Sofiane paced the room but it only made him more anxious every time he lapped around Shuixing’s body. The most he could do for her was pull the needle out of her leg and sit her up in the chair. After that, he was powerless to do anything but hope Shui could do what she claimed and drain Baphomet’s stats.
“How are you so damn calm?” Sofiane asked Vidorgia seated across from Shuixing with her feet up on a coffee table.
“Cuz I don’t care how this ends,” Vidorgia said. “What difference does it make to me? I’m back to doing evil villainess performances once this is over.”
Sofiane shook his head. “You’re telling me you don’t care about being wiped out of existence if the Yishang win?”
Vidorgia shrugged. “I’ve been alive for four months and the only thing I’ve done that I can remember is read off a script. You two have your friends and your lover and all that, so I get why you all are so concerned, but I don’t have any of that, so I don't care.”
“You seemed pretty scared when we threatened to dimension jump you earlier,” Sofiane said.
Vidorgia folded her arms. “Because the Yishang told me not to get dimension-jumped so I can be a part of the finale quest. I’ve got a job to do.”
“Even though you know it’s bullshit?”
“Even though I know it’s bullshit.”
Strangely, her bizarre fatalism calmed him down. He stopped pacing and leaned against a countertop behind Shuixing. Truthfully, he might also have rolled over and let the Yishang do what they wanted had it not been for his need to see Gomiko again.
“Non-Heroes don’t talk to each other?” Sofiane asked.
“Some do,” Vidorgia replied. “It depends on who they are. Random Mooncom soldiers probably hang out together. But as the main villainess of the region, it ruins the illusion for me to be shooting the shit, y’know? The Yishang heavily discourages it. I don’t remember what I did exactly, or who I was talking to, but talking to others got me re-formatted a couple of times. After that I put my head down and stuck to the script.”
Sofiane tried to imagine what it would be like to forget everything. His time with Gomiko and her team, his adventures with Shuixing and the others. Even the memories of Xiuquan’s team seemed worth preserving in their own way. To have that done to you just for socializing seemed cruel. Looking at Vidorgia, her long black hair falling over eyes too numb to be sad, he finally understood why Shuixing had made such a big deal out of saving the inhabitants of the Mage’s College. They were real people, as complete as he was, but the Yishang had taken pains to make sure they didn’t—and couldn’t—seem too much like real people. For whose benefit, he didn’t know.
“That’s all the more reason to fight,” Sofiane said.
Vidorgia shook her head again, but some small amount of life flickered back into her numb eyes for a moment. She opened her mouth like she was going to say something but then deflated. Sofiane exhaled with her. Oh well, he supposed.
The yelling in the hall outside grew louder. At first Sofiane thought Baphomet had returned, but to his dismay, he instead heard the voices of the Bolters from earlier.
“If they were trying to sabotage The Prophet, they’d go after his supplies,” said a muffled voice with a troop of footsteps behind it.
“Fuck,” Sofiane said, pushing off the counter full of supplies.
The door’s lock lay discarded on the ground. In the center of the door was a big, round, impossible-to-miss hole where it was supposed to be. Without it, he couldn’t even prop the door closed with a chair. Sofiane grabbed his arquebus.
“Help me keep them away from Shui!” he said to Vidorgia.
“Huh!? If they see me helping they’ll kill me too!” Vidorgia said.
Ignoring Vidorgia's protests, he picked up Shuixing’s stolen arquebus and tossed it at her. Being a Non-Hero designed for combat, her hands instinctively caught it.
“You’re already in here with us. What do you think that looks like?” Sofiane said, nudging a rolling table full of lab equipment towards the door.
“But— I can tell them I—”
“They’re in there!” cried a voice outside.
The voice was joined by a chorus of running feet.
“You’re with us now, Vidorgia,” Sofiane said.
He leveled the doctored barrel of his arquebus at the hole in the door, bracing it against the rolling table like a cue stand. The footsteps slowed at the door. A leg appeared on the other side of the hole and he thrust towards it, turning its owner into a pile of flickering geometry.
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On the ground Baphomet was fast. His stats made up for his lack of fighting experience. He closed the hundred yard distance between them in the time it took Daisy to throw up a wall. Natsuko tackled Daisy to the ground, saving her from a bottle swing which shattered the wall before coming for her head. Daisy staggered out from under Natsuko and the two broke into a blind sprint through the forest, bushes and branches tearing at them as they ran.
“Should we roll the dice on killing ourselves?” Daisy asked.
“Too risky. What if the Yishang decides not to re-summon us?” Natsuko said.
Daisy swallowed. She hadn’t thought of that. But given Baphomet’s sudden leap in stats and the fact he was hunting them specifically, it seemed likely the Yishang was trying to off them both in a dramatic way that appealed to the Celestials. Even if the Yishang didn’t know she and Natsuko were working against them, they might leave them dead purely for the shock factor. But then, what about the Celestials who had paid money for their emanations?
Daisy’s circling thoughts were cut in half by a spear through her stomach. Blood rushed up and out of her mouth. Natsuko ground to a halt. Her hand shot for the haft of the spear and with her own overpowered strength, snapped it in half, leaving Baphomet with a broken stick in one hand and his dimension-jumping bottle in the other.
“Cheating bitch,” he said, tossing the broken spear aside.
Daisy staggered backwards, gasping for breath. Aside from being painful, the attack left her on almost no HP, passive tankiness once again barely saving her life. If she could find an opening, her Desperation Art was ready to use, but the second it took to channel was long enough for Baphomet to run her down.
“Cheat? That’s rich coming from the guy having his stats boosted by the Yishang,” Natsuko said, putting herself between him and Daisy.
“The Yishang? No, I did this myself,” Baphomet said, a wide, deranged grin growing across his face. “I broke through to a spirit world belonging to neither the Yishang nor Po-Lin. A world of pure energy. And I made it mine. I earned this! You needed help from the Yishang to get where you are, you little cunt.”
Natsuko blinked. Had Baphomet gone to the place where Heroes were force dimension-jumped to, and then come back? In which case…
“Listen,” Natsuko said, holding up her hands. “It sounds like you’re trying to get back at the Yishang. So are we. There’s no reason to fight.”
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Baphomet laughed. “Get back at them? No… They’re a tool, same as this bottle. You take every advantage you get, whether it’s from the gods or from your own willpower. I don’t hate you for winning a free ticket to the top, Natsuko. What I hate is you took it for granted. You didn't have to keep fighting for your place like the rest of us because the Yishang made you too overpowered! That’s why Po-Lin is in decline, because the Celestials want to see us struggle! They want to see us fight and compete! If some boring, lazy bitch takes the top spot of course they’re gonna get bored! Of course numbers are gonna go down!”
Natsuko's eyes darted around looking for an escape, but there was no direction she and Daisy could run in he wouldn’t catch them. On top of that, something else, something formless was stewing in her mind. Something she was missing.
“I’ll give the Yishang this: They know they fucked up making you so powerful. Why else would they put on this whole charade about giving some stupid Non-Heroes a way to kill Heroes? Now that's a struggle! There’s your drama! And me? I plan to put on a good fucking show.”
Stupid Non-Heroes? Wait, that’s what she’d forgotten.
“Wait! Baphomet,” she said, her voice wavering. This was her last ditch effort. If this didn’t work, she and Daisy were as good as dead. “You— you were a Non-Hero! A villain! The Yishang raised you up to Hero status after al-Nuwba, r-right? So, is that what this is really about? You know you don’t have to—”
He snorted. “Hah! Again, you don’t get it. Hero? Non-Hero? It doesn’t matter. The Yishang don’t matter. Nothing matters! Nothing except getting stronger. Bringing numbers up. I fought to make myself a Hero. I had to be charming, I had to be strong, I had to make a fucking impression, and once they made me a Hero, I had to fight to keep the Celestials’ interest. Gor a long fucking time I made it work! But when that time was over, I didn’t waste it by wallowing in self-pity, or—” the blood-red orbs of his eyes zeroed in on Natsuko’s eyes like two infernal lenses, “—drinking myself into a stupor. I kept fighting. And now?” He smiled at them and hefted the wine bottle up to his shoulder. “Now, I’m winning again.”
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Chunk by chunk, the door to the fortified supply room was being torn apart by a mob of Non-Heroes. Their actions were uncoordinated, and Sofiane was able to score a few easy kills as they struggled against his makeshift rolling table barricade. But more kept coming, eager to support their Prophet by eradicating the Heroes stealing from him. As soon as Sofiane stabbed a grasping hand or swinging rod, two more took its place. More than once a rod narrowly missed him, dimension-jumping a piece of lab equipment instead.
Vidorgia watched the struggle from afar. She was used to having a script to go by, or at least being able to guess what the Yishang wanted. Now every option was a bad one. Her only directive was to not get dimension-jumped, but the mob of angry Non-Heroes now wanted her dead and if she jumped up to help Sofiane, that was also disobeying the, Yishang and she would be re-formatted. With two options, both terrible, her brain did nothing. It could do nothing.
“Get over here and help, for gods’ sakes!” Sofiane shouted.
The mob outside was organizing. As the first true proving ground for their weapons, the Non-Heroes were only now learning how FDJ rods actually worked. And they were getting better fast.
“Hold on!” shouted a Shikijiman ronin. “Stop! You’re gonna get killed too if you keep hacking at him, idiots!”
The mob withdrew from Sofiane’s attacking range. Unfortunately, there was no way to bust out without leaving Shui defenseless. Some of the Non-Heroes had real stats like Vidorgia, which meant his Ball Lightning wouldn't insta-kill. Sofiane was forced to listen while they plotted their siege right outside the door.
“The rods zap objects too, right? So, stand outside his range and hit the barricade. If you can hit his gun, even better,” the ronin explained. “Don’t go for a kill until we have him cornered."
Sofiane’s stomach sank. Here was the flip-side to his revelation that Non-Heroes were equally complex people: They were also not dumb. Before they renewed their attack, he grabbed as much extra equipment as he could and threw it on the table. Soon enough, the tips of rods were once again prodding through the door, this time aimed at dismantling his barricade. With better reach, his arquebus prodded back, but now he had to pay attention to keeping it out of harm’s way too, lest he lose his—fourth? fifth?—weapon. Soon the blockade, including the rolling table, was gone, and there was nothing but the terrifying dance between him and the Non-Heroes for who would tag the other first. Then, a second arquebus joined his, killing a Sibe-Lander who was about to land a hit on Sofiane's arquebus.
Sofiane glanced at Vidorgia fighting at his side but said nothing, focused on defending the narrow entryway between Shuixing and her attackers. He wanted to ask what made her change her mind. And if Vidorgia were able to respond, she would say there was almost no difference between being reformatted and refusing to get involved. Almost, because at least if she was reformatted, it meant she had made a choice herself. So she decided to throw herself into defending Shuixing, thrusting and thrusting, ducking and swinging, in a desperate attempt to protect the Hero Sofiane claimed could help them all escape from the Yishang. Whether that was true or not didn’t matter. This was her choice, and she stuck by it right up until the corner of a stray rod caught her forearm and sent her through the floor to a place that was very, very dark.
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It was hard to isolate specific emotions in the cerebral thought-looping of Numberspace where Shuixing's emotional landscape was a seesaw of ecstasy and horror. But she could tell by the dread paralyzing her thoughts that something was going wrong. Her first and second efforts had failed. Not only could she not drop Baphomet’s raised stats, but she also could not raise Natsuko and Daisy’s to parity. By the rapidly changing HP-numbers, she could tell time was running out. For all she knew, so was the time limit on her journey. Double-checking, Shuixing could still edit her own stats, but her power to do so ended where another Entity began. Right as her anxiety seemed ready to sabotage everything, something occurred to her that she hadn’t even thought of:
Use a Special Event field.
Could she do that? It wasn’t something she had ever tried since she couldn't find where the Yishang inputted data for it. Whatever they did must interface with the Central Probability Algorithm, she knew, otherwise they couldn't control it, but there were countless locations which fed into the CPA, and reverse-engineering a list of pathways would be almost impossible.
But if a Special Event field already exists…
She scanned through Natsuko’s Entity file again, searching for anything that seemed like it was receiving a feedback loop of inputs—the tell-tale sign of an ongoing Special Event. This loop was, to put it more simply (for her) a density of referential links that tied the flux of Natsuko’s numbers to other objects, entities, and code. In there she found two promising sites: One a vague and loosely-defined event with seemingly no input into the CPA beyond checking for the states of herself, Natsuko, Sofiane, Pechorin, and Daisy. This one concerned her, since it could potentially be some kind of final trap for the Yishang to spring on them, but for now she set it aside.
The other event was enormously-scoped but also limited in its parameters, and was likely the one the Yishang had set up across Po-Lin to allow Non-Heroes to congregate in Vermögenburgh and which predisposed them against their will to follow Baphomet. This was what she was looking for. With a rush pf excitement and the strange, unexplainable, hands-off sensation with which they had fought Hemiola, Shuixing altered the event.
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Natsuko panted. She was out of energy, almost out of HP, and half of Vermögenburgh was a smoldering, charred wasteland where Natsuko had detonated her Hypocenter. Beside her, Daisy was in no better shape. Amidst the scorched landscape, Baphomet strode towards them, barely damaged.
“That’s pretty good,” Baphomet said. “It almost got me below a million hit points.”
Natsuko's heart pounded. Both she and Daisy were spent. From here on, everything would be up to Shui and Sofi, she thought. But amidst the rolling black plains the pine forests had been reduced to, three Heroes shivered as the world changed imperceptibly, its rules changing with it. Hero-on-Hero violence was now strictly prohibited, their abilities frozen.
“Why!?” Baphomet screamed, his neck craned towards the sky. “You motherfuckers!”
He swung his bottle wildly, as though the Yishang were an invisible ghost slowly choking him to death as punishment for borrowing their power. Stunned by the sudden change that had saved them, Natsuko and Daisy both assumed it was the will of the Yishang as well. Then, Natsuko gasped.
“Pechorin!”
She and Daisy looked at each other and started squealing and jumping for joy. Daisy had no idea why Natsuko mentioned Pechorin, but that was less important than the fact that they weren't going to be killed.
Baphomet’s face snapped back towards them and he snarled. “The Yishang want to keep their poster child safe that fucking bad, huh? They’ll see…”
He stomped forward, bottle in hand. If Daisy and Natsuko had also been helpless before the Special Event’s script, Baphomet might have still been a threat. Instead, Natsu turned to Daisy and smirked.
“Swap incoming."
Baphomet blinked and he was suddenly on collision course with Daisy’s fist. Her knuckles struck his cheek bone and he staggered backwards into Natsuko who kicked out his knees from under him. The shock jarred the bottle from his grip and sent it rolling across the burnt ground. As soon as he was down, Daisy put one of her pink heeled boots onto his throat while Natsuko snatched the bottle and hefted it in her hands, reacquainting herself to its awkward bulk.
“W-Wait! I can help you!” Baphomet said, his horns wriggling against the ground like petrified worms.
“I would’ve accepted that a couple traumatic injuries ago,” Natsuko said, still bleeding from the gashes his spear had put in her.
“Please don’t kill me! I’m sorry! I-I— I got drunk with power, I don’t know what happened! I’ll play the event straight, I promise! I want to go to the other world, please!”
Natsuko's jaw hung open. He wasn’t begging her for mercy, he was begging the Yishang. Even having crossed over into the weird dimension-jump world, the greatest liberation he could fathom was being graced with the opportunity to populate the Yishang's new world. For a moment, a part of Natsuko even doubted whether she had made the right choice refusing something tens of thousands of Heroes and Non-Heroes would literally kill for. But she looked to Daisy, and without needing any other confirmation, brought the bottle down on Baphomet.