“How did Hemiola know!?” Sofiane said.
The five of them were standing in a circle outside Khalid’s tent. Without anything else to go on, they had to accept the possibility that the mad hermit Nuwas had been dimension-jumped out of existence.
“What do we make of the timeline?” Pechorin asked. “Two weeks places Hemiola here immediately after our encounter with him in the Dungeon of Stars. He must’ve beelined it straight here.”
“He come here for the same reason we did, d’ya think?” Daisy asked.
“Considering the only two things that can stop him are FDJ weapons or an anomalous dungeon, assassinating Nuwas would be a rational move on his part,” Shuixing said.
Natsuko sucked air through her teeth. “Shit. And there aren’t any other Tomes of the Bladee-blah in existence?”
“There are,” Pechorin said, “but I have no idea where we would find one. The only one whose location is confirmed is Koyon’s copy.”
“Piss. Shit. Dick. Ass,” Natsuko opined.
Pechorin tapped his chin in thought. He would have stroked some facial hair if male Heroes were allowed to have any (apparently a big no-no for the Celestials). Something Khalid had said stuck out to him.
“He was staying…” Pechorin said, folding his arms and lowering his voice in order to create an atmosphere of mystery. “Khalid said he was staying in the hills, which means he must have had a base to return to.”
Daisy’s eyes lit up and she gave him a peck on the cheek. “Mwah! Pech you’re a gosh dang genius!”
“It wasn’t that big of a leap,” Natsuko mumbled, finding something other than Daisy and Pechorin to look at. Daisy and her overreactions could be incredibly annoying sometimes.
“Right, so… let’s start scouring the hills?” Sofiane said, trying to skate over the interaction.
He wasn’t sure what was making everyone act so differently. With Natsuko he could chalk it up to the power trip of making Heroes a hundred ranks above her look like incompetent morons, but then there was Shuixing the other night, and now Daisy. Were the situation less dire, he would be all for exploiting whatever was in the air in al-Nuwba to make himself a harem, but right now it felt like things were coming off the rails. What if Shuixing and Daisy were going mad from the revelation of the Yishang’s power?
Sofiane looked at Pechorin who was looking back at him with a confused expression like he was trying to make sense of the same thing. Sofiane gave him a shrug in solidarity.
Hopping on Peng again, they spent the next hour or so flying up and down the line of hills that shielded Jann from the desert. Despite several trips back-and-forth, they spotted no collapsed tents, burnt fires, or scattered supplies to suggest anyone had been camping in the hills. Exasperated, Daisy landed on the tallest hill.
“Ugh!” she said, kicking a bush. “There’s no way he was sleeping out in the open, is there? That’d be crazy!”
Everyone stared at the surrounding hills in helpless silence before Natsuko broke the silence.
“Hehehe. Crazy, huh? I have crazy in a bottle,” she said.
Natsuko popped the cork on her giant wine bottle and heaved it over her head with both hands. She chugged the waterfall of purple liquid like a parched man in the desert in a quantity that could have been a smaller-sized bottle on its own.
Sofiane watched with something between admiration and repulsion. “Natsu, what are you—”
Natsuko held one hand up to tell him to hush before guzzling down a few more gulps. Wine began to overrun and trickle down her chin and neck. With a hefty sigh, she tipped the bottle upright and wiped the spilled wine from her mouth with the back of her first.
“Ahh! Okay, lemme explain,” Natsuko said.
“You have to be crazy to think like a crazy person,” Pechorin said, finishing her logic.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
She snapped her fingers then loudly burped. “What he said.”
Sofiane just shook his head. He didn’t know why Natsuko even bothered giving her drinking habit a pretext. He knew she’d been dying to do that anyway.
As the noonday sun descended, the five members of Team Natsuko fanned—or stumbled—out to search for any signs of habitation. Sofiane searched anywhere with shade from the harsh sun, Pechorin searched exposed spots that would’ve provided views of the starry sky at night, Shuixing checked easily-defensible areas with good sightlines, and Daisy continued to search by air. Natsuko, however, wandered down the hills and out into the desert, drunk and dehydrated.
After a small hike, she fell face first into the sand. How unusual, Natsuko thought: Being drunk really was not fun right now. Her body felt… not great. She was covered in sand and sweat, and the existential crisis that she’d put on the backburner was making its way back to the front burners against her will.
Panting with a mouth full of sour, curdled wine, Natsuko turned herself face up and stared into the sun. What was she doing here? What did she need to do to feel right again? In answer, she grabbed a fistful of sand, raised it over her head, and dropped it on her face. Dark circles ringed her vision, black like oil.
“Pech?”
It took her a moment to realize it came from her own throat. The fuzzy dark circles expanded. Did he wander through the desert seeing these dark circles every day? Did who wander? Pechorin. When he was dimension-jumped by the Shikijiman Empress he…
No. Why would there be something below the sand? There were no dungeons out this way at all. The Western edge of Po-Lin was almost barren. There was nothing… But—
Natsuko gasped and shuddered as she was drenched in freezing cold water. Her arms clutched around herself as she shivered.
“Brr! Sh-Shui?”
“Natsuko, what the heck were you doing!? You could’ve died!”
Shui bonked her friend repeatedly on the head in reprimand. Natsuko rocked back and forth with the impacts while stared off into space. The other three watched her with concern as though she’d gone insane. Then the lights flicked back on.
Natsuko grabbed Shuixing’s arm before she could bonk her again. “Wait! Shui! I need you to dimension-jump me through the hills!”
This did nothing to help her beat the insanity allegations. She slapped around in the sand. At some point, Pechorin had apparently confiscated her bottle.
“L-Let’s get you inside and out of the sun, o-okay?” Shui said, helping her up.
“Listen, I’m not crazy. I think I know where Nuwas might be, but I need to go to that weird in-between space when you’re in the middle of a dimension jump to be sure,” Natsuko said.
They all knew what she was talking about. The dark void where the other planes became flashing bits of jagged geometry.
Shui’s glasses slid down her nose and her cerulean bob swished side-to-side with the force of her shaking head. “Natsuko, no! I-I— I won’t—”
Natsuko grabbed her friend's arms. “I know you know the math. You’ve been doing it for years. You’re a genius, Shui! Really! I don’t doubt for a single second you’ll get me to the other side, safe and sound.”
Shuixing opened her mouth like she wanted to protest, but the force of Natsuko’s eyes shut it. The thought of making a dimension-jumping mistake horrified her like nothing ever had. Not even the truth about the Yishang’s playground.
Natsuko squeezed her arms again. “Have the faith in yourself that I have in you, okay?”
Shuixing swallowed and nodded. She held her hand out for the bottle and Pechorin handed it to her. It was heavier than she expected. She had no idea how Natsuko lugged it around all day. She didn’t feel confident using it on Natsuko until she had test-swung it for almost ten minutes and practiced the trajectory on a mango Natsuko had smuggled out of Shikijima.
“It’s a matter of momentum,” Shuixing explained, her voice shaking with nervousness almost as bad as her sweating hand. “The mango made it to the other side because it was going fast enough along the X-axis to make it to the other side of the hill before a constant gravity could pull it below the exit plane. If you and Sofiane recall, we required upward momentum when we were dimension-jumping along the Y-axis in the abandoned dungeon.”
Natsuko and the others nodded along like they understood what Shuixing was talking about.
“Lemme know when you’re ready,” Natsuko said, wobbling for a second as she lined up with a steeper part of the hill. She was definitely still drunk. Once in position, she stuck her butt out and wiggled. “Gimme a nice hard swing, Shui. I’ve been a bad girl!”
Shuixing flushed red. “Please take this seriously! If you trip I could accidentally kill you.”
Taking a few more deep breaths, Shuixing wound up the bottle. In her mind she could see the trajectories and vectors of a safe dimension-jump, but it was her body she didn’t trust.
“On my count, use Fire Gale to launch forward,” Shui said.
“Roger captain!”
“Three. Two. One—”
Several things happened at once. Natsuko rocketed forward, Shuixing swung the bottle, and the ground shook. A group of Heroes hiding on one of the hills picked that moment to attack. Shui’s swing was off. So was Natsuko’s Fire Gale. As the bottle collided, Natsuko was shunted diagonally downwards into a black void. Their ears rang with the infernal chunking sound of matter going where it wasn’t supposed to.