There was something ridiculous in all of the Heroes being together in one location. It occurred to Natsuko that at least part of why the Yishang had encouraged them to adventure separately was that all of the idiosyncrasies of appearance and behavior, all the flashing lights and roaring sounds of elemental abilities, they all looked cool and badass on a small scale when each individual Hero was given a chance of shine. But combined together into one mob, there was something monstrous about it. A carnival with too many clowns.
“It’s not gonna take them long to get to town if they’re using movement abilities,” Natsuko said.
“Should we go back and tell Sofiane?” Daisy asked.
“He already knows, trust me,” Natsuko said.
If anyone had asked two years ago if she could imagine Sofiane as the brains behind a war effort, Natsuko would’ve laughed in their face. But necessity was a hell of a drug, and damned if Puffball didn't have it in him.
“We oughta go down and ask for orders,” Daisy said.
“Or, we go blow ‘em up. Most of the Heroes are gonna be obsolete and I don’t see any Xian with ‘em,” Natsuko said.
The two of them were circling Vermögenburgh on Peng as they watched the Heroes approach. Their only orders from Sofiane were to flush out the opposing Non-Heroes with a bombing run and that had gone off without a hitch. However, that didn’t scratch Natsuko’s itch for a fight. Outside of evasive maneuvers from Peng, the bombing was a complete turkey shoot. What she wanted was some action. Some danger.
“Natsuko, I don’t know about that… Aren’t we leaving Vermögenburgh open to a flank?” Daisy asked.
“The Non-Heroes came here to fight and they're equipped to do so. Besides, don’t you figure they wanna see us blow up some Heroes?”
Daisy wasn’t quite convinced, but Natsuko wasn't wrong, this was what the Non-Heroes had been training for. All of them were ready to fight and die defending Vermögenburgh and Shuixing. This fight was everyone’s together, and her and Natsu’s role was to beat up Heroes.
“Yippee-ki yay then!” Daisy said, urging Peng onward toward the approaching parade of Heroes.
As they neared, they saw the crowd of Heroes splinter. Those who recognized and feared Daisy’s stone bird sprinted for the tree cover, while those either too low-ranked to have ever seen it or those too high-ranked to care stayed in the road, bracing for the charge.
“ETA Twenty seconds!” Daisy shouted over the wind as Peng’s beak tilted towards the colorful crowd.
Daisy felt her musket rattling against her back. As much as she wanted to take a shot, there was still a chance the Heroes had FDJ weapons, in which case she needed her full attention on maneuvering Peng. Even Natsuko had foregone any weapon, instead planning on dealing HP damage with Megaton. With no more 4am resets left, HP death was as good if not better than FDJ death if you could make it happen.
“Five seconds!” Daisy called.
As she did, the first of the Heroes' abilities raced up to greet her. Daisy immediately realized they were in trouble. Her brain, against her wishes, flooded everything else with attempts to identify the signature abilities of two dozen Heroes: Meimei’s Firecracker Pinwheel, Calhoun’s Grapeshot, Altan’s Thunderbomb, Izmat’s Sand Cone, Jouchi’s Superbolt, Elodie’s Astral Flurry, Karelia’s Splinter Typhoon, B-Ko’s Vacuum Snap, and that was as far as Daisy got before the mass of abilities overwhelmed her. A moment later she was tumbling in open air surrounded by the residue of an exploded stone bird. Below her a mushroom cloud blossomed a half-second before an ear-rattling boom slammed the air from her lungs. In mid-air tumble, Daisy thought she saw Natsuko’s red kimono among the spinning green and blue, but the next thing she saw with any certainty was a field of roiling white.
“Welp, that was a mistake,” said Natsuko’s voice, which Daisy realized was coming from the ball of white fire bearing her upwards in its arms.
“We must’ve got some of ‘em, right?” Daisy asked.
“The lower-ranked ones for sure. The other bastards? The ones up on the moon with us? We probably just made them mad,” Natsuko said.
Daisy chuckled. “Good. Jouchi can bite my toe.”
The two shared a moment of relief before they realized two ghostly purple circuit-boards were forming above and below them, tracking them as they moved.
“Oh shit…” Natsuko said.
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Daisy was mid-way through exclaiming the name ‘Alice’ before bolts of electricity jumped between the two circuits like slithering eels, running right through the two Heroes and causing their muscles to seize and spasm. The ability’s stun triggered and Natsuko was forced out of Black Fire, putting it on cooldown almost a kilometer in the air. The rushing air filled with the smell of ozone and the sounds of Natsuko firing off every single expletive she knew.
Daisy started praying. To who or what, she didn’t know, since the gods existed as fake flavor text no one read and the Yishang—the real gods—were trying to kill her. She had a plan in mind, but this plan involved exactly one miracle, which, Daisy thought, was hardly too much to ask. It wasn’t like she was praying for two.
That miracle was a fraction of a second timing. Daisy remembered Shuixing once rambling about how the world was constructed in chunks of five milliseconds. Two hundred of these things passed in a second. Tens of thousands had passed while her brain came up with her plan. And at their current speed, she and Natsu were approaching a very painful splat that would see them shown off the stage prematurely with only about one or two of those two hundred itty-bitty little mini seconds where the two might not go splat. These were the one or two little blips before the great numbers in the sky checked for a collision with the ground after she had already interacted with it. This delay had to exist, Daisy surmised, because otherwise dimension-jumping to the Dungeon of Stars wouldn’t work. There had to be a moment where two pieces of geometry connected without it registering fatal HP damage.
Natsuko, seeing Daisy had a plan, cut off her screaming expletives and fixed her with a stare that meant, ‘what do you need me to do?’ Answering, Daisy reached out her hand and pulled Natsuko against her, lining their feet up as close as possible. In the last 200 refreshes of the world, Daisy squeezed Natsuko’s hand and Natsuko squeezed back, the two of them pressing down against Daisy’s compass cupped between their palms.
A pillar of stone exploded out of the earth and stretched up to meet them. It came to an abrupt stop to register that it was touching their feet before retracting back into the earth at an ever-so-slightly slower speed. By the time the pillar and Daisy and Natsuko reached the ground, they were moving slow enough not to paint the ground with pink and red smears but still fast enough to take three quarters of their HP in fall damage and be thrown like ragdolls. Neither could get air into their lungs as the rock and dirt and trees they crashed into punched it out of them, sending droplets of glittering red blood spraying from their mouths. They came to a painful stop at the bottom of a small hill off the main road.
“Whatever the hell— you did— thanks,” Natsuko said, clutching her chest where a couple ribs had been pulverized.
“Ow… I wanted— to say— bullseye,” Daisy laughed before immediately regretting it.
“How far out?” Natsuko said, testing her leg for damage and finding it mercifully without bones sticking out of it.
“The fast ones”—Daisy winced—“a couple minutes.”
Natsuko pulled herself to a stand using the bent pine tree that had provided their final brakes. Daisy tried to copy her but fell forward as she realized her leg was bent at an impossible angle.
“Oh dear… That’s very not marvelous,” Daisy said.
Wasting no time lamenting it given their already astronomical good luck, Natsuko squatted down and lifted Daisy onto her shoulder and carried her out of the ditch as her own pain screamed through her veins until she could hear it like an ear-rattling whine in her ears. Blood trickled into her eyes and she blinked it away, determined to get back onto the road to intercept the Heroes.
“We’re gonna— make it back— to Vermögenburgh,” Daisy said, her words bouncing with the rhythm of Natsuko’s march.
Natsuko grunted. “I know we are. Just got the one hill first.”
Careful step after careful step brought Natsuko to the top of the hill and onto the cobblestone road to Vermögenburgh. A few hundred yards away, the remnants of both the group Natsuko hit and those who fled to the treeline were approaching, racing along on spear thrusts and dashes and wind forms and wolf forms and every other little movement micro-optimization from seven years of struggling to find advantages over others. All were heading straight for the two injured Heroes.
Natsuko set Daisy down and handed her the FDJ musket which had survived the fall by virtue of going the longest without being checked for fall damage. In too much pain to lay prone, Daisy sat with her legs swept to the side, musket brought to her cheek. Beside her, Natsuko hefted her bottle up with one hand and pulled a Moon Bar from the folds of her kimono, bit the packaging open with her teeth, spat the wrapper into the grass and held it up for Daisy to munch on.
“I hate these dang things. They taste like chocolate dirt,” Daisy said, biting into the food bar like a horse reaching for a carrot.
“It’s good for you though. It’s got HP in it!” Natsuko replied, taking a bite for herself.
It didn’t give them all of their HP back, but it would be—with all hope—enough to withstand the barrage of abilities bearing down on them, provided none were Desperation Arts.
Daisy whimpered as she swallowed the bar against the wishes of her aching torso. “Could really use some Medico-Magic right about now.”
“Vladim has some. When we make it back to town, we’ll have him patch us up,” Natsuko said, fighting to ignore the needles in her throat and chest.
There was a brief warm glow accompanying the HP gain from the Moon Bar, but it wasn’t much more than Natsu could get from a shot of whiskey. They needed magic healing as soon as possible. Fighting the ordinary bastards was already bad enough, she didn’t even want to think about fighting the Xian in this state.
“You look a lot better than the last time I saw you,” Boulanger said.
Shivers ran up Natsuko’s back and she turned around with a dread that forced her bodily pain into the background. Standing there was Boulanger wearing a military parade outfit so dark she thought it was a hole where the world hadn’t loaded correctly. Only golden tassels and ribbons identified it as clothes. She was about to snarl at him when he brought up the barrel of his ebony wood and gold musket and shot her.