“You can’t destroy the Yishang,” Harun said.

  “We can,” Pechorin replied.

  Harun folded his arms. “Listen, I know you’re not the Entropic Axis. I don’t know why everyone else has lost their gods-damned minds and decided to start taking the made-up backstory stuff seriously, but that also doesn’t mean you can fight literal demi-gods. It’s just not happening. So, I’m not going to turn you in, because fuck those Xian pricks. And I’m not going to dimension-jump you, because you don’t even pose a threat. But in exchange, you are going to leave me out of whatever stupid thing you think you’re doing here.”

  Pechorin, with the full intention of dragging him into the stupid thing he was doing here, nodded. “Fine.”

  Harun ran his hands through his long, oil-black hair and exhaled. “Man… what the hell is going on with the world. Why couldn’t we just keep grinding dungeons and killing mobs?”

  Shikai grunted in agreement. Somehow, the fact that none of this grinding and farming was actually improving their lot or making them happier appeared irrelevant.

  “Shall we go to the sewer then? As we were told?” Pechorin asked.

  “Are we going to the— man, no, fuck the sewers and fuck the Xian. I don’t take orders from them,” Harun said. “This entire battle is a shitshow anyway. I doubt anyone is even gonna remember where they sent us.”

  “May I make a suggestion about where we might go instead?” Pechorin said.

  Harun threw his hands up. “Whatever. Just don’t get us killed.”

  Pechorin broke into a light jog headed for the laboratory in the back right of the Mage’s College. Years ago, when Pechorin and his party were still adventuring, they visited the college on a questline to deliver parts of some man-eating plants to Dr. Cox. While there, Shuixing accidentally admitted to exploring dimension-jumping and Dr. Cox, noticing for the first time that he could get away with deviating from the Yishang’s script, gushed to her about his own research into the subject. He then took them all on a tour of the college through rooms the other Heroes didn’t care to visit since they weren’t tied to questlines.

  The last room he showed them was the laboratory that would eventually become Shuixing’s. She told Dr. Cox on the spot she loved it and he offered her unrestricted access if she would share her findings with him. From then until their team moved to Tianzhou several months later, the laboratory was their team’s combination hide-out and apartment. The money they saved from living there instead of paying for an inn or apartment could be credited with at least part of the reason they jumped ahead and stayed ahead of their erstwhile competitors.

  Pechorin didn’t know for sure Shuixing would be there, but if she was still in the college, she was there.

  “How do you know this place so well?” Harun asked after Pechorin took his third precise turn down an identical hallway.

  “Of course he knows it, 1st-gens spent all their time in Verm?genburgh for a year. They know every inch of it,” Shikai said.

  “I don’t really know the college that well,” Gunhilda added.

  Shikai cleared his throat. “I mean, not all of them, sure, but most of them.”

  “I used to live here in the early days,” Pechorin said. “I mean here here. After the things the 3rd generation got up to, the Yishang placed restrictions on where Heroes could live. You used to be able to sleep wherever and the older generations were grandfathered into that.”

  Harun snorted. “Wouldn’t that be nice. Hell of a long way from any dungeons or quests though.”

  “I make my own quests,” Pechorin said as he took the final turn.

  He could see the door at the end of the hall. But he could also hear the scuffing of feet elsewhere in the building as the other teams began their part of the search.

  “I mean real quests,” Harun said.

  “Real how?” Pechorin asked.

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  “As in it has to have a real reward and it has to lead to other quests to complete, and—”

  Pechorin threw open the door and stepped back in case an FDJ rod was aimed at it. Sure enough, one of the students swung at the frame and missed him by a foot. He held up his empty hands to the student.

  “It’s me, Pechorin.”

  “Pechorin? Aren’t you supposed to be out fighting?” the boy asked.

  Pechorin barged past him into the room. “I’m going with the flow right now. You can let those three in.”

  His three temporary teammates stepped into the lab with expressions hovering somewhere between wonder and confusion. Whatever they had expected, it was not a dozen Non-Heroes passed out on lab tables with their students injecting them full of murky red liquid.

  Harun rubbed his temples. “What the hell?”

  Pechorin supposed the sight was a tad disturbing for someone who didn’t know what they were looking at. He dealt with disturbing visions and nightmares daily, so he himself remained unmoved. Out of pity, he decided to explain the situation in order to clear up any confusion.

  “They are all hard at work attacking and dethroning the gods in their own realm,” Pechorin explained.

  “W-Where is their realm?” Gunhilda asked, looking around as though it might be up on the ceiling.

  “All around us. Yet, on a different plane. Shuixing and the other scientists are projecting their consciousnesses into the realm of pure numbers which overlays our own. It pokes through here and there like the tip of an iceberg in the form of your stats or wealth, yet these numbers determine far more than that. All of us, in fact. Mere numbers…” Pechorin said, trailing off into a cryptic sotto voce.

  Gunhilda gasped. “What!? But I’m not a number!”

  Pechorin shook his head and tutted. “I’m sorry Gunhilda. You very much are.”

  She started tearing up.

  “Man, you really think you can beat the Yishang, huh?” Harun said, poking one of the sleeping faculty members in their limp cheek.

  “We can,” Pechorin said.

  Harun’s expression of bewilderment was replaced by a deep frown spreading across his face. He took a long breath in and expelled all of his air on one word:

  “How?”

  “You mean how do I know?”

  Harun nodded.

  “I don’t know. But I feel that we can.”

  “If you want me to buy into all this you need to tell me what you’re actually doing. Hunches and beliefs don’t cook rice,” Harun said.

  Pechorin raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t ask you to buy into this.”

  A part of Pechorin knew he was ‘wasting’ time, but he felt a subtle tug towards Harun and the other two telling him this was what he needed to do.

  Harun threw his hands up. “I don’t— fine, we’ll get going then! I don’t care about any of this gods-damned—”

  “Do you want to see for yourself?” Pechorin asked. “There’s a version of the drug that doesn’t send you all the way there. You will be on it for the rest of the battle, though awake and able to act. If you want to see one-hundredth of what they’re seeing, I’ll show you.”

  Harun, Gunhilda, Shikai, and all of the graduate students were dumbfounded by Pechorin’s offer. The students looked particularly uncomfortable at the notion of giving up any of Shuixing’s special compounds despite the fact that they were only using Aqua Shen and had plenty of the other two compounds to spare.

  “You want me to be tripping balls in the middle of a fight? Are you joking? Cuz it’s not funny,” Harun said.

  Pechorin shrugged. “You wanted to know why we think we can fight the Yishang. I can offer you a taste of this transcendental knowledge right now. However, first let me ask: Why do you know what ‘tripping balls’ is?”

  “Because— it’s just a phrase, it means being high on drugs,” Harun said.

  “What drugs?”

  “Well, like—”

  Harun’s eyes told Pechorin all he needed to know. His temporary teammate was confronting the strange and discomforting fact that he knew a euphemistic phrase for taking an illegal substance that did not exist anywhere in Po-Lin besides the artificial stuff he had learned of a minute ago.

  “How do— what? I don’t understand…” Harun said.

  “There’s a lot you don’t understand. With so little time, you’ll have to take it on faith. Are you ready to do that?” Pechorin asked.

  “Aw, heck it, I am!” Gunhilda said, stepping around Harun and thrusting her hand out for the drug. “Gimme the red pill!”

  “It’s in a vial, actually. And it’s gold, not red,” Pechorin said.

  He knew Harun and Shikai were hooked because their expressions looked like someone had just caught them with an uppercut after a jab. Both were wondering what the hell a ‘red pill’ was and why they knew immediately what Gunhilda meant by it. And now that Pechorin had proved to them he was privy to things they had no idea of, he went for the haymaker.

  Casually, as though mentioning a minor item of interest, Pechorin said, “The Yishang plan to end this world in a few days. They will take the Xian to a new world to do everything they did with Po-Lin all over again. Then, like snuffing out a candle, they will turn Po-Lin off forever. There is only one alternative. Work with us. Every other path before you leads to annihilation. Only with us do you have a chance of survival.”

  Pechorin handed each of the stunned Heroes a vial of Aqua Qian. Gunhilda, who a moment ago looked downright thirsty for it, now looked into the shimmering gold vial as though it contained the annihilation Pechorin spoke of. Harun opened his mouth and tried to say something but Gunhilda beat him to the punch.

  “Frick it!” she said and downed the gold vial.

  Statistics:

  Team Pechorin