With a squeak and a glug, dark wine spilled forth and wet the dirt of the Mage’s College courtyard. It pooled like garnet ichor in the hole Natsuko picked to dump it in and her heart strangled her brain for wasting precious, precious liquor and demanded she get down on all fours and lap the wine from the puddle like a dog. She came very close to doing that before she felt Shui’s gentle hand on her arm.
“Agh! It feels like I’m sacrificing my child!” Natsuko moaned.
“I’m proud of you for doing it, Natsu,” Shuixing said, hugging her side.
The bottle took a long time to empty as it splashed over the ground and both of their legs. What might have been a touching and cathartic moment was ruined by the sheer volume of wine, which ran downhill and created a second puddle across the breezeway of the Mage’s College. And there was still more wine to go.
“Wow. You drank all this the first time?” Shuixing asked.
“It’s not that much,” Natsuko said. “It’s like… I don’t know, twenty bottles of wine? Thirty? That’s like, ten nights of drinking, tops.”
Shuixing calculated the content to be four gallons, of which there was still an entire gallon left. A group of Non-Heroes, mostly students, gathered to watch.
Still holding the bottle, Natsuko turned to them and said, “what are you looking at, huh? You don't even have the cathartic context for this, rubbernecking bastards!”
This only heightened their entertainment and they started jeering and accusing her of a party foul. In response Natsuko swung the bottle, spraying them with wine and forcing them off. When they were alone again Natsuko returned to dumping out the wine.
“They’re a lot bolder, that’s for sure,” Natsuko said.
“The Non-Heroes you mean?” Shui asked.
“Yeah! What’d you do to them?”
“Me? I-I didn’t do anything! It was Baphomet at the behest of the Yishang that got them to pick a fight with Heroes. If anything I calmed them down.”
Natsuko shook the bottle to get the last few drops out and as she did she thought about her fight with Baphomet. He claimed his origin as a Non-Hero didn’t really matter, but she wondered about that. A lot of Heroes treated their Non-Hero brethren like mobs. Natsuko was one of the first—and one of the only—Heroes to pick up on them having as much inner-life as Heroes. That was why she'd made friends with the patrons of the Devil's Cut and gone out of her way to defend them from being destroyed by a wyvern for three straight years at the expense of her own mental health.
“I like their spunk,” Natsuko said.
"Especially because we’ll need them soon, I suspect. Them and their FDJ rods,” Shuixing replied.
“Oh?”
“I assume the Yishang will try to get every last bit of money they can from us, so they won’t just switch us off. They’ll make a show of it. Of us.”
Natsuko stroked her chin. “Us and the Non-Heroes against the world, huh? Well, I beat some asshole with perfect stats so, fuck it, I can do that to another couple hundred.”
Natsuko re-corked her bottle and tread out of the wine-sticky ground looking for a spigot to wash her feet off. She found one in the garden and as she cleaned herself, a conspicuous silence came over Shuixing. Without saying anything, Natsuko knew what it was about.
“Pechorin isn’t really dead,” Natsuko said.
“I know, but…”
He was as good as dead, Shuixing wanted to say. She could go and examine the string of 1s and 0s that comprised his place in Numberspace, but that wasn’t the same as hearing him awkwardly declaim a poem or dramatize over a minor inconvenience. Even just his physical presence, his looming height and black coat and mellow voice, was a conspicuous absence.
“That’s the one thing I have a tough time with in this arrangement,” Natsuko said. “Somewhere in that crowd of Non-Heroes are the pricks that jumped him.”
Shuixing sighed. “Yes, and Sofiane also dimension-jumped a couple dozen of them defending me while I was modifying your special event field.”
Natsuko’s eyes widened. “Wait, that was you!? I thought that was Pech!”
“I didn’t make the field. The Yishang created it for Baphomet’s fake rebellion. Though there was another strange event field I discovered at the same time which does nothing but add referential tags to the five of us. I worry it may be a final trap for the Yishang to spring.”
Natsuko chuckled. “Nah, the Yishang probably has no idea about us yet. That right there? That was Pech, I guarantee.”
“Creating a special event field? That’s not possible. I have access to Numberspace and I still haven’t figured out how to do it," Shuixing said.
Natsuko shrugged. “I don’t know, I just got a feeling. Oh, and Shui?”
Her friend looked up at her.
“Thanks."
“For what?”
“For putting up with me being an ass and running off to relive the glory days, and for continuing to fight for us, even when no one was helping you. I fucked up, Shui. I’m sorry.”
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
Shuixing abruptly hugged Natsuko. In the two years she was poking around Numberspace, the “real” world, Po-Lin, had felt more and more false. Witnessing the raw, unmediated substance that comprised reality, the endless stream of irrefutable numbers, the idea that something higher could emerge from these numbers had slipped out of her consideration entirely. Even the chair she sat on for her journeys was nothing but an illusion created by the interaction of various parameters of her code with the Central Probability Algorithm. But what she felt when she hugged Natsuko was warmth. It was another human being, firm in her arms, but soft enough to accommodate her own being. The numbers weren’t important, she thought. This was important.
“I forgive you,” Shuixing said.
Natsuko murmured for a moment, her chest rumbling against Shuixing. “In that case, I forgive you for sabotaging my pie.”
Shuixing started laughing so hard she had to pull out of the hug. “Oh gods, you’re still hung up about the pie?”
“Yeah, dammit! We were playing to win!”
Natsuko managed to hold a serious face for a few seconds before bursting out into giggles. The pie was about as far from their current worries as could be. Having said everything they wanted to say, the two walked back inside in contented silence, enjoying the presence of the other on their way to the first planning committee meeting.
Sofiane, refusing to let any time be wasted, had immediately set about the previous evening organizing the Non-Heroes. Anarchy and independent initiative were all well and good, but it was only a matter of time before the Yishang fired everything they had at them to stop Shuixing, at which point Vermögenburgh would become a castle under siege. In anticipation of this, Sofiane had appointed himself Minister of Defense.
Though the defenses were yet to be organized, what Sofiane accomplished in the half-day between defeating Baphomet and the following morning was to organize a planning committee and find suitable representatives for it. The meeting was held in the lecture hall where he and Shuixing had rescued the members of the Mage’s College. In the center was an oval table and ten chairs. Aside from Natsuko, Shuixing, Daisy, and himself, Sofiane identified a handful of Non-Heroes who seemed the most competent and willing to help coordinate defense efforts, bringing the total committee members to ten. Once everyone was seated, he cleared his throat.
“First order of business: Let me introduce everyone. I myself am Sofiane de la Nuit, Minister of Defense.”
Natsuko snorted and he shot her a look.
“If you want to be the one to organize everything, Natsuko, be my guest. But in the absence of anyone else willing to do the job, I stepped up. Now, aside from myself, these three are the other Heroes on the committee: Daisy, Shuixing, and Natsuko, who I am sure you are all familiar with by now. As she announced yesterday, Shuixing has a way of tapping into the dimension the Yishang use to build and manipulate our world. Our primary objective is to keep Shuixing safe at all costs while she researches a way to get us out.”
Shuixing blushed from neck to scalp at the attention she was getting. Speaking into a giant crowd had the advantage of collapsing everyone into a single collective subject. Here, she had nine sets of eyes staring at her, scrutinizing whether she was up to the task of saving Po-Lin.
“I-I— uh… we…”
Sofiane patted her shoulder. “Our secondary objective is to relieve you of the duty of making grandiose speeches and leading a war effort, Shui. Your focus from now on is your research.”
Shuixing exhaled in relief.
“The other two, Natsuko and Daisy, will be fighting and intercepting Heroes sent to target us, among other duties as assigned,” Sofiane continued.
Across the table, a goblin chief with his scraggly feet propped on the table and rusty hacksaw in his lap grunted. “How d’ya know what they’re gonna do?”
“Thanks for asking. Everyone, this is our Captain of Ground Defense, Spriggansnout.”
The goblin chief tipped his raggedy leather cap over a scarred eye.
Sofiane nodded. “How do I know they’ll attack us? Fortunately, we have one extremely useful piece of information about the Yishang: Money is their king. If they were smart, they’d delete Shuixing with a wave of their hand—”
More precisely a press of their finger, thought Shuixing. She was beginning to understand their physiology based on passing anatomical references in emails. As far as she could tell, they were almost anatomically identical to Heroes and Non-Heroes. And they manipulated the numbers with their fingers.
“—but they won’t, because they can make money off our rebellion. Heroes dying is exciting for the Celestials, and so is a sudden twist in the whole Entropic Axis plot. Naturally, they’re going to make this a Special Event. Most likely the final one. THE Special Event.”
No one around the table objected to his logic.
“Moving on. To Spriggansnout’s right is Medea, Captain of Aerial Defense.”
A sultry-looking woman with curly purple hair wearing an indigo peplos smiled and nodded. Natsuko had distant memories of fighting her at some point, but the only thing she remembered was that Medea was really hot. Damn, she realized, she looked kind of like Ailing.
“And, last but not least for the defense side of our operations, Captain of Reconnaissance, Vronsky.”
Vronsky was a Sibe-Lander from the Medingradian side. Like his goblin chief colleague, his feet were up on the table, but he wore black cowboy boots, spurs, and a pair of clockwork pistols in leather holsters, all three traded with someone from the Homeland Prairies region of Deco Imperia. His curled brown mustachio (something male Heroes were forbidden from having) and shaggy brown hair spilling out of a papkha hat, however, were unmistakably Medingradian. Like his chaos general colleague Medea, he was also really hot. Damn, she realized, he looked kind of like Frederick.
He gave a subtle, two-fingered wave from his hip. “Lookin’ forward to workin’ with ya, comrades.”
Natsuko curled her fist. Son of a bitch, even his voice was hot.
“Vronsky will be helping us form an early warning system across Vermögenburgh and the surrounding regions to give us ample time to react before we can expect an attack. He will also be working closely with our Chief of Intelligence, Zicheng,” Sofiane said.
Zicheng was a dark-haired, dark-eyed Tianzhounese bandit leader in black robes that Natsuko swore she ought to remember but couldn’t. If she had to guess, he was part of the front half of the Tianzhounese questline that was all about stabilizing the Tianzhounese League before the second half brought the Entropic Axis back in.
“In addition to providing information on what the other Heroes are up to, Zicheng will help facilitate recruitment. Baphomet rounded up every “bad guy” Non-Hero in Po-Lin, but that leaves a lot of untapped manpower from the others. Optimally, we hope to get at least 25% of Po-Lin’s Non-Hero population recruited before any major confrontations, but that’s a best case scenario. Moreover, I gave him a list of Heroes we might be able to swing to our side. We’ll take any hand that can swing an FDJ rod, frankly,” Sofiane said.
Daisy smirked. “I don’t s’pose a certain raccoon girl is top of that list?”
Sofiane flushed. “As a matter of fact, yes. All of Team Harald is. And if you have anyone to add, let me know.”
Daisy thought about her own team. Kane would come along if she told him to, Cunegonde absolutely would not. And Yuna…. was Yuna. She might enjoy an opportunity to stick it to the Yishang, but she might also enjoy an opportunity to pummel the person who blew her to smithereens. Or she might want to read comics instead. Daisy put a pin in that for now.
“Second to last, we have Joad, who will be Logistics Officer,” Sofiane said, gesturing at an older, bearded man in Purple Bolter coveralls. “And Dr. Cox, who Shui and Natsu are already acquainted with. He will head up the Science Team.”
“Science team? What are they up to?” Natsuko asked.
Dr. Cox straightened the tie tucked into his robe. “We will be assisting Dr. He in Numberspace once we have digested the Algorinomicon. Now that we have the theoretical background, we ought to be better equipped to understand its nuances.”
At that Sofiane clapped his hands together. “Any questions? No? Fantastique. According to Natsuko’s intel we’ve got twelve days until the end of the world and probably less until we’re facing down a horde of pissed off Heroes, so let’s get to work.”