“Okay, fine, this is actually really good soup,” Natsuko said.

  The soup was a spicy fish stew made from local saltwater catches and flavored with seaweed, mussels, and a heavy dusting of five-spice and scallions. Even better, Minhua had given them a couple bowls for free for helping find the killer, and free made everything taste better. She would have enjoyed it a lot more, however, if she wasn’t pissed.

  “Only vengeance has a greater flavor,” Pechorin added.

  “Oh, I’m getting vengeance alright. I’m gonna…”

  Natsuko wasn’t quite sure what she would do to get back at her teammates, since sending them into oblivion with her wine bottle felt like an overreaction. Nonetheless, her ire must be demonstrated. She would have to give their punishment deep consideration.

  “Natsuko?”

  Natsuko glared at Pechorin. “What?”

  “The Non-Hero killer.”

  “What about them?”

  “We were going to deal with them.”

  “Oh, right.”

  Natsu and Pech stared out the window of the main dining hall of the Lanbaoshi Roadhouse, out to the shadowed road which passed underneath the giant building. The other shopkeepers and residents were busying themselves putting wooden boards over their doors and windows for the coming night. Not that it would help them. Natsuko wasn’t the strongest Hero around and even she could turn those boards to splinters. She could burn the entire Roadhouse down by herself if she wanted and it, along with its inhabitants, would pop right back into existence at 4am. That was what confused her most about whoever was doing this. If the Hero had beef with the inhabitants they could easily wipe them all out single-handedly. Why pick them off one at a time, knowing they would come back? What was that supposed to accomplish?

  “For fun,” Pechorin said.

  Natsuko realized she had mumbled these last questions aloud.

  “Fun? Who gets fun out of murdering a single Non-Hero every day? I mean, I've heard of psychotic rampages but..."

  Pechorin took another sip of fish stew and swallowed it before answering. “Shui gets her fun from tackling physics problems. You get fun from obliterating your brain with alcohol.”

  “And you get fun from LARPing a tragic backstory,” Natsuko said.

  “No, that is a tragic path that I walk. Do not make light of it.”

  “Okay, what’s your point?”

  “They are probably a forgotten Hero, same as we are.”

  Natsuko’s nostrils flared and she looked down at the flakes of dead fish and crustaceans floating in her broth. “No. We’re not the same. I spend my time helping the Non-Heroes in Verm?genburgh. This sick scum murders them. Don’t compare us.”

  Natsuko stood up and left her half-eaten bowl on the counter. Even if the fight would be tougher, she had hoped it was a 4th-gen Hero or later doing this. If they were a forgotten nobody like her and Pechorin, the chances were good she knew them personally.

  “You said you thought they were where again?” Natsuko asked Minhua who was sorting out nails for her husband to hammer into boards.

  “A shipwreck site, a couple miles that way,” Minhua replied, pointing somewhere beyond the wall in front of her finger. “A ship got beached there and now it’s crawling with monsters. There’s nowhere else out here on the dunes where someone could hide.”

  Once Pechorin finished his soup, the two of them began their trek across the sand. A short ways inland there was a small estuary right before the sandbar turned into large dunes which resisted efforts to climb them. Cool winds whipped the sand up and deposited it on the two Heroes.

  “This is buns, dude! My boots are full of sand already. I don’t even remember this place from our adventures,” Natsuko yelled over the wind.

  “There was a quest to retrieve a package from the wreck Minhua mentioned,” Pechorin said.

  Natsuko snapped her fingers. “Oh yeah! And it turned out to be some piece of a device the Entropic Axis wanted to use to blow up Tianzhou City, then we realized we got tricked and had to stop them before it was too late. Shit, that was fun. How did you even remember that?"

  “I have a mind that never forgives and never forgets, but mostly never forgets,” Pechorin said.

  “I guess I also put that part of our adventures out of my mind because of you-know-who.”

  “Freder—”

  “Bup-bup-bup! Not another syllable!” Natsuko said.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  “After all these years, you still haven’t moved on?” Pechorin asked.

  Natsuko snorted. “From the guy who wanted to duel me because I refused to date him. That’s rich.”

  “Rich indeed. My honor shall not be impoverished.”

  Minutes of silence passed before Natsuko spoke again:

  “Frederick was an asshole. I don’t want to think about ever dating him. Happy?”

  Natsuko was so focused on her diatribe that she crested the top of a tall sand dune too quickly and started to fall forward down a steep hill towards a small outcropping of rocks. Pechorin grabbed her arm, pulling her back at the last second and sending both of them tumbling down the way they’d come. At the bottom, Natsuko pushed herself off a fallen Pechorin and tried to dust herself off but somehow the sand had already made it inside every crevice of her outfit.

  “Dammit, Pech, you dumbass! What the hell was that for?” she said, spitting sand out of her mouth.

  Pechorin stood up and had more success dusting himself off. It turned out the trench coat was good for something other than looking dark and mysterious and extracting enormous amounts of sweat.

  “You were going to fall into those rocks,” he said.

  “I’ve got my Fire Gale ability, moron. I can break my own fall!”

  “I forgot.”

  Natsuko growled and rolled her eyes. Everything was high stakes drama and sacrifice with him. Everything he did was frilly, froo-froo, ornamental bullshit. He was like the human equivalent of Sofiane’s poofy outfits. It drove her nuts. Why couldn’t he just face the world as it was and quit being a delusional edgelord? Refusing to think any mor about it she pulled a waterskin from her shorts pockets that she filled with ale back at the roadhouse and swished some around her gritty mouth. Once the sand was dislodged from her tongue and teeth, she thought about spitting it out, but swallowed it instead to not waste the beer.

  “Let’s keep going,” Natsuko said, trudging back up the sand dune. “And don’t touch me again, got it? No more of this savior crap.”

  As they crested the top more carefully this time, miles of marshy plains came into view. The dunes blocked the marsh from the tides which occasionally flooded the road to Tianzhou, but when the Entropic Axis summoned some giant sea monster once a year in the middle of summer as they had for the past four years, storms sent walls of water into the plains, leaving them a boggy marsh for the next year. Right in the middle of this flat, moist terrain, was a three-sailed junk smashed into two pieces. This was where Natsuko’s party had retrieved that artifact on a quest so many years ago. It had been swarming with monsters then. It was supposed to be swarming with monsters now. And it wasn’t.

  Natsuko remained on her guard as they eased down onto the wet soil. Suctioning squelshes accompanied their footsteps, grating on Natsuko’s nerves. Their footsteps sounded too much like pop-up enemies. That was her biggest fear. It didn’t matter how big and terrible the boss monster was, she could annihilate it with one hit of her bottle. But if someone or something one-shot her first, she was toast.

  “The stones are ill-omened,” Pechorin said.

  “Pechorin, do you just like hearing yourself talk?” Natsuko said.

  “No. There,” he said, pointing out a series of three foot tall stones scattered randomly around the marsh. Some were isolated, some were in clusters, but the quarter mile circumference around the shipwreck was littered with these large stones.

  “Wow. Rocks. Who cares?” Natsuko said.

  “It’s anomalous and ill-omened.”

  “You know they were probably here the first time we came, right?”

  “They were not,” Pechorin said definitively.

  “That right?"

  “On the honor of my—”

  “Dead clan, yeah. How about you go first and if they are pop-up enemies you be the early warning,” Natsuko said, not really intending the suggestion to be any more than the kind of back and forth shittalking she did with Sofiane.

  “As you wish,” Pechorin said, picking up the pace through the marsh.

  “Wait! I was joking!” Natsuko said, jogging to catch up.

  Passing through the field of stones, Natsuko began to feel like Pechorin was onto something. There was a logic to the layout of the stones that became more apparent standing next to them. Something about the human scale. Memories tingled on the precipice of recollection but refused to come when she called.

  “I believe,” Pechorin said, glancing a a stone rolled into a puddle of water, “that these stones are why there are no monsters around.”

  Natsuko squinted. “Wouldn't they just respawn at 4am if you dropped a rock on them?”

  “Perhaps the stones halt that process somehow.”

  Natsuko shook her head. “The Yishang throw another Wyvern at Verm?genburgh every week even if I punt it through the ground. Ain’t no way some oversized pebbles are enough to stop them from spawning in more goblins or wolfhounds or pirates or whatever.”

  Pechorin stopped and knelt down to run a hand along one of the stones, his thumb dragging across its crevices. “Maybe the Yishang are unaware of these stones. Maybe they have been put here recently by someone seeking to create their own, artificial anomaly.”

  “Pffbt, please. The Yishang are demi-gods, Pech. They see everything and they know everything,” Natsuko said, placing her boot on the stone and wiping mud off it.

  “They didn’t know about The Anomalous Dungeon of the Empty Waterfall. Or the one you and Shuixing went to with Sofiane,” Pechorin said.

  “Yeah, but…”

  Natsuko wasn’t quite sure what to add after the but. She hated the Yishang, she loathed what they had done to her and her friends, and she would love to punch them in the face for it, but the idea that there were things even they didn’t know about filled her with a vague anxiety. She hated the Yishang, but they were the ones who pushed back the Mist and organized the fight against the Entropic Axis. What could possibly exist outside of that? Deciding motion and action could drive those uncomfortable thoughts from her head, Natsuko doubled her pace towards the shipwreck.

  Pechorin jogged to catch up. “The Yishang might not know about your wine bottle either."

  “They’ve gotta know. They send a new wyvern every week.”

  “In pursuit of my poetry, I have spent a long time observing the world," he said. "There are events triggered by certain criteria, and there are events which happen reliably at a given time. I set out on my quest to avenge my clan because they were murdered. That’s an event trigger. But I fire my guns at the night sky and howl in a cathartic release of my inner turmoil only on a full moon. That’s a time trigger. If Heroes are summoned when they die, that’s an event. If a wyvern is released every Monday at 5pm, that’s a time.”

  “Would you shut up, you edgy loudmouth? You’re gonna lose our element of surprise!” Natsuko said in a harsh whisper, dropping to a crouch as they neared the bow of the smashed ship.

  If she was being honest, telling Pechorin to shut up had less to do with surprise and more to do with not liking what he was talking about. She felt like she was on the edge of putting something together that she didn’t want to know. But try as she might to ignore Pechorin, one question kept nagging at her, refusing to leave her alone: Why did the Yishang use their divine magic to send a wyvern to slaughter a town every week?

  Natsuko shook her head. She desperately needed someone or something to beat up to take her mind off things.

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