Xiuquan getting murdered moved up the timetable to escape a little bit. Daisy wasn’t sure what the margin of error for hitting the underground dungeon was, but so far only Xiuquan was out of the Use-Rankings, so concluded it was probably safe to wing it.

“Time to go, Sofi,” Daisy said.

Before he could react, she bopped him through the ground with Natsuko’s bottle. Looking up, she found a horrified Gula Asu backing away from Hemiola. She was surprised Hemiola wasn’t coming for her first, but Gula was indisputably the easier target. But… she’d be alright, right? Koyon was there…

No he wasn’t. Daisy looked around and found that Koyon had already fled, leaving Gula to fend for herself.

She bit down on the inside of her cheek. “Shoot…”

The safe thing to do would be to get herself and Natsuko’s bottle down into the underground dungeon. Even safer would be to hop on Peng and get the hell out of there, leaving everyone else to their fate. Which Daisy would it be today? The one that pushed Maitri out of a window to get her Top Ten spot, or the one willing to risk being force dimension-jumped for the sake of a Hero she barely knew?

Hemiola swung his FDJ rod at Gula followed by a loud chunking sound. The rod crunched into a sandstone turtle, turning the golem into monochromatic planes flailing wildly in every direction. Between them, Daisy caught sight of Gula heaving in terror.

Stone engulfed Daisy’s boot and she kicked Hemiola backwards. A storm of dust kicked up from the force. Next to her, Gula was still frozen in fear.

Daisy grabbed her arm. “Run you silly goose!”

In the blink of an eye, Hemiola was back on them. If Daisy’s instincts had been any duller, the rod would have connected with her arm, but she managed to coalesce a small brick of stone to put between herself and the kill rod. With her free hand, she shoved Gula up the hills towards Jann.

“Find a Pengwu! Get to where the Yishang has eyes on you!” Daisy yelled, guessing that was the only thing that would ward Hemiola off.

Stone gloves formed around Daisy’s hands to complement the stone boots. The glass of Natsuko’s bottle crunched under the stone but held in one piece. All she had to do was hold out long enough for Sofiane’s former teammate to get to town.

As Gula staggered up the hill, Daisy locked herself into a staring contest with Hemiola’s brass mask. Both of them were fast. Both of them hit hard. Both of them had a weapon that could kill with the tiniest clip. Only by sheer force of will did Daisy manage to keep her nerves in working order, ready to respond to the slightest change in Hemiola’s stance.

There: A glint in the eye sockets, sunlight on an eyeball, shifting left, towards Gula.

Daisy moved. The air cracked as she rocketed forward, sending up plumes of sand in her wake. She swung the bottle, aiming for Hemiola’s center mass. This time, she was on the offensive. Hemiola missed Gula by a foot as he aborted his own swing to counter Daisy’s. The shockwave of both their movements slammed Gula to the ground.

“If you keep focusing on her, you’re gonna die,” Daisy said, feeling the sadism crawling through her words.

Here was the balancing act: Good Daisy was allowed to come and save Gula if Bad Daisy got to relish the prospect of using the bottle on someone. Watching Natsuko refuse to use it—especially when she was justified—drove Daisy crazy. Natsu just didn’t have the instincts to grab and take power. But now the bottle was Daisy’s, and she could use it all she wanted.

With her stone gauntlets, she grabbed Hemiola’s rod and yanked it towards herself as they entered a tug-of-war. Her own face now inches from his mask, she saw eyes peering out of its sockets, and she grinned wickedly in full view of them.

“What’s wrong? The Yishang didn’t give you enough grip strength, Hemi?”

The eyes widened at that. Natsuko was on the mark about who it was. Daisy gave another tug and the rod pulled closer to her. If the Yishang had given him a Force stat, it was good, but it wasn’t as good as #4. Daisy Corduroy. With him locked in place, she swung Natsuko’s bottle.

The first thing she realized after a white hot flash was that her ears were ringing. Stars danced in her vision. Her entire body hurt from the point-blank explosion Hemiola had detonated in the space between them. Oops. She’d be the first to admit her bloodlust could get the better of her at times. That was the secret spice to her archetype: Cutesy, with just a dash of insane.

She scrambled to her feet, her stone grip still curled around Natsuko’s bottle because her life depended on it. Her one break of luck was that Hemiola wasn’t immune to his own abilities and had blown himself over too. Half of his mask had cracked off, exposing part of a smooth, pale face and a single deep, blue eye looking out past a curtain of black curls.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Glancing around, Daisy couldn’t see Gula anymore, which meant she must have escaped down the side that faced the town of Jann.

“Alright, Hemi-boy. You want this bottle? Come and get it,” Daisy said, carefully aligning herself along more or less the same line she sent Sofiane. Clutching the bottle tightly, she swung it down at her stomach.

~~~

“Ugh! This is so dumb! Dungeon puzzles aren’t supposed to be this friggin’ hard. You’re supposed to do them in two seconds and then move on to beating up more mobs!” Natsuko said.

She, Shuixing, and Pechorin were standing on a balcony overlooking a giant tomb floor with a mirror puzzle. A light beamed into the room and they had to rotate specially-placed mirrors to get the light to shine on the obsidian eyes of a sphinx statue. They’d completed dozens of this same type of puzzle before, except this one inexplicably had a dozen mirrors and a bunch of stupid obstacles which turned it into a giant migraine.

“Those five are fine,” Shuixing said, pointing out the handful of mirrors at the start of the puzzle. “Plus the last one. I’ve ruled out any alternative combinations which would allow the beam to reach the statue. We can focus our efforts on just the remaining six in the middle.”

Natsuko groaned. “Can’t we wait for Sofi and Daisy to bring the bottle down with them and just dimension-jump through the puzzle door?”

“No! No more unnecessary dimension-jumping!” Shuixing said in a huff. Admittedly, it was hard to take her seriously between the pout and the adorable balled fists. Natsuko wanted to poke her in the cheek.

“Come on… it’s just a door! That should be easy!”

“If it was a solid shape, yes. But if there is even one unaccounted plane of geometry between one side of the door and the next it could redirect us straight into the void. Just to avoid a puzzle—”

Sofiane burst into the room, huffing and panting. “H-Hemi— Hemiola! Up there!”

The other three tensed. Everyone pulled up their Use-Ranking chart. The total had gone down by one, but Daisy was still at the #4 spot.

“W-Was it—”

“Xiuquan…” Sofiane said. His voice had a hollowness like someone about to throw up. He messed up his own hair. “Gah! Xiu was such an asshole b-but— Gods!”

Tears started to leak from his lavender-colored eyes. “That bastard murdered half of my old team!”

Shui hugged him while Pechorin and Natsuko stood around being awkward and emotionally stunted. A quiet “sorry…” was all Pechorin managed.

Sofiane peeled himself off of Shuixing. “It’s… fine. We’ve got a job to do, let’s focus on that. Daisy isn’t down here yet, but she’s also not dead, so my guess is she stopped to help Gula escape.”

As soon as he said this, the exit door on the far right of the balcony opened and out walked Daisy with Natsuko’s bottle slung over her shoulder. Natsuko breathed a sigh of relief at being done with the puzzle.

“Howdy! Guess the dungeon didn’t like how I came in the wrong side and decided to just open up, huh?” Daisy said.

“Daisy, what happened with Hemiola?” Sofiane asked, wiping his face dry on his sleeves.

“Umm… that is a good question that I’d love to know the answer too. I’m sure y’all saw…” Daisy took one look at Sofiane’s puffy red face and decided to skate over that particular detail. “Anyhow, he and I had a kerfuffle while your al-Nuwban lady hightailed it outta there and we ended up in a bit of a stalemate, so I popped down here. Hopefully he doesn’t follow—”

“No, we do want him to follow,” Natsuko said. “We’ve got our ability-nullifying dungeon right here.”

Both Sofiane and Daisy tested this at the same time and Natsuko, who had gotten to see the process twice already, got a laugh out of the constipated look on their face when they realized their abilities didn’t work. There was something indescribably uncomfortable about it. Abilities were such an innate part of being a Hero that not having them felt like moving a phantom limb.

“Force stat for Force stat, I can pin him down if we catch him, but I have no idea whether he’ll jump down after us,” Daisy said.

“Wouldn’t it be stupid of him to come down though?” Sofiane asked.

“He probably didn’t know this dungeon was here until we dimension jumped into it without dying,” Pechorin replied. “He must’ve thought he killed Nuwas. Now he knows that he left two jobs unfinished. Hemiola was cocky and arrogant, by both archetype and nature. If he’s anything like he used to be, he’ll follow us.”

“And he also doesn’t know we can corner his ass,” Natsuko said. Her face was gleaming with a very Daisy-like glee. The hunt was even more important to her than the answers Shui wanted to wring from him. “By the way, can I get my bottle back?”

Daisy blinked, suddenly recalling the three-foot long wine bottle resting on her shoulder. Her mouth hung open slightly, as though considering something. Daisy seemed to feel the uneasiness that her brief hesitation wrought and chuckled to herself. “Oh! Right, yeah, sorry, my head is all over the place right now.”

She shifted the bottle from her shoulders to her arms and held it out for Natsuko who took it. An awkward silence followed which Sofiane decided to break.

“You stayed behind to save Gula, didn’t you?” Sofiane asked.

Daisy nodded. “Felt like the right thing to do.”

“Thanks,” Sofiane said. His voice was almost as soft and quiet as Shuixing’s

Daisy rubbed her neck. “Aw shucks, don’t worry about it. Instead, let’s worry about finding Nuwas. I suspect our little murderer is gonna go after him first.”

With Natsuko and Pechorin having ruled out the front half of the dungeon, they turned towards the door Daisy had come from and headed further inside.