Crouching, Natsuko crept along the splintered wood of the junk’s smashed hull, easing around driftwood and refuse. Her objective was the spot at mid-ship where the junk had split in two and spilled its wooden guts across the plains. The only sound was a torn, Tianzhounese merchant flag flapping in the wind and the squish of their footsteps in the mud.

“Pech, talk first, ask questions later,” Natsuko whispered. “First person we see is going to be our killer so we’ve gotta go in shock and awe style.”

He said nothing, which Natsuko took as some kind of performative answer. The silence was killing her. She wanted to fight someone. Anyone. ASAP.

Turning the first corner of the broken ship, she was met with a cross-section of the triple-decked junk. Both sides of the bottom deck were strewn with crates and barrels that could be smashed open for maybe two tomatoes and a head of cabbage. No one put good loot in barrels or crates. It had to be in a chest.

Not that she was here for loot, she reminded herself. But old habits died hard. Her eyes were still trained to look for money and equipment.

On the stern side of the broken deck there was a ladder leading upwards. Natsuko trudged towards it before she felt a hand yank her back. Natsuko was moments from swinging her bottle in a blind haymaker before realizing it was Pechorin.

“What did I say!? Stop randomly grabbing me!” she whispered.

He pointed at a handful of boards in front of her that were colored ever-so-slightly differently than their surroundings. It came back to her: The memory of Pechorin stepping there when they’d first come here on a quest and falling through the floor into the mud where a bunch of pop-up enemies spawned.

“Thanks, but just point it out to me ahead of time, alright?”

He gave a curt nod and they continued to the ladder. The second deck was also empty, but the ladder to the top was all the way up at the bow because of course it was. Why build a ladder convenient for the sailors to go straight to the top?

“The crates are in different places,” Pechorin whispered.

“What?”

Natsuko squinted. They just looked like crates to her. They weren’t even the kind that could be broken open for some small amount of food. It was hard to believe Pechorin could actually remember the position of random filler crates years later.

“Stop,” Nastsuko said.

“Stop what?”

“Stop trying to turn this into another dark and mysterious edgelord mystery of yours. The stones are weird, sure, but the crates have nothing to do with our killer.”

“There were monsters up in the decks too,” he said.

Natsuko couldn’t argue with that. The last time they’d come, the entire ship had been crawling with enemies to fight off, attracted to the power of the artifact they were sent to retrieve which turned out to be some totem for disassembling order… or something. She didn’t actually know how it worked. Just that she had to keep it out of the hands of the Entropic Axis.

“They’re probably not hard to kill if you’re an older Hero,” she said as they navigated a conveniently-placed rickety plank that stretched between the broken halves of the ship.

“Wouldn’t you get tired of clearing them?”

“I’m tired of a lot of things, Pech. Like this conversation.”

Natsuko looked up through the gap between ship halves to see if anyone was watching them. The ship seemed as abandoned as before. Maybe the villagers had been wrong?

Taking the rungs gingerly to avoid making them creak, Natsuko went up the ladder. A clear blue sky met her at the top, as did a figure sitting cross-legged under a woolen blanket. Their back was to her, pressed against a mast on the other end of the ship.

It could still be an act, she reasoned, but to her eye, they looked asleep.

Natsuko whispered, “Pechorin, on my mark you’ll—”

“Excuse me! You have an appointment with judgment,” Pechorin said at the top of his voice.

The figure jolted at the noise.

Natsuko slapped her face. “Why, dude?”

“Justice is only meted out when the guilty party is aware of their transgressions. Even if I were to find my clan’s killers in their beds, I would still wake them up so that they may know why their lives have been made forfeit,” Pechorin replied.

The figure chuckled. “Pechorin, is that you? You haven’t changed a bit!”

Natsuko’s heart dropped. “Oh no…”

The woolen blanket dropped away from the figure as he stood up, revealing a Hero with shaggy brown hair wearing a gleaming white-and-gold lancer’s uniform. His golden lance gleamed in the sun and at the end of its haft billowed the banner of the Knights of Innocentus: Three, green spruce leaves against a field of white. On his face was an easy smile.

“And Natsu too! How have you both been?” Frederick asked with a soft smile.

His hospitality caught them both off-guard. For once, Natsuko found herself unable to immediately launch into a fight. She grit her teeth.

“As well as one can be, given my traumatic past,” Pechorin said.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“Good, good. That’s good to hear,” Frederick said, tapping the butt of his lance against the deck. Between them lay the gap in the deck, bridged by the length of a collapsed mast. Its old, Tianzhounese lugsails draped over the crushed captain’s cabin. After the pleasantries there was a brief silence.

“So, this is about the Non-Heroes, isn’t it?” Frederick asked.

“Yeah,” Natsuko said.

“I thought that might be the case. Where do you stand?”

“We’re here to make you stop.”

Frederick laughed, hard enough it sent him into a cough. When he regained his composure he asked, “how do you plan to do that?”

“Killing you. If we have to,” Natsuko said.

“Oh, Natsu, I wish you could. That’s the puzzle I’m trying to solve. I want to die, and I don’t know how.”

His words froze Natsuko. Pechorin was also perturbed, but had to nod approvingly at the macabre drama of it all.

“You’re… trying to die? You mean—”

“Permanently. Yes,” Frederick said, walking across the creaking planks to the edge of his broken half of the ship. “I’ve been doing a bit of research on it. You’ve seen the stones, yes?”

“They stop monsters from being re-summoned in the morning,” Pechorin said.

Frederick chuckled and pointed at Pechorin. “You got it! Straight out the gate. You know, Pech, you lay on the archetype so thickly, I don’t think anyone understands how good your intuition is. I mean you…” Frederick’s hands balled into fists and shook for a moment as he figured out his next words. “You get it! Sort of. Maybe just shy of the full picture. But you’re closer than most.”

“After the death of my clan, I was forced to—”

Frederick waved his hand. “And you lost it. Please stop. We’re years past that, my friend. Years past it. Maybe I can’t blame you though. Maybe that whole “traumatic past” and “hurt little sad boy” act you put up is your last little sliver of psychological protection from the abyss. I wish I still had my delusions, anyway.”

Natsuko’s knuckles curled around the neck of her bottle. “What the fuck are you on about Frederick?”

His wide, amber eyes shot to her with uncomfortable speed. There was something wild and scary in them, but what worried her most was how much clarity she could still see.

“Do you remember why you left me, Natsu? It seems so long ago by the measure of our short existences, but it was a blink of the eye compared to the mundane eternity we’re both staring into. Tell me, do you remember?”

She glared at him. “You were annoying and kept guilting me about adventuring without you? I don’t remember exactly. Remind me.”

“Because I was the first Hero to be left behind!” Frederick said, stabbing his lance into the snapped mast. The entire ship trembled and creaked. “You dropped me because my Use-Number plummeted. Because the Celestials decided I was worthless trash! I had no money because I’d spent it all on equipment and supplies and all the other Heroes, especially you, up there at your glorious #1 spot, had nothing to spare. Helping me would have cut into time better spent leveling or doing quests. Isn’t that right?”

Natsuko winced at the outburst. Not a word of it was incorrect or an exaggeration, all from memories she had put out of her mind.

“You’re right,” Natsuko said, her voice suddenly calm. She set her bottle down on the deck of the ship. “I’m sorry, Freddie. I was a piece of shit. I was the asshole, not you. But we’re in the same spot now. I’ve got an even worse Use-Ranking than you do.”

Frederick sighed. “I don’t blame you, Natsu. We were all deluded back then. I think maybe, if our positions had been reversed, I would have done the same thing to you.”

This earned a small chuckle from Natsuko.

“But that’s why I want to die,” he said.

A rush of wind whistled through the crevices of the shipwreck, making it howl and groan.

“Freddie, you don’t want that,” Natsuko said, as tenderly as she could muster. “Like I said, I’m in an even tougher spot than you, but I still find the courage to get on with it, even if I’m drinking myself silly every night! You just have to find something else to do with yourself. Take Shuixing, right? You remember—”

“Stop!” Frederick said. His nostrils flared, his hands squeezing the haft of his golden lance.

“I’ve been fighting this fight for longer than you have. I’ve had more time to think about things. About the way things are. The Yishang need us, Natsuko, but not for any of this shit about the Entropic Axis or whatever they claim. They’re whoring our emanations, copies of our soul, out to the Celestials. They’re selling us, Natsuko. We’re commodities. And then, when we’re no longer performing well enough for them, when Celestials no longer want us, they cast us out! And then, out of some special love of cruelty, they refuse to let us die. I’ve tried, Natsuko. So. Many. Times. But they always bring me back…” Frederick chuckled quietly. “They always bring me back.”

Natsuko knew of a way, but she couldn’t bring herself to offer it to someone she once shared feelings with.

“What is killing Non-Heroes supposed to accomplish?” Pechorin asked.

Frederick’s cornered eyes switched to Pechorin.

“I’ve figured out how to prevent monsters from spawning. They spawn in a fixed position whenever they’re killed,” he said, stepping out onto the broken mast and walking towards their half of the ship.

Pechorin’s right hand curled into his coat and around the grip of a gun.

“If you know where they’ll respawn, you can block it with something and then poof! They don’t come back the next morning.” Frederick continued.

Pechorin’s words about event triggers and time triggers echoed in her head and Natsuko connected the dots. “That doesn’t work for Heroes…”

Frederick grinned. “Or for Non-Heroes.”

Natsuko snarled. “You sick piece of shit. They’re humans too!”

Frederick hopped off the mast on their side of the broken ship, the butt of his lance thumping loudly. “Who cares? Yes, they die, but they come back the next day, so what does it matter? Once I learn how to prevent people from coming back, I can die in peace, and the world can finally forget about me.”

He continued a slow advance towards them. Pechorin drew his guns and moved behind Natsuko. She glared at him for being a coward and turned back to Frederick, her bottle over her shoulder, ready to swing.

Frederick laughed. “If you kill me, I’ll go right back to doing what I was doing. Unless you intend to hunt me down every day of eternity.”

He walked right up to Natsuko, staring down at her smaller form with the same shaggy brown hair and cocky smirk she had fallen for. The only thing different were his dark, hunted eyes. “Are you ready to do that, Natsu?”

She growled. “I’ll beat you into a paste, every single day until you leave those Non-Heroes alone, understand? I devoted myself to killing that fucking wyvern in Vermögenburgh every week just to keep it from slaughtering the Non-Heroes there, understand? I’m not playing around!”

“I’m not either, Natsu…”

Pechorin coughed and inched closer to Natsuko’s back. “Natsu… His Desperation Art…”

“There’s nothing more to say then,” Natsuko said.

“No,” Frederick said, standing straight up. “No there is not.”

With a flash, Frederick teleported behind Natsuko’s and thrust his lance at the base of her spine. She’d forgotten his Desperation Art let him do that, and that it was scaled for boss monsters with giant, damage-soaking health pools, and not washed-up, forgotten Heroes. It would have been a one-shot kill except that Pechorin, standing behind her, tackled her to the deck.