As soon as Baphomet’s usage numbers disappeared, Shuixing knew her gambit paid off. With time to spare in her current Aqua Shen journey, she migrated over to Sofiane’s numbers and found them in sharp flux. Even if she didn’t know precisely what was happening, the turbulence told her he was in danger. The Non-Heroes must have found the supply room.
She could picture the scene by this alone, the back and forth thrusting of sticks and rods with a microscopic mountain range of lethality at the tip. She allowed the fear of helplessness to pass and subside. She wasn’t helpless. The same Special Event she had manipulated for Daisy and Natsuko could be used again to pacify the Non-Heroes. But did she want to have that power? This was precisely what she hated about the Yishang: Their power to manipulate and coerce indirectly. To force Heroes and Non-Heroes to make the choices the Yishang wanted as if they were doing it of their own free will.
But she had to do exploit what little power she had. If she didn’t, her, Sofiane, and Vidorgia could all be dead. Disgust seeped into her floating consciousness as she radiated an impulse out through the event field to pacify everyone in it.
----------------------------------------
Sofiane was far beyond any other emotion but the flow state of survival. If he lived, if he died, it didn’t matter. Vidorgia was gone. He might be next. But Shuixing had to live.
When the combat finally did end, his muscles fought the command, demanding to keep fighting and thrusting his arquebus at the endless horde of Non-Heroes. For a few brief moments, he and his adversaries stood staring at each other in confusion. Murmurs spread through the crowd about this being the work of the Yishang. What it felt like, Sofiane supposed, was the reassertion of normalcy. Heroes as the stars, Non-Heroes in their supporting roles. He glanced at Shuixing, her limp arms draped over the arms of the chair. This was her, he was sure of it. For the first time, Sofiane truly understood how dangerous access to Numberspace really was. He trusted Shuixing with that power, but it was a power that demanded either trust or fear.
During the brief reprieve before the Non-Heroes rallied, Sofiane checked his Use-Rankings chart. Baphomet was gone. Defeated by Daisy and Natsuko, no doubt, but with an inordinate amount of help from Shuixing. He looked around the room at everything that was not her empty, lifeless body until the idea that she was anywhere, or everywhere, and that Po-Lin was so infinitesimal that being its omniscient observer was a trivial feat, overwhelmed him.
Sofiane thought about Gomiko instead. If he was going to be overwhelmed by anything, he wanted it to be by love rather than existentialism. Unfortunately, this thought was itself interrupted by the mob of Non-Heroes coalescing once more at the door like an amoeba pulling itself into homogeneity. He took up his gun again, waiting for the mob to throw itself at the doorway.
“Stop! They’re not our enemies!”
The voice came from the hallway right as outrage and violence was flickering back into the eyes of the Non-Heroes. Sofiane recognized other voices in the argument that ensued: members of the Mage’s College. He caught little of what was said, as both parties were leaderless and thus talking at each other simultaneously in volleys of angry shouts. It was less an argument and more a verbal brawl which seemed ready to spill over into a physical—and potentially dimensional—brawl at any moment. What Sofiane did hear, however, was talk of Baphomet being dead and discussion over whether catching the Heroes stealing from him still mattered.
After much yelling, the newly-integrated group concluded that stealing Baphomet’s confiscated garbage did not matter, but the fact that Sofiane had permanently killed at least 20 or more of them via forced dimension-jumping very much did matter and would continue to matter until he was executed.
“H-Hey! Hold on a second! They’re not dead, okay?” Sofiane said, guarding the door with his arquebus.
Arguing against the assembled crowd was a harder struggle than holding the doorway. He babbled through an explanation of how the Yishang and dimension-jumping and Numberspace all worked, but angry shouts and jeers drowned out his explanation. This conundrum was in no way aided by the Mage’s College faculty jumping in to shout the first group down, who then took it upon themselves to shout back until it felt like the inside of Sofiane’s skull was nothing but angry shouting and that maybe angry shouting was all that was or had ever been and that if the gods existed they were nothing but an angry chorus singing creation.
Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
Shuixing gasped.
The crowd quieted. Those closest to the door peeked in as far as they dared without entering Sofiane’s stabbing range. Every eye was watching Shuixing struggle out of her chair and onto wobbly feet. Sofiane wanted to run over and help her, but he didn’t dare move from the doorway.
“What’s— what’s happening?” Shuixing said, struggling to see the world in front of her.
She shut her eyes for a moment to ground herself, but the world behind her eyelids was nothing but spiraling fractals, so she had to open them again or otherwise throw up. The hallway erupted into another cacophony as everyone offered their opinion on what was happening all at the same time. Sofiane looked back at her and tried to offer his opinion as well, but it all blended into a flat wall of sensation pounding against her eardrums.
“Please, be quiet!” Shuixing said.
Even those that could not possibly have heard her went silent. Sofiane, so recently the target of her special event command, recognized the same force again. A moment later, both Sofiane and Shuixing realized what had happened. Shuixing hadn’t ended the special event. She had replaced Baphomet’s role with herself. To Sofiane, that was a source of enormous relief. To Shuixing, horror.
“I-I um…”
She froze under the stare of innumerable eyes, growing by the second. Without the experience of perverting a special event field, the Non-Heroes had no way of knowing that they weren’t drawn to Shuixing's words of their own free will. To them it was completely natural that Shuixing had emerged as The True Prophet out of the cocoon of the The False Prophet. And that her guardian had just murdered several of their companions.
“I want to explain everything to you all… to everyone. B-But I need you to follow me out to the square,” Shuixing said, her voice wavering uncharismatically.
The sea of people parted to allow her to leave and Sofiane scurried after, not wanting to test the permanency of her commands.
Shuixing glanced back at him. “Vidorgia, she…”
Sofiane nodded.
“That’s unfortunate."
It was a cold response, but Sofiane understood what she meant. They had already lost Pechorin too. If they wanted a chance to see them again, there was nothing to do but remain focused on the task at hand. For now that meant getting a mob of angry Non-Heroes under control.
They first stopped in a classroom to change back into their regular clothes, now in the role of the Heroes they were. Sofiane worried this stop would lose them their momentum, but with none of her own effort, the train of people following Shuixing grew as they left the Mage’s College. Much like the Sibe-Lander riders had for Baphomet, the faculty formed an honor guard of sorts, with Dr. Cox in the lead announcing the purpose of the procession. His efforts, however, were redundant, as her artificial authority was already pulling Non-Heroes into her gravity.
By the time she and Sofiane mounted the remains of Baphomet’s ad-hoc platform, the crowd had swelled to fill the entire square. Not only had Baphomet’s former zealots come, but the Vermögenburghers who had been hiding indoors, now emerging with the sense that something had changed. Atop the platform, Shuixing was once again arrested by the attention on her. Aside from the moral repugnance of what she had done to capture it, she also hated attention in a general sense. Laboratories were where she wanted to be. Capturing and holding attention was something the rest of her friends, even Pechorin, were superior at.
“U-Um… You all…”
Sofiane’s gaze fell to Shui’s hands balling up her filthy robes in tight fists. Knowing what she wanted to say to the assembled Non-Heroes, he stepped forward, ready to take over for her. But stopped. Would his words even have any effect on them without the compulsion of the special event field, he wondered?
Shuixing looked back at him through glasses cracked and dented, preserved by the anomalous Dungeon of Stars from that mechanism of the Yishang’s which sanded away imperfections overnight. Wearing stained and soiled robes and crooked glasses, trembling like the least leaf of autumn, Shuixing was hardly the image of an inspiring leader. But beneath all this was an undeniable solid core which had stared into the horrifying implications of their world and discovered the language of the gods and bent it to her own willpower, using it not for herself, but to keep the hope of escape and freedom alive. Sofiane couldn’t be the one to tell the Non-Heroes the truth. It had to be Shuixing. So he grasped her hand and squeezed and she took a deep breath and finally spoke:
“The Yishang created this world and trapped us in it. And I want to tell you all how we will leave,” she began.