Refusing to be outdone by a little girl, Shikai and Harun were peer-pressured into taking the drugs too. Having never tried any of Shuixing’s compounds before, Pechorin had no idea what the three of them were actually experiencing, but he had a suspicion it was not too dissimilar from his own experiences while meditating. Certain patterns about the world became obvious. So too did one’s delusions about them. Though it was clearly not a 1:1 match, as the first thing out of Harun’s mouth was:

  “Oh gods! It's full of numbers!

  Shikai was staring into space, his eyes drawn wide enough to see the blood vessels in them. Gunhilda was crying.

  “So the next step is finding some way to get the scientists to safety. Are you all up for that?” Pechorin said.

  It took a minute or two to coral the three stupefied Heroes into helping him move the scientists. By the time they understood the task, however, there were people out in the hall. Pechorin cracked the door to peek and saw at least two teams going door to door checking the empty laboratories and classrooms for the research team. Why Windwalker didn’t blow the entire campus down, he wasn’t sure. Perhaps the Yishang were fishing for a more dramatic finale, rerolling their inputs in a handful of places until they got a desirable narrative. But knowing that didn’t help.

  “3.669… 3.452… 4.004… 3.898…” Harun mumbled.

  “What’s that?” Pechorin asked.

  Harun’s glazed eyes couldn’t quite meet him. “Movement speeds…”

  “For the people outside?”

  Harun nodded. Pechorin didn’t bother clarifying what those numbers actually stood for.

  “How about their max move speeds?”

  “15.520… and… the highest is 16.783,” Harun said.

  “And yours?”

  “31.441. 62.882 with Desperation Art. I can increase everyone else’s.”

  Pechorin looked at the students. Some were tending to the faculty and re-dosing them with Aqua Shen. Those that weren't stared wide-eyed at the display in front of them. They had witnessed Non-Heroes trying the shallower compounds, but the Heroes reacted to it in ways they weren’t used to.

  “Harun, can you edit your stats?” Pechorin asked.

  Harun shook his head. “I have no idea where those are.”

  Unfortunately, having never entered Numberspace himself, Pechorin had no idea either.

  “What are you two able to see?” Pechorin asked.

  Gunhilda squeaked, suddenly remembering there were people in the room with her and the endless 1s and 0s which she was just beginning to parse out into bite-sized chunks of information.

  “Angles! So many angles! And circles! It’s just shapes and stuff,” Gunhilda said in wonderment. “It’s so pretty!”

  “The shape of the hallway?” Pechorin asked.

  She nodded absently.

  “How about you, Shikai?”

  Shikai fumbled around with his hands in open air as though trying to grasp something that kept slipping away. “There are… little bits of time. I can see the individual chunks, but they keep running by. And there are spikes where a lot of stuff happens in that chunk, and little bumps where not a lot happens.”

  Pechorin found himself stumbling into a plan. Insanely high, overpowered stats would have made for a much simpler solution, but he could work with his three teammates’ preoccupations.

  Speed, geometry, and timing. These habits and proclivities undoubtedly came from their combat roles, and it was pure good fortune that these exact three inputs were needed to calculate an escape. The one remaining problem was that Pechorin had renounced all mathematics the day Natsuko pressured him out of calculating EXP yields, so he was a little rusty.

  “Are any of you good at math?” he asked the students

  They all raised their hands.

  “Sublime. If you help me do some calculations, I believe we may be able to get everyone out safely,” Pechorin said.

  The students leapt into motion, grabbing whatever stationary remained in the laboratory.

  Harun was able to give them a down-to-the-second calculation of how much time it would take the closest Hero team to work their way to Shuixing’s laboratory. This was how they learned their timer was exactly four minutes, 56 seconds. Gunhilda rattled off a sequence of hallways between them and the staircase to the sewers as well as the location of all search teams along the way. Lastly, Shikai provided them with qualitative data on which teams were checking the rooms more thoroughly by analyzing the “density of things,” which Pechorin took to mean the frequency with which the individual entities were checking against data stored in the CPA.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  With 47 seconds to spare, the team of students arrived with 90% confidence at a route through the college hallways with exact timings to avoid being spotted. Pechorin appreciated the irony that this took them past the teams taking the search the most seriously, since they were spending more time searching rooms than killing time in the hallways.

  Shikai lined up at the door to signal the start of their march and everyone moved to grab a scientist. This included Gunhilda who, with her face red and puffed up, just barely managed to drag Dr. Cox behind her with his legs trailing on the floor. Had the circumstances been better, Pechorin would have offered to help, but they only had barely enough to take everyone with them and he himself was carrying not only Shuixing, but a satchel full of Aqua Shen.

  “Almost,” Shikai said, waiting for the last member of a search team to kick something off of their boot before entering a classroom. “Now!”

  Harun ran ahead with two scientists flung over his shoulders, moving with an eerie level of quiet. The students and Pechorin jogged after him, moving as fast as they dared with the dead weight around their shoulders. Each shoe squeak or stumbling step had the chance to give them away, but so did missing their window. Fortunately, by the time Pechorin caught up with Harun checking down the next hallway, the next enemy team had just entered their classroom and they were clear to move ahead.

  It astounded Pechorin how well things worked when he wasn’t trying to make them work. There were at least a dozen ways they could have come up short, but down to the burst of initial speed that Harun’s Daoshi passive gave, they were just able to make it. They proceeded like this until they arrived at the second-to-last corridor, whereupon Harun started mouthing swear words while peaking around the corner.

  “They’re not moving…” Harun whispered to Pechorin at his side.

  “The Heroes?”

  “They’re having an argument in the fucking hallway.”

  “Then we’ll change course,” Pechorin replied.

  Harun turned to look at him with a shocking level of focus for someone who was currently seeing him as a bundle of floating numbers. “We didn’t plan that route.”

  “The one we did plan is blocked,” Pechorin whispered back. “Time to improvise.”

  As quickly as he dared with a bag full of glass vials clicking against his side, Pechorin moved to the back of the group toward Gunhilda and Shikai bringing up the rear. Before Pechorin opened his mouth, Gunhilda was already gesturing back the way they came.

  “The right we didn’t take. It’s got one team that might finish early, but it’ll be clear,” she said, looking through him.

  Pechorin motioned for the others to follow as he retraced back to the fork and took the other hallway. He noticed immediately why they hadn’t routed it: Halfway down, just before the final turn to their destination, there was a Hero with her arm on a door frame joking with her teammates inside. If she wasn’t paying attention, one person might sneak by. But two dozen was out of the question.

  He turned back to Gunhilda. “Any other routes?”

  She shook her head. Anxiousness was creeping into her look of open-eyed wonder.

  Pechorin looked back at the group. He supposed when changing plans abruptly it was better not to give people too much time to stew on things, so he said simply, “when you hear the shooting, book it for the staircase.”

  A storm of quiet murmurs kicked up behind him but Pechorin was already walking down the hallway. It would be a tricky thing to execute while carrying Shuixing and a bag of vials and in bulky, unfamiliar clothing, but he had the advantage that no Hero in their right mind expected another Hero to do what he was about to do. It was like poetry. At some point, you had to talk like a mad man for it to work.

  As he neared, the Hero leaning against the door glanced over and did a double take at the strange sight of Pechorin in his flamboyant outfit carrying a bag of vials with Shuixing over his shoulders.

  “Can you give me a hand?” Pechorin said, shrugging the shoulder bearing Shuixing.

  The Hero jogged over and took her as he lay the vials of Aqua Shen against the wall.

  “Is this who we’re supposed to be looking for?” the Hero asked.

  Pechorin brushed past her without a word and moved to the door she had been leaning against. Her three teammates were looking at him in confusion. He beckoned for them.

  “There’s more. Gonna need some help carrying,” he said.

  They were part way to the door when one of them, a male Hero from Deco Imperia, stopped in his tracks.

  “Hold on… those are Laitan’s clothes!”

  Pechorin shook his sleeves and his two pepperboxes dropped into his waiting palms. He opened with a shot at the Hero holding Shuixing, dimension-jumping her instantly. Her three teammates dove for their weapons or cover, but the other pepperbox was already pointed at the room. Lights and colors flickered across his retinas as Flak Cannon triggered and the room and everything in it was forced to make quadrillions of calculations about what was going where and why. Time slowed and the roar of gunfire which should have filled his ears like a howling wind stuttered and distorted and all he could hear amid the ocean of noise was the staggered tinkling of the duplicated bullets falling from his guns.

  When he was certain nothing could still be alive inside the nauseating collage of colors he moved to grab the satchel of vials and Shuixing. Doing so felt like wading through an ocean. Whatever he had done by activating Flak Cannon had caused a ripple that disturbed Numberspace, though to what extent he didn’t know. And while the thought should have been horrifying, Pechorin couldn’t help thinking this was merely the vindication of his many rants about the dark and terrifying power he held within him all this time. It was not mere edginess, but future foresight into his awful potential.

  A moment—which was either a few seconds or around a minute depending on from which perspective one was counting—passed and he was able to move freely again once Po-Lin finished all of its pesky calculations. The others came running around the corner as he scooped up Shuixing and threw her limp body over his shoulders.

  “What the fuck was that!?” Harun yelled, confirming Pechorin’s suspicion that the ripple in Numberspace had repercussions beyond the tiny classroom.

  “Absolution,” Pechorin replied.

  With the students and his teammates following him, Pechorin sprinted for the door down to the sewers. Once he reached it, he set Shuixing and the vials down one final time. The students looked at him in confusion, wondering whether he was abandoning her.

  “Get her outside, however you can. I leave that in your hands,” Pechorin said. “It is now time for me to offer myself up as a distraction in one final act of sacrifice.”

  Harun scoffed. “What the hell are you talking about man, we can—”

  Harun and the other two Heroes with their feet in the shallows of Numberspace all stopped abruptly.

  “We have a lot of teams coming… Oh no! And the Xian!” Gunhilda said.

  “First one reaches us in 16 seconds. Xian in 32,” Harun said.

  There was no more argument. The students began the process of carrying the slumbering faculty members down the stairs. Shikai, already carrying two, managed to pluck Shuixing up by the hem of her robes and carry her and the vials down by himself.

  “We’ll drop them off and be back up,” Harun said. “It’ll take a minute at most. Then we’ll help you distract them.”

  Pechorin nodded and gave him a thumbs-up, though he didn’t expect to last the entirety of that minute.

  Statistics:

  Team Pechorin