Pechorin munches on a Shikijiman pineapple curry. A heat spreads from his mouth, down through his neck, his arms, his chest, and his legs. The muscles of his arm tremble with boosted attack power.
“Alright, we ready to try this gain?” Natsuko asks with a wide grin splashed across her face. Out of the four of them, she is the only one who isn’t frustrated. Or, maybe she’s the only one who isn’t showing it.
Shuixing moans a little. “Natsu, maybe we should just grind a bit more and—”
Before she can finish, Natsuko cuts her off by throwing an arm around Shui’s shoulder and squeezing, forcing a squeak out of her nervous teammate.
“Oh, my dear Shui, don’t you know that fortune favors the bold? That the only thing we have to fear is fear itself? Okay, so what if we got beaten up a couple times? It’s not like that’s never happened before,” Natsuko says with a wink to Hemiola who, back in Vermögenburgh, died to a pitiful oni footsoldier because he wasn’t paying attention to his HP.
Hemiola doesn’t find this funny. He crosses his arms and scowls at her. Pechorin, however, finds this at least a little funny. He decides better than to mention that fact, both because he doesn’t want to irritate Hemiola and also because finding things funny is very uncool and undark and unmysterious.
“Every time a new region gets de-Misted it’s a little harder. We know that. But, c’mon guys, we still have a job to do! It just means we’ve gotta stop second-guessing ourselves and worrying about hypotheticals and focus on doing our best. We’ve memorized the Scytheworm’s attack patterns and we’ve gotten a little smarter and a little wiser every time. This one’s gonna be the one, I feel it in my soul,” Natsuko says.
“Yeah? And what about our lowered stats?” Hemiola says.
“What about them!? Numbers can’t substitute for tactics, Hemi,” she says, squeezing a helpless Shuixing to emphasize her point.
Shuixing squeaks again. “Natsu, please let me go!”
“Huh? Oh, sorry Shui!”
The four of them are having this conversation on a cliff overlooking a massive, kilometer-wide sandstone pit. Down in its depths, past where lines of sand trickle ever downward like an hourglass, is the Scytheworm. Aka, the bane of their existence. On the face of it, the Scytheworm isn’t too bad, it’s just a giant sandworm into whose body the Entropic Axis slotted Magico-technic devices to cause earthquakes and sandstorms. All they have to do is go down there and kill it to complete a quest for the Padishah of al-Nuwba, something several teams of Heroes have already accomplished.
The trouble is the numbers. The Scytheworm hits hard and hits fast. It can kill Shuixing in two hits, Hemiola and Pechorin in three, Natsuko in four, all from attacks that come out faster than they can dodge. As if that isn’t bad enough, it has a massive health pool and damage can only be dealt to its mouth and its underbelly. And they’re facing it after two deaths worth of stat loss.
“One more try,” Hemiola says. “One more try and I’m calling it quits.”
“What!? That’s ridiculous! We have a mission to save the world from the Entropic Axis. That’s not something you can just abandon,” Natsuko replies.
Her optimism and her spunk make Pechorin’s heart ache. To get knocked down so many times and still get back up is cool. It’s supremely cool. It’s a type of cool that is completely different from his aloof, emotionally unavailable cool.
Or, maybe it isn’t. Sometimes Natsuko is so optimistic and energetic it feels like she’s operating on another plane of existence that no one else has access to. Hers is a different kind of emotional unavailability. Frederick learned that the hard way, and Pechorin learned through watching him. In his lonely hours, he wonders if there is something about being a Hero that is fundamentally lonely.
“No more thinking, time for doing. Let’s do this!” Natsuko says.
She skids down the sand, leaping between outcrops of sandstone that dot the rolling waves of sand. Pechorin and the others follow behind her, easing their way down the dunes. Even though Natsuko has sunk from #1 to #23, the way she bounds towards their next objective makes it feel like a temporary mistake.
Natsuko’s boots land on a solid platform of terracotta and the world trembles, just as it has the past two times. Knowing what’s coming, Shuixing, Hemiola, and Pechorin spread out as they ride the sand down to the platform. A moment later, the Scytheworm bursts from the dunes that encircle the platform and writhes in the air as it falls towards Natsuko.
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Their plan goes into action. Hemiola strums his lute giving Natsuko a speed boost. Shuixing backs up towards the opposite end of the platform to spread out aggro. Pechorin fires towards the worm’s airborne stomach..
Pechorin’s job is an easy one: shoot. He has long ago figured out that the Elemental scaling on his Abilities is bad. Really bad. Borderline useless. It’s the kind of weakness that is barely noticeable in the easy fights of Vermögenburgh, but all the more obvious as newer, better Heroes are summoned whose Ability kits are much more effective. He, like Hemiola and Shuixing, realizes he has already become irrelevant.
Through the smoke rising from his guns he watches Natsuko bait the Scytheworm towards the center of the platform then use her Fire Gale to dodge the worm’s spiny maw. She escapes with an inch to spare, stabbing her sword into the ground to stop her momentum. He’s seen her practice this movement every night for the past week after the others have gone to bed.
Pechorin peppers the Scytheworm with his Flak Cannon to set up a Molten reaction with Natsuko’s fire. Unfortunately, the worm does something different today. It writhes in Shuixing’s direction.
“Shit! Shui, run!” Natsuko yells.
Shuixing tries to sprint, but she’s slower than the worm, and her Ability kit has no mobility skills. Before the Scytheworm catches her, however, Natsuko casts her Swap ability and trades places with Shuixing to take the HP-chunking hit for her. The worm slams down on Natsuko.
Pechorin continues to fire his guns because that’s all he’s good for.
After being spit out from the worm’s mouth, Natsuko wobbles for a second.
“Just some bad luck!” she yells.
The Scytheworm continues to fling itself across the terracotta platform. Of the four of them, only Natsuko can match its speed, and only by furiously cycling her Jack Abilities specifically picked for their mobility. What is obvious to everyone but her, though, is that speed means nothing. This worm is a gate, opening and closing to those whose numbers are high enough to proceed past it.
Shuixing dies when they get the Scytheworm below three-quarters health and it activates an earthquake ability that is almost impossible to dodge. Hemiola dies when Natsuko sprints in front of him to parry the worm’s spine missiles and only manages to deflect 6 out of 7 of them. By then it’s obvious how this is going to end.
“We’ve got this Pech. We’re gonna shock the hell outta Shui and Hemi when they get resummoned, alright!?” Natsuko yells to him, sweat drenching her face. The Scytheworm isn’t below half-health yet.
“Right,” Pechorin yells back.
The two of them have been backed up against a sand dune by the thrashing worm. Natsuko’s mobility skills are on cooldown, they’re both almost out of HP, and neither has any healing items left. They have no chance of winning. What else is left to Pechorin other than to do something cool?
“You can do more with this health than I can,” he says.
Natsuko looks to him, her eyes wild. “What!? No, don’t you dare!”
Pechorin lets the worm hit him. His passive triggers as he dies and brings Natsuko back up to max HP. Maybe it doesn’t change the outcome of the fight, he thinks, but that’s not why he decides to do it.
The next morning, after he wakes from that impenetrable gulf of time between shores of existence, he finds himself lying on a sand dune underneath the early morning sky poked through with a million starry pinpricks. Beside him, Shuixing and Hemiola are also waking up, as is Natsuko. He doesn’t need to ask how the rest of the fight went.
“Well, that didn’t go as planned,” Natsuko says, rocking forward into a sitting position on the sand, arms clasped around knees purple with bruises. “Let’s get some breakfast and then we can start planning for our next attempt.”
Hemiola gets up out of the sand and dusts himself off. “There’s not going to be a next time, Natsu. I’m quitting.”
“What!? Quit— what is there to quit from!? This is what we do! We’re Heroes, we do heroic shit! There’s nothing else for us!” she yells, her voice carrying over the kilometers of desert that surround them.
Hemiola shrugs. “I don’t know what I’ll do, I just know it won’t be this. The Yishang keep summoning Heroes that are better and better. If they really wanted us, if they needed us, don’t you think they have the power to bring us up to speed? And if they’re not, then it means they don’t want us to compete.”
“Don’t want us to compete? Hemi, what the hell are you talking about!? We’re all in this fight together, to take down the Entropic Axis.”
Hemiola laughs at that. It’s a dark, acidic sort of laugh. Pechorin is torn about whether to be impressed with or frightened by it. Pechorin’s the one who’s supposed to be dour and brooding, Hemiola’s archetype is the frivolous hedonist.
“If you don’t get it by now, Natsu, maybe you never will,” Hemi says, turning away from them and trudging down the dune towards the distant lantern-light of al-Nuwba City.
“Get what!?” Natsuko says. When it’s clear their former teammate is not about to turn around and continue arguing, she looks to her two remaining teammates. “You know what? Who cares? There’s plenty of Heroes around. Once we get back to al-Nuwba City we’ll go find someone, invite them to our party, and have another go at the worm, yeah? Y’all ready to go?”
She says this, but for the first time since Pechorin has known Natsuko, which is as long as the two of them have existed, he sees something else in her eternally energetic, optimistic, excitable face: Sadness.