“Well stick me on a hook and fish for tuna, if it ain’t Kurashi!”
Pechorin looked over at the fishing boat he was sailing past and saw Ogawa and a few of the other fishermen who helped teach him Shikijiman poetry. He waved back and pulled his boat up alongside. Stepping aboard, he shook their leathery, pruned hands.
“Didn’t even know you were in town!” Ogawa said.
Town, Pechorin supposed, probably meant all of Shikijima. Explaining what he had been up to would turn into a full conversation, so he decided to keep things to pleasantries. He was on a mission, after all. Though there was something he wanted to ask them.
“Ogawa, when did you and the fishermen become interested in poetry? Did you have that interest all along?” Pechorin asked.
“Hmm… don’t think so,” Ogawa said, scratching his wispy scalp. “Tanaka, when’d we start doin’ poetry again?”
“After the Heroes left, ya geezer. Wasn’t nothin’ to do and the fancy aristocrats were all high and mighty cuz they could do poetry n’ we couldn't, so we had to show ‘em we could do it too,” Tanaka replied.
“Yeah, I guess that was it,” Ogawa said. “What made ya curious?”
“Just wanted to confirm something,” Pechorin replied.
They all hmm-hmm’d and nodded sagely at this. It was possible they thought Pechorin was just being mysterious and dramatic as per usual, but he actually had a reason this time. Specifically, he wanted an outside voice besides his own to weigh in on the potential of Po-Lin’s world-moving spirit. If fishermen, designed and placed to be nothing but set-dressing, could take up and master poetry, there indeed was a powerful force of change underlying the world. It was the sort of force that a Hero focused on the Use-Number competition could ignore entirely as silly and unimportant, failing to recognize the profound possibility it entailed. The Yishang could design and build a world, but they couldn’t control it. They couldn’t keep fishermen from learning poetry.
“Takin’ off so soon, eh Kurashi? Somethin’ more important than your poetry pals?” Ogawa asked.
“I’m afraid so. I have to go save the world now, so the poetry will have to wait,” Pechorin said, stepping back onto his own boat.
“How about one for the road then?” one of the other fishermen said.
Having done as much for a copse of trees, it would've been a grievous insult to deprive his former teachers. Clearing his throat, he spoke:
“Stormy clouds ahead,
Fear grabs at my heart, but then—
A boat of donkeys.”
This had them cracking up and prompted a return couplet from Ogawa:
“The donkeys cast out their lines,
And catch a fellow jackass.”
Ogawa’s was a dangerous response indeed, because it invited yet another response verse, and that one invited the next, and very soon someone would find some plum rum somewhere and they would all be sipping on it and doing poetry on a fishing boat and then Pechorin would blink and it would be late afternoon and there would be no more ferries to the mainland. So he kindly bowed out and bid them all adieu.
“Wait!” Tanaka said as Pechorin moved to hoist his sails. “You’re going to the mainland, ain’t’cha?”
Pechorin nodded.
“Here’s a warning: There’s some crazy guy runnin’ around calling himself a prophet that’s got it in for Heroes. The rebels that the Empress rounded up all busted outta jail and got themselves a ticket to Vermögenburgh to go see him speak. Never seen anything like it! I don’t know what they’re up to, but be careful,” Tanaka said.
The other fishermen affirmed this assessment with a chorus of curt, manly grunts.
“Thanks,” Pechorin said.
In fact, Tanaka had probably saved him quite a bit of time. Apparently it was Vermögenburgh he was headed to next, and undoubtedly where he would find Shuixing and Sofiane. The event field he had set up for his team was intentionally vague, since a stricter script would prevent them from acting spontaneously when the need arose. But if he kept his ears and eyes open, the information he needed came to him naturally. Otherwise he would've been aimlessly wandering.
By noon he was in Kazan-to harbor and his boat poofed out of existence the second he stepped off it. Finding a ship wouldn’t be difficult. There were always Tianzhounese junks going back and forth until the harbor closed in late afternoon. The trouble was that he had no Ying, and it was unlikely that his prospective captain would accept a poem as compensation. For all their trouble, numbers could not be fully dispensed with.
At a general store, Pechorin sold his guns for 10,000 Ying, just enough for the voyage and a nice minced spam bun to take with him. Being unarmed out in the wild was not an ideal situation, but if it was his only option for getting back to the mainland in a timely manner, there was nothing else for it.
Conveniently—though he was sure the sailors were instructed by the Yishang to do this—The Gold Paulownia set sail immediately after Pechorin came aboard. The estimated time of arrival in Tianzhou was a day and a half. A part of him worried about what might occur in that lapsed time, but without a stone bird to ferry him across the ocean, the sailing ship was his fastest means of travel. Once again, he had to place faith in logic higher than himself that Po-Lin would get him where he needed to go.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
During the day out at sea, he chatted with the crew members and nibbled on his spam bun. The sailors on The Gold Paulownia weren’t quite sure what to make of him at first. Heroes usually ignored them, and they ignored Heroes. However they soon took a liking to the eccentric Hero who offered a pleasant break from the work routines that had been their entire world for seven straight years. They especially enjoyed Pechorin's challenge to them that they couldn’t find a subject he was unable to turn into a humorous poem. His haikus on taxes, accidental drownings, and famine were particularly big hits.
Saturday morning, two days after leaving his little island retreat, The Gold Paulownia docked in Tianzhou Harbor. It was about two days to Vermögenburgh if he was quick. Sadly, he was missing his gun to shoot food out of trees, but he figured he could stumble onto a meal or two between here and there.
By noon his journey took him into a bamboo forest where the wind whistled gently and the bamboo bowed over the path like an arch. Ahead, three figures stepped out of the thicket and approached him with rods in hand, and Pechorin got the sense that his role to play had changed somewhat, though he wasn’t yet sure how. Drawing closer, the three figures—a Shikijiman rebel, a Tianzhounese bandit, and an al-Nuwban tribesmen—spread out to flank him. The one in front, the Shikijiman, raised his rod directly at Pechorin. The convoluted geometry at the tip told Pechorin what kind of rod it was.
So that was it, he thought: The Yishang’s answer to declining Use-Numbers. They must’ve thought they could get a repeat performance out of the permanent death crisis. He highly suspected the grand ideas of this “prophet” had been whispered to them by a Pengwu.
“Congratulations,” the rebel Non-Hero said. “You get to be the first Hero to find out why Non-Heroes aren't to be fucked with anymore.”
Pechorin raised an eyebrow. Without weapons, there was nothing he could do here. Evidently, his role was to be force dimension-jumped.
“Look at ‘em, he thinks he’s too gods-damned cool for this,” the bandit said.
“Doesn’t have a clue, does he?” the tribesman replied.
They were having too much fun rubbing it in. If Pechorin let them, they would go off on a monologue, taunting him and savoring their newfound power over a Hero. But now that things were in motion again, every second counted. He couldn’t let them waste any time.
“Let me help you,” Pechorin said and then pushed himself onto the extended rod.
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The area surrounding Lake Amber swarmed with Non-Heroes given the duty of hunting down Sofiane and Shuixing. To both of their moderate good fortunes, neither Baphomet nor his flock knew about the anomalous Dungeon of Stars. On his trips outside, Sofiane was extra careful not to accidentally lead them to it, making sure never to use abilities and triple-checking his surroundings before making the return plunge. His last several outings, though helpful for establishing the passage of time, had only confirmed there was no way for him and Shuixing to slip through Baphomet’s net. He knew they hadn’t left Vermögenburgh and was determined to find them before they did.
As Sofiane lined himself up for the jump, a shudder ran through his body and with it the nagging sensation of something having been taken from him. He stood on the lip of the cliff for a moment trying to think of what it could be but then brushed it aside and jumped. Upon his return, he found Shuixing up and walking; a good sign considering she had spent most of the time lying down and resting. Her face was pinched in a grimace, but she flashed him a weary smile when he returned.
“No luck yet?” Shuixing asked.
Sofiane shook his head. “Nope. Although they have more rods. About half have one now.”
Shuixing had no idea how the Non-Heroes had manufactured FDJ weapons so fast, but according to Sofiane, the rods had been few and precious only yesterday. Now every other Non-Hero had one.
“You don’t think the Yishang is behind this, do you?” Sofiane asked.
“I don’t know. I wish I could connect the dots, but my brain is a mess right now. I can’t tell if I’m over or under stimulated. Just a second ago I had this weird spasm…”
“Wait, you too?” Sofiane asked. “It was a little over a minute ago, non?”
Shuixing nodded, concern creeping onto her face. Both pulled up the only source of outside information available to them: the Use-Rankings Chart.
“The total…” Shuixing said.
“It’s down by one.”
“Who?”
Shuixing's own ranking hadn’t budged, which narrowed the list to only the handful below her. It didn’t take them long to figure out.
Shuixing gasped. “Oh gods… Pechorin…”
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At first Daisy chalked the jarring sensation up to her stone gorilla smashing alien tentacle monsters into a gooey pulp. But her mind was tuned to filter out the rock-on-rock violence that her summoning spells created. This feeling was coming from inside her body.
“Guys, did you all… um… feel something just now?” Daisy asked.
Cunegonde glanced at her while searing the head off an alien with a beam of white light. "Hmm? No...”
Yuna slashed diagonally through a large octopus then jerked her katana sideways through a group of three smaller ones. “It’s the rocks, dumbie.”
“It wasn’t Kong,” Daisy said, referring to her alien-squashing stone gorilla.
Kane didn’t even hear her question as he continued blasting mobs with lightning, completely unburdened by thoughts.
Daisy wished she could let it go, but the sensation had come with a feeling of anxious wrongness. Like she was in the wrong time and the wrong place. Or like she was disobeying a special event field. But Cunegonde flashed her a look that said she needed to get her shit together and Daisy forced herself to ignore the nagging feeling and focus on what really mattered: Grinding monsters and leveling up. Whatever it was could wait.
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Natsuko started to nod off. One of the Mooncom officers had just revealed themselves to be a secret agent under the command of Chaos General Vidorgia all along so that they could sabotage Selenia’s defense systems so the Entropic Axis could invade Selenia directly so that blah blah blah. It was the usual boring plot stuff except it was even more aggravating because it was getting in the way of Ailing’s relaxation sessions. For the last week or so her teammate had been helping her calm down in the evening, and it was doing wonders for her mental health.
“Those Mooncom fools are lifeless and stagnant! They’ve given up on progress—”
Natsuko’s eyelids fell shut in the middle of the evil villain speech. No one could fault her for sleeping through it. What did the Yishang care? Maybe this could be a new arc for her emanation. Sleepy Natsuko.
Dreams came surprisingly fast. Lately she had been dreaming about the old days, and especially about Pechorin for some reason. This time, however, the dream took place in the present day. She was in Tianzhou, walking in a bamboo forest, when all of a sudden she was attacked by Non-Heroes wielding Hemiola’s rod. She tried to incinerate them, but her abilities didn’t work in the dream, and then they lifted the rods and—
“Ahh!”
The double agent, the surviving Mooncom agents, and Natsuko’s team all froze to look at her. She blushed profusely once she realized she had interrupted the scene.
“Sorry!”