Natsuko was suddenly conscious of how unimportant she really was. Frustrated and forgotten, she was, to the other Heroes and to the Non-Heroes who knew her, just a symbol of being forgotten about. A token which stood for “who cares?” Even in the anomalous dungeon when they were first attacked, she had been tucked in the background of Daisy’s side of the battlefield. Now, suddenly, someone cared. Natsuko was no longer forgotten about, and that was terrifying.

“W-W-What the fuck did you just do!?” she stammered, knowing full well what had just happened.

She backed up slowly, bringing her wine bottle to bear. Ironically, her bottle had undergone the exact opposite process. Upgraded out of its status as a background object, her wine bottle had been something special: A one-of-a-kind weapon that could do the impossible and end someone permanently. Now, it was no longer special. No longer one-of-a-kind.

The black figure said nothing, staring at her through their smiling brass thalia mask. With a flick of their wrist, the deadly rod went from the ground to pointing at Natsuko. She swallowed hard.

“Why!? What do you get out of this?” Natsuko said, feeling behind her for bushes. Her attacker was fast. Tripping might be the last thing she did. For the first time in her entire life, Natsuko wished she was sober again. Feeling for the bushes, Natsuko’s hand missed the decorative bricks surrounding the hedges and she tripped.

Bang bang. Plink plink.

Inches from Natsuko’s face, the metal rod jerked aside from the force of two bullets slamming into the arms holding it, its lethal tip missing her by inches. Instead, the smooth length of the rod slammed into her shoulder, forcing her to the ground with a crunch.

Pain crackled in lightning strikes from her shoulder and through the rest of her body. Without having to check, she knew she was almost dead. Adrenaline from Natsuko’s Passive flooded her vision with red and she violently kicked out, connecting with a body that might as well have been a castle wall for all the damage it did. She had only one way out.

“Pech, run!” she screamed towards the gunshots. Putting a palm to her face, she blasted herself with a Fire Gale.

Pechorin froze. Neither he, nor the black figure, had expected Natsuko to kill herself to avoid being forced dimension-jumped, but in an instant her body dissolved, waiting to be reformed at 4am the next morning.

His legs turned to jelly. He needed to run, to get back to the crowd where there would be safety in numbers, but he couldn’t. If he did, they would have Natsuko’s bottle too, which was their only trump card over the murderer. But his legs wouldn’t move. The figure turned to face him across the dark garden. His Desperation Art activated. With trembling hands, Pechorin raised his guns.

The glass windows of the first floor lobby of the Heavenly Card Parlor shattered in a hail of gunfire. Screams erupted in the crowd of Non-Heroes. Cards spilled across the floor. Inside the playing room, two Heroes turned to one another.

“Find Daisy. I’ll go help Pechorin and firecrotch,” Sofiane said to Shui.

He burst into a ball of lightning that zipped over the stampeding crowd and shot through the shattered window. Ball Lightning’s duration ended right as he cleared it, falling into a tumble over the railing of the pagoda’s porch. From here he could see Pechorin and the attacker from the anomalous dungeon, but Natsuko was nowhere to be found.

In a split-second decision, he coiled back for a Coup De Grace, calculating that the thrust distance was slightly longer than he could cover by dashing forward. His calculations proved correct down to the inch. In an eye-searing flash, Sofiane put himself between Pechorin right as their assailant launched forward to strike him with some kind of rod, its tip pointed at Sofiane.

The tip of it connected with Sofiane’s rapier as he switched from the motion of his Coup De Grace to his Perfect Parry stance. The rod tipped away, but so did his rapier, which transformed from a thin, nimble blade into a strobing polygon that slipped through the earth.

“No… There’s no way…” Sofiane said, heart pounding in his ears. He shot a look at Pechorin who nodded. “How did you make one so fast!?”

The smiling brass mask tilted to the side, as if wondering why he even bothered to ask. Down a sword, he couldn’t parry again. Sofiane was staring down a one-hit kill.

“We need to hold out until Daisy gets here,” Sofiane said to Pechorin.

Ball Lightning’s cooldown came up and Sofiane launched forward in a zig-zag formation. He ran through their attacker’s center mass doing almost no damage, but Pechorin recognized what his teammate was trying to do. Roaring flak sprayed from Pech’s gun triggering Conduction reactions. These also did minimal damage, but each instance carried a brief shock, stunning their attacker for a few precious milliseconds each time.

Abilities back on cooldown, Sofiane sprinted for Natsuko’s fallen bottle. Having it would at least make their attacker think twice. But before he got there, the world exploded in spiky pain.

His ears rang and flashing lights spun in his eyes. Was this what getting force dimension-jumped was like? It wasn’t as bad as he expected. Then the lights stopped flashing. Dirt and debris showered down on Sofiane. Where he had been a moment ago there was now a small crater.

Oops. He’d forgotten they were still a Hero on par with Daisy. Ignoring the pain, vertigo, and nausea, Sofiane pushed himself to the side in time to avoid the rod smashing downwards. He scrambled backwards into a bed of purple peonies. Pechorin’s bullets bounced harmlessly off the looming figure.

“L-Listen, this is about getting revenge on the top Heroes, r-right?” Sofiane said, ankles kicking the dirt, fingers grabbing at shrubs. “I-I’m not one of them! I’m on my way down! I’m a nobody!”

The figure’s shoulder rose and fell in silent laughter. They twirled the metal rod in their hand, its jagged tip a vortex in the dark that pulled Sofiane’s eyes towards it. Before they swung, the figure looked up. A stone bird was diving headfirst towards the garden.

The masked assailant vibrated. Sofiane blinked to make sure it wasn’t a hallucination, then a sonic boom rattled his bones and eardrums and the figure was gone. A second later, Peng pulled up above the garden and Daisy hopped down.

Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

“What happened!? Where’s that gosh dang murderer!?” Daisy said, looking around. “And where’s Natsuko?”

“Gone,” Pechorin said.

Daisy gasped. “Oh no! Wait, her or the attacker?”

“Both,” he said.

Daisy gasped again. “Oh no!”

Sofiane grunted and pulled himself out of the flower bed. His carefully selected outfit was ripped and torn and his HP was down in the quadruple digits, but he was alive.

“The killer, they— they teleported. I’ve never seen that ability in my life,” Sofiane said, still feeling dizzy from the explosion.

“And Natsuko killed herself,” Pechorin added.

“What? Why in the world would—” Daisy gasped yet again. “Oh no! They made another bottle and she killed herself to escape, didn’t she!?”

“Did she actually?” Sofiane asked.

Pechorin nodded. “T’was valiant.”

“We need to go after them!” Daisy said.

Sofiane shook his head. “I’m pretty sure they’re gone. This wasn’t a flash-step type of mobility spell. This was something else.”

Shuixing finally caught up to them, panting. Before she could launch into the same series of questions, the rest of them caught her up: Their adversary had a forced dimension-jumping rod, Natsuko had killed herself, and things were going very, very badly.

Shuixing pursed her lips. “P-Perhaps it is time we told the other Heroes what is happening?”

“No!” Daisy said, her voice echoing through the garden. She lowered it. “Err… I don’t think that’d be a good idea.”

“Why not? Other Heroes need to be informed about what they’re up against. They have no idea there’s someone who can— can—”

Shuixing’s throat choked up before she could finish. Her work was no longer theoretical. Someone had put it to violent and effective use. She felt like throwing up. Before that happened, Pechorin wrapped her in a wordless hug.

Sofiane exhaled. “You understand what that would mean for you, don’t you, Shui? For your sake, I’ll be blunt: Heroes are going to want to know where this came from, and they’ll eventually find out it came from you. At best they’ll be not very nice about it. At worst… you may have Heroes forcing you to make more.”

Shuixing started sobbing. Not really sure what else to do, Pechorin awkwardly swayed back and forth while continuing to hug her.

“We ain’t tellin’ anyone anything,” Daisy said.

“Tell anyone what?” Yuna said, cutting through a shrub with her katana. In the dark she looked like a devil, her red eyes flicking between all four of them, memorizing their positions. Daisy’s fist curled around her pocket watch. Sofiane’s hand went for a rapier that wasn’t there.

“None of your business,” Daisy replied.

“Ohoho, I think it is,” Yuna replied, crystals of ice starting to gather in the air around her and at the tip of her sword. “A Hero gets bumped off for good and you want to keep me from finding out why?”

“We had nothing to do with it!” Sofiane said.

“Bullshit,” Yuna said.

Light flooded the garden as Yuna’s entourage of soldiers brought lanterns and formed a ring around the garden. Worse, the magnetism of the Use-Ranking chart followed Yuna. Heroes and Non-Heroes alike were coming to the garden to find out what the #10 Hero had discovered.

“What happened to Shrike?” Yuna asked. In the crowd behind her, Sofiane could make out the murdered Hero’s former team members, shocked and dazed.

“We don’t know,” Daisy replied as she backed towards the middle of the garden, her thumb hovering over the crown of her pocket watch. Pechorin pulled a frightened Shuixing towards the center of the forming ring. Before joining them, Sofiane picked up Natsuko’s bottle.

Yuna pointed a sword at him. “That was your redheaded friend’s bottle, wasn’t it? Where’s she at?”

Daisy huffed. “Yun-chan, we can explain if you’ll just—”

Yuna flicked a katana and a crescent of ice flew at them. Daisy clicked her pocket watch and formed a wave of stone. Upon impact, cracks ran through the stone and it disintegrated.

“You can explain things here and now, or at 4am, your choice.”

Daisy bit her lip. Everything that could go wrong had gone wrong. Someone had both Shui’s papers and a working replica, and she had to explain this to a bunch of frightened, jumpy Heroes. And with Zhidao skulking around, the Yishang would know by now.

Beside Daisy, Shuixing sighed. Her soft voice was barely audible above the crowd chatter. “I created something that can dimension jump someone against their will,” she said.

Daisy’s fist curled around her pocket watch. The fool had just signed her death sentence. Daisy was strong. She could protect the lower-level Heroes from one powerful Hero like Yuna. But if the rest of the Top 10 wanted to punish Shui and Natsu, she couldn’t save them. They were on their own.

“You did what?” Yuna said. Her voice, low and dangerous, killed the crowd noise.

“I was researching dimension-jumping because I— I had nothing else to do with myself. I shouldn’t have but I…” Shuixing lowered her head. “I did. And someone found out. And now they have something that can kill other Heroes.”

The crowd exploded into angry and anxious yelling.

“Who has it?” Yuna asked, shouting over the crowd which quieted for her.

“We don’t know,” Sofiane said. “We thought it was you!”

“Me? Who the hell do you take me for!?” Yuna said, taking a step forward. Only a few yards separated them. That was close enough for her to one-shot everyone but Daisy. “I would never create something so heinous. I don’t want that kind of power over others.”

Yuna glared straight at Shuixing as she said this, the scholarly Hero trembling under her gaze.

“Doesn’t matter,” Daisy said. “What matters is that some ne’er-do-well has it and we need to get it back. We can worry about how to handle Shuixing later.”

Yuna’s nostrils flared. “Were you involved with this, Daisy?”

“No! I…”

Daisy wasn’t sure where she stood. It wasn’t her style to plan that far ahead. But with her privileged knowledge of the Yishang and the Top Ten, she was more aware than Natsuko and the rest about who all the major players were. Yuna was the least of Daisy’s worries.

“It sure looks that way from where I’m standing,” Yuna said.

“I don’t suppose we can talk this out over cards?” Sofiane asked.

Yuna shook her head.

He shrugged. “Worth a shot.”

“So, what’s it gonna be then, Yun-chan?” Daisy said, leaning into the syllables of her former friend’s nickname. “You don’t wanna talk, but you wanna know what’s going on, so go ahead, tell me what you want us to do.”

“Give us our friend back!” Benkei shouted.

Shrike’s former teammate broke from the crowd and charged at them with a pole-arm. Jumpy from Yuna’s threats, Daisy acted automatically. A stalagmite burst from the ground and impaled Benkei, killing him instantly. The crowd went silent.