.

...I'm home! So happy! Let's put away all the toys I collected today!

...Hmm...I'll play with my favorite doll for a while first!

...No, that won't do. The "Mom and Dad" shreds from a few days ago, so we need to replace them!

Keng Huo looked at the small, severely decomposed corpse and couldn't help but swallow hard.

...Has the potted plant on the windowsill rotted again? That's strange, why doesn't the other one? And it's even growing?

...Hang this up too, and make it look like the person in the painting...Wouldn't it look similar if you positioned this leg like that?

...So soft and comfortable! No wonder the little doll likes to lie on it!

...I found this doll when I first came here. It's been with me for a long time, and I can't bear to replace it even when it's broken.