“What!? No! No way!” Sofiane shouted. “Merde! Absolutely impossible!”
The judges, disgusted with the pumpkin pie, pushed it away and hastily announced the Mage’s College team the winners. The crowd seemed especially excited at the scholars’ win over not one, but two Hero teams. Even the losers seemed impressed save the goblins who had snatched their meat pie and were devouring it themselves.
Natsuko was agape in shock. “They didn’t even have aprons!”
Daisy snapped her finger. “Tits!”
“I told you all we should have gone with the bitter pumpkin,” Pechorin said.
“I refuse to believe it. This must be a conspiracy,” Sofiane said, stomping off towards their pie and carving himself a slice with a lightning-fast swish of his rapier. He raised it to his mouth, took a bite, swished it around, and spat it out.
“Ptew—! Pah, pah— wormwood!” he said, wiping his mouth.
“What? Worms got in our pie?” Daisy said with alarm.
“No, it’s— pah— a bitter herb! Someone must have added a bunch of it to the spices to sabotage the flavor.”
Daisy gasped. “How is that possible!? Y’all were watching it the whole time!”
Natsuko and Sofiane looked at each other, then at Pechorin.
“Did you—”
“No,” Pechorin said, folding his arms. “I cannot tell herbs apart. My nose is filled with the smell of sulfur and brimstone.”
Sofiane exhaled. “And it wasn’t Harald’s group…”
“Ah well, it is what it is, right?” Daisy said, throwing her hands up.
“What about our reward money!?” Harald said, walking over to them with his group.
“You weren’t gonna win anyway. If the saboteur thought your pie would be a threat they would’ve gone after you too,” Sofiane said, shooing them away.
That got Natsuko thinking about who did end up winning. A few yards away, the judges were handing out the 100,000 Ying reward and a pair of enchanted gauntlets giving +33 to Elemental Power, which the Non-Hero scholars had zero use for. Regardless, she was curious how the scholars ended up winning with their anti-Pie. Natsuko walked up behind Shuixing who was celebrating with them.
“Looks like you won,” Natsuko said.
Shuixing jumped. “O-Oh! H-Hi there, Natsuko. Th-thanks.”
She threw her arm around Shuixing’s shoulder. “No problem! I’m glad you got to root your team on. Of course, we had a few hiccups, like our stove that got soaked.”
Shuixing looked away. “O-Oh yeah?”
“And then after we bought some more logs and managed to get our pie into the oven, it came out bitter because someone snuck wormwood into it.”
“That... sounds awful. Sorry, Natsu,” Shuixing said.
“Easy come, easy go, right? Actually, we ended up torching Harald’s team’s pie because we thought they were the ones that sabotaged us,” Natsuko said with a laugh.
“I—”
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“—was the one who sabotaged our pie?”
Shuixing looked at her sheepishly. “Y-Yeah…”
The two friends moved out of the crowd to give space for the rest of the Non-Heroes to come and congratulate the Mage’s College team and to try their bizarre orb pie.
“Why? I mean, I’m not mad or anything. This whole thing was just a time-kill from the get-go after all. But weren't you the one who told me to enter in the first place?”
“I-I… I know I did, but the professors didn’t tell me they were going to be entering until after you left, and I-I just—” Shuixing paused to take a deep breath. “But don’t the Non-Heroes deserve to win some of time too? The original Pie-Baking Contest was set up for Heroes, but it’s become a cultural event for Non-Heroes, and I wasn’t going to intervene, but then it was my friends that wanted to enter and…”
“Ugh, I can go a night or two without drinking I guess,” Natsuko said.
Shuixing chuckled at that. “I must admit, it was nice seeing you excited about something again. I almost never see that side of you nowadays. Usually it’s either Mopy Natsuko, or Stumbling Drunk Natsuko, or Violently Angry Drunk Natsuko, or Moderately Angry Sober Natsuko, or—”
“Please don’t tell me you have an entire taxonomy of my mental states,” Natsuko said.
“Not… written down.”
Natsuko sighed. “Anyway, it’s risky getting excited because 99% of the time you get burned. Like when someone promises that there’s this crazy abandoned dungeon that you can totally be the first one to raid, or there’s some secret Cursed Eye Demon thing that actually sucks, or you get really into a pie-baking contest and someone helps your competitors cheat.”
“I know I shouldn't have done that, Natsu," Shui said. "But I’m still worried about you. You keep saying you’re over the Use-Number competition, but I don’t think you are. I hate seeing you like this. How about this: We both enter the competition next month and we'll win together."
“I don't think I'm gonna find the solution to my existential crisis in a Pie-Baking contest, Shui.”
Natsuko had been hiding it well up until now, but Shuixing finally caught a glimpse of the hurt that went deeper than her friend initially let on. She had expected Natsu to treat the prank as a joke like she had in the past. Sure, there was the reward money she missed out on, but Natsuko had lost more than that on one evening of cards and laughed it off with an, “easy come, easy go.” More than just money had been at stake here, Shuixing realized.
“I’m sorry," Shuixing said softly.
The sun was starting to set and paint the sky a bruised purple and orange. Tall fir trees in the distance rippled like tidal waves in the cold wind. Having wandered away from the market square, they found themselves on the deserted steps of the Vermögenburgh Cathedral Plaza and sat down.
“It’s alright,” Natsuko said. “What difference would it make if we won or not? I couldn't buy better stats with it."
Shuixing hugged her friend. She really wished she hadn’t sabotaged her. Seeing the grin on Natsu’s face while she was firing up the oven reminded her of the old days, and it made their forgotten little existence all the more forlorn. For her part, Natsuko went into full-on bawling mode. Just like her drinking, combat, and poker hands, Natsuko’s cries were all-in. The only thing strange about it was Shuixing couldn’t remember the last time her friend blubbered, “I lub you Jwejing!” into her shoulder while sober. This was touching for the first five minutes before Shui had to gently nudge Natsu off her to prevent her scholar’s robes from soaking through with tears and snot.
When she was done sniffling, Natsuko said, “I’ll catch up with you later. I think Daisy and Sofiane were gonna go out to the Devil's Cut and I can probably finesse Daisy into paying.”
Shuixing laughed. “Right. Well, I made some pretty serious headway into research on your wine bottle. I think it may be possible to replicate the geometric vectors which render it capable of dimension-jumping. I’m looking forward to showing it to you when you get back!”
Natsuko tousled her friend’s teal hair. “Yar. You sure you don’t wanna come with? It’s probably gonna be a hell of a party after the bake off today.”
Shuixing straightened her glasses made crooked by Natsuko’s tousling. “That’s alright, I’ve gotta clear up all my research and get it sorted and organized.”
And just like that, Natsuo was back to giddily cruising for booze. Sometimes a good cry could fix you. Leaving her to it, Shuixing made her way back to the Mage’s College and swung by a small after-party held by the professors to celebrate the success of their boundary-pushing gastronomical research. After a polite drink, she returned to the laboratory to tidy up her research papers.
The entire place was ransacked.
“Oh no! Oh no, no, no, no!”
Shuixing dashed to her workbench. Gone were her diagrams of how to replicate the wine bottle’s geometry, her movement vector graphs, and her long sheets of complex calculations. Vials were shattered, drawers torn open, and equipment scattered the floor. Someone else had her research, and with it, the secret to getting rid of anyone, or anything, permanently.