Sofiane yawned. “Haven’t we done this already?”

  “Gotten revenge for getting Margaret killed? No. No we have not,” Harald said, leveling his halberd. Behind him, Faisal unfurled his whip and the raccoon girl clutched a sizzling potion bottle.

  Sofiane drew his rapier. "This is going to end the same way, you know."

  “We owe it to Margaret to get even with the person responsible," Harald said. "We'll hunt you to the ends of Po-Lin until we have justice."

  “Look, buddy, you know I didn't kill Margaret. It was—”

  Before Sofiane could pass the blame off on their mysterious attacker, Harald charged. Ready for a fight this time, he didn’t give Sofiane the opportunity to use his Coup De Grace. Sofiane zipped to the side, barely dodging a stomping stun at the end of Harald's charge. Once he had used it do dodge, however, Ball Lightning went on cooldown, and Harald flicked his halberd to the side, clipping Sofiane for a small amount of damage.

  “What the hell!? I didn’t kill your damn teammate!” Sofiane said.

  “You trapped us in that dungeon!” Harald said through grit teeth. He cocked the halberd back to swing again, but Daisy walked up and grabbed the end of it, locking it in place with her enormous Force stat.

  “What if we solved this diplomatically?” Daisy asked.

  “There’s nothing left to talk about,” Faisal said, cracking his whip. “Your business led to our teammate getting killed.”

  In their eyes Natsuko saw a blinkered hatred. Like her, they didn’t care about dying because their stats didn’t matter anyway. They could die and respawn as long as they needed because the message they sent was more important. To make this point, Faisal fired his whip at Daisy who took damage so infinitesimal it would take Faisal the rest of the day doing nothing but flailing his whip at her to get her below half health.

  As he struck her impotently, Daisy turned to him. “Wouldja stop that?”

  Cowed by the silly pointlessness of it, Faisal stopped. His eyes blinked back tears.

  Natsuko cleared her throat and stepped forward. “So… yes, Sofiane is an asshole,” Natsuko said without a shred of self-awareness. “But we’re on our way to deal with the person responsible as we speak, and if you get in our way, you’re only making it easier for them to do the same thing to other people.”

  A dollop of confusion was added to Harald’s team’s expressions of anger.

  “Do what, kill people? How about you explain why they were coming after you, or why this purple piece of shit was coming after us!?” the racoon girl said, still crouched and ready to fling her bottle grenade.

  “Look, you were there, you heard what was said. She... I mean, this person, they stole some research for building a weapon to kill Heroes permanently,” Sofiane said, sticking his rapier back in his sash as a sign of good will. “Not just in anomalous dungeons, but out here, in the real world. I thought you all were the ones that stole it so I chased you down.”

  Harald’s anger shifted from Sofiane to Shuixing as he recalled whose research they said it was down in the dungeon. “Why? Why would you even try to do that? Are you insane!?”

  Shuixing choked up. “I-I—”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Sofiane said, tapping his nail against the pommel of his rapier. “You can let us through, or you can die, your choice.”

  “If we die, we die. At least you’ll have a taste of what Margaret meant to us,” Harald responded.

  Daisy let go of the halberd blade for a split second and with more speed than Natsuko thought a 2nd-gen Hero was capable of, Harald swung his halberd in a wild arc at an unprepared Sofiane. The blade slashed through his arms and dealt a moderate chunk of damage. More than the cocky Duelist had been expecting. Sofiane's blood ran down the halberd in streams, forming into a thin red mist shield around Harald.

  Sofiane coiled back, expecting to get another clean one-shot kill on Harald, but the raccoon girl tackled him out of the charging ability and pinned him to the ground as she clawed at him with her spiked metal nails. “Nice try!"

  While this was happening, Faisal side-eyed Natsuko, Pechorin, and Shuixing, clearly wondering whether they would intervene in Sofiane’s fight with them. Getting into a Hero-on-Hero fight was frowned upon by the Yishang at the best of times, let alone when it involved the permanent deaths of Heroes.

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  “Would you give me some bloody help!?” Sofiane shouted, bursting out of the raccoon girl's grasp as a ball of lightning before popping out into a halberd swing from Harald that hit him square in the stomach.

  Sofiane lined himself up for another coup de grace strike when Shui yelled, "Stop!"

  For a few, tense seconds, Shuixing had everyone’s attention.

  “L-Listen, this was my fault. Sofiane made a poor choice hunting you all down, but we weren’t trying to get anyone killed. And if I knew this would happen I-I… I would never have started the research. If it helps you... process things, I will let you kill me to make things square. But it’s pointless to go after Sofiane. He had nothing to do with Margaret’s murder.”

  Pechorin’s eyes watered. “Such a noble sacrifice, I find myself almost shaking with envy.”

  Natsuko socked him in the arm. “Really dude?”

  No one spoke for a moment after that. The only sound was rustling leaves and ragged panting from Harald, Sofiane, Faisal, and the raccoon girl. Harald locked eyes with Shuixing and, after a few agonizing moments, his halberd dropped.

  “Gods-dammit! Shit!” he said, mussing up his own hair. “I’d rather just beat up this obnoxious purple mannequin!”

  The raccoon girl was also still red with anger. Sensing his cue, Faisal stepped in as the voice of reason. Wiping back the sweaty strands of hair pulled loose from his jet-black bun, Faisal put a hand on Harald’s shoulder. “We’re not accomplishing anything here. Not if we win, not if we lose."

  Harald growled. “But Margaret—”

  “What about her? We should've known better than relying on a dangerous place like that fake Dungeon of Stars anyway,” Faisal said.

  “What are we supposed to do then!?”

  Faisal shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  Natsuko’s brain, high on the performance-enhancing drug of sobriety, suddenly made a connection.

  “Wait, the total Use-Ranking didn’t drop! Margaret isn’t like… dead dead. We just have to… um… talk to the Yishang, maybe?”

  That seemed about as likely to succeed as sowing Marget’s body back into one piece. Everyone knew the Yishang lived in a floating treasure tower in outer space. Their requests and orders sometimes came down through the Pengwu, but there was no way to predict when or where. Even then it was usually only to announce some important event like the Mist being pushed back or a new Hero being summoned. And there was certainly no communication in the other direction. While they discussed this possibility Daisy went for a short walk.

  The raccoon girl scoffed. “Oh, okay, just ask the demi-gods, 'hey, if you’re not busy, could you please go find this random Hero and bring them back to life pretty please?''

  Natsuko looked at them guiltily. “I mean… It could happen, right?”

  Harald let out a deep exhale and tucked his halberd away. “It’s better than nothing. And you’re sure they can do it? No, it’s the Yishang, they must.”

  Whether that came from genuine confidence or a willingness to grasp onto anything at all, Natsuko didn’t know. The important thing was that the situation was defused. She was 90% satisfied with her own quick-thinking but 10% disappointed she wouldn’t get to beat some ass. No longer drowned in her urge to drink, Natsu's urge to fight was coming back. She needed some ass to kick soon or she would go crazy.

  “Alright, we're done here? Squash le beef, non?” Sofiane said, thrusting a hand at Harald.

  Harald spat at it and walked off to rejoin his teammates.

  “Plouc de deuxième génération,” Sofiane muttered as he wiped his palm off on Natsuko’s sleeve.

  Natsuko swiped at it. “You prissy little shit! You oughta be thanking me for saving you!”

  “Eh, I was holding back to be nice,” Sofiane said. “I could’ve run him through the same way I did last time, I was just paralyzed with guilt.”

  “Please, can we stop this?” Shuixing said, rubbing her temples.

  Natsuko and Sofiane both muttered something in response that let them vaguely keep face.

  “Where did Daisy go?” Pechorin asked.

  Everyone looked around, surprised that she had slipped away so quietly. Before they could organize a rescue operation, the missing party emerged from between two cranberry bushes. Her hands were rubbing her forearms and she somehow looked mildly surprised to be back on the forest road.

  “Daisy? Are you also tormented by envy at Shuixing’s impeccably-timed self-sacrifice?” Pechorin asked.

  “Huh? Oh, um, no, I just stepped out to warm up. I get cold standing in one place for too long.”

  Natsuko raised an eyebrow and looked up and down at Daisy's riding breeches, boots, and pink jacket. “You’re better dressed than I am."

  “Maybe because you're a Fire Elemental?” Daisy asked.

  Natsuko looked dumbfounded. “Yo! Do you think that’s, like, a hidden passive or something? That’s awesome! Wait, no, why is that my passive and not free HP or double attack speed or something? Never mind, that's friggin' buns!”

  Daisy giggled and used that as an excuse to drop the conversation.

  Due to the delay, Team Natsuko was a few miles shy of Lanbaoshi Roadhouse before the sun went down. Despite Sofiane’s insistence that they push on through the evening, Natsuko’s alcohol-induced sleep-deprivation was getting the better of her and she passed out standing up while the others set up camp. Shuixing had to drag her friend to their shared tent by her ankles to get her inside.

  An hour or so later, once he was certain the others had gone to bed, Sofiane shimmied out of his sleeping bag, being careful not to wake Pechorin who was lying beside him, and crawled over to poke at Daisy’s tent. The two went for a short walk down to a rocky creek off the road full of water threatening to turn into ice.

  Anticipating his question ahead of time, Daisy broke the silence by saying, "I don't know whether I'll ask them or not."

  “You shouldn’t,” he said. “The Yishang won’t do anything about it and it'll just get the lower-ranked Heroes all riled up. Pretty soon the Yishang will want to know what's happening, and then they'll know about forced dimension-jumping.”

  “I know that,” Daisy said, picking up a polished stone from the creek. She chucked it and the stone sailed far, far away. Miles away. When it finally came down, it did so with enough force to knock a pine tree down. “Believe me, I know that.”

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