“Shui… you really wanna kill that Pengwu?” Natsuko asked.

Shuixing, unable to say it outright, swallowed and nodded.

“Jeez, I mean… yeah, that’d do it,” Sofiane said, running his fingers through his hair. “Not that we have the bottle with us either since it’s in evidence lock-up.”

“Is anyone gonna ask if I even want to use my bottle for that!?” Natsuko said.

“Weren’t you saying repeatedly you were going to kill Zhidao when we were in Tianzhou?” Pechorin asked from behind her.

“That was hyperbole! Everything I say is hyperbole! I don’t do normalbole, that’s my thing!” Natsuko said, now unsure of what she would’ve done had she caught the little fox. Reality had a funny way of intruding on her hyperfixations. “Whatever. Point is, I’m not going to use my bottle on this monkey. Not happening.”

“Would you let someone else use it?” Sofiane asked.

“Also no! Everyone thinks we’re murderers right now and I’m not going to make them right about it,” Natsuko said, wishing she could fold her arms right about now.

Sofiane rolled his eyes. “Fine, we’ll think of something else.”

What became clear, as their long, boring day dragged on into a long, boring afternoon, was that “something else” was not coming to any of them except for Pechorin, whose only contribution was the unhelpful suggestion of fighting their court case legally. At some point, both Shuixing and Sofiane came to the same conclusion and waited for Natsuko to drift off to sleep so they could discuss it. Once they heard loud snoring, they convened.

“So, we agree on dimension-jumping the monkey, yeah?” Sofiane whispered.

Shuixing nodded. A deep frown betrayed her own disappointment in herself. It wasn’t that Natsuko was wrong about killing Saruga vindicating the Heroes hunting them. But Natsuko also didn’t understand how much danger they were in. There was no way of telling how long until more dimension-jumping weapons made their way into the hands of the other Heroes. And if the Empress threw them in prison through some Yishang-scripted event, they were sitting ducks waiting for those other Heroes to find them.

Even if Natsuko wasn’t willing to do what it took to survive, Shuixing was, and that meant using the bottle when their back was against the wall.

“If we can find some way to distract the guards, I can go get the bottle,” Sofiane said.

Shui glanced over at Pechorin who was laying down on his cell cot with hands across his chest and fingers interlaced like he was resting in a coffin. She tapped a nail on one of the wooden bars.

“Pech!” she whispered.

“Hmm?” he said at full volume.

Natsuko’s snoring reached a crescendo as Shui waved her hand in a “shut the hell up” motion.

“Can you distract the guards with your poetry?”

“I could,” he said, barely lowering his voice. “Do you want me to do that so you can creep off and steal the bottle to kill Saruga with?”

Shuixing froze. “I… I know it’s bad… but we don’t—”

Pechorin raised one palm up from his chest in the laziest stop motion conceivable and spoke from his coffin-bed like a monologuing vampire. “Stop. I hang now over a moral precipice. Right now, the worst parts of my nature are winning. I cannot help but think of the sheer dramatic escalation from someone such as yourself, hitherto the voice of innocence and mercy, corrupting your moral principles in a moment of desperation, to save precisely the person who protests your extreme methods. But should I—”

“Save it for the guards, Pech, please!” Shuixing whispered.

“Very well.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Pechorin sat up and got out of bed and went to the bars of his cell and shouted. “I wish to declaim poetry!”

Sofiane and Shuixing jumped.

“You weren’t supposed to start right away, mon chéri!” Sofiane said. “How are we supposed to slip out if the guards are coming here?”

The two of them stood dumbfounded for a minute before a couple guards came to check in on them.

“This is the barbarian poet, eh?” one of the guards said at full volume.

Shuixing stole a glance at Natsuko. Fortunately, her friend seemed to have an in-built defense mechanism to her sleep being disturbed by snoring even louder.

“Yes. It is I,” Pechorin said.

“Well? Let’s hear it then, poet-san,” the guard said with a snicker.

“Captivity is not suitable for poetic production. I do not mind being kept under watch, but you must take me somewhere with more beauty.”

“You want us to let you out of your cell so you can go outside and make poetry?”

Pechorin nodded. Shuixing expected them both to laugh, but instead they seemed to be giving the idea serious thought. A moment later they went to ask the guard captain who came back and deliberated with them. Eventually, they settled on a compromise.

“Give us a poem on the spot, and if it’s any good, we’ll let you outside to compose more. One for each guard. Does that sound fair?” the guard captain said.

Pechorin glanced up, then down, then side-to-side, taking in breaths so deep and long that Shuixing suspected he was doing them for dramatic effect, before finally nodding.

“In desolate jail,

Blooms between heavy stone cracks—

A lone red flower.”

Natsuko started leaning sideways. Sofiane lunged to catch her and set her upright before she could bang herself awake again.

Pechorin’s poem was met with enthusiastic praise from the guards who launched into an argument about its style and what could have been the source of its inspiration. Eventually, they declared the poet worthy and opened up his cell to escort him outside where he could work even more poetic magic for them. Once they were out of the room, a ball of purple lightning zipped between the wooden bars of the cell and Sofiane emerged out the other side.

Easing a squeaking door open, Sofiane squeezed out to a stone walkway with arched openings facing the sea. Seawater dripped from the ceiling and palm trees waved on the hill below the windows. The view to the sandy shore, which the sun was just now turning into shimmering gold, gave Sofiane a feeling that reminded him of examining a new outfit.

Was there a term for that? There had to be. Oh. Beauty. What a weird thing.

Usually he thought about it in terms of what kind of beauty would increase his appeal to Celestials. He wasn’t sure what to do with beauty when its object was a sunset. He couldn’t wear it, or turn it into some change in his emanation. Maybe internalizing the beauty would somehow indirectly alter his personality and attitude in a way that would be more appealing to Celestials?

A door at the end of the hallway startled Sofiane out of his rumination. Two guards emerged and came down the walkway before stopping at an opening. Both had cups of steaming tea which they set down on the sill they leaned on. Staring out to sea, one sighed and took a sip of tea while the other stretched.

“Long day, eh?” the stretcher asked his sighing partner.

“Aren’t they all,” the sigher replied, cradling his teacup like a fragile bird.

“I like ‘em better when they’re boring. Keeping Heroes freaks me out. You never know when they’re gonna get violent, especially that loudmouthed redhead. I’m not questioning our dear Empress’ decision, but shit, man, I wanna go home for dinner tonight without getting dismembered.”

His partner grunted in agreement. After a few minutes, Sofiane’s arms began to ache from holding himself pinched between two ceiling arches. If these two dipshits didn’t wander off, they were gonna get killed by a Hero, he thought. Fortunately, once their tea was finished, they headed off somewhere else, leaving Sofiane to drop down to the floor.

He turned his head towards the sunset again and the same aching feeling of beauty washed over him. What in the world did the Non-Heroes get out of it though? It wasn’t like they had emanations or Use-Numbers to worry about.

Shaking his head, Sofiane continued his jaunt down the corridors of the jail, making a few rights and lefts through a labyrinth of cells where Non-Heroes had been locked up. Most were rebel soldiers, but a handful looked like the banal and harmless variety of Non-Hero who stood around waiting for a Hero to push quests on. A few looked up at him and watched him pass, but he wagered their love for the Empress was not enough to snitch, assuming they even knew that he himself was a prisoner and not a bored Hero combing for obscure loot.

Eventually he arrived at a steel-barred door: The evidence lock-up. Inside sat crates and chests and boxes and racks full of all kinds of weapons and armor and tools of criminality. But Sofiane was there for a specific one.

Using Ball Lightning, he hopped through the bars and started rooting through the piles of junk for the bottle. It couldn’t have been buried deep, he reasoned. After all, they’d only been imprisoned for a little less than 24 hours. Some of this stuff looked like it’d been there for years.

It didn’t take Sofiane long to find Pechorin’s guns neatly placed in a fur-lined lacquer box and he grabbed those too. Shuixing’s rod had been tossed in a random corner, their gliders and default outfits stuffed in a chest, and their accumulated useless quest items dumped in a big barrel. There was even an Uncommon rapier lying around with some not-so-great stats that would at least let Sofiane use his Perfect Parry.

What he did not find, however, was a three foot tall, empty bottle of wine.

Sofiane put his hands on his hips, puckered his lips, and arrived at the conclusion that this was not good.