After Zhidao’s ultimatum, Natsuko shut herself up in her room and refused to speak to anyone, ignoring their attempts to coax her out. If she was going to make the selfish decision to abandon Po-Lin, she didn’t want to hear anyone else’s shallow justifications. Not Ailing whispering sweet-nothings about how happy they would all be, not Koyon's ruthless "winner takes all" attitude, and not Boulanger telling her that this was the fruits of their struggle.

Not that their concern was real anyway. Boulanger spontaneously asking her out and Ailing suddenly being concerned for her after two years of self-absorption were nothing but attempts to wave a carrot in front of her nose so she would abandon Po-Lin and join them in whatever fucked up new world the Yishang built. As if the stick of permanent annihilation was somehow not enough.

But despite all that, it was plain fact that they—and Ailing particularly—had made her feel good again, if only for a moment. Whenever she tried to hate Ailing and Boulanger, hate them enough to give the Yishang the finger and run back to Vermögenburgh, she was reminded of Shuixing sabotaging her pie during the contest, or one of the countless times Sofiane had taunted and insulted her, or Daisy treating her like a disposable rag doll when she complained about her relationship with the Yishang. Well, okay, that last one was a little hypocritical.

So what if Ailing was faking a friendship? It still felt good. Was she really so bad for wanting to feel good? The last time Natsuko had overcome that guilt and done something with herself, she had ended up the most powerful Hero of all time.

Her arms pulled her knees tight to her chest under her blanket. Refusing to cry, she dug her nails into her legs until pricks of blood beaded up around her fingertips. When that wasn't enough to defuse the ball of stress burning away in her stomach, she walked over to her dresser and smashed it in half. And with that final, destructive purgation, she crawled back into bed and fell asleep.

When the darkness came, she didn’t wait for it to take shape as some strange, vaguely-symbolic nightmare again, but sprinted straight for it and yelled, “Is it you, Pechorin, or not!?”

The formless fever-dream sharpened instantly into a little island somewhere in Shikijima. Overhead there was a cool, clear night, only thin wisps of clouds obfuscating the crescent slice of a waning moon. Standing before her was Pechorin. Though, how she knew that, she didn’t know, because in front of her was nothing but a jagged, jittering polygon.

“It is me. I suppose we can dispense with the dramatic storm clouds and looming, dreadful darkness now,” Pechorin said.

“Wha—? You mean that was all theatrics?”

“Yes,” he replied.

“You dumbass! Why didn’t you show up like a normal person!”

“I like theatrics.”

She tried to punch the polygon, but her fist went right through it. Or him. She wasn’t quite sure what she was looking at, or whether it was the real Pechorin or just a nightmare concocted by her mind.

“I’m not just dreaming? It’s really you, Pech?” she asked in a softer voice.

“No offense to your subconscious, but I don’t think it’s as cleverly symbolic as I am,” he replied.

“So what— you’re in my head? How!?”

“A lot becomes possible when you aren’t chained to a mortal body.”

“Okay, here’s the downside to your theatrics, Mr. Genius Poet, I have no clue what’s a Pechorism and what’s you being serious,” she said, wrapping her hands under her armpits to warm herself against the cold sea winds.

“I’m dead. Or, at the very least, not in Po-Lin. I was force dimension-jumped by Non-Heroes equipped with rods like Hemiola’s.”

“How— hold on, Non-Heroes have FDJ weapons!? Wait, forget that, how are you even talking to me if you’re dead? And I saw the Use-Rankings, you’re still alive.”

“Editing your Use-Ranking individually is trivial for the Yishang. It's an illusion. And as for how I’m talking to you from beyond the veil, Hemiola was right. There is a space that Heroes are sent to when they’re removed from the physical world. Though it is not a heaven. Nor is it a hell. It's simply another place. Shuixing has found her own way into it, albeit by different means and likely with a different, less spiritual interpretation. I myself cannot leave here, but I set up a Special Event field before I was attacked over which I still have some small semblance of control.”

Natsuko felt a tightness in her chest. “I-I’m glad you’re alright.”

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

For a moment there was no response from Pechorin’s jagged polygon, as though he was surprised at her response.

“Thank you. But while I would like to enjoy being here with you, we do not have much time left. Soon you will wake up, and my connection to you will dim as you return to the physical world. We need to discuss our next steps.”

At that, the tightness in her chest constricted further, and this time it was not out of a surplus of tenderness. She knew what these “next steps” were towards, and she wasn’t sure if it was the direction she wanted to go in.

“Pechorin, I... the Yishang offered me a place in their new world, and my new friends and… I’m scared, Pech! I’m really scared! I’m a gods-damned coward and I don’t want to die! And I don’t know what we can do about this! The Yishang control the whole fucking world, and if the gods themselves come down and say, “you can be saved or you can drown in darkness with everyone else,” how the fuck do I tell them no!? How!?” she asked, truly meaning her question.

Tears she’d refused to cry in her waking life sprung hot from the corners of her eyes. Every choice was wrong. Be honorable and be exterminated, betray everyone and survive. Why did it have to come to this? If Natsuko had been on the chopping block with everyone else she could've committed to fighting back without a shred of doubt. Now she had to elect to stick her neck under the guillotine of her own free will.

“I know you think I’m a bastard for this, Pech, but I don’t— I can’t do it. I can’t die! Hate me with whatever time you have left, but it is what it is."

“I don’t hate you, Natsu, and I never will. You made me who I am. There is no Pechorin without you,” he replied.

She jerked her forearm across her eyes to wipe the tears and said, “just hate me, you son of a bitch! I’m a backstabbing, greedy piece of shit who’s selling her friends out so I can live! Don't spit in my face with some stupid fucking Pechorism about how I'm part of you or whatever!”

“I’m not. Natsu. The memories you have been dreaming recently, I have been sharing them with you. Or rather, you’ve been sharing them with me without knowing it. Do you remember the time you convinced me I had to pull my head out of my numbers and be in the world as it is, in all its glory and horror? Do you remember when you convinced me to take up poetry? Almost everything I am now was because you refused to let me sink into my obsession with my own inferiority. Whether you call these bizarre, strange little things entwining themselves with each other Spirit as I do, or lines of numbers as Shui does, we created each other, Natsuko. I can’t hate you. I love you as I love myself.”

Natsuko’s sobbing came to a hiccuping stop. She didn’t deserve his forgiveness, but she greedily sucked it up the same as she sucked up Ailing’s comforting nothings.

“So what… what am I supposed to do? I’m afraid…”

“If you want a true answer, you have to come to it on your own. But if and when you choose to side with us against the Yishang, you’ll need to return to Vermögenburgh. Shuixing and Sofiane are in danger from the same cult that attacked me, and while I am expendable, if we lose Shui’s connection to Po-Lin there will be no one left who can discover a way to escape.”

“You’re not expendable,” Natsuko said.

Though there was nothing in the spasming ball of spiky geometry that would suggest it, she felt as though Pechorin was grinning back at her.

“On the contrary, my role was to be expended. How else would we have contacted you?”

Natsuko tried to say something back to him, but there was a subtle shift that caused the sand beneath her feet and the wind against her hair to dissolve into the foggy, intangible phantasmagoria of a dream which itself gave way to a groggy awareness with one foot in the dreamworld and one in her bedroom in Selenia. For a time after she woke, Natsuko refused to move from the bed. Her waking life felt fake, and with the fakeness came a paralysis where her mind refused to believe the world which wouldn’t melt around her in the next moment. But eventually the fogginess retreated and she struggled out of the numb, pseudo-comfort of her covers and into the cold emptiness of her room.

On her feet, the events of the previous day came back to her, including smashing her dresser in half. It lay in a pile of broken wood, puddled clothes, and scattered knick-knack. The clock must not have struck four yet. Unsure what else to do, she sat cross-legged in front of the destruction and idly picked apart the debris and formed neat, sorted piles. These piles were meaningless, as they would disappear at 4am to be replaced by a perfectly reassembled dresser, but there was a comfort in performing order for order’s sake, separating out her clothes and souvenirs and Opto-box photos.

One particular photo found its way to her hands. In it, a smiling Natsuko had her arms thrown around a blushing Shuixing with Pechorin off to the side posed like a mysterious cowboy and Hemiola with his lute laying below sporting a cocked eyebrow and a smirk. She stared into the distant past long enough for her heart to scream that it couldn’t take anymore before flipping the photo over to read the words on the back:

Always fight for what’s right,

even if it’s suicidally stupid!

Those had been her words, she supposed, but everyone else had lived up to them better. Hemiola faced down the threat of extinction to spite the Yishang, Shuixing had sacrificed everything to figure out how to escape Po-Lin, and Pechorin was speaking to Natsuko from the other side of death just to convince her to stop being a coward. Suicidally stupid, that’s what they were. Only she had taken the smart path and tried to save herself.

She moved to set the Opto-box photo down in a pile with the rest when her palm found a nail sticking out of a board and a shock of pain went through her hand. The pain was crystal clear to the point where it wasn’t even truly pain so much as pure sensation, standing in absolute opposition to the panoply of numbers and statistics that filled her waking life. The impact of this pure pain wiped clear all the scattered thoughts and stories in her head until all that was left was something Pechorin had been trying to tell her that she hadn’t understood until just now:

“We created each other, Natsuko.”

The “we” he had used didn’t just mean him, but Shuixing and Hemiola too, and Sofiane and Daisy, and all the other Heroes and Non-Heroes in their greater and lesser ways. Their strength and their spirit weren’t separate from her own but came from the same well. And if they could summon the courage to be suicidally stupid and fight back against the gods, so could she.