Shuixing’s ears rang. The world spun as she picked herself up off the sand. Her glasses were long gone, adding another layer to the chaos around her. From somewhere on her left came dull thuds like someone banging on a door. Looking in that direction, she saw the large, fuzzy outline of a sandstone wall, trembling from each thud like a dusty subwoofer.

A hand at her shoulder made Shui screech.

“It’s me!” Natsuko yelled through the muted, ringing fishbowl in Shui’s ears. “Glasses!”

Motion occurred in jerky lurches. Shui’s awareness zoomed forward to Natsuko shoving glasses onto her face and then to the world pulling itself into focus. Daisy was holding off a barrage of sonic blasts with not a wall but a lumbering hippopotamus made of sandstone. Sofiane and Pechorin were both flat on their stomachs behind, cringing with each boom.

Shui’s instincts kicked in. Bubble Storm descended from the open sky and popped against her teammates. Everyone but Daisy had taken around 5,000 damage or so, but Daisy, who had been on top of Peng and took a direct hit, had lost ten times that. If Shui, Natsu, and Pech hadn’t been behind Peng, they would have been blown apart in one hit.

“It’s them!” Sofiane screamed in-between booms, though by now they had all arrived at that deduction.

“They’re somewhere in the treelines—” Daisy’s heels dug into the sand as she braced against another earth shaking boom. “—but I don’t know where! I could go after them, but you’d all end up high and dry!”

“Killing ourselves again is an option, all I’m saying,” Natsuko said.

“Not funny, Natsu,” Sofiane said, his emerald sword drawn and ready by his side as he laid down on the sand.

“I wasn’t being funny.”

Shui’s Insight stat was too small for her healing to make much of a dent on Daisy, but she dumped all of her Healing Waters charges into her the moment they replenished. Just as she was halfway to topping Daisy off again, the sand hippo crumbled and Daisy took another direct hit. The crack of the sonic boom was no longer muffled and forced everyone’s head down under a rain of falling sand.

“Daisy, can you get Peng up!?” Sofiane shouted.

“Not while we’re under fire I can’t!” she said.

Another blast was aimed right at her, but Daisy put her superior stats to work. In a blast of speed almost as fast as Sofiane’s Ball Lightning, she exploded forward towards the jungle line, throwing up another bulky sand creature closer to where the explosions were coming from.

Daisy pointed. “The village! Get to the village!”

Sofiane zipped in that direction as the other three stumbled along the sand. Pechorin fired off “suppressive fire” that only managed to turn the foliage into a chopped salad.

Natsuko wished she still had her bottle. She needed that bottle. With that, she and Daisy could set up a Swap combo and she could club their attacker out of existence. But that also would put Daisy at risk being that close, and she didn’t even have her bottle anymore.

Under Daisy’s cover, they made it to the wooden stairs to the village pier.

“What did she want us to do?” Natsuko asked. “That bastard can level the place, can’t they?”

“Hide,” Sofiane replied. “It’ll buy Daisy some time.”

“Where are we supposed to hide!?”

“I don’t know, firecrotch, find somewhere!”

Sofiane sprinted in the direction of the fishermen’s meeting hall, wooden boards thumping as he went. Natsuko looked at Pechorin and Shuixing.

“Is he going to get his damn clothes?”

“Clothes maketh the man,” Pechorin said.

Natsuko slapped her face and was about to follow it up with a remark when another explosion detonated uncomfortably close along the beach.

“Is Daisy gonna be alright?” Shuixing asked.

“She ain’t a pushover. I don’t think they can close the gap with her easily enough to knick her with the dimension-jumping rod,” Natsuko replied.

The three of them made for where Sofiane had run off before another explosion sent them tumbling through the air. The next thing Natsuko knew she was rolling sideways across the boardwalk and her chest felt like the sonic boom had gone off inside it. Pain entirely detached from her critical loss of hit points crackled through her veins and made breathing an exercise in self-imposed agony.

When she propped herself up on one elbow, she saw a ten-foot hole almost thirty yards from where she was lying. There were no signs of Pechorin or Shuixing. On instinct, she checked the Use-Rankings chart and breathed a sigh of relief as she saw the total hadn’t changed. Their attacker must have snuck past Daisy rather than taking her out.

As if her ears had not taken enough abuse already, however, they were assailed yet again by a tiny, child-like voice. “Oof, did I catch you at a bad time?”

“Zhidao? What the hell—!?”

“I was just passing through, but I didn’t know you’d be getting into a fight!”

Natsuko grit her teeth. “Bull! You only show up when you’re meddling with things, you creepy little shit.”

Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

“Hmm, so you wouldn’t want me to meddle with things right now?” he asked with the charming inquisitiveness of a child.

“No! Stay the hell out of our—”

The last part of her sentence was interrupted by a blast somewhere else in the village that turned a house into a splintery shrapnel bomb. She could only hope whoever the target was was alright. Realizing she was in danger but having precious few places to hide on the end of the pier, Natsuko crouched down behind a barrel full of fish and caught her breath.

“Are you sure? Things don’t seem to be going in your favor right now, so meddling in them could only be to your benefit, right?” Zhidao said.

“More like to your benefit! You and the Yishang have an agenda, and unlike Daisy, I’m not gonna be your puppet!”

The Pengwu fox folded his front paws and laid his head across them. Natsuko was convinced she saw a smug grin spread across the fox’s face and it made her skin crawl.

“Everyone has an agenda, Natsu. But sometimes they can align. And besides, if you don’t let me stir the pot a little, your friends could be in terrible mortal danger! I know you like to play the Big Hero that can always pick herself back up and keep going, but that might not be an option if Mr. Big, Dark, and Evil clips ‘em with his stick, right?”

“Mister?”

“Oh, did I say mister? Sorry, that was not very gender-inclusive of me. There’s no reason they couldn’t be Ms. Big, Dark, and Evil.”

Natsuko growled. “The Yishang knows who they are, don’t they?”

To the extent that a fox could shrug, Zhidao did so. “Who knows? The only thing I have on offer is a bit of meddling.”

Two more houses went up in a single concussive boom that echoed out across the ocean. Whether their attacker had found Shui, Pech, and Sofi yet or not, it was only a matter of time before he leveled Kajimata village and picked through the rubble to find them.

“Fine,” Natsuko said, glaring at the noxious little fox. “Meddle.”

Zhidao grinned toothily. “Happy birthday, Natsuko.”

With a wave of his paw, a three-foot tall bottle of wine was conjured directly in front of Natsuko. The first thing she did was check the bottom. There was no mistaking it, the odd intersecting angles on the bunt were the exact same. With the wine still inside, it was a bitch to swing, but it was undeniably capable of forced dimension-jumping. She looked up to say something, but Zhidao was already gone.

With a grunt, Natsuko lugged the 85 pound bottle of wine over her shoulder, gobbled up the gyoza appetizers she had stuffed in her pocket for some extra hp, and darted towards the center of the village. Above, she saw Daisy circling on Peng’s back. That was good. What was not so good was that their attacker was now stalking through the streets, and flagging Daisy down meant her teammates would have to come out of hiding.

“Where are you, you son of a bitch?” Natsuko muttered under her breath, creeping along the edge of a building.

Around a corner Natsuko heard a yelp. She bolted for the source, turning the corner just in time to see Shuixing on the ground trying to crawl away from the black figure readying his rod. As he swung, Natsuko used Swap on Shuixing.

Metal clanged against glass. Natsuko found herself on the ground, buried under the painful downward force of her attacker’s metal rod. She couldn’t see him with a bottle full of dark red wine between them. With no other option, Natsuko kicked out at his kneecap, forcing him to jump away.

The second they were back in the open, Peng’s entire mass slammed down like a meteor, destroying the boardwalk and everything around it. Daisy leapt into a roll and shot to her feet. “That should buy us some time. Let’s find Pech and Sofi!”

The three ran for the Fishermen’s Meeting Hall. Along the way, Natsuko very nearly dimension-jumped Pechorin who stepped out of the shadows of a building he’d been using as camouflage. If there hadn’t been wine slowing down her swing, she might have succeeded. The weight was messing with her muscle memory of how to control the bottle.

This only left Sofiane.

“Y’all grab Sofi, I’ll ready Peng again,” Daisy said, dashing towards the beach.

Natsuko stopped at the threshold of the meeting hall door and looked behind her at the rubble strewn village. Sand and wood chips were still daintily floating to the ground.

“I’m gonna try something,” Natsuko said.

“Something?” Pechorin said.

“Something,” she replied, shooing them inside the hall.

Natsuko spotted a nook formed by the building’s L-shape that placed her out of sight of the entrance and pressed herself behind it with her bottle clutched to her chest. Her pounding heart resonated through the glass and liquid. This would be her first—and hopefully only—time force dimension-jumping someone, but she was ready. It was a disgusting act, but the alternative was that she and her friends would continue living in fear of whoever this sadistic bastard was, and she wasn’t going to allow that. This ended tonight.

Peeking around the corner, she watched the figure pull himself out of the pile of debris, metal rod in hand. He moved slowly and silently in the night like a spreading puddle of tar. She wanted to leap on him right then and there, but she had to see her plan through.

Patience. It went against Natsuko’s very nature, but that’s what she needed now. She just had to imagine there was a tiny Shuixing piloting her body and wait for that creeping puddle of tar to seep into the meeting hall. Eventually, he disappeared around the front of the building.

Now Natsuko was the hunter and he was the prey. As quiet as possible with an 85 pound bottle of wine sloshing around, she approached the front door to the meeting hall. Easing the bottle to a supported batting stance, she entered. Her prey was a single shadow outlined by a burning hearth from further inside the building. She took one step, then a second, three, four, and cocked back for a swing.

Squeak.

Under the combined weight of her foot and the wine bottle, a wooden plank let out a cry of stress. Natsuko swung.

The difference came down to inches. The squeaking plank, the heavier bottle, the lower ceiling, any one factor could have accounted for the difference, but the result was a metal rod between the bottle and its target.

With a loud smacking sound, the rod, struck by the bunt of the bottle, shot through the floor. Natsuko was close enough to the figure now that she could see not only the brass Thalia mask underneath the hood, but a set of strangely familiar blue eyes peering out of the mask. Natsuko blinked and they were gone, teleported away.

“Natsuko!”

She felt Shuixing’s hand around her arm. Somehow, the others had gotten out of the building and circled around to grab her. She numbly let her teammates take her out of the meeting hall and towards Daisy and Peng hovering over the water at the end of the boardwalk.

With a trembling voice, Shuixing asked, “Natsu, did you…”

The implication was obvious enough. Natsuko shook her head.

“He teleported away.”

“W-Well that’s alright, at least you didn’t have to kill anyone. Is everything alright though?”

Natsuko shook her head again.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Pechorin said. “I’m jealous. Very gothic.”

“I think I did,” Natsuko said, her voice thin and quiet. “I think the person attacking us, the one who stole Shui’s papers, is our old teammate Hemiola.”