Once the Honkai Beasts swarmed before Sienna, they weren’t met with an order to charge alongside the Herrscher and slaughter humanity.
Instead, they met a cold farewell.
“Goodbye.”
Sienna, a self-proclaimed president of the “Pretty Faces Club,” saw no reason to keep them around if they couldn’t even manage to be cute.
She spread her arms, releasing a web of shimmering threads that instantly ensnared the pack.
Whimper…
The beasts realized something was horribly wrong as their Honkai Energy began to bleed away at a terrifying rate.
After a few feeble cries, the once-energetic horde collapsed into a collective heap, their life force completely drained.
“Now that’s what I call a successful haul.”
The energy she’d harvested was over ten times what she’d spent to catch them.
“Not a single Zombie in the bunch?” She mused, looking over the remains.
Without energy to sustain them, these fallen beasts—a mix of Vanguard, Super-Vanguard, Knight, and Chariot classes—would eventually dissolve into nothingness.
Yet, among the pile, there wasn’t a single human-based Zombie to be found.
“Maybe they’re just too slow to keep up with the beasts,” Cecilia offered.
Compared to the various animals mutated into Honkai Beasts, the Zombies—once human—were noticeably weaker in stature.
With their small frames and stiff limbs, they were naturally no match for the beasts’ raw speed.
“Fair point.”
Accepting Cecilia’s explanation, Sienna sank back into her chair and picked up her book.
“I can’t focus on this at all,” she groaned after a few pages.
Bored, she tossed the book back into her bag.
To prevent the premature emergence of a Herrscher, Schicksal and Anti-Entropy had a silent pact to lock away any civilian applications of the Previous Era technology they unearthed.
If Sienna wanted to play video games, she’d have to wait for the world’s technology to crawl forward at its natural, agonizingly slow pace.
“I shouldn’t have killed them all so quickly,” she muttered.
The other Valkyries on her flight hadn’t even reached their destinations yet, and Sienna was already dying of boredom, wondering how she’d kill the rest of the day.
Since Cecilia was currently a spirit and couldn’t touch physical objects, a snowball fight was out of the question.
Sienna had resorted to sitting in the snow making snowmen when a few Scythe and Ranger Zombies finally crested the distant horizon.
Unlike the game, where every Zombie of a certain type looked like a carbon copy, the denizens of the real Honkai world possessed slight, individual variations in their features.
As they approached, Sienna fixed her gaze on a Ranger Zombie that stood roughly at her own height.
“What are you doing?” Cecilia asked.
She assumed Sienna was about to plant a Herrscher Core into one of them, much like she had done when empowering Vanilla earlier.
Instead, Sienna simply drove her Threads of Domination deep into the creature’s body.
“I’m crafting a suitable vessel,” Sienna replied.
Curiously, the voice didn’t come from her own lips, but from the mouth of the Zombie she was currently restructuring.
“I suppose this is my unique little quirk.”
She tore open an entrance to her theater of Domination within the Ranger Zombie’s chest.
By extending a thread from her core housed within that pocket dimension, she took direct command of the form.
“It’s like splitting my consciousness. I can perfectly inhabit two bodies at once, with no delay or loss of awareness between them.”
Sienna and her new double paced back and forth, putting on a small show for Cecilia.
This “one soul, two bodies” trick was exactly what she needed for the schemes she’d been brewing.
“That ability definitely suits you,” Cecilia remarked.
Being a Valkyrie offered Sienna many perks, but it also kept her on a short leash.
With a double, she could bypass Schicksal’s surveillance without having to resort to faking her death or going rogue.
“There are a few more bodies here,” Sienna noted, glancing at the remaining Zombies.
“Want me to prep a temporary one for you?”
“Let’s give it a try.”
Seeing how effortlessly Sienna steered her puppet, Cecilia felt the itch to walk the world in a physical form again.
“It’ll be a bit of a fixer-upper for now,” Sienna cautioned.
“Once we can raid Schicksal for your genetic data or a proper clone, we’ll get you back to your old self.”
“Knowing Otto, he wouldn’t let your ‘Holy Blood’ go to waste. After losing you, he’s almost certainly using your DNA to mass-produce clones to harvest that power.”
Sienna selected a Scythe Zombie and began the modification process, chatting casually about their future plans.
“That does sound like something the Overseer would do,” Cecilia sighed.
The blood in her veins—the power to suppress the Honkai—was the result of Otto’s relentless experiments and genetic tampering.
In the years since her “success,” she hadn’t heard of a single other clansman achieving the same result through the same agonizing process.
“The thought of people with my face being manufactured in some dark lab… it’s unsettling, to say the least.”
“Well, the next time we see Otto, we’ll just have to give him a proper thrashing to vent some steam.”
Using clones to fight the Honkai might have been a noble goal on paper, but doing it without Cecilia’s consent earned him a beating in Sienna’s book.
“Done.”
The “modification” was essentially a massive injection of Honkai Energy.
As the former human organs were corrupted, some were annihilated while others warped into the strange, resilient tissues that powered a Zombie.
With this surge of power, the body was finally strong enough to house an active Herrscher Core.
Cecilia’s spectral form drifted toward the Zombie, her essence retreating into the core.
Under Sienna’s guidance, the Scythe Zombie caught the floating gem and pressed it into its own chest.
Sienna severed her link, stepping back to wait for Cecilia to wake.
As the core integrated, the creature’s appearance began to shift.
The scythe it held dissolved into mist, and short, snow-white hair began to sprout rapidly from its scalp.
“I guess the body really does follow the soul,” Sienna whispered.
The transformation slowed once the Zombie’s features reached a seventy percent resemblance to the original Cecilia.
Exhale…
The eyes fluttered open—no longer the dull gold of a monster, but a vibrant, living blue.
“How does it feel?” Sienna asked, handing her a small hand-mirror from her pack.
“It feels… fragile,” Cecilia murmured, looking at her reflection.
“But it has potential.”
Even with Sienna’s power boost, the body was only mid-tier by Zombie standards.
Cecilia was careful not to let the full might of her Herrscher Core loose just yet, fearing she might accidentally shatter the very vessel that allowed her to feel the world again.