Daisy stretched and yawned and num-num-nummed herself awake. She’d had one of those brain-blitzing naps that left her wondering what plane of existence she was on. Her body still had the icky crustiness of a band-aid nap slapped over the gash of sleep deprivation, but she could push through until they were in al-Nuwba and she could sleep in a proper hotel bed.
In the other bed, Shuixing was sitting up reading a book, her arms maneuvering through the tangle of Natsuko’s limbs wrapped around her like she was a body pillow.
“Didja get any sleep?” Daisy whispered.
“Some,” Shui replied, setting the book down.
Midday light glowed on the fringes of torn curtains without piercing inside, suggesting it was about noon. Daisy supposed that was a good sign to start moseying. Daisy shuffled out of bed and Natsuko woke with a start.
“On the third phase—” Natsuko said and then squinted, taking a moment to recognize she was awake.
Daisy raised an eyebrow. “Third phase?”
“She was dreaming about the Scytheworm,” Shuixing explained.
“The Scytheworm has phases?” Daisy asked.
The girls packed their stuff and headed downstairs to pick up the boys. They found Sofiane sprawled face-down in starfish position across the dusty floor with a thin pile of clothes under him like he’d been hit with an attack of narcolepsy while doing laundry. Pechorin was stock-still in corpse position, fingers clasped over his chest. Natsuko nudged Sofiane’s head with her foot.
“Up. Get up! Time to go. I wanna kill that worm today,” she said.
“Today?” Shui said as Sofiane fought a boxing match with Natsuko’s foot to get it to stop kicking him.
“Sure! No sense wasting time, right? Let’s get straight to it.”
“Natsuko, it’s going to be dark by the time we get out to the Temple of the Worm and we’ll be exhausted from flying straight from Shikijima,” Shuixing said, making the fatal mistake of trying to appeal to Natsuko’s reason.
Natsuko shook her head. “Nope. If we wait another day, you and Pechorin will overthink it and get nerves. We gotta do it straight away.”
Shuixing was fairly certain she would not overthink it, and that Natsuko’s fear in that regard had its source closer to home. Having not gotten much of a nap, Shui also did not have much energy to argue, so she set the issue aside until she could have another tilt at changing Natsuko’s mind once they were in al-Nuwba.
While Pechorin was wide awake and ready to go immediately, Sofiane’s wake-up process (as they all knew by now) required at least 5-10 minutes of being incessantly pestered before he got up and packed. The pestering was mandatory. If they left him alone for another half hour, the 5-10 minute timer started as soon as they finally got around to bothering him. It was a tie between him and Natsuko for the honor of having the most annoying sleeping habits.
Once everyone was ready, Daisy pulled Peng out of the ruined cobblestone wall and they hopped aboard. Ordinarily, soaring through the skies eased Daisy’s mind and helped her relax, but an anxiousness had been creeping up on her over the past 24 hours and taken up permanent roost during her nap.
In a moment of passion, Daisy had thrown away everything. Sure, she was still at the top of the Use-Rankings, but only for so long as the Yishang decided she was. She didn’t understand the specifics of it, but she knew they pulled some strings in the background to promote some Heroes to the Celestials over others, entirely unrelated to their stats and usefulness in battle. It wouldn’t be an immediate drop, but if they pulled the plug, her numbers would start to sink.
The question was whether breaking with Boulanger was enough to warrant that. If Daisy wasn’t completing quests and fighting the Entropic Axis, she would fall behind and the Yishang would replace her with someone else. Cunegonde, most likely. They were close in archetype. And the likelihood that she could solo her way through the next round of dungeons and quests and boss monsters was extremely low. Boulanger could, but she couldn’t.
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So what happened next?
She’d thrown her lot in to protect some lower-ranked Heroes, but what if the Yishang came and asked her to betray them? The Yishang was using Natsuko’s team towards some sort of end. That much was clear by the Yishang’s promise of rewards for capturing them. But other than hinting she should poke around Vermögenburgh, the Yishang had more or less left her alone. Was the day coming when some Pengwu would tell her that if she didn’t turn over Natsuko that she could expect to kiss her Use-Ranking good-bye?
Worse still, Daisy didn’t know what she would do in that moment. She wanted to think she wouldn’t betray them, that her principles would compel her to side with them against the Yishang, but every time she thought that, the memory of pushing her rival out of a window popped into her head. Was she still that same Daisy?
She bit her lip. The cold wind slashed at her face and she pulled her scarf up to cover herself. If she was still the same Daisy who had done that, she would hand them over to the Yishang in a heartbeat.
For the rest of the party, the sky overhead was a comfortable mixture of chilly air and the sun’s warmth. Unlike Daisy at the helm facing the wind directly, they were shielded by the alcoves on Peng’s back. Three of the four, everyone but Natsuko, were able to relax in the nice weather and set their minds at ease. Natsuko, however, had her brain running on its highest settings.
It wasn’t enough for her to remember the phases and attacks and movement of the Scytheworm, she had to feel them. She flexed her ankles to simulate jumping over its whipping tail, then the sideward-thrust of her wrists as an imaginary sword plunged itself into the worm’s weak point on its mouth. In a more complex rehearsal of muscle twitches, she went through the motions of using Fire Gale to dodge the Scytheworm’s bite, then thrusting her sword into the ground to slow her momentum and continue the attack. She didn’t have a sword right now, but she could get Sofiane to lend her the emerald sword.
What was the order of the phases again?
Phase one, the Scytheworm emerges, slams the ground, causes sand to fall and knocks any Heroes who hang back on the sandpit wall down onto the terracotta platform. It then writhes and bites and swats with its tail until it takes a quarter of its health as damage.
Phase two, the Scytheworm triggers its earthquake devices and hits them with the undodgeable tremors. It also gains access to its spine missile projectiles. This was the phase they died to most often.
Phase three, the Scytheworm is at half health and triggers another earthquake and writhes faster and harder and fires twice as many spine missiles per barrage. It also gains regenerating armor which makes it harder to deal damage to it.
Phase four, Natsuko didn’t know. She only knew that it activated once the Scytheworm was under the last quarter of its health. The lowest they had gotten was around 33%.
“You ready for this, Pechorin?” Natsuko asked.
He glanced over at her, looking somewhat surprised, then contemplative as he thought up his response. Natsuko didn’t understand why he had to make all their interactions into a thing. Everything was weighty with him. No friendly banter. She was already regretting asking the question.
“I have steeled myself. I am ready for both possibilities: success and death. I give myself over to your command,” Pechorin said.
Natsuko rolled her eyes. “How about you, Shui, you ready?”
“Must we do it today?” Shui asked.
“Pechorin’s ready, I’m ready, we’re just waiting on you, babe.”
“What if our fighting performance suffers due to fatigue from travel?”
“We’ll do that much better to compensate.”
Fatigue. If Natsuko had to sleep on it, she’d toss and turn and end up even more fatigued. It was now or never.
By the time the plains of western Tianzhou turned to sand, the sun was coming down over the horizon and casting shadows over the vast stretches of desert. Visible in the far distance were the train lines which spidered through the desert, linking al-Nuwba City with its satellite colonies along the coast and the tribes in the desert which lay under the Padishah’s influence (in other words, not the evil ones in the service of the Entropic Axis). The Padishah’s palace, a colorful domed building in the center of the city, rose like a sherbet swirl over the barren expanse.
“Do we really have to keep going? I want to stretch my legs and get something to eat,” Sofiane complained.
Natsuko’s response was to say nothing. She was done arguing. As Peng flew past al-Nuwba City towards the deep desert where the Temple of the Worm lay, the last chance to back out passed Natsuko by, and her body finally let on how nervous it was. Butterflies fluttered in her stomach. Past failures projected across her mind’s eye. The memory of traumatic hits her body had taken awoke in sympathetic spasms across time and place.
And it made her excited.