“Daisy time!” Daisy said to Daisy to get Daisy psyched up.

“Daisy time!” said Zhidao to Daisy in encouragement, clapping his little paws together.

With her detour to dump Natsuko off on the ship to Shikijima, it had taken Daisy a full day or so to turn around and fly all the way back up to the Sibe-Lands. For no reason in particular, she reflected on how this put her current self chronologically two days past the eventful second day of the card tournament, or roughly about the same time when her four little dependents ought to be arriving in Shikijima. Satisfied that she had situated Daisy Time in a larger temporal framework, she turned to Zhidao.

“Anything the Yishang would care to tell me about?” she asked.

Her boots squelched in the mud of the Khar Tenger plains. Gray clouds whisked across the giant expanse of the sky towards jagged mountains in the far west. The soil and grass lay slick with rain recently jettisoned by those same clouds. If she reached out, Daisy could fit the mountains in her palms, even though they lay hundreds of kilometers in the distance. If there was one thing the Sibe-lands had, it was space. So, so much space. Having a movement ability or a teammate with one was an absolute requirement for getting around in it.

“You mean other than the card tournament being a big ol’ fiasco?” Zhidao said, hovering alongside her.

Daisy smiled. “Yup! I mean other than that.”

“Well, let’s see: Your deadline for submitting your halloween costume preferences is coming up the Sunday after next, you’re expected for a gardening special event in Cascadia three weeks from now, and Yuna is currently turning Vermögenburgh upside-down looking for Natsuko and friends,” the fox said.

Daisy exhaled. She really did need to submit that halloween costume preference form so they didn’t try to stick her in something too skimpy again. And she could only hope that things would blow over before the gardening special event came up.

“And what do the Yishang make of that lil’ fiasco?” she asked.

“This fox has been sworn to secrecy, I’m afraid,” Zhidao said.

She huffed. “Ugh! You’re real good at pretending like you’ve got useful information without ever actually having any.”

“Oh c’mon, Daisy! You know I’m on the Yishang’s side first and foremost. So are you, so really, you already have everything you need to know!”

Zhidao said this so cheerily that there was no way not to read it as a polite request to stop pressing him for information. Of course, Daisy did consider herself on the side of the Yishang. She would be insane not to, in her position. She just wished they would clue her in on what that involved sometimes without waiting until the absolute last minute. It made the whole “helping Natsuko and the others” thing difficult.

Ahead of Daisy was the city of Ariunuul, a city of tents that wound around a large hill jutting from the steppes. At its top was a sacred grove and a giant scorched birch tree where the Golden Khan resided. Compared to the other important city in the Sibe-lands, Medingrad, it looked like a refugee camp, but it was currently the nexus of the fight against the Entropic Axis who had infected the pine forests north of the city. It was there she would find her teammates: Ailing, Jouchi, and Boulanger.

Or at least some of them. Probably. Hopefully.

Ariunuul was not nearly as busy as it had been when the northern pine forests of Sibe-Lands had just been de-Misted. For a couple of months it swarmed with as many Heroes as could still make it this far. About the Top 40 and up. But now that the dungeons had all been cleared, shrines uncovered, loot collected, monsters killed, and quests completed, it was in a holding pattern where only the most dedicated Heroes were still around while the others fled to their region of personal preference (mostly Deco-Imperia with its extravagant amenities or Cascadia for those looking for more quietude).

Boulanger would be here though. Daisy could smell smoke in the air. He was already at the level cap, but in his own words, “qualitative experience needs to be as sharp as quantitative experience.” Personally, she preferred to go traipsing around on pie-baking quests during her downtime (even when they were thrust upon her by the Yishang), but she was lately coming around to the wisdom behind keeping one’s nose to the grindstone and out of funny business with killer bottles.

The dour, leather-faced Non-Heroes in fur armor parted for Daisy’s bright pink peacoat and white fur hat which made her stand out like a highlighter in a garbage can. The Sibe-Landers attacked outsiders on sight, and they were tough. Stronger than most Heroes when attacking in groups, even. They presented a hard barrier between Heroes strong enough to clear Cascadia—roughly the Top 60—and those who were stronger.

They stepped aside for Daisy because they respected strength.

“I’m surprised you didn’t fly Peng all the way here,” Zhidao said, stretching on his flying cloud as they passed through streets of circular ger tents that ringed the slopes of the central hill. The tents’ streaks of crimson and cerulean were the only chromatic companions to Daisy’s fuschia amongst the brown, gray, and black of the Sibe-Lander palette.

“Sometimes a girl likes to get her boots muddy. It’s fun to squish around sometimes,” Daisy replied.

“I s’pose you wouldn’t be back here if you didn’t like to squish around in mud, huh?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Dear Zhidao, surely you aren’t comparing anyone unfairly to mud?”

“No, of course not, Ms. Daisy! I am a polite and honorable fox. I was implying the scenario is a bit muddy. Killer bottles, dangerous papers, mysterious forces. I would’ve told you to back off a while ago if I didn’t know you were the kind of person who likes to get muddy.”

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The comment made Daisy grimace. Pengwu were bound to their cheery playfulness like flowers were bound to a branch, but that didn’t mean both couldn’t have thorns. What Zhidao was referring to was Daisy’s own complicity in a particularly important Special Event back when the Use-Rankings weren’t quite so set-in-stone. There had been a stage drama audition to figure out who of a certain type of Hero—female, bubbly, innocent, wasn’t it always?—was most appealing to Celestials. Far into the “bracket,” Daisy’s competitor took lethal fall damage and couldn’t make the final day of the event.

The heel of Daisy’s leather boots drove a hole through a pile of horse dung as she continued her way up the hill.

“Well, Po-Lin’s a muddy world, Mr. Zhidao, and if you worry about the mud you won’t have anywhere to put your foot down,” she said.

The smell of smoke and salt and roasting fat grew stronger as Daisy neared the summit. Her stomach growled and she made a play at looking embarrassed in front of the half a dozen Heroes that had come out to meet and talk with her and ask about the Card Tournament affair and Use-Number drop and yap yap yap from mouths that weren’t Boulanger’s.

Amid the hounding, Zhidao politely excused himself.

Excusing herself as well, Daisy doubled her pace towards the three-story open-air pagoda constructed as her team’s lodging in Ariunuul. There were equivalent—and much nicer—structures in Cascadia and Deco-Imperia that functioned as her team’s home bases.

On the ground floor of their half-porch, half-living room, Boulanger was hurling tar black flame into logs under a cast-iron wok. Inside the pot were a handful of hot, oily stones surrounding the charred skin of a horse’s stomach into which had been placed cuts of meat and root vegetables. Copious smoke poured out through the open sides of the octagonal pagoda.

Plates upon plates of this dish lay behind Boulanger. Her teammate had a wild tangle of curly black hair and a sharp chin and was swathed in a white wool cloak clasped together with black tassels. His bayoneted musket lay put up on a rack near the lodge’s reading nook. He said nothing to her, because Daisy was the one who had to justify interrupting his concentration.

Here came the part she’d been psyching herself up for.

“Err, Boulanger?”

Gray eyes found her—harsh, violent, and serene as the black flame he was feeding into the logs under the wok, they never failed to prompt a startled reaction. It was like staring up at the night sky and finding something staring back.

“What is it?” he said, his voice a whisper that pulled one’s ears level with it. For its own good, the boiling fat in the pot quieted too.

“I’ve got news about the Use-Number drop. Are the others around?”

He looked around as if intently checking for their other teammates in the creases between the wood planks in the floor and ceiling. “Not here.”

She exhaled.

“But you can tell me what you would have told them. I should hear it first,” he said, reaching into the pot and turning over the horse’s stomach with his bare hand.

“Are you sure we can’t—”

His hand reached out to grasp Daisy’s wrist.

“Yes. I’m sure. Tell me, and I’ll tell them.”

Not once above a whisper. Never above a whisper. He snapped the fingers of his free hand and the black fire roared.

Daisy swallowed. “I was there when Shrike was murdered, and I know how forced dimension jumping got out. I know who invented it: A 1st-gen named Shuixing. I know how she invented it: A bottle with exactly the kind of angular geometry you expected it might entail, found by another 1st-gen named Natsuko. And I know someone else has replicated the bottle’s geometry with Shuixing’s research.”

“That’s…” Boulanger paused, still clutching her wrist. He tapped his chin as if in thought and then let Daisy’s wrist go. “Unfortunate.”

His dead eyes returned to her and urged her to go on without words.

“I don’t know who has the research now. We… that is, Shuixing and her team that I was investigating at Zhidao’s behest, we thought it might be Yuna. I fought whoever it was and they were strong, so I thought it couldn’t be anyone who wasn’t in the Top Te—”

Boulanger stood and slapped Daisy with the force of a pillow. No sting came with it, and it happened so slowly that she felt the sweat and grease and warmth coating his hands of black fire and it could very easily be mistaken for a pat had it come from anyone but Boulanger. But it wasn’t a pat, it was a very, very gentle slap.

“Ignore the numbers. They mean nothing beyond what they mean. One, four, ten, twenty, a hundred. It tells you who the Yishang like and who the Celestials like and nothing more. You forgot that?”

Daisy nodded. He pat her cheek. This time it was a pat.

“Try not to,” he said. “You’re more than that. But you, like the others, go slack when you’re idle. I like you better when you have a job to do.”

“I was only there because Zhidao asked—”

Boulanger closed his eyes so she stopped talking. When he closed his eyes, you had to wait for him to decide what happened next. Daisy wet her dry lips and swallowed back minutes of accumulated mucus and stared straight through the other side of the wooden pagoda to the dark green fur of the distant forest. Bubbling fat and whistling wind were her only companions in the suspended silence.

“You can tell the Yishang no, you understand,” he said.

“I-I—” Daisy croaked.

Boulanger shook his head. “If they need something investigated that badly, they will find someone further down the chain. Don’t let them waste your precious time. You’re still a level behind us, aren’t you? Still 89?”

Daisy nodded.

“Fix that soon.”

“But the dimension jump—”

He raised a single index finger up to her mouth and tapped her lips once, twice, three times. Tap. Tap. Tap.

“Tell me, when I remove my finger, that you have not become an idiot.”

He removed his finger.

“I have not become an idiot,” Daisy said, hand shaking at her sides.

“So you can tell me what I am going to say next before I have to waste an exhalation?”

Her lacquered pink nails clawed at the leather of her riding breeches. “That this is a Yishang matter and that we should leave it to them to deal with.”

Boulanger smiled and returned to cooking. She was expected to leave now. When Boulanger was done speaking, the conversation was over, whether or not she wanted to discuss the matter of protecting the gaggle of obsolete Heroes that she’d grown fond of over the past couple of weeks.

It was a purely selfish wish, and she had expected nothing more than exactly the answer she got, but she’d been counting on Ailing and Jouchi being around to back her up and possibly persuade Boulanger. He was somewhat keener on them than he was Daisy, who he was convinced needed to be kept on a tight leash lest she waste time on one of her many useless hobbies such as poetry and fashion.

She departed the lodge and, spotting a nearby horse, ran over to it to scream angrily into its hide.