Until this first incursion attempt, Sofiane didn’t know for sure how he would act when a crisis arrived. The answer was better than he expected.
“Natsu, Daisy, Yuna, Kane. You four are with the investigation party. Vronsky will lead you out to whichever post lit the smoke signal,” Sofiane said.
The four powerful Heroes wasted no time following Vronsky out to the courtyard. Not even Yuna, allergic to taking orders, fought him on it.
“Spriggan, Medea, Zicheng, Joad. Rouse the militia. Get your commanders up first and delegate the rallying to them. Treat this like a real attack and don’t leave anyone in reserve unless they haven’t been given assigned positions yet,” he said.
The four Non-Hero committee members leapt up. This left a Shuixing, Dr. Cox, and a bewildered-looking Team Harald.
“Harald, you and the rest are in charge of getting Shui and Dr. Cox down to the sewers. If things go poorly I’ll send someone down to warn you. At that point you’re in charge of getting Shui and Dr. Cox to our backup location at the Dungeon of Stars. Split into two parties after you leave the sewers, but gods willing that won’t be necessary.”
As Team Harald moved to leave, he caught Gomiko’s eyes: Big, bright, nervous, and so incredibly, deeply brown. They were the brown that leaves turn at the end of autumn. This simple observation derailed his entire thinking and for a moment he couldn’t remember what his own next move was. His soul seemed to understand that if this was the final battle, as it might be, this was possibly the last moment he would see her. He ran up to her before they left and hugged her.
“Hey, hey! We’ve got a job to do, Sofa,” Frizzy said, hugging him back for a moment before pushing him away.
“I know I just—”
Harald put his large hand on Sofiane’s back and pushed him towards the opposite end of the hallway.
“Come on, brother. Time to focus,” Harald said.
Sofiane made his way outside of the Mage’s College and zipped up to the top of the Vermögenburgh Cathedral so he could keep an eye out and direct the battle. He tried hard to concentrate, but every path in his mind led back to Gomiko.
----------------------------------------
“This is pretty damn fun. Wish I got to do this before the world was ending,” Vronsky said, holding onto Peng’s rock fins one-handed.
“Try doing it for three days straight,” Daisy yelled back over the roar of the wind.
Even in a mad dash to intercept the invading Heroes, Natsuko had a hard time imagining riding Peng being not fun. Unless you were encased in rock. That one time kind of sucked. Other than that? Pretty damned fun. She hoped wherever they all ended up going would have the option of surfing a rock bird tens of thousands of feet in the air.
“Weeeeeeh!” Kane shouted, giving his opinion on the topic.
“Shut up and lock in, dumbasses,” Yuna said.
“This is me locking in,” Natsuko replied.
Natsu almost felt guilty she wasn’t nervous or high-strung or starkly serious. Instead, she was excited. A love for dangerous threats and high-stakes lay at the very core of her being so that without it she was someone else entirely. The lack of action during her involuntary retirement was part of why she had become so messed up. Battling enemies with FDJ weapons to determine the fate of the world was what she was—quite literally—programmed to do.
“There,” Vronsky said, gesturing to where the pine forest ended and the Hammertal canyon began.
How poetic, Natusko thought. The final battle would begin where their adventure had. At the end of the line stretching from Vronsky finger down to the ground below was the goblin camp next to where Sofiane had taken Natsu and Shui to investigate the weird dungeon. Strange to think she was the only one among them that would remember it.
“There’s a plane below the ground there,” Natsuko said. “A dungeon that the Yishang didn’t finish designing. We can’t kill them by Dimension-Jumping, but it also means we won’t die.”
“How do we use that to our advantage?” Yuna asked as Daisy brought Peng into a sharp descent. She pinched Kane to keep him from makeing ‘weeeh!’ noises.
“We should draw them into a fight with FDJ rods. We have a small advantage over them if they try to go for one-hit kills with the rods. Otherwise they'll kill us with their stat advantages. They don’t have the dimension-jumping knowledge Shui does, so if they get stuck in the dungeon, they can’t get out while we can,” Natsuko said.
“I like it. You heard that, Daisy?” Yuna called up to the front of the bird.
“Loud and clear,” Daisy replied.
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Drawing closer to the ground, the pandemonium below pulled into focus. Three teams of Heroes, none of whom Natsuko recognized from this far away, were chasing a group of Non-Heroes into the forest. From above the scene resembled dogs herding sheep, with the occasional sheep disappearing.
“Looks like this isn’t the final battle after all,” Natsuko said, trying to hide the disappointment from her voice.
Whoever they were, they were neither Top-Tier Heroes nor the bottom of the barrel that Natsuko shared the rankings with so many years ago.
“Guess clearing them up oughta be easy!” Kane said.
“Let’s expect things to get messy,” Daisy said. “Twelve Heroes means 40 or so abilities flying around."
“Yeah, but they’re weak as hell. It’ll be like playing whack-a-mole,” Natsuko said while wondering what the hell whack-a-mole was. Damn, now Shuixing had her second-guessing whether she actually knew something or whether the strange number generator in the sky was coming up with it.
As they approached and lost the cover of night, Daisy swung Peng out to a clearing a short ways away from where the Heroes were chasing the Non-Heroes. The four of them hopped off, leaving Vronsky to stay clear of the fighting beside Peng. The distant “fighting” was eerily quiet. Usually fighting meant spells and abilities. But now, as though filtered through the strange and dark distortions of sleep, there were only the occasional echoing scream or cry, yelp or taunt and the colliding of blunt objects. As Natsuko and the others crept closer, easing their way through underbrush to keep the advantage of surprise, they could see the attacking Heroes were not attempting to efficiently dispatch all of the Non-Heroes, but were instead playing with them.
One team, who looked to be all Heroes from Shikijima and al-Nuwba, had surrounded a Shikijiman fisherman and were swiping at him with FDJ rods while the middle-aged man frantically swung back with his own. Whoever he swung at would step back while laughing or saying, “oh! Almost got me!” while the others brought their rods and pipes down on his legs and back. They were specifically hitting him with the blunt sides, away from the deadly angles that induced dimension-jumping.
“Kazeko,” Daisy muttered, gesturing at a girl with pink cat ears winding up for a harder blow.
The fisherman realized what was coming a split second too late as the metal rod collided with his mouth. Even from a distance of thirty or so feet, Natsuko could see loose teeth dribble out of his mouth on ribbons of blood. One of the others, a Pechorin-like ronin that Natsu suddenly recognized as Yoshihide, stepped up to the fisherman who was blubbering through his mutilated mouth and with his rod crushed the bones in the fisherman’s arms so that he couldn’t swing again.
“You still wanna kill Heroes now? Still think it’s fun to swing your little rod? Fucking prick!”
Yoshihide ground his boot into what was left of the man’s mouth and like smothering a cigarette butt ground his heel in, jostled loose what remained of the man's teeth. Natsuko tried to stand but Daisy’s grasp kept her down.
“What!? Let’s go!” Natsuko whispered.
“They all have rods, Natsu! We need to do this smartly or we might get picked off by a freak swing,” Daisy whispered back.
“Looks like the other two teams split off from them,” Yuna said. “If we all pick one we can take them out all at once.”
“Which part of the rod do I use again?” Kane said, handling his metal rod daintily.
Yuna jerked his wrists until the jagged end faced down. “That way. Anyway, I’ve got that catgirl chick.”
“I’m taking Yoshihide,” Natsuko said.
“I’ve got Layla, you take Ahwar, Daisy,” Kane said.
“Who? How do you know them? You were summoned months ago,” Daisy replied.
Kane shrugged. “I read the Use-Rankings when I’m bored. I know everyone. Even the dead people.”
Not questioning how he also knew what they looked like, Daisy figured Ahwar was the male al-Nuwban in a bright copper tunic and Layla was the female al-Nuwban with highlighter orange hair and wearing a few strands of silk held together by the Yishang’s divine intervention. Yuna counted them down and on three the four of them burst forward.
Natsuko arrived first. Her bottle was aimed at Yoshihide’s sneering lips, but at the last second, as the look of disgust turned into one of shock, the black-haired, black-dressed, brooding ronin reminded her of Pechorin and her bottle diverted at the last second to merely crack him along the temple. Daisy and Yuna both struck true, turning Ahwar and Kazeko into jittering, sinking shapes. Kane, however, was slightly too slow and his target poofed into five ghostly apparitions of herself, all sharing the same horrified expression at suddenly becoming the prey.
“W-What are you doing here!?” Layla shouted dumbly.
Not waiting for an answer, she bolted down the forest path towards the other Hero teams, screaming for help and throwing ineffectual magic bolts behind her as she ran. Yuna sprinted forward and nailed her on the back.
With Natsuko still shocked by her own indecision, Daisy grabbed Yosihide’s arm and pulled it behind him until it broke and his rod went limp in the dead arm. He screamed and she slammed his face into the dirt, muffling him.
“Natsu! What are you doing!?” Daisy whispered.
“I-I don’t know what happened…” Natsuko said.
“Lemme get him,” Yuna said.
Yoshihide thrashed until his lips were just above the dirt. “No wait, please! We can make a deal! I don’t want to—”
Yuna brought the rod down on his head and he disappeared from Po-Lin.
“Huh, the numbers changed," Kane said. "Guess the dungeon you were talking about doesn't go this way, Natsu."
With the team of Heroes dispatched, Yuna and Kane ran ahead to spot the next team they could ambush. Daisy and Natsuko were left with the bloodied and wheezing figure of the Shikijiman fisherman whose face now looked like an exploded tomato.
“Gods… Should we just kill him and let him revive tomorrow?” Daisy asked.
“He won’t, remember? This is a Special Event,” Natsuko replied.
“Ah… right. Um… what do you want us to do, Mr. Fisherman?”
His response was garbled and mostly involved a bubble of snot and blood foaming from one of the holes in his face.
“I’m sorry,” Natsuko said, bringing her bottle down on him. Shuixing was bringing everyone along anyway.
Natsuko and Daisy stood there for a moment, the only sound the distant screams of Non-Heroes, indistinguishable from the howling of the wind through the pines.
“Today is still the day we, um, had girl’s day, right?” Natsuko asked, a bitter, metallic taste filling her mouth.
“Yeah,” Daisy replied.
“Fuck me…”
Natsuko ran her palms over her eyes and up through her hair and then rested them on the ribbon holding her hair up.
“Let’s go help the others,” Natsuko said.
“Yeah,” Daisy replied.