More guards came running at the sound of shooting. A stampede of thumping on the wooden floor announced their arrival. Pechorin was ready. With a wave of bullets, he turned the hallway into a shooting gallery with body after body dissolving into the ground.

Dying in a special event... He could only pray the Yishang would take care of things.

Carving his way through the hallway, he doubted anyone else but him had broken from the event. Breaking out required a special frame of mind. That was the trick of the event fields: They worked because the Yishang made it almost impossible to imagine that they didn’t. Or, almost impossible. Sofiane and Shuixing had no chance of escaping. But for whatever reason, the strange mental place he withdrew to in order to compose his poetry seemed able to imagine things going differently.

Guards from the courtroom poured through the door and Pechorin unleashed a Flak Cannon at them without looking in their direction. They were behind him, and Natsuko was somewhere in front.

~~~

Natsuko woke up that morning to a hand over her mouth. Before she could start getting violent, as she was wont to do, the guard standing above her whispered harshly.

“Not a peep. The Empress wants a word with you. Give us trouble, and it’ll be your friends that get punished.”

She answered the guard with a glare containing all the acid she’d been saving for when she saw Daisy next. It was unfortunate it had to go to waste on a faceless guard. But she was that mad.

Natsuko tore his hand off her mouth. With a balled fist, she punched the guard’s neck hard enough that he crumpled. If there was any confusion remaining regarding how hard she hit him, his body dissolved into the floor. The other guards, fear in their eyes, leveled their halberds at her. She held her hands up.

“I’m going, I’m going. Just needed to relieve some stress is all,” Natsuko said.

Unsure what to do about their fellow guardsmen’s 24-hour timeout, they decided it was probably better not to second guess the violent Hero offering to go willingly. Rather than shoving her along as they had been, though, they formed a respectful bubble around her as they took her up towards the palace.

Early in the morning, Shikijima had a strange air about it. Dawn was still a purple-pink blob hovering over the bay and birds were twittering in the fluttering pine trees and hibiscus bushes. The only other sound was the scuff of the guard’s thatch-soled boots and the clip-clop of Natsuko’s wooden sandals. It was the kind of scene that would be beautiful if she wasn’t in a perpetual state of hungover or pissed off. The irony of Pechorin going gaga over Shikijima this time around was that it had been her on the first trip. The only thing that could peel her away from adventuring, it turned out, was the beach.

When Natsuko came back by herself as a “vacation” a month or so after finally giving up on adventuring, the magic was gone. Nothing was different, but it roused nothing in her. Not the hibiscus flowers, not the palm trees, not laying on the beach. The only thing she enjoyed on that trip was the plum rum. She supposed that’s when her love of alcohol had started.

Natsuko was drawn out of her thoughts by the thumping halberds of saluting guards at the palace gate.

“Hey, you all wanna tell me what the Empress wants from me?” Natsuko asked.

“You are to be tried separately,” one of the braver guards said.

“Uh-huh. Did she say why?”

“That is between you and Her Imperial Majesty.”

~~~

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Paper screens whizzed by as Pechorin pounded through the corridors of the palace. He’d only heard Natsuko scream once and that was all he had to go off of. It sounded West. It sounded up. He took the stairs, taking a guard coming down them by surprise, grabbing his collar, and putting the barrel of his pepperbox pistol to the man’s eye.

“The Empress, where is she?”

The guard grit his teeth. “I’d rather die than betray my—”

He died. Another guard came running and Pechorin posed the same dilemma to him.

“Uh— uh— upstairs! Top floor!”

Pechorin shoved him out of the way and plunged up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

~~~

“Alright, what is it?” Natsuko said, her voice echoing across the large wooden chamber of the Empress private meeting hall.

By this time the sun was high enough to throw beams of hazy light through the window slats. Sliding screens to her left obscured a balcony large enough to have its own manicured garden with magically-powered running water. On the far end of the hall the Empress leaned against a knee-high serving table with a tray of breakfast and tea on it, her ankle-length hair arrange behind her.

The guards all tactfully buried their eyes in the floor since the Empress was only wearing a kimono instead of her 12-layered robe. Natsuko suppressed a snort. You still couldn’t see an inch of skin except for the Empress’ face and her hands curled around a mug of tea.

Instead of responding to her, the Empress raised a finger to be quiet. Natsuko stood and waited. Right as she was wondering whether this was a prank, the bamboo tube of a sōzu clacked against a rock. The air seemed to change. Thicker, denser, less free. This was a special event field. And she was in danger.

“You lied! You said you wouldn’t bring in the Yishang if we cooperated!”

A guard’s boot kicked out her knee and drove her to a kneeling position. She flailed and punched, but under the effects of the Yishang’s intervention, the guards were suddenly as strong as her. It didn’t take them long to gather up her thrashing arms and pin them behind her back.

The Empress smirked. “Lied? What a word to hear from a traitor’s mouth.”

“Would you drop this traitor shit!? We both know backstories are a lie,” Natsuko said, testing the guard’s ability to keep hold of her.

“They are indeed, but let’s put that aside for now. It’s bad manners not to offer a guest some food and drink. Would you like some?” the Empress asked, gesturing at the tray.

Natsuko wanted to say, “go fuck yourself!” but instead, her stomach growled. All she’d had to eat in the past 24+ hours had been rice gruel, some pickles, and a gourd of wine. Plus, the tray had curry bread, and she really liked curry bread.

“Fine,” Natsuko said. Maybe it was due to overexposure to Sofiane, but she expected the Empress to come back with something humiliating like having to say, “please” and “thank you.” Instead, the Empress waved for a guard to fix her a cup of tea and a plate of food. Her arms were released, though Natsuko got the impression she was not allowed to stand up yet.

Since finishing meant having to deal with the Imperial Pain-in-the-ass, she decided to drag out the eating process as long as possible. After almost twenty minutes of this, the Empress caught wise and snapped her fingers to have the food taken away.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“Hey! I was still eating that!” Natsuko said as the guards snatched the curry bread out of her hand.

“And now you’re done eating it,” the Empress said, standing up from her languid pose on the ground. “Now, you’re going to stand judgment.”

“Oh yeah? For my many crimes of having a made-up backstory?”

Empress Sadako fixed Natsuko with an expression that hovered on the thin line between freezing and boiling in anger. “For killing my father.”

“What!?”

Natsuko yelled this loud enough to make the guards shoot for their halberds. Even under the effects of the event field, they were still frightened of her.

“We didn’t kill anyone! We exorcized the former Emperor,” Natsuko said.

“What you did,” Empress Sadako said, pacing the floor in front of Natsuko, “was completely change the only person I’ve ever held dear.”

“Hey, wait a sec, you yourself said backstories were bullshit!”

“They are. But that wasn’t what my father—if you can call him that—meant to me. I loved him as a person, not as the roles we were supposed to play for the Yishang. I loved him when he flew into one of his tempers and I loved him in the tender moments when we talked on that balcony,” she said, gesturing at the garden.

“Wow, neat, but we didn’t kill him! He’s still around!” Natsuko said.

The Empress closed her eyes and took a long, heavy breath. “No. No he’s not. What you left me with was a husk of a man. He dispenses pleasantreis if you press him, but there’s no depth. He used to talk to me into the early morning about his fears and doubts, and about this hell we live in. That’s the man I loved, not the one you left me with!”

The longer she talked, the scratchier and more unhinged the Empress’ voice became. Some of the chill from her icy glare crawled down Natsuko’s neck and spine. She knew when Non-Heroes were in melodramatic speech mode. Everyone involved knew the stakes weren’t as high as they were made out to be. But that wasn’t what the Empress was doing here. Her anger was real. Personal. Not even Heroes talked like that.

Natsuko bit her lip. “Look, I’m sorry that happened… But that was the quest! Your father was harming his own citizens through misrule because he was possessed by a demon, and if we didn’t stop him—”

“Stop him!? His “tyranny” was as bullshit as mine! My citizens take turns pretending to be jailed political dissidents because we’re supposed to keep up appearances for the sake of you Heroes. You dear, chosen few that the Yishang love so much, who constantly need little “quests” to complete or you go insane. And you want me to sympathize just because destroying the person I loved was part of one of these stupid “quests?”

“We didn’t have a choice!” Natsuko said. “If we didn’t, another Hero would have completed that quest and exorcized your father. And— and we… we didn’t know, okay? We were too busy fighting—” Gods, she sounded so silly, “—fighting the Entropic Axis.”

“So you deserved the right to be the first greedy Hero to complete the quest instead of the next greedy Hero?” Empress Sadako asked.

“We thought we were doing something good! How the hell could we have known the Emperor was going to turn into a— a—”

“A zombie. That’s the closest word,” the Empress said. “And I’m sure the next thing you’ll do is try to claim that that’s not such a bad fate, that it’s a good thing that he’s a blank slate of a person because he’s happy now, is that it? Because you’ll say anything to not admit guilt.”

“No,” Natsuko said. After what happened with Frederick, she knew better than to continue denying her culpability. She was guilty, through and through. “I’m sorry, Sadako. I regret what we did to your father. If there was a way for me to undo it, I would.”

Sadako’s chin trembled and for a moment it seemed like she was going to tear up, but the hard empress recomposed herself.

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe you would. But it doesn’t matter, because you did. And the only way to make us square is to trade a life for a life.”

Natsuko wondered for a moment whether the Empress had heard the rumors that permanent deaths were possible during events. It wouldn’t work, though. The Yishang wouldn’t let a Non-Hero kill a Hero in an event unless Natsuko was stupid enough to try and get herself skewered on a guard’s halberd.

“Pin her down,” the Empress ordered.

Four separate guards shoved Natsuko face-first into the floor, arms once again pinned behind her back. She struggled, but they were more than enough to keep her still. The Empress moved towards the balcony screen door, black hair trailing at her feet like a puddle of oil, and threw the doors open.

Even with Natsuko’s face pressed to the floor, she could still make out the shape of a huge, three foot wine bottle, resting on a set of chairs that faced the garden. The Empress picked up the bottle, cradling it like a newborn child.

“No!”

~~~

A group of guards formed a downwards-facing wall of halberds at the top of the staircase to greet Pechorin. He liked his guns, but they were not stealth weapons. Everyone in the palace knew about his rampage by now. But this was the final hurdle. He was getting through. His Desperation Art flicked on and he unloaded.

Concentrated Fire was an almost hypnotic ability. He fired and it did the work. The guns themselves, firing at machine gun speed, moved from one body to the next, tearing the low-leveled guards to shreds. In a perverse way, it felt good. Before he knew it, the stairway was clear. Pechorin threw open the bamboo screens leading to the Empress’ chamber.

Natsuko was pinned to the floor by four guards. The Empress stood over her, bottle in hand.

“Drop the bottle,” Pechorin said.

“You shouldn’t be— what happened to the event field!?”

“Poetry happened,” Pechorin said and then immediately regretted not thinking of something better to say.

Natsuko laughed. “Ahaha! Pech, what the hell was that!?”

The Empress was not laughing. “Shoot, and she goes through the ground.”

Pechorin narrowed his eyes. He had a plan. It was risky, he wasn’t 100% certain that it would work, but shooting his way to the Empress was just as risky to Natsuko’s life. Well, sort of risky. That “sort of” was pulling a lot of weight in his plan. But enough thinking.

“I’ll sacrifice myself for Natsuko,” Pechorin said.

“I’m sorry, what?” the Empress replied.

“No you won’t!” Natsuko said, although her attempt to enforce this involved wriggling around on the floor helplessly while pinned under several boots.

“This is about your father, isn’t it? The former Emperor?” Pechorin said. “This is payback for exorcizing him.”

Empress Sadako narrowed her eyes. “How did you—”

“A poetic eye is an open eye,” he replied, and it was almost a cool enough response to make up for “poetry happened.”

Her nostrils flared. “And you think I’ll be satisfied with killing you instead of the person responsible for turning my father into a simpleton?”

“Why not? Natsuko didn’t harm you directly, she harmed someone you cared about. Wouldn’t it be poetic justice to kill someone she cares about?” he asked.

“Pechorin what the hell are you talking about!? I don’t care about you!” Natsuko yelled, her voice strained by a guard leaning a foot into her back.

“You’d sacrifice yourself for her?” The Empress stepped forward and lifted Natsuko’s scowling face from the floor with her foot. “For a greedy, parasitic, self-centered, alcoholic Hero with a foul mouth and an even fouler personality?”

Pechorin nodded.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “Whatever is telling me to do this comes from the same place my poetry does: dark and violent and unknowable. When I think about my poetry, I don’t have any interest in asking “why?” I just know I have to do it.”

“Pech…” Natsuko said.

A small, malicious smirk crept onto the Empress’ face. “Alright, you have my word, here, before my subjects, that if you submit to being dimension-jumped out of existence, I will let Natsuko and the rest of your friends go.”

“Pech stop! This is my responsibility! Keep your gods-damned, stupid, faux-edgy bullshit out of it, do you hear me!?” Natsuko said.

Both Pechorin and the Empress ignored her, even as she yelled and cursed at them. As Pechorin knelt in front of Empress Sadako and cast his guns aside, Natsuko’s curses got more creative, her impotent thrashing more urgent. In this world where no one died for real, it was hard to show someone how much you cared. The stakes didn’t matter. How could you tell someone you’d give your life for them if you had a new life to give every 24 hours? There were times even Pechorin didn’t know if what he felt was really that serious. But now he knew.

After showing the Empress where on the bottle to strike him, Pechorin asked if he could deliver one final poem.

“I would have to arrest myself for treason against the Shikijiman culture if I denied you that,” she replied.

Looking up to the rafters of the great wooden hall, Natsuko’s cursing floating through his ears, Pechorin composed his death poem.

“How brazen to judge—

The red hibiscus in Spring,

Before her Fall bloom.”

The Empress opened her mouth as though to respond with a couplet, but chose instead to speak plainly.

“You would have made a good Non-Hero,” the Empress said.

She swung the bottle.

“No!”