Pechorin needed a plan to fight off several dozen, much more powerful Heroes and four Xian without any back-up. At half health, a basic attack from any of them would kill him. He could pick off a few before the others reacted, but even with his Desperation Art, the numbers were against him. Eventually an attack would go through.

  Since a perfect plan didn’t reveal itself right away, he decided to buy time by stowing his guns and sprinting into a nearby room. It turned out to be a storage closet containing the most beautiful thing he could think of: A broom. He snapped it in half with his boot and filed the larger spikes by grinding it against the floor. Provided no one looked too closely, what he now had was something resembling an FDJ rod.

  He stepped out of the closet and sprinted around the corner back the way he’d come to join the growing mass of Heroes.

  “What the hell? There’s nothing here!” Pechorin said, adding his voice to the symphony of Heroes saying more or less the same thing.

  ‘Here’ was the classroom stripped bare of absolutely everything, including things which Pechorin had thought the Yishang created as un-jumpable architecture. The side-windows, all furniture, all stationary and all the rest of the little decorative touches the Yishang had added were cleared out, but so too were the floor tiles, the ceiling rafters, and a dozen other architectural touches that, once ripped free, became interactable with the other millions of particles flying around the room. The result was an unsettling cleanliness.

  The crowd fought for a peek, though none dared step inside. Not while it remained a mystery what exactly had exploded everything while simultaneously slowing the entire world down. Pechorin avoided it too, just in case.

  “Who was supposed to be checking this room!?” Windwalker said. His voice boomed through the corridor as he shoved aside lesser Heroes to get to the front of the crowd.

  Leenhardt followed close behind, wedging himself in with the Xian as though their power might rub off on him.

  “I had Team Caroline working this hallway,” Leenhardt said.

  Windwalker and the other Xian looked around at the empty space while Pechorin tried not his observation of them obvious. Watching, he noticed something he hadn’t in the chaos after Windwalker blew the dormitory building apart. Crawling along Petyr’s shoulder pauldrons was a mouse with two tiny, interlocking halos hovering above its head.

  “Hmm… looks like dimension-jumping, doesn’t it?” the mouse said, twitching its nose.

  “It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out, Yuzu. Anything else you wanna add? Like why the hell the world slowed down?” Petyr said.

  “N-N-Nothing!” Yuzu the mouse stammered. “O-Only, I’m just wondering how they managed to get away so quickly! There’s not many places to hide. Not while we’re all patrolling the halls…”

  It’d been awhile since Pechorin witnessed Pengwu putting ideas into the heads of Heroes. They were subtle in how they slipped the suggestions into character interactions, so it was easy to miss what they were doing. Natsuko was the first to notice but no one took her seriously. Eventually, the seed of doubt she planted grew, and Pechorin noticed their gentle nudgings too. That, he supposed, was the beginning of his suspicions about the Yishang.

  Windwalker stroked his chin. “Not many places to… Leenhardt!”

  Leenhardt startled and finally entered the room everyone else was avoiding.

  “Y-Yeah?”

  “Besides Caroline’s team, is there anyone missing?”

  “I don’t think— I’ll check right away!” Leenhardt said. The nervous, ingratiating voice he used with the Xian dissolved as he turned to the Heroes behind him. A voice of barking authority replaced it. “Get with your teams! Anyone who doesn’t have four people with them in the next ten seconds will be killed on sight.”

  Amid the crowd stampeding to their teams, Pechorin imagined Yuzu the mouse with a grin on its little whiskered mouth.

  Pechorin had an escape option if need be. Shooting himself, to be specific. But that left the scientists with only Harun, Gunhilda, and Shikai to defend them and no easy way to do what he had set out to accomplish: Assassinating the Xian. One option was to clear out the Xian and worry about permanently dealing with them later. For that, he needed a better angle.

  Pushing against the tides of the crowd, Pechorin maneuvered his way to the classroom door and tapped on Leenhardt’s shoulder.

  “I need to talk to the Xian,” he said.

  Leenhardt glared at Pechorin and grabbed his arm. “No you don’t, you need to get with your team before I pull your head off.”

  “I don’t have my gods-damned team, that’s the problem!” Pechorin said, his voice a roar which grabbed everyone’s attention. Xian included. “They ran away as soon as we got inside!”

  Leenhardt worked his jaw. “You know who they were?”

  “I do,” Pechorin said. “They told me their names. They were all low-rank nobodies I’d never heard of, except one of them said his name was Pechorin. That’s the guy who’s been on the bottom forever, I think.”

  “Let him in, Leenhardt” Anastasia said.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Leenhardt let go of Pechorin’s arm and he stepped into the room. Windwalker glared for a split second before a look of fear spread across his face. Pechorin realized too late that his dark, brooding, apathetic demeanor was, for once, working against him. They all realized who he was when he failed to show the appropriate awe and terror at beholding a Xian.

  Faced with fewer mental expectations to revise, Pechorin was the first to react. He dropped the fake FDJ rod and grabbed one of his guns in time to blast all four Xian with Flak Cannon. Based on what he witnessed during Shinshuu’s assassination attempt, he had twenty seconds before the Xian all popped back into existence.

  His first move was to drop to the floor. Abilities and projectiles ripped over him as he did so. One, a wave of fire, licked him for most of what remained of his HP even while missing a direct hit by several feet. Prone, he activated his Desperation Art and unloaded a machine gun of duplicated FDJ bullets into the crowd outside while his guns vomited duplicated bullets. Although he was managing to kill several, the cascade of physics interactions didn’t trigger and all that he accomplished was mowing down the Heroes standing in the doorway. There was no way for him to duplicate the slowing effect on command.

  Unless… maybe there was. He just needed Gunhilda within the next 20 seconds.

  Keeping his guns firing on the doorway, Pechorin stood and cheated to the right side to keep the others—if they returned for him—from being caught in the crossfire. He took a step toward the door but leapt back at the last second to avoid an ice grenade that barely missed nicking the last bit of his HP.

  “Shoot…” he muttered.

  A delicious, poem-worthy deluge of dread swelled in Pechorin’s heart at the knowledge that he might not escape in time, but this dread was deflated when the hallway lit up with abilities from another direction.

  Pechorin heard stomping and swearing and held his fire, letting Concentrated Fire drop. This occurred not a moment too soon, as the next thing that came into his view through the door was Shikai encased in hard, spiky bark flinging pine needles off him. The Heroes he charged were caught off-guard and tried to swing at him with FDJ rods but none had enough force behind them to trigger the jump.

  “Start running!” Shikai said, projectiles and conventional weapons clattering off his bark skin.

  Pechorin put his faith in Shikai and ran around the corner blindly, grabbing at the door frame to keep himself from tumbling over as Harun’s passive movement speed kicked in. Pechorin realized immediately why Shikai picked that moment. He would have known from Numberspace where the next round of abilities were aimed.

  Abilities of every element and kind rained down on the muscular Tianzhounese Hero. Even with his resistance, there was enough damage to turn both Shikai and the hallway into a smoking crater. But with everything aimed Shikai’s way, Pechorin slipped past the crowd before they could wind up another round of abilities or swing a rod.

  Looking more like a flashing ability than a movement speed buff, Harun shot forward to retrieve Pechorin. Tearing him from the crowd, Harun used his stored momentum to hurl Pechorin to safety on the far side of the hall beside Gunhilda. Pechorin slid and slammed into the wall.

  “You better get us out!” Harun yelled, pivoting back towards the crowd of Heroes.

  Whatever his intent, Harun was instantly turned into a flickering polygon with the swing of a rod. It was a sad state of affairs, Pechorin supposed, that the current situation did not leave him time to make a dramatic show of grief at such a beautiful sacrifice. But nowing what he had to do next, Pechorin smashed out a window, grabbed Gunhilda like a sack of potatoes, and hurled both of them through it.

  From the glass-covered ground, Pechorin watched a boom rattle the building and shatter nearby windows. The glittering rainbow of abilities came to a halt. The Xian were back.

  “Gunhilda?” he said.

  “Y-Yeah!?” she said, shivering violently underneath him.

  “When I say go, I need rockets. But don’t hit anyone with them. Can you help me with that?”

  He rolled off her and popped up into a kneeling stance with his guns trained on the window. Gunhilda wobbled onto shaking legs and gripped her wand with two trembling hands.

  “I bet you thought that would kill us, didn’t you? You worthless shitstain!” Windwalker yelled from inside.

  Perfect, Pechorin thought. The Xian wanted theater, the Yishang wanted theater, and he wanted theater. Everyone was going to win here. All he had to do was monologue right back at them.

  “You can never hope to defeat us! Our rebellion is inevitable! Come back as many times as you like, this world is ours to destroy!” Pechorin said with the best villain laugh he could muster.

  His knuckles curled around his gun. Petyr arrived at the broken window and with a laughing smirk said, “This is something you Entropic Axis-types just have to learn over and over, isn’t it?”

  Pechorin held his fire. He needed to hit more than one to make this gambit worthwhile. The others followed behind Petyr who, as Pechorin expected, had a little mouse politely suggesting he continue talking at the evil villain.

  “You guys are the evil ones! The Yishang are gonna delete the whole world!” Gunhilda said.

  Petyr chuckled. “Oh dear, I feel sorry you were tricked by this nasty man, kiddo, but I’m afraid I’ll have to punish you too.”

  As soon as the last of the Xian stepped through the broken window frame, Pechorin yelled, “Gunhilda, now!”

  Miniature rockets exploded out the end of Gunhilda’s wand by the hundreds, zipping and soaring into the air nearby and startling the four Xian bearing down on them. Pechorin’s guns swiveled upwards as he shot a blast of Flak Cannon straight into the field of rockets. As Pechorin hoped, the world slowed and then stuttered, progressing time as a series of leaping picture frames rather than a flowing river. Between two, he pointed his guns back at the Xian and waited for a frame in which both of their feet were off the ground before firing.

  In one seamless calculation, Po-Lin saw that his gun was pointed at Petyr, scanned the bullet as arriving in the same moment he triggered an attack, noted the geometry at the tip of the bullet, bounced Petyr’s body between the two infinitesimal canyons on the tip of that bullet until his velocity reached over 5,000mph, set his trajectory downwards, and then checked to see what happened when his body hit the ground.

  The result, which his teammates watched second-by-second in a horrifying slideshow, was a thin red mist. Pechorin then proceeded to do the same thing to two of the other Xian.

  At this point there remained only one problem: Windwalker had figured out the trick and stood with both feet on the ground, raising his bow to kill Pechorin. With no other option, Pechorin shot him through the ground, taking him out of the picture for another 20 seconds.

  The world lurched back into motion and Gunhilda gaped at him in a mixture of awe and horror.

  “You have twenty seconds to run as far as you can away, Gunhilda. I am needed elsewhere,” Pechorin said, feeling guilty about leaving her with Windwalker on her tail.

  “Wait, but where are you—”

  Pechorin turned his own gun on himself and said the coolest line he could think of in the moment.

  “I’m going to hell,” he said before dimension-jumping himself.

  Statistics:

  Team Pechorin