Natsuko flopped onto the carpet and groaned. “What are we gonna do, dude?”

Trying to figure out how to interpret the carpet-flopping, Kane decided the closest action he had seen one of his teammates do was Yuna throwing herself to the floor after a training session and so he too dropped to the floor. Once there, he sat cross-legged and sighed.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “Daisy's never been like this before.”

The carpet the two of them were on was in the common area of the college dormitory. The Non-Heroes who usually lived and slept there had all left and Natsuko and Kane had the place to themselves. The loneliness feeling that permeated the air made dragging Daisy out of her grief all the more difficult. Minute by minute it felt more like a jail.

What had begun as an attempt to calm Daisy down had spiraled into a life-or-death struggle with her catastrophizing. That morning, right as she seemed to be pulling herself together, Daisy decided she had to read all of Yuna's comic books. When Natsuko made the mistake of pointing out that the comics were all only four-pages long, Daisy just wailed, “I know!” and started crying again. After that she locked herself in her dorm room and refused to come out no matter how many times Natsuko offered to have tea or compose poetry together.

“How are you holding up?” Natsuko asked Kane.

“Me? Um, I’m fine. Could really go for an ice cold juice box right about now but I don’t know where Daisy keeps them. She says I’m not allowed to know cuz I’ll drink them all in one sitting,” he replied.

“Well, would you?”

Kane glanced up at the ceiling and thought for a moment, then said, “yeah, probably.”

Natsuko exhaled. “Our drinks might be different, but I can empathize. I think I’ve mostly kicked the habit though.”

“That’s good,” Kane said.

“So besides juice boxes, how do you get your mind off things when they get stressful?”

“Um… I don’t really get stressed out that much. Not like how Daisy, Cunegonde, and Yuna do. I mean did. I mean— Daisy and Cunegonde do and Yuna did," he said.

Kane’s wide-eyed optimism about the world felt to Natsuko like looking at herself through a time machine. It was hard to believe there was a time when it baffled her that Pechorin could be stressed and grumpy in a beautiful fantasy world with so much to explore. Kane at least had the excuse that he was genuinely trying to come to terms with Yuna’s death. Natsu had just been dumb and naive.

“Oh, hold on a second. I have an idea,” Natsuko said, popping up from the carpet into a frog squat.

“Did you hurt yourself?” Kane asked.

Natsuko glanced at Kane with a look somewhere between bafflement and amusement. “Excuse me?”

“What?”

“What do you mean what? Where did that come from?”

“Oh, whenever Yuna said she had an idea, Cunegonde always replied, 'did you hurt yourself?' I thought that was how you were supposed to respond. Like how you’re supposed to say, ‘bless you’ when someone sneezes,” he replied.

Natsuko laughed so hard her sides ached. Even she hadn’t been that naive. The Yishang had way overtuned his personality numbers or whatever the heck they did to build Heroes.

“Is that the wrong response?” Kane asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” Natsuko said.

“What’s your idea by the way?”

“Huh? Oh You haven’t seen much of Vermögenburgh, right?” Natsuko asked.

“I beat all the quests here so I’ve seen a good bit of it,” he replied.

“How long did you spend on the Vermögenburgh quests?”

“Um… six hours, I think? Maybe seven?”

“You didn’t really see it then. Not the little nooks and crannies and scenic views and stuff. It takes time to appreciate all that. Daisy and I are going to show you around. For real this time,” Natsuko said.

“Whoa, really? That sounds awesome!” Kane said, popping up from the carpet into a frog squat.

With that settled, Natsuko banged on Daisy’s door. “Hey! Put down the comics, we’re gonna show Kane around Vermögenburgh!”

There was no response. Not even the usual crunching of chip wrappers. Unlike her previous attempts to get Daisy out of the room, this time Natsu punched through the door and manually unlocked it. Inside the tiny two-person dorm room she found Daisy fast asleep on a bed full of potato chip bags and comic books. Her face was puffy and red with dried up tear trails running down both cheeks. One arm was draped over her chest which rose and fell with gentle, rhythmic breaths.

“I think it might just be you and me, buddy,” Natsuko whispered to Kane.

“That’s okay. I’m glad she’s getting some rest,” he whispered back.

Natsuko gently shut the door and tip-toed away.

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Before heading out she grabbed her wine bottle and told Kane to bring along some kind of FDJ weapon in case there was any trouble. She was tempted to swing by the Devil’s Cut and swipe one of the new ranged FDJ weapons Sofiane had bragged about, but he'd also given strict orders not to take any outside the walls of Vermögenburgh, lest they wind up in enemy hands. Technically he couldn't stop her, but the little Shuixing-like angel on Natsuko’s shoulder told her not to tempt fate. With her luck she would misplace it and some asshole Hero would find it.

With the two of them prepared, Natsuko began the tour at Vermögenburgh’s stone bridge.

“This,” Natsko said, arms spread wide, “is the great Vermögenburgh bridge!”

“Oh wow! I knew it was a bridge but I didn’t know it was a great one,” Kane said, full of wonder.

“Every Hero runs across this thing a million times doing the Vermögenburgh questline, but few know its secrets!” she said.

She took Kane around the side of the bridge where the island the city was on descended towards the moat. They went down for a bit until they arrived at a bridge column with a decorative piece of stonework roughly half a foot wide winding around it.

“It doesn’t look like much, but if you’re careful, there’s just enough space to place your foot,” Natsuko said, inching herself onto the stone ledge.

She could've flown to the spot with Black Fire, but she wanted Kane to have the experience of finding it the way she had. Kane imitated her and the two sidled across the small ledge and around the corner until they were underneath the bridge. Halfway between the two sides there was a small, circular alcove formed by the design of the column with just enough space for two people to stand or sit.

“This was my little hideaway,” she explained as Kane squeezed into the alcove with her. “I know it doesn’t look like much, but it’s got a nice little view down into the moat and when the wind picks up there’s this whistle that comes through. I’m usually extroverted, but every once and a while, when I wanted alone-time, I’d come down here and just stare at the water.”

“Wow. This is cool,” Kane said.

She beamed at him. From anyone else, the words would’ve sound forced or patronizing, as though it were just something they were expected to say. But Kane seemed genuinely interested in this random quirk of the world where you could sit under a bridge and hang out for a while.

“Here’s the best part,” Natsuko said and then leapt off the ledge.

With Vermögenburgh being so high up, the drop to the moat was almost a hundred feet. The splash formed by her cannonball was enormous. When Kane tried, however, the sensation of falling made him freak out and he flailed frantically before plunging into the ice cold water. When he came up for air, Natsuko was laughing again.

“The first one is scary, but you get used to it. You almost never get to experience falling without being terrified of fall damage, but since it’s water, you don’t have to worry,” she said.

“Can I go again?” he asked.

And up again her ran. After his fifth jump, Natsuko remembered Daisy taking away his juice boxes and realized if she didn’t drag him away, Kane would spend the rest of the day jumping and running back and jumping again.

The next location was a much farther walk but the two of them had movement abilities to speed them along, with Natsuko rocketing ahead on Black Fire and Kane spamming Direct Current on cooldown. The place she was taking him to was Moonward Cliff. The enormous cliff jut out from the little valley with Lake Amber and the Dungeon of Stars in it and rose over Vermögenburgh’s southern shore. The smell of pines and bonfires from the goblin camps rose along with the cliff and suffused the air with woodland fragrance. Whenever Natsuko tried to imagine what ascending out of Po-Lin would be like, this was what she thought of: The rising slope of the grass, the fresh pine, and the view out to an endless ocean glinting like a field of sapphires in the sun’s rays.

“I’ve already been here,” Kane said.

“No shit, dummy, we all have. But how long did you spend here one-shotting Völsunga for a quest?” Natsuko asked.

“A minute?”

“So you never went up to the top of the cliff?”

Kane shook his head and Natsu dragged him up the enormous grassy slope. When he tried to use his ability to speed up the process she yelled at him to slow down and take his time. Like that the two tiny specks—one purple, one red—meandered up to the top of the cliff where the world ended. It didn’t feel quite as profound as when the Moonward Cliff truly was the end of the world, when Shikijima did not yet lie in the ocean to the far southwest and Deco Imperia did not begin somewhere along the fuzzy green coastline to the southeast, but the enormous open space at the top of the cliff nonetheless stirred something in Natsuko that was too big to be contained in numbers.

A flash of unease hit her as she worried Kane would find the view uninteresting.

“Heck that’s pretty!” he said, stuffing his hands in the pockets of his purple waistcoat.

'Pretty' was an understatement. It was the kind of thing she wanted to write a poem about but felt too small for the task. Stuffing this vista into her rough, amateurish words felt like smearing dirt on a painting. Better to leave it unsaid.

“Pechorin could write a poem about this,” Natsuko said, tucking her arms into the wide sleeves of her kimono to warm herself against the frigid winds.

“The guy who used to be at the bottom of the Use-Rankings?” Kane asked.

For a split second, the idea that someone would only know Pechorin for that seemed ridiculous, yet Natsuko was forced to admit it was the only reason most Heroes would even know the name. Already that was more than could be said about most 1st-gen Heroes.

“I guess he was,” Natsuko said.

“Is he your friend?”

“He was.”

“What happened?”

“The same thing that happened to Yuna.”

“Oh…”

Kane didn’t say anything after that. The two just stared into the enormous ocean and its rolling tides. She didn’t even think to look over at him until her ears picked up a weird half-moan coming from him and she turned to see his jaw was trembling.

“I-I’m sad about Yuna dying, b-but I think I’m even more scared of dying,” Kane said. “I feel like I just got here and that I’ve done so much already, but there’s a lot more to do that I’m gonna miss out on it. I wish I'd had as much time to explore Po-Lin as you did.”

Natsuko’s almost laughed at the absurdity of a Top-Tier Hero being sad he hadn’t been born early enough. But the more she thought about it, the less absurd it was. Those first two years of her adventuring had been a golden age of innocence before the min-maxing and power-grinding and ruthless competitiveness kicked in and became the only way to live. Even as a newly-summoned Hero, Kane had been up this cliff to complete quests, but spent all of a minute here before sprinting off to the next quest in order to catch up with everyone. He never had the chance she did to climb the Moonward Cliff one aching step at a time and to stare out from it without a care in the world about what came next.

“Whatever comes after this world will be even better, I’m sure,” Natsuko lied.

“But I’m not done yet...”

Natsuko took a long, long inhale and looked around at Vermögenburgh in all its green and brown glory. From so high up, the pine trees blended into a fuzzy carpet which climbed up the rolling hills and up the sides of valleys and canyons broken only by glittering blue puddles from the many lakes and rivers.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have brought you out here,” she said.

“No, I’m glad,” Kane replied. “Even if it’s just a little taste, it’s better than not seeing it at all.”

Natsuko smiled. “Well then, next up is Hammertal Canyon.”

The two of them took off towards Hammertal Canyon, racing the setting sun to see who would reach the horizon first. Natsuko would have made it there easily, but kept herself back to not get ahead of Kane who was Direct Current-dashing as fast as possible. Although they arrived before the sunset, someone else had arrived ahead of them. Standing atop the eastern cliff was a woman wrapped in wispy, cloud-shaped white silks which barely covered her modesty. The sun behind her blinded any attempt to pick out details.

Natsuko was about to tell Kane to back away so they could report this to Sofiane and the others, but before she could, he opened his mouth and said, “Cunegonde?”