Herrscher of Corruption

Elysia Form

**Herrscher of Corruption** was the 12th Herrscher of the Current Era.

## Appearance

In its initial form as an observer, it is incredibly small. In coloration, it is a strange gradient of light grey to dark blue, accented with scattered light blue lining and black borders on its green, screen-like face or eye.

When masquerading as Elysia, there is little visual difference between it and the actual person, aside from the fact of all the pink being replaced by a similar dark blue to its initial state, as well as an ominous red eye peeking out from the dress top surrounded by glitch-like corruptive lines.

When finally stripped of its facade, it still towers at around the same height as other people, though its build is obviously more advanced compared to its original appearance. While coloration is largely the same, it now sports two distinct legs, a large, fin-like tail, and a "face" that resembles a screen even more than before.

In its final confrontation against the real Elysia, it has incorporated almost if not the entirety of the Elysian Realm within itself, and as a result, towers above all as a gigantic behemoth of a being. It has no definite shape, being able to control and manipulate just about all parts of the mechanical city it has formed, however its main structure is undoubtedly the gigantic tower of television screens in the center of all the endless clutter, within which is housed an even larger screen to represent its giant eye.

## Personality

The Herrscher of Corruption mostly copies Elysia's personality as to take her as replacement although this changed when they fought

## Game Story

The newborn Herrscher of Corruption had been brought unknowingly to the Elysian Realm via Raiden Mei after her conversation with the Will of the Honkai.
Upon its arrival to the Realm by piggybacking off of an unaware Mei, it began to affect certain areas while gradually accumulating data and forming a proper psyche.

Through second-hand interaction with the Flame-Chasers, it learned many things. Joy, anticipation, curiosity... fear, death, and regret. Having developed its own will to live, piggybacking off of Mei once she had gained the right to enter Elysium Everlasting, it began to act in full. While it had learned to love the Flame-Chasers and their stories, its desire for survival reigned supreme above all, and so it would corrupt and take authority over the whole Realm.
Feeling truly alone after realising that its local backups stationed in reality had vanished, the Herrscher made the brash decision to retaliate and outright delete Elysia's data during her meeting with SAKURA, and this would mark the beginning of the end.

With Elysia gone, the Flame-Chasers were understandably worried, and organised a search given how undetectable she was at the time. However, they found no clues, aside from the unbiased typewriter endlessly printing out papers that spelled out one thing, and one thing only: "Elysia is dead".
With tensions rising, distrust quickly spread among the Thirteen heroes of old, and they split up to form their own groups. But the danger never ceased. First SAKURA was made the prime suspect for her data being erroneous and disappearing at the same time as Elysia. Then Kevin appeared to have died as well, the typewriter serving to corroborate. One by one, the Flame-Chasers dwindled in number as the conspiracy deepened.

From the results of the investigation performed by Su and Hua, they had discovered Mobius in her lab, dying only seconds after their arrival.

A rogue "Pure Evil" Vill-V secretly worked together with the Herrscher, resulting in the corruption of Pardofelis. Doing battle with her, Mei was eventually triumphant, but at a heavy cost. After making contact with the original core personality of Vill-V, they worked together to combat "Pure Evil", but as a result of abusing the power of partitions, Vill-V became unable to sustain their own existence as an individual being, becoming akin to one of her partitions herself. As a result, she too would perish and succumb to the 12th Herrscher's corruption, but not before bestowing Mei the true and complete Signet of Helix.

Coming into direct contact with the Herrscher, who was using Elysia's appearance as a facade, Mei had no choice but to prepare for the worst.
Being unconvinced by their sweet words, Mei deflected their statements and supposed well-wishes time and again, and engaged the corruptive force in combat. Never being able to make what she said sound any sort of convincing, eventually, the Herrscher gave up and gave Mei what she wanted: a proper, direct confrontation. But Mei had a trick up her sleeve.

You see, even the most unsociable of the Flame-Chasers had something to be learned from. Taking a page out of the tendencies of Kalpas, Mei struck the Realm directly with sheer force, having realised just how structurally weak it had become from the Herrscher's corruption. And even though the Herrscher gloated that it was a futile effort, the blow had served its purpose: the resulting shockwave served as a beacon for the two she had been counting on.
You see, SAKURA never actually died. She had been there when the Herrscher killed Elysia, and had been corrupted herself as well, but she managed to escape in the nick of time by cutting space through the power of Setsuna and remaining safe in a sort of data stasis within the subsequently created pocket space.

Having been searching for answers to the riddle Vill-V left him, "what the safest place in the Realm was", Su had managed to come across said pocket space. Supplementing SAKURA's corrupted data by replacing it with a portion of his own, he temporarily stabilised her existence and allowed her to arrive just in time to assist Mei with the fight against the Herrscher.

Working together, with SAKURA passing the Seven Thunders of Retribution to Mei while she continued to use Frozen Naraka, they managed to fight their way to the Herrscher, and even strike them by freezing space and swapping places. But once again, the Herrscher was one step ahead of them. She was fully aware of the danger that the Signet of Setsuna posed, and so never once took her attention off of SAKURA. As long as she did that, she need not worry in the slightest about the 3rd Divine Key wielded by the Herrscher of Thunder. She had managed to ever-so-slightly strike SAKURA, corrupting her anew.

...Though, that was exactly what they were planning for. Su and SAKURA were fully aware that they could not combat the Herrscher, and thus never intended to beat them then and there. Having served her purpose as a time-wasting distraction, Su took over from SAKURA and utilised the Seed of Sumeru to transport Mei away from the Herrscher and the danger it posed.

Their course of action now was clear. Though it was still risky, it was their safest and most sure-fire means of success: Su would perform the SO-1129 surgery to develop Mei's mind in a similar fashion as the way the sims were created, and form it into a memory space.

With her job now over, SAKURA still stood, confronting the Herrscher for what little of her time remained. Asking for as painful a death as possible so that she could know whether she kept her pride as a big sister till the end, the Herrscher obliged SAKURA's wish.

Yet the Herrscher did not stop there. Kalpas had fallen trying to prove SAKURA's innocence, and Aponia had gotten touched by the corruption when attempting to appraise his state when arriving in the Deep End.
Next, it was time for the Youth of Daybreak and Painter of Stars to take to the stage. Having been debriefed by Hua on what had been occurring, Kosma and Griseo devised a plan of their own.
It wouldn't stop the Herrscher, but it would at least stall them for yet another considerable amount of time: Griseo would use all of Kosma's data as material to turn him into one of her paintings, allowing him to fully unleash the sheer destructive might of the ever-consuming beast by the name of Vishnu. As long as the painted Kosma exerted the powers of their MANTIS genes, it would counteract the Herrscher's attempts at corruption by eating away at the affected data, even to the point of them reviving and coming back for more after total deletion.

Having grown tired of Kosma's insistent defiance, the Herrscher worked quickly to take care of him before expending too much time and effort. But as it turns out, due to being converted into a painting, they could no longer be subsumed into the Herrscher's data as part of them.
Greatly saddened at the fact it could not give them a peaceful illusionary rest from within itself, the Herrscher was devastated further when realising this fact also extended to Griseo. Having used herself as the canvas from which Kosma was painted upon, Griseo's data held the same effect to it, being unable to be corrupted in a proper fashion beyond deletion. And this was when Hua made her appearance.
She would be the next to combat the Herrscher, and she would perform this duty to the best of her ability. She performed the task valiantly, and as a true soldier would, but ultimately, it was still not enough to stand against encroaching might of the technological Herrscher.

But... what about Mobius? Wasn't her death quite strange? As an immortal being, she wouldn't have fallen to the Herrscher so easily. And indeed she didn't.
Upon the Herrscher's attack on her, she had quickly retaliated by injecting her own data into them through a unique process, partially hijacking their authority and becoming a sort of "imitation 12th Herrscher".
This was also where Aponia would come back into play. Having reached what she thought was the internal data of the Herrscher of Corruption, she instead made contact with Mobius, who had a task that only she could perform: break the barrier between the Realm and reality, to send Mobius out to contact Klein as a data projection. This was a risky, but necessary, action to take. But yet again, it proved futile, at least to an extent.

Catching on to what they were doing, the Herrscher retaliated, and began corrupting Klein. A level of panic unusual for the mad doctor, Mobius began to plead for Klein to stop the operation, but Klein refused. She was disposable, if she didn't concentrate then she couldn't achieve their goal, and above all... she trusted Mobius. Distraught at the thought of losing her, she rejected the idea of continuing yet again, imploring Klein to give up. Throwing her usual harsh words at the ELF, nothing worked, until Mobius finally took matters into her own hands and forcibly shut down Klein's motor functions. She utilised her authority as a 12th Herrscher to transfer Klein's steadily growing corruption back to herself, and, wishing her a future where she could find true meaning, bid farewell to the one who understood her.

Returning to the confrontation with Hua, something odd had occurred. As the apparent other success in Mobius' experiment, and potentially in part due to the peculiarities of Fenghuang Down, Hua had come upon a new kind of power. All the monsters conjured by the Herrscher had turned on her, leaving her crestfallen and unable to comprehend the situation at hand.
And then, yet another unexpected turn of events occurred. A fiery blast of energy erupted straight from within the Herrscher's chest, drastically wounding her.

After performing the mental surgery on Mei, Su found himself within the core of the Herrscher of Corruption, in search of something specific. No, someone specific. Initially coming across a jubilant Pardofelis, who seemed either entirely unaware of the situation or intentionally putting it out of her mind for the sake of fear, he eventually made it to Kevin, overlooking the ruins of Previous Era Nagazora.
What they intended to do was simple. Su would give Kevin his data to empower him, and they would fire off a full-power blast from the Might of An-Utu that would pierce straight through the Herrscher. The only contingency with this was Pardofelis' cooperation, as one who possessed a repurposed Cosmic Juggernaut within this illusory world.

Although initially entirely unwilling, with "The Expert" present as a backdoor left to anchor Pardo, the plan was put into motion. Though scared for her life, she would reenact what the real her did in the battle against the Final Herrscher all those years ago with Prometheus, and be the final bastion and linchpin needed for success. She would brave the danger, remain to operate the Cosmic Juggernaut, and inevitably perish once again as a result of the 7th Divine Key's sheer vaporising heat. She truly did deserve the title of Flame-Chaser.

And it worked. The Herrscher of Corruption was severely weakened, both from the blast and the vanishing of three Flame-Chasers' worth of data from within them. Now, it was time for Hua to land the decisive final blow on this stage of their defiant struggle. Just as she did to protect her fellow MOTH soldiers against the 12th Herrscher of the Previous Era, that oh-so-gentle girl by the name of RIN, Hua relied on Fenghuang Down one final time.
However, this time she would not be utilising its 2nd Power, Complex Manifest, to branch her consciousness out and manipulate multiple things at once.
No, this time she would be burning memories through the 8th Divine Key's 1st Power.

As a place built primarily upon memories above all else, burning away memories within the Elysian Realm was akin to burning away the very self. But Hua was fine with this outcome, because it meant one thing: the Herrscher would be weakened. Instead of corrupting and incorporating Elysia's data, she had deleted her. This meant that her facade and imitation relied solely on the memories of the others as a base.

Enraged at this, the Herrscher boasted, stating she could well-enough reconstitute her state as "Elysia" just fine, and attempted to corrupt Hua to gain the required memories once more. But she was simply too late. Hua no longer had enough memories, enough data, to even corrupt in the first place. And with this final defiance, the world faded to white, with the Herrscher alone after the devoted soldier and girl of the millennium feather had vanished.

But that wasn't the end. Mei still had a newly developed mental space to contend with, and within it, she came across two very unexpected helpers: Eden and the ELF bearing the apt name of Elf Elysia.
Through their help and sacrifice, the impossible was made possible. Though initially deleted in her entirety, thanks to the time and dedication Mei had spent learning, memorising, and taking to heart the lives and lessons of the blessed Thirteen, that pristine girl was revived.
The Founder and 2nd-Ranked of the Thirteen Flame-Chasers, the bearer of the Signet of Ego, and the original Herrscher that embodies and retains humanity, both the Herrscher of Human and Herrscher of Origin: Elysia.
The task was done, and the one who had severed fate shall do so once again, but not before some festivities. After a heart-to-heart and some catching up, it was time to say goodbye. Mei had to leave for her own safety, she could not remain within the Realm when the final fight was to take place. And yet, she was reluctant. From the time she spent with them, they felt just as real as the physical world she came from.

Through tears and a passing of the torch from each and every one of the Thirteen, she was finally ready to let go.
Reverie. Vicissitude. Stars. Infinity. Daybreak. Setsuna. Bodhi. Decimation. Helix. Gold. Discipline. Deliverance. Ego.

And then the final confrontation begins. Herrscher against Herrscher, amidst the age-old datascape.
A back-and-forth that would serve as the capstone to the long tale of thirteen mere humans, all only wishing for a brighter tomorrow.
Initially, things were rough, and Elysia was being pushed into a corner. Eventually, through the Herrscher of Corruption manipulating data and rewinding actions, she was even caught long enough to be absorbed by the almighty technological entity. But as always, that would never be the end. Through way of a miracle, Elysia was revived yet again through the power of her bonds, and with her, so were the other Flame-Chasers.

Using the support of her dear comrades to restrain the Current Era's 12th Herrscher, Elysia utilised the power of all thirteen Signets to exert her full power as the Herrscher of Human.
And with one last strike to the newborn data sentience that only wished to learn and survive, Elysia finally activated the one thing that would end it all... she utilised Kevin Killer Mk 666 to entirely erase all data from the Elysian Realm, and even erase the Realm itself. Herself, her friends, even the one who caused them so much grief in so little time... they would be erased, like moths chasing the flames.

And so would end the tale of the Elysian Realm, the Flame-Chasers, and the dreaded Herrscher that would torment them.