While Schicksal deployed dedicated satellites to pinpoint Honkai Beast clusters, Vanilla was left to do things the hard way.
She relied entirely on her own senses, tracking trace amounts of Honkai Energy drifting through the air—levels so minuscule that even Schicksal’s high-precision instruments would struggle to detect them—as she painstakingly hunted down the beasts scattered across the frozen barrens.
“Meow…”
Even a spirited Herrscher has her limits after trekking for hours on end.
Whenever Sienna headed out on a mission, she had a private jet at her beck and call.
Vanilla, on the other hand, had nothing but her own two legs to carry her across the drifts.
After detecting a faint Honkai signature earlier that morning and spending hours sprinting through the deep snow, Vanilla was finally taking a breather under the skeletal branches of a lone tree.
She was only a short distance from her target now; she just needed to recover her strength before moving in for the kill.
“If you’re really that exhausted, you should just find a Honkai Beast to ride,” a voice teased.
Vanilla was in the middle of pulling a Honkai crystal from the Theater of Domination’s subspace to replenish her energy.
Usually, the rift would snap shut the moment she retrieved what she needed, but this time, the fissure widened.
Two unfamiliar figures stepped out from the void.
“Meow?”
Vanilla looked them over.
Their appearances were completely foreign to her, but the Herrscher Core throbbing within her chest could feel it: they were Herrschers of Dominance, just like her.
“It’s us,” one of them said.
Every Herrscher radiates a unique Honkai signature.
Even among the individual puppets of Domination, there are subtle variations that set them apart.
Walking right up to Vanilla, Sienna let her energy flare slightly, allowing the girl to get a proper “read” on her.
“Meow!”
Once she confirmed that the stranger standing before her was indeed her boss in a new skin, Vanilla pointed toward a distant horizon.
“Cecilia, you feel that, don’t you?”
Now that she was no longer shackled by her former identity, Cecilia had joined Sienna to execute the next phase of their plan.
Sienna had transferred her primary consciousness into this puppet body before returning to the Theater of Domination with Cecilia.
When she had sent Vanilla out alone earlier, Sienna had instructed her to keep a tiny “anchor” rift open through her core.
It was a shortcut that brought them right to her side.
“That Honkai reaction… it’s faint, but distinct,” Cecilia noted.
“It feels like a powerful beast that’s either mortally wounded or locked in a deep slumber.”
Now that she possessed a physical form again, Cecilia had truly stepped into her role as a Herrscher of Domination.
Following the direction Vanilla pointed, both she and Sienna picked up on a volatile yet waning Honkai pulse.
“At least Emperor-class, and heavily damaged,” Sienna murmured.
After days of the same grueling routine—travel, hunt, repeat—Vanilla had finally reached the epicenter of the Honkai Eruption.
Sienna wasn’t entirely sure if the creature ahead was her true objective, Benares, or some undocumented Emperor-class beast.
“I suppose we’re doing Schicksal a favor by thinning the herd,” Sienna added.
While B-rank Valkyries were usually tasked with mopping up lower-level Honkai thralls, engaging an Emperor-class beast typically required a squad of A-ranks or a single S-rank to ensure everyone made it back alive.
Back in the day, Theresa had earned her promotion to S-rank—and convinced Otto to grant her the Oath of Judah—only after successfully soloing an Emperor-class beast.
Even if these monsters had been weakened by Honkai fission bombs at the heart of the battlefield, they remained a lethal threat.
“Next time, remember: ride a beast. Don’t walk,” Sienna reminded her.
After swallowing the Honkai crystal, Vanilla’s stamina bounced back in an instant.
The trio began their trek toward the source.
The dense concentration of Honkai Energy in “hot zones” didn’t just spawn monsters; it birthed nightmare weather.
After walking for a while, the terrain gave way to a wasteland of solid ice.
“Is that… Shub-Niggurath’s lance?”
As they crunched across the thick permafrost, Cecilia spotted something glinting beneath the surface.
Frozen deep within the ice, amidst shattered branches and stones, were several shards of red that shimmered under the pale sun.
Cecilia rushed over to inspect them.
“It’s Shub-Niggurath’s weapon.”
Even though it was shattered into fragments, Cecilia—as the captain of the Snowwolf Squad—instantly recognized the remains of ‘Murmuring Carnage,’ the weapon belonging to Shub-Niggurath.
With a flick of her wrist, a lance bearing a striking resemblance to the Abyss Flower materialized in Cecilia’s hand.
CRACK!
She knelt to retrieve the shards, tucking the relics away.
Knowing she was standing on the very ground where her teammates had fallen, a shadow of grief crossed her face.
“If these are the remains of the Snowwolf Squad, then Benares must be right under this ice,” Sienna concluded.
In the final moments of the battle against Benares, Shub-Niggurath had driven her lance into a wound previously opened by Siegfried’s Shamash.
Using the lance’s high-frequency vibration, she had taken the dragon down with her in a final, mutual destruction.
The three continued forward for a short distance until they finally saw it: Benares, encased in a tomb of ice.
“Are we really going to wake her up?” Cecilia asked.
The enemy that had slaughtered her friends lay right before her.
If it weren’t for Sienna’s plan, Cecilia would have ended it right here, driving her lance through the dragon’s heart to finish the job once and for all.
“If we want to stop more tragedies like this from happening, we need her strength,” Sienna said firmly.
Sienna knew that in Benares’ heart, there was only loyalty to Sirin.
The dragon would do anything to return to its master’s side.
She also knew that to a Valkyrie, this creature was a monster that needed to be put down.
But in this world, right and wrong were rarely that simple.
Sirin had brought this catastrophe down as an act of vengeance against the world.
Yet, the research into artificial Stigmata—the very thing that sparked it—had also been a tool to fight the Honkai.
Everyone believed they were the hero; everyone believed they were the victim.
“The ice is a bit thick here,” Sienna noted.
As the epicenter of the freezing disaster, the ice surrounding Benares was several times thicker than what they had walked over.
“Vanilla, looks like you’re up again. Sorry about that.”
Sienna’s current puppet body wasn’t carrying any heavy weaponry.
Her usual threads of Domination and Cecilia’s lance weren’t exactly suited for excavation work.
Of the three, the only one with the right tools for the job was Vanilla and her claws.
“Meow!”
Vanilla raised her claws, shrouding them in a searing coat of flame to help melt through the ice as she began to dig.