Sofiane stared at the roots running up and down, into and out of the soil as they raced ahead of their master. His blood froze.

“Spread out!” Sofiane yelled.

He turned into Ball Lightning, leaving Gula alone as he shot towards the perimeter of the camp. A moment later, the trees at the edge of the clearing uprooted and fell like doors smashed open. Xiuquan rode the wooden wave into the clearing and hopped off.

“Were you really having trouble with these nobodies?” Xiuquan asked.

Pechorin fired at him, but every bullet was parried by a gleaming emerald sword in Xiu’s hand.

Gula picked herself up. “W-Well, th-there were only three of us and we didn’t have our damage—”

Stomping up to her, Xiuquan punched Gula in the stomach and spit flung from her mouth. Baran winced at Xiuquan’s outburst of rage. Natsuko standing next to him was equally transfixed by the abuse. Sofiane ground his teeth. He didn’t particularly like any of his former teammates, but this was a step too far even for Xiuquan.

On the other side of the fight, Koyon scratched his neck and looked on with disinterest.

“Get up,” Xiuquan said, grabbing Gula by her hair as she collapsed to the ground. “We’re already wasting time we could be using to grind for quests and experience, so. Get. Up!”

Gula scrambled to her feet and uncorked another bottle. Sofiane recognized it as her Infuse ability that gave Xiuquan water-empowered attacks. The shock of the brutality over, the fight resumed.

Sofiane lurched forward to strike at Xiuquan and prevent him from going after the others. Before Sofiane closed the distance, roots reached up like grasping hands and grabbed his ankles along with those of Pechorin, Shuixing, and the raccoon girl. Sofiane tried to enter his Perfect Parry stance, but Xiuquan’s sword got to him first.

Xiuquan’s emerald blade sliced through him, dealing both Water Elemental and Wood Elemental damage, combining for a Sap reaction that made Sofiane’s worst hangovers feel like a massage. Toxic flowers burst from where he’d been slashed and sapped his health, speed, and defense, rendering him somewhere between sleepy and nauseous. And that was only one attack.

“Kill the rest of them. I only care about getting those two alive,” Xiuquan said, gesturing at Natsuko and Shuixing.

Faisal flicked his whip at Xiuquan who dodged it with ease. A second later, Xiu was up in Faisal’s face, slicing him open with the water-powered attacks. Even though Faisal had already spent his Desperation Art to pump up his evasion, the sheer onslaught of Xiuquan’s attacks negated his evasion, and before Shuixing could turn her healing on him, Faisal lay dead, dissolving into the soil.

Xiuquan cracked his neck. “Again, how in the world were you all losing to these peons?”

“It’s not a quest, Xiu. We’re having fun, chill out,” Koyon said, whipping Harald with the horse baton without looking at him. Without the bonus evasion from Faisal, Harald was a few hits from death. In anticipation of that, Koyon slowed down so he wouldn’t lose his chew toy too quickly.

“You can fuck around because you’ve got better stats, pretty boy. The rest of us can’t,” Xiuquan said before whipping around to lop Pechorin’s head off.

Fortunately, Faisal’s death was not in vain, because it tipped Sofiane over the threshold to activate Overcharge. The cooldown on his Ball Lightning disappeared and purple lightning crackled along his small frame as he flashed forward to stun Xiuquan mid-slash at Pechorin. Sofiane got off a few cuts of his own, but even as his Lightning reacted with Pechorin’s Metal element, the damage modifier on the little katana he stole from the evidence locker was too low.

At the highest thresholds of power, every single thing mattered: Weapons, equipment, accessories, stats, levels, upgrades, all of it. Slipping in even one area made a gigantic difference, as it did when Xiuquan grabbed the impotently-slashing Sofiane and smashed him in the nose with the pommel of his sword. Blood spurted from crushed cartilage as Sofiane staggered backwards into Pechorin.

“If it was just you, Sofi, I wouldn’t mind having some fun,” Xiuquan said with a glance over at Koyon. “But we have a job to do, and we can’t do that with the threat of being bottled out of existence looming over us. If you won’t help, fine. But don’t get in our way.”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Sofiane pawed at his bleeding nose, sending spatters onto his lips. “Xiu, they didn’t kill Shrike. Why aren’t you going after the person who did?”

A plan was coming to Sofiane, he just needed to distract Xiu for a little longer.

“My job is to bring in the two dumbasses who invented a way to murder people and make sure they don’t do it again,” Xiuquan said, pointing his sword at Natsuko and Shuixing.

Sofiane chuckled, blood flinging from his lips. “If you’re too scared to handle the real threat, just say so.”

Rage boiled on Xiuquan’s face. It was so stupid that his silly taunting worked, Sofiane thought, but what was this all if not a rematch of the card tournament? When Sofiane had been on their team, they were a one-tactic pony, and when things went wrong, it was usually Xiuquan and Sofiane butting heads. Or Baran and Sofiane butting heads. Or even Gula and Sofiane butting heads. But if he could knock them out of sync, Sofiane’s team might have a rail-thin chance to get away. And that plan started with Xiuquan.

Xiuquan swung at Sofiane again. This time Sofi was ready with a parry and deflected it.

“A mysterious other guy who happened to be right there beside you all when Shrike was murdered but who disappeared right after? Sofi, come on now…”

Sofiane readied a Coup De Grace and aimed the crackling purple energy towards Xiu.

“That’s cute, Sofi. Apparently you think I’m as much of an idiot as you are.”

“Pech, push me to the side!” Sofiane yelled.

Pechorin lunged, ankles still tangled in roots, and shoved Sofiane to the right of Xiuquan, which put him in a direct line to hit Koyon. A searing purple after-image lit up the jungle as Sofiane shot across the length of the camp to run Koyon through with his rusty katana. Even with the pitiful weapon, the damage was enough to halt Koyon’s assault on a nearly-dead Harald.

From here, Sofiane launched into his own onslaught. Popping in and out of Ball Lightning with Overcharge’s cooldown removal, he kept Koyon boxed in with stuns and parries to every attack he tried to throw out. The trouble was that their enemies would be full health again once Gula dumped health into them. Meanwhile, Shui and the raccoon girl and their inferior stats were barely keeping Harald alive, let alone Natsuko living entirely off of well-timed Fuel Injection parries.

Koyon became transparent and slipped out of Sofiane’s control, walking right through his body then turning and hitting him with a point-blank horse charge that planted Sofiane in the dirt.

“Can we just nuke them already? We can pick the other two up in the morning,” Koyon said with a yawn.

Xiuquan growled. “No, you’ll do what I say! My team is the best team at this level plateau, so unless you want to slow down your leveling progression, you’ll obey my orders.

A patch of roots moved Xiuquan across the battlefield towards Sofiane. On the way, Xiu took a swing at the raccoon girl who poofed into a tanuki-shaped doll to dodge the attack. The swing was a casual drive-by, not a serious attempt to kill the Grenadier Hero who Xiu didn’t consider a threat. So once his back was turned, she threw every bottle she had at him.

Xiuquan was splattered in glass and liquid that tripped, blinded, slowed, and stunned him. Gula started to coax some liquid out of one of her bottles. A status restoration spell.

“Stop her!” Sofiane yelled.

He turned into Ball Lightning and zipped over to Gula, but Baran blasted him with a gust of wind like a punch to the gut before blowing Sofiane away from the Medico-Mage. Harald sprinted for Gula, dropping into a Brutal Charge.

“Nope,” Koyon said, floating in front of Harald in his ghost form and putting up a prismatic wall for Harald to run straight into.

The wall was wide enough to block Pechorin from getting a shot off. And for a moment, it seemed like Gula was going to get off a spell to cure Xiuquan’s status effects. Then, with no other offensive abilities left, Shuixing darted for Gula and knocked the bottle out of her hand.

This act startled everyone but Natsuko into silence. Weapons, as everyone knew, were sacred. If you had to interrupt another Hero’s ability, you could attack them, but you couldn’t attack their weapon. And this wasn’t a matter of decorum or etiquette, but something that was quite simply impossible. It didn’t make any logical sense to attack someone’s weapon, since it was a part of them. It was capital-E Equipped. It wasn’t possible to un-equip someone else.

And yet, Shuixing did it. The act of disarming Gula, of un-equipping her bottle, possessed all the strangeness of something that could happen in a Special Event but not in the ordinary world. Even Sofiane hadn’t considered doing such a thing, believing the loss of his rapier to be a fluke of forced dimension-jumping.

Being exposed to so much strangeness recently, Sofiane recovered from the impossibility before everyone else. Now recognizing it as possible, he swiped Xiuquan’s jagged, emerald sword from the Hero’s grip and prepared a Coup De Grace in a random direction. It wouldn’t be enough to insta-kill Xiuquan, but with Baran’s lost health…

“Swap me now!” Sofiane said to Natsuko.

Right as he released the Coup De Grace charge, his vision was replaced with Baran’s surprised face. Xiuquan’s—now Sofiane’s—emerald sword carved through Baran with a bolt of flashing purple energy, killing him instantly. A second later, Baran’s body dutifully dissolved,

“Screw this, I’m nuking them,” Koyon said.

Before Sofiane could relish his small victory, ghostly purple and green lights filled his peripheral vision. Glancing above him, he saw an aurora, gently rolling like the ephemeral ribbons of a phantasmic parade, floating to the ground.

And then, nothing.