Hemiola strode into the room with the serenity of an approaching thundercloud.
It was almost impossible to recognize him as the dark figure who had been chasing them. He was no longer wearing the Thalia mask and had exchanged the black cloak for flowing white silk robes embroidered with gold threads and designs of clouds and cranes. A few black curls fluttered around his face, but his shaggy black hair now fell like a waterfall to his hips. The only things that identified him as their former assailant were the dimension-jump rod in his hand and deep blue eyes that managed to seem simultaneously sympathetic and disdainful.
“Nuwas is right, Natsuko. The Yishang make money selling your Emanation to Celestials, though they themselves use other terms,” Hemiola said. His voice was smooth and placid like the night sky. “I am sorry to say, but it truly is about money and always has been.”
Before his sentence was finished, the five Heroes arrayed in front of Hemiola readied their weapons. Two guns, one sword, a rod, a pocket watch, and a wine bottle rose to meet him. Five hearts pounded in a unison symphony of anticipation.
Hemiola chuckled and smiled. “I understand your fear, but you wouldn’t win a fight against me. You all walked yourself into a trap. Hero Abilities don’t work here.”
“We know,” Sofiane said, knuckles turning white against the hilt of his emerald sword. “That was the plan.”
Shuixing’s face turned white along with them. “Oh no…”
Daisy was the second to realize, her teeth grinding into each other as she cursed herself for not thinking of this possibility.
Pechorin was the first to vocalize the realization. “You’re not a Hero.”
To demonstrate his point, Hemiola snapped his fingers and the burial chamber trembled from a sound-burst explosion detonating against the ceiling. Gold dust and gems fell in a shower of debris.
“I am indeed not a Hero. As Nuwas kindly explained, I am a Xian, the highest position possible shy of being a member of the Yishang. Not that such a thing is possible. You have to be born to their plane of existence. However useful we may be, we are only a kind of robot or automaton or—”
Hemiola paused, verbally as well as physically. His trailing silk robe swished to a halt in the middle of the chamber. He stroked his chin thoughtfully, trying to come up with a suitable metaphor for what Heroes were.
“A musical motif,” Hemiola finally said. “A core around which the rest of a melody can be built. You might call this your archetype. But when the melody moves too far away from that motif, it becomes a bloated, baroque monstrosity, as the Yishang see it, and this scares the Celestials who desire the comfort of the simple and recognizable. They have more names than you could possibly imagine to categorize this canon of motifs, but the core archetypes are limited in number, as you have all surmised. Perfect for the Yishang. They couldn’t possibly dream up enough complex, multi-faceted Heroes to meet the Celestials’ demand for you.”
Nuwas picked that moment to break for Hemiola, shoving Natsuko and Pechorin aside as he dashed in-between them. He threw himself in prostration.before Hemiola.
“I am ready to go, please send me!” Nuwas wailed.
With a fatherly smile, Hemiola rested the palm of his left hand on Nuwas head. The hand holding his dimension jump rod lifted and came down with a gentle strike that removed Nuwas from the world forever. More than the jump itself, it was the casualness with which Hemiola employed forced dimension-jumping that struck Natsuko and the others. What was for them an agonizing moral dilemma was a flick of the wrist to Hemiola.
“Murderer!” Natsuko screamed until her throat stung. She ran at him, bottle at her side.
“Natsuko no!” Shuixing said.
Hemiola teleported next to Natsuko and grabbed her by the throat mid-charge, slamming her to the ground and pinning her to the floor with his foot. The shock jarred the bottle out of her grip which Daisy bolted for, throwing herself into a slide to grab it before Hemiola could. With inches to spare between the bottle and his fingers, Daisy leapt out of her slide and entered a defensive stance to keep the bottle away from Hemiola.
Hemiola chuckled, his laugh as deep and rich as a cuckoo bird’s song. “I don’t think of what I’m doing as murder. It’s more accurate to say I am saving people from the Yishang and their world of horror. As many as I can, anyway. Saving everyone would be impossible. The Yishang will only let me get away with this for so long as they have a compelling narrative for their “permanent death” special event. So, I had to pick only those I love to join us on the other side. Hence why I began with you three.”
He looked in turn upon Pechorin, Shuixing, and Natsuko growling at his feet.
“I appreciate you leaving me off the guest list,” Sofiane said.
Sofiane’s lavender eyes were locked to Hemiola’s every movement. He teetered on the edge of blind rage at hearing Hemiola call murdering Xiuquan and Baran “a gift,” but after watching how easily Hemiola trounced Natsuko, Sofiane forced himself to hold back through sheer force of will, waiting for the right moment.
“Hero abilities…” Shuixing muttered by Sofiane’s side. “Why would they not be working…”
It was blind, but Sofiane had absolute faith in Shuixing to figure something out. That was his role now: Buy Shuixing time to figure out the physics of the dungeon.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
“You don’t understand,” Hemiola said. “I’ve been there. To the other side. I’ve felt what it’s like to escape. It’s a greater existence than I could possibly explain, and the Yishang brought me kicking and screaming back to this world of endless grinding. Believe me, it is a gift.”
“Funny how ya didn’t bother explaining all that before. Or to anyone ya killed,” Daisy said.
Hemiola shook his head. “Perhaps it would have been morally preferable. But if I explain everything and they refuse, what then? Every Hero who knows what’s really going on is a danger not only to themselves, but to everyone. This is not the Yishang's first world, after all.”
He raised his foot. Natsuko let out a heaving breath and scrambled to safety. In that moment, Hemiola’s ability to treat her like a crushed bug eclipsed the murders as the reason for her hatred of him. That, and the patronizing half-smile painted on his face as securely as the Thalia mask. Pechorin grabbed Natsuko’s arms and pulled her back up to her feet.
“What do you mean, not their first?” Shuixing asked.
“I mean that they have made other worlds like Po-Lin to do the exact same thing: Sell Heroes. They aren’t always called Heroes, but the principle is the same. For the Yishang I play a role somewhere between a mechanic and a mascot, and so I have observed these other worlds. They are fundamentally different in only one regard: When the Yishang created Po-Lin and created the Heroes and Non-Heroes to inhabit it, they employed a new technology as an experiment which allowed its population to think and act independently. In the other worlds, everyone and everything follows a rigid script. But Po-Lin is different,” Hemiola said.
The thought of a world in which they were dragged along like puppets, forced to say and do whatever the Yishang wanted so that they would appeal to some mysterious “Celestials” was a crescendoing horror that came in waves, each wave slamming into one of the five Heroes as their minds turned over the idea. Natsuko could only imagine the humiliation of eternally playing the upbeat, peppy girl as her livelihood collapsed around her. Depressing or not, her self-destruction was a play at keeping at least some of her dignity.
Daisy held her head by the temples. “What the fuck…? This is a joke… You’re joking…”
“It’s not quite as bad as you imagine,” Hemiola continued. “I doubt the Heroes in those scripted worlds ever had a soul to begin with. What frightens me is what the Yishang will do with Heroes that do. I am not sure if even they understand precisely what they have created in Po-Lin. Their goal in employing this new technology was simply more realistic characters. All they know is that they designed a perky, excitable tomboy tsundere, and she broke herself and turned into a depressed alcoholic.”
Natsuko squinted at him. “What in the fuck is a tsundere?”
Hemiola waved his hand. “Forget about it. The salient point is that there will come a day in the future where this world ends. It costs the Yishang money to keep Po-Lin spinning, and if there are not enough Celestials paying them to do so…”
Everyone understood the implication. In one moment, a world that seemed as though it would stretch on into eternity now had a looming end point. Shuixing shivered. For once in her life, she wished she knew less.
“Do you see now why I consider the dimension-jump a mercy?” Hemiola said.
For a moment there was silence as Natsuko and the others gave serious thought to his statement. But something didn’t sit right for Natsuko.
“You were going to save us and screw the rest of the world?” she asked.
“I was going to save as many as I could before the Yishang caught on,” Hemiola replied.
“And then what?”
“I would leave too. And perhaps they would bring us back, but some of us would find a way to exist on the other side, and that would make this entire exercise worthwhile. Working for the Yishang, pretending to help them refine their physics models, investigating Shuixing’s research, all of it was nothing but shots in the dark that some of us might escape the Yishang’s clutches for good. Perhaps such a thing is impossible, but it is better to have tried than to be snuffed out when we no longer make them money.”
Natsuko laughed in disbelief. “O-Oh, so now you’re in favor of choices! Isn’t that convenient? You planned to kill us o-or— or send us to wherever the hell exists out in the void, but you weren’t going to leave it up to us until now!? I smell bullshit!”
The placid half-smile finally melted off of Hemiola’s face. In a tone closer to the one Natsuko remembered, he said, “Natsu… You were always obnoxious, but I see you’ve gone and invented a new type of obnoxiousness. I can’t even bring myself to dislike it. This is proof that there is something in Po-Lin’s Heroes that is vital and dynamic. Something worth saving.”
Natsuko grunted. “I don’t care about any of that. What I wanna know is: If I say that I wanna walk outta here without being given your “gift,” what are you gonna say?”
Hemiola closed his eyes and exhaled in frustration. “At this late hour, I’m sorry to say that I will have to make the choice for you. Otherwise, you would tell the other Heroes the truth, wouldn’t you?”
“They deserve to know and make their own choices too, you gods-damned hypocrite,” Natsuko said, walking towards Daisy who was still holding her bottle.
“I can’t let you do that,” Hemiola said.
Only then did the other four realize how deeply lulled they had been by Hemiola’s words. For just a moment, the hereafter he’d promised to send them to had seemed the better alternative to living on in the Yishang’s meat-grinder. But the spell was broken. Hemiola’s mask dropped. He had been feeding them sugar pills to disguise the fact that he had already made the decision for them.
Shuixing returned to mulling over the matter of Abilities as Sofiane remained close at her side, prepared to defend her from both the front and the back.
“Err… Maybe I ought to be the one holding the bottle, darling,” Daisy said without looking at Natsuko. Everyone’s eyes were fixed on Hemiola.
“It’s my bottle, and Hemiola was my teammate. I’ll be the one to finish this,” Natsuko said. Reluctantly, Daisy handed her the bottle.
Hemiola twirled the rod in his hand. “I suppose this means you won’t go willingly?”
Natsuko grinned and brandished her bottle. “That is exactly what that means.”
“So be it,” Hemiola said, teleporting behind Natsuko and slamming the rod into her.