Natsuko waited for something magical to happen after doing poetry. A profound reinterpretation of Pechorin’s hobby, maybe? But after rattling off her embarrassing attempts at poetry to the moat, nothing happened. She was the same as before and just as depressed.
“Damn, Pech, you made it sound like this shit fixes you,” she told the frog sitting beside her.
With nothing else to do, she stood up and wandered around the nearby forest. It was hard to relax when her eyes were constantly scanning the horizon for Heroes coming to mess everything up. However, bit-by-bit, her senses relaxed into the surroundings and her mind cleared space for the brisk wind and the way it rippled along the sleeves of her silk kimono, warblers and starlings and the crisp sound of a woodpecker knocking on sappy pine, the pine smell joining the cold air in her lungs. Without any intention of her own, the earlier attempts at poetry recirculated in her mind and arranged themselves anew:
“My thoughts circle
The outside world. Knock, knock—
A woodpecker.”
That was it, wasn’t it? And she hadn’t even been trying. Natsuko laughed, this poetry shit was easy. The feeling it gave her—or maybe the one she was trying to capture—was like when she first began adventuring, and even the forests and hills and lakes of Vermögenburgh, now mundane and ordinary, held an inexhaustible wealth of enchantment. Like her first dance with alcohol, it was a sensation she’d chased for years after its depletion. A feeling of being surrounded by something wonderful and mysterious and beautiful. And to be changed by it. To be open to being changed. She threw herself into adventuring every day because she came back different than when she left, the top of a mountain or a wrecked ship in a marsh imprinting themselves on her mind. Nothing else—no competition, no number-crunching, no grinding—stained her mind.
What happened since was Natsuko no longer wanted to be changed. From the moment she began worrying about keeping her numbers up, her mind subconsciously divided the world into “useful” and “not useful,” and the same things that once enchanted her, like a copse of pine trees behind Vermögenburgh with no dungeons but plenty of woodpeckers, became barren. At the center of everything was a hard shell of 'Natsuko' that only wanted what Natsuko wanted and only cared about acquiring those things that promised her immediate pleasure.
It became clear then why in the two years of her renewed adventuring she had never recaptured the magic. But here it was again, in the midst of uselessness. Brought into the light of day, the idea was funny. Five years spent struggling against a miserable world and it turned out the world wasn’t miserable after all. She was. The Yishang hadn’t made an evil world, but they had pushed the Heroes in an evil direction.
Natsuko braced herself against the rough bark of a pine tree. Fun as the revelation was, the whirlwind of thoughts made her dizzy with both euphoria and disorientation, like being drunk without alcohol. She wished she had someone to tell about what she'd learned, but it was the kind of realization you could only stumble on by wandering around alone without purpose. That was alright. There would be time in the future when everyone was reunited. Nothing demanded of her, and demanding nothing of anyone or anything else, Natsuko was free for the first time in half a decade to wander aimlessly so long as she remained near enough to protect Shuixing.
Like a cowboy, she supposed. Maybe Pechorin wasn’t so dorky after all.
Pine needles and cones crunched underfoot as she walked and soft snow started to fall, flakes settling soundlessly in her hair red-and-white hair.
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Sofiane’s body and mind were exhausted. On any other day he would’ve fallen straight into a comfortable, well-deserved, dreamless sleep. But not that night. That night, whenever he felt the beginnings of the deep, bodily relaxation foretelling sleep, another loose thread of the day’s concerns popped into his head:
Should the research team remain in a defensible position in the Mage’s College, or should they hide? Should they pull forces away from the main battle to guard hidden entrances like the sewer pipe? What was the Yishang planning to counter them? Would the Yishang pull the plug if it seemed he and the others might repel the invading Heroes? What if they couldn’t repel them? What if his preparations were good but a single unlucky strike dimension-jumped him? What if some of the Non-Heroes turned traitor and assassinated someone? What if they assassinated Shuixing? Which of the Non-Heroes could they trust to keep her safe? Which Non-Heroes were a treason risk? Where was Daisy right now? Where the hell did Natsuko get off to?
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Lying in the dark on the sofa in Shuixing’s old apartment, Sofiane was helpless to work on any of these things. The committee members forced him to go to bed around midnight once he stopped being able to focus on the information they were giving him. They were right, of course. He needed sleep and rest. But knowing that didn’t make the rest come. It took two hours of tossing and turning and stretching and yawning to realize his thoughts weren’t really the core of the matter. What was really keeping him awake was wanting to see Gomiko again. When—or if, since he felt the universe would pull one over on him if he became complacent—Zicheng was able to contact Team Harald and get them to Vermögenburgh, he would be a lot happier.
By the back end of 3am Sofiane decided to stay up and watch the morning reset. Flipping open the blinds above Shuixing’s couch, he looked out at the town of Vermögenburgh, dark but for a few pinpricks of lantern lights from night sentries. It wasn’t the first time Sofiane had stayed up to watch the reset. Every Hero had at one time or another. There wasn’t much to see, truthfully, unless there was an enormous amount of damage to reset. Last night might’ve been interesting, but tonight there were only a few small corrections fixing themselves instantaneously. A roof tile righted, a collapsed shop stall made whole, and so on…
Coffee stains came out of Sofiane’s hoodie, but the angry red marks on his fingers from writing things down remained. How had everyone gone so long in this world without noticing all the peculiar things in it? Maybe you had to be outside of the Yishang’s game to notice, but to do that you had to know it was a game. It was a miracle anyone had been able to see through the veil at all. Ironically, the moment when they were finally unraveling the world’s mysteries and baring the Yishang’s enormous money engine in all its strange functions, everything was all over. Whether they succeeded or failed, none of their newfound knowledge would matter ever again.
Maybe whatever existence came after this would have its own struggles. He even hoped it would, since the idea of eternal bliss amongst a sea of numbers sounded more like hell than heaven. But he hoped these struggles would be ones he and Gomiko took on together of their own free will, rather than being thrust into them by gods from on high. That kind of struggle he could stomach. And with that thought, he was released to sleep.
Sofiane woke to a knock on his door. Light beamed in through the blinds above the sofa, but something felt off. It wasn’t morning light. He looked at the clock reading 1:16pm.
“Shit!”
He scrambled to the door. Greeting him was Vronsky.
“News, Sofiane,” he said.
That wasn’t a good sign. Vronsky had teased him all yesterday by calling him “minister.” He only called Sofiane by his name when he was being serious.
“What? And why didn’t someone wake me up?”
“You needed the sleep,” Vronsky replied. “As for the news: Some of our patrols had a skirmish with Heroes at the border with Tianzhou. Two teams traveling together. We killed four of them but the rest wiped out our patrol except for a lone survivor. According to what she saw, they turned back to Tianzhou, but not before acquiring some of our FDJ weapons.”
Sofiane's first reaction was relief upon hearing that the skirmish happened away from Deco-Imperia. His second reaction was no less callous, which was to calculate whether that was a worthwhile trade. He knew FDJ weapons would end up in the hands of Heroes eventually, but the quicker that happened, the more time Heroes had to figure out how they worked and possibly make more. Shuixing wasn’t the only Hero with a proportionally-high Cognition stat, after all, and the Yishang were now actively trying to spread the weapons around.
The deciding factor for whether the skirmish was worth it was whether they had gotten any dangerous, higher-ranking Heroes. Attacking lower-ranked Heroes was a problem for several reasons: One, any attack on Heroes raised the perceived threat level of the rebellion and thus compelled Heroes to band together with more urgency. Two, of the Heroes who might join their rebellion, the majority were probably forgotten Heroes with nothing to lose, so they were potentially decreasing their own manpower pool.
Sofiane’s fears were confirmed when he checked the rankings. His own number hadn’t budged while Shuixing had moved up three places, meaning at least one of them had been in the bottom five and the rest were probably near there.
“Shit… Shit, shit, shit. Okay, let’s find Medea and Spriggansnout,. We need to talk about our patrols,” Sofiane said, slamming the door behind him as he marched down the hallway. “And find me a cup of coffee.”
Vronsky caught up and matched Sofiane’s stride. “You might also want to hear what the Yishang have been telling them.”
“What’s that?” Sofiane asked, not liking the sound of that.
“The Yishang are telling Heroes we’re trying to dimension-jump Po-Lin out of existence. Zicheng informed us this morning they’re offering a secret reward to any team who can kill Shuixing.”
Sofiane froze. The “secret reward” was a ticket off Po-Lin, no doubt. But that wasn’t what made him freeze. Instead, it was the realization that if defeating Shuixing was part of a special event, they didn’t need to dimension-jump her. She was being treated like a villainess to be defeated, meaning Heroes could kill her in battle and she would stay dead even without a force dimension-jump. No re-summoning.
That solved one conundrum for Sofiane. The science team would have to be relocated to where a stray ability couldn’t snipe them.