Although the Xian had been defeated and other Heroes standing down by order of the Pengwu under her control, Shuixing didn’t fully relax. The research team had done all of the ground work she asked them to, and if her hunches about the way the Celestials’ systems worked were correct, that would be enough. But it was still one of those pesky untestable hypotheses she kept running into. In other words, blind faith.

  The principle of it went like this:

  Since it was not possible to preserve and secure the physical machines housing Po-Lin in the Celestials’ world, there was, in fact, no way to prevent the Yishang from turning their world off. To do so would require physically manipulating things in the Yishang’s space which was not possible. The end of Po-Lin was nigh and there was no way to prevent it, but that did not mean everything they had worked for ended with it.

  Control over the prompts and inputs the Yishang used to influence Po-Lin gave Shuixing an invaluable opportunity to ensure something of this world was sent forward. What she had asked her research team to do was copy everything and funnel it into the data source for the new CPA that would turn on when the Yishang unveiled their new game. She, Natsuko, and all the other entities, living and dead, would provide the seed for this new world. All of the things they had learned in Po-Lin through so much pain and suffering would not have to be relearned by the new generations. Hopefully.

  But whatever existed on the other side would not be called Shuixing. Nor Natsuko, Pechorin, Sofiane, or Daisy. This was the price of transcending Po-Lin. To the extent that they would exist, it would be as a final, static emanation affecting the course of things to come. What that state would be like, she did not know. However, she was convinced such an existence was neither a death nor an end, but simply a different way of being. And even if it was an end for her, it did not change her course in the slightest. This was how the fight for independence from the Yishang would continue.

  Even before her final dose of Aquan Shen wore off, Shuixing worried about how to explain all of this to the others. She knew it would be discomforting for those who pictured an eternal paradise at the end of their struggle, and she had no desire to inflict one final anxiety on them when they ought to be celebrating victory. But she also couldn’t lie. They had gotten this far confronting the harsh truth of Po-Lin. Their escape should be no different.

  “We did it! Pech, we did it!”

  Pechorin had no time to prepare himself before Natsuko rammed into him and knocked the both of them over. The mud and snow and ash they fell in felt as pure and beautiful as the clear blue sky overhead. Natsuko laughed for joy and Pechorin hugged her to him with a contented smile.

  Natsuko held this hug for a minute or two before her small arms pushed off his chest so that she found herself pinning him, hands on either side of his head. She suddenly felt her face grow hot despite the fact they’d been even closer the night before.

  “It uh… it’s pretty nice out, huh?” Natsuko said. “Doesn’t feel like we just fought a battle for the fate of Po-Lin, does it?”

  Pechorin gazed past her at the sky and the shining sun. Now that he only had a small time left to experience it, its heat felt as precious as gold.

  He cleared his throat and declaimed:

  “O! Sun in the autumn sky,

  The last of those to be

  A gold fit for the weary eye

  And ne’er more to see.

  Still, in autumn’s crown

  The sun finds no prime place

  For only the red hibiscus

  Befits its noble grace.”

  Natsuko thought it was pretty good. She preferred poems that rhymed to the little Shikijman ones Pechorin usually rattled off. This one seemed more like one Daisy would compose. Then something occurred to her.

  “Hold on, all those poems from years ago that had red hibiscus in them, was that me?” she asked incredulously.

  Pechorin nodded.

  Natsuko put her palms to her face. “Oh gods… that’s so embarrassing. It’s adorable, but it’s so embarrassing.”

  Watching this, Daisy turned to Sofiane. “And I thought you and Gomiko were bad.”

  Sofiane snorted. “We used to be. They’ll get over it. Which, speaking of…”

  His words hit Natsuko like a blow to the stomach. Below her, Pechorin’s face turned sober. He must know too, she supposed. A silent stand-off followed over who would break the news to Sofiane, but this proved unnecessary.

  “Oh… Are the Use-Rankings in a weird order? I don’t…”

  Natsuko, Pechorin, and Daisy watched Sofiane’s face go blank and then start to twitch.

  Daisy put her hand on his shoulder. “I-I’m sorry, Sofi…”

  “It’s okay… I knew something like this could happen. So did Frizzy. They all did. We chose to— to—”

  Daisy hugged him and he began to cry. Through some effort, he managed to keep his sobs to a quiet hiss. The thought went through his mind that Daisy had also seen her friends die and it made him feel guilty for going to pieces so quickly. He tried to say as much aloud to Daisy in-between hiccuping sobs but she shushed him.

  Natsuko and Pechorin weren’t sure what to say beyond murmuring some gentle condolences and they were—with quite a bit of guilt—a little relieved when he excused himself for a walk. They watched him in silence wander around the side of the moat for a while before Natsuko finally broke the spell.

  “How are you feeling, Daisy?” she asked.

  Daisy blinked. “Hmm? Oh… I-I don’t really know to be honest. I’m happy, but I’m also sad. We won, but I didn’t get to give either Yuna or Kane proper good-byes. And even Cunegonde…”

  Natsuko rubbed her back. “It’s not over. They’ll be with us when we escape the Yishang.”

  “I know,” Daisy said, trailing off as though she had more to say, but nothing came.

  It turned out that Daisy was not alone in her mood. The Non-Heroes inside the city walls were partly celebrating, partly mourning, and partly wandering around, waiting to be told what to do. It wasn’t long before a throng surrounded Natsuko, Pechorin, and Daisy, badgering them for information about what would happen next.

  “Really, we don’t know either! We’re waiting to hear from Shuixing,” Natsuko told them.

  The response from the Non-Heroes was a mixture of anxiousness and disappointment, though these emotions were in turn re-absorbed into triumph and elation so that the equilibrium of excitable strangeness remained undisturbed.

  “I suppose we should head up to the college to wait for Shuixing,” Pechorin said.

  Along the way they passed streams of Heroes wandering back down the hill, sometimes gazing at them walking up, sometimes gazing straight ahead. Natsuko wasn’t sure what had happened on this front beyond Shuixing telling her she’d ordered them to stand down. She could only imagine how bewildered the Heroes were at being told to stop fighting and leave what should’ve been a climactic battle for the fate of the universe.

  As they neared the entrance to the college, Pechorin explained it might be difficult to find Shuixing and proceeded to tell them everything he’d been up to while the rest fought Boulanger and the other Xian. His telling was so sober and understated compared to the sheer absurdity of what he described that Natsuko and Daisy found themselves giggling and apologizing for giggling at the particularly gruesome parts. More than anything, the story provided an outlet for the positive emotions they weren’t quite ready to feel yet.

  Pechorin had just finished when Shuixing walked around the corner with researchers in tow. Her face looked utterly exhausted and resigned and her body weak and pale, but there was a gentle smile on her face and in her eyes that said she wasn’t worried about the Yishang anymore.

  “Shui!” Natsuko yelled and sprinted at her.

  “Don’t knock her down,” Pechorin called out.

  Seeing her friend wince, Natsuko pulled up on the gas before throwing Shuixing into a bear hug.

  “You did it! I knew you could! Mwah! Mwah!” Natsuko squealed as she grasped Shui’s hands and planted kisses on her cheeks in-between jumps for joy, causing Shui to blush.

  Daisy glanced at Pechorin with a raised eyebrow.

  “That’s what Natsu used to be like,” he explained. “Except 24/7. No off-switch.”

  “Wow,” Daisy said, and then something clicked in her head. “Wait… I know you guys told me this, but I just realized Natsuko has my archetype. It clicked just now.”

  Pechorin nodded. “Yeah. She is, or was, a proto-Daisy, if you will.”

  Daisy hummed. It explained quite a bit, not least of which was the darker part of her that had always balked at being told to be bubbly and happy-go-lucky, as well as the backsliding laziness when she stopped being rewarded for following her archetype.

  “The Yishang really aren’t that original, huh?” Daisy said.

  Pechorin shrugged, but it was the kind of shrug he did when he knew something but didn’t want to put it in words so he decided to be vague instead.

  Daisy pouted. “Out with it! No secrets among friends!”

  “I was thinking you two also have a lot of differences,” Pechorin said.

  With the extra hint, Daisy thought she understood what was going through his mind. It didn’t really matter if the Yishang made them original or not. That was something they did themselves. Daisy couldn’t imagine herself any other way, and that way was a mixture of what was given to her and what she’d made of it. It was a bit like poetry, she supposed.

  “So, Shui, when are we going? I wanna get outta this dump already!” Natsuko announced once her feet were firmly back on the ground.

  Shuixing’s expression suddenly turned uneasy. “Err… about that…”

  She took them into the laboratory and explained, as well as she could, what would happen next. The reaction was about what she expected, with Daisy and Natsuko being disturbed and Pechorin reacting as though he’d known all along, which he might have. She was able to mollify the other two with her assurances that it wasn’t like they were dying or being snuffed out, but without either having been in Numberspace, she could only offer them her word.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  Shuixing worried this anxious energy would be carried into the seed planted in the new world and that it would affect the new entities born there. Unfortunately, nothing was to be done about it. They were beyond the point of any other alternative.

  When Shuixing asked them if they had any questions, Natsuko was the only one who raised a hand.

  “When are we going?” she asked.

  “We’re already there,” Shuixing replied. Seeing the look of bewilderment on Natsuko and Daisy’s faces, she explained, “when I took control of the Yishang’s inputs I had the research team copy everything. We’re still in Po-Lin, but we’re also already over there. My best guess as to what will happen is that at some point it will be like going to sleep, and then, after some amount of time, we’ll wake up as… whatever we will be. As far as when the Yishang does this… it could be days, it could be a few minutes from now.

  Noticing her look of discomfort, Pechorin grasped Natsuko’s hand and squeezed. “I think I understand what Shuixing means. It’ll be okay.”

  “B-But we never— we won’t be—”

  He squeezed tighter. “We’ll be together on the other side, Natsu. Trust me.”

  And she trusted him for as long as her courage held. Pechorin himself, though he thought he might know what this new state would be like, was himself placing faith in Shuixing.

  After Shuixing finished her explanation, Natsuko loudly announced, “Okay! Next thing is to make a memorial. Let’s go!”

  Now it was Shui’s turn to look confused. “A memorial? It’ll be erased as soon as the Yishang turn off Flux Aeternum— er, Po-Lin. Why bother with it?”

  “Because,” Natsuko said, standing up and putting her fists on her hips in Daisy-like fashion, “I wanna know for sure that we’re the kinda people who’ll remember our friends before we ship off to fix another world.”

  Appreciating Natsuko’s logic, the other three waited for Natsuko to change into her original outfit she had tucked away in the laboratory closet and then went to the town square where the survivors were aggregating. Daisy erected a stone arch over top of the fountain. The best way they could think of to acknowledge the fallen was to etch their name into it along with a little description of what they were doing when they were killed. Daisy began with Yuna defending the border and beside her added Zicheng, Cunegonde, and Kane.

  The Non-Heroes took a moment to wrap their heads around what Daisy was doing, but the first to get the idea was Spriggansnout. He hobbled up to the monument and using his forehead to brace himself—since he had lost an arm—chiseled Medea and Vronsky along with a short, frank description of their being killed defending the hill to the Mage’s College. With that, the rest figured out the spirit and came forward with any tool that might carve into stone and set to work covering it with descriptions of the battle until Daisy was forced to add more wings to for writing space.

  Pechorin waited for the Non-Heroes to finish before stepping up to write down as many as he could remember, being responsible for a disproportionately large number of them. He thought to begin with Harun and Shikai until he spotted Gunhilda wandering the crowd. Waving her over, Pechorin explained the memorial and gave her a stone to chisel with. The first name Gunhilda wrote down was Astrid followed by Vladim, her former teammates who fled to the bad guys—who turned out to be the good guys—but were then caught by a scary lady who took them to the dormitory to do bad things to them and were thereafter blown apart by Windwalker. Pechorin asked her to write something for Harun and Shikai as well, to whose name she appended the entire story of what happened from her point-of-view, requiring Daisy to add still more stone to the arch.

  There was an awkward moment a ways into the process when some of the Heroes involved on the opposite side wandered into the town square to see what was happening and a few Non-Heroes went running for FDJ weapons. Shuixing talked them down and in short order the other heroes were filling out the memorial with the names of their own teammates. Harbin was surprised to find Shinshuu already there and Pechorin apologized for jumping the gun.

  The last to arrive was Sofiane looking more miserable than when he’d set off on his walk.

  “We’re writing people’s names down and what happened to them,” Shuixing explained to him when he wandered over to them.

  “I’d write down Gomiko and my teammates, but I don’t know how they died,” he said.

  “I might be able to help you with that, actually,” Shuixing said.

  It took a bit of searching, but she found Hilda etching researchers and students they had lost during the evacuation process. She wasn’t able to give Sofiane a perfect picture of what happened and how they died, but it was enough to provide a summary of Faisal, Harald, Margaret, and Gomiko’s efforts to save the research team. He considered what touch he might add to Gomiko’s epitaph and decided to add, “see you over there, Frizzy — Sofa.”

  Watching Shuixing finish up a list of fallen researchers, Natsuko was struck by the fact that she really didn’t know who to add. Neither she nor Daisy were jumping to write down Boulanger and Ailing, and Koyon was… Koyon. It was bad enough they were part of the seed, Natsuko didn’t feel the new world needed any more of the Xian than they were already getting.

  Eventually, Natsuko realized she ought to add Frederick and Hemiola. They hadn’t died in this exact battle, but in the broader struggle against the Yishang they had been both victims and participants, and they deserved a spot. Hemiola’s story was easy enough to write, but as she got to Frederick’s, she hit a wall of not being able to find the right words.

  “It’s hard, isn’t it?”

  Natsuko yelped as Pechorin suddenly appeared, hovering over her shoulder. She covered it with her body.

  “C’mon, dude, no peeking!” she said.

  “You don’t want the advice of a poet?” he asked.

  “No! Wait— I mean, maybe. Are you gonna write a poem for them?”

  “No, you are.”

  “Me? But I suck! I only started like a week ago.”

  “Sometimes the raw material of emotion makes for a better poem than the refinement of cultivated practice,” he said.

  She looked up at him and was struck by the way his eyes were fixed on the stone, turning over a poem, no doubt. It amazed her that she’d overlooked parts of Pechorin she now found so endearing. It was like a switch had been flicked and all of their past memories were repainted with her present emotions. She hoped the process Shuixing was talking about was kind of like that. They would all be little kernels of newness recasting Po-Lin in a different light.

  “Alright, I’ll have a go at it, poet-sensei,” she said.

  Pechorin chuckled and wondered whether he was finally a poet of the same caliber as Ogawa the Fisherman.

  Natsuko, meanwhile, was busy watching the words that had come to her the second she decided to spill everything out:

  Snow falls on your monument.

  I wonder now what you think.

  Can you see this from where you are?

  Can you see what we carried forward—

  From you?

  Can you see where we’re going next?

  I hope you can,

  And I hope you’ll be there.

  “Well, it doesn't rhyme, but oh well. I feel like I could’ve just written the words as a sentence without doing the funny poem lines thing,” Natsuko said.

  “No,” Pechorin said simply.

  “Just no?”

  “The words mean something different arranged like that. Prose carries information, poetry carries emotion,” he said.

  Natsuko wiped the leftover stone dust from the etched poem and stood up, boots squeaking. It felt nice to be back in her original clothes, though her hair was still long and half-white. Partly out of a desire to lighten the conversation, she asked Pechorin if she ought to cut it. To her surprise, his response was clear and direct:

  “Yes.”

  “Really? You like it shorter?”

  “I do,” he said.

  “You don’t like it long?”

  “I do, but I like it shorter more.”

  She laughed at how he said this with the same seriousness he opined about the nature of existence and its ceaseless torments upon the flesh. Since she herself didn’t feel strongly either way it was a good enough reason to her that it appealed to Pechorin and, in a way, the idea that he liked it made short hair feel more appealing by the second. If he thought it was pretty, then she did too. For this process they recruited Sofiane who was able to slice Natsuko’s hair down to its original messy bob with one flick of Taiyouken.

  “But I’m keeping the sword as payment,” Sofiane said.

  “It’s my sword!”

  “You’ve got your bottle! I want a cool, iconic weapon. You can’t have two, that’s unfair.”

  “What? That doesn’t—”

  “A man needs his cool, iconic weapon. It’s a part of his identity,” Pechorin said.

  Natsuko stamped her foot. “Oh! Fine! Take the damn fire sword. It’s not even your element!”

  Sofiane swished Taiyouken around. “Yeah, but it’s still pretty sick. It’s helping me get over my grief.”

  His internal logic was that, in the event that the Yishang won and the end of existence was just a statistics sheet, he wanted his to have a number for how many times he lost his sword and then stole someone else’s. Taiyouken made three.

  Once no one could think of anything else to add to the monument, Natsuko, Shuixing, Sofiane, Pechorin, and Daisy wandered over to The Devil’s Cut which was in the process of being cleared of its FDJ-smithing tools while Klaus set up his bar again. Joad and the remaining logistics team members were rolling barrels and carrying crates of booze back into the bar.

  “We’re not open yet,” Klaus said with his back turned.

  “Even for your favorite customer?” Natsuko said.

  Klaus turned and frowned, folding his arms. “Come back when you’ve cleared an ice wyvern for us.”

  He was able to hold his frown for a couple of seconds before cracking up and apologizing that most of the bar wasn’t set up yet and that he didn’t have access to much.

  “Any sparkling?” Sofiane asked.

  “As a matter of fact, yeah,” Klaus replied as he filled five mugs with beer.

  The five of them only had the chance to savor a few sips before the outside grew dark. Natsuko raced to the window to look out. Above, the sun had gone out and the sky was being replaced not with blackness, but with… nothing. It looked like what being dimension-jumped looked like.

  “It’s happening now…” Natsuko said, her heart racing. “Holy shit, it’s happening now!”

  They sprinted outside to watch the sky disintegrate as the dissolving process crept downward toward Verm?genburgh.

  “So quickly…” Shuixing muttered.

  “They didn’t get the end they wanted, so they’re wrapping up early,” Sofiane said.

  “The apocalypse which hath tormented me night after night finally appears…” Pechorin said.

  “Holy heck!” Daisy added.

  It was Natsuko who first decided to grasp someone's hand. Her right hand clutched Pechorin, her left Shuixing, and the others followed suit, making a little half-circle of five.

  “Kinda silly,” Daisy said, laughing nervously. “Not like it’ll stop it.”

  “No, but I wanna know we were the kinda people who comforted each other at the end,” Natsuko said.

  Pechorin, forever on the lookout for poetic devices, found himself dumbstruck at Natsuko’s ability to capture the essence of what they had been fighting for in a plain, prose sentence. If all that was carried forward into the Yishang’s new universe was this sentence, then their seven years of struggle had been worth it.

  There was panic and terror in the square as the dissolving force reached the tops of the buildings and swept down toward the street. But amid the terror, the five of them found a seed of excitement. An anticipation of what happened next.

  “I love you all,” Natsuko said. “And I’ll see you on the other side.”

  Statistics:

  This chapter marks the end of Forgotten Girl Quest. I want to thank each and every one of you who followed from beginning to end, or even just popped in for a time. This story began as an attempt to write for the RoyalRoad market before I quickly realized it wasn’t getting the traction necessary to take off. There were several times, especially during the early chapters, when I wanted to quit and try again with a new project. Ultimately, it was the enthusiasm and encouragement from the reviews and comments I received that kept me going and made me want to see it through to the end. In a sense, you all helped carry Natsuko across the finish line. Like the characters in the story, I doubt I could have done as much under my own power.

  As for what comes next, I think this is all I intend to write for FGQ. I might take a small break from writing to do some other stuff I’ve been meaning to do, but the next things on my slate are finishing Lions of Steel and working on a collaborative project with a couple friends of mine to make a visual novel. Since I can’t shill on my own author’s comments anymore, let me know if you are interested in checking out the visual novel and I will send a one-time DM blast (just the one, I promise) when we have a demo up on itch.io.

  I hope you enjoyed FGQ and I’ll see you on the other side.