“Your Black Fire is gonna come off cooldown in time, right!?” Daisy yelled over the roaring wind.

“Probably!” Natsuko yelled back.

“Can I get more than ‘probably’!?”

“Very probably!”

Natsuko had no idea. Shuixing could probably calculate their falling rate versus the seven seconds left on her cooldown timer, but Natsuko had never been good with numbers. Despite her cheekiness, as the ground raced up to meet them Natsuko felt her butt clench. It was going to be tight. Daisy screamed for the last couple hundred feet before the wind was knocked out of her as Natsuko slammed into her in Black Fire form, grabbing her around the torso.

“See, very probably!” Natsuko said.

“Yeah, uh-huh. Now get me down!” Daisy replied.

The solution to this came in the form of a glowing stampede of horses that blasted both of them head-over-heels into the snow and dirt. Natsuko thrust Taiyouken into the ground to slow herself but the fiery blade only succeeded in melting the leftover snow on her way to a halt. Daisy’s stop was slightly more graceful as she summoned a stone gorilla to catch her and set her down.

Both she and Natsuko had ended up on the far side of the ruins of the tent camp from Kane and Sofiane standing by the destroyed bridge.Between them stood Ailing and Koyon, eyes brimming with fury. But despite the deaths of their colleagues, a smirk worked its way onto Koyon’s face.

“What a comeback! Very impressive!” Koyon said. “But that’s about all you’re gonna get, I’m afraid.”

“How do you figure?” Natsuko said, walking toward him with her bottle in one hand and Taiyouken in the other.

Koyon spread his hands out and laughed. “I don’t take fall damage, and Ailing can’t die until she runs out of teammates.”

Natsuko bit her lip. She didn’t trust him at his word. It was still worth trying to get a shot off on him or Ailing, but she’d also never known Koyon to pass up the opportunity to taunt someone about something they couldn’t do anything about. He didn’t need to lie for that.

Natsuko looked at the others. “Guys, we can—”

Koyon interrupted her by darting towards Kane who had no time to dodge or parry the strike with how fast the Xian moved. He tried to dodge a third attack, but one of Ailing’s light beams caught him and incinerated him. It happened so quickly neither Sofiane nor Daisy nor Natsuko could react.

“Kane!” Daisy screamed, her voice raw and hoarse.

His corpse was already dissolving as she sprinted for him. Ailing laughed at the sight of Daisy running for someone who was already dead. Tears bud on Daisy’s screwed up face.

“Oh darling, you look so ugly,” she said.

Her reaction was automatic, a response to seeing her third and final former teammate killed in the span of a week. It was enough to make her forget her own self-preservation until Ailing’s golden lights flashed in her peripheral vision and all of a sudden the world was replaced with darkness.

Natsuko watched Daisy disappear into a tangle of polygons a split-second before three of Ailing’s light rays converged where she’d been running. The last-second dimension-jump had come from a Hero wearing bright gold pantaloons and silk dress coat with enormous poofy shoulders. It took her several seconds to realize who it was.

“Pech!” Natsuko yelled.

Natsuko threw up a Prismatic Haven wall just in time to block Ailing’s beams and Koyon’s spectral charge from turning him into a crater. With the time they had before the wall came down, the three Heroes joined up in the middle of the battlefield.

“Nice to see you, Pech, but you couldn’t come a little bit sooner?” Natsuko said.

Everything felt surreal after watching Kane die so quickly. Pechorin’s extremely uncharacteristic wardrobe change did not help matters.

“I come when the event bids,” Pechorin replied, looking off into the distance. “So too for Daisy, I am afraid. So it might just be us four.”

Sofiane looked around. “Uh… four?”

“Shuixing is with us,” Pechorin said.

Sofiane looked confused but Natsuko nodded. The bubbles hadn’t come from nowhere. And the voice speaking to her while she was unconscious felt too articulate to have come from her own mind. How Shuixing was doing that from Numberspace, she had no idea.

“So what do we do?” Natsuko said, glancing back at the two Xian waiting behind the prismatic wall with hungry looks.

“There’s a simple solution these two have already overlooked,” Pechorin said.

“We’ve got about 15 seconds, bud. Hurry it up,” Natsuko replied.

“HP damage.”

She blinked. “Um…”

“You haven’t used your Desperation Art yet, have you?” Pechorin said, glancing around at the miles of unexploded forests around them.

“No, it only unlocked a second ago when Kane died.”

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Use it.”

“Here!? I’ll kill everyone in a five mile radius. Shuixing included. And if we try to lure them away they’ll just kill you two and go after Shui,” Natsuko said.

“Yeah, I’d prefer not to kill everyone at the last second if possible. I’d like to see Gomiko again before we leave,” Sofiane said.

Natsuko sucked in air and turned her head. Now was not the time to tell him.

“Shuixing has a plan. But we’ll need to deal some damage first,” Pechorin said.

“How much? Sofiane might be able to take two hits, but you’re dead in one,” Natsuko said, surprising herself with how much that worried her.

Pechorin shrugged. “If I get hit, I get hit. It’ll just mean I finally sacrificed myself for—”

Natsuko punched him. “Knock it off, dumbass! You’re not living just for you.”

For the first time Natsuko had ever seen, something poked through Pechorin’s mask of perpetual angst and earned a look of genuine, almost goofy-looking surprise from him. Or, no, it was the second time. The first was when she told him to give up worrying about the Use-Rankings. Regardless, it was a rare sight to see him so dumbfounded, and she wanted more than anything else, more than saving the world even, to look at him just a little longer. But there was no time.

Putting her bottle down and brandishing Taiyouken with both hands, Natsuko turned to face the two Xian pacing the wall.

“Don’t die, Pech,” Natsuko said as the wall came down.

Faster than Sofiane’s Ball Lightning, Natsuko shot towards Koyon. He got a lash of his whip off on her before she ducked to the side and kicked him into Ailing and detonated a Megaton on top of them. She gave them no time to recover before dashing into the mushroom cloud and chopping into Koyon with her Napalm Strikes. With each swing she caught flashes of his shocked expression through the smoke and she wondered whether she might kill him outright without even needing Shuixing’s plan.

She knew that wouldn’t be possible when more of Ailing’s beams shot into Koyon, healing his wounds with each burst. Realizing he was safe, Koyon’s expression of surprise turned into a smug grin and he floated out of her reach.

What Natsuko wanted to do was get Ailing out of the picture temporarily while she wailed on Koyon, but doing that meant putting Sofiane and Pechorin in danger. Even shooting her required Pechorin to get close enough to aim, which also meant being in range of her beams.

“Natsu, swap!” Pechorin yelled.

She looked back and was about to yell that she wouldn’t let him sacrifice himself, but she saw he was serious, and not in the feigned, pretend way he usually was. Clenching her fist, she swapped Pechorin into range of Ailing. He was visible for all of half a second before shooting Ailing with one gun and himself with the other, dimension-jumping both simultaneously to dodge the light rays fired at him. Floating above it all, Koyon watched stupefied.

“Hey idiot, pay attention to your surroundings!”

Sofiane popped out of Ball Lightning behind Koyon and grabbed the Xian’s rabbit ears and dragged them down with him as he fell. Koyon let out a scream of pain that was stifled instantly by Natsuko plowing into him with Black Fire, dragging him along for the ride and burning him before he slipped free. She was about to turn around and hit him again before she heard Shuixing’s voice:

Now you can lure him away.

Trusting Shuixing, Natsuko soared westward away from the smoldering city of Vermögenburgh and leaving a trail of rolling white smoke behind her.

Below, Koyon floated down and his furious gaze was directed not at Natsuko, but the Hero who yanked on his ears. Sofiane clutched his rapier and swallowed. Maybe he wasn’t going to see Gomiko again after all.

“What are you doing!?”

Sofiane shook his head, convinced he was hallucinating the voice. Seeing Zhidao in the flesh, loafing across his nimbus cloud as it floated across the battlefield, only made Sofiane more convinced his brain had stopped functioning.

“What am I doing!? Is that a fucking joke!?” Koyon said.

“Does this look like a joking face?” Zhidao asked, making an exaggerated frown.

Koyon’s nostrils flared. “What! What do you want then, you gods-damned fox!?”

“Go after Natsuko.”

“Why!? I can kill this little purple prick in two seconds and deal with her later.”

Zhidao sighed. “That is very unfortunate, Koyon. Very unfortunate. Because this came directly from the Yishang.”

Koyon scowled and stabbed a finger at Sofiane. “Don’t let him escape. I’ll be right back.”

This was the last and final thing that made Sofiane question his sanity. There was no way this could be anything other than Shuixing’s direct interference, but how was she able to get Zhidao to do whatever she wanted? All he could do was shake his head. Shuixing was Shuixing.

As Koyon flew into the air to chase after Natsuko, Sofiane sighed. “Well, I wanted to be the one to get the bastard, but oh well. Have fun Koyon.”

Not long after Sofiane said this, the air over the region of Vermögenburgh exploded in a flash of white light engulfing everything to the west of the city. He had a brief moment of panic at how close the explosion was and ran for cover behind the banks of the moat. Wind from the shockwave blew hard overhead and sent the remains of the tent camp blasting into the city walls. But no HP damage followed.

After the shockwave had passed, Sofiane lifted his head over the embankment to survey the damage. From a thin line of surviving trees near the city all the way to the western ocean on the far side of the region there was nothing but black, scorched earth. Lake Amber was the only thing that was remotely recognizable, and only as a large hole in the ground where water had been. There was no question of getting back into the anomalous Dungeon of Stars now, he thought. Gomiko would be disappointed.

Though, he was already getting ahead of himself. Ailing was about to pop back up to the surface and while Zhidao was potentially under Shuixing’s control, his presence still made Sofiane wary.

Ailing emerged before Natsuko returned. She looked around and, spotting Natsuko, stomped towards him with a look of unrestrained fury, her disheveled hair falling onto her face.

“No more screwing around. Even if we lose, I’m going to make damn sure you die,” Ailing said.

Daisy and Pechorin popped back into existence beside Sofiane. He didn’t question why Pechorin’s special event spat them back out in that precise moment. It seemed like the thing it would do.

Ailing hesitated for a moment at the sudden arrival.

“Daisy,” Pechorin said. “Pull.”

The rocks underneath Ailing rumbled and then thrust upward as a column, launching her several feet in the air. Pechorin aimed for her, but Daisy already had her former teammate in the sights of her musket.

“Bullseye,” Daisy said as she painted the stone column red.