This time, Natsuko was more appreciative of Pechorin's save. Frederick’s follow-up attack came a quarter of a second later and both of them rolled in separate directions as the glowing golden spear pierced the deck where Natsuko’s head had been. Her eyes darted for the bottle that slipped from her fingers when Pechorin tackled her. She found it rolling towards the edge of the ruined deck.

  “You’ve always been slow, Pech,” Frederick said with a wide grin. “But you have damn good intuition. You, Natsu? Not so much.”

  Natsuko scrambled to her feet before the lance struck again, but Frederick was faster than her for the duration of his Desperation Art. Catching a glint of gold in her vision, Natsuko waited for the coming pain. Then, two shots rang out across the marshes. Two bullets found their marks in Frederick’s chest. The wide grin left his face as he shrugged off the damage.

  “You Yishang toadie! You’d preserve this worthless fucking world instead of helping your own people!?” Frederick screamed.

  A flurry of lance stabs shot towards Pechorin. Two strikes found his chest. The gatling lance thrusts happened in the span of a few seconds but that was all Natsuko needed to set off a Fire Gale from her palms, rocketing her back onto her feet. Frederick didn’t wait for her to run. A golden lance tip pierced her center mass, but all Natsu felt was the adrenaline rush from hitting the 50% health threshold of her Hothead passive. The only trouble was she was halfway to death.

  “Pechorin, throw me one of your guns!” Natsuko yelled.

  Pechorin lobbed the gun at her. Recognizing what they were trying to do, Frederick reached out to intercept it. Before he could, a roar of flak spewed from Pech’s remaining gun at Frederick, the deck, and even Natsuko. Frederick caught the thrown gun, but buried instincts deep within Natsuko emerged to capitalize on the metallic flak. She blanketed Frederick in fire which reacted with the flak, coating his body in molten lead. Frederick howled and dropped the gun and Natsuko had just enough time to pick it up before water flew out of the tip of his golden lance and doused the Molten reaction.

  Natsuko recognized this immediately as Shuixing’s Ablutions ability, stolen by Frederick's Jack class. For a moment, she wondered if it was pure chance Frederick had picked it as one of his three Jack spells for the day before noticing the bottles of liquor stacked up where he’d been sleeping. Apparently, she wasn’t the only person aware of Ablutions’ alternative uses.

  “Frederick, stop! We want to help you!” Natsuko said, her voice low and desperate, gun at the ready to parry with.

  “Help me what, keep living? No, Natsu, I'm done with Po-Lin. Done with the Yishang. All I want is sweet oblivion," he replied, crouching and coiled.

  Natsuko took a step forward and Frederick whipped his lance around in a whirlwind. Her arm brought the barrel of Pechorin’s borrowed gun up and parried the golden lance in a teeth-rattling clang that knocked her backwards, ripping up planks beneath her feet. Giddy pleasure flushed through her as her Fuel Injection kicked in. Her wounds healed, her cooldowns went down, and most importantly, she felt wired. Her first addiction, before alcohol, had been activating this ability. Her fighting instincts took over and she used a pulling Wind spell to yank Frederick towards her waiting palm, grabbed his face, and slammed it to the floor while activating her Fire Gale directly into it.

  The force of the flames drove Frederick through the deck and down to the one below where he landed on a smashed barrel with an expulsion of air loud enough for Natsuko to hear over the roaring in her ears. She felt powerful again. It had been so long since she felt like this. She wanted to keep feeling it.

  Pechorin glanced at her. “Natsu, we need to talk him down from—”

  “No more talking,” Natsuko said, leaping down and eating the fall damage to keep herself under the 50% HP threshold flooding her with fiery energy.

  Frederick was back on his feet and ready to meet her but his Desperation Art had worn off. His lance was no longer glowing and he was slower. Her twitching nerves could react to his thrusts with perfect timing, parrying one strike after another. She was disappointed when the parries gave her health back and she felt the knife’s edge rush leaving her.

  Recognizing he couldn't win, Frederick laughed with blood running out of his charred pink mouth. “I’m gonna come back and do it again, Natsuko. And again. And again. I’ll keep experimenting on Non-Heroes until I find a way out. You can’t keep someone in who wants to get out.”

  Resisting the urge to smash his face in with another Fire Gale, Natsuko took a deep breath and said, “no, I’ll beat you until you get sick of it and then I’ll sit your ass down and we’ll talk this through. You think you’re stubborn? Freddie, you’ve got nothing on me. Stubborn and stupid are my only personality traits.”

  “Not true,” Pechorin called down from the deck above.

  “Ha! You might be right, Natsu. I know that better than anyone. But we’ll just have to see, won’t we?” Frederick said.

  With a wave of his hand, a shower of golden sparkles exploded in front of Natsuko, blinding her for a second. She tried to parry the follow-up, but rather than thrusting at her with his lance, he hurled a Fire Gale at her that ignited the specks of gold on her and inflicted the same burning molten reaction she had hit him with. Natsuko screamed and staggered backwards, accidentally walking over the edge of the split deck and falling to the marshy ground below. The muddy water below the shipwreck helped put out the gold melting on her. A second later Frederick splashed down beside her.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Both of them were nearly dead. She could see the desperate look in Frederick’s frenzied eyes. He wanted to die so bad he was willing to fight her to the death. Sadness at the sight cut through the adrenaline. There was still something in him she couldn’t let go of, something in the ferocity with which he threw himself at everything, even when it was self-annihilation. It was why she couldn’t use the bottle on him. Not now, not ever.

  Frederick stabbed at her again, but he was now so exhausted it was nothing but a token gesture. She caught and deflected the lance tip with Pechorin’s gun and pushed herself to her feet with the rush of health that came with her Fuel Injection. Before she could make one final plea for Frederick to come to his senses, Pechorin dropped down from above-deck with her wine bottle slung over his shoulders. Her eyes shot to him.

  “Pech, leave it. This is between us,” she said, her voice ragged.

  Frederick wiped blood from his mouth and glanced at the bottle. “I noticed you ditched your sword, Natsuko. For that bottle, right? That’s not a weapon.”

  “I don’t carry a weapon anymore. There’s no point,” she said.

  “Even when you're hunting another Hero? There’s a weapon shop at Lanbaoshi. You could've bought one there,” he said, holding his lance in a defensive stance.

  “I thought I could talk you down without needing it.”

  “Bullshit. I saw the look of surprise. You had no idea it was me and every reason to believe it was a newer-gen Hero who could squash you in a heartbeat. So, I’ll ask again, what’s the bottle for?”

  “Drinking.”

  “It’s empty.”

  “Just give him the option, Natsu,” Pechorin said.

  Frederick narrowed his eyes. “What option?”

  “Pechorin, I swear to the gods, the Yishang, and every last Celestial in the sky, you will not—”

  “The wine bottle can end Heroes’ lives,” Pechorin said flatly. “If you get hit by a certain spot on it you’re shunted through the floor like a bad dimension-jumping accident and the Yishang can’t re-summon you.”

  Frederick’s eyes lit up with relief. His arms slackened and his golden lance dropped to the mud, its luster dimmed by the dark shadow of the wrecked ship.

  “Natsu, please…”

  She refused to meet Frederick’s gaze. If she did, she would start crying and wouldn’t be able to stop. All she had to do to get Frederick to stop talking was one last Fire Gale, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Her hands clutched at the hem of her shorts.

  “Shut up,” she said.

  “Natsu…”

  “Shut up!”

  The scream echoed into the empty decks of the shipwreck, deprived of the monsters that should’ve been there. She would've even welcomed some stupid, ambling goblins. Anything but Frederick looking at her with that awful look of defeat. She jerked when she felt a hand on her shoulder and almost blasted Pechorin with a Fire Gale.

  “Let him make his own choice,” Pechorin said, his voice patient and level, without any of the strained gruffness he usually added to sell his archetype.

  Natsuko slapped his hand off her shoulder. “Help a friend kill himself? No! You’re insane!”

  “There are things we still need to do, Natsu. Urgent things. We don’t have time to thwart him every single time he respawns. As a matter of dignity, we ought to give Frederick the choice the Yishang won’t.”

  “A choice is all I want,” he said, locking eyes with Natsuko.

  She stomped through the mud to Pechorin and tore her bottle from his grip and thrust it into Frederick’s chest.

  “This part, right here on the punt. That does the trick. I’m not going to watch,” Natsuko said.

  “I’d like it if you did,” Frederick replied. His voice had exchanged its manic desperation for calm acceptance.

  “And I’d like it if you weren’t using my bottle for this. I guess both our hearts will be broken,” she said, turning her back to him and walking away.

  He laughed softly. She expected him to say something else, but she made it a few steps out into the sun before she heard the unmistakable chunking sound. Stopping to take a deep breath, she continued forward, back across the marshy plains. There came a slopping noise from behind her as Pechorin ran to catch up. Wordlessly, he handed her the wine bottle back. They walked in silence until the land turned back into the tall, rolling dunes which shielded the marsh from the ocean.

  “We all have different ways to bare our tortured souls to the world,” Pechorin said, ending the silence.

  “Not the time for the edgelord shit, buddy,” Natsuko replied.

  “The edgelord shit is my chosen vessel. Yours is alcohol."

  She wanted to tell him to shut up like always, but instead she sat down in the sand at the top of the dunes and looked out to the sea and the little green-brown speck that was the Lanbaoshi Roadhouse full of Non-Heroes waiting to be told they would be alright and wouldn’t be picked off night after night. Pechorin sat down beside her, the weight of his trench coat sending up a plume.

  “What was Frederick’s vessel then?”

  “He didn’t have one,” Pechorin said. “That was his problem.”

  Natsuko’s back fell into the sand and she splayed out her arms. “He didn’t have one…”

  That wasn’t Pechorin’s full theory on the matter. His full theory was that Frederick had had one years ago and lost it, never to be regained. After a moment of quiet reflection, a calmer Natsuko popped up from the sand, dusted off her bare skin as best she could, and turned towards the Roadhouse.

  “Guess we better go deliver the good news,” she said.

  Statistics: