Natsuko knew things were going poorly the first time Boulanger hurled her through a building. By the second time, things were looking pretty abysmal. She didn’t have time to cough up the dust and rubble in her throat before she had to roll out of the way of Boulanger driving a rod through the debris she was laying on. She had no chance of counterattacking. All Natsu could do was keep dodging and blocking and running, feeling herself get slower and more tired with each passing second.

  Her and Boulanger’s stats weren’t that much different. She was closer to his power level than she was to Pechorin’s. The difference, she realized, was that Boulanger and the other Xian were relentless. He wasn’t slowing. On the contrary, he was moving faster and hitting harder as his fury grew with each strike she parried or dodged. At this rate it wasn’t if, but when he was going to kill her. And if one Xian was enough to take her out, no one else stood a chance.

  Boulanger feinted with another rod swing and Natsuko brought up her bottle to block, only to be caught with a bare-knuckled punch to her stomach that sucked what was left of the air out of her lungs and sent her staggering into the ruined wall of the shop he’d thrown her into.

  “Please keep fighting,” Boulanger said, stomping towards her with hunched shoulders, rod dragging in the debris. “This is fucking cathartic, let me tell you.”

  Bracing herself against the wall, Natsuko kicked up in time to catch his rod with the wooden teeth of her geta and pulled it down to the floor. Finding her first opening in their brutal slugfest, she swung her bottle at his side. Her spark of hope was immediately extinguished as Boulanger let go of his rod to grab her wrist out of the air and yank until she felt something tear. Through willpower alone she kept the bottle clenched in her fist and turned with his twisting grip until she had a clear kick at his face, forcing him to release her.

  When she looked up, she found his face full of wild-eyed joy.

  “The Yishang giveth, the Yishang taketh away, Natsuko,” he said, wiping her blood off his knuckles and onto his flowing robes. “I bet you enjoyed their pampering, didn’t you? And you threw it away! Gods, you’re stupid.”

  He laughed like a man cured of an illness. Knowing he had her on the defensive, he took his time picking his FDJ rod up and tossing it in his hand. Natsuko had one second left on her Black Fire and it was the longest second of her life.

  “Aren’t you gonna run? Or have you given up? It’s not fun if you give up.”

  He was waiting for her to use Black Fire. Not knowing why he was waiting scared her.

  “They’ll do the same thing to you,” Natsuko said, her voice ragged and choked with dust and blood. “They’ll cut you loose too.”

  “Maybe. But why should I care? The struggle is the struggle. I live for it, Natsuko. I fucking thrive in it. Hell, I almost admire you being insane enough to think you can claw your way to the next level. Beating the fucking Yishang…” Boulanger shook his head. “You’re crazy. But that doesn’t mean you get to take from me what’s mine. The Yishang are bastards, Natsu, but I’m the exact same type of bastard.”

  Natsuko watched the intensity in his eyes reach a boiling point, where the ideas and notions that had percolated in Boulanger’s head for years finally spilled out into the world. This was his personal truth, hidden behind everything he did, everything he said. This was who Boulanger was, and he was excited to say it out loud.

  Moving like she was about to take off with Black Fire, she waited for him to reach for her before swapping. In the same moment she slammed her bottle into his stomach and dimension-jumped him. Wasting not a second of his downtime, Natsuko took off with Black Fire. The Non-Heroes in town could hold for a little longer. Sofiane and Kane facing down two Xian was the more pressing issue. As was Boulanger when he came back up.

  “Gods, Shui… how much longer do you need?” Natsuko muttered.

  It would have been easier to endure the pain of getting the shit kicked out of her over and over if only she knew how much longer she had to endure it. The awful fact was that the Xian were too strong. It wasn’t a matter of winning the fight, it was a matter of losing slowly enough that Shuixing could do what she had to do. At this point, they were buying minutes at best.

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  Natsuko closed in on the lightshow Ailing was putting on outside the city. Light beams from her body leapt up to scorch Natsu as she descended, but the pain barely registered amid all the other warning bells ringing through her nerves.

  At the exact moment when Natsuko would have slammed Ailing to the ground, her world exploded into nauseating lights and noises. When she righted herself she was laying in a groove carved through the ground by her aborted descent. Ailing stood a hundred feet away encased in a rainbow-colored shield that must have come from Koyon. The culprit himself hovered above the battle, waving around his whip while pretending to be a conductor.

  He paused his conducting to clap. “Nice try, Natsu. Bravo! Still as mindless as ever!”

  Ailing faced her, ignoring Kane and Sofiane scrambling for safety from the beams she was automatically spawning.

  “Oh Natsu… you look so dreadful!” Ailing said with a pout.

  For a split second, Natsuko felt a flutter as she was reminded of those brief moments of comfort at Ailing’s hands. If the intent was to catch her off-guard, it nearly worked. But there was something in her patronizing expression that pissed Natsuko off. The anger was enough to pull her back onto her feet. She picked up the bottle and pointed it at Ailing.

  “My outside still looks better than your inside, rotten bitch,” Natsuko said, spitting a glob of blood onto the ground.

  Ailing wrinkled her nose. “If it makes you feel better to believe that, darling.”

  Behind her, one of her beams struck Kane at the end of a charge to escape Koyon’s spectral stampede. He was nearing the end of his HP despite scarfing down food at every opening. Sofiane was faring only slightly better, though only by using every resource he had on cooldown. Worse, if Koyon and Ailing wanted to close in for the kill, all they had to do was walk up and use a regular attack. The thought occurred to Natsuko that they might be alive right now only because Koyon and Ailing didn’t want to dirty their Xian outfits.

  With Daisy out of the picture, everything was on Natsuko. Everything. If they wanted to win, she had to push through and find some way to beat these terrible odds. It was all on her.

  Ailing’s mouth twitched into a smirk and Natsuko’s heart sank. From over the wall came a roiling cloud of inky darkness barreling straight for her. Boulanger was up. With her own Black Fire on cooldown, Natsuko had to take the hit. The one thing she could do was time a Megaton blast for the exact moment he hit and pray she timed it right.

  Natsuko’s vision filled with blinding fire as she scorched herself in the explosion, but she got the result she was looking for. Boulanger launched backwards, bounced by the interaction between Koyon’s prismatic shield and the shockwave of the explosion, keeping Natsuko safe from a blow she wasn’t sure she could walk away from.

  Through the smoke of a rising mushroom cloud, Natsuko now saw three Xian gazing back at her. Kane and Sofiane weren’t even worth their attention anymore. Her three former teammates were focused on her and ensuring she died in a sufficiently satisfying manner.

  “Why!?” she yelled, hoping that getting them talking would buy a few more seconds. “What the hell did I do to you!?”

  “You mean besides blow us all up?” Koyon asked.

  “Because you refused to let me leave!”

  Boulanger stomped through the smoke cloud. “You wanna know why? Because you’re going to destroy the world, Natsu. That’s why. Maybe it isn’t fair that only us eight get to live. No more fair than your fake #1 status. But the alternative isn’t that you all escape and live happily ever after. The alternative is that all of this is over! The Yishang made us. Do you really think we can somehow live apart from them? Magic yourselves to another realm where everything’s happy? No. I’m not letting you drag everyone with you into the dark. Not even 10% of the Heroes wanted to join you and you think you can make a decision for all of them?”

  He stopped a few yards from her, rod curled in his hands. She didn’t dare move.

  “You were always an idiot, Natsuko. You were a lazy, surly, whiny, self-pitying, alcoholic little shitstain and you still are. And somehow you still think you deserve to decide everyone’s fates. If you at least had one fucking ounce of self-awareness then I wouldn’t take so much pleasure in this. It would be just another special event to me. But I won’t be sated until I can look into your eyes and see that you understand how much of a pitiful fuck-up you are and I will keep beating you within an inch of your life until that happens.”

  Natsuko’s eyes flicked to Ailing. Perhaps that instinct had come from that dark, self-hating part of her that Boulanger was pressing against, the one Ailing had been so good at soothing into silence. All she was met with was the smarmiest look of disdain she had ever beheld. Koyon, for his part, barely seemed interested and wanted to go back to torturing Kane and Sofiane.

  Everything was on her, Natsuko told herself again and again until the words seemed to bounce off every surface of her mind and overlap each other. No one else could do this. Everyone was counting on her. She just needed to put Boulanger’s acid out of her mind and focus on winning. And that happened one step at a time.

  She put one foot forward, drew her bottle up to her shoulder and blinked. In the next instant, Boulanger was in front of her, grabbing her by the throat and lifting her off the ground. His free hand caught the same wrist yet again, this time making sure to bend it as far back as he could. Natsuko scratched and clawed, legs flailing, kicking at Boulanger until her geta fell off and she was held in mid-air, scrambling for any purchase she could find.

  “When you’re ready for this to stop, just say you’re a pathetic dog who deserves to die,” Boulanger said as he slammed her head into the ground.

  Statistics:

  Team Natsuko

  Team Harald