“What the hell was she thinking!?” Daisy said. “That freaking idiot!”
Despite her harsh words, Daisy was choked with tears she was trying and failing to dam up. During the flight back to Vermögenburgh, none of the three had been able to figure out why Yuna made the irrational decision to charge the Hero attacking Kane unarmed. He himself recalled the two yelling beforehand but not what about.
Of the three, Natsuko was the least affected by Yuna’s death. Even after the permanent death crisis, she had never particularly liked Yuna. Admired the frankness of, yes. But not liked. Now that Yuna was dead, however, she wasn't quite sure how she felt. It wasn’t the harsh, serrated grief Pechorin’s death provoked, but it wasn’t irrelevant to her either. It was a strange middle-ground.
“Do you know if they were on a team together?” Natsuko asked.
Daisy tried to speak, but the effort brought a fresh flood of tears and forced her to bury her mouth in her fist. This in turn caused Peng to list to the left until Natsuko crawled up Peng’s back and tapped Daisy’s shoulder to make her notice.
“Probably,” Daisy said, gulping down a sob. “She went through a lot of teams. I mean— she got kicked off a lot of teams. People didn’t like her much.”
“I wonder why,” Kane said with no sense of irony. His own grief was kept to a gentle whisper of angst, as though he didn’t quite understand what permanent death meant and was trying to wrap his head around it.
“She was an asshole,” Daisy blubbered in a tone that was neither a laugh nor a sob. “I liked her cuz no one else liked her. I don’t—”
Kane patted her on the back and Daisy broke down again. Natsuko stiffened, preparing to smack her out of it if Peng nose-dived. Fortunately, Daisy was more cognizant this time and kept on a more-or-less straight course. On the right wing, Vronsky was looking quite a bit less excited about flying for the return trip.
The only reprieve Natsuko had from the grave atmosphere was seeing Vermögenburgh by air. Kilometers away it was an oasis of light in the dark. Searchlights from Deco Imperia beamed pillars of bluish-white into the sky and forest surrounding the fortress city. These were accompanied by strings of electrical lights and Tianzhounese paper lanterns along the walls upon which swarmed throngs of Non-Heroes from every region. Anyone who had a ranged attack, be it a Cascadian Arquebus or a Shikjiman longbow, manned a position on the wall, while below their statless comrades formed dispersed clusters of skirmishers poised to defend chokepoints and blindspots along the approach to the city gates. The entire city watched the descending stone bird.
The only Hero was Sofiane crouching in the cathedral belfry. When their landing was imminent he zipped off the tower with Ball Lightning. Natsuko wondered briefly how much he already knew, but his pained expression as he went to receive them said everything.
“Daisy, Kane, I’m sorry…” he said.
Daisy, who had recomposed herself long enough to make the descent into Vermögenburgh, started wailing again. Unsure what else to do, Sofiane awkwardly hugged her.
“You were watching the Use-Rankings, I take it?” Natsuko asked.
Sofiane looked helplessly at Natsu from over Daisy’s shoulder as she took control of the hug to squeeze Sofiane until his eyes started to bulge.
“Yeah—” he choked out, “—I keep an ongoing list.”
Which meant he also knew who Natsuko and the others had killed. Did she want to know that? She felt she ought to dignify them by knowing their names, but what difference did it make at this point? She decided not to ask.
“The incursion has been dealt with. Those were the only three teams our scouts noticed,” Vronsky said.
“Good. Go tell the others to stand down. If nothing else we can call this a good dress rehearsal,” Sofiane said. “Daisy please let me go.”
Daisy had progressed to hiccuping at this point but was still functionally non-verbal. Figuring she didn't want to be alone, Natsuko swallowed the awkwardness she felt and went with her and Kane to take care of Daisy.
Once the others had left, Sofiane threw himself back into managing the defenses. His plan was still to give the defenders a rest, but he himself had to organize and settle the new arrivals from Shikijima who were no doubt still rattled after escaping from the attacking Heroes. When he turned his thoughts to Yuna’s death, he found that what little sense of loss he felt had everything to do with losing one of their strongest defenders and nothing to do with Yuna herself. His role in organizing the defense demanded a level of detachment. He imagined himself like a brain willing to lose a finger or toe for the sake of the body. But when his mind turned on someone like Harald or Shuixing or Gomiko dying, he wondered whether that was really the case.
When he went to inform the research team that the danger had passed, he found the sewer the most energetic and active he’d ever seen it. All of the seats allotted for Numberspace journeys were filled along with people waiting by their side to immediately dictate their findings when they emerged. These findings were then run over to the side of the sewer responsible for synthesizing the data. Everyone in sight hummed with the anticipatory energy of someone on the threshold of a discovery except for Harald, Faisal, Margaret, and Gomiko who stood in the middle of it all looking bewildered and useless. As soon as they spotted Sofiane they came over to him.
“Shui didn’t waste much time, huh?” Sofi asked, spotting Shuixing out of the corner of his eye discussing something with Dr. Cox and a couple others.
“They were already bouncing ideas off each other on the way over,” Faisal said. “And if I didn’t have proof all this was real I would've thought they were insane.”
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Sofiane yawned and stretched. Seeing the research team so productive had caught him in a moment of weakness and filled him with the idea that maybe he could leave things up to others while he got some rest.
“The incursion is over, by the way. We had one casualty. Yuna was apparently caught by a random rod,” Sofiane said.
He could see in their expressions his own awkward feeling of not-quite-grief mirrored back at him, though Margaret seemed to be at least a little disturbed. He was beginning to feel sorry for Yuna that only Daisy and Kane seemed to care for her all that much, but there was no sense in turning grieving into yet another numbers-based competition.
“Anyway, you’re all officially relieved of duty for the time being. Go get some rest,” he said.
Harald clapped him on the shoulder. “You too. You look like you’re about to pass out standing up.”
He was about to shake it off with a joke before he felt a gentle tug on his other wrist from a furry hand.
“I’ll make sure he gets to bed,” Gomiko said, eyes flicking upwards towards Shui’s apartment. The thought was a pleasant one, but there was one last thing he needed to take care of before he officially retired for the evening.
“You can head up, Frizzy. I’ve got one more thing I need to do."
Sofiane politely waited for a lull in the spirited conversation Shuixing was holding before approaching her. With a side-glance at Dr. Cox, he pulled her away from the other researchers towards the sewer tunnel.
“I take it the new research direction is going well?” he asked.
Shui looked around at the main room of the sewers and with a more skeptical tone than he expected said, “the opening moments of a new line of inquiry are always full of optimism. The real test is whether it gets us anywhere.”
“You sounded more enthusiastic during the meeting."
“This is as important as I made it sound, but I might have fluffed things up a bit. I thought everyone could use a little morale boost.”
“A prophecy from the prophetess to her adoring masses?” he asked.
A blush peaked through the coldly rational mask Shuixing adopted during her research, but she didn’t deny it. They both knew the Special Event binding the Non-Heroes to Shuixing was still in effect. Thus far, she'd been reluctant to use it, but she had come back from Girls’ Day with a greater appreciation for the benefits of a good state of mind. Artificial or not, morale was morale. A moment later, however, she shook her unkempt mane of teal hair and re-donned the mask of rationality.
“I know you didn’t call me over to ask about that. What else do you need?”
“Dr. Cox. His side project. How is it coming along?”
“The ranged FDJ weapons? Not well. The very notion of the weapon flies in the face of the fundamental principles behind dimension-jumping,” Shui said, straightening her glasses. “He and I are in agreement that we may need to abandon the idea and have him work on something else. The meeting we were having a moment ago was about how to reintegrate him into the research team’s primary workflow.”
That was not what Sofiane wanted to hear. Though he’d restrained his tongue in front of Daisy and the others, what he realized while watching the Non-Heroes organize their aerial defenses was that they were a joke. Natsuko alone could clean up the entire city. Perhaps he had known all along and simply refused to confront the frightening reality of their helplessness, but the night’s events left him no room to retreat from it. They needed an answer to flying threats.
“Surely there’s some other way to go about it? A whole new way of looking at it, maybe. Like you had with our escape route,” he said, nervously chewing the inside of his lips.
Shuixing shook her head. “It’s extremely unlikely. As I said before, it was a pipe dream to imagine we could take a process requiring solid surfaces and accomplish it without solid surfaces. It’s categorically impossible to dimension-jump someone in mid-air. Or, heck, even someone with a plane below them. How many times have we proved that ourselves?”
Sofiane shook his head. If he and Medea had to redraw their defense plans to accommodate the impossibility of aerial defense,so be it. Unfortunately, this was also something that couldn't wait, meaning his next conversation was telling poor Frizzy he wasn’t going to be able to join her. But that thought, like a billiard ball, collided with another.
“Wait, Shui, has Dr. Cox had any rest?” he asked.
“You mean like we had this morning? No, I don’t believe so. I’ve brought the idea forward a few times and he's refused to even consider a break,” Shui replied.
“Have you tried coating his medicine with a bit of sugar?”
Shuixing’s mind was currently locked into the overly-literal, overly-rational mode of scientific inquiry, so it took her a moment to parse Sofiane’s turn of phrase.
“You mean offer him something for taking a break?” she asked, brows furrowed in confusion.
“Exactly! What can we give him to force him to go rest and come back to his problem with a clear head?”
“Nothing,” Shuixing replied, knowing the Non-Hero scientist almost as well as her own friends. “Like me, he does physics for the sake of doing physics. What else could we possibly offer him?”
“He really has nothing else? You’re sure? Because what you’re describing sounds like how the Yishang would program a scientist Non-Hero, but we know that everyone, Hero and Non-Hero, is more complex than that. There has to be something else. Just think on it,” Sofiane said, squeezing her arm.
Before Shuixing could attempt to abjure her duty, Sofiane made for the stairs. ‘Resent’ was perhaps too strong a word, but Shuixing certainly felt vexed by Sofiane putting this fool’s errand on her plate after she had so clearly explained the lack of theoretical basis for ranged FDJ weapons. A few minutes later, right as she had re-joined the scientific machine she was a part of, ready to begin processing the flow of new data, one of the researchers nearly bumped into her.
“Oops! My apologies, Dr. He,” said Dr. Venstein.
He was one of the ‘younger’ faculty members, with a mop of blonde hair and permanent stubble beneath sharp, rectangular glasses. Shuixing was about to mumble a short response so she could get back to work on charting data flows when an idea struck her.
“Actually, Dr. Venstein, I have a task for you,” she said.
“Oh?”
“This is going to sound strange, but could you possibly keep Dr. Cox… occupied for a bit?” she asked.
Dr. Venstein coughed suddenly and looked away. “We’re both very busy with our work. Is there, um, any particular reason? Or…”
“He needs a break,” she said, baffled with herself for going along with Sofiane’s plan.
Dr. Venstein looked back at her with his bright blue eyes and seeing that Shuixing was treating this task with the same urgency as escaping from Po-Lin, he said he would and went over to Dr. Cox. She watched long enough to make sure Venstein was able to convince the overworked scientist to leave and when Dr. Cox stood up to look around for Shuixing, she flashed him a thumbs up. Once the two had departed, she herself got back to work.