While Natsuko fumbled for a bottle that no longer existed, more lobbed glasses soared from the jungle canopy. One exploded on top of Sofiane and caused him to thrash in slow-motion, hitting him with both a speed debuff and a bunch of broken glass. Pechorin tried valiantly to shoot another three bottles out of the air. Unfortunately, there was actually only one bottle and he picked the wrong one of the three waving images. It hit him with a greasy splash that caused him to fall on his face.

“Heroes! We’re getting attacked by Heroes!” Sofiane yelled, sprinting in the other direction at a half a mile an hour. Within the next ten minutes, he’d be home free.

“Who’s there!? Come out and fight like a man!” Natsuko said, grabbing the nearest stick and swishing it in the air. Her provocation was answered by a whip flinging out from a bush and snapping at her. It didn’t do much damage, but it did hurt like a bitch. Wait, if it didn’t do much damage…

Natsuko turned to look at the others who were still being pelted by bottles and, after the adrenaline settled, even the acid bottle proved to deal negligible damage, especially to Sofiane who was getting hit over and over as he made his valiant, snail-like escape.

Natsuko dropped her stick and folded her arms. “This a prank or something?”

“Argh!”

With a battle roar, Harald broke from the treeline, halberd in hand, and charged straight at Natsuko. In an instant, the fear and urgency coursing through her dissipated. She waited for Harald to get closer to her, then did a Fire Gale-powered roundhouse kick to force him to stop before he hit her.

“Man, are y’all done? You scared the crap out of us,” Natsuko said.

Harald growled. “No we’re not done! We won’t be done until you answer for the deaths you’ve caused. Do you even remember their names?”

“Uh, yeah: Shrike, Frederick—but that wasn’t my fault—and uh… what’s her face… Marjory?” Natsuko said.

“Margaret!”

“She’s not technically dead,” Shuixing said, pulling herself to her feet and straightening her glasses.

“If you have to modify “dead” with “not technically,” it’s probably not a convincing argument,” Faisal said, emerging from the bushes with whip in hand.

Sofiane was taking his time turning around so Shuixing did him a favor and used Ablutions to cure his status effect.

“Gods, I’d rather be poisoned, burned, or blinded than slowed,” Sofiane said.

Harald physically cringed at his voice.

“Well, you’re not gonna win now that Sofiane can beat the piss out of you all, so what now?” Natsuko said.

“Now,” Harald said, bringing his halberd up. “We fight to the death. We let you get away once, but not again!”

Natsuko ducked under a swing so telegraphed she had time to learn morse code. Stat-wise, Harald and his team should've been slightly better, but the events of the past several days had Natsuko’s brain on high alert. Stats were not a replacement for conditioning. Or, at least not at the level the two parties were at. Sofiane pointed his dinky little rusty katana at Harald and coiled back for a Coup De Grace.

“Wait!” Pechorin yelled.

Pechorin's exhortation couldn’t stop Coup De Grace’s charge time but it, combined with some funny mango juice, distracted Sofiane enough for his ability to miss and send him rocketing past Harald into the foliage.

“What do you want?” Harald asked.

“Vindication.”

“We’re not offering any to murderers,” Faisal said.

“No, I mean for you all.”

The two enemies blinked and said simultaneously, “what?”

“For dramatic reasons, I want to give you all a redemption arc where you learn about the true nature of our plight and shed your former identity as minor comic relief villains to join us in our worthy struggle,” Pechorin said.

“Shut up!” Harald, Faisal, and Natsuko said.

Shuixing stepped forward, tilting to one side as she tried to balance against the world waving in her vision. “H-How did you all even find us?”

“That would be me,” the raccoon girl said, dropping down from her hiding space up in a tree. Her bandolier of bottles was mostly empty, but every few seconds another bottle would pop back into existence in it. She glared at them. “My passive.”

“What’s your passive?” Shui asked.

“I can track Heroes and monsters by smell alone,” she explained.

Natsuko wrinkled her nose and turned her body away. “Ew. That’s weird.”

“What!? No it’s not! It’s just an ability!” the raccoon girl protested.

“Are you sniffing me right now?”

“No! I mean— it’s a passive, it’s always on, but I’m not— I don’t have to take that from a murderer!”

Natsuko huffed. “We’re not murderers, you trash panda! The same person who sliced up Margarine was the one who force dimension-jumped Shrike. And as for Frederick… he was the one holding the bottle, okay? So if the other Heroes want to be oblivious idiots, fine, but you all should know better.”

Harald lowered his halberd. “Yeah, but…”

“You haven’t had anything else to do?” Shuixing asked.

“That’s not why!” he replied in a tone of voice that sounded like it was definitely at least part of it, with maybe a dash of frustration about being able to do nothing for Margaret.

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“Even if you could catch us, what would that accomplish?” Shuixing asked. “You would do what, turn us into the other Heroes? The real murderer is still on the loose with my papers and we’re down the only thing that can stop him.”

Their three attackers stood around, unsure of what to do next. Shuixing could tell they hadn’t thought this through and that the allure of having something to do, even if it was chasing their party halfway across Po-Lin, had overridden the rational part of their brain that would've told them it was pointless. With their momentum lost, Harald, Faisal, and the raccoon girl were glancing around, trying to think of a face-saving way to leave.

“Ugh. Do you want some jungle sashimi?” Natsuko said.

“We’re fine. We brought baked potatoes,” Faisal said.

The raccoon girl licked her lips. “We’ve been eating baked potatoes for a week, Fai, maybe we could have... y’know, a little.”

Harald pounded the haft of his halberd into the dirt. “We are not accepting sashimi from our adversaries!”

A tropical bird song cawed from somewhere off in the jungle.

“Okay, maybe we’ll have the one,” Harald said.

Natsuko clapped her hands. “Great. Pech, go get another fish. Shui, go take me to find some more mangoes. And we can reuse the garnish since Puffball is off getting bitten by spiders.”

Shuixing shook her head. “I’ll come back with the mangoes, but you’re not coming with me.”

The raccoon girl squinted until her little mask face turned into a thin black bar. “What’s up with these mangoes?”

“They get you plastered,” Pechorin said.

The raccoon girl and Faisal offered to go help Shui find some more mangoes while Harald was on Natsuko watching duty as the only Damage-type Hero that could easily deal with her. She sat cross-legged on the ground with her arms crossed, eyeing up Harald who squatted in front of her.

“I still think you’re all at fault. At least partially,” he said in a low rumble.

“Yeah, well, I think you all are a bunch of sniffers.”

“What the hell does that— listen, I don’t sniff. That’s—”

Several gunshots rang through the jungle as Harald said his teammates’ name. Natsuko could’ve asked him to repeat what he said, but decided she didn’t care enough.

After a short wait, Pechorin returned with another perforated fish and Shuixing and Harald’s teammates with some mangoes. The vines were easy to find since they were everywhere in the jungle. Tossing them into the helmet-pot again and stirring over a fire, they soon had another plate of cold, raw fish garnished with hibiscus confetti. Harald grunted in thanks as he accepted the dish while the other two dug straight in. The raccoon girl barely came up for breath as she scarfed down several rolls at once.

Around that time, a sweaty, wide-eyed, heaving Sofiane slashed through the bushes and emerged into the clearing.

“I hate this gods-damned jungle,” he said. “I hate it. I hate it. I hate it.”

“Hey, there’s a spider in your hair,” Natsuko said.

Sofiane gasped and swatted his head, sending his purple bob in every direction as he tried to murder the non-existent spider. He figured out what happened as Natsuko burst out laughing. Shuixing couldn’t help giggling a little as well.

“Hey, Harald,” Sofiane said.

“Mmm. Yeah?” replied the Bazouk, mouth full of fish.

“If you decide to kill Natsuko, I won’t stop you. I give you free reign.”

Harald swallowed. “No thanks. I’m not looking to get bottled to death.”

“I can’t do that anymore,” Natsuko said with an angry glance at Pechorin.

“Wait what?”

“That's what Shui meant when she said we couldn't deal with the murderer guy anymore. The bottle broke. Pechorin shattered it.”

Their three attackers-turned-guests looked at each other with an expression of confusion, as though they weren’t sure whether that was a good, bad, or none-of-the-above thing.

Faisal steepled his fingers. “So— but wait, if the person who attacked us comes back…”

“We’re screwed, yeah,” Natsuko said.

“Oh…” the raccoon girl said.

The needle fluctuating between good and bad nudged a little over towards the “bad” end.

Natsuko gave a malicious grin. “And guess who else they might want to silence?”

The raccoon girl shuddered.

“In any case,” Shuixing said. “If it’s all the same to you all, I think we could be of mutual benefit to each other for the time being. Her sniffing passive—”

“Can we call it something other than sniffing?” the raccoon girl said.

“—can help alert us if anyone else comes after us.”

“So what do we get?” Harald said, folding his arms.

“Food,” Natsuko said.

“And the chance to possibly get Margaret back. Recall that, unlike the others, the Yishang might be able to save her since she’s not technically dead.”

This time around, “not technically dead” was a little more convincing. It was decided after that that the two parties would share a camp for the time being, or at least until Daisy could return to Shikijima to come pick them up.

After night descended, Natsuko waited until Shuixing had rolled over onto her right side, then her left, then back to her right in their tent, which was her friend’s tell-tale sign of falling asleep. Inch by inch, Natsuko eased herself out from under the sticks and palm fronds they had constructed in lieu of a proper tent and got to her feet. She then headed off in the direction she recalled Shuixing coming from when she returned with the mangoes.

Off-road travel through the jungle wasn’t easy, but when they first came to Shikijima, Natsuko could do controlled burns to get the damn trees and vines out of the way. Unfortunately, having to be sneaky so that she didn’t disappoint Shui with her degeneracy, this was not a viable strategy. That meant dealing with the skin-crawling sensation of things brushing against her. Strange as it was, she had no problem being beaten, stabbed, crushed, slashed, and exploded by monsters, but light touches drove her insane. She had to bite down on the collar of her kimono not to make a noise whenever a vine rubbed past her elbow.

Even worse, being paranoid about Shuixing finding her on her mango quest, her eyes kept debating with her brain about figures in her peripheral vision. Every time she said no, her eyes said, “alright, but what if?” And Natsuko got so caught up in this debate that she realized she had no idea where she was in the middle of a giant jungle in the middle of the night. She turned her head up to the sky where a drizzle of rain was starting to fall.

“Come on. One break, please?”

She doubted the Yishang would answer, but it was the only outlet she had that wasn’t burning several hundred acres of greenery to the ground. However, after stumbling around in the dark for a bit, her luck turned around and there, before her, lay the glorious sight of a tree with plump, dripping, overripe, and boozy mangoes weighing down its branches like Christmas ornaments.

Natsuko rubbed her hands together. “Oh baby. Here we come.”

With no one to pressure her into temperance, she munched on mango after fermented mango until her hands were sticky with the juices of four or five. Only at that point did she really have a proper tipsiness going. As she reached for another to make herself feel even more awesome, something caught her eye. It was a lump of darkness out in the trees that looked vaguely person-shaped, albeit on the shorter side, though it could just as easily have been a tangle of vines. It was a day past new moon, so she couldn’t make anything of it one way or the other. Regardless, it creeped her out.

She swallowed and called out. “Shui?

The only response came from a rumble underneath her. A second later, roots burst from the ground and gripped Natsuko by the neck, lifting her off the ground. A half-eaten mango dropped from her hands.