Chapter Text
Wendy woke up late.
Not because she had slept well, of course, as that would have been a mercy, and mercies were not something her "handlers" had much use for. No, she woke up late because there was very little point in waking up early.
The first few seconds were always the worst. Not due to any pain, because pain meant sensation, and sensation meant proof that something was still there. It was the lack of pain, or almost any sensation whatsoever, that was the issue, as her legs offered nothing besides a dull wrongness beneath the blanket, as if they were just heavy and troublesome weights attached to her body only by technicality.
For a moment, Wendy stared at the ceiling of her room in the high-clearance sector of the Oceania Branch and pretended she didn't remember how mornings used to feel.
There had been a time when she woke before the alarm. Back then, it had been from excitement. There were training schedules, assignments, written exams she had already studied for twice over, and combat evaluations where she could measure herself against the expectations placed upon her and, more often than not, exceed them.
She had become an A-Ranker at a young age and was well on her way to becoming an S-Ranker, if everyone's opinions were to be believed. A Valkyrie who could soar higher than anyone.
Then, one day, she received an invitation to join an extremely important project in Schicksal's Oceania Branch. A project that, she was told, could forever affect how the organization faced the Honkai, and that was more than enough for her to accept the honor of taking part in it.
And then, after many examinations and trials and finally the implantation of the Gem of Desire, she only received one thing: her body's complete rejection of it. A pair of legs that didn't work, and nothing else to show for it.
After that, the future everyone had spoken of so brightly became sealed behind doors that only opened for people with authorization cards. And her life was reduced to nothing more than… this.
"..."
Wendy turned her head toward the digital clock beside her bed. It was late morning, and all she could feel was surprise that she hadn't slept until midday for once. Her next round of experiments was still a fair way off, scheduled for the afternoon, and that usually meant there was no one to disrupt the peaceful darkness that allowed her to pretend she was somewhere else.
But clearly, with the lack of an external agent to do so, her own body decided that it was a great time to awaken and grant her the opportunity to do absolutely nothing. At best, she could only make an attempt at getting ready before the will to get up escaped her body entirely.
Maybe she would. Why not? She had no reason to, but she also had no reason for anything at this point, and that was its own kind of freedom, no?
She let out a quiet, wry laugh at the thought and raised a hand to her face, pressing her palm over her eyes and breathing in slowly. The room was quiet except for the low hum of the air-conditioning unit and the faint beeping of monitoring equipment, because even when she wished she was alone, she was never truly allowed to be unobserved.
They monitored her because her role was, to put it simply, to be monitored. Her vitals, Honkai readings, Core activity, neural response, and even emotional irregularities were, in theory, important for the project. Countless little invasions of privacy that had become an inescapable part of her life.
Wendy's mouth twisted. Perhaps they would add "unmotivated subject displayed low morale upon waking" to today's report. A little variety to shake things up, at least assuming they had worded the very same information differently each previous day.
She let her hand fall away. All things considered, there was no point in staying in bed. Lying there would not make her legs move, would not make the Gem any more compatible, would not make the researchers stop looking disappointed whenever the numbers failed to justify what had been done to her, and would not even grant her any measure of comfort when she knew their eyes and ears were everywhere, so what exactly did she have to gain by remaining there?
Just like that, she found a perfectly good motivation to begin her routine, and so she started by pushing herself upright. Which, of course, took effort. Not much, not enough to impress anyone, but enough to remind her that even sitting up was a process now that her arms bore the weight her legs no longer could. Her body shifted awkwardly over the mattress, and she caught herself before she could tilt too far to one side.
The wheelchair waited beside the bed, as always, and Wendy hated how familiar its shape had become. She transferred herself into it with the experience gained from daily repetition, jaw clenched through the small indignity of it. One hand on the mattress, the other on the armrest. Lift. Shift. Settle. Adjust.
Done, and to no applause. It was a tragic state of affairs, to say the least.
She looked down at her legs, where they rested uselessly against the footrests, covered by the soft fabric of her sleepwear. Beneath the skin of one calf, the Gem of Desire sat inside her, just powerful enough to make her existence dangerous but not compatible enough to make her of any use.
She knew for a fact, even without anyone saying it to her face, that there was no point in a weapon that could not be fired, and so she was saddled with the knowledge that her very existence was simply a series of misfortunes which Schicksal was still trying to get some value out of.
Wendy wheeled herself toward the bathroom, forcing herself through the same routine as every morning. The mirror greeted her with the same face as always: pale, bearing tired dark green eyes, and framed by overlong black hair that fell messily over her shoulders.
Something about the experiments often made it grow far faster than it reasonably should have, and while a normal girl might have found it odd, the only thought that crossed Wendy's mind was that she should probably cut it at this point.
Unfortunately, that was entirely dependent on successfully managing to care about it, and these days it was a chore to care about anything.
Wendy stared at the mirror for several more seconds, if only because she hardly had anything else to do with her meaningless time. On her mouth was a permanent frown that had found its home somewhere between her third and fourth months of stay.
In a rare moment of curiosity, she made her lips twist upward into an awkward, forced smile.
… No. It was creepy. Enough to make her wonder if the girl in the reflection had finally been taken over by the Honkai. She let it return to a frown, and couldn't quite stop the relief she felt as her expression returned to normal.
Sometimes she wondered how she once managed to smile so easily, because now, just like caring, it was also a chore.
Then, her eyes flicked to the reflection of her hair. There had been a time when Wendy took pride in keeping it neat, but now, most of the people who saw her were researchers, and they cared more about the Gem readings than whether she looked alive.
Still, Wendy reached for her brush.
The motion was automatic. Slow, steady strokes from root to tip. Again and again, until the tangles gave way and the girl in the mirror looked a little less like the discarded doll she really was.
It wasn't done as thoroughly as it could have been, and if anything, it was horribly rushed, barely doing more than keeping her hair in a mildly recognizable shape. Now that there was no one around her who cared enough about her appearing human, she brushed her hair only because she had always brushed her hair.
Routine was one of the few things she was allowed at this point, and so routine was what she followed, if only as part of a hopeless effort to keep herself sane. So Wendy kept brushing, ignoring the growing despair of knowing this would always be her life, that everything she hoped for back at St. Freya was dead and buried, and that no one could change that.
No one. Not herself, not her former principal, whom she was expressly forbidden to contact, and most certainly not even the white-haired girl looking at her with a yellow gaze from the portal in the depressing gray-walled cube that they called her room.
The brush passed through her hair once more, untangling the messy knots with effort, and then she paused, blinking at her own reflection. Slowly, Wendy turned her head, and there, on the wall next to her bed, a thin, glowing fracture split open in the air, hanging over the room, and there, on the other side, was unmistakably a girl.
She had white hair and yellow eyes and was dressed in a loose white dress, as if she had just wandered out of bed. As if that wasn't enough, she held a red bag of snacks in one hand and a snack halfway to her mouth in the other as she stared back at Wendy with a deeply confused expression.
"..."
"..."
The unknown girl blinked, and Wendy politely blinked back as the girl, through some combination of mental gymnastics which Wendy was not equipped to decipher, decided to continue and take a bite, maintaining eye contact as she did.
"Uh," the girl said awkwardly as she began munching, "want some?"
"..."
Wendy's mind, equipped with years of combat training and scarred by months of invasive procedures, arrived at the only sensible course of action.
Which was, of course, to let out a shriek and fling her hairbrush at the invading entity.
The white-haired girl yelped, ducking back just as the portal disappeared, and with its target gone, the brush hit the wall behind it with a loud crack and fractured on the spot.
As its pieces fell, Wendy remained frozen, one arm still extended from the throw, because the wall was whole again, the snack-eating girl was nowhere to be seen, and absolutely nothing seemed out of place, as if she had merely witnessed a passing daydream.
After a long moment, Wendy lowered her arm, and for the first time in recent memory, a single thought pierced right through the veil of hopelessness and despair within Wendy's mind.
"... What."
.
.
.
Wendy returned to her room in an objectively worse mood than when she left it, which was impressive, in its own way, considering that the morning had included waking up — already a negative, as far as she was concerned — and then meeting a snack-eating intruder with glowing yellow eyes.
She, who liked to believe her mind still operated on some measure of common sense and reasonable expectations, would have thought she had reached the ceiling for misery. Unfortunately, the Oceania Branch, it seemed, was often eager to prove her wrong.
The wheels of her chair rolled over the polished floor of the high-clearance sector. She hadn't been given an escort, of course, because she was not allowed even the bare minimum indignity of being pushed back to her room by some junior staff member pretending to be helpful while actually looking at their phone instead of her.
No, they had simply dismissed her.
Dismissed.
As though she had wasted their time by panicking after seeing reality tear itself open in her room. As though the following hours of scans, blood draws, neural-response checks, Gem stability monitoring, psychiatric questions, Honkai contamination analysis, memory consistency evaluations, and one deeply humiliating balance assessment were somehow her fault.
Wendy gripped the wheels a little harder. Her arms ached from the effort of returning to her room, but there was no one to care for such a useless detail. A pair of researchers passed her in the corridor, neither looking away from their tablets.
"Subject's readings stabilized after the initial spike," one of them said.
"Psychological reaction remains disproportionate."
"Hallucination?"
"Likely. No evidence of external breach."
"Camera failure?"
"Localized Honkai interference. Already logged."
They passed by her without slowing down, seemingly not even registering that the subject of their conversation had been right there, or simply not caring for that small detail. Because it was bad manners to offend other humans, but she wasn't one, was she? She was merely the subject of their conversation, indeed.
Wendy stared ahead as she continued on her way.
Subject. Container. Compatibility case. Asset with limited combat value. A body with a Gem in it, wheeling herself down a corridor because the people who cut her open had better things to do than remember she existed outside their reports.
She understood, on a certain level, that her inability to harness the Gem of Desire's power had ruined things, but that did nothing to stop the occasional bitterness from the smallest offenses.
Her mouth twisted as she remembered the words she had been told. The official conclusion, spoken bluntly after the examinations and now kindly repeated to her, had been simply that she had hallucinated.
There had been no strange girl, no portal, no breach, no intruder in morning clothes eating snacks at all, and their proof was that the cameras had recorded nothing useful. According to the researchers, a brief surge of Honkai energy had distorted the footage at the exact moment Wendy claimed to have seen the anomaly, which was, apparently, proof nothing had happened. Somehow.
Wendy, for her part, wasn't entirely sure that followed. If the surge had been real, then something had caused it. If something had caused it at the exact time she saw the portal, then perhaps the portal had caused it. That felt like a reasonable line of thought, but according to her so-called handlers, that was not the case at all.
She had asked, just to be sure, after they had graced her with their stupid conclusion.
The answer she received was a careful, patient explanation, in the sort of tone used for fools, that the Gem of Desire was unstable, that Wendy's emotional state was unstable, that her nervous system had undergone extreme stress, that her sensory input could not be taken as reliable during a Honkai reaction event, and that, generally, none of her words could be trusted on an empirical level, which, therefore, meant that it could only have been a hallucination.
The only alternative explanation was that someone had removed the footage, falsified the report, and allowed the researchers to convince themselves the disabled girl with a Herrscher Gem in her leg was seeing things, and that made even less sense, because why would anyone bother?
If there had been an actual breach, the entire sector would have been locked down. If someone had covered it up, then that meant whoever did so had both access and a reason to prevent the branch from knowing about it, but to do so for Wendy was outright ridiculous.
No one with that kind of authority or ability cared enough about her to deceive an entire facility. She wasn't important enough for a conspiracy, only experiments that had long since ceased to provide important data.
The door to her room opened automatically when her ID was accepted, because at the very least they deigned to give her one, if only so she could open doors herself without bothering or distracting anyone who had more important things to do than babysit their local cripple. Wendy wheeled herself inside and let the door close behind her, observing her surroundings.
The room was exactly as she left it, and she wasn't certain whether to be thankful or annoyed about it. Even the broken hairbrush was still lying in pieces near the wall, so at the very least that was real, unless she had hallucinated throwing it as well.
But at that point she would simply have to wheel herself out again, seek the most important-looking researcher she could find, and either politely request a brain replacement or at least warn them that the Honkai was finally eroding her sanity.
Then again, that would also provide a very good reason to terminate both the project and herself, and Wendy on some days wasn't entirely sure she wanted that outcome, so maybe she should shelve that plan for now.
Wendy stared at the fragments for a moment before letting out a tired sigh. "Brilliant," she said to no one. "Now I need a new brush."
No one answered — or rather, it would have been stranger if someone did. There was no reason for her to have spoken aloud other than mere whim, part of her routine as much as anything else, an occasional reminder of what her voice sounded like on days when she spoke little, which, in retrospect, hardly applied anymore after her attempted report of a portal-creating intruder.
As she retreated to her thoughts, the silence of the room settled around her again. Now, she was too tired to feel much of anything, but once, a lifetime ago, she might have been revolted to know that all she was afforded were gray walls, a white bed, monitoring equipment, a desk with nothing on it that could not be inspected, and a bathroom with only the bare minimum.
This was her home.
Her cage, and not even a decently decorated one.
Wendy rolled toward the bed, stopping beside the wall where the portal had appeared. She looked at it for a long moment, her brain repeatedly noting that there was nothing there, of course, and it would likely be a noticeable divergence from conventional baselines of sanity to expect otherwise.
She leaned back in her chair, eyes narrowing as she muttered to herself, "Idiot… You're actually waiting for it, aren't you."
The wall remained a wall, completely devoid of portals, and that was normal and expected and not at all a reason to be annoyed, but none of that stopped Wendy from scoffing and turning away. "And you tell yourself you're completely sane," she said to no one in particular. "What a joke."
Then, as if to mock her, a strange buzzing noise sounded, and Wendy froze. Her fingers tightened around the wheel rims, and then, very slowly, she turned her chair back around.
A thin, glowing violet line had appeared on the wall, and Wendy wasted no time staring at it with wide eyes as it widened, folding open like a curtain. Beyond it was a room that was definitely not part of the Oceania Branch, and in the center of the view was the girl, who looked almost the same as before but not quite.
She had flowing white hair, golden eyes that now bore a pattern almost like an aiming reticle, and instead of a loose white nightdress, she was clad in a shirt and shorts that looked almost too casual for the situation.
But this time, Wendy noticed, she looked far more composed. She stood beyond the portal with one hand resting lightly near its edge, posture straight and a slight smile on her lips as her golden gaze moved over Wendy's room with a calm assessment that felt almost regal.
This behavior, however, would have been much more convincing if Wendy hadn't first seen her staring foolishly into her room and eating snacks like a raccoon.
"You," Wendy said flatly.
The girl's eyes settled on her. "Me," she agreed.
With that single response, Wendy rather reasonably decided that this girl was annoying and she wanted to throw something at her. She took a moment to look around, but unfortunately, Schicksal had designed her room with very few convenient projectiles.
The closest object was a pillow, and even in her current mood, Wendy had enough pride left not to open hostilities with bedding.
"Your timing is awful," Wendy said.
The girl tilted her head slightly. "So I gathered."
Oh, annoying indeed. "Do you have any idea what I went through because of you?"
The girl raised an eyebrow. "I was not informed, no."
Wendy stared at her. The girl stared back, calm as could be.
"They spent hours deciding I'd lost it because I told them a strange girl opened a portal in my room," she said, voice rising despite herself. "Then they decided I hallucinated you because there was no camera footage!"
"That part was intentional."
Wendy went still.
The girl continued in a tone that seemed almost casual. "A friend dealt with it. You will not be punished for speaking to me, and they will not have evidence of this conversation unless I allow it."
For a few seconds, Wendy was silent, slowly taking in a deep breath.
"Excuse me," she said, far too calmly. "You're telling me you made sure they'd reckon I was hallucinating?"
The girl blinked, and then, for the first time since appearing, some awkwardness crossed her face.
"... In hindsight, that may have been inconvenient for you."
Wendy smiled, and it was anything but pleasant. "I had three blood samples taken," she began. The girl winced. "Then they ran a neural-stability scan twice and asked me if I had been experiencing auditory hallucinations, visual distortions, hostile thoughts, intrusive commands, or urges to surrender my body to the Gem."
The girl blinked. "That last one sounds rather specific."
"After that," Wendy continued, ignoring her interjection, "they made me describe your stupid snack bag. To check for subliminal messages."
The girl's posture faltered. "Well—"
"And then," Wendy continued, "they told me I was under 'psychological strain' and I should avoid 'unnecessary emotional stimulation'! Like you, apparently!"
The girl looked faintly offended. "I am not unnecessary."
Wendy narrowed her eyes. "You're extremely unnecessary."
"... I disagree," was all the girl offered, her expression almost becoming a pout.
To that, Wendy could only stare at her flatly. "Couldn't care less."
For a moment, neither of them spoke after the exchange, simply staring at each other as if waiting for the other to look away first. Then, after several seconds, the mysterious girl's lips curved faintly.
"You are less frightened now," she observed.
Wendy huffed. "I'm pissed off."
The girl didn't react to that. "That is preferable."
"For you, maybe."
"For both of us," the girl said. "Fear makes people foolish."
Wendy gave her an unimpressed look as she gripped her wheels again, turning her chair fully to face the portal. The strange girl remained where she was, as if nothing about this strange situation was unusual. "What are you?"
The girl didn't answer immediately. Instead, her golden eyes flicked down, right to the calf where the Gem was buried beneath skin and muscle and scar tissue.
Every alarm in Wendy's mind should have started screaming, but she only felt a dull, tired resignation, because of course the girl knew about the Gem.
If she was a hallucination, then she came from the Gem, and if she was not a hallucination, then she had come for the Gem. There were only so many ways this could go.
The girl's gaze returned to Wendy's face, and then she finally spoke. "My name is Sirin—"
Surprisingly, the girl stopped herself then, eyes widening as though she had made a mistake, but it was too late.
Wendy's blood had already run cold, because there were some names anyone who spent long enough at Schicksal would know: Siegfried Kaslana, Cecilia Schariac, Bianka Ataegina, and, of course, Sirin, the Second Herrscher.
Recovering quickly, the girl opened her mouth again. "Pardon, I meant to say Kia—"
Whatever she was about to say was interrupted by Wendy's laughter. Before she knew it, she couldn't stop, one hand coming up to cover her face as her shoulders shook.
The girl watched her with a faint frown. "I fail to see what is amusing."
Wendy lowered her hand enough to look at her, a lopsided smile on her face, because everything finally made sense.
It wasn't enough that Schicksal had ruined her. It wasn't enough that the Gem sat inside her like a parasite, neither accepting nor killing her. It wasn't even enough that the only thing she had left was a boring room, a wheelchair, and a schedule full of experiments designed to measure exactly how disappointing she was.
Now the Honkai had decided to whisper, and not with a voice in her head, because apparently that would have been too simple for something that liked to twist everything it touched.
No, it had come dressed as a dead Herrscher, speaking sweetly through a portal that, oh so conveniently, no camera could see.
"So that's it," she said.
Sirin tilted her head. "That is what?"
"The Honkai's finally having a proper go, then."
Golden eyes narrowed slightly at the accusation, but Wendy just leaned back in her chair, smiling bitterly.
"Got bored of ruining my legs, did you?" she asked. "Was that not enough for you? Now you're trying to bait me with a fairy tale?"
Sirin huffed. "Pardon me? And what is that supposed to mean?"
Wendy gestured vaguely at her. "Some weird girl appears where no one else can see her. The cameras fail. The readings spike. She calls herself the Second Herrscher." Her smile widened without warmth. "And then what? You tell me Schicksal's evil? That they used me? That no one here gives a damn if I live or die?"
Sirin said nothing, eyeing her with something that could almost be mistaken for worry. Wendy's fingers dug into the armrest of her chair.
"Because you don't need to bother. I already know," she said, the words coming out sharp. "There's nothing you can tell me that isn't bloody obvious. But sure. Have a go." Wendy let out a sigh, deflating in her wheelchair. "Staves off the boredom at least, yeah?" she reasoned.
"... Hm." The Herrscher gave Wendy a complicated look, suddenly less certain than she had been moments ago. After a brief silence, Sirin spoke. "I did not come here to overtake you like some manner of body snatcher."
Wendy let out a huffed laugh. "Sorry, but that's exactly what a body snatcher would say."
Sirin's eyebrow twitched. She seemed to be holding herself back from pouting, and for some reason, that made her seem less terrifying.
"I am trying to be polite," she said.
"You opened a hole in my wall," Wendy reminded her, incredulous. "While eating snacks. Where's that polite, exactly?"
"That was accidental," Sirin argued. "I pinpointed the Gem and opened a portal to it. I was not aware that Schicksal had decided to do… this," she hissed, the word laced with venom as her eyes washed over the wheelchair.
"So what, then? You're ripping it out?" A dangerous question, but there was no point in talking in circles. "Go on. Not like I'm using this leg anyway," she joked bitterly.
"Nyet," came Sirin's blunt answer. "Don't tell me what to do."
Wendy blinked.
"I'm sorry?"
"You are wrong about what I am," Sirin continued, voice quieter as she ignored the girl's confused look, "but not about what this place is. You are wrong to think I am the Honkai speaking through the Gem, but not wrong to distrust anything that approaches you with convenient words. At the very least, I cannot fault your instincts."
Wendy's fingers loosened slightly.
"I know what Schicksal does to special children," Sirin said. "I was one as well. Do not think I speak of this lightly, or I shall actually become angry."
At that, Wendy swallowed despite herself. Sirin's golden eyes did not leave hers.
"I know what their doctors call necessity. I know what their reports call acceptable losses. I know what they do when they see a child and only register a source of knowledge." Her expression darkened. "So, no. I am not here to take what lies within you, nor to tell you something as worthless as 'Schicksal is evil' and expect you to be impressed and follow me. You learned that already."
Wendy could not look away. For all her attempts at cynicism, for all the bitterness she had wrapped around herself until it became easier than breathing, something in that tone, devoid of excuses and filled with a confusing amount of understanding, threatened to cut right through her barriers.
"What do you want, then?" she asked.
Sirin's posture straightened.
"I have questions," she said. "About the Gem of Desire. About what this place has done to you. About how things came to this."
Wendy had to hold herself back from saying something very impolite. Was that meant to make her less wary? Because that was a dodgy start.
Honestly, she should just hit the alarm and be done with it, but unfortunately, she had no convenient button to call anyone. They had apparently decided that Wendy had no need for that level of autonomy, not only because she wasn't a person, but also because they kept watch of her at all times anyway.
That was actually a rather amusing thing to think about, assuming this wasn't an elaborate hallucination and the camera network really was actively being meddled with.
"... That it?" Wendy asked the Herrscher.
"No." Sirin's gaze sharpened. "I also want to know," she said, "whether you wish to leave. With or without destruction."
That made Wendy go silent. For one stupid, treacherous moment, her mind supplied images before she could stop it. A life with no researchers, no scheduled tests, no cold hands checking her pulse, and no one speaking around her instead of to her. A chance to actually be human again. Freedom.
And then reality returned. Wendy looked down at her lap. There, she only saw her useless legs, and the wheelchair beneath her. The same as every other day, she thought, and smiled.
"You're cruel, you know that?"
"..."
When Sirin didn't answer, Wendy looked back up at her. "You reckon I haven't thought about that? Like I haven't imagined every possible way out? The doors need clearance. The elevators need clearance. The staff need clearance. The entire branch would lock down if I so much as moved toward an unauthorized sector. And even if I did somehow get the Gem to work, fight my way out, or even just… go with you, then…" Her hands tightened into fists. "Then what? Run from Schicksal forever? Hide in some dark corner and hope no one looks?"
Sirin just watched her, and Wendy hated how steady her gaze was. She looked away first.
"No," Wendy said.
"... No?" the Herrscher echoed.
"No," Wendy repeated, sharper. "I'm not doing this. I'm not listening to some hallucination wearing the Second Herrscher's name. I'm not letting you dangle escape in front of me until I'm desperate enough to believe you. I know how this works. I'll just…"
Wendy paused, taking a deep breath. She joined her hands together, only then realizing she had started trembling at some point, and met the Herrscher's gaze once more with an exhausted glare.
"I'll just end up in another cage, won't I?" she continued. "You make me lose control, and then I start destroying everything, thinking that there's something waiting for me on the other side if I just go far enough. Then, before I realize, I hit a dead end and there's no turning back except death. That's how it goes with the Honkai, isn't it?"
Strangely, Sirin remained quiet, assessing the girl before her as if she was seeing another scene entirely, but Wendy wasn't going to wait for her to gather her thoughts. Instead, she pointed at the portal.
"Go away."
Sirin looked at her for a long moment. Then, to Wendy's surprise, she inclined her head.
"Very well."
Wendy blinked at the ease of it. No argument, threats, or a sudden transformation into something horrifying? She was just… leaving?
"I will return," Sirin added just as the portal began to shrink.
As Wendy's brain caught up to that, she narrowed her eyes. "Hold on, that's the opposite of going away."
Sirin shrugged. "I am aware."
Once again, Wendy's hands tightened around the wheels. Spoken like someone who knew how to be insufferable and was proud of it, she thought. As the portal narrowed further, right before it closed, Sirin seemed to notice her agitation, and her gaze softened by the smallest degree.
"For what it is worth," she said, quiet as a whisper, "you should take pride in being smarter than the Second Herrscher. If you hear my words and only see deception, then I do not believe you will fall to the Honkai, either."
With those parting words, the portal snapped shut. The wall was whole again, and silence returned to the room as Wendy remained still in her wheelchair, staring at the empty space where the girl had been.
As several seconds passed, no alarms sounded, and no one came rushing in. Whatever friend Sirin had mentioned, they really had done something to the system, assuming any of that had been real.
Wendy lowered her gaze to her lap, noticing that her hands were still shaking lightly.
"Just told the Second Herrscher to get lost," she whispered to herself. "Yeah, nah. I'm definitely crazy."
Even so, her eyes drifted back to the wall.
"... Not reporting this again, though."
If she did, and they forced her to undertake more hours of stupid additional examinations, only to tell her she was still hallucinating everything, well…
Wendy wasn't so certain she'd need the Honkai's influence to go on a rampage if it came to that.