Sofiane found himself blindsided by something he’d been taking meticulous notes on since the start of their rebellion: The death of a Hero. Or rather two, to be precise, the other being some random 2nd-generation nobody. But according to Kane’s surprise exclamation, Natsuko had bitten the FDJ bullet.
“You better be right about this Special Event thing, Pech,” Sofiane mumbled to himself as he and Kane watched the enemy Heroes' approach. It was one thing to be told Pechorin had some weird special event thing set up to pull them out of a dimension-jump, but for obvious reasons, no one felt like testing it.
Sofiane was already mad that Daisy and Natsu decided to fly off without orders, but after Natsu got herself killed by some random idiot, his anger gave way to fear. Wherever Daisy was, she was also in danger. Things were going badly, and it was out of his hands to do anything about it at this stage. The one thing going right was that the Non-Heroes didn’t know yet. He hoped they wouldn’t find out about Natsuko's death until she could pop herself back into existence.
“You wanna go over the defense strategy again?” Sofiane said.
“Nope! Don’t wanna psych myself out,” Kane replied.
Sofiane shook his head and chuckled. “You might be onto something. Wish I could tell my overactive brain to do the same. Though, I would remind you our main goal is to hold off the lower-leveled Heroes. If you see a Xian, run. We have positions to fall back to and draw them towards Pechorin.”
Kane nodded.
When he focused on the kid, Sofiane couldn’t decide whether Kane reminded him more of Shrike or Daisy. He had a little bit of both in him, in temperament and in appearance. Sofiane didn’t have time to think about what they meant as the army of enemy Heroes came close enough to start flinging abilities at the Non-Heroes in the tent city. Fireballs, lightning, ice shards, and wind blasts obliterated the circle of wagons and cars which had managed to repel the enemy Non-Heroes. His deep-seated instinct was to identify the sources of all these spells and abilities but he forced the impulse down and readied the rapier at his side. It felt good to have an FDJ version of his old tried and true weapon.
“Ready to rock their shit?” Kane asked.
Sofiane shook his head in disbelief at hearing that from him. “Been hanging out with Natsu, huh? Guess you got a point. If our backs are against the wall, might as well have fun, non?”
Kane grinned and shot him with a finger gun. At the same time, the first of the Heroes breached the ruins of the ad hoc wall. Jouchi was leading them with a look of boredom on his face. In his hands was a crackling purple spellbook.
“Can’t have three Lightning Elementals all going at it. That’d be too confusing,” Sofiane said.
To rectify this, he and Kane charged Jouchi across the long bridge. Kane went first, using Direct Current to blast across the bridge in the span of a second, leaving a crackling cloud of lightning in his wake. Jouchi reacted just in time to leap out of the way of the electric blast that the ability released at its terminus. A few other Heroes were caught in the blast but Jouchi grinned, preparing to fire off a Superbolt. But while the ability was winding up, a purple ball of lightning swung out over the moat and towards his flank. Sofiane burst out at the last second and thrust his rapier, catching Jouchi with the tip and blowing him up into oscillating polygons.
Within a half-second of his feet touching the ground, Sofiane was surrounded by both melee Heroes and a cloud of exploding Desperation Arts. Most of these he deflected with a timely combo into Perfect Parry, but this was followed by pain from a dozen little sources of chip damage that would soon spell death.
“Oops, one sec!” Kane yelled.
Sofiane blinked and Kane popped into existence in front of him as lightning leapt from his boots out to sting his attackers. Using Vanguard right as he did so, Sofiane’s HP shot back to full as Kane’s overkill damage on the weaker Heroes flooded into him. With this they dispatched the first dozen or so Heroes who came through the breach, but the rest were regrouping not far away. This time they were forming around a few higher-ranked Heroes barking orders at them. It was Cornelius, Nuxalk, Calhoun, plus a couple others too recent for Sofiane to know. All could one-shot him.
“We’ve gotta pull back. We got a cheap shot on Jouchi, but this is gonna be ugly,” Sofiane said.
“Is their shit fully rocked yet?” Kane asked.
“No, but ours will be if we don’t back the hell up,” Sofiane said.
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He turned to run with Kane at his heels. He suspected the other Heroes wouldn’t dare follow them while the Non-Heroes on the wall were alive to rain bullets and arrows down on them. But Sofiane knew he was wrong the moment his feet began to slow, stop, then walk backwards. He recognized Nuxalk’s Rewind ability immediately, albeit with a far longer range. The jolt of fear at being dragged back towards the waiting Heroes tipped Sofiane over the edge into triggering Overcharge.
Purple lightning scorched the grass around Sofiane as he flickered into Ball Lightning to dodge an arrow sailing through his incorporeal plasma and into a tent which disappeared into the ground. Thinking quickly, Sofiane decided the best way to end Nuxalk’s CC on Kane was to trigger an elemental reaction and he silently apologized to Kane as he leapt through him in Ball Lightning form. The resultant Vacuum reaction between Lightning and Aether elements buckled Kane’s knees and dropped him just as a bullet whizzed past his head. Sofiane could hardly celebrate before a leather-gloved fist rammed into his stomach and grabbed him by his shirt and picked him up. He turned back into lightning as a rod swung through him and he thanked the Yishang once again for not giving his Ball Lightning collision detection.
Cornelius, who had used the distraction to get into melee range, snarled at Sofiane. “You smarmy purple prick. You’ve got until the end of your Desperation Art before you die.”
The white-clothed orchestra conductor Hero tossed an FDJ rod in his hand. Following behind Cornelius were a handful of skittish Heroes similarly equipped. The ones further back with guns and bows were holding off, waiting for their comrades to get out of the way. If Cornelius was smart, he'd scatter, Sofiane thought. So what he needed to do was keep them right where they were. He spotted his opportunity standing behind Cornelius.
“Et tu, Mademoiselle?” Sofiane said, curtsying in the direction of Shrike’s former teammate, Maitri.
Maitri, who until that point had been leering at Kane, turned towards Sofiane and spat at the ground in front of him.
“It wasn’t enough to drag Shrike into your business and get him killed, you had to do the same with all of us, did you? You son of a bitch,” she said.
A part of Sofiane resented that characterization, but what he needed now wasn’t a debate about morals, it was more delaying as Kane picked himself up and Non-Heroes came through the city gate to reinforce them. Already he saw one of Spriggansnout’s ground squads coming to join them.
“Oh no, none of your little helpers,” Cornelius said.
He snapped his fingers and behind him, Calhoun and a few other Heroes with large AoE abilities let loose on the city walls and bridge. A sound like pottery breaking filled the air which Sofiane realized was the most hilariously out-of-proportion noise for what Calhoun’s Faultline ability did. What it actually did, rather than break pots, was cleave a V-shape into 40 feet of solid stone, bringing part of the Vermögenburgh city wall down along with the Non-Heroes manning it. Acting in alongside him, the other Heroes managed to accomplish something similar by destroying the bridge and sending the reinforcing Non-Heroes plunging into the moat.
Sweat rolled down Sofiane’s brow. There were maybe ten seconds left on his Overcharge.
“Yeah? Well guess what!” yelled Kane, who was once again standing under his own power. “I think you guys suck and I’m gonna fight you!”
The reaction to Kane’s childish declaration was a mixture of confusion, awkward laughter, and a bit of pity. Some probably thought he was an idiot, or too new to the world to understand what everyone was fighting about. A few pitied him for being misled by Sofiane and the others. And more than a few thought his outburst downright hilarious. Cornelius, hands curled around a rod, did not.
“I’m sorry these bastards tricked you, son, but they’re trying to end the world. And I’m not gonna let ‘em,” Cornelius said.
“You’re wrong, idiot,” Kane said, pronouncing ‘idiot’ with the same expulsion of air that Natsuko did.
Cornelius opened his mouth to continue the moral debate but instead Kane charged past him with Direct Current. Expecting a direct charge, Cornelius parried, but Kane was aiming at his followers who scattered as though fleeing a grenade. At the same time, Sofiane realized what Kane was trying to do, and with one second left on his Overcharge he dropped into Ball Lightning and honed in on Cornelius who swung at the ball and left himself open for a counterattack as Kane blinked to Sofiane’s current position with Alternating Current and struck Cornelius with a rod.
Sofiane flicked his rapier in front of the loud chunking and flashing polygons. “Anyone else like to try?”
This was bluster, of course. His Desperation Art was on cooldown same as Kane’s regular abilities. Nonetheless, it worked. Calhoun and Nuxalk’s impromptu squads along with the mass of other Heroes backed away. While they did so, Sofiane did a mental count and realized only about half of the remaining Heroes were in this group.
“Hey, I’d like a go!” Koyon said.
Fear: Raw and unadulterated, froze Sofiane to the spot. Koyon had appeared from nowhere and now floated twenty feet above him and Kane as the air around him warped ever so slightly. Accompanying this effect was a strong scent of… something. It was less an odor and more of a twinge, as though Sofiane were permanently on the edge of an itch. Even deeper than that, however, was an instinctual sense that Koyon's very presence was stretching and tearing at the fringes of how Po-Lin operated. Hemiola had had a similar feeling about him but nowhere near as strong. Po-Lin’s laws weren’t designed to handle someone who could float, teleport, and do who knew what else. Stranger still, Heroes further away seemed to speed up relative to Koyon.
Sofiane had thought something was amiss when Natsuko was almost killed by Cunegonde. A Xian with the power of Hemiola should've been a cake walk for Natsu. But this was different. Koyon was an order of magnitude more dangerous than Hemiola had ever been. And he, Sofiane, was fucked.