A hundred yards or so up the hills, Xiuquan’s team looked down on them. This time around, Xiuquan did not have a cocky grin on his face. Sometime after Baran’s death it had been replaced with a look of unhinged fury. His green hair lay matted with sweat against his face. By his side, Gula gazed at them with her own undisguised hatred. Koyon seemed bored.

“That red-headed bitch lied,” Xiuquan said, conjuring a sword into his hands that looked equally powerful to the one Sofiane stole. “You did have the bottle. You killed Baran with it.”

Xiuquan and his team were still far away, but all had mobility spells. Sofiane put himself between them and Shuixing still holding Natsuko’s bottle and prepared to parry their opening attack.

“We didn’t have the bottle at the time and we didn’t kill Baran! I would never!” Sofiane replied. “All you’re doing is making it easier for the person who did to find us, and you.”

“Sofi, I don’t believe a word out of your treasonous fucking mouth. Murdering someone because you got kicked off a team? You’re a fucking psychopath. I’m gonna make damn sure you get caught and executed along with the rest of them,” Xiuquan said.

Sofiane grit his teeth. “Would you just listen! You wood-headed moron, I’m trying to help y—”

A sandstone elephant burst from the sand to lock horns with Xiuquan who had rocketed forward by the power of his roots. The impact rocked the ground under Sofiane’s feet and blew sand off the elephant. But it held. He glanced at Daisy who was watching the fight through deathly serious eyes, waiting to summon a new golem based on how Xiuquan and his team responded. Sofiane suddenly felt like a very small fish in a very large pond. Behind him, he heard Shuixing hyperventilating.

“No! No, no, no! Natsuko!”

Shuixing was frozen in horror, staring at the ground. Her worst fears about a botched dimension-jump had come true, even if they weren’t her fault. Pechorin grabbed her and shook her.

“Shui! Hey! Look at me!” Pechorin said.

Shuixing barely registered the shaking, her eyes glazed over in shock.

“Look at your Use-Rankings! Natsuko is still there!”

Life returned to Shuixing’s eyes as she realized the numbers hadn’t changed. Natsuko was alive somewhere.

“I don’t understand, I—”

Sofiane’s rib cage rattled as something else slammed into Daisy’s elephant, blowing more of its sandy body from it. The elephant golem gave a gravely groan as it stumbled around on its last legs. Sofiane had precious few seconds to get a lot of information out.

“Underground!” Sofiane shouted. “Like that first dungeon we went to! Nuwas is there! We have to get down there!”

Sofiane needed Shui and Pech out of the way pronto. One stray hit, one missed block or parry from Daisy or him, and Shuixing and Pechorin were toast. Especially since, with Daisy here, Xiuquan’s team were about to get their Desperation Arts any second now. Sofiane had already gotten his and was waiting to activate it.

“D-Dimension-jump again!? I can’t!” Shuixing said.

The sandstone elephant exploded in a shower of rubble. Sofiane triggered Overcharge and launched forward in Ball Lightning form and gunned for the green-and-brown figure charging through the cloud of sand. He popped straight out of Ball Lightning and into a Perfect Parry stance. Magic bolts from Koyon and Gula and Xiuquan’s charge smashed into him as his sword flung wildly of its own accord to block all three.

Knowing a follow-up was coming a split second later, Sofiane hopped back into Ball Lightning form to phase through Xiuquan’s Root Control stun and Koyon’s spectral horse charge. Frayed nerves or no, outplaying both made him feel electric.

Sofiane popped back to human form long enough to shout. “Shui! Save Natsu! Go!”

Shuixing swallowed hard and looked at Pechorin. He nodded to her that he was ready to be sent through the ground. Under the cover of a second elephant blocking Koyon off, Shui lined up Pechorin as close to the same trajectory as Natsuko and swung, turning him into a jagged polygon.

~~~

Bottomless, hot-cold, nauseating horror filled Natsuko. With no mouth and no legs in her oscillating form, she could neither scream nor thrash, but was now just a thing helplessly tossed into the abyss. So deep was the terror that she missed the jungle-gym like structure appearing below her until it was rapidly enlarging before her eyes. In an instant, the horror changed to rapture, the pure bliss of not only getting to live another day without being swallowed by an infinite void, but also being right.

There was an abandoned dungeon underneath the hills.

The void spat her corporeal body back out face-first into a sandstone floor. She slid for a few feet, shaving deli slices off her face meat before coming to a halt. Standing up, Natsuko found herself in a chamber that looked like an ancient al-Nuwban burial tomb. And although she was coming off some of the biggest lows and highs of her emotional life, her first thought was: Does al-Nuwba really need another burial-tomb themed dungeon? It already has, like, four.

When the world was done spinning, Natsuko conjured the katana she’d stolen from Shinshuu. There were three exits to the chamber she was in: left, right, and center, all of which led to stairways going down.

Hoping to save herself a bit of time, she yelled, “Hey! Nuwas! You in here, buddy!?”

There was no response.

“Is that a no!?”

Considering her next options, Natsuko decided her teammates would eventually figure out she wasn’t dead and realize what happened. The question was whether or not to go looking for Nuwas on her own or stay put where they could find her.

“What would you do, Shui?” Natsuko asked aloud.

Doing an impression of Shuixing’s soft, dulcet voice, she replied to herself, “you should definitely go explore the freaky dungeon, Natsu. Don’t be a weiner.”

“Thanks Shui, that’s a good idea,” Natsuko said in Natsuko’s voice.

Picking left because it wasn’t right, Natsuko took the sandstone stairs two at a time on the way down. At the bottom, she found a large chamber with moody candle lighting and a handful of easily-identifiable al-Nuwban signifiers like ankhs and hookahs and arched walls with tessellated tiling. This was a dungeon design much closer to what she was used to compared with the weird indoor-monastery place Sofiane and Shuixing and her explored several weeks prior. Even more typical was the closed door to the next section that would not open until she defeated the mummies now spawning into existence.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

Fortunately for Natsuko, she was in peak fighting condition, meaning still drunk. Unfortunately, as she found out when she tried to Fire Gale roundhouse kick the first mummy, this was in fact a dungeon where abilities didn’t work. Her unpowered foot collided with the mummy and, completely unfazed, it grabbed Natsuko’s ankle and bit into her leg.

“Ow! You bitch! Biting is supposed to be a zombie thing!” Natsuko said without knowing what mummies were supposed to do instead.

She yanked her leg back. Ignoring the blood trickling down her calf, Natsuko slashed at the mummy. It had HP, but it had a lot of it, and there were five more mummies behind it that could chomp her to bits before she could kill it.

“Hoo boy…” she said, backing away from the mummies. “Will you despawn for me if I walk back up the stairs?”

The mummies funneled into a mob as she backed up the stairs. They should have dropped aggro or poofed out of existence at the stairs, but apparently the Yishang hadn’t gotten around to that part yet, so the mummies stumbled up the stairs after her. Kiting them into another room was an option, Natsuko supposed, but there was a risk of more monster spawns, and then she’d be up to her neck in the damn things.

She stabbed at them with her sword. “Back, you toilet-paper lookin’ motherfucker!”

In the next instant there was a thump as somebody popped through the ceiling and landed behind the mummies inside the burial chamber.

“Sofiane? Daisy?” she called out.

“No,” Pechorin responded. “‘Tis I.”

Not her first choice. “Whatever. Kill me some mummies!”

“As you wish, my pharoah queen.”

Natsuko’s groan was drowned out by gunfire echoing across the chamber. After a couple seconds, the gunshots stopped just long enough for Pechorin to say, “oh. No abilities.”

“Yep,” Natsuko said, carving into the wall of HP sponges in front of her.

With two people the mummies were more manageable. Three of the six had split off to shuffle after Pechorin, and the three that remained on the stairs were funneled nicely into slashing range. Soon the floor had been wiped clean and the mummies dissolved.

“Wait, dissolved?” Natsuko said, swiping her foot across the bare floor where the mummies had been.

“So it appears the rules are: No to abilities, yes to dissolving,” Pechorin said, scratching his chin. “Perhaps the one you visited previously was in an earlier state of construction?”

“Except we could use our abilities in that one,” Natsuko said. She shook her head. “I just don’t get it, man.”

Pechorin put his hands on his hips and hummed for a second. “Oh. I forgot to mention. Xiuquan and his team are attacking us again. That’s why Shuixing messed up the dimension-jump.”

Natsuko stared at him. “Why the hell didn’t you open with that, dumbass!?”

Pechorin shrugged. “I was told to kill mummies first.”

~~~

“You’ve gotta go down next, hun,” Daisy said, crouching with Shuixing behind a small bunker of sandstone.

“But you all don’t know how to make the jumps!” Shuixing replied, her glasses rattling on her face with each thump against the bunker wall.

“We’ll figure it out babe, but if you wanna make it down there to help Natsu, you gotta get goin’! Now!” Daisy said.

Shuixing nodded and laid down face-up with the bottle held over her chest. It was a strange arrangement, but since she only needed to have downward velocity, the horizontal vectors she calculated for Natsuko were unnecessary. She explained as much to Daisy with the caveat that whoever was the last to come down—Sofiane or her—needed to keep hold of the bottle to make sure it went with them. Otherwise they’d all be stuck down in the dungeon with no way out.

“Did you get all that!?” Shui yelled over pounding blows growing louder as Koyon rounded on their bunker.

Daisy nodded. “Listen, I know… I know ya don’t have much reason to trust me—”

Shuixing fixed her with a somber stare. “Daisy. I don’t care what you think, you’ve never given me a reason to doubt you.”

Shuixing let the bottle drop on her chest and in the next second she was crunching through the floor. Daisy bit down on her fist, hoping like hell Shuixing was right, and grabbed Natsuko’s bottle. The bunker crumbled around her.

“Daisy watch out!” she heard Sofiane yell.

The blue sky turned dark and filled with ghostly purple and green light. She guessed it was either Koyon or Xiuquan’s Desperation Art. There was no time to get out of the way. There was nothing to do but tank the hit and hope for the best.

Searing pain and pressure rippled along her body. It was indescribable. Nothing had ever hurt this much. She screamed her throat raw, fighting with everything she had to remain on her feet. If it hurt, she was alive, and if she was alive, she had to keep on fighting.

A moment later the lights lifted and she was back in the al-Nuwban foothills. Koyon was walking towards her with his hands behind his back, whistling in admiration.

“Damn. You Top Ten really are a cut above. I told Xiu we should’ve waited until you bailed on them again,” Koyon said.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Sofiane dodging Xiuquan’s onslaught with his Ball Lightning. That must’ve been how Sofi avoided Koyon’s Desperation Art.

Daisy glared at Koyon. “Who’s saying I will?”

Koyon raised his eyebrows and rabbit ears up in amusement. “Oh come on, Daisy, we both know the second the Yishang decide you’ve run around and played too much babysitter for these losers instead of doing quests and ranking up, they’re gonna kick your ass to the curb. But hey, if you don’t want the spot—”

“Shut up!” Daisy screamed. Her pocket watch trembled in her clenching fist. “I know that better than you do, f-fucking rabbit-boy!”

It was a silly insult and she felt silly for saying it as soon as Koyon started laughing. “Oh man, she’s losing it! And here I was worried I was gonna get stuck in the Top 20 waiting room.”

“Enough screwing around, Koyon, kill them!” Xiuquan said.

Koyon stopped laughing. “You don’t order me around, trash. You have temporary use of me before I throw you out too.” His half-mocking, half-angry eyes flicked back to Daisy. “That said, let’s finish this up soon. I want that bottle you’ve got in your hot little hand.”

Daisy felt it the moment she tipped over the top. Because of her high Insight stat, her Desperation Art, Tectonic Drift, had an astronomic threshold for activation. Not even getting nuked by Koyon’s had done the job. But the prospect of letting this rotten little shit have Natsuko’s bottle did it.

She clicked her pocket watch. The ground shook. Just a little at first, but the shaking grew exponentially. It took Xiuquan, Koyon, and Gula a few seconds to realize this wasn’t another golem. Daisy herself never knew how exactly Tectonic Drift would manifest, she didn’t have full control over it, so it was a surprise to her too when a 30 foot stalagmite burst upwards and speared Koyon.

Xiuquan and Sofiane were split from each other by a growing fissure in the ground like an enormous chisel had been stabbed straight into the ground.

“Shit! Gula!” Xiuquan yelled.

Sofiane zipped between cliffs rising like ship bows out of the ground, any one of which could have clipped him for his entire health pool. He popped out beside Daisy who was standing in an oasis of calm amidst a boiling sea of earth a thousand yards in diameter. Their enemies had already disappeared into the mass of protrusions and fissures.

“Well, that’s one way to bait out Gula’s Desperation Art,” Sofiane said, clutching his knees as he caught his breath.

“What do you mean?” Daisy asked.

“She gives her teammates temporary invincibility. Once your Desperation Art is over, they’re gonna be right back on us.”

Daisy groaned and scarfed down some HP-healing maple-salmon croquettes, some Elemental Power-boosting braised horse beef, and some movement-speed buffing fermented mare’s milk. She wiped the last of the milk from her lips.

“I was really hoping this would be a quick fight,” she said.

“So was I,” Sofiane said.

A moment later, the twisted landscape dissolved back into the placid foothills they came from. A hundred feet from them, Koyon was smirking, his body still glowing with a cerulean aura from Gula’s invincibility.

Xiuquan snarled and took a step forward. Sofiane leveled his emerald sword. Daisy rubbed her thumb over the pocket watch.

“Xiu, let’s just stop and talk, okay? We didn’t kill Baran,” Sofiane said.

Xiuquan opened his mouth to respond, but the look of shock on Sofiane and Daisy’s faces made him pause. He looked behind him. Standing there was a black figure wearing a Thalia mask.

“Oh…” Xiuquan said before he was turned into a spasming chunk of geometry.