Natsuko didn’t insult Pechorin for saving her this time. Not that she would’ve had time. Frederick’s follow-up attack came a quarter of a second later. Both of them rolled in separate directions as the glowing golden spear pierced the deck where Natsuko’s head had been.
Her eyes darted for the bottle that slipped from her fingers when Pechorin tackled her. She found it rolling towards the edge of the ruined deck.
“You’ve always been slow, Pech,” Frederick said with a wide grin. “But gods-damned do you have some good intuition. You, Natsuko? Not so much.”
She scrambled to get to her feet before the lance struck again, but she knew Frederick would be faster than her while using his Desperation Art. Natsuko shut her eyes and waited for the pain.
Two shots rang across the marshes. Two bullets found their marks in Frederick’s chest. The wide grin left his face as he shrugged off the damage.
“You little Yishang toadie! You’d rather preserve this worthless fucking world than help your own, huh?”
A flurry of lance stabs went down towards Pechorin, two finding their way into his chest, though the damage dealt was reduced by both attacker and defender being Metal Elementals. The gatling lance thrusts happened in the span of a few seconds, but that was all Natsuko needed to set off a Fire Gale from her palms, rocketing her back onto her feet.
Frederick didn’t wait for her to run. Glistening golden lance tips pierced her center mass as she felt the adrenaline rush that accompanied hitting the 50% health threshold to deal bonus fire damage. The caveat was that she was halfway dead.
“Pechorin, throw me one of your guns!” Natsuko yelled.
Pechorin lobbed the gun at her. Recognizing what they were trying to do, Frederick reached out to intercept it. Before he could, there was a clickety-clacking roar of flak spewing from Pech’s remaining gun at Frederick, the deck, and even Natsuko.
Trained instincts buried deep within her veins woke up to capitalize on the low-damage metallic flak peppering her opponent. Frederick caught the gun flying through the air, but in the next instant was blanketed in fire that reacted with the flak, coating his body in molten lead.
Frederick howled and dropped the gun and Natsuko had just enough time to pick it up before water flew out of the tip of his golden lance and doused the Molten reaction before it could deal worse damage. Natsuko recognized it immediately as Shuixing’s Ablutions ability, wiping away the ongoing burn.
For a moment, Natsuko thought it was pure chance that Frederick had picked that as one of his three Jack spells for the day before noticing the bottles of liquor stacked up near where he’d been sleeping. Apparently, she wasn’t the only one aware of Ablutions’ alternative uses.
“Frederick, stop this! We want to help you!” Natsuko said, her voice low and desperate.
“Help me what, keep living? I told you already, I’m done! Done with Po-Lin. Done with the Yishang. All I want is sweet oblivion.”
Natsuko tried to step forward, but before she could, Frederick whipped his lance around in a whirlwind. Her arm brought the barrel of Pechorin’s borrowed gun up and parried the golden lance in a teeth-rattling clang that knocked her backwards, ripping the deck’s boards up under her feet.
Giddy pleasure flushed through her as her Fuel Injection kicked in. Her wounds healed, her cooldowns were up, and more importantly, she felt wired. Her first addiction, before alcohol, had been activating this ability. Her fighting instincts took over and she used a pulling wind spell to yank Frederick towards her waiting palm, grabbed his face, and slammed it to the floor right as she activated another Fire Gale into it.
The force of the flames drove him through the deck and down to the one below where he landed on a smashed barrel with an expulsion of air loud enough for Natsuko to hear over the roaring in her ears. She felt powerful again. It had been so long since she felt like that. She wanted to keep feeling like that.
“Natsu, we need to talk him down from—”
“No more talking,” Natsuko said, leaping down, deliberately eating the small amount of fall damage to keep her under the 50% HP threshold that was flooding her with fiery energy.
Frederick was back on his feet and ready to meet her, but his Desperation Art had worn off. His lance was no longer glowing and he looked slower. Her twitching nerves could react to his thrusts with perfect timing, parrying one after the other. She was disappointed when it gave her health back and she felt the knife’s edge rush leave her.
Recognizing he wasn’t going to win, Frederick laughed with blood running out of his charred pink mouth. “I’m just gonna come back and do it again, Natsuko. And again. And again. I’ll keep experimenting on Non-Heroes until I find a way out. You can’t keep someone in who wants to get out.”
Resisting the urge to smash his face in with another Fire Gale right then and there, Natsuko took a deep breath and said, “no, I’ll beat you until you get sick of it and then I’ll sit your ass down and we’ll talk this through. You think you’re stubborn? Freddie, you’ve got nothing on me. Stubborn and stupid are my only personality traits.”
“And alcoholism,” Pechorin called down from the hole to the deck above.
“Hehe, you might be right, Natsu. I know that better than anyone else. But we’ll just have to see, won’t we?” Frederick said.
With a wave of his hand, a shower of golden sparkles exploded in front of Natsuko, blinding her for a second. She tried to parry a follow-up strike, but rather than thrusting at her with his lance, he hurled a Fire Gale at her that ignited the specks of gold on her and inflicted the same burning molten reaction against her.
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Natsuko screamed and staggered backwards, accidentally walking over the edge of the split deck and falling to the marshy ground below. The one upside was the muddy water below the shipwreck put out the gold melting on her. She rolled to the side on instinct and a second later Frederick splashed down beside her.
Both of them were nearly dead. She could see the desperate look in Frederick’s frenzied eyes that told her he didn’t want to live and didn’t want to be killed. Cutting through the adrenaline flooding her veins, the sight of him made her sad. There was still something in him that she couldn’t let go of. Something in the ferocity with which he threw himself at everything, even when that thing was self-annihilation.
It was why she couldn’t use the bottle on him. Not now, not ever.
Frederick stabbed at her again, but he was now so exhausted that it was more of a token gesture at fighting. She caught and deflected the lance tip with Pechorin’s gun and pushed herself to her feet with the rush of health that came with her Fuel Injection.
Before she could make one final plea for Frederick to come to his senses, Pechorin dropped down from above-deck with her wine bottle slung over his shoulders. Her eyes shot to him.
“Pech, leave it. This is between us,” she said, her voice deep and ragged.
Frederick wiped his mouth of blood and glanced at the bottle. “I noticed you ditched your sword, Natsuko. For that bottle, right? That’s not a weapon.”
“I don’t carry a weapon anymore. There’s no point,” she said.
“Even when you know you’re going to hunt another Hero down? There’s a weapon shop at the Roadhouse, you could have bought a passable one there,” he said, holding his lance in a defensive stance, ready for one last stand.
“I thought I could talk you down without needing it.”
“Bullshit. I saw the look of surprise. You had no idea it was me and every reason to believe it was a newer-gen Hero who could butcher you in a heartbeat. So, I’ll ask again, what’s the bottle for?”
“Drinki—”
“It’s empty, Natsu.”
“Just give him the option, Natsuko,” Pechorin said.
Frederick narrowed his eyes. “What option?”
“Pechorin, I swear to the gods, the Yishang, and every last Celestial in the sky, you will not—”
“The wine bottle can end Heroes’ lives,” Pechorin said flatly. “If you get hit by a certain spot, you’ll be shunted through the floor like a bad dimension-jumping accident and the Yishang-ren can’t re-summon you.”
Frederick’s eyes lit up with relief. His arms slackened and his golden lance dropped to the mud, its luster dimmed by the dark shadow of the wrecked ship.
“Natsu, please…”
She refused to meet Frederick’s gaze. If she did, she would start crying, and wouldn’t be able to stop. All she had to do to get Frederick to stop talking was one last Fire Gale, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Her hands clutched at the hem of her shorts.
“Shut up,” she said.
“Natsu…”
“Shut up!”
The scream echoed into the empty decks of the shipwreck, deprived of the monsters that should’ve been there. She would have even welcomed some stupid, ambling goblins. Anything but Frederick looking at her with that awful look of defeat.
She jerked when she felt a hand on her shoulder and almost blasted Pechorin with a Fire Gale.
“Let him make his own choice,” he said, his voice patient and level, without any of the strained gruffness it usually had to sell his archetype.
“Help a friend kill himself? No! You’re insane!” Natsuko slapped his hand off her shoulder.
“There are things we still need to do, Natsu. Urgent things. We don’t have time to thwart him every single time he respawns and if you don’t let him do this, he’ll go back to experimenting on NHs. At the very least, we ought to give Frederick the choice that the Yishang won’t let him have.”
“A choice is all I want,” he said, locking eyes with Natsuko.
She stomped through the mud to Pechorin and tore her bottle from his grip and thrust it into Frederick’s chest.
“This part, right here on the punt, does the trick. I’m not going to watch,” Natsuko said.
“I’d like it if you did,” Frederick replied, his voice having exchanged its manic desperation for calm resignation.
“And I’d like it if you weren’t using my bottle for this. Guess we’ll both have to have our hearts broken,” she said, turning her back to him and walking away.
He laughed softly. “I know that, Natsu. I know that.”
Natsuko made it only a few steps out into the sun before she heard the unmistakable chunking sound. Stopping to take a deep breath, she continued forward, back across the marshy plains. A slopping noise behind her told her when Pechorin was running to catch up. Wordlessly, he handed her the wine bottle back. They walked in silence until the land turned back into the tall, rolling dunes that shielded the marsh from the ocean.
“We all have different ways to bare our tortured souls to the world,” Pechorin said, ending the silence.
“Not the time for the edgelord shit, buddy,” Natsuko replied.
“The edgelord shit is my chosen vessel. Yours is alcohol. Shui’s is research.”
She wanted to tell him to shut up like always, but something made her sit down in the sand at the top of the dunes and look out towards the sea and the little green-brown speck that was the Lanbaoshi Roadhouse full of Non-Heroes waiting to be told they would be alright and wouldn’t have to wait to be picked off night after night. Pechorin sat down beside her, the weight of his trench coat sending up a plume.
“What was Frederick’s then?” Natsuko asked.
“He didn’t have one,” Pechorin said. “That was his problem.”
Natsuko’s back fell into the sand and she splayed out her arms. “He didn’t have one…”
That wasn’t Pechorin’s full theory on the matter. His full theory was that Frederick had had one years ago and lost it, never to be regained.
After a moment of quiet reflection, a calmer Natsuko popped up from the sand, dusted it off her bare skin as best she could, and turned towards the Roadhouse.
“Welp, guess we better go deliver the good news,” she said.