"Wait… is that me?"

Looking down at her phone, the young girl was shocked seeing the appearance that was her own. An almost forgotten, yet very familiar feeling resurfaced within her, but she quickly suppressed it to instead look around-

"Miss Raiden! Senpai!"

Only for a ball of white to tackle the purple haired girl… along another person who she initially overlooked from the shock seeing herself on the phone's camera, many years younger wearing a very nostalgic uniform.

"…Carole-"

"You're both all right! Please tell me you're all right!"

Mei Raiden tried to ask her squad member of the status report of… well, everything that occurred while she was apparently unconscious, only to get more wailing from the white haired junior. So she turned to the other person for answer, which she realized was Adam from the grey coat at the edge of her vision-

"Adam, you-!"

"Uhm… complicated things happened."

Seeing the dreaded glowing crimson lines on the male valkyrie's neck and cheeks caused Mei to remember what happened before she was taken down by the mechanical quadrupedal monstrosity took her down.

Instinctively, Mei felt down on her stomach where she was stabbed, before realizing that she was no longer even in the same body anymore. The current Raiden Mei is no longer the leader of the third valkyrie squad of Schicksal, she is now but a high school student.

Once again Mei suppressed down a sudden pulse of familiar power from within her, and returned to worry on the black-haired male with obvious and visible signs of honkai infection.

"Can you still feel this?"

"Don't worry much, Miss Raiden. I can still -please don't pinch me there- feel so this infection is not as bad as it looks," Adam joked through a faked smile.

"For now you are grounded from any use of honkai," Mei was not lost on the uptake, and replied back with a forced sigh of relief as she released her grip on the male's arm, "And after we settle this new mess we've been sent to, we will be having a very long talk, Adam."

"Yes ma'am."

Mei did not miss the very blatant lie by the male valkyrie, as she did not at all touch the skin outside of his view. Much less a pinch.

But all of these she held back from saying out loud in the face of the still bawling Carole. As she felt for the white hair and doing a few soothing scratches, she felt the sting of being a hypocrite and hiding the severity of the infection.

But the time for rest should now end and they can lick their wounds later. There were more immediate matters to solve.

Specifically, how they got sent back to the familiar rooftop of Chiba Academy, and seeing all the busy buildings at the distance and the loud bustling of the people from below, Mei can infer that she was sent back at a time well before…

"Oh."

Another pulse of power tried to burst from within her, one that was more powerful than the two earlier pulses, yet useless against her masterful control of the Gem of Conquest. Confident in her control, the host of the Herrscher of Thunder allowed the power to be slowly released.

A flash of lightning… then nothing. Mei released the breath she was holding when, seeing she did not accidentally cause an impact. She took hold of the minimal energy now flowing around her… and examined it closely.

Finding out that the energy was actually a stimulus caused by energies outside her body, not at all from her.

Oh? Has the coward has finally stopped shutting me out?

Ignoring the honkai-born sentience within her, she looked at the two people who were now standing and watching, clearly having noticed her subtle release of honkai energy. The squad leader decided to answer the question their raised eyebrows were asking.

"These were from the honkai energy stimulations that the Anti Entropy commander Cocolia used to awaken the Third Herrscher."

"Energy stimulations… what?"

One member of the third squad had his eyes widened at realization, and the other hopelessly clueless at the ramifications of that fact.

"Year 2014, the third impact occured in Nagazora, and-"

"Hey, I know that! And Miss.. Raiden was the host of the Third Herrscher, right?" Carole interrupted Adam's explanation, as she looked closely at Mei. "But Miss Raiden is currently a student…? So we are in Nagazora before the impact, right?"

"Eventually we found out that the AE commander caused the third impact using stimulations," scratching his head, Adam decided to get straight to the point. "Stimulations that Miss Raiden is feeling right now."

This time it was Carole's eyes' turn to widen.

"Wait so that means the Third Impact… is happening!?"

Mei decided to takeover the explanations to hasten things up.

"It's not happening, no, not at least in this timeline. Which we find ourselves in. We don't know what happened nor know who caused this-"

"It's the evil man that hurt you both!"

"-protocol please, Carole, but for now what's important is to plan what we are going to do now. This was our world, but it isn't now that the third impact isn't happening the same way it did to ours. You two got that?"

""Yes ma'am.""

There was a short silence, before the serious air ended when the squad leader visibly relaxed and wal

With the awkward moment where she took command over two valkyries who were now visibly older than her now over, the purple haired student pulled up her phone to search for details that would allow her to blend in and not act like a totally different person.

"For now, I will handle the issues of being a student again. You two, I suggest going at my place as our base of operations. However, try not to walk around in the open."

"Police will mistake us for cutting classes!" Carole nodded eagerly. "And when they try to look for our identities, they will find none in their records!"

"Indeed," Mei coughs to get attention, "But I'm more concerned about the Schicksal finding about the two of you."

"Right, the current Schicksal is still under control of Otto Apocalypse."

"Wait, isn't that the name you called that evil masked man, Senpai?"

"Anyway, I task the two of you to go here for now, I will write up a letter so that the servants will accept you both," Mei pulled up her phone and showed an online map showing Carole and Adam the path to her house-

But she was interrupted as the door to the school rooftop opened up.

Mei Raiden did not notice her squad members swiftly jumping out of view to the top of the rooftop shed.

She was too distracted by the white haired knight that made her way to the purple haired time traveller, her innocent smile widening as her blue orbs came across the unprepared girl's purple eyes.

"Mei-senpai! Let's eat lunch together again!"