Gomiko shivered as she and Sofiane walked along the beach. There wasn’t much of a difference between night and day temperatures on Shikijima, but it was still mid-autumn and the sea breezes could bite hard.
“Cold?” Sofiane asked, forcing himself not to shiver through willpower.
“Yeah. I should’ve packed my cold-weather outfit,” she said.
Gomiko’s default outfit consisted of the baggy, black-and-white, open-sided trousers and sleeveless tunic and sandals that were as generically “female ninja” as you could possibly get. Sofiane was confident there were at least two other Heroes with identical archetypes. Only one of the two, Kazemi, had a somewhat high Use-Ranking. The other one was irrelevant, same as Gomiko.
Gomiko cleared her throat. “D-Do you mind if I…”
Sofiane felt guilty as he realized he was back to his habit of thinking about Use-Rankings.
“Oh! My apologies, mon cheri, I have failed in my duty to offer first!”
He slipped his arm around Gomiko’s waist and the two of them shared body heat as they walked. Both being equally short, the scheme worked quite well. Or maybe it was just the heat rushing to Sofiane’s cheeks. He’d initially flirted with her as a joke and, without his noticing, it had become less of a joke.
Rather than walking straight, they teetered hither and thither, both tipsy on plum rum punch. At one point, Gomiko teetered a little too far thither and ended up falling into the surf, bringing Sofiane along with her.
“Ahahah gods! That’s so co~old!” Gomiko said.
Sofiane’s teeth chattered as he laughed along with her. “We survived Xiuquan and now you’re gonna kill us with hypothermia!”
She splashed him with frigid sea water. “You got me drunk, you womanizing dandy, this is your fault!”
I did not!” Sofiane said, splashing her back. “Daisy got you drunk and I did nothing to discourage her!”
The two of them continued the silly spat until the water got too cold for them to handle and they made a mad dash back towards Kajimata Village to get their clothes over a brazier. Both of them were thinking—and wondering if the other was thinking—about what that would entail, but there wasn’t a whole lot of privacy in the fishy-smelling barracks they were sharing with their teammates, so there was no chance of anything too outrageous.
They found the fisherman’s hall empty, their teammates presumably still at the restaurant. At the center of the hall was a large hearth set into the floor with a firepit in the middle and a kettle hanging from a large spit. The hearth was cold and there was no firewood to be seen.
“Shoot. For once, firecrotch could actually be helpful…” Sofiane muttered.
“It’s kind of rude to call your own teammate that, isn’t it?” Gomiko said, rubbing her arms to warm up.
“It’s usually her starting it. She’s as abrasive as sand,” Sofiane replied as he rifled through some storage cabinets hoping the fishermen had left something to start a fire with.
“Harald can be abrasive too… and so could— can Margaret… but I’ve found if you pay attention, you can mediate things before they turn into an argument,” Gomiko said.
Sofiane turned from a cabinet full of fishing nets. “That works if your teammates are sane. All of mine—” he realized Xiuquan’s team had stopped being “his” and Natsuko’s team had started, “—are a little, uh, damaged, on account of being forgotten Heroes for so long.”
Gomiko put her hands on her hips and puckered her lips. “So am I, you know! That wasn’t a problem a moment ago.”
“No! No, I… I don’t mean there’s anything wrong with them, I just mean…”
He wasn’t sure what he meant. Well, other than exactly what he said, but he was trying to walk that back. Gomiko said nothing as she came over to help him look through the cabinets. After a few doors, she found a compartment full of firewood, a box of sawdust, and a couple pieces of well-chipped flint. She handed him the flint while she set up the fire.
The two rocks hung awkwardly in his outstretched hands. “I’m sorry, Gomi.”
She raised an eyebrow and chuckled. “I’m already Gomi? Boy, you’re moving fast. At least take me on a proper date first before you go making up a pet name. Besides, I don’t really care. It’s your teammates you oughta apologize to.”
“Yeah,” Sofiane said. “I guess so. Not like I’m in a different situation from them now.”
“Aw, see? And Faisal and Harald are gonna try and tell me I can’t fix you.”
“If Harald says that to my face, I’ll fix him,” he replied.
“You’re cute when you’re insecure, Sofi. Now help me start this fire before I freeze myself into a 4am wake-up.”
It took several attempts with the unfamiliar tools, but Sofiane and Gomiko eventually got the fire going and stripped down to their underwear to hang their sea-wet clothes on the spit. Once done, they sat down in front of the fire with their hands and feet facing it and toasted themselves to the sound of crackling wood.
“You were the second generation of Heroes, right?” Sofiane asked.
“Yeah,” Gomiko said. “The four of us were summoned to be part of a Tianzhou questline, but it was a while before we overtook Natsuko’s team. We weren’t so strong we could blitz through a region in a day like the Heroes summoned now can do. I actually remember the days when Natsuko was #1. I think I only ever topped out at #9.”
It felt like ancient history to Sofiane. By the time he’d even been summoned, Natsuko was nothing but a meaningless name at the bottom of the Use-Rankings. He couldn’t imagine her in Boulanger’s position. Shuixing and Pechorin kept saying she used to be a peppy go-getter, but somehow that was even harder to imagine than her at the #1 spot.
“How far did you end up making it?” Sofiane asked.
“Farther than Natsuko’s team did. We completed the al-Nuwba questlines. But we were already past our peak at that point. We struggled through al-Nuwba. I’m talking four hours of sleep a night because we spent 16 hours doing nothing but grinding experience to hit the level 50 cap. And then, of course, Deco Imperia wiped the floor with us. We didn’t even make it to New Imperia before getting throttled by basic mobs.”
“Damn, that sucks,” Sofiane said, declining to mention that his former team had run through al-Nuwba in a weekend.
“It is what it is,” Gomiko said, hooking her arm around his and leaning into his shoulder.
Sofiane’s old habits reared their ugly head once more and compelled him to take a look at Gomiko’s current placement on the Use-Rankings. He scrolled down to the bottom starting with “Pechorin” and working his way up until he found her name. However, something felt off as he scrolled. He wondered if it was guilt about comparing numbers again, but somehow he didn’t think that was it. It was something with the numbers themselves and—
Sofiane gasped. “Oh fuck.”
“What is it?”
“The Use-Ranking total. It went down again.”
Gomiko’s hand went to her mouth. Sofiane flicked through the rankings, this time starting from the top. Nothing was out of order there, but then something compelled him to check the Heroes he knew were nearby, starting with Xiuquan, Gula Asu, Koyon, and… Baran was missing. Sofiane checked ten spots on either side of where he knew his former teammate ought to be, and then checked again, but Baran’s name was gone.
“It was Baran,” Sofiane said flatly.
“The wind guy that got re-summoned with us!?” Gomiko said.
Sofiane nodded. “Which means…”
“The mysterious attacker…”
Was nearby. One island away, as of whenever Baran had been killed. But Sofiane didn’t know when it had occurred.
He grabbed Gomiko by the shoulders. “Did you look at the Use-Rankings at all tonight?”
She shook her head, meeting his frightened expression with her own.
“Gods… I wasn’t looking either. Baran could’ve been killed hours ago, and if that’s the case—”
Against the firelight, the dark windows were an opaque black. Outside, the wind from the water caused the fishermen’s hall to creak and sway. Sofiane shuddered. Gomiko held onto his arm. Whatever was left of their tipsiness was replaced with cold sobriety.
“The others probably haven’t noticed either,” he said, his voice half-whispering. “At least we’ll have a warning if someone pops up in your smell radius, right?”
Gomiko shook her head. “That time in the anomalous dungeon… they didn’t smell like anything. They didn’t register as a Hero to me.”
“M-Maybe it was because of the dungeon?”
“I could smell you all just fine then.”
Sofiane’s heart pounded.The last time he’d fought the black figure, they had thrown him around like a chew toy, and that was with his rapier in hand. He wasn’t any stronger now, even with Xiuquan’s sword.
“If they did want to kill us, they wouldn’t need to set a trap. We’d already be dead right now,” Sofiane said. “I say we book it to Taki’s.”
Gomiko gave a firm nod.
A couple minutes later, an out-of-breath Sofiane and Gomiko threw the doors to Taki’s Sushi open with a loud bang. Every eye in the restaurant was on them, but before they could get their news out, Natsuko and Daisy burst out laughing. Shuixing covered a giggle with her hands. Harald and Faisal looked scandalized. Pechorin was doing an excellent performance of someone who was too cool to laugh.
“Oh gods,” Natsuko said, wiping a tear from her eye, “did you all lose something on the beach?”
Harald scoffed. “A walk on the beach, huh?”
Sofiane looked baffled. “What are you all— oh gods-dammit.”
The news had been critical enough that he and Gomiko had forgotten to take their clothes with them. Gomiko buried her face in her hands.
“Forget about that, check the Use-Rankings!” Sofiane said.
The Non-Heroes had no idea what was going on, but knew Hero business was usually a bad thing and started abandoning their tables with piles of Ying left as payment. Taki himself halted halfway through plating a salmon roll and headed for the “Closed” sign.
Shuixing was the first to figure out what had happened. Her breath hitched.
“Someone else was killed…”
“It gets worse,” Sofiane said, charging past the abandoned tables. “It was Baran.”
The change was immediate. Muscles stiffened and alcohol-reddened faces turned pale. Even Daisy, the only one of them who had been a match for their mystery assailant, looked frightened. Unlike the first time they fought, she was now one glancing blow away from being thrown through the ground, same as anyone else.
“Did this just happen?” Daisy asked.
“We don’t know,” Gomiko replied. “Sofi only just noticed.”
Despite the danger they were in, Shuixing found the use of Sofiane’s nickname oddly discomforting, along with the question of what exactly the two were doing in their underwear in the first place.
“We need to leave,” Harald said. “Tonight.”
He and Faisal stood up as the latter unfurled his whip.
“It might be best,” Faisal said, “if we went our separate ways at this juncture. I hate to be self-interested, but I would like to point out that this figure has been chasing you all, not us. For our own safety, I think this might be best.”
Straight man archetype indeed, Sofiane thought.
Gomiko protested. “Wait, Faisal! We only just—”
“You can postpone your little fling until after there isn’t a murderer on the loose,” Harald said. “Let’s get your clothes and go.”
The two of them dragged their teammate out of the restaurant through a backdoor. Sofiane gave a small bow and blew her a kiss as they departed. Once they were gone, Daisy dropped a giant bag of Ying on the table still full of food and drink. Natsuko made sure to consolidate the rest of the plum rum punch into one jug and took it with her.
“Seriously?” Sofiane said to her.
“These are dire circumstances, “Sofi”,” Natsuko said, imitating Gomiko’s cadence. “And dire circumstances call for alcohol.”
Sofiane threw up his hands and looked around at the others for support, but Shui and Pechorin were already at the front door, scanning for any signs of mysterious attackers, and Daisy was packing up her Ying purse.
“Guess we’re back on Peng again,” Daisy said with a sigh. “My thighs are going to look like boiled leather by the time I finally get some proper rest!”
Daisy led them out of the restaurant and towards the beach and raised a block of sandstone out of it in the shape of her trademark bird. While she did that, the rest of them watched the jungle, waiting in suspense for it to spit out their deadly pursuer.
“Do you think we have time to go back and get my clothes?” Sofiane asked.
“What!? Dude, no, you already travel with like eight changes of clothes!” Natsuko said.
“Yeah, but I really liked that qipao! That was a Master Sima original! Can we at least yell at some fishermen to set it aside for me?” Sofiane asked.
Daisy was already on Peng’s back as the others tried to convince Sofiane to give up the outfit. And as Shuixing moved around behind the stone bird to add her own voice to the effort, a chest-rattling boom knocked them to the ground.
Statistics:
NATSUKO
Level: 48
EXP To Level:
513,202
Class: Jack
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Fire Elemental
HP: (1,001 | 8,700)
STATS
Force: 101
Vitality: 121
Finesse: 51
Cognition: 37
Insight: 83
ABILITIES
PASSIVE:
Hothead —
Deal 50% more fire elemental damage while under half health
ACTIVE:
Jack of All Trades —
Every two levels, Jack learn an ability belonging to another class. These can be used once per day.
ELEMENTAL:
Fire Gale —
Produces a burst of fire from its user's limbs dealing moderate fire elemental damage and setting target ablaze
ACTIVE:
Fuel Injection —
Parry an elemental attack and regain 10% of the damage that would be dealt as HP and halve all current cooldowns.
DESPERATION ART:
Spontaneous Combustion — Coats the user in a wreath of flames and deals heavy fire damage centered on the user who loses half their health.
USAGE STATISTICS
USE-RANKING
#186/187
USE-NUMBER:
12,921 Emanations
ART NUMBER:
7,067
ERO-ART NUMBER:
4,747
FIC NUMBER:
17,022
Shuixing He
Level: 44
EXP To Level:
240,500
Class: Medico-Mage
Water Elemental
HP: (1,989 | 5,929)
STATS
Force: 22
Vitality: 62
Finesse: 72
Cognition: 160
Insight: 85
ABILITIES
PASSIVE:
Mental Mending — Add Cognition stat to any elemental abilities which heal or cure statuses.
ACTIVE:
Light of Hope — Cast a beam of light that deals significant unmitigated damage to undead enemies
ELEMENTAL:
Healing Waters — Passively store charges over time which can be used to heal HP proportional to Insight.
ELEMENTAL:
Ablutions — Use a charge of Healing Waters to cure status effects.
DESPERATION ART:
Bubble Storm — Produces a field of bubbles which protect and heal teammates and harm and slow enemies.
USAGE STATISTICS
USE-RANKING
#182/187
USE-NUMBER:
22,060 Emanations
ART NUMBER:
5,464
ERO-ART NUMBER:
2,112
FIC NUMBER:
18,218
Sofiane de la Nuit
Level: 71
EXP To Level:
2,004,699
Class: Duelist
Lightning Elemental
HP: (55,809 | 55,809)
STATS
Force: 324
Vitality: 534
Finesse: 697
Cognition: 171
Insight: 402
ABILITIES
PASSIVE:
En Garde — Successful parries increase crit chance on the next attack by 100%. Any overflow over regular crit chance is converted into bonus damage.
ACTIVE:
Perfect Parry — Briefly enter a stance in which the user automatically parries any damage in all directions.
ELEMENTAL:
Coup De Grace — Aims a precise strike at the target’s vitals and deals massive lightning damage to them on a successful hit. If this drops the target below half-health, it kills them instantly.
ELEMENTAL:
Ball Lightning — Turns the user into a ball of lightning and zips a short distance, dealing damage along the way.
DESPERATION ART:
Overcharge — For a brief period, all abilities have no cooldown and teammates’ attacks deal bonus Lightning damage and stun enemies.
USAGE STATISTICS
USE-RANKING
#38/187
USE-NUMBER:
2,399,202 Emanations
ART NUMBER:
11,266
ERO-ART NUMBER:
15,751
FIC NUMBER:
45,166
Pechorin the Gunslinger
Level: 47
EXP To Level:
126,005
Class: Gunslinger
Metal Elemental
HP: (3,678 | 7,539)
STATS
Force: 115
Vitality: 97
Finesse: 97
Cognition: 73
Insight: 4
ABILITIES
PASSIVE:
Headhunter — Each attack on enemy weak points reduces skill cooldowns by 1s.
PASSIVE:
Magnificent Seventh — Deal 200% damage while below 25% health and if you die, fully heal nearest ally.
ELEMENTAL:
Flak Cannon — Fires exploding shots in every direction which deal light Metal elemental damage and inflict the “conductive” status effect.
ACTIVE:
Vampiric Bullet — Fires an extra powerful shot which deals physical damage and heals for 33% of damage dealt.
DESPERATION ART:
Concentrated Fire — Attack speed quadruples and if target enemy dies, automatically lock on to the next.
USAGE STATISTICS
USE-RANKING
#187/187
USE-NUMBER:
4,005 Emanations
ART NUMBER:
467
ERO-ART NUMBER:
68
FIC NUMBER:
8,073
Daisy Corduroy
Level: 89
EXP To Level:
4,331,779
Class: Summoner
Earth Elemental
HP: (103,667 | 155,872)
STATS
Force: 2,948
Vitality: 2,745
Finesse: 1,730
Cognition: 1,559
Insight: 3,318
ABILITIES
PASSIVE:
Fashionista — Sacrificed accessories and armor give +25% bonus experience to the merged item.
ELEMENTAL:
Terraform — Summon or sculpt minerals into desired form. Maximum volume is determined by Insight.
ELEMENTAL:
Golem Creation — Imbue Terraformed minerals with consciousness corresponding to the animal they are shaped as.
PASSIVE ELEMENTAL:
Granite Sentinel — Teammates within a kilometer of the user take less physical damage proportional to Insight and cannot be critically hit.
DESPERATION ART:
Tectonic Drift — Rearrange the surface of a large area, causing earthquakes, fissures, and rockslides dealing massive physical and elemental damage with each terrain feature an enemy collides with.
USAGE STATISTICS
USE-RANKING
#4/187
USE-NUMBER:
7,934,277 Emanations
ART NUMBER:
27,852
ERO-ART NUMBER:
34,144
FIC NUMBER:
50,076