Sofiane sighed. “Please stop whistling.”

Natsuko stopped whistling long enough to ask, “why? It helps keep me calm when I’m stressed out.”

“Because it tells everyone we’re coming, dumbass!”

“Hey, my whistling could just be the wind. Your yapping is way more suspicious.”

“Both of you shut up,” Daisy said, flicking them both on the back of the head.

The front half of the dungeon had been fairly conventional as far as dungeons went with scripted monster fights and puzzles, but the second half felt like the skeleton of one. Lots of corridors, a few larger rooms for enemy ambushes, but no locked doors, no monsters, no treasure. It was a dungeon halfway through its construction.

“Do you think the Yishang builds them from the ground up?” Pechorin asked.

“They must,” Shuixing said. “I assume that means every monster, every trap, every piece of treasure, is planned out ahead of time.”

Daisy shut her eyes in contemplation.

“Wait a minute, how come they get to talk?” Natsuko said.

“Cuz they’re being quiet about it, firecrotch!” Sofiane replied.

Daisy flicked them both on the head again. Not that their talking mattered, as they came within earshot of crazed laughter drifting through the halls. Everyone went quiet. The laughter came from down a final corridor painted floor to ceiling with murals.

The wall art was unsettling. Dungeon decorations were usually forgettable, the kind of things that screamed, “you are in an al-Nuwban dungeon,” without it mattering much which one. These paintings, however, were lurid and violent. Little black figures resembling Entropic Axis mages were forcing people into holes to be buried alive, while some kind of demon king sat on a throne watching. There were more violent scenes like this that made Shuixing shudder.

“The Yishang painted that too, I suppose,” Pechorin said, his words underlined by the harsh laughter coming from the stone doors at the end of the corridor. “How delightfully macabre. I wonder why they didn’t bother finishing this dungeon.”

As they reached the door, the laughter stopped. Replacing it were words spoken somewhere between a sob and a whine. “He sent me to hell. He sent me to hell. He sent me to hell. I thought it would be the heavens, but it was a hell…”

Pechorin pointed at the door. “That would be Nuwas. Shall we go see him?”

Sofiane gestured for him to go ahead. “After you, mon ami.”

Pechorin tapped his guns on the stone doors and they rolled out of the way. Inside was a large burial chamber, almost fifty feet across, glittering from the gold and jewels encrusting every surface. There was a lot of empty space in the middle set aside for a boss fight that would never occur. On the far end was a dais where the dungeon treasure chest would have gone. Instead, there was an old al-Nuwban man half-laughing, half-crying.

Nuwas’ appearance didn’t match his demeanor. Being set by the Yishang upon his summoning, he couldn’t damage his immaculate white beard if he tried, and the ochre robe and turban and white scarf swaddling him refused to be dirtied or torn. Nuwas was, in appearance, exactly the regal, al-Nuwban scientist he was supposed to be. But his deep green eyes glistened with the tearful madness of someone for whom the external world was an engulfing iron maiden.

Nuwas shot to his feet. In a voice scratchy from yelling, he said, “y-you… You’re not tricking me again! Phantoms! Demons!”

Pechorin cleared his throat. “The sky settles to the ground,

In glistening mirages—”

“Demon! Beguile me not!” Nuwas said, plugging his ears.

Natsuko placed her hand on Pechorin’s shoulder. “Let me try a more subtle method.”

She stomped across the chamber and punched Nuwas in the gut, doubling the old man over. He choked and coughed as the air left his lungs.

“We’re real, dickhead. And we need you to start talkings.”

“F-Fire-headed, male-acting demon!” he groaned.

Natsuko rolled her eyes. It was a better title than firecrotch. She raised her fist again. Nuwas winced.

“Doesn’t matter if we’re your crazy hallucinations or not, it hurts when I punch you, doesn’t it? If you don’t wanna get smacked around then answer our questions.”

“I think you’ve done your part, Natsu. Let’s let the people that aren’t cavemen talk now, okay?” Sofiane said.

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Nuwas watched on, baffled by what was happening. Presumably they were putting on a better performance than his usual hallucinatory demons. Shuixing took the opportunity to jump in before Natsuko could derail things further.

“Mr. Nuwas, is it?” she asked.

The man nodded in fear.

Even for Shuixing, her voice was especially soft and tender. “We understand what you’re going through. We all learned about the nature of the Yishang and this world just yesterday. From one scientist to another, I empathize with the learning more than you bargained for.”

The old hermit was still trembling, but something like awe crept onto his face. “So then… if you’re here, in this hell, you too must have asked him for salvation?”

Everyone shared a look that Natsuko perfectly encapsulated when she said, “uhh…”

“Who is “he”?” Shuixing asked.

“The angel,” Nuwas said, his gaze growing more distant as his spiritual ecstasy grew. “The one clothed in white and gold, who promised to help me transcend my immortal suffering.”

“Did this angel have a name?” Sofiane asked.

The presence of a second voice startled Nuwas out of his fervor. “N-Not a name, but a title—Xian. A deputy of the devil gods who turned his back on them to deliver the world from their evil!”

“And he never referred to himself as Hemiola? As a former Hero?” Shuixing asked.

Nuwas shook his head violently. “No Hero—those violent, black holes of self-interest, made in the image of the devil gods—no Hero could act as selflessly the Xian.”

Natsuko scoffed. “And lemme guess, this “salvation” involved bopping you with a rod and sending you through the ground?”

“You say this as someone who fears the Other Side,” Nuwas said, his fear of Natsuko long gone. She got the impression that if she punched him again, he wouldn’t even feel it.

“What is the Other Side?” Shuixing asked.

“Somewhere without suffering. Somewhere free,” Nuwas said. “Somewhere without Heroes, and without Non-Heroes. Without the Yishang.”

Natsuko raised an eyebrow. “And this… Xian. He convinced you this place would be heaven?”

Nuwas shook his head. “No. I knew of heaven, but I knew not how to get there. He came to me, years ago, claiming he was a newly-created Xian, seeking to learn. He asked me for my wisdom. I told him what I knew of the world under the promise that, should he ever come into the power to save me, he would do so. That day came not too long ago, but I was wrong. This is not heaven, it is hell.”

Shuixing’s mouth froze half-open, unsure whether it was more ethical to tell the hermit the truth about where he’d ended up, or to lie and convince him to come back to the surface. Uncomfortable with the possibility that he would beg to be killed for real, and that that responsibility would fall to Natsuko, Shui elected to lie, if only by omission.

Shuixing cleared her throat. “Well, er… we can at least help you get back to the surface—”

“It’s his choice, Shui. Let him make it with the full truth,” Natsuko said.

Sofiane nudged her and below his breath said, “shut up, Natsu.”

Natsuko fixed him with a glare. “No. I said what I said. And I’m sure Pechorin agrees.”

The other three glanced at Pechorin who nodded in confirmation. With his sanction, Natsuko faced Nuwas and looked him in the eyes.

“Hemiola… I mean the Xian—he missed. You were dimension-jumped into a dungeon the Yishang didn’t finish. If you want to go to your “heaven” I can help you,” she said.

Shuixing gasped. Daisy frowned. Nuwas cried tears of joy.

“Please! Release me from this world and its thousand pinpricks, and the Other Side I go to will be permeated with my boundless gratitude for you,” Nuwas said, cupping Natsuko’s hands in his.

Natsuko jerked her hands away. “Fine.”

“Wait!” Shuixing said. “Before you go, we’d like to know what the Xian told you about the Yishang and about this world.”

Nuwas grimaced as his paradise was yanked away once again, bringing his thoughts back to the profane world he was fleeing from. Nonetheless, his “boundless gratitude” compelled him to provide some sort of answer.

“If you have already discovered the Yishang’s use of this world as a printer of some heavenly currency, I have little else to impart. If you wish to know more, being a deputy of the devil gods the Xian surpasses my own knowledge. I long ago ceased to be interested in the mysteries of this world. Of what use would it be to me to know my prison in greater detail?”

“Wait, wait, wait, printer of heavenly currency?” Daisy asked, putting her hands on her hips. “What in the world does that mean?”

Nuwas looked at them in confusion. “I assumed if you were already aware of the Yishang’s deception that you also knew its nature. It is, after all, their reason for creating this world of illusions and suffering.”

“Enlighten us,” Natsuko said. Her heartbeat rose as Nuwas approached an answer she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to hear. The moment after she spoke, she felt a sensation like being mid-air, watching lethal fall damage coming up below you.

His eyes pierced her with undeniable sanity. “The Yishang create Heroes and their emanations, and the Celestials pay the Yishang with something that passes for Ying in their realm of existence in exchange for those emanations. I care little for you all, brutal, violent Heroes that you are, but I pity you just the same,” Nuwas said. “Like draught animals, you are milked for as much as the Celestials will pay for you, and then you are discarded. It is a different kind of hell from the shackles that us Non-Heroes live in, but it is a hell nonetheless.”

“No…” Natsuko shook her head. “No, no, no. You got something wrong! This is— it can’t be money! It’s not just money, that can’t be why!”

Pechorin, long-time connoisseur of all things tragic and ironic, stomached the revelation better than everyone else. With a sigh, he said simply, “as above, so below.”

“No!” Natsuko shouted. “There’s gotta be more to this! The Yishang— they… they’re doing some fucked up research experiment on us! O-Or hiding the universe from us because we would rebel a-and…”

“No, Natsu,” said a voice from the doorway. “He’s right.”