“So,” Sofiane said, clapping his hands together as they walked along the beach road. “When we get there, clothing shopping?”

“Didn’t you bring a Tianzhounese outfit?” Daisy asked.

“Well, yes, but there’s a Halloween event right around the corner, non? We won’t be able to track down Yuna right away anyhow. She’s got a whole corps of her resistance guys swarming her at all times, so we might as well do some recon,” he said, stifling a yawn.

“Recon at the clothing store?” asked Shuixing.

“Multi-tasking, Madame Shui, is the key to efficiency.”

“I prefer concentration, thank you.”

Ignoring the spoil-sport, Sofiane threw his hands behind his head and walked backwards, facing Daisy. “Any costume ideas for you yet?”

“Hmm…” Daisy pressed a finger to her mouth. “Haven’t given it much thought.”

“Wow. Just goes to show the impeccable taste of the Top 10 that you can throw something together and have it work.”

“Well… Sometimes a little bird gives me advice,” she said with a bit of embarrassment.

“Ah,” Sofiane said, realizing that what Daisy really meant was that event costumes at that level were curated by the Yishang to maximize Celestial engagement.

Sofiane didn’t know what to make of that. On the one hand, it sounded a lot easier to have the special attention of the Yishang guaranteeing your Use-Number increase. On the other hand, he enjoyed assembling his outfits. Even agonizing over them. He highly suspected, though never tested, that he would still be putting outfits together even if he didn’t need them to keep his Use-Number up.

“Tell me you at least enjoy the pageantry,” Sofiane said.

Daisy nodded. “Well, yeah. I don’t like pickin’ but I do like wearin’. And the events are always a lot of fun.”

“Phew. I was worried for a second there.”

Shuixing was trying and failing not to eavesdrop. The truth was that she missed the seasonal events too, but they weren’t worth showing up for unless they were held in Vermögenburgh—which they never were. Not that she had any idea what she would do even if she did go. The main purpose was to see-and-be-seen by other High-Use Heroes, debut some kind of seasonal outfit so that the Celestials could summon you in it, play through a cheesy, seasonal quest, and then get plastered and play drinking games with the other Heroes.

None of that seemed appealing to her after she stopped knowing the Heroes involved. But the times she had gone to seasonal events with Natsuko, Pechorin, and Hemiola had been an absolute blast. If she was being honest with herself, as any good scientist ought to be, she was a little jealous of Sofiane and Daisy.

“Are you planning to be there, Shui?” Daisy asked.

“O-Oh, me? N-No. It’s a lot of work. And plus, we really need to get those papers back, don’t we?”

“Pffbt, we’ll get those papers back well before Halloween,” Sofiane said.

Shuixing said nothing. Ultimately, the other two were in the driver’s seat. There wasn’t much she could do by herself. Even less without Natsuko, whose absence was making her anxious. What if the NH-killer was really powerful and killed her? She knew Natsuko would hyperfixate on getting revenge and probably go and get herself killed several more times if that were the case. And then there was Pechorin…

She was so absorbed in her simmering stress that Shuixing failed to notice the change in scenery. The narrow sandbar finally widened out into a beach full of shells. Golden larches and tall pines formed a barrier between the sand and the abrupt, pillar-like cliff-face of one of Northern Tianzhou’s many mountains.

What did catch her eye was a fast-moving nimbus cloud emerging from the trees with a peach-colored fox sporting interlocking haloes sitting atop it.

“Zhidao?” she called out.

“Hi there! Quest for ya,” the fox said with a tone of panic in its child-like voice as it banked its cloud around the three of them and parked it behind Daisy.

From where Zhidao had burst through the treeline came a rapid thumping and the sound of cracking timber. A second later, a giant crab the size of a three-story house burst through the trees, sending uprooted trunks soaring through the air. Its chitinous jaws cricked and chittered as its spidery legs skittered along the sand far faster than anything a creature of that size should have been capable of.

Red bars above it filled and then overflowed into little blocks of health markers above its head. Each was 100,000 HP if Shuixing recalled correctly, and it was coming up on five of those blocks.

Shuixing’s meandering brain jerked into strategy mode. They had no formal DPS, with Daisy and Sofiane both being control Heroes, but Daisy was better at control and Sofiane could deal a decent amount of damage. The scale of Daisy’s distractions meant that she could occupy the crab while Sofiane lined up his Coup De Grace and she healed them as needed.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

“Daisy, can you distract the crab!? Sofiane and I will—”

Daisy had already clicked her pocket watch and a fist made of condensed sandstone rose out of the beach and flew to meet the crab and bopped it on the head. The strike staggered the three-story crustacean, and by the time it was shaking off its stunned status, the fist had repositioned itself over the crab’s head. It came down again. Then up. Then down. Then up, taking off a quarter of its multiple 100,000 HP health bars every time.

The entire beach trembled with each titanic collision. Shuixing watched with wide eyes as Daisy casually popped the crab for more health than four Shuixings combined every second.

For her part, Daisy looked mildly annoyed. Her lips pursed as the chunking sand got all over her boots and blouse.

“Huh, those aren’t supposed to be in Tianzhou. That’s a Deco Imperian enemy,” Sofiane said. “Oh shit wait, I need experience!”

“It followed me all the way from there!” Zhidao said as Sofiane zipped forward to tag the crab at least once with his ball of lightning.

“Deco Imperia is hundreds of miles from here,” Shuixing said. “How did…”

With one final crack, the crab slumped forward in an explosion of sand that blanketed all of them except Zhidao hiding behind Shuixing. A second later, the crab dissolved into a cloud of dust, leaving behind some level-up material that none of them could actually use.

“Drat!” Daisy said. “Would’ve liked it to drop some crab legs. Mmm, that with a little bit of butter and seasoning…”

“Well, the experience was certainly nice,” Sofiane said.

Shuixing turned around to face Zhidao. The little fox had propped its head up on its forepaw and lay like a lounging emperor waiting to be fed grapes while its two interlocked halos circled lazily above. Even more striking than the halos was the distinctly human-like intelligence behind its large eyes. It was a signature look of the Pengwu, the shapeshifting animal fairies native to Tianzhou.

Natsuko insisted Pengwu creeped her out, but they were the only animals other than owls that Shuixing thought were cute. She liked their sense of wisdom.

“What were you doing that the crab was chasing you so far?” she asked.

“Oh, you know, floating about,” the fox said, unhinging its jaw to give an enormous yawn. “I’m not attached to a party right now, so I just thought I’d ramble around, and then that crab decided I looked tasty!”

All the way from Deco Imperia. They would have had to chase the fox across that region, then the entirety of Vermögenburgh from South to North, then either across the sand dunes or all the way up through Cascadia and back down through the Sibe-Lands, which sounded… unlikely.

“Is that really what happened?” Shuixing asked.

“Well… sort of. Kinda. Hehe,” the fox said.

“We missed out on crab legs, so it’s not too late to eat something else,” Sofiane said with a fox-eating grin.

Unamused, Zhidao floated over to Sofiane and batted him on the nose with a paw.

“Ow!” Sofiane said, rubbing his nose.

“Bad girl!”

“I’m not a girl!”

“Oh! You’re the old Koyon!” Zhidao said.

“No, he’s the new Sofiane! I mean— no, he’s the— he sucks and I’m trying to get rid of him! I swear, if you scratched my nose…”

Shuixing shook her head. She felt like she’d been thrown back in time. The only difference was that it was usually Natsuko that Zhidao was batting at.

“What’d’ya mean sorta?” Daisy asked.

“Oh, hi Daisy! Thanks for saving me by the way.”

“No problem. You were saying though?”

“Huh? Oh, right! So… us foxes are very curious creatures, you know. And so… I was curious about how to travel faster. Not that I don’t like my little nimbus here,” he said, patting the fluffy cloud he was curled up on. “But it doesn’t get you across the continent very fast.”

Sofiane narrowed his eyes, still rubbing the spot he’d been pawed at. “Is there a crab in this story, or…”

“I’m getting to the crab! Simmer down, puffball,” Zhidao said.

Puffball. Natsuko’s preferred insult. That was an odd coincidence. Though she’d heard it said that Pengwu tended to take on the traits of the Heroes they hung out with. She wondered if the fox had a dark, tortured monologue somewhere in it from Pechorin.

“As I was saying, I was looking into ways to traverse the entirety of Po-Lin in one go, right? Apparently there have been some secrets released recently about jumping across dimensions or something. Have you heard about that?”

Sofiane stopped rubbing his nose. Daisy bit her lip. Shuixing felt her blood run cold.

“Th-That’s always been around, h-hasn’t it? Heroes have known about dimension-jumping forever,” she said.

“Sure, I remember us trying it too when Natsuko wanted to steal from the Tianzhounese Royal Treasury!” Zhidao said. “But um… people have been learning more about it lately. And one of the things you can do, according to someone I met in Deco Imperia, is if you angle it downwards at a shallow enough angle, you can shunt yourself through the center of Po-Lin with enough forward momentum to get you to the other side of the world. Isn’t that cool!? I can even take my nimbus with me!”

It was incredibly cool, Shuixing thought. She hadn’t even thought of trying that, being so focused on Natsuko’s bottle and its ability to permanently annihilate other creatures. She almost felt guilty at having been so caught up in the violent possibilities of dimension-jumping at the expense of more useful techniques. Of the secrets to get out, teleport-jumping was vastly preferable to what she had released into the world.

“Lemme guess,” Sofiane said “Monsieur Crab happened to come along for the ride?”

Zhidao rubbed his neck with a forepaw. “Hehe, I can only take so many precautions. Have you guys learned anything about dimension-jumping recently?”

Shuixing swore Zhidao had been deliberately looking at her when he said that, though he hadn’t turned her way. No, she was just being paranoid. The only people that knew about forced dimension-jumping were their small group, Harald’s team, and whoever had stolen the papers. There was no reason to think Zhidao knew anything about it.

“I-It was nice catching up with you again, Zhidao,” Shuixing said, starting to walk towards the vague direction of Tianzhou City, “but we’re really busy and have to get going.”

“Hey, I’ve got nowhere to be. Mind if I tag along?”

The three of them looked at each other with the same sense of mild unease at the request. Zhidao picked up on it immediately.

“Pretty please? I can do cool tricks!” he said, walking around on just his forepaws. “I can tell some fun stories about the old days! Even some you might not know, Shui. Or I can even tell you about how I pulled off the teleport jump.”

Before the other two could protest, Shuixing said, “you can come.”