In our era, we no longer pay much attention to the word “sacrifice”. We prefer words such as “efficiency”, “optimal solution” and “maximization of benefits”. In such a context, the existence of Xiadie seems quite ironic: she does not directly achieve herself, but relies on the blood, death and pain of her teammates. To be more precise, she is a strong person at the cost of sacrifice, and a fighting machine that uses consumption as the driving force for advancement.
Her name is Xiadie, but she is not a butterfly. Butterflies are soft and are born for flowers. She is hard, peeling off her humanity layer by layer in battle until she becomes a knife with blood rust.
1. Her “ability” is the “price” of others
We see her entering the battle, pale and indifferent, with a certain indifferent constant in her eyes. She will not take the initiative to protect anyone, nor will she heal anyone. She stands there quietly, waiting for others to bleed, and then pulls out the flower called “new bud”.
Flowers should grow in the sun, but her flowers bloom under corpses. Her gains are extracted from the pain of teammates. If you think she is rescuing, you are wrong. She is not a doctor, nor a priest, she is an executioner – it’s just that she cuts off the enemy; the knife she uses is made of the pulse of her companions.
This is not a noble spirit of sacrifice, but institutionalized cruelty: some people have to stand in the front to die, and some people have to use their deaths to pile up a path in the back.
2. Her “Netherworld” is a tool of control, not a shelter for salvation
If you enter her Netherworld, don’t think it is some kind of safe zone. It is not an altar, nor a habitat. It is a catalyst for battle, a mechanical space after moral concessions.
Her Netherworld reduces the enemy’s resistance and increases the attack strength of her “Dead Dragon”. But the price of all this is the health value of teammates – her teammates must “pay the price” to stimulate the strongest form of her skills. So we see that this “team support” role actually treats teammates as resources, a resource that can be burned and exhausted.
This can’t help but remind people of the question that many people have ridiculed: “Is a person a means or an end?” In Xiadie’s case, the answer is clear: in order to fight, she can make teammates a means, a bait on the front line, and a juice-squeezing machine.
3. Her combat skills are a kind of “alternative violence” and a manifestation of distorted justice
Her skill description is beautifully written: “The dead dragon attacks the enemy and gains according to the life ratio of teammates.” But we know what this means: the more people are on the verge of death, the stronger her skills are. This is not an incentive, but a violent structure.
She uses “the dying of others” as a source of power. She gets pleasure from every roar of the dead dragon, and that pleasure comes from the fluctuation of a number-a teammate’s HP bar is only the last 5%, which doubles her damage. This structure is disgusting. It is not a revolution of common hatred, but a capitalist exploitation: the more miserable you die, the harder I will hit you.
The battle became a fire sacrifice fueled by suffering, and she was the host.
4. She was not indifferent, but she completely saw through the hypocrisy of “sacrifice”
Some people say she is ruthless. But I don’t think so. I think she is more sober than anyone else. She knows that no one will really remember the name of the sacrifice, and she knows that the word “hero” is just a medal for the dead. So, she learned to consume sacrifice in advance and convert the life value of teammates into output that can be seen on the spot.
It’s not that she doesn’t know the pain, but she thinks that pain is meaningless. She doesn’t have the ability to save everyone, so she just turns everyone into a tool. She is not a bad person, but just an extreme reaction after looking at the world with cold eyes.
She may still have softness in her heart, but that softness has long been crushed by the roar of battle and kneaded into the data by the rules set by the system.
5. Why do we need her?
This question is actually a self-torture. Why do we allow a character who “uses the death of teammates as a source of power” to exist? The answer is simple: because she works.
She can turn a nearly failed battle around; she can pull back the most dying teammates and make the enemy collapse instantly; she can respond to the cry of mankind with cold data. So we say she is “strong”, we say she is “key”, and we even say she is “great”.
But what we dare not look directly at is: when we praise her, do we also accept the fact of “letting others die”? Do we tacitly agree that the victory of a team should be borne by the weakest one, and the strongest one stands behind him to reap the glory?
6. Her shadow is actually in each of us
I looked at Xiadie and remembered that I was that kind of person. Sitting on the podium, criticizing students for their poor grades; sitting in the office, evaluating colleagues’ “performance”; sitting in front of the battle simulator, calculating the efficiency of “sacrificing an auxiliary can increase output by 10%”.
We all think we are nobler than her, but in fact we are also Xiadie. It’s just that she turned the choice into a skill, and we hide it in reason and rhetoric.
Epilogue
So, is she a villain? No. She just lives in this system and recognized the truth that “anyone can be sacrificed” earlier than others. She was just one step ahead of us, compressing human nature into damage values and pricing sacrifice into “combat efficiency”.
This is not her fault. This is our fault.
We call indifference a strategy, package death as “sacrifice spirit”, and then after the battle, smile and say: “Fortunately, there is Xiadie.”
Yes, fortunately, there is her. But she won’t laugh. She knows that she just understands in advance that we will become the kind of people sooner or later.