Natsuko didn’t come out for the rest of the night other than to grab a bottle—any bottle—and trudge back to her room. Not even a knock from Shuixing could coax her out.

      The fluffy fun of being inebriated was wearing off now and Shui was once again left with the awareness that her friend was not okay. Natsu's complaints to her about the unfairness of the Use-Ranking system and power creep had only been the surface of the iceberg. And the only thing Shui's hazy, unfocused mind could think was how ill-equipped she was to help.

      A hand on her arm put the brakes on the guilt train. Sofiane was staring at her over a table of cards. "Focus on the cards, Shui. I know it sounds cold, but we've got a job to do. When we have your papers back, then we can worry about fixing Natsuko's weird hang-ups. Well, you can. I'm not touching that mess with a ten-foot polearm!"

      Sofiane was right, Shuixing knew. Shaking her head and clapping her cold palms to her hot face, she tried to refocus. Cards first, friend's latent mental trauma later. Regardless, she struggled to sleep in the academy dorm that night. The alcohol in her—was it one hour or two required to metabolize a standard alcoholic beverage?—surely did not help. After tossing and turning for hours, the sun finally got up to tell her to stop trying.

      A quick peek in the mirror told her she looked as bad as she felt.

      "How does Natsu wake up like this every single day?" she asked her mirrored self.

      Despite outdrinking her 2:1, Sofiane was grinning from ear-to-ear when Shuixing walked in the hotel room door.

      "Excited?" he asked.

      "Erm, no, I'm rather nervous in fact," Shuixing said.

      "Nervousness is just excitement that you’re being a weenie about. I know Pechorin's excited, see?"

      Pechorin was leaning against a wall with his arms crossed and one foot propped up against it.

      "He doesn't usually prop the foot up," Sofiane explained. "That's means he's excited!"

      Pechorin neither confirmed nor denied this hypothesis.

      Despite Sofiane's unrelenting excitement, the game plan was still hurry up and wait, since the opening ceremony didn't begin until just after sundown.

      Late in the morning, Natsuko finally emerged from her cave and took a liquid breakfast of tomato juice and baijiu whisked together with a couple strips of braised pork belly stuck in it. Since Daisy was gone and Natsuko's alternative was hanging out with Pechorin, she stepped out onto the balcony and watched the silent card match through glazed over eyes.

      "You gonna be ready for tonight?" Sofiane finally asked.

      "I'll be ready," she grumbled. "I won't be good, but I'll be ready."

      "Good. I'm not kidding about emergency bottle duty," Sofiane said. "I don't know what's going to happen when we confront Yuna, but Daisy can't fight her to a standstill out in the open like she could in the Dungeon of Stars. Yuna isn't stuck trying to hide her identity and fighting style. And if she goes all out, she can fight all five of us simultaneously and win. The only thing we have up on her is the bottle."

      "Yeah, yeah, I know," Natsuko said.

“Who likes outfits!?” Daisy shouted from the doorway.

Stacked in her arms were several black, lacquer boxes. Natsuko groaned as Daisy dumped the boxes on the ground. Sofiane winced.

“A little more care, please,” he said.

Daisy blinked. “Why? It’s just fabric.”

Sofiane launched into a tirade about the importance of respecting fine apparel. Natsuko went to pick up her box. It wasn’t hard to find because it had a donkey painted on the top instead of a gun or book.

Inside was a pile of red, orange, and yellow silk that, unfolded, became a short kimono that reaching about her mid-thigh. Running through the scarlet cloth were designs of fireworks and starbursts in orange and yellow and a few pinpricks of black and purple similar to the ones on her okobo. The obi sash that came with it was glittering gold.

At the bottom of the box were a handful of accessories and baubles out of which she selected a few unassuming beaded bracelets and necklaces and an anklet with a good luck charm on it.

“What do you think? I told you he does good work,” Sofiane said.

It looked good, Natsuko had to admit. At least on the inside. She wasn’t admitting a damn thing on the outside. Not after putting up a fuss about it, that would be too embarrassing. Plus, she still wasn’t happy about being forced into it. It was just marginally better that it didn’t look like shit.

In a quick dress rehearsal, everyone threw on their opening ceremony outfits. It was immediately obvious why Master Sima was not called Amateur Sima.

Shuixing in her layered, indigo-and-white hanfu and boots really looked the part of some kind of goddess of strategy and wisdom while Pechorin looked very nearly like the mysterious, debonair badass he posed as most of the time. Though the pocket flower was a bit over the top for Natsuko’s taste.

“What about y’all’s outfits?” Natsuko asked Daisy and Sofiane. Far from engaging in high fashion, Daisy was busy stuffing her face with dumplings.

“Mmm!” Daisy licked her fingers. “It’s a surprise!”

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Blood pressures and heart rates rose as the afternoon dragged ever onwards towards the 6pm start time. Shuixing squirmed in her seat as the clock ticked over to 5:45.

“Shouldn’t we be going now?” she asked.

“Gods no,” Sofiane said. “It’s only just time for me to get ready.”

“But— but doesn’t the ceremony begin at 6?”

“Yes, darling, and I wouldn’t be caught dead arriving on time. We’re shooting to be an hour late and only because, unlike Daisy, we can’t get away with being even later.”

“An hour and a half late is my bullseye,” Daisy said.

Shuixing sighed. “I don’t think I want to do something like this again. I would rather fight monsters.”

“Try being me, fighting the monsters inside me every waking moment,” Pechorin said.

“Oh! That reminds me. Word of advice, Pech,” Sofiane said. “Don’t open your mouth. Like, the entire time we’re there. Unless it’s in real quick bursts with no tortured poetics.”

Pechorin nodded.

“Okay, cool. Time for me to get dressed.”

Sofiane’s outfit was so far over the top that the “top” was no longer a useful point of orientation. It consisted of a violet, split-leg qipao decorated top-to-bottom with a chaotic mishmash of dice, roulette wheels, roosters, cards, and Elemental symbols rendered in gold-and-silver thread. The sleeves and hem had some ruffles as a nod to his Cascadian background. His purple hair was done up in double buns with side-fringes and on his feet were long purple stockings tucked into purple silk flats embroidered with platinum fleur-de-lis.

“Well?” he said, flaring out his hands.

“Where does your sword go?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know, firecrotch.”

Natsuko rolled her eyes. “They’ve got booze there, right?”

“Yeah, but at event prices,” Sofiane said, flopping languidly over the back of the sofa.

“Screw that,” Natsuko said, grabbing one of the bottles of whiskey the hotel attendants were dutifully replenishing and stuffing it into her sash like a kangaroo.

Sofiane opened his mouth to say something about it but stopped himself. “Oh what the hell, that’s definitely a statement. Let’s get going. We need to be a precise amount of late, otherwise the other stuff I prepared won’t be in sync.”

Shuixing blinked. “Other stuff?”

Sofiane grinned. “You didn’t think glamor stopped at fancy shoes and a nice strut, did you?”

Outside, the sky over the Bay of Tianzhou was turning reddish-pink as the last of the sun’s rays died. Pinpricks of stars stabbed through the purple firmament and the streets of Tianzhou filled with the fragrance of night-blooming jasmine.

The beating heart of the city was the Heavenly Card Parlor, outshining the lighthouse in the harbor and throwing out the jaunty sounds of drums, horns, and strings playing over an ambient buzz of crowd excitement.

“I am reaching new and unheard-of levels of nervousness with each passing second,” Shuixing said.

“Try not to overthink it when it comes time to walk. Remember, you’re teaching these dunces how it’s done,” Sofiane said.

Only a few blocks away, Natsuko ground to a halt. “Wait. Hold on. Don’t we need to like, prep ourselves? Have a little pow-wow before we—”

“Nope,” Sofiane said, not stopping for her. “We’re going. It’s showtime, firecracker. Burst or fizzle out.”

“W-Wait, n-now? Like right now!?” Shuixing said.

“Oh yeah. As of, oh… now.”

The four of them, whipped on by Sofiane’s pace, stepped into the plaza outside the card parlor. Entrance ropes and carpets were laid out below blazing paper lanterns. Crowds of both Heroes and Non-Heroes had gathered to see and be seen and, most importantly, were blocking them and diluting the impact of their entrance. Sofiane snapped his fingers.

First, rough-looking bounty hunters from the Sibe-lands stepped out of the crowd to muscle everyone who was in Sofiane’s way out of it. This left the roped-off carpet free for his personal use, which was now of intense interest to the gathered crowds.

Second, fireworks exploded over the bay behind them, painting the sky in glittering white, red, green, blue, and purple bursts. Everyone besides Sofiane was overwhelmed trying to take it all in. The musicians changed tunes from a jaunty little background tune to a drum-heavy marching song complete with gong strikes.

“Walk,” Sofiane said.

Shuixing and Pechorin locked in immediately. Natsuko finally understood why Sofiane had been so insistent on them learning how to walk. Compared to the other three walking in like predators, she toddled like a baby deer on ice. And with Sofiane’s “special preparations,” every eye in a hundred yards was looking at them or desperately trying to. Her ears and cheeks turned the same color of scarlet as her kimono. This was a performance, and she wasn’t a performer..

“Sofi, you son of a bitch,” she muttered, trying and failing to imitate Shuixing.

Past the giant blue doors to the Heavenly Card Parlor lay the ground floor lobby decorated with flowers, brocades, and signs for the card tournament. More eyes awaited them there, and these were the eyes of movers-and-shakers, heroes she had never met before but could tell on sight were far, far above her. And she was supposed to strut like a peacock in front of them.

For a moment, Natsuko thought she might be sick. Then, from out of the corner of her eye, she saw it: A sneer.

It came from Minamoto, a Hero whose backstory was that he was some wealthy bastard prince who, despite his unsavory upbringing, was adored by everyone, was good at everything, and had his own harem of women.

He wasn’t at the top of the Use-Rankings. Hell, he could have been in the triple digits for all she knew. But none of that mattered because his sneer was the singularity of everything she hated about the lucky, spoiled few who’d been graced by the Yishang, guaranteed to win, and truly believed their success was through hard work and determination and not divine intervention.

Once, she’d been in their shoes and thought the same thing. Sofiane’s stupid words from yesterday echoed in her ears:

“You are going to be so in on the joke that the joke becomes that you are making it work despite you and everyone else knowing it doesn’t.”

With the next step she hit the stride. Her feet clicked into place and the awkward, angular prows of her okobo sandals turned into two battleships cruising through shark-infested waters. There were more sneers and smirks and snorts. She was at the bottom of the Use-Ranking chart, why wouldn’t they laugh? Except, somewhere within the swishing of her silk kimono, the clacking of her wooden sandals, and the look of equanimity on her face, it all just stopped mattering. The numbers didn’t mean anything. All that mattered was that she had their eyeballs, and they had to look.

Like that, Natsuko walked to the table the tournament organizers had hastily evacuated for the use of Sofiane and his entourage once they recognized the dramatic narrative Sofiane had brought with him. The tournament had its villains, and off in the far corner, beneath an ocean of scraggly rebel soldiers, Yuna’s cold steel eyes met Natsuko’s.