Room service was just arriving at their hotel room with all manner of succulent Tianzhounese meals when a drunk and injured Natsuko staggered past the surprised hotel attendant and collapsed face-first onto the sofa, coating it in her blood.

“Ugh…” she moaned.

“Oh no! Natsu, are you alright?” Shuixing said, leaping up from her cards to go see her friend.

“Zhidao beat you up that bad, huh?” Sofiane asked.

A barely conscious Natsuko raised a middle finger over the top of the couch aimed at the general direction of the balcony. Though it could have been wildly off-mark. The world was tumbling violently under her.

“What happened!?” Shuixing said, ringing her medical rod and sealing Natsuko’s wounds with her Healing Waters.

“Dungeon…” Natsuko mumbled.

“Huh? You went to a dungeon?”

She nodded, rubbing her face into the sofa cushion.

“W-Why?”

“Had to pay back… pay back for cards. Broke cards.”

“You broke cards?”

Natsuko nodded again.

“Natsu, I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”

“Want sleep.”

“O-Oh okay, we’ll um, let you sleep,” Shuixing said before turning to face the disturbed hotel attendant. “Th-Thank you for the food. Daisy said to give you this.”

Shuixing handed the attendant a sack of Ying before they left.

While Natsuko snoozed on the sofa, the other four gathered around the glazed bowls full of delicacies and made a buffet of them. Stewed carp, duck blood soup, braised pork belly, fried noodles, buns, and things that had never passed across anyone but Daisy’s tongue before all graced their palettes.

“Such decadence,” said Pechorin with a plate piled higher than the other three’s combined. “It is truly gothic in its grotesqueness.”

“Um, glad ya like it?” Daisy said, spooning some carp to her mouth.

“That is a compliment from him, I promise,” Shuixing said, slurping some noodles.

The only person who wasn’t actively feasting was Sofiane, who only grabbed a couple of buns. His face was still glued to the endless words and numbers on the cards in front of him. Shuixing went and sat back down at the table while Pechorin and Daisy nattered about poetry in the living room.

“It’s sort of silly when you take a step back,” Sofiane said without looking up from comparing two different negation cards with differing trade-offs.

Shuixing cut her waterfall of slurping noodles short. “Everything riding on a card game, you mean?”

“Yeah,” Sofiane said. “I think I was half-joking at first when I said I knew it would turn out like this. Now my heart won’t stop pounding every time I look at these damn cards. I can’t tell whether I actually enjoy this game or not, but it doesn’t matter, because I’m playing them knowing that a single wrong move means we come up short of getting in contact with Yuna.”

“Even if this gambit doesn’t work out, I’m sure we can come up with other means. We’ll find a way,” Shuixing said, her words half for her own comfort.

“Will we find it in time though? And what do we do even if we get her to talk? Natsuko can’t threaten to kill her in front of everyone at a major event. I’m almost as scared of succeeding and getting a table with Yuna as I am failing,” Sofiane said.

Shuixing giggled.

“What?”

“That was me with my research, up until a few days ago. Scared to fail, scared to succeed.”

“I guess you should have been more scared of the latter.”

Shuixing’s eyes darkened. “I suppose I should’ve been. But… I had time to think about it when we were traveling here, and when I was staying at the academy by myself. It doesn’t bother me as much.”

Sofiane raised a skeptical eyebrow and crossed his leg. “It doesn’t bother you that someone out there, most likely our zealous, homicidal, gambling-addict rebel general, has the ability to kill?”

“W-Well… I have to think about what would have happened instead. I-I mean if I hadn’t thrown myself at that research,” she said, rubbing her arms.

“What do you mean?”

“I would’ve gone crazy.”

“Oh,” Sofiane said. He looked down at himself and the cards in front of him. The pleasant tipsiness he’d been sustaining throughout the afternoon fled him. The wind out on the balcony felt unseasonably piercing.

Sofiane had also found himself feeling thinner and thinner lately. More brittle. The substance of self-identity he had carried with him was evaporating, leaving a dried husk. It had begun the day he was kicked out of his party when his Use-Number started its downward plummet and continued, slowly and inevitably. His time with Natsuko, Shuixing, Pechorin and Daisy had tempered it somewhat, but he felt it increasing again.

He put his cards down on the table and slumped in the seat with his hands behind his head. The whole adventure of trying to get Shuixing’s papers back had distracted him from that hot-ball-of-iron question he had been unable to answer: What was he doing? An undying infinity stretched before his eyes of nothing but monotonous, pointless obscurity.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

“Stop,” Pechorin said.

Sofiane looked up to the balcony doorway where Pechorin was standing with a bun clenched in his fist.

“You are stealing my personality archetype,” he said. “Get your own. Do not cut into my niche.”

“Pechorin, my emanation is not going to turn dark and gritty just because of one existential crisis,” Sofiane said.

“No, but a gradual increase in their frequency will.”

“I also have, like, a couple million more Celestials summoning me than you. I’m pretty sure I am not going to peel away your, what, 30 celestials?” Sofiane said.

“3,990,” Pechorin replied.

“Yeah, no. I wouldn’t worry about that, buddy,” Sofiane said.

There was something else in Pechorin’s gaze that made his complaint about archetype stealing seem not fully genuine, but not fully ironic either. Not for the first time, Sofiane found himself wanting to know more about that kernel of person which lay under Pechorin’s unceasing performance.

“What do you really think about, Pech?” Sofiane asked.

Sensing she might be in the way, Shuixing picked up her bowl of noodles and migrated inside to check that Natsuko hadn’t rolled over on her back and made a choking hazard of herself.

Pechorin leaned against the wall, which was a pretty cool way to stand, and said, “hmm?”

“I mean what I said. What do you think about? Don’t you ever feel pent up only ever expressing yourself through your archetype? I get sick as hell of mine,” Sofiane said.

“No,” Pechorin replied. “I am my archetype.”

“You’re really that edgy, huh?”

Pechorin nodded. Brevity was the soul of edge.

“Damn,” Sofiane said. He couldn’t imagine what it was like to have your actual personality line up with your archetype like that. It seemed a whole lot nicer, but also a great way to turbo-charge his Use-Number drop. Then again, he wasn’t going to take Pechorin at his word, either. Especially when he had seen a different, less edgy side to the Hero while he was hammered after the pie contest.

“You never waver from it, huh?” Sofiane asked.

Pechorin shook his head. Sofiane saw his opportunity. Both his combat and card-playing styles left him well-equipped to strike at his enemy’s weak point.

“So, what’s the deal with you and Natsuko? You’re into her, right?”

Pechorin frowned. “Into her?”

“Yeah. You know exactly what I mean, don’t try to deflect.”

“What about it?”

“What’s the deal with it?”

“What do you mean what’s the deal?”

“You know what I mean, what's the deal?”

“I do not know what you mean?”

“I mean— come on, man,” Sofiane said, frustrated at Pechorin’s deft outmaneuvering. He had more social acumen than his persona of edginess suggested. “Why? Why are you into her? She’s an obnoxious, loud-mouthed alcoholic and talking to her is the conversational equivalent of rug burn. What’s the appeal?”

“Opposites attract,” Pechorin said.

“Opposites attract…”

Sofiane actually gave that some thought. It made a little sense, maybe. Except Natsuko was a gloomy mope half the time too. He didn’t see that big a difference and said exactly that to Pechorin.

“Everyone has their off days,” Pechorin said. “She just has a lot of them. But even her off days she commits to with passion.”

“So, it’s her passion? Nothing else?”

“And I find her attractive.”

Her snickering, smushed, goblin face and sniveling little upturned nose popped into Sofiane’s head and he wasn’t sure he understood the appeal, but beauty was in the eye of the beholder, he supposed.

And even then, it wasn’t like the Yishang summoned Heroes that weren’t at least a little attractive. Non-Heroes? Yes. Heroes? No. All of them were attractive. Not a single unattractive one. That was the one saving grace of this brutal, cutthroat life running the Use-Ranking treadmill: You got to look good doing it.

“And what about her not liking you back?” Sofiane said, feeling maybe just a touch vindictive given his complete lack of experience in even being attracted to someone. His two long years on Po-Lin had been spent in single-minded focus on improving his Use-Number. Relationships tied you down and got in the way of that.

“What about it?” Pechorin replied.

“How do you deal with that? It’s gotta be frustrating, no? And it’s not like you’d have a shot with someone higher up the Use-Ranking charts given you’re on the bottom,” Sofiane said.

Pechorin shrugged.

“A shrug? What does that mean?” Sofiane asked.

Pechorin shrugged at that too.

“You’re a weird one, man.”

“And you’re not?”

Sofiane realized his existential dread had subsided and he was feeling mellow again. At least Pechorin was getting along fine down there at the bottom. “I guess I am.”

Natsuko woke up a few minutes later and tore through both the buffet of food and the minibar like a tornado while trying and failing to regale everyone with an adventure she was blacked out for half of. Sofiane kept looking over at Pechorin’s face to try and witness any change in the mask of nonchalance and remained unrewarded for his effort.

Despite the initial burst of partying from Natsuko, the night was an early one, since they had already decided tomorrow was reserved for more card practice and for Sofiane and Shuixing to visit the Heavenly Card Parlor and scope out key players, their decks, and the overall state of the meta-game.

While they were busy with that, Pechorin mentioned something about his righteous path of vengeance and wandered off into the city while Daisy made equally vague excuses about needing to, “speak to some folks.” By the time Natsuko was up around noon the next day, the entire hotel room was abandoned.

Drinking a bit of whiskey to soothe her headache and scrounging together a plate from the generous leftovers, she was finally able to take on the day. The “day” consisted of continuing her pursuit of that flying, shapeshifting demon called Zhidao. It went even worse the second day as sobriety made her sluggish, tired, and not able to think straight. It was all she could do not to throw up in the harbor.

She was back around mid-afternoon and once again everyone was waiting on her.

“Whoa, looks like he won again,” Sofiane said from the sofa, having finally traded his cards in for another baijiu martini.

“Piss off,” she replied.

Natsuko was halfway to the bar before Sofiane clinked his glass to get everyone’s attention.

“We have a very important mission tomorrow,” Sofiane said. “One that has serious repercussions if we screw up, so pay attention. All of you will have roles to play. Shuixing and I have been coordinating to scout our opponents, learn their strengths, learn their weaknesses, and learn their cards. We’re confident our preparation can at least land us in the same room as Yuna and from there it’s just a matter of getting her to money match us, with funds kindly provided by Daisy. So far so good.

“Pechorin! You are on stand-by for auxiliary missions. If we can knock someone out of the tournament by exploiting their fear of dogs, we’ll need you to make dog noises behind a curtain. That sort of thing. Daisy! You’re our spy on the premises. We need you to keep us apprised of anything that could disturb the plan. New arrivals, strange moves, anything out of the ordinary, that’s on you.”

“Roger dodger!” Daisy said, saluting.

“Natsuko!”

“What?” she said.

“You’re on emergency bottle duty.”

Natsuko frowned. “Wasn’t the plan to avoid using the bottle so that we can continue keeping its existence hidden?”

“Hence,” Sofiane said, “the emergency. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, non?”