The plan Sofiane concocted was for Pechorin to function as the ultimate glass cannon while the other Heroes ran interception for him. Pech himself, however, knew from the beginning this plan was doomed. Three strong Heroes in Natsuko, Daisy, and Kane were never going to outmatch eight Xian and an army of other Heroes behind them. Even without the Xian, the rest of the Top 30 might have proven a match barring Natsuko unlocking her Desperation Art. Sofiane and the others would not have had time to put together a new plan, and with the Xian being a black box, Pechorin had decided to spare them the extra anxiety of fretting over a new plan and kept silent. Things were always going to become an improvisational mess.
Now it was time for the improvising..
Pechorin’s strategy for the moment, while the enormous power sources blew themselves up elsewhere, was to pick off the Heroes coming through the breached walls. This was tricky, as he had to not only avoid being seen before shooting, but also time the shots to line up with the Non-Heroes firing from the ramparts or otherwise give away his position. Lastly, to prevent the enemies alerting anyone else, he could only pick them off in groups of four or less. Typically, that meant waiting for teams to split away.
One such team was coming up on him now, running down the shadowed side street behind the Devil’s Cut. With the added darkness of a narrow alley, Pechorin’s dark trench coat provided enough cover that the team of Heroes ran right past him. They looked to be newer Heroes of the lurid yet homogeneous variety, products of the Yishang’s design process growing more and more routine. He held his fire due to a lull in the volley from the walls.
“Where the hell are we supposed to be looking!?” one of them, a mage in a frilly pink Cascadian maid outfit shouted.
“I don’t know! The gods-damned Pengwu just said ‘beat the villains’,” replied their archer in orange and blue Sibe-Lander robes.
“You’re the one who’s supposed to be leading us, Altan. Where are we going?” replied the third team member, an al-Nuwban woman of indeterminate class wearing red harem clothes.
“Does it matter?” the fourth and final team member said. He was dressed up in musketeer clothes not unlike the male version of what Sofiane usually wore, though he bore a stolen FDJ musket. Pechorin marked him for the opening shot.
“Does it matter!? Of course it fucking matters!” Altan said. “This is our last special event. Nothing else besides this matters!”
“That’s what I mean,” replied the musketeer. “Why don’t we just relax and let those buffed up dickheads deal with it? It’s not like we’re getting rewarded for this while they’re hogging all the Use-Numbers!”
Altan snorted. “You’re not, but—”
He stopped mid-sentence. Pechorin observed with interest the team’s silent hostuility..
“What?” Altan said.
“No, finish that sentence. You tell us what,” the maid-mage said.
“It’s none of your business. Forget about it.”
“The hell it isn’t our business! If the Yishang promised you a reward, we wanna know why we’re not getting one too,” said the woman in harem clothes.
“Fine. You wanna know why? Because you’re not in the Top 30. That’s why,” Altan replied.
“So what’s your reward then?” the musketeer said.
Altan grinned. “You really wanna know? Or would you rather keep your peace of mind?”
“How about you tell us or I shoot you through the gods-damned floor.”
“Calm down, Laitan! Don’t even joke about that!” the harem girl said.
Altan’s cocky grin dissolved and he walked up to Laitan and pulled him up by his ruffled collar. “Threaten me again and I’ll kill you first. And since you asked, I’m going to a new world when this is over. You all get to stay here and enjoy a nice little retirement with the Non-Heroes, but me? I’m on to a new adventure.”
The other three were shocked into silence. Not that any of it was true, Pechorin noted. It wasn’t always easy to divine why the Yishang did certain things, but he guessed that by lying to the Top 30 (which, down the Xian plus Kane, Daisy, and Natsuko was really less than 20 in total) they were trying to create a lightning rod. The Top 30 Heroes would do their best to corral the lower ranks on the promise that they would be saved, and if or when the lower ranks figured out something was amiss, it would be the disposable middle-ranks who would take the brunt rather than the Xian who really were going over.
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“They’re just gonna leave us here!?” the maid-mage shrieked.
“Yup,” Altan said.
“So why the hell should we help you look good when we don’t get anything?” Laitan said.
“Because if you don’t, I’ll kill you all right now, and you know what happens when you die in a special event, don’t you? Especially a climactic one like this.”
In a move that surprised even Pechorin in its dramatic timing, Laitan drew his gun up and fired point-blank on a shocked Altan. As their former leader fell through the floor, the two women tried to grab the gun from Laitan causing it to go off and shoot the mage. The survivor, the al-Nuwban woman, looked at him in horror.
“Wait! Ayesha I didn’t— she grabbed the… the trigger, and—
Ayesha ran, sprinting for the end of the street. Laitan was too stupefied to try and stop her. It was the perfect moment for Pechorin to take the shot, but a better idea occurred to him. He crept up behind Laitan and when he was within a few feet he held one of his pepperboxes to Laitan’s head.
“Where did the other four Xians go,” Pechorin said.
Laitan startled and tried to bring the unwieldy musket up but Pechorin dimension-jumped it with the other pistol.
“Shit! Who the hell—”
“Where did the other four Xians go? The ones that aren’t with Boulanger,” Pechorin repeated.
Laitan gestured with a trembling hand at the hill that the Mage’s College sat on.
“Th-There! They were gonna sneak up b-behind! It was a big argument, a-and—”
“Is there anyone else with them?”
Laitan nodded vigorously. “Yeah, a bunch of other Heroes. We were all told to root out all the Entropic Axis members, that’s everything I know!”
“Do the Xian know who they’re looking for? Or were they also told to root out everyone?” Pechorin asked.
“P-Probably! There’s all kinds of shit we weren’t told!”
So there was a non-zero chance that they knew what he looked like, Pechorin supposed. He might have even been a special target if they knew about the modifications to his guns. It only took one spy among the Non-Heroes to report to a Pengwu about it. Time for more improvising.
“Your clothes,” Pechorin said.
“W-What!?”
“Give me your clothes.”
“Are you joking!?”
“Are you waiting for me to ask in the form of a haiku? Because I will.”
Under threat of poetry, Laitan doffed his gold-and-white musketeer outfit. Once he was down to his underwear, Pechorin shrugged off his trench coat, tossed him it, and motioned for Laitan to leave which he did with all the haste of a Hero who no longer wanted to be a part of a special event. As soon as he was gone Pechorin slipped into an abandoned townhouse to change.
The outfit was not at all his style. Not only the color—which was dreadfully bright and clashed with his pallor—but the frilly ornamentation along the sleeves and the baggy ruffles on the pants made him look garish and silly. Pechorin preferred to be in the position of looking understated only to surprise people with his oceanic depth of personality, rather than externalizing it and having his clothes speak for him. He felt like a peacock in pantaloons.
He slapped his cheeks a few times. “All clothes are an illusion. This entire world is made of illusion. There is nothing which can disturb your inner peace.”
Nonetheless, his cheeks burned in embarrassment when he stepped out of the townhouse. It would be best, he thought, if this entire unfortunate event could be wrapped up before Natsuko saw him in this state. But the thought of Natsuko also fortified him for what he had to do next and he stowed his mortification. Tucking his guns into the pockets of the baggy pantaloons, he grabbed a piece of twine from where it lay discarded on the ground and used it to tie his long black hair up in a bun.
He turned the corner to find the main town square a roiling melee. Non-Heroes with stat blocks sufficient to tangle with Heroes were locked in duels with FDJ rods. There was something almost dance-like to it except for the looks of mortal horror as both sides flirted with the concept of permanent death. The Non-Heroes had a slight upper-hand at the fencing, being more ready to die for the goal of escaping Po-Lin than their opponents, but this was balanced by the Heroes’ abilities occasionally flying out of the blue to kill a Non-Hero in a colorful Elemental explosion.
Pechorin did his best to thread the needle between seeming like he belonged with the invading Heroes while avoiding the attention of the defending Non-Heroes. His intimate knowledge of the streets and alleys of Vermögenburgh proved invaluable, allowing him to lose a pair of Sibe-Lander horsemen without having to dimension-jump them by cutting through an alley and leaping onto a roof until they passed. It was with quite a bit of guilt that he was forced to admit this high-stakes game of hide and seek was quite fun. It was precisely while at play that he made his best decisions. He thought of it as a poetic dance between himself, the city, and all the entities locked in brutal, life-or-death combat inside of it. He was simply finding the right crack and slipping into it.
This elusive dance was how Pechorin made his way to the upper city. Having put the frontlines behind him, he travelled further from the walls in order to put distance between himself and any Non-Heroes with ranged weapons. Fortunately, most were drawn into the battle raging in the town square or whatever conflagration was happening up at the Mage’s College that was generating the plume of black smoke. Noting this last bit of imminent danger, he broke into a sprint.
Pechorin was almost at the top of the hill when the dormitory building was blown apart. Colossal gusts were visible to the naked eye by the way they ripped brick and stone from their foundations along whirling, looping streams. The tempest of debris collided with the wall and broke through it, taking several dozen Non-Heroes with it. This was a scale of power which could only belong to one or more Xian, and if they had narrowed their search down to the Mage’s College, Shuixing’s timer could be counted in minutes.Curling his hands around the pistols in his pockets, Pechorin charged up the hill toward the Xian.