Honkai: Fire Moth Herrschers
Chapter 416: I’m Definitely Firing Her!

Chapter 416: I’m Definitely Firing Her!

"Aaaaargh! Dammit! As a teacher, drinking in her dorm is one thing, but now she’s sneaking out by climbing the wall like a student... Aaaaargh! This time, I’m definitely firing her!"

At the southeastern wall of St. Freya High School, Theresa Apocalypse picked up three iron bars from the grass that should have been part of the fence, roaring in a furious, hushed voice.

She was seriously about to lose it. The third time! This was already the third time! Not the third time in history, nor the third time this year, but the third time in this month of November, which was barely more than twenty days old!

The problem was, if a regular student had gone missing, she could have mobilized the entire academy’s staff and student body to search for them.

But with a teacher—Murata Himeko—missing, she had to keep the situation contained to minimize any negative influence on the students... which meant finding her personally.

"I’m sorry. You came all this way from Shenzhou, and... sigh. How embarrassing."

"It’s fine," Hua replied. "What a strange teacher... So, why did you hire her to teach at the academy in the first place?"

Hua bent down and pretended to rummage through the dark grass for a moment before stopping—after all, this had little to do with her, and it wasn’t a big deal. Compared to all this, she was far more interested in Theresa’s state of mind.

"It was nothing. I just wasn’t thinking straight back then and thought her personality would be a good fit for the academy’s founding principles."

Theresa looked genuinely regretful, but Hua couldn’t help but smile faintly.

Theresa’s anger was real, but it was nowhere near the point of firing Himeko, as she claimed. What truly infuriated her was likely just how reckless the other woman was. St. Freya High School wasn’t an ordinary school.

Even setting aside its special status as Schicksal’s Far East Branch, it was an academy for training Valkyries—at least a semi-military institution—and its location was rather unique...

To be precise... uh...

Hua gazed out at the lake’s surface, which shimmered under the moonlight, as Theresa’s helpless, angry sigh reached her ears.

"She’s so reckless. To get to the city from here, she’d have to swim nearly a kilometer across the lake... Wait, don’t tell me she prepared a boat? Aaaargh! I am absolutely firing her! Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely!"

Hua tried hard to suppress her laughter. For some reason, she felt a wave of impulse, as if her body instinctively wanted to speak up and defend the teacher named Himeko.

"Hmm? Could she be... No, impossible."

Hua rested her chin on her hand, silently recalling all the information she had on Himeko. She had to admit, Mount Taixuan—or rather, she herself—had been isolated from the world for too long. She’d had to ask Old Seventh’s daughter to run a check on the file of this A-rank Valkyrie named Himeko at the last minute.

Normally, the files of not just A-rank but even B-rank Valkyries were classified at the highest level, inaccessible to most Schicksal personnel.

But Hua’s own prized disciple, Lixue, was an A-rank Valkyrie, and Old Seventh’s daughter, Li Sushang, had some sort of ambiguous relationship with the Schicksal Overseer, Otto.

So, it hadn’t been difficult for Mount Taixuan to obtain the file of an A-rank Valkyrie.

[Murata Himeko, daughter of Murata Ryusuke, born June 11, 1987.

During her university years, she had contact with Anti-Entropy and the second Herrscher of Reason.

Graduated from Caltech in 2006, received an artificial Stigmata implant that same year, and joined the Valkyrie Assault Squad.

In early 2010, the Valkyrie Assault Squad, including Captain Ragna, went missing during a mission in Siberia and were confirmed KIA. Murata Himeko was the sole survivor due to her absence.

One month later, Murata Himeko retired from the Valkyrie Assault Squad as an A-rank Valkyrie and, in the same month, accepted an invitation from Theresa Apocalypse to teach at St. Freya High School, where she has been ever since.]

It was a flawless record. Both her birth and family background confirmed she was a person of this era.

And yet, there’s this strange sense of familiarity, especially when I say that name...

But Hua didn’t dwell on it. For her, a simple answer was all she needed. As long as Murata Himeko was confirmed to be a person of this era, she could stop overthinking it.

"By the way, Theresa, removing one of these bars would have been enough to get through, right? Why did she take out three?"

Theresa was standing on the stone steps of the fence, putting the iron bars back into their slots one by one. As she worked on the last one, Hua took advantage of the gap, leaning her upper body through it with room to spare.

Theresa didn’t say a word, just forcefully patted her heaving chest.

Hua understood and found it rather amusing, but then she clutched her head.

"Back during the Second Honkai Eruption, the Captain went with us to the underground military base in Irkutsk. Hahaha! The base was abandoned, and the smart system would only open the main gate a crack. I slipped through easily, Ely barely managed it, but only the Captain... she had to turn sideways and still got stuck between the two door panels, hahaha... Er, ah, Captain, you’re here too... I’m sorry, I mean, help me..."

She didn’t need to try to place it; it was unmistakably Michael’s voice from her memories. But she had no recollection of the event Michael was describing, not even when he had said it. It wasn’t surprising. If it hadn’t been Michael speaking, she would have deleted such a trivial memory to free up space in her mind long ago.

Even so, after countless purges, only this extremely abrupt audio clip remained.

"Hey? What’s wrong?" Theresa asked, jumping down from the steps and nearly disappearing into the tall grass.

"Nothing, I just remembered something funny..."

"Someone ancient like you can actually laugh... Er, well, Grandpa laughs too, but his laugh is just creepy."

Hearing Theresa mention Otto, Hua felt an urge to ask more. He was another one—a boy she had watched lose everything...

After all, mentioning Otto made it hard for Hua not to think of another person. In some ways, Otto was so much like his ancestor... both in his tendency to go to extremes and in his cruelly mocked fate.

But in the end, she chose to remain silent.

She could no longer fully condone the actions of either Michael or Otto, but because she had seen who they once were, because she had witnessed every step that led them to where they were today, she couldn’t bring herself to completely condemn them... him.

This was also why, two nights ago, despite being so eager to see him, she couldn’t even muster the courage to look him in the eye or speak to him when they finally met face-to-face.

She honestly didn’t know. Five hundred years ago, she could use the excuse that "the Herrschers haven’t been born yet, the real war hasn’t begun."

But now, burdened with Project EMBER, what kind of attitude was she supposed to take when facing the enemy known as Finality?

Especially since, this time, Michael’s stance was no longer ambiguous. Back when facing the Second Herrscher, she had used the first rated power of Fenghuang Down at the last moment to sever the Herrscher’s connection to another entity.

It was only for a split second, and she couldn’t be certain who had been connected to the Second Herrscher’s consciousness... but was there really any other answer to that question?

In that final battle all those years ago, from the Second Herrscher’s inexplicitly masterful control over her powers to the repeated, extreme-pushing applications of the Imaginary Screen... that combat style... anyone who had seen Michael fight before would never mistake it.

"Alright! Sigh... Today was just one embarrassment after another. You should head back and rest. I’ll give you a proper tour of the academy tomorrow."

Theresa climbed back onto the steps, thought for a moment, and then pulled out the two iron bars she had just put back, tossing them on the ground.

Her tone was casual, and Hua didn’t mind. Technically, Theresa wasn’t even a junior’s junior’s junior in her eyes, but they had once been comrades who had faced life and death together, so such formalities didn’t matter.

Compared to the "Grand Master" and "Master Ancestor" titles she heard constantly at Mount Taixuan, she much preferred this kind of interaction between equals.

So, she simply touched the small braid at her left temple, her voice long and serene, like the sea of clouds that shrouded Mount Taixuan.

"You’re staying here?"

"Yup!" Theresa nodded emphatically. "That woman definitely won’t dare use the main gate. She’ll have to row her boat back later. She got away the last two times, but this time I’ll catch her red-handed!"

"Are you so sure she won’t just stay out all night?"

"Ahem! I have faith in Himeko. She has that much self-awareness, at least. The previous times she disappeared at night, she always managed to get back before dawn. At the very least, she never misses her classes the next day..."

Despite her words, Hua could tell from the way Theresa kept craning her neck that she wasn’t so sure herself.

After all, humans were experts at pushing their own boundaries, time and time again.

From Theresa’s fragmented complaints, it wasn’t hard to guess that Himeko probably started by just getting drunk in her dorm. Only later did she start sneaking out of the school at night.

And the frequency of these escapes, just as Theresa said, had likely evolved from three times a year to three times before this month was even over...

It really was improper, more frequent even than Old Seventh’s Sushang leading the charge to sneak down the mountain for meat buns during morning practice.

"Judging by the time, it should be soon," Hua said softly, glancing at the moon, which had begun its descent westward.

"I won’t be heading back. This Miss Himeko... heh heh, just hearing your description, Theresa, makes me eager to meet her."

"Oh... give me a break," Theresa groaned, losing count of how many times she had sighed that night.

What surprised her even more was that this "old antique" her grandpa always talked about, this grand ancestor of Mount Taixuan, actually seemed interested in a troublemaker like Himeko.

"Alright... let’s go hide in the bushes behind us. Sigh... I wonder how long we’ll have to wait! Aaaaargh! I’m definitely firing her this time, for real!"

Hua let out a short sigh. How many times had Otto’s little granddaughter repeated that she was firing Himeko tonight?

A mischievous impulse struck her, and she said, "I hear the Valkyrie cadets have a pretty high opinion of Miss Himeko. How about this, Theresa? After you fire her, I’ll hire her as a foreign instructor to teach at Mount Taixuan."

"Eh? Huh? Wh-wh-why would you think of something like that?"

Seeing Theresa grow so nervous that she was already clutching the Judah’s Oath hanging around her neck, Hua suppressed her laughter and explained with a perfectly straight face:

"You see, the combat composition of Mount Taixuan is different from that of Schicksal and Anti-Entropy. We don’t rely solely on mechs, nor do we accept artificial Stigmata technology. As Overseer Otto’s granddaughter, you should be well aware of this. Shenzhou’s current stability is precariously maintained by the cooperation between Mount Taixuan’s disciples and tactical mechs...

"Heh heh, perhaps that’s giving ourselves too much credit. The truth is, Mount Taixuan’s structure is derived from the martial arts sects of old. Our disciples tend to have the temperament of wandering heroes, and since the number of Stigmata-awakened disciples is much smaller compared to the Valkyries, they often fight alone, at most cooperating with a few tactical mechs.

"But considering the rising intensity of the Honkai, this method won’t be sufficient for much longer. Miss Himeko is an A-rank Valkyrie who served in the renowned Valkyrie Assault Squad and has extensive teaching experience... Therefore, I would like to invite Miss Himeko to Shenzhou to teach Mount Taixuan the ways of multi-person small-squad combat."

In fact, regarding their tendency to fight alone... there was another reason she’d left out—she herself lacked experience in group combat, so how could she teach her disciples?

Thinking back, aside from a few instances where she was just playing a supporting role, the only times she had truly fought in coordination with others... her opponent had been Michael every single time.

Of course, Theresa didn’t know any of this. She was already too flustered to care.

"Ahem! I really don’t think that’s a good idea. You’ve seen what Himeko’s like. You don’t want a teacher who’s harder to manage than the students, do you? At least the students don’t let drinking get in the way of their duties..."

"Ah, that’s not a problem. There’s only one person at Mount Taixuan who drinks, and his two senior sisters recently forced him to quit. As for sneaking out for a drink like she does here... I’m sorry to say, but at least in the small towns at the foot of Mount Taixuan, there’s no such thing as a bar."

"I-Is that so..." Theresa muttered, gripping the braids on her shoulders as the muscles in her face twitched. "I think you’d have better luck asking my grandpa for an instructor from Schicksal HQ."

Theresa’s voice was strained, and her form of address had shifted from the familiar "you" to the respectful yet distant "you." Hua finally couldn’t hold it in and broke into a laugh.

But like most of her smiles, it was silent, not making a single sound. It didn’t even catch the attention of Theresa, who was standing right in front of her. Only the shifting shadow at the corner of her mouth bore witness to the smile’s existence.

"Alright, I was joking. Lixue will be retiring and returning to Mount Taixuan early next year. It’s a bit embarrassing to admit, but part of the reason I agreed to let her become a Valkyrie in her personal capacity was with this in mind."

"Mhm, that’s good. Lixue is way more reliable than Himeko," Theresa said, shaking her head nonchalantly. As long as it wasn’t her own talent being poached, she was fine with it. Grandpa would just have to deal.

"Ah. After all, Lixue used to be... mm... hmm..." Hua hummed twice, swallowing the rest of her sentence and awkwardly changing the subject. "Once she’s done with her mission over at Mount Taixuan in a few years, let’s have her come teach at St. Freya. I think she’d like the job."

"We’ll see when the time comes," Theresa said with a wave of her hand.

"W-Wait! Is that—"

Hua followed Theresa’s pointing finger and saw a tiny black dot bobbing up and down with the shimmering lake light, drifting slowly but surely toward them.