“Kane? Do you see a strange guy in a dorky trench coat in front of you?” Natsuko asked.
“Um… yes? Is he supposed to be there?” Kane said.
Natsuko shook her head. “No.”
“My sudden appearance is surprising, I know, but I have laid in wait for your darkest hour, that I might come to your aid,” he said, bowing deeply.
Natsuko put a hand on her hip. “You mean besides when I was being attacked by Boulanger and my other teammates?”
“Yes besides that,” Pechorin said. “They would have killed me instantly.”
“And besides when Baphomet almost murdered Daisy and I with his inflated stats?”
“That too.”
“And when Cunegonde cut my finger off?”
“Red Hibiscus,
Time has—”
“Pech, you’re an idiot,” Natsuko said.
Pechorin glanced around the room trying to come up with something cool to say now that his opening lines had failed him and while his eyes were elsewhere he felt a thump in his chest. Natsuko had wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his chest and he could feel by the pulsing in her chest that she was sobbing and despite how many times he had imagined this exact scenario, he was now at a loss for what to do. It did not help that the arms he would’ve hugged her back with were pinned at his side by Natsuko’s bear hug. He looked over at Kane who shrugged.
“When Daisy does this I just kinda do nothing and let her get it all out,” Kane said.
Pechorin wondered briefly at the wisdom of such enlightened non-action before Natsuko said, “if you don’t hug me back I’ll fucking dimension jump you back where you came from.”
“You’re pinching my arms,” he replied.
“Oh…”
She let go of her hug just enough to allow him to pull his arms free before re-tightening and Pechorin hugged her back. Even if his arrival wasn’t as dramatic as he imagined, this was still pretty nice. The two of them stood there for several minutes while Natsuko waited for herself to stop sobbing so she wouldn’t look pathetic. Unfortunately, her puffy eyes and tear trails were still visible on her face when she pulled away.
“How did you come back?” Natsuko asked.
“I chose to,” he said.
“No, but seriously, how did you come back?”
“I am serious. You, me, Shuixing, Daisy, and Sofiane are all tied together by a Special Event Field, and due to our ability to alter the event slightly I was able to choose when to come back.”
She punched him in the stomach. “Why didn’t you come back sooner? You dumbass!”
He wheezed from the punch but managed to grunt down any verbalization of pain. “I couldn’t— not yet. Shuixing had to realize that I could choose to come back before I could choose to come back.”
“What!? That doesn’t make any sense! I swear to the gods, Pech, if this is more dramatic bullshit or whatever…”
Still double-over from the punch he shook his head. “It’s not. That’s how it all worked. The part of me in Numberspace couldn’t interact with Po-Lin directly, but Shuixing altered the rules of the event to make it so I could interact with myself. At that point I became able to re-summon myself.”
Her expression softened. “What about all that stuff about lying in wait for my hour of need then?”
“That was dramatic bullshit,” he said, massaging his chest and standing back up.
She laughed, which to Pechorin’s newly tangible ears was as sweet as caramel on the tongue. His twisted, tormented heart lightened at that.
Natsuko turned and beamed at Kane. “Hear that? Sounds like we can bring Yuna back!”
Pechorin frowned. “Not quite.”
Natsuko matched his frown. “Why not?”
“Because there’s no Special Event Field involving her. Not one that we have direct access to, anyway, and I can’t create another because I don’t have enough referential ties to her. I am sure Shuixing would put it more… numerically, but to put it bluntly, I was only able to build our field due to our close relationships as a group. I just don’t have enough ties to Yuna,” Pechorin said.
Natsuko looked guiltily at Kane, who was too bewildered to have even processed her first proposal, and then back at Pechorin. “Could you teach him and Daisy how to?”
“I’m sorry, Natsu, but it’s not something that can be explained in words. I know how I did it, but it required intense meditation in isolation for years. We don’t have that kind of time. Besides, Yuna is out there. When we escape, she’ll escape with us,” Pechorin replied.
Natsuko mussed up her hair, causing strands of it to pull out of her ponytail. “Agh! Okay, fine, but at least the five of us can use this as a counter to being killed, right?”
As she said this, she saw his hesitant expression. “Aw hell, why not!? Can’t we catch one gods-damned break!?”
“I believe we can have Shuixing replicate this form of protection. The trouble is that it won’t help us if we are killed by HP damage, since we are now designated villains. If that happens, our own, lower-priority Special Event will be in conflict with the Yishang’s higher-priority Special Event which explicitly declares us dead and defeated. Ironic, isn’t it? Our quest began because Shui invented a way to kill someone permanently without HP loss, and now this is the only hazard we are immune to.”
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
“Fuck. Well that’s a big problem,” Natsuko said, pacing the floor of the dungeon courtyard.
Charles sensed something was wrong and trotted off to pace with her. While Natsuko calmed herself down, Kane explained their current situation and about Cunegonde waiting for them outside and finally about Natsuko’s severed finger which Pechorin had completely failed to notice upon being re-summoned.
“Sorry about your finger, by the way,” he said.
She looked over from the other side of the courtyard then down at her hand. “Yeah, well, I’ve only gotta live with it for a few days. I just gotta make sure the shithead above us doesn’t cut off any more or I won’t be able to use my bottle.”
There was something poetic about those words. Pechorin thought he might try and rearrange them:
“Up will not work.
When the heavens loathe you,
Jump sideways.”
Natsuko was so happy to have Pechorin back that she almost slipped into the comfortable back-and-forth of telling him to shut-up. But having her own experience with poetry, she couldn’t dismiss it so easily. His latest poem was in fact a better articulation of her own theory of poetics than Natsu herself could come up with. Poetry, as she understood it, was the sideways jump you could make when the heavens were keeping you down. And by forcing her brain to jump sideways, she recalled the couplets Pechorin sometimes added on to the end of his own or others haikus and added to it:
“No answer from heaven,
Go looking in the dirt.”
Recognizing that the situation called for poetry, Kane finished by declaiming:
“Roses are red,
violets are blue—
oh no, I hope Daisy’s okay!”
Natsuko’s brain froze trying to process the abortive poem and then burst out laughing. She locked eyes with Pechorin while laughing and seeing him excited to share some insight, Natsu realized he’d come to the same conclusion she had.
“You wanna try dimension-jumping sideways, huh?” Natsuko asked.
“Shuixing mentioned Zhidao doing it over a long distance one time,” Pechorin said. “It’s possible, or even likely, Zhidao was lying. But as I recall, the original use of dimension-jumping was to bypass walls. Using it to kill wyverns was something you came up with years later. So it’s not impossible to think that if we could line it up correctly we could dimension-jump at a slight diagonal angle to come up in Po-Lin miles away from Cunegonde.”
“How about we go ahead and try that then?” she said.
As the only one besides Charles who had been down to the abandoned dungeon before, Natsuko led the way back to the brick entrance hall that she, Shuixing, and Sofiane had fallen into when they first entered the dungeon. Once there, she was able to orient herself based on how they had fallen. Facing the stairs that led down to the courtyard, Vermögenburgh was a little less than 180 degrees behind her. With that figured out she emulated what she had seen Shuixing do and arrived at what she thought was a passable trajectory for someone hit by her bottle to fly through the wall at a shallow incline. The one question mark that was impossible for any of them to erase was that they had no idea how much distance there was between the forgotten dungeon and the surface of Po-Lin, making calculating the precise angle of that incline almost impossible.
Once she was halfway confident she wouldn't kill them, Natsuko went back down to grab one of the non-de-spawning rocks and used it to mark her calculations on the wall. While she did this, Pechorin leaned against the wall making up poetry. Kane, who did not have a way to instantly pop back into existence if Natsuko made a mistake, was sweating and fidgeting, the most his manners allowed him to protest.
Natsuko pat him on the shoulder. "You'll be alright, buddy."
She was calculating that if he wasn't alright, he wouldn't be in a state to know. Well, truthfully she didn't know that for sure.
"Pech, are you still conscious while dimension-jumped?" she asked.
"Sort of. It's a different state of consciousness, but you still exist. Sometimes your life outside weaves into the phantoms and spirits that populate the world beyond," Pechorin said.
She turned back to Kane. "Okay, you'll maybe be alright. I'm trying my best here."
"Um... could I double check your math then?" Kane said, looking guilty for having any doubt in her geometrical ability.
She shrugged and stepped out of his way. She watched Kane touch the wall markings and then glare at them as though they had insulted him.
He did this for a couple minutes then said, "can I see the bottle?"
Natsuko handed it to him and he repeated his scrutiny on the bunt with its many diamond-shape nubs. He then coughed and blushed and looked away from her.
"Um... I think you didn't factor in the angle of the nubs well enough. I can see you considered that hitting someone upwards will bounce them between the two angles and they'll be forced downwards, but it's still too low even with what you have here. I think the result if you hit us center mass is about a 1.5° decline," Kane said.
Natsuko gaped. "Dude... what is your Cognition stat?"
"Um, 657?"
"What the fuck? That's trash! How did you—"
"Cognition as a stat works the way Force and so forth do. In specific circumstances and contexts only. Otherwise it's irrelevant," Pechorin said.
"But Shuixing was able to figure out all of the Numberspace stuff by artificially blowing up her Cognition stat," Natsuko said.
Pechorin shrugged. "Placebo, probably. You're more likely to succeed in something if you're convinced you're more capable of succeeding."
"Well shit... Anyway, once you make your corrections, Kane, we can get the hell outta here."
Kane picked a different spot on the wall and made markings similar to Natsuko. Once they were complete, Pechorin volunteered to be the first one punted through the abyss so that if the calculations were still off he could pop back into existence. Natsuko launched him through the wall and, after waiting a few minutes to be sure the total Use-Number didn't drop, they decided the trajectory was safe and Kane lined up next. After he was sent, Natsu looked back to Charles who was staring at her out of bright yellow eyes.
"You wanna go up too?" she asked.
Charles cocked his head sideways. After some gesturing, he picked up that Natsuko wanted him to stand in front of the white markings on the wall and he padded over to it. Unlike her previous two targets, Charles was a little more fidgety, and she was worried about accidentally sending him in the wrong direction. After trying and failing to get him to keep still, she decided to just go for it and hope for the best. After that, she was alone in the abandoned dungeon.
Before she left herself, Natsuko's hands caressed the wall. Despite having only come here twice, she felt a strange sort of nostalgia for the place. Maybe it was even sympathy. It was twice now that this forgotten dungeon had saved her. First, when it triggered her and Shuixing's initial awareness about the strange logic of Po-Lin that would go on to form the basis for their dissection of it. And now, more directly, saving her from Cunegonde by giving her and Kane a place to hide. The dungeon had done none of this of its own volition, and yet, just like Natsuko herself, the dungeon too was a line of numbers stored in some higher realm where the Celestials lived. When the Celestials themselves refused to believe she was a sentient being with her own desires and fears, how could she say the same thing about this dungeon, simply because it didn't have a mouth to speak? Maybe she was being silly, but she felt the need to say to the dungeon:
"We'll make sure to take you with wherever we're going."
And with that promise to it, she lined herself up against the wall, lifted the bottle above herself, and swung it down, sending her through the darkness between planes.