Sofiane turned on his heels and walked quickly in the opposite direction of the pajama-destroying forces at play.

“Get those cheap-shotting bastards!” Harbin yelled to his teammates.

Shuixing raised her hands. “H-Hey, I-I don’t want to—”

Shinshuu, who was now standing beside the similarly-named Shuixing after being swapped, raised her katana. A glowing green aura flared around her. All Shui could think to do was flash her with Light of Hope, even though the spell did no damage to non-undead enemies. What it did do, however, was blind and stun her attacker.

Shinshuu yelled and swung anyway, blindly cutting into Shuixing who stumbled backwards from the hit. Shui didn’t think to get out of the way because her mind was reeling from a new discovery: blinding and stunning were different from Blinding and Stunning. The latter were status effects tied to a finite number of abilities, none of which Shuixing had access to. But getting flashed in the face with a blinding white light could surprise and prevent a Hero from seeing, even if it came from an ability that should’ve been useless.

“Haha! Eureka! Pechorin did you— eep!”

Pechorin yanked Shuixing back by the hood of her robes as the enemy Samurai Hero made another wild swing that came close to knicking Shuixing in the head.

“What the hell did she do!?” Harbin asked.

Yinyin summoned Wind Sprites which hovered around her. “They’re cheating!”

Harbin’s question and Yinyin’s reaction seemed silly to Shui, but a moment later she realized the implications of her paradigm-shifting theory: Harbin, Shinshuu, and Yinyin didn’t know they were in the Yishang’s playground, so they could only think in the rigid numbers and codified definitions the Yishang gave them. They could not comprehend that a spell that dealt damage to undead monsters with a flash of light could be useful for the flash of light instead of the damage to undead monsters.

“No such thing as cheating, just winners and losers, numbnuts,” Natsuko said.

Despite her bravado, Natsuko still didn’t have a weapon in hand. Harbin thrust his lance at her, forcing her to dance around like a monkey to not get hit. This worked for a couple seconds before Harbin used an ability that yanked the three of them—and Sofiane all the way down the hall—towards a point in space. A force like getting punched in the stomach slammed into them, dealing damage and marking them with an Aether Element which Yinyin capitalized on by dive-bombing them with kamikaze Wind Sprites and dealing bonus damage from a Vacuum reaction.

Exciting as Shuixing’s theory was, numbers clearly still mattered. Her and her teammates’ special theoretical knowledge was an add-on to, not a replacement for, the physical properties the Yishang had imbued the world with. More powerful Heroes were still more powerful, so they had to be smarter.

Pechorin hopped up once the Vacuum condition wore off and went with a tactic of maximum confusion. He walked directly in front of Shinshuu, towering over the Shikijiman Hero who dropped into a defensive stance in anticipation of Pechorin using some secret Ability on her, a guess which wasn’t too far off.

Ignoring the pain, Pechorin grabbed Shinshuu’s katana by the blade and yanked it out of her hands. Despite the fact that he was now bleeding profusely from his palms, he took no damage since Shinshuu hadn’t technically attacked him. The Hero herself was looking down at her empty hands in disbelief.

“Y-You… took my weapon!?” she said, mouth agape.

Pechorin nodded. “Yeah.”

He chucked the weapon Natsuko’s way. She caught it in time to parry a thrust from Harbin’s spear.

“H-How did he do that? Y-You can’t take someone’s equipped weapon!” Yinyin said, walking backwards with one hand along the wall behind her and the other wielding a tome to summon more Wind Sprites from.

Shuixing decided not to give their opponents the explanation of how, which was, quite simply, “you can steal weapons, actually.” Instead, she thought of trying something else. Combining the two corollaries of her theory—that one can steal equipped weapons and that abilities can be used for more than their stated purpose—she aimed a charge of healing waters at Yinyin’s tome. The waters hit and Yinyin was left holding a bunch of soggy paper.

Yinyin squinted at her. “What the hell!?”

Shuixing’s theory was again proven correct, however, this did not stop the tome from being used as a weapon, so her reward for this was to get dive-bombed by more Wind Sprites.

“Hold on, Shui, lemme deal with this idiot and I’ll come help,” Natsuko said.

Harbin detached the Banner of Innocentus from his lance and slammed it into the ground. Natsuko recognized this immediately as a re-skinned version of the Coup ability, which slowed down her, Shui, and Pech, and sped up and regenerated their opponents. Feeling the tides turning in his favor, Harbin smirked at Natsuko and readied another onslaught of attacks.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Natsuko’s thought processes were not as sophisticated and deductive as Shuixing’s. No thoughts went through her head as she grabbed the top of the banner, placed her boot on the lower portion, and with the added force of Fire Gale, snapped the banner in half, dropping the aura.

“Wha— you can’t— you broke my banner!” he said.

“Yeah, dumbass, this is like the third time in the past thirty seconds we’ve done something like that,” Natsuko said, throwing the banner on the ground and stomping on it. “When are you gonna realize you’re fighting gods?”

“Uhh… I wouldn’t go that far, Natsu,” Shuixing said.

“Kneel before us, peasants,” Natsuko said.

Harbin sneered. “Die!”

He raised his lance over his head and started to glow golden yellow. He was about to activate a Desperation Art. Not knowing what it did or how much damage it could deal, Natsuko did the only thing she could think of, which was to blow herself up with her own Desperation Art.

Spontaneous Combustion blew Harbin through the stone wall and out into open air. For a split second, Natsuko caught a glimpse of pure shock written across his face. A second later, a brilliant white-gold flash illuminated the air outside of the Tanzimat Hotel from his Desperation Art. Then there was a crunching splat as Harbin hit the ground and died instantly.

While Yinyin was distracted by the death of her teammate, Pechorin walked up and grabbed the soggy book from her and threw it out the gaping hole in the wall.

“Surrender,” Pechorin said, pointing his guns at Yinyin and Shinshuu. The sight was a little ridiculous since the guns were the least threatening thing about him. The two raised their hands over their head

“P-P-Please don’t dimension jump us!” Yinyin blubbered, tears beading in her eyes.

Natsuko grabbed the girl by her overly-complicated three-layered collar and shook her. “I told you, we don’t do that! It’s someone else, okay? Get that through your thick skull before you get this sword through it, got it?”

Shinshuu bit her lip. “Can I have my sword back?”

“What?” Natsuko looked down at the katana in her hand. “No. It’s mine now.”

“But you didn’t—”

“Didn’t what, earn it? I don’t care. Might makes right! You and your team were gonna catch us and turn us into the Yishang for a reward, so you ought to know that. Be glad you’re just getting your sword taken.”

Natsuko flicked Shinshuu on the nose to add insult to injury. It wasn’t heroic or gallant, in fact it was quite petty, but these idiots had stopped her from getting her beauty sleep. That, and she was still belligerently drunk.

“W-What are you gonna do with us?” Yinyin said, still trembling despite Natsuko’s insistence they weren’t going to force dimension jump them.

An evil grin spread across Natsuko’s face. “We could have you follow your friend.”

A look of horror swept onto Yinyin and Shinshuu’s faces at the suggestion. Quite apart from stat loss, all Heroes had an ingrained fear of taking fall damage, especially lethal.

“But we’re not going to do that,” Pechorin said.

That was a little too dark, even for him. Brooding and mysterious required the subtle suggestion of a heart of gold buried deep in the darkness that the right person could come along and help him uncover. Forcing other Heroes to jump out the window made the “heart of gold” thing a tough sell.

Before Natsuko could countermand Pechorin, Shuixing locked in the decision.

“What we would appreciate, however, is if you could tell people that we are not the culprits the Yishang is giving out the permanent stat increase for the apprehension of. This is a mistake that is becoming quite vexing. Would you do that for us?” Shuixing asked.

Yinyin and Shinshuu both nodded vigorously. Shuixing waved them out and they bolted past Sofiane and into the elevator.

Once they were gone, Natsuko huffed. “I wasn’t actually gonna make them do it, I just wanted to freak them out a little, y’know?”

“I think they were already fine in that regard,” Sofiane said, strolling back over now that his silk pajamas were safe. “What concerns me is that if they are remotely intelligent—and at a minimum I suspect Yinyin is—they will realize the trick to weapon-stealing is no trick at all. Now we have two sources—Xiuquan’s team and Harbin’s—for the dissemination of this new tactic.”

Shuixing crossed her arms and gazed up at the ceiling. “Do you think it’s possible for them to figure that out without knowing about the nature of the Yishang and the world? The act of de-equipping a weapon is incredibly, even radically simple, but it requires the correct frame of metaphysical reference.”

“We were doing it before you worked your theory out,” Sofiane replied.

“Yes… but we were also in the right state of mind due to our previous experiences in those strange dungeons and proximity to the forced dimension jumping business.”

“I wouldn’t give ourselves too much credit in that regard,” he said. “You don’t need to know the nature of reality to figure out you can grab someone’s weapon. Let’s try to limit how often we need to show off our special knowledge, non?”

He looked particularly at Natsuko while saying this, but she was already in the middle of investigating the stats on her new weapon.

“Oh, gods-dammit,” she said.

Sofiane raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“Bonus to Wood Elemental damage! How did we steal two different weapons and end up with two swords that only boost an Element we don’t have in the party?” she said.

Sofiane shrugged. “C'est la vie. I’m just glad you won’t be begging for my sword now.”

With the fight resolved, the crushing existential dread returned and everyone ran out of desire to continue debating, discussing, and arguing.

The one nice thing was that the penthouse was extremely nice. Low ceilings and warm-colored stone gave it a homier feel than their room in Tianzhou, while the floor and furniture were covered with lurid quilts and silks. All the rooms on both corridors extending from the main living space had a view overlooking the Aleanbar River, and if there was not enough observation space already, a second-story exited out to a grand, semi-circular balcony that ran the length of the suite.

“Hard to believe I used to live in your laboratory closet,” Natsuko muttered to Shuixing as the two of them went to claim their rooms in the left hallway.

Shuixing thought about those times. Living through them had been tough, but with everything that had happened since, and the trouble they were now in, a part of her would have traded this opulent hotel room to have her quiet, quaint little laboratory back. Ironically, what she had produced in that laboratory had been the catalyst for their problems, even if she had been pushed in that direction by the Yishang. Given what she had figured out, she anticipated these problems would get a lot worse in the near future.

With that thought circling her mind, it was a wonder Shuixing got to sleep at all.