The moment the stream went live, the viewer count exploded.
Between the "missing person returns" hype and the "suspected beauty hidden at home" drama, countless viewers had been waiting, starving for this moment.
The chat flooded the screen like a waterfall, every line packed with accusations so dense it was almost impossible to see the game window.
"Brother Su, you finally showed up! You ran off so fast last time—you were definitely feeling guilty!"
"Confess! Did you betray the Single Dogs Alliance or not?!"
"Brother Su, please, just say something! Waaaah! My electronic husband is gone!"
"Confess and we'll be lenient, resist and we'll be severe! Who was that voice? Which little temptress was it?!"
Looking at the furious chat, Su Yu coughed and calmly pulled out his well-practiced Change the Subject technique.
"Ahem. Good evening, everyone. About last time… actually, my cat knocked over a cup, so I had to go deal with it. Really, it was just the cat."
He lied with a straight face, sounding sincere enough to win an acting award.
"Let's not talk about that. Today we're continuing our games with Elysia. You all know her skills are…"
Before he could finish, the chat exploded.
"A CAT? Your cat can talk? And say stuff like 'I want…'?!"
"You've already got a beauty hidden at home and you're still thinking about Elysia? You really deserve death, Brother Su!"
"Damn it! Brother Su is an otaku, I'm an otaku too—why don't I get a pretty girl taking care of me?!"
"Noooo! This can't be real! My youth is over!"
Wisely, Su Yu looked away from the bitterness pouring across the chat and quickly connected the voice call with Elysia.
"Good evening, Su Yu~"
Elysia's trademark cheerful voice came through his headset, instantly softening the room full of wailing despair.
"I heard you got hurt. How are you now? Does your leg still hurt? Are you absolutely sure you don't need me to come take care of you?"
"Much better, thanks for asking. Really, no need."
As he spoke, Su Yu skillfully launched Star Counterterror.
"Come on, let's rank up tonight. I'll prove with pure skill that my leg isn't broken."
"Yay! Then I'm counting on you, Su Yu~"
The match began.
Honestly, in this world, Su Yu's gaming talent really was top-tier.
Combined with his experience from his previous life, playing an FPS like this was practically bullying.
A brutal late-round clutch.
All his teammates were dead. Three enemies remained.
Su Yu held a sniper rifle behind a crate, breathing steadily, eyes fixed on the screen.
The audience held their breath too, temporarily forgetting all the gossip.
Even Elysia fell silent, quietly watching him play.
Bang.
First shot: wallbang headshot.
Bang.
Second shot: quickscope kill.
Just as Su Yu focused completely on locating the final enemy, something moved on the sofa behind him.
Kiana felt like her mouth was getting bland.
Too many chips. Too salty.
As a standard-issue Kaslana, studying—even if it was just reading encyclopedia articles—required sugar.
She glanced at Su Yu and saw that he was still wearing his headset, eyes glued to the screen, paying no attention whatsoever to this side of the room.
And besides, the Absolute Free Time countdown still had more than ten minutes left.
Just grabbing a snack should be fine, right?
As long as she didn't make any noise.
And that camera… it was so tiny and dumb-looking. It probably couldn't see that far anyway, right?
Clinging to that flimsy hope, Kiana slipped down from the sofa like a cat.
She was wearing an oversized white T-shirt—one of Su Yu's old shirts.
Her silver-white hair hung loose over her shoulders, looking especially striking in the dim light.
She padded toward the fridge on bare feet, right through the hallway behind Su Yu.
At that moment, in the game, Su Yu heard footsteps.
He snapped his mouse sideways, crosshair instantly locking onto the enemy who had just rounded the corner.
Bang.
Third shot.
Triple kill. Victory.
"Nice!"
Su Yu shouted reflexively, pulling off one side of his headset, ready to bask in the chat's admiration and Elysia's praise.
"So, how was that play—"
Then he looked at his second monitor and froze.
The chat was not full of "666."
The chat was not full of "God Su is insane."
The entire screen was spamming the exact same thing:
"AM I BLIND????"
"That white… that white thing just now…"
"HOLY SHIT!!!!!!!!"
And then came the wailing.
"AAAAAH! THERE REALLY IS A GIRL!"
"I'll kill you, Brother Su! I'll kill you!!"
"Who was that?! WHO WAS THAT?! White hair too? A foreign beauty… I'm dead. She's way too gorgeous!"
"You beast, Brother Su! You absolute beast!!"
"I can't take it, I really can't take it!! This definitely isn't just some casual relationship! She was wearing your shirt! That was totally your shirt, wasn't it?!"
Su Yu's brain went blank for a second.
He whirled around just in time to see Kiana standing in front of the open fridge, holding a bag of chips in one arm and a bottle of soda in the other, a straw between her lips, looking every bit like a cat caught stealing fish.
When she saw him turn around, she froze for half a beat—then, realizing what had happened—
Whoosh.
She darted back into the camera's blind spot.
But it was already too late.
From his headset came Elysia's delighted, utterly gossipy shriek.
"Waaah—! Su Yu! That just now! That just now, was that…?"
On the other end of the screen, Elysia had practically pressed her whole face against the camera, eyes huge and sparkling with pure, ravenous gossip.
"So pretty! That hair, that figure… she's a top-tier beauty! And she's wearing your clothes too? My, my, what kind of development is this? Cohabitation? Raising route? Or… hehehe."
Cold sweat broke out on Su Yu's forehead.
He turned stiffly back to the camera and forced out a smile uglier than crying, teetering on the edge of total social annihilation.
A grown man's home.
An underage girl inside it.
Wearing his shirt.
This really was the kind of thing that could get the authorities called.
"Um… Elysia, everyone, just listen to my explanation…"
He tried to salvage the collapsing situation, his brain running at maximum overclock.
Great. Wonderful.
Was this what people meant by Murphy's Law? Whatever you feared most would absolutely happen.
"Actually… there's no girl."
Su Yu put on a righteous face, his tone so sincere it almost convinced himself.
"You all saw wrong. It was an illusion. A collective illusion. You know how it is—lately I've been… um, rather lonely, and the magnetic field in my house is a little weird, so…"
His mind raced, trying to come up with some remotely believable excuse.
Hallucination? Hologram? Or…
Then, like a lightning strike, the lie he'd casually used before resurfaced.
"I have a cat at home."
He said it solemnly, with all the honest dignity of a man sprinting toward self-destruction.
"A white cat. Just… a rather large one. With a lot of fur. And, uh… it also walks on two legs. A new breed. Very rare."
The stream fell into a brief silence.
It was the kind of silence produced when a lie was so outrageous that even the internet collectively needed a second to process it.
Then the chat exploded even harder than before.
"A CAT???"
"You call that a cat?!"
"So this is the legendary catgirl? Don't fool me, I may not read much but I'm not stupid!"
"Brother Su, to dodge the issue, you've really gone and made up this?"
"Calling a girl a cat? Is this 'point at a deer and call it a horse,' version otaku edition?"
"I want to keep that kind of cat too! Where do I buy one?! I'll go broke if I have to!"
Elysia laughed so hard she was practically falling over, slapping the table.
"Hahahaha! A white cat? Su Yu, even a three-year-old wouldn't believe that excuse~"
She wiped tears of laughter from her eyes, face full of amusement.
"But if it's your cat, Su Yu, then she must be adorable, right? Does she have a name? Does she scratch people? Can you show her to us next time? I want to pet the cat~♡"
Su Yu covered his face in despair.
He knew it.
From today onward, his reputation was ruined.
The "He keeps a giant white cat" joke was going to follow him for the rest of his life.
And the culprit—
He didn't even need to turn around to know that the "white cat" was currently crouching behind the sofa, eating chips and delighting in his suffering.
Su Yu's pathetic White Cat Theory had not only failed to calm the situation, it had dumped a whole barrel of oil onto the fire.
There was no washing this clean anymore.
Faced with a screen overflowing with variations of beast, and Elysia's eyes full of dangerous delight on the other end of the call, Su Yu's seasoned otaku heart was still beating—
Barely.
Not dead yet, but pretty close.
An ordinary excuse? Forget it. That would fool toddlers, not these veterans raised in the depths of anime and internet culture.
If that was the case, then there was only one option left—
Fight magic with magic.
If they wanted a web novel plot, then fine.
He would give them the most standard, most classic, most unarguably web-novel setup imaginable.
And honestly…
He really did need to generate some hype to increase Kiana's recognition value.
Getting caught was already a done deal. Regretting it now would solve nothing.
So he might as well ride the wave.
Su Yu inhaled deeply and adjusted his expression.
The panic of being "caught red-handed" vanished from his face, replaced by something else entirely—
Thirty percent resignation.
Thirty percent depth.
And forty percent since you found out, I won't pretend anymore.
Don't ask how one human face could produce so many layered expressions at once. The answer was simple:
Honkai made all things possible.
What? There was no Honkai in this world?
Then fine. Honkai Face Acting made all things possible.
He bit his lip, as if steeling himself for some great, painful, ancestral betrayal.
"Actually…"
His voice dropped, rich with the gravity of a man carrying a dark and ancient secret.
"The person just now… is my junior sister."
"Fresh down from the mountain."
The room froze for a second.
"Eh——?"
Elysia let out a sharp gasp, her eyes widening even further. Her pupils were practically sparkling with the blazing fire of gossip.
"Junior sister? Really? Since when did you have that kind of setting, Su Yu? Are you secretly some urban cultivator? Or the descendant of an ancient martial arts school?"
He had mentioned this to the pink menace before, but she had probably assumed it was a joke.
The chat detonated too.
"JUNIOR SISTER?! Did I hear that right?!"
"What the hell do you mean 'junior sister'? Are we filming a wuxia drama now? Or one of those Dragon King son-in-law novels?!"
"I don't believe it! Unless you get her on camera and have her call you Senior Brother! In a soft, sweet voice too!"
"Good grief, a junior sister? Those things still exist? What kind of ancient patch version of reality is this?!"
"If you don't believe me…"
Su Yu kept his face perfectly calm and pointed at the phone on the desk.
"You can ask Himeko. She's seen her."
This was a risky move.
But strictly speaking, it wasn't exactly a gamble—because Himeko genuinely did treat late-night melodrama like documentary evidence.
And with Himeko's personality—loud, shameless, and delighted by any possible source of chaos—
Plus the fact that Kiana really had solemnly told her, Please take care of me that night—
There was a very high chance Himeko would back the story up.
Most importantly, Himeko had seen with her own eyes that Kiana could lift him like a chicken.
The "junior sister" foundation was already solid.
Elysia, true to form, was a woman of action.
Without a second's hesitation, she snatched up her phone with the speed of someone lunging for discount eggs at a supermarket.
Then she called Himeko on the spot, though she muted herself before the call fully connected, so the audience could only watch her mouth moving silently without hearing a word.
Meanwhile, on Elysia's end—
Beep… beep…
After a few rings, the line connected.
"H-hello… who is it… hic…"
Himeko's voice came through thick with drunken laziness.
In the background, there was the unmistakable clink of bottles knocking together.
Clearly, the woman was having a one-person drinking party at home.
"Himeko~ It's me, Elysia!"
Elysia greeted her sweetly.
"Sorry to bother you so late, but I wanted to ask something. Is there a girl staying at Su Yu's place?"
"Mmm… Su Yu?"
Himeko mumbled fuzzily.
"Oh… you mean that little white-haired one…"
She let out a hiccup.
"Yeah… that's his… his junior sister from the mountain… pretty cute too… hic… and she can carry him around…"
"So she really is a junior sister?!"
Elysia's voice jumped an octave, and she nearly leapt out of her chair in excitement.
"Yeah… follows him around like they're glued together… says something about repaying a debt or whatever… ah, I forgot… hic…"
Himeko sounded like she rolled over mid-sentence, her voice suddenly muffled.
"Anyway… they're close, like really close… like Siamese twins… okay I'm sleepy, hanging up…"
The call ended.
The chat fell into dead silence.
Even though they hadn't heard the actual contents of the conversation, Elysia's expression—those glittering eyes, that look of gleeful disbelief—already told them everything they needed to know.
The silence lasted only as long as the calm before a storm.
Then the barrage came again, faster and more unhinged than before, like it wanted to physically destroy the server.
"HOLY SHIT!!!! THERE REALLY IS A JUNIOR SISTER?! OFFICIAL CONFIRMATION?!"
"Always by his side? Repaying a debt? What kind of light novel plot is this?!"
"Brother Su! And you said you weren't a normie?! You're the king of normies!"
"I want a junior sister too! I want to be repaid too! Brother Su, can you start a class teaching us how to pick one up?!"
....
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