“So, what next?”

It was Natsuko asking the question. As the team’s most experienced drinker, she was weathering her hangover the best. Pechorin was walking circles in the living room to distract himself from the nausea of two hours of sleep, Daisy was curled up under a blanket on the couch, and Shuixing was on a reclining chair massaging her throbbing temples. Sofiane, meanwhile, was still in his wake-up routine.

No one bothered to answer Natsuko’s question. It was more like a statement of what was in the air. Besides the smell of breakfast cooking, anyway. They could have had food brought up, but as the lead expert on drinking and hangovers, Natsuko liked to guide her wayward flock back to health with a personal touch. Towards that end she was brewing coffee and making shakshuka.

Al-Nuwban food was the last region she had had the chance to perfect. Natsuko had always felt disappointed she wouldn’t get to master other regions’ cuisines. She could do it if she had recipes and ingredients, but if you weren’t foraging ingredients from the region itself, they were prohibitively expensive. 25,000 Ying for three Imperian Clams? Hell no.

Shuixing, to distract herself from her pounding headache, watched Natsuko cook. She had never noticed before, but the cooking process was another Yishang-influenced act which made no causal sense. For one thing, the recipe for Shakshuka was only three things: Tomatoes, eggs, and spices, but the resulting dish very clearly had onions and peppers in it. For another, Natsuko did nothing but put the three ingredients in a pot and pull the pot off at the right time.

Noticing this distracted Shui from her headache, but replaced it with another existential spiral.

“Hey,” Natsuko said in a tone of voice she almost never used: Soft.

Shuixing looked up and found herself at eye level with a bowl of shakshuka.

“Eat. The olive oil will help the hangover.”

Shuixing accepted it but she didn’t feel much like eating. She picked at it, moving the poached egg around in the bowl. Once Natsuko had distributed the other bowls, she circled back around to Shuixing.

“Eat,” she said.

“Natsu, I’m not really hungry…”

“Yeah you are. You’re just stuck in the doom spiral of feeling bad because you haven’t eaten, making you not want to eat, which’ll make you feel bad! Push through and eat, or I’ll have to force it down your throat while making airplane noises.”

Shuixing giggled and used her spoon to slice the egg yolk open, sending runny orange to mix with crimson tomato. Natsuko watched her expectantly. Not wanting to let Natsu down, Shui took a bite. It was tasty. Objectively tasty. But she just did not feel great.

“Thanks, Natsu, but I—”

“Am going to finish the bowl, is what you were going to say?” Natsuko said, walking around behind her friend and rubbing her shoulders. “My dear Shui-shui, perhaps you thought my comment about forcing it down your throat was a joke. Hehehe. It was not. Finish the bowl.”

Shuixing gulped and continued eating. The first five or six bites were hard to get down. Her throat fought against her. But after polishing the bowl off and washing it down with a cup of coffee, she did in fact begin to feel better.

She watched Natsuko perform similar feats on Daisy and Pechorin, the latter of whom was convinced he would throw up if he ate anything, to which Natsuko’s insistent answer was to start with a shot of whiskey and then eat breakfast.

“Hair of the dog, baby! Works like a charm,” Natsuko said.

Pechorin stared at the shot of whiskey in his hand with raw disdain. “I think of myself as more like a wolf.”

“You look like a kicked gods-damned puppy to me, so be a good boy and down it!”

Through some twisted logic that belonged neither to causal logic, nor the alien rules that the Yishang imposed, the “hair of the dog” helped Pechorin scarf down the shakshuka.

“I told you,” Natsuko said, finally sitting down to her own bowl and coffee. “I’m the Queen of Drinking.”

Shuixing gave a small smile and wondered what it would look like if Natsuko turned that same conscientiousness on literally anything else but drinking more.

“Goo~ood morning!” Sofiane said, instantly earning everyone’s ire with his good mood.

“What’s so good about it?” Pechorin asked, grimacing from the black coffee he was forced to drink due to Natsuko’s proximity. Alone, he preferred copious amounts of cream and sugar, but he had an archetype to uphold.

Sofiane sauntered into the room already dressed to face the day. “The sun is shining, the birds would be singing if there were any nearby, and we have the ability to pierce the veil of illusions which has been placed in the eyes of all! I’d say we’re doing pretty good.”

From where she was sitting and swinging her legs on top of a granite counter, Natsuko laughed. “For once, puffball, we’re in agreement.”

The other three looked at the two of them like they were insane. Shuixing considered the possibility that the revelations about the nature of their world had broken Natsuko and Sofiane’s brains.

“Mind sharin’ with the class where y’all’s vim and vigor are comin’ from?” Daisy said, slurring words to avoid aggravating her headache.

Sofiane put on a pot of scalded milk to make himself a café au lait. “The way I see it, we were stuck in the Yishang’s playground before, and we’re still stuck after, but now at least we know we’re stuck. That’s the first step to figuring out what’s really going on. And not only that, we have a window to act in where we’ve got an advantage over every other Hero. Daisy might not be able to defeat Boulanger, but she could steal his weapon, non? I’d say we’re in a better spot now than we were yesterday.”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Shuixing’s mood lightened. She was less concerned with the advantage over other Heroes—that seemed like Sofiane’s preoccupation—but now that she had had her theoretical breakthrough, a thousand experiments and lines of inquiry were open to her which were previously inconceivable. It might even be possible, she supposed, to find an escape from the Yishang’s artificial world. The prospect was simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating.

“That’s all well and good,” Daisy said, “but first thing’s first, we still gotta hunt down Natsuko’s old pal Hemiola. If possible, I’d like to get him to answer a few questions. We won’t get much from the Pengwu, but if your guy went rogue on the Yishang, maybe he’ll be more talkative.”

Natsuko squinted at her. “Daisy, he’s tried to kill us three times now. Pretty sure he’s not gonna wanna talk it out now.”

“W-Well, who knows!” Daisy replied.

Natsuko could tell Daisy was putting on a facsimile of optimism. She was a good actor, but there was anxiety in her words. Daisy had by far the most to lose by these revelations, since out of all of them, the Yishang’s system still worked for her. With Sofiane having subtlety drifted towards the “burn everything down” camp alongside Natsuko, Shuixing, and Pechorin, Daisy alone was still invested in the status quo. Daisy wasn’t a bad person, Natsuko supposed. At least not like some of the other top Heroes. But she was trying to be everything for everyone, and that was a problem when it meant working for a bad system.

Natsuko’s heart skipped a beat as Daisy’s penetrating eyes flicked to her as if guessing every single thought running through her head. The 99% of the time that Daisy was being cute and bubbly could make you forget the 1% of the time she was ruthlessly calculating.

“I know what you’re thinking, Natsu. Which way’s she gonna fall when the chips are down? Am I on the money?”

Natsuko did an awkward version of Daisy’s finger guns back at her. “Um… bingo?”

“Since I like y’all so much, I’ll tell it to ya straight: I don’t know. I’ve got both things in me: A need to be a good person, and a need to win. Both can make me do some pretty crazy things. As for which way I’ll fall in the moment?” Daisy shrugged. “No way to tell. Maybe it’s a roll on the dice.”

Pechorin leaned against the wall and folded his arms. “That does not inspire confidence.”

Daisy pulled her blanket up to her neck. “I said what I said cuz I meant it. It’s the gods’ honest truth and y’all deserve to know it.”

“B-But Daisy, you’ve supported us so much so far!” Shuixing said, trying to sound hopeful. “The hotel rooms a-and saving us from Yuna and Hemiola…”

Daisy exhaled. “Ya know, I wasn’t gonna mention this, but there was at least a day up in the Sibe-Lands where I wasn’t gonna come back for y’all. I was gonna stay up there and pretend I never knew ya.”

“But you didn’t,” Natsuko said, returning Daisy’s intense gaze..

“No, I did, and then I changed my mind. I’ve done plenty of bad things to get where I am. Everyone in the Top Ten has. I know what’s inside me, Natsu. That fight y’all had last night? With the mid-rankers? If I’d been there, I wouldn’t’ve let them escape with the knowledge of weapon-thievin’.”

Sofiane shrugged. “So we didn’t force them to jump out of a building, big deal.”

“No,” Daisy shook her head. “I mean I would’ve used the bottle.”

Silence followed her statement. All of them wanted to contradict her, but the look on Daisy’s face was deadly serious.

“I could take that bottle from ya super easy, Natsu. Ya know that, right?”

Natsuko swallowed and nodded.

“Ya know why I don’t?”

“Why?”

“Cuz if I had it in my hands, I’d probably use it. That’s why it’s better in your hands. That’s a decision that the good part of me made and I’m sticking to it.”

With nothing else to say, everyone went to the kitchen to put their bowls and mugs in the sink. Pechorin grabbed Daisy’s for her out of respect for the exquisitely brooding backstory drop.

“Any ideas how we find Hemiola?” Sofiane said, finally breaking the awkward silence. “Oh, and follow up, how are we planning to pin down someone who can teleport and is powerful enough to go toe-to-toe with Daisy?”

“Finding him will be easy,” Pechorin said. “We wait right here and he’ll come. It just may take a while.”

“And it gives him the drop on us,” Natsuko said as she sipped her third cup of coffee. Her leg was bouncing fast enough to be on the threshold of “vibrating” territory.

“If we could think of a way to find him first that would be preferable,” Daisy added.

“And when we catch him?” Sofiane said.

“Since none of our abilities will do the trick,” Shuixing said, “I suspect we will need to capitalize on our newfound knowledge in some way.”

“Like how?”

Shuixing thought for a moment. There were the two strange dungeons they had gone to, each with their own different properties. It was likely there were more, and she wondered if one such dungeon might have the anomalous property of preventing the use of Abilities. She said as much to the rest.

Natsuko snapped her fingers. “Oh! Pech! Don’t you have that—”

“The Tome of the Unnatural and Cursed, a compendium of all the myriad physical anomalies that populate Po-Lin,” Pechorin proudly announced.

The last time he’d brought up the “tome,” it had seemed like a mild curiosity to the rest of them which just so happened to have a useful entry about the anomalous version of the Dungeon of Stars. It hadn’t stood out even to Shuixing at the time. This time around, everyone was interested in its contents.

“Do you have it on you?” Sofiane asked.

Pechorin shook his head. “I sold it a few months ago to buy some food.”

“What!? You bonehead!” Natsuko said.

“Mad he didn’t use it to buy booze instead, firecrotch?” Sofiane said.

Natsuko threw a coffee mug at Sofiane who Perfect Parried it out of the air. Daisy shuffled around and her legs finally emerged from under her blanket and planted themselves on the ground.

“That’s remarkably cheap for what the Tome offers,” Daisy said.

“I do what I have to do to survive,” Pechorin said. “The lowest position on the Use-Rankings doesn’t get anything in their weekly payment. The Yishang probably intended it as a tactic to scare Heroes into fighting to survive even when they were at the bottom of the rankings. They failed to consider that a cowboy would come along who could ride the wave.”

Sofiane whistled. “Damn. Mixed metaphors aside, that’s honestly kind of impressive, Pechorin. You’ve lived off of no salary for years?”

Pechorin nodded.

“Oh no!” Shuixing said, “Pech, if you’d said something I could’ve gotten you somewhere to stay in the Mage’s College. You didn’t have to do that!”

He shook his head. “Natsuko and I were at odds. It wouldn’t have worked out. Better to live off the land than bother you two in her own home.”

Natsuko refused to meet his gaze. “I would’ve let you stay if you said you were homeless, idiot.”

“Heartwarming,” Sofiane said. “Pech, who’d you sell the book to? Daisy should be able to buy it back.”

“The Vermögenburgh general store,” he said.

The mention of home made Natsuko excited. “Great. Let’s go shake down Lawrence.”

Pechorin held up his hand. “We can’t. I tried to buy it back from him with my split of the money we made from the Cursed Demon’s Eye, and the shopkeeper told me he’d just sold it.”

“Did he say who he sold it to?” Natsuko asked. Then, all of a sudden, a memory resurfaced.. “Oh crap. Please tell me it isn’t bound in black leather.”

“It is,” Pechorin replied.

“Fuck.” Natsuko rubbed her temples. “Koyon has it.”