“Rats,” Daisy said, snapping her fingers. “Didn’t mean to do that.”

She barely got a stone shield up in time to block Yuna’s katana. Even then, steel cut clean through and slashed Daisy across the arm. With another click of her pocket watch, a wagon-sized beetle made of stone slammed its horns into Yuna who blocked it with both swords. Grinding filled the air as metal met rock.

“If this is how you want it, Yun-chan,” Daisy said.

Yuna scowled. “It’s not a matter of what I want, it’s a matter of due punishment.”

“Shoot. I really need a damn sword right now!” Sofiane said, looking around. He moved away from Daisy to grab one, any one, from some Non-Hero in the crowd.

“No you don’t!” Yuna said.

Activating another of her Ice Crescents point blank, the stone beetle shattered. In a flash of ice crystals, she was in front of Sofiane. Raw instinct turned him into a ball of lightning a split-second before Yuna’s sword would have ended him. He turned back into human form right as Daisy launched a counterattack in the form of a volley of rock spikes that broke against invisible panels of ice Yuna had conjured around herself.

Daisy bit her lip. Her strength lay in controlling the terrain of a fight while those with Control and Damage classes held off and damaged the enemy, in other words the roles Sofiane and Pechorin were supposed to fill. The problem was that the difference in power was gigantic. This was a one-on-one fight with Yuna, and Daisy was stuck protecting three liabilities.

“Turn her over to me, Daisy,” Yuna said, eyeing a trembling Shuixing. “She’s gotta answer for what she’s done.”

“What do you plan to do?” Daisy replied, thumb hovering over the crown of her watch, ready to counter Yuna’s next move. For the moment, the Samurai Hero held back.

“First, we get those papers back and burn them. Then, I’m thinking we make sure no one ever replicates them by doing to her what she did to Shrike,” Yuna said.

“Shuixing didn’t kill Shrike!” Daisy said.

Yuna sent another Ice Crescent to probe at Daisy’s defenses. Another wall of rock blocked it, peppering her with debris when it exploded.

“From the moment she put that cursed knowledge to paper, that was Shrike’s death sentence. We have to make an example out of her for the next person who wants to try. Hand her over, Daisy.”

“The Yishang will decide what to do! You have no right to—”

“Fuck the Yishang!” Yuna said. “I’ll bring her in front of the rest of the Top Ten and we’ll decide, but I want an eye for an eye. Now you tell me right here, right now, dog of the Yishang, are you with her, or are you with us?”

Daisy looked at Shuixing, deathly pale and silently mouthing apologies to herself over and over. She looked at Pechorin who, despite appearing as dark and brooding as usual, had wide, frightened eyes. She looked at Sofiane, hugging Natsuko’s bottle to his chest and searching desperately for a sword.

Then, she sighed. “I just wanted to bake a pie.”

Daisy pulled a sword made out of bricks from the garden path and tossed it to Sofiane. Grabbing it, Sofiane triggered his Desperation Art just in time to surge in front of Yuna and Perfect Parry her slashes and Ice Crescents, zipping around with his no-cooldown Ball Lightning to block her from every angle.

“Shui,” Daisy said, patting Shuixing on the cheek. “Time to wake up darling!”

A moment later, Shuixing rang her rod. A shower of bubbles descended on the garden, healing her teammates while popping against Yuna and triggering electric shock interactions with Sofiane’s lightning, briefly stunning her. There was no chance of killing Yuna with her giant health pool and defense, but it occupied her long enough for Daisy to cast the two consecutive spells to summon Peng from the ground.

Pechorin was first to the bird. From its back he launched a fierce attack against Yuna, each shot pelting her for 2 or 3 damage out of her 250,000 health pool. Given another 12 hours, he might have eventually killed her. Daisy hoisted Shuixing up beside Pechorin then hopped on the bird herself and took off. After Peng rose a dozen feet above the garden, a purple ball zipped up to one of its wings.

“What are we gonna do now!?” Sofiane yelled over the roaring wind. Peng flew twice as fast as usual as the sky chilled and flakes of ice began to fall.

“We’ll talk about it if we’re not dead!” Daisy yelled back.

She had hoped they could escape before triggering Yuna’s Desperation Art, but the prospect of them getting away must have helped her reach her activation threshold. Around them the ice thickened and cut their vision down to a few feet in front of them.

“Grab on tight, don’t let go,” Daisy said and twisted Peng upside-down.

She gripped the rocky handholds as the stone bird rocked with the impact of ice shards falling from the sky slamming into its upturned belly. After the initial collisions, Daisy swung Peng right-side-up again.

Yuna’s Blizzard came in waves. After a bunch of small icicles, gigantic ice-spikes began to fall, deliberately targeting the people Yuna identified as enemies within the kilometer radius. Daisy had seconds to react to a dark shape descending through the flurry. She banked Peng to the left, Sofiane coming within inches of the falling icicle.

“This ability is nuts!” Sofiane said.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Daisy didn’t have time to respond. She was fully-focused on the timing of Yuna’s Desperation Art. If she remembered correctly, the next giant icicle would come down in ten, nine, eight…

Daisy jerked hard right. A dark shape loomed past them. The scale was impossible to tell, but the icicles had to have been 30 feet around or more.

“Pechorin fell!” Shuixing said. Daisy clucked her tongue.

She steered Peng into a vertical dive, but the chances of finding someone wearing all-black in the middle of a nighttime blizzard were not good. The chances of finding the ground first were much higher.

“I can give you one look,” Sofiane said.

Glowing purple lightning lit up the opaque snowfield below. Sofiane zipped in small helixes to spread as much light as possible. Just as he was pulling up to return to Peng, the tip of a fluttering black cloak came into view. Daisy gunned for it.

Flying in under Pechorin, who looked only mildly inconvenienced by his impending death, Shuixing grabbed his cloak and pulled him down to the handholds on Peng’s rocky back. Daisy curved upwards right as red-tiled buildings rushed into view and they shot back into the blizzard.

“Where the hell are we going!?” Sofiane asked.

Daisy gestured at a beam of hazy, yellow light now coming into view. Hidden somewhere beyond the blizzard was the lighthouse of the Cerulean Tower. After dodging one last falling icicle, they broke through the kilometer perimeter of Yuna’s Desperation Art and the world pulled itself into sharp focus.

Peng swooped down to the harbor and towards a three-masted junk. Once they were above its deck, the stone bird crumbled. Daisy jumped down and kept her balance by breaking into a small jog while Sofiane, Shuixing, and Pechorin tumbled into a pile on the deck. The sailors looked on in shock.

“Who’s the captain?” Daisy asked.

“That’d be me,” said a grizzled Non-Hero man wearing fancy blue robes, a bushy gray beard, and a scowl.

“Take these three to Shikijima and don’t stop for anyone. I’ll pay you the other half when I get there,” Daisy said, materializing a Ying purse from thin air filled with a million Ying.

The scowl disappeared. “Be happy to, mistress Daisy!”

The other three were still picking themselves up from the deck as Daisy spun on her heels to walk back to Tianzhou.

“You’re going back!?” Sofiane asked.

“She’s sticking around to pick up Natsu,” Shuixing said, straightening her glasses.

Daisy fired her signature finger guns. “Bullseye!”

“Are you going to be safe from Yuna? Or the rest of the angry Heroes?” Sofiane asked.

“Oh don’t worry, my teammates will be gettin’ involved soon, and Yuna knows better than to mess with Boulanger,” Daisy said, dropping the name of the #1 Hero with a casual laugh.

She hopped off the boat and, with a buzzsaw of sand, slashed the mooring lines to speed up their departure. Breathing in cool, salty air, she made her way across the boardwalk towards the looming blizzard over Tianzhou City.

~~~

Natusko gasped.

She lay on her back below a thin crescent of a moon. Her body was still coursing with adrenaline, prepared to fight an enemy that was now long gone. There was no black figure in front of her. In fact, there was no one at all. She had respawned in the early hours of the morning on the stairs that ran from the city down to the harbor.

Picking herself up, she felt naked for some reason. She was still in the stupid kimono, but that wasn’t it. It was something else.

“Oh fuck, the bottle!”

Her eyes darted around as though the bottle might have respawned with her. Of course, it did not. Her stomach twisted in knots.

Needing information about what happened, she wandered the dark streets of Tianzhou in the vague direction of the Yongfu Hotel. She turned a corner and caught sight of a lone figure which she recognized as one of the Heroes at the card tournament. She couldn’t remember their name, which meant they were either fairly new or unimportant or both.

“Oi!” Natsuko shouted.

A female Hero with brown sausage curls and a yellow bonnet gazed back at her in surprise. Natsuko recognized her as the one that Daisy had been sitting with.

“I found her! She’s over here!” the Hero yelled.

She did not sound relieved to find Natsuko alive and intact. In fact, it almost sounded like they were trying to catch her. They didn’t think she killed Shrike, did they? Being not an idiot, Natsuko bolted the other direction. She could hear more than one set of footsteps behind her as well as the tell-tale magicky noises of Heroes using movement abilities. She might as well have been a fleeing Non-Hero for how fucked she was.

Natsuko cut a corner into a tight alley, knocking over a trash pile to hopefully slow her pursuers down. Not that it would help her much since the alley dead-ended.

“No! Why!? At least give me this!” Natsuko said to no one. Nothing was allowed to go right for her, apparently. But a whistle came from a doorway on her left.

“Hey! Kiddo!”

She turned and squinted at a chubby, middle-aged Tianzhounese bureaucrat in teal robes.

“Kongy?”

“Get in here, fool!” he said in a strained whisper. Nearing footsteps ushered her inside.

She found herself in some kind of dark storeroom at the back of a liquor store. Racks of bottles and cups filled the walls.

“What the hell happened while I was dead, Kongy? They sounded pissed!”

“Maybe you can tell me that,” he said, tugging at his wisps of gray hair. He went to another door in the store room to check the front of his store and then turned to her. “They’re saying you killed a Hero for good. Popped ‘em with some kinda bottle that makes it so the Yishang can’t re-summon them.”

“What!? That’s only mostly true!” Natsuko said. “I— I do have a bottle…”

Kong looked nervous.

“Not right now though! It’s… I have no idea where. Anyway, yeah, it can do that, but I’ve never used it on anyone! And I don’t plan to!”

“So what’s all this about a Hero being killed?”

“That was someone else. There’s— look, someone copied how to make something like my bottle, and now they can do it too.”

Kong rubbed his temples. “Oh good, the Heroes have something else to screw things up with. Gods… I took this chance cuz you seem better than most. I found it hard to imagine a Hero who stopped to go buy me replacement cards going and doing something as messed up as murder. But no one else is gonna believe that.”

“But I didn’t! How did they even find out about my bottle!?”

“Hush!” Kong said, finger to his lips.

Natsuko felt panic rising in her chest. Of all the times for her to be a flaming ball of emotion, this was not one of them. She wanted to scream and break things and bite herself until she bled.

“How do I convince them I didn’t?” she asked, dropping her voice.

Kong shook his head. “I don’t know, kiddo. But I sure hope you figure out a way, cuz I don’t wanna live in a world where Heroes can off people. Anyhow, you can stay here for the night. It’s not gonna be comfortable, but I don’t think they’ll check some unimportant Non-Hero’s liquor store. At least not right away.”

“Thanks,” was all Natsuko found to say.