As he, Daisy, and Shuixing walked along the beach road to Tianzhou, Sofiane clapped his hands together. “So, when we get there… clothing shopping?”

  Daisy raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t you bring a Tianzhounese outfit?”

  “Yeah, but there’s a Halloween event right around the corner, non? And we won’t be able to track down Yuna right away anyhow, so we ought to prepare for Halloween season.”

  “Recon at the clothing store?” asked Shuixing.

  “Multi-tasking, madame Shui, is the key to efficiency.”

  “I prefer deep concentration to multi-tasking,” Shuixing replied.

  Ignoring the spoilsport, Sofiane threw his hands behind his head and turned to Daisy. “Any costume ideas for you yet?”

  “Hmm…” Daisy pressed a finger to her mouth. “Haven’t given it much thought. Maybe a cowgirl?”

  “You’re telling me you can throw something together last minute and have it work?”

  Daisy gave an embarrassed chuckle. “Er… I receive a little outside help.”

  “Ah,” Sofiane said, realizing that what Daisy really meant was that event costumes at that level were curated by the Yishang to maximize Celestial engagement.

  If Daisy had any individual input, he realized, it was at the level of very broad strokes and subject to a Yishang veto. Sofiane wasn’t sure what to make of that. On the one hand, it sounded a lot easier having the Yishang guarantee your Use-Number increase. On the other, he enjoyed agonizing over his own outfits. Even if he were to go the way of Natsuko and Shuixing, Sofiane suspected he would still enjoy designing outfits for special events, whether it boosted his numbers or not.

  “At least tell me you enjoy the pageantry,” Sofiane said.

  Daisy nodded. “I don’t like pickin’ but I do like wearin’ nice clothes. And the events are always a lot of fun.”

  As the two of them talked, Shuixing was tried and failed not to eavesdrop. She missed participating in seasonal events. Unfortunately, they weren’t worth showing up for unless they were held in Verm?genburgh, which they never were. Not that she had any idea what to do if she did go. The main purpose was to see and be seen by other High-Use Heroes, play through a cheesy quest, and then get plastered and play drinking games with the other Heroes. None of that seemed appealing after she stopped knowing the Heroes involved. But if she was being honest with herself—as any good scientist ought to be—she was a little jealous of Sofiane and Daisy.

  Shuixing was so absorbed with thinking about the past that she failed to notice the change in scenery. The narrow sandbar between Tianzhou and Verm?genburgh widened into a beach full of shells. Larches and pines formed a barrier between the sand and the abrupt, pillar-like cliffs of Northern Tianzhou’s many mountains. What finally caught her eye, however, was a fast-moving nimbus cloud emerging from the trees. Sitting atop it was a peach-colored fox sporting interlocking haloes.

  “Zhidao?” Shuixing called out.

  “Hi there! Got a quest for ya!” the fox said.

  There was a tone of panic in its child-like voice as it banked the nimbus cloud around the three of them and parked it behind Daisy. From where Zhidao had come from there came the sound of cracking timbe. A moment later, a giant crab the size of a three-story house burst through the trees, sending uprooted trunks soaring through the air. Its chitinous jaws cricked and chittered and its spidery legs skittered along the sand faster than a creature of its size should’ve been capable of.

  Red bars above it filled and then overflowed with blocks of health markers. Each block was 100,000 HP, if Shuixing recalled correctly, and the crab had five such blocks.

  Shuixing’s brain lurched into strategy mode. Their ad-hoc party had no formal DPS, with Daisy being a Support Hero and Sofiane both being Control. At the very least, Daisy’s summoning spells could create a distraction to occupy the crab while Sofiane lined up his Coup De Grace to deal damage. Her goal now was to keep them both healthy.

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  Shuixing’s knuckles squeezed around her rod. “Daisy, can you distract the crab!? Sofiane and I will—”

  By the time Shuixing was saying this, Daisy had already clicked her pocket watch and a fist of condensed sandstone rose out of the beach and flew to meet the crab and bopped it on the head. The strike staggered the three-story crustacean and before the crab could recuperat from the stun the fist came down again. Then up. Then down. Then up, taking off chunks from its health blocks each time. The beach trembled with each titanic collision and Shuixing watched with wide eyes as Daisy popped the crab for more health than four Shuixings combined. For her part, Daisy looked mildly annoyed. Her lips pursed as sand got all over her boots and blouse.

  Sofiane tutted. “That mob isn’t supposed to be in Tianzhou. That’s a Deco Imperian enemy.”

  “It followed me all the way from Deco Imperia!” Zhidao said.

  “Deco Imperia is hundreds of miles from here,” Shuixing said. “How did…”

  Sofiane was more concerned with letting experience go to waste and zipped forward to tag the crab at least once with his Ball of Lightning to ensure he would receive half the experience. With one final crack of Daisy’s sandstone fist, the crab slumped forward in an explosion of sand. A second later the crab dissolved into a cloud of dust.

  “Drat!” Daisy said. “I hoped it would drop some crab legs. I’m really hungry…”

  “Well, the experience was nice,” Sofiane said.

  Shuixing turned to face Zhidao. The little fox had propped its head up on its forepaw and lay like a lounging emperor waiting to be fed grapes. There was something unnervingly intelligent behind his eyes as he stared back at Shuixing. The human-like intelligence was a signature look of the Pengwu, the shapeshifting animal fairies native to Tianzhou, but Shuixing couldn’t make up her mind what she thought of them. Natsuko insisted Pengwu creeped her out, but Shuixing personally liked their sense of wisdom.

  “What were you doing that the crab was chasing you so far?” Shui asked.

  “Oh, you know, floating around,” the fox said, unhinging its jaw to give an enormous yawn. “I’m not attached to a party right now so I thought I’d ramble around. But that crab decided I looked tasty!”

  Both Zhidao and the fox had come all the way from Deco Imperia. The crab would’ve had to chase the fox across Deco Imperia, then the entirety of Verm?genburgh from South to North, then either across the sand dunes or all the way up through Cascadia and back down through the Sibe-Lands.

  “Is that really what happened?” Shuixing asked.

  “Well… sort of. Kinda. Hehe,” the fox said.

  “We missed out on crab legs, so it’s not too late to eat something else,” Sofiane said with a fox-eating grin.

  Unamused, Zhidao floated over to Sofiane and batted him on the nose with a paw.

  “Ow!” Sofiane said, rubbing his nose.

  “Bad girl!”

  “I’m not a girl!”

  “Oh! You’re the old Koyon!” Zhidao said.

  “No, Koyon is the new Sofiane! I mean— no, he’s the— he sucks and I’m trying to get rid of him!”

  Shuixing felt like she’d been thrown back in time to when Natsuko and Zhidao used to argue when the Pengwu was attached to their party. The only difference was that it was Natsuko Zhidao would be fighting with.

  “What’d’ya mean sorta what happened?” Daisy asked.

  “Oh, right! So, us foxes are very curious creatures you know. And I was curious about how to travel faster. Not that I don’t like my little nimbus here,” he said, patting the fluffy cloud he was curled up on. “But it doesn’t get you across the continent very fast so I was looking into ways to traverse the entirety of Po-Lin in one go, and then I found out about some method to jump across dimensions or something. Have you heard about it?”

  Sofiane stopped rubbing his nose. Daisy bit her lip. Shuixing felt her blood run cold.

  “Th-That’s always been around, h-hasn’t it? Heroes have known about dimension-jumping forever,” Shuixing said.

  “Sure,” Zhidao said with a cheery smile. “I remember when you, Natsu, Hemiola, and Pechorin were trying to use it to steal from the Tianzhounese treasury. But I learned recently from a Hero in Deco Imperia that if you angle the dimension-jump shallow enough you can shunt yourself through the center of Po-Lin with enough forward momentum to reach the other side of the world. Isn’t that cool!? I can even take my nimbus cloud with me!”

  It was incredibly cool, Shuixing thought. She hadn’t even thought of trying that because of how focused she was on Natsuko’s bottle and its ability to permanently annihilate other creatures. She felt guilty being caught up in the violent possibilities of dimension-jumping at the expense of its more useful purposes. Teleport-jumping was vastly preferable to what she had released into the world.

  “Lemme guess,” Sofiane said, “Monsieur Crab just happened to come along for the ride?”

  Zhidao rubbed his neck. “Hehe, I can only take so many precautions. Have you guys learned anything about dimension-jumping recently?”

  Shuixing swore Zhidao was deliberately looking her way when he said this, though his eyes didn’t meet hers. No, she was just being paranoid. The only people who knew about forced dimension-jumping were her traveling companions, Harald’s team, and whoever had stolen the papers. There was no reason to think Zhidao knew anything about it.

  “W-Well, it was nice catching up with you,” Shuixing said, walking of in the vague direction of Tianzhou, “but we’re really busy.”

  “Hey, I’ve got nowhere to be. Mind if I tag along?”

  The three of them looked at each other with the same sense of mild unease. Zhidao picked up on it immediately.

  “Pretty please? I can do cool tricks!” he said, walking around on just his forepaws. “I can tell fun stories about the old days. Even some you might not know! Or I can even tell you how I pulled off the teleport jump.”

  Before the other two could protest, Shuixing said, “you can come.”

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