Faisal, Margaret, and the raccoon girl formed a protective wall between Sofiane and Harald who was staining the icy floor pink with his blood.

“We don’t have it! Why won’t you believe us!?” the raccoon girl said.

Puffs of vapor left Sofiane’s mouth as he breathed in and out. Tracking them down hadn’t been easy. Their levels and stats weren’t very high, but their abilities gave them a lot of mobility to evade him. But now, there was no more running. He knew all about the empty doppelganger version of the Dungeon of Stars. If Harald’s gang thought they were going to use it as a place to lay low and wait until they could walk away with the research to make another version of Natsuko’s wine bottle, they were mistaken.

“Oh yeah?” Sofiane said, raking his rapier against the ice. “Why are you hiding here then? You could camp out anywhere you want. Hell, you could get a room at the inn. So what brings you to this secret little hidey-hole in the middle of nowhere?”

Margaret’s eyes darted behind him at the only exit. Sofiane leapt forward a foot, turning into his Ball Lightning form for just a moment to remind her she wasn’t going anywhere. He could kill all four of them and not even drop below half health. Margaret grit her teeth and backed up closer to Harald. The burly, bear-pelted Bazouk was hyperventilating, as though a missed breath would be his last.

“We’ve been camped here for months,” Faisal said.

“Is that how long you’ve known about Shuixing’s research?”

“What research!?” Margaret said. “We don’t even know what you think we stole!”

Sofiane fought with his mind. If he told them and they weren’t the thieves, the secret about forced dimension-jumping would get out. Not only that, he’d have to admit he had the wrong suspects. Sure, he might have moved a bit quickly. But who else was in position to both know about and steal the papers?

“How about this? I kill all of you and wait by the nearest respawn and kill you over and over until you talk. Or, you can stop playing around and tell me what I want to know,” Sofiane said.

“We can’t!” the raccoon girl said. “We’re not in here because we took whatever research you’re talking about! We're in here because nothing changes inside the dungeon, a-and if we stay here we only have to buy meals half as often…”

The look of shame on the raccoon girl’s face made Sofiane pause. It was too real to be an act. But what if he was wrong? Releasing the power of permanent death into the world would be an unthinkable horror. Stats and rankings would be nothing. If he helped bring that about just by falling for a cute raccoon girl's crocodile tears, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself. Sofiane readied his rapier to make a lunging attack through their sad little human wall, a purple ball of lightning growing into a flashing star at the tip of his blade.

“Wait! Please! We don’t— know— if we’ll respawn if we—agh—die in here,” Harald said, spewing blood from his mouth as he spoke.

Excuses. So many excuses. Almost as if they had prepared them all. Sofiane pulled at his purple hair.

“Argh! Why do you all have to talk so much!?”

“Sofiane!”

He turned to see Shuixing running into the icy chamber. Natsuko, Daisy, and Pechorin were close behind her. The glowing purple ball at the tip of his sword dimmed, then winked out.

“I believe I have found the people who stole your papers, Madame Shuixing,” Sofiane said with a small curtsy. As he came up from the curtsy he noticed the suspicion in their eyes. “Surely you don’t suspect me?”

Natsuko brandished her wine bottle. “It sure looks suspicious of you to run in here of all places, doesn't it?”

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Sofiane burst out laughing at the absurdity of having his own words spat back at him. But a moment later he sobered up with the realization that it was indeed the exact same logic he had used to justify hunting down Harald’s team. Sofiane turned to look at them and saw the terror in their expressions which he had been deliberately ignoring a moment ago.

Tucking his rapier back into his sash, Sofiane sighed and threw his hands behind his head. “Oh, this is so silly, isn’t it?”

“I’m sure not laughing,” Daisy said.

“I don’t have the papers,” Sofiane said, holding his arms out. “And, despite my earlier suspicions, I guess they don’t have them either.”

The suspicion didn’t leave Natsuko’s face. “Why’d you go after them then?”

“Because they left town in a hurry the morning after the papers went missing and I didn’t have time to alert you all since it was imperative to stop them as soon as possible.”

Shuixing was simultaneously relieved and anxious. On the one hand, it seemed they hadn’t been betrayed by Sofiane after all. On the other, they now had no leads for who did have the secrets of forced dimension-jumping.

“I wish I'd never done all this stupid research in the first place,” Shuixing said, her fists balling up her robes.

Daisy scratched her head. “Actually, that’s a good question, why didja research forced dimension-jumping?”

Harald's team's eyes went wide as they finally learned the nature of Shuixing's research. Being old enough to remember the accidental deaths, they understood the full implications of what Daisy had let slip.

“I— I just didn’t know what else to—”

Shuixing had been mentally whipping herself for hours now, but having to admit out loud that she had been researching how to murder other Heroes permanently purely because it fascinated her was agonizing. Her throat closed up every time she tried to explain that she had endangered everyone just to avoid the existential dread of idleness.

Her eyes blurred with tears and Natsuko put a hand on her shoulder. “You don’t need to explain anything, Shui. We’re gonna get your papers back, and we’re gonna beat the piss outta whoever took ‘em, and then we’ll worry about keeping it secret.”

“So we’re just supposed to ignore that she was making a way to kill people!?” the raccoon girl said. Her voice was as sharp and cold as the stalagmites of ice lining the cavern.

Faisal cleared his throat. “Perhaps, going forward, we ought to gather the rest of the Heroes, especially the high use ones,” he said, nodding to Daisy, “and have a productive discussion about what to do about this forced dimension-jumping technology going forward.”

“Or you can mind your own damn business,” Natsuko said.

Margaret glared. “We were.”

“We need to continue our search,” Sofiane said, turning on his heels towards the odor.

“That’s it? You—cough—nearly murder us for real and you’re gonna walk off like nothing—urgh—happened?” Harald said.

Sofiane raised an eyebrow. “Sorry?”

“It’ll be you in our position someday soon, you little purple ass!” the raccoon girl said. “At the mercy of people stronger than you. Getting bullied around. And it’ll be sooner than you think.”

“Nah,” Sofiane said with a laugh. “I’m built different.”

“Hold on,” Shuixing said, rubbing her puffy eyes underneath her glasses. “You said murder for real… Is this weir—”

Pechorin coughed.

“—anomalous dungeon… you believe Heroes who die here won’t respawn?”

Like a wave, expressions of nervousness hit Harald’s team all over again.

The raccoon girl swallowed heavily. “L-L-Listen, w-we’re sorry about what we said! Y-You don’t need to get rid of us. We won’t say anything!”

Shuixing waved her hands. “Oh! No! No, that’s not what I was getting at.”

Faisal swallowed. “We think… based on the fact that nothing seems to break in here, and that we don’t get hungry no matter how long we stay, that this in-between version of the Dungeon of Stars preserves the state of its inhabitants in limbo. So if someone were, say, chopped up…”

The other five occupants of the icy chamber adopted their adversaries’ anxious expressions. Natsuko’s mind turned back to Daisy killing them all and taking both the papers and her bottle. A bolt of fear ran through her. There was, after all, a string of something dark that poked out of Daisy's cheeriness every once in awhile. Everyone that knew about forced dimension-jumping was all gathered in one place where they could be permanently disposed of. In the cold of the cavern, sweat dripped down Natsuko’s back.

Daisy frowned. “I don’t like this.”

Given her superior stats and sharpened combat skills, it should have been Daisy who reacted first. But something had set Natsuko’s nerves on edge, so she swung the bottle in front of Shuixing before she even knew what she was swinging at. The impact jarred her arm and left it numb all the way to her neck. A boom rocked the chamber, knocking everyone but Daisy, Natsuko, and Shuixing off their feet.

Standing in front of Natsuko was a black-cloaked figure. Tar against the glittery ice. In the figure’s hands was a black-purple biwa, the color of pre-dawn, with fluorescent golden strings and an almost-invisible obsidian blade that ran the length of the instrument’s body. Natsuko only detected it once it was grinding against her wine bottle, releasing a harsh screech. Inches from where Natsuko’s quivering hands held the blade at bay, Shuixing’s face looked on in shock.