The news spread quickly that Shuixing had stumbled on some kind of breakthrough. Though good news, it rattled the unconscious rhythms that both Heroes and Non-Heroes had fallen into between Shuixing’s usurpation of Baphomet’s cult and a true plan of escape. Accordingly, the mood amongst the Non-Heroes piling into the lecture hall was somewhere between elated and anxious. Whatever brief stability they’d clung to was obliterated on contact with Shuixing’s first words:
“I believe I may have discovered a way to escape Po-Lin.”
This statement was met with a great shuffling of chairs and murmuring of mouths. No one was quite sure how to react. Po-Lin was all anyone had known. Beautiful as an idea, escape from the Yishang was also a terrifying black box. What else was there? What would it look like? How could they live there? It didn’t help that the only people who had gone beyond the confines of Po-Lin as most understood it were a handful of scientists designed by the Yishang to be bad at explaining things even when it wasn’t a mind-boggling new plane of existence.
“The um… the core idea of it is… well, it has to do with our numbers and the way they… erm, interact with this large algorithm. Which…”
A tapestry of eyes gazed back at her, from Natsuko’s bright red ones beside her to the most indistinguishable Non-Heroes. All were watching and listening and trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. It was the kind of subject most might have glazed over listening to, except that her words pertained directly to whether or not they would live past another week. They wanted to understand. Needed to. And Shuixing trembled at the responsibility of keeping their hopes alive for what was, at the end of the day, nothing more than untested hypothesis.
So Shuixing took a big huff of a breath and continued:
“I-I believe there is a way for us to copy our numbers into some form which can be distributed across the larger network of Celestial, err…”
‘Folders’ or ‘envelopes’ would make no sense to anyone but her and the research team.
“…worlds. This stream of numbers… It's kind of like a river. Celestials words and ideas come to us from outside Po-Lin. Just think about how exactly you all know what… what a…”
She glanced at Natsuko, her bottle resting across her lap.
“What a wine bottle is. Have any of you seen a winery? No? But you know what one is.”
Her question garnered a ripple of hesitant nods. Natsuko furrowed her brows, surprised there were still illogical pieces of this world she hadn’t noticed. Even after everything, she still somehow thought alcohol spawned into bars and shops and fancy hotel liquor cabinets as though the alcohol fairies brought it. It never occurred to her that you needed to make wine, except…
“Oh, duh,” Natsuko said, “you need to press the grapes and then the yeast…”
Wait, how did she know that?
Shuixing nodded. “Right. That river of information flowing into the algorithm? That’s where your idea of winemaking is coming from, Natsu. So what I wanted to say is that we might be able to escape by, er, swimming upstream, metaphorically speaking.”
A pregnant silence fell upon the packed lecture hall as Shui strained against the confines of her chosen metaphor, long before the crowd of Heroes and Non-Heroes were satisfied with her explanation.
“And what exactly does ‘swimming’ mean? How are we gonna do that? Are we all taking the funny juice?” Vronsky asked, arm draped over his chair.
“That is, erm, what we are researching next,” Shuixing said.
The room deflated. Without realizing it, everyone had been hoping this was an immediate solution, something that would allow them to avoid the coming confrontation with the Yishang and remaining Heroes. Only the other scientists of the Mage’s College appreciated the possibilities afforded by a paradigm shift. After all, their current understanding of the Yishang’s world was owed to a similar reconceptualization back in al-Nuwba.
“Th-that is all I have to, um, add,” Shuixing said with a bow as she took her seat.
Sensing a morale boost might be in order after the not-quite-as-hoped research report, Sofiane stood up next.
“The rest of the afternoon and evening we will be taking a break from defense preparations. We have rudimentary early warning systems in place, so the best thing we can do now is take time to process what Shuixing explained,” Sofiane said. The words came reluctantly, but Gomiko convinced him earlier that the Non-Heroes might need some rest too.
The lecture hall quietly drained until only the Heroes and other committee members remained. As soon as the last of them had shut the door behind them, Natsuko allowed a grin to creep onto her face.
“So? What about Pech?” Natsuko asked.
Shuixing startled out of thinking through her next research avenues. She looked at Natsuko beaming back at her with excitement, an optimism she unfortunately had to match with a sheepish smile.
“I um… might have an idea…” Shuixing said.
“Yeah? Yeah?”
The rest of the committee was also interested in what might be a countermeasure both to dimension-jumping and to the Yishang neglecting to re-summon those killed in the special event. Again, Shuixing regretted her enthusiastic declaration during the pampering session. To her, just having a new line of inquiry was exciting. That everyone else expected this to translate into immediate action she hadn’t considered.
“Basically, just like how there is a discrete unit of time based on the cycling of the CPA, the Yishang likely has a discrete unit of space indicating where each of us are positioned at any given moment,” Shuixing said.
Natsuko scooched her chair out. “Like I’ve got new location numbers now?”
Shuixing nodded. “Exactly. And as we know, the data comprising an entity is not eradicated upon being dimension-jumped outside the boundaries of the world. Otherwise the Yishang could not have brought Hemiola back. So, the coordinates tied to a dimension-jumped person’s code have to be either an extreme negative Y-value below the world or, as I suspect, a null value holding them in suspension outside of Po-Lin. However, they must still be interacting with the Central Probability Algorithm or otherwise we wouldn’t remember their existence.”
This last claim did not sit well with the committee. Shuixing and Dr. Cox alone regarded it as nothing more than a piece of evidence, everyone else was busy turning over the existentially frightening idea that not only could you be taken out of the world entirely, but that you would be forgotten instantaneously. It was possible, assuming Shuixing was right, for them to have known and interacted with someone who was no longer with them and never would be again.
Natsuko bit her lip. “H-Hold on a second, Shui, what about our memories? You said yourself that we all affect each other—” or maybe it was Pechorin that said that “—that we all have pieces of each other. Doesn’t that mean it’s impossible for them to just be… gone?”
Shuixing took her glasses off to wipe them on her robes. “The way another entity has changed our numbers will persist, that much is true, but the original referent point will be gone. Without an upstream flow of that person back into the Central Probability Algorithm, we would understand these traits as originating from ourselves.”
Sofiane glanced at Gomiko then back at Shui. “So it’d be like if Sofiane-plus-Gomiko was the exact same, but I felt it was just how I always was.”
“Precisely,” Shui said, re-donning her glasses.
“Whoa! What the heck!?” Kane said.
“Hush kiddo,” Daisy said, patting his arm.
“Oh, sorry.”
“No, that’s about how I feel right now,” Vronsky said, his moustache twitching.
Joad stroked his beard and muttered an oath which so aptly summarized everyone else’s feelings that no one bothered to speak for half a minute.
“Yeah? And so fucking what?” Natsuko said, breaking the silence. “We still remember Pech! Who cares whether or not the Yishang can delete us? Right now we have a way to fight them and get Pechorin back, that’s all that matters! I don’t know about you all, but me and Shui are gonna keep fighting and fighting and fighting, win or lose.”
Shuixing’s head bobbed back and forth as Natsuko jostled her shoulder for emphasis. Nonetheless, the Medico-Mage had a small smile on her face.
“Fighting, huh? Was that what we were doing in that infernal nail salon?” Yuna said, still bitter about being broken by something so embarrassing after waging a five-year guerilla warfare campaign.
“Yep!” Daisy replied, making a not-very-subtle show of flexing her fingers against the table to show off the hot pink polish on them. “Fighting comes in many forms, don'tcha know!”
Sofiane rolled his eyes, but deep down he felt the same. Helping Shuixing had initially been nothing but a desperate fight for survival, but the longer this went on, and the closer they came to escaping, the more things faded into a single-minded focus. The only thing that distracted him—and he was loath to admit it—was Gomiko. She had a way of dominating his thoughts to the exclusion of all else. A part of him wondered, guiltily, and without a means to shake it off, whether this would be a liability.
“It’s fight or die at this point,” Harald said, drumming his fingers on the table. “I guess it doesn’t matter what we think about it, it’s just how it is.”
“Makes the decision a lot easier,” Faisal added.
“Never was a decision,” Joad said, picking at his teeth with his fingernail. “Yishang never gave us one. This was always how it was gonna go down.”
Spriggansnout snorted, his gnarly goblin hands folded under his armpits. “Doesn’t seem wise to back people into a corner.”
“They’d have to see us as people and not bundles of numbers first,” Medea replied.
Zicheng looked up from under his hood and gazed at the Heroes on the opposite end of the table. “Of course, to even get this far we had to stop thinking of ourselves that way.”
This was a tactful way of putting it that the Heroes specifically needed to get their heads out of their asses. Natsuko and Daisy particularly. Natsuko, recognizing the light barb intended by the comment, snorted. Feeling the inspiration flow through her, she composed a response:
“Dreaming of spring,
My dreams are mine alone,
In lonely dark.
But when I wake in Spring—
The world wakens with me.”
A contemplative silence followed and was then promptly broken by Sofiane.
“Isn’t ‘waken’ a transitive verb?”
“Oh shut up, Puffball!”
The insult was a little ridiculous considering Sofiane’s outfit for the past two weeks had been an increasingly grimy and droopy pair of jeans and a purple hoodie, but there was something in the ordinariness of their usual back-and-forth that loosened the last bit of betrayal Sofiane felt at Natsuko and Daisy leaving. He realized it just didn’t matter anymore and chuckled at the absurd banality of their usual banter amid an ocean of existential horrors.
“I thought it sounded pretty,” Daisy said.
Dr. Cox leaned into the table. “Very nice, but I believe we have gotten sufficiently off-track. Dr. He, it is time to return to the research room and test our new hypotheses.”
Shuixing started to say something in response but was interrupted by the doors to the lecture hall thrown open by some of Vronsky’s recon goblins. The out-of-breath goblins could only jump around and gesture wildly at the windows out in the hall. Wasting no time, Vronsky bolted for the windows.
Off in the distance, beginning on the Vermögenburgh city walls and extending like a line of purple ghosts into the dark pine forests, were the jury-rigged signal flares set up to warn of encroaching Heroes.
Statistics:
Team Natsuko
SHIRO NATSUKO
Level: 109
EXP To Level:
253,914,444
Class: Jack
Fire Elemental
HP: (514,404 | 514,404)
STATS
Force: 4,702
Vitality: 5,348
Finesse: 2,468
Cognition: 1,366
Insight: 5,286
ABILITIES
PASSIVE:
Veteran — Team receives 10% more experience points.
ACTIVE:
Jack of All Trades —
Every two levels, Jack learn an ability belonging to another class. These can be used once per day.
ELEMENTAL:
Megaton — Deals heavy fire damage in a large AoE and stuns any targets in range.
PASSIVE ELEMENTAL:
Napalm Strike — All attacks deal bonus Fire Elemental damage scaling with Insight. Each successive attack adds a burn stack which deals damage over time and reduces the target's defense.
DESPERATION ART:
Hypocenter — Deals enormous damage in a large AoE.
USAGE STATISTICS
USE-RANKING
#9/202
USE-NUMBER:
1,389,287 Emanations
ART NUMBER:
66,133
ERO-ART NUMBER:
79,853
FIC NUMBER:
103,798
Shuixing He
Level: 44
EXP To Level:
199,712
Class: Medico-Mage
Water Elemental
HP: (10,540 | 10,540)
STATS
Force: 400
Vitality: 111
Finesse: 120
Cognition: 4,000
Insight: 250
ABILITIES
PASSIVE:
Mental Mending — Add Cognition stat to any elemental abilities which heal or cure statuses.
ACTIVE:
Light of Hope — Cast a beam of light that deals significant unmitigated damage to undead enemies
ELEMENTAL:
Healing Waters — Passively store charges over time which can be used to heal HP proportional to Insight.
ELEMENTAL:
Ablutions — Use a charge of Healing Waters to cure status effects.
DESPERATION ART:
Bubble Storm — Produces a field of bubbles which protect and heal teammates and harm and slow enemies.
USAGE STATISTICS
USE-RANKING
#192/202
USE-NUMBER:
709 Emanations
ART NUMBER:
5,507
ERO-ART NUMBER:
2,334
FIC NUMBER:
21,446
Daisy Corduroy
Level: 103
EXP To Level:
110,244,008
Class: Summoner
Earth Elemental
HP: (202,189 | 202,189)
STATS
Force: 2,995
Vitality: 3,029
Finesse: 1,647
Cognition: 1,493
Insight: 3,645
ABILITIES
PASSIVE:
If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
Fashionista — Sacrificed accessories and armor give +25% bonus experience to the merged item.
ELEMENTAL:
Terraform — Summon or sculpt minerals into desired form. Maximum volume is determined by Insight.
ELEMENTAL:
Golem Creation — Imbue Terraformed minerals with consciousness corresponding to the animal they are shaped as.
PASSIVE ELEMENTAL:
Granite Sentinel — Teammates within a kilometer of the user take less physical damage proportional to Insight and cannot be critically hit.
DESPERATION ART:
Tectonic Drift — Rearrange the surface of a large area, causing earthquakes, fissures, and rockslides dealing massive physical and elemental damage with each terrain feature an enemy collides with.
USAGE STATISTICS
USE-RANKING
#34/202
USE-NUMBER:
244,999 Emanations
ART NUMBER:
40,337
ERO-ART NUMBER:
48,965
FIC NUMBER:
69,252
Team Harald
Sofiane de la Nuit
Level: 72
EXP To Level:
13,915,159
Class: Duelist
Lightning Elemental
HP: (58,442 | 58,442)
STATS
Force: 332
Vitality: 560
Finesse: 715
Cognition: 173
Insight: 412
ABILITIES
PASSIVE:
En Garde — Successful parries increase crit chance on the next attack by 100%. Any overflow over regular crit chance is converted into bonus damage.
ACTIVE:
Perfect Parry — Briefly enter a stance in which the user automatically parries any damage in all directions.
ELEMENTAL:
Coup De Grace — Aims a precise strike at the target’s vitals and deals massive lightning damage to them on a successful hit. If this drops the target below half-health, it kills them instantly.
ELEMENTAL:
Ball Lightning — Turns the user into a ball of lightning and zips a short distance, dealing damage along the way.
DESPERATION ART:
Overcharge — For a brief period, all abilities have no cooldown and teammates’ attacks deal bonus Lightning damage and stun enemies.
USAGE STATISTICS
USE-RANKING
#92/202
USE-NUMBER:
17,898 Emanations
ART NUMBER:
14,445
ERO-ART NUMBER:
18,042
FIC NUMBER:
56,284
Harald Omnibane
Level: 59
EXP To Level:
3,430,981
Class: Bazouk
Earth Elemental
HP: (36,349 | 36,349)
STATS
Force: 435
Vitality: 330
Finesse: 102
Cognition: 41
Insight: 101
ABILITIES
PASSIVE:
Runic Rage — When all abilities are on cooldown, gain 50% attack speed and regain 15% of physical damage as health.
ACTIVE:
Brutal Charge — Run down an enemy, stunning them for a few seconds and increasing damage dealt by all sources in proportion to Force state.
ELEMENTAL:
Deep Roots — Draws power from the soil and gives them damage reduction based on both Vitality and Insight for so long as the user is attacking someone.
ELEMENTAL:
Blood Shield — Swings halberd in a wide arc and provides a temporary shield based on amount of enemies hit.
DESPERATION ART:
Bull of the Earth — Increases movement speed, attack speed attack power, crit chance, and crit damage by a small amount, increasing proportionally to health missing to a maximum of 500% at 10% HP. Base values are determined by Force and Vitality stats.
USAGE STATISTICS
USE-RANKING
#166/202
USE-NUMBER:
3,874 Emanations
ART NUMBER:
1,001
ERO-ART NUMBER:
211
FIC NUMBER:
12,304
Faisal Hashemi
Level: 59
EXP To Level:
3,687,667
Class: Cuirassier
Wind Elemental
HP: (13,890 | 13,890)
STATS
Force: 54
Vitality: 180
Finesse: 402
Cognition: 245
Insight: 148
ABILITIES
PASSIVE:
Desert Spice — Any attack-boosting dishes cooked by the user are 25% more effective.
PASSIVE:
Excessive Gallantry — Attacking an enemy who is targeting the user's teammate, while they themselves are being attacked, gives both enemies a 33% miss chance.
ACTIVE:
Whip Kiting — Deals damage to target while also restraining them with the user's whip. For a brief time they can move the restrained target in certain directions.
ELEMENTAL:
Become Wind — Turns the user into a gust of wind, becoming untargetable and giving all teammates nearby evasion, movement speed, and attack speed increased by Finesse as well as Insight.
DESPERATION ART:
Mirage — User and all teammates gain increased evasion and %HP regen. Attacking enemies have a chance to deal damage to themselves.
USAGE STATISTICS
USE-RANKING
#189/202
USE-NUMBER:
755 Emanations
ART NUMBER:
2,702
ERO-ART NUMBER:
2,680
FIC NUMBER:
21,508
Gomiko
Level: 59
EXP To Level:
3,899,751
Class: Grenadier
Water Elemental
HP: (22,496 | 22,496)
STATS
Force: 40
Vitality: 233
Finesse: 220
Cognition: 130
Insight: 395
ABILITIES
PASSIVE:
Dumpster Hunter — Sniffs out enemies and quest objectives in a 5km radius
PASSIVE:
Rapid Replenish — Grenade replenish speed and effect duration is tied to both Insight and Finesse.
ELEMENTAL:
Tanuki Brewing — Throws out a specially-brewed mixture that causes different effects in a repeating order. CAPACITY: 15/15
1. Deals water elemental damage over time.
2. Slows enemy movement and attack speed.
3. Trips Enemy or Increases Attack and Movement Speed of teammate.
4. Blinds and stuns enemies.
5. Gives a 5%/sec HP regen buff to all teammates.
ACTIVE:
Bake-Danuki — Shapeshift into an inanimate object to temporarily gain 100% evasion.
DESPERATION ART:
Throw Them All! — Instantly regain all Tanuki Brewing charges and detonate all five at once with 200% effectiveness.
USAGE STATISTICS
USE-RANKING
#171/202
USE-NUMBER:
2,915 Emanations
ART NUMBER:
3,257
ERO-ART NUMBER:
5,697
FIC NUMBER:
9,343
Margaret Fratelli
Level: 57
EXP To Level:
650,249
Class: Aggro-Mage
Fire Elemental
HP: (7,643 | 7,643)
STATS
Force: 26
Vitality: 110
Finesse: 166
Cognition: 355
Insight: 329
ABILITIES
PASSIVE:
Conjuration School — 25% chance to create an extra item when crafting.
PASSIVE:
Aggressive Intellect — For the purposes of damage scaling, Cognition and Insight are considered a combined stat.
ELEMENTAL:
Fireball — Launches a ball of fire that deals damage in a straight line.
ELEMENTAL:
Cold-Seeking Missiles — Throws five small fire darts that lock onto an enemy dealing increasingly more damage and causing them to take more damage from allies.
DESPERATION ART:
Fire Walk With Me — Turn into a floating ball of fire that cannot be damaged and launch projectiles every 0.5 seconds at enemies within range.
USAGE STATISTICS
USE-RANKING
#201/202
USE-NUMBER:
34 Emanations
ART NUMBER:
6,662
ERO-ART NUMBER:
10,983
FIC NUMBER:
24,811
Others:
Yuna Shikansogo
Level: 104
EXP To Level:
350,000,000
Class: Samurai
Water Elemental
HP: (211,694 | 211,694)
STATS
Force: 3,060
Vitality: 2,880
Finesse: 2,059
Cognition: 891
Insight: 1,892
ABILITIES
PASSIVE:
Final Stand — Any lethal damage when above 1hp drops health to exactly 1 instead of dying.
ACTIVE:
Bushido — Gain lifesteal and damage proportional to Vitality and become unstunnable.
PASSIVE:
Nothing Personal — After a combo of four consecutive hits, teleport behind the target and gain a guaranteed critical hit.
ELEMENTAL:
Ice Crescent — Launches a crescent of ice that deals moderate Water damage and slows enemies.
DESPERATION ART:
Blizzard — Create a large zone which slows enemies and deals Water elemental damage from falling icicles.
USAGE STATISTICS
USE-RANKING
#58/202
USE-NUMBER:
138,729 Emanations
ART NUMBER:
31,416
ERO-ART NUMBER:
21,115
FIC NUMBER:
23,346
Crane Canos
Level: 104
EXP To Level:
175,991,255
Class: Phalanx
Lightning Elemental
HP: (332,999 | 332,999)
STATS
Force: 2,142
Vitality: 3,869
Finesse: 3,226
Cognition: 657
Insight: 2,945
ABILITIES
PASSIVE:
Electric Arc Forge — Gain 25% bonus weapon experience when scrapping lower-tier weapons.
ACTIVE:
Vanguard — 15% of damage dealt to enemies heals the lowest HP ally.
ELEMENTAL:
Alternating Current — Teleport to any ally currently under attack, stunning the attacking enemy and dealing moderate lightning damage.
ELEMENTAL:
Direct Current — Charge in a straight-line towards an enemy, knocking aside anything in the way and then releasing an electric blast at the destination that deals Lightning damage and stuns enemies.
DESPERATION ART:
For Imperia! — Call down a lightning storm that sends out bolts to strike at enemies randomly, stunning and blinding them and dealing heavy lightning damage. Struck enemies take 50% more damage for 5 seconds.
USAGE STATISTICS
USE-RANKING
#17/202
USE-NUMBER:
356,222 Emanations
ART NUMBER:
626
ERO-ART NUMBER:
246
FIC NUMBER:
1,249