Natsuko's Megaton wasn’t going to kill a Xian, much less the supercharged version the Yishang had turned Cunegonde into. What it did do was compress a lot of air all at once, something that operated outside of HP damage. It was also something that had an equal and opposite reaction.
Natsuko slammed through a line of trees. The world tumbled around her and air shot out of her chest faster than she could suck more in. The leftover ball of fire and smoke obscured what had happened to Cunegonde, but it was hard to imagine she was in any better shape.
The smoke crackled with purple electricity and Kane burst out of it, racing towards the forest. Natsuko stopped her momentum by using Swap on a nearby squirrel who was turned to mush against a pine tree. Ignoring her instinct to save herself at all costs, she waited for Kane to catch up. Right as he arrived at the line of smashed trees, Cunegonde floated out of the Megaton cloud, her body unnervingly still and covered in burn marks. On her face was an expression of hatred. Gone was the sadistic mirth from toying with Natsuko.
“Fuck the Yishang. You two die here,” Cunegonde said.
She raised her hand in the same way she had before annihilating the top of Hammertal Canyon. The Area of Effect of the invisible ability was impossible to calculate, but even being clipped by it would kill outright from HP damage, or otherwise do the kind of bodily damage that would leave them both living as disembodied heads. With half a second to think but not nearly enough time to go through the casting process for her Desperation Art, Natsuko looked for anything that could help, and as though the Yishang themselves had sent her a lifeline, she found what she was looking for: A goblin camp.
Kane’s face as Natsuko hit him with her bottle was painted with shock and betrayal. She mouthed an apology as he was thrown through the ground and then turned the bottle on herself right as the world above exploded with a world-shaking crack and she was pitched into peaceful oblivion. As Natsuko rode an invisible trajectory into the dark, the pain in her finger stump disappeared. Her fingers themselves disappeared. And for a blissful moment, Natsuko felt separated and protected against the harsh world of noise and light she had just escaped, wrapped in a dark cocoon of nothingness. To her immediate and intense regret, this dark journey ended with her thrown to a rocky stone floor beside a catatonically confused Kane. The pain in her finger exploded back into reality.
“Shit, shit! Son of a fuck! Ow!”
Natsuko wandered in circles clutching her hand while praying the pain would dull. Realizing it wouldn’t, and that if Cunegonde wasn't lying that this was permanent, she used one of her Jack spells to conjure a flame sword and pressed it against the finger stump until it scorched over into an oozing, charred scab. It continued to throb with pain but at a more manageable level with the nerve endings burned to a crisp.
“W-Where are we? Why did you dimension-jump me?” Kane asked, glancing around at the stone chamber with a collapsed pile of rocks on one end.
“This is a dungeon the Yishang never finished building,” Natsuko said.
“Wait, the Yishang make dungeons?” Kane asked.
There were times when his naivety was charming. Other times not so much. This time it was the latter. For the moment she ignored him and paced around the room to calm herself down before planning their next move.
“Are we safe?” he asked.
Natsuko glanced up at him. “I think so, but don’t let your guard down. Cunegonde might be able to teleport in here if she knows it exists."
“So what do we do now?”
“Wait,” she said, having no better answer than that for the time being.
The trouble with leaving was that she had no way of knowing if and for how long Cunegonde might wait for them once she realized they were still on the Use-Rankings. And while she was reasonably confident she could make an upwards dimension-jump, it wasn’t a guarantee. Shuixing was good at calculating the angles and the cosines and the tangents and all of that shit. Natsuko was not. Even with an enormous bullseye the size of any upwards trajectory there was still the chance of her accidentally redirecting herself or Kane downwards. furthermore, Kane did not look well.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, seeing his nauseous face.
“Cunegonde… I can’t believe I was going to kill her. I thought I did kill her! But she’s my friend, I-I— I don’t know why I did that, or why she was acting like that, or why she—”
His eyes roamed to the cauterized finger stump on Natsuko’s right hand.
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She chuckled sympathetically. “I’m sorry to tell you this, buddy, but Cungonde was always like that. I know it doesn’t make it any easier to stomach, but uh, thanks for saving me.”
He nodded but his gloomy expression remained.
Thinking of something, Natsuko snapped her remaining fingers. "We can continue our tour of Vermögenburgh down here! Wanna meet Charles?”
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With all the chairs set aside for Numberspace journeys occupied, Shuixing dragged Hilda off to an abandoned classroom and asked her to administer the Aqua Shen.
“I should still have a vein right here,” Shuixing said, pointing out a spot on her thigh which was covered in a spiderweb of sunken veins.
Hilda looked at her wearily, sighed, and pressed the needle into the space Shuixing indicated. A moment later the colors and lights and shapes dissolved into the shifting phantasmagoria that existed in the transit between Po-Lin and Numberspace when the former lost its firmness and sharp angles and the latter had not yet absorbed Shuixing into its abstractified nature. Her skin filled with glowing numbers and letters, ‘FBE8C5,’ and the spatial coordinates constituting her position in Po-Lin arose out of a hazy autumn dawn of brown, red, and yellow. If only she could stay here awhile, Shuixing thought, it might give her the key to how they could escape. And, she suspected, to what a world after Po-Lin might look like. This liminal space between light and number, digit and sound, was how she imagined the world to come. Unfortunately, this was nothing more than untestable conjecture.
Shuixing had spent enough time outside of Numberspace that her mind did not return to whatever she had been doing the last time, but instead circled, reflecting on what it knew about Numberspace and itself. Through a combination of willpower and the serendipity of stumbling upon Pechorin’s Entity Envelope, she snapped out of the loop and headed straight for the envelope housing the Special Event field for Pechorin and the others. Her fear before entering Numberspace was that she would not have enough time to stumble her way through the special event editing process. Her only experience with it had come from the fight with Baphomet, and the change had been a relatively minor and uncomplicated one. Using the field to reset Pechorin’s spatial coordinates, however, was an order of magnitude more challenging. Especially once she realized that there was no way to insert specific coordinates.
Although she had duplicated and modified an event trigger before, she now had to create one from scratch. Willing it into existence accomplished nothing, nor did inserting strings of numbers into the existing envelope. Shuixing was confronted yet again, as she had been so many times, with her own helplessness in Numberspace. Her and her team’s knowledge of the realm had grown exponentially, yet despite their ballooning understanding, their ability to influence it had remained static. She was no more capable of modifying its characteristics than she had been in the two years leading up to that point.
Her frustration morphed into despair and anxiety which sent her tumbling through another self-referential loop. Memories ripped from their physical environs populated her mind as tones of emotion and lines of data. Among them, no doubt emerging from its referential connection to the source of her frustration, was the conversation Shuixing had with Natsuko where her friend was convinced Pechorin himself made the dummy Special Event field she was attempting to edit. Even now she found the idea implausible when she herself couldn’t create an event field or any trigger within it while being inside of Numberspace.
But suppose he had? Suppose Pechorin had left her two years ago precisely to figure out how to accomplish such a feat. It was already possible to alter Special Event fields from within Po-Lin itself as they proved in their fight with Hemiola. But if that were the case, Pechorin ought to have been able to re-summon himself at any time. Yet he hadn’t.
Just as Shuixing felt like she was stumbling on some kind of answer, she was forced back into the physical world. Her dry mouth causing her to choke and cough, but before Hilda could run off to get her some water, Shuixing said, “No! More Aqua Shen!”
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“Who’s a good boy? Who’s a good boy!? You are! You are!!!” Natsuko said.
Charles panted wildly as his hind leg stomped and his tail swept the floor behind him. Not only was the beast getting to see one of the three people he had ever interacted with in his seven year-long existence, but he was getting head scratches too. To top it off, Kane was ruffling the fur on his flanks up and down. Within minutes the proto-Pengwu’s eyes were almost rolling back into his head.
“Where did you find him?” Kane asked.
“In that room,” Natsuko said, gesturing at one of the identical empty rooms in the interior courtyard. “I wanted to take him with me but Shui said no.”
“Aw, I wanna take him with us!”
Recalling what awaited them above, Natsuko was fairly certain he was safer down here. Though it was hardly a better existence. And if the world was ending, wouldn’t it be better to let the little guy out to run around and stretch his legs at least a little? For a second Natsuko wondered whether she was thinking about Charles or Kane.
“We can try, but first I need to make sure we can get out ourselves. And also we need to make sure we’re not dimension-jumping up into an ambush. It’s only been… uh… an hour, maybe?” Natsuko said. For all she knew, only a few minutes had passed. “If you have any ideas for what to do, lemme hear ‘em.”
Kane shook his head sadly and kept petting Charles. It was beginning to seem to Natsuko like their only option was to roll the dice and brave another attack from Cunegonde. Before she put any more thought into it, however, her deliberation was interrupted by a third figure who came into existence beside the two of them with the same immediacy as if they had been there all along and simply gone unnoticed. Natsuko’s eyes glazed over trying to figure out whether the pain of having her finger cut off or exposure to the black space outside Po-Lin or some weird pheromone given off by Charles was the culprit of her hallucination.
“I have come in your hour of need, my lady,” Pechorin said.