Finding Zhidao was not going to be easy. He was one fox and the city of Tianzhou was a lot larger than that. There were some blocks in its endless grid of streets that contained more people than all of Vermögenburgh combined. The one thing Natsuko had going for her was her excellent investigation skills.

“You seen a fox on a cloud rolling past here?” she asked the owner of a dumpling stand.

“Uhh…. no? Sorry,” the dumpling man said.

That checked one street off her list. Now all she had to do was do that with every single other street and avenue in Tianzhou of which there were a little less than a hundred or so. If she could skillfully nurse a pleasant buzz, this would be a piece of cake.

“Floating fox?” she asked someone else.

“Like a Pengwu?”

That was a no as well.

“...on a cloud…”

“Not in months.”

Nope. How about the docks?

“I wouldn’t need to buy dinner if I had seen it!” a longshoreman with rotten teeth told her. So much for that.

“S’cuse me,” Natsuko said, having just recharged at a street stall selling cinnamon-flavored soju which had gone down almost as nice as her whiskey cocktail. “You seen a Pengwu shaped like a fox anywhere?”

“Don’t bother me,” the woman replied.

Natsuko forced her eyes to sober up. The woman she’d asked was swathed in an indigo robe and golden sash with bottles dangling from it. On her head was a golden diadem out of which fell a tumble of coal-black hair. And if her tan skin was anything to go by, she was probably an al-Nuwban Hero.

“Uh, sorry? Who are you exactly?” Natsuko said.

She stared vacantly at Natsuko like she was a boring book. “Gula Asu. Rank 29. If I don’t already know who you are, I don’t need to know. Sorry kiddo.”

“Kiddo!? I’m two years older than you at least!” Natsuko said.

“How unfortunate,” Gula said, spinning on her sandaled heels and leaving.

Natsuko growled, wishing she had her emotional support bottle with her to plausibly imagine scenarios of murder with.

“Up yours too!” she yelled into the crowd of Tianzhounese Non-Heroes who either looked confused at Natsuko’s antics or tutted silently in her direction.

The crowd gave her a bit of berth as she walked off muttering drunkenly. Inebriated Heroes were a serious threat to Non-Heroes that didn’t want to be out of commission until 4am the next morning. Except for egregious cases that messed up a quest line or the operation of a city, there were almost no legal repercussions for arbitrary, Hero-inflicted violence. Not that Natsuko had ever done such a thing. She was above that, but below angrily shattering her empty soju bottle on the ground.

Irritation was ruining her buzz so Natsuko decided she would give another couple streets a try and then give up and go pass out at the hotel in preparation for evening drinking.

Whatever look was plastered on her face, it probably wasn’t pretty, as the silk store shop assistant physically recoiled when she walked in the door.

“H-Hello there! D-Do you need a new outfit, or…”

“Floating fox… on a cloud… go past here?” she said, making a wiggly, floating motion with her hand and pointing at the window. “Did they go through here? The Pengwu? The fox thing?”

The shop assistant nodded nervously. “Y-Yeah, this morning. They went, um, that a’ way!” He said, pointing up the street towards the Heavenly Card Parlor.

Natsuko grabbed the man by his shirt. The fabric tore a little in her grip. “N’yer not just sayin’ that cuz I’m cute, right?”

He shook his head. “No! I mean, um, the— the fox, it was peach-colored, a-and it had these little circling rings over its head…”

Natsuko let go of his shirt. “I’ll be damned! Thanks for the tip! Lemme give ya a tip back.”

Fishing around in her coin purse, she found a couple coins. She subtly placed the two Ying in the shop assistant’s breast pocket, almost ripping it out of his shirt in the process, then put her fingers up to her lips to urge his discretion in this little bribe of hers.

“Shh! Don’t tell yer boss or he’ll make ya split it with him!” she said with a conspiratorial giggle and a hiccup. For some reason, she had it in her head that soju was as strong as beer. It was apparently a bit stronger than that. She was a lot drunker than she expected to be.

“Off I go!” she said, slamming the shop door behind her and knocking bolts of silk off the shop counter.

Forgetting that it was a general direction rather than a final destination that she had been given, Natsuko beelined for the Heavenly Card Parlor. Her beeline was impeccably straight. So straight, in fact, that it went directly through a table of card players.

“Oh, whoops! Sorry guys!” she said with a laugh, her face going as red as her crimson clothes.

“Come on, why!?” said one of the players. “Can you Heroes have at least a little respect now and again? Yishang preserve…”

The other player looked less disappointed, probably because they were not winning.

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“Hey, I said sorry! I’m really drunk right now, okay?”

“And that’s my problem!?”

Natsuko stared dumbly at the man. He was middle-aged with graying hair and a paunch that made a big bump in his teal changshan robe. His wrinkled eyes gazed out at her with deep resignation, as though this were only the latest injustice that wounded the man.

“Hey, you seen a flying fox around here? Floats on a cloud? ‘Bout yay high off the ground?”

With a swish, he folded his sleeves. “Pick up our cards and I’ll tell you.”

Wasting no time, Natsuko got down on her hands and knees and started shoveling up the cards that had spilled over the cobbled road.

“No! Be careful with that! Don’t bend them, kid!” he said.

A gasping whine came from the man’s mouth as Natsuko bunched up several of the cards in her fist and chucked them back onto the table. The other participant was smart enough to put his body between Natsuko and the cards before picking them up, blocking Natsuko off from “helping.”

She slapped down the last couple of rumpled cards and hopped to her feet, teetering for a second and almost stumbling into another game in progress. Its participants were prepared for her and pushed Natsuko away from their table.

“Alright, tell me where he went, that little shit,” Natsuko said.

The man, busy trying to straighten his bent cards out, pointed at the door to the Heavenly Card Parlor which she now remembered was where she was headed to begin with.

Natsuko stuck her hands in her pockets. “Hey, uh… sorry about your cards, man. I’d give you some money but I’m kinda flat broke right now.” To illustrate that fact she pressed on her pocket until the fabric ripped so she could wiggle her finger in the hole.

The man rolled his eyes. “You’re a Hero, you’re not broke. Just go kill some monsters or something.”

“Bet! You stay right there, I’m gonna go run out to like a… a dungeon or something… and I’ll find something to pawn. How much’d yer cards cost?” she said, the man’s body doubling every time she moved her head. It was kinda funny to see so she kept jerking her head side-to-side to make it keep going.

“You don’t have to— listen, kid, we can just forget about this—”

She lunged forward to hug him, locking him in an inescapable straitjacket due to her superior stats. Thrash as he might, he wasn’t going anywhere.

“What’s your name, bestie?”

“Let go of me!”

“His name’s Kong Yiji,” the man’s opponent said, cracking up at Natsuko’s assault on his friend.

“Kong… Kong… Kong…” she said, stroking his wispy, receding hair. “M’Gonna help ya out here, Kong, cuz I’m better than those fff-reaking asshole Heroes, got that? I’m chill like that. So here’s the deal Kongy…”

“Please let me go.”

“Here’s the deal Kongy… I’m gonna go into a dungeon, I’m gonna brave—” she burped into his ear. “—brave serious peril, and I’m going to win you your cards back… got it?”

“I already have my cards they’re just wri—”

She slammed her finger into his lips. “No, Kongy, I will buy you a new pack. All of your favorites will be in it, okay? Jus’ watch me.”

Not waiting for an answer, she stumbled off towards the edge of town. If she remembered correctly, which was not a guarantee, there was a clearable dungeon with some mediocre loot she could pawn not too far up the little river valley that Tianzhou City was built along. Within the hour she was stopped in front of some ancient temple flanked by a row of giant, stone figures carved directly into the mountain. She had definitely been to the dungeon, but she couldn’t remember what its thing was. They all had a damn thing.

Running inside, the usual stuff greeted her. Long stone corridors that smelled like burning sulfur, ominous murals full of suffering, slightly larger rooms where there was a group of pop-up enemies to defeat, and puzzles. One thing she forgot was how hard combat could be when you were running a dungeon solo, especially outside of Vermögenburgh. And drunk.

In one room, several crawling, gasping ghosts grabbed at her ankles and started biting her.

“Agh! Get off me, silly bitch!”

She launched a Fire Gale from the attacked foot but forgot to balance it out with a Fire Gale from the other foot and sent herself cartwheeling into the ceiling. The enemies in this room were supposed to be a little reprieve from the rest of the dungeon’s combat, but this was where she ended up spending the most time. It was an epic battle with Natsuko on one side and a bunch of low-health, low-danger enemies and her own hand-eye coordination on the other. But with almost 1,000 HP to spare, she finally defeated the last crawling ghost.

“Okay Kang… Kong, I’m doin’ this for you buddy,” she said, saluting a mosaic depicting endless post-humous torture for the damned and topping her HP off by chain-eating six of her 99 baked potatoes until she felt too stuffed to move.

The next room was an open-air antechamber overgrown with moss and with a bottomless pit at the center. She tried for ten minutes to get health back by parrying the attacks of a mob of slow-moving ghouls before remembering that her ability only gave her health back when it was an elemental attack and then proceeded to wipe them out before stumbling drunkenly through a puzzle by muscle memory, walking off to go dry heave, coming back to the puzzle, forgetting she did it, resetting it, solving it again, and finally wobbling into the Boss Fight Chamber.

“Your sins are known to the world. They announce themselves by the fetid miasma emanating from your foul lips,” said the Boss, a snarling half-hog, half-man standing almost twelve-feet tall and wielding a butcher’s knife and hook.

Natsuko giggled. “You sound like Shui.”

Running straight at the demon, she let her vague memories of its attack patterns guide her strategy of using some weird vine-weaving-dash attack she had as part of her Jack skills that she couldn’t remember either learning or preparing in order to set up Scorch reactions with her Fire Gales, then landing about 50% of her Parries to cut the cooldowns. She was barely able to keep track of what was going on between the throbbing in her ears and the crazy double-vision but she wasn’t dead yet, which was good.

Wobbling to a stop facing the Boss Hog who was looking quite smoked at this point, Natsuko spoke, “and now for my—” she put her fist to her mouth then pounded her chest to fight down reflux. “—now for my finishing move!”

In her mind, she would use Fire Gale to launch herself forward and activate her Spontaneous Combustion directly below the creature. The only problem was that she tripped, pitched forward, landed flat on her face, and only then did the Fire Gale kick in, rocketing her along the ground and scraping her face with it. Like this, she headbutted the Boss’s knee before finally exploding into a shower of self-harming fireworks that killed the Boss.

Her tongue felt around for any missing teeth and found a few gaps. Oh well, she thought, they’d be filled in at 4am that night. With that she stood up and grabbed the handful of mediocre, sellable accessories and equipment from the dungeon’s loot chest.

After turning on the charm and seducing a treasure broker in Tianzhou City into bringing her total from 750 Ying to 775 plus a promise not to come back, she finally had some money to pay back poor Mr. Kongy.

She briefly thought about doing solo dungeon delves more often to make a little side-cash, but realized that her current gig of getting other people to pay and occasionally stumbling into cash one way or another was still preferable to real work. It wasn’t like busting her ass for hours would even come close to what Heroes in the #100-150 range made weekly.

Natsuko proudly dropped the sack of Ying directly onto another game in progress to the relief of Kong Yiji’s opponent.

“Huh. I… didn’t expect you to come back,” Yiji said.

She ruffled his receding hair. “I’m a woman of my word, Kongy. With this you can buy a whole new deck!”

He shrugged. “Well, I can replace a couple of the most damaged cards anyway. Listen, I… I appreciate this. I might have appreciated not having my cards thrown everywhere and then crumpled up even more, but you didn’t have to do this.”

“‘Course I did! I’mma woman of my word, like I said.”

Yiji looked Natsuko up and down, noting the fields of skin plowed clean off half her face, thighs, and stomach, and the healthy stream of blood bubbling from the corners of her mouth.

“You’re a Hero, so you didn’t have to, but I appreciate that you did. Dare I say, I respect it, kiddo,” he said.

“Thanks, Kongy!” she said with a semi-toothy grin.

“Oh, the fox thing? He left an hour ago,” Yiji said.

“Son of a bitch!” she yelled, blood from her mouth flinging over his cards.