Sacrifice, Pechorin supposed, was an aesthetic act. The form and style of a sacrifice contained its meaning. Reducing the act to mere content, you would have to call it pointless or wasteful, but to do so would be to deny its self-evident power. To put it another way, the style of a sacrifice was also its content. They were one in the same.

  This was how Pechorin rationalized the success of his plan. Either his plan failed and he wouldn’t be alive to know it had failed, and thus his sacrifice was a true one, or his plan succeeded and he would be left with the much happier task of reconciling between his theory that true sacrifice entailed putting one’s own life on the line, and the fact that he wasn’t dead.

  Natsuko was going to be mad at him anyway when she found out he’d been about 85-90% certain he wouldn’t die by force dimension-jumping. As far as he was concerned, the fake act was just as impactful as the real act, and perhaps more so in its deliberate attempt to measure up to reality.

  Well, no, Natsuko was probably going to dimension-jump him herself.

  Pechorin stood up and looked around the unfamiliar room that lay exactly one floor below the top floor of the palace. In other words, the floor he’d been dimension-jumped to. Unlike if he was standing directly on the ground, there was another geometric plane for him to get bonked to.

  “Er, hello there? Can I help you?” said the former Emperor of Shikijima, Sada-no-Michi.

  He had a shock of gray hair that stuck straight up, bushy eyebrows, and a goatee that made him look like an overstuffed scarecrow. He was sitting on the floor with his legs tucked under a heated table and a cup of tea in hand.

  “Not unless you know any cheat skills to calm someone down,” Pechorin replied.

  The Emperor laughed at that. “No, but if you learn any, you should teach me.”

  Wanting to put off dealing with Natsu, Pechorin took a seat across from the former Emperor. This was without being invited, but he figured poetry could get him out of a social faux pas if need be. You could basically fix anything in Shikijima with poetry.

  Sada-no-Michi stroked his goatee. “Hmm… I know you from somewhere…”

  “The exorcism?” Pechorin said.

  “Aha!” he slapped the table. “Right! Interesting times. I suppose I ought to thank you for that. Life has been a lot calmer since you pulled the Demon King out of me.”

  Sada-no-Michi took a sip of his tea and gazed wistfully out an open window at rolling clouds. Outside the room guards were stomping up and down the corridor looking for Pechorin.

  Pechorin frowned. “I’m curious why the Empress doesn’t seem to share your gratitude.”

  “Ah, Sacchan,” Sada-no-Michi said with a sigh. “She… has her own way of looking at things. My change of heart was a bit startling, I will give her that, but I have no desire to go back to the paranoid tyrant that I was. The totalitarianism was an act, but my rage at the state of our world was not. Not that I’ve let go of all my concerns, of course, there’s still a lot wrong with our world. But I can diagnose it now with a clear mind, rather than raging at every injustice.”

  “Injustices like the way Heroes act?” Pechorin asked.

  Sada-no-Michi gave him a knowing smile and sipped his tea. “That’s certainly one of them.”

  “Why haven’t you tried to bring the Empress around to your thinking?”

  “Sacchan isn’t ready to hear it. She looks at me and sees a broken man because what resonated with her was my anger and outrage and paranoia. Without them, I seem like an uncanny fake. But it just takes time. Believe it or not…” The former Emperor locked eyes with Pechorin and leaned forward. “Not every problem can be solved by poetry. Just most of them.”

  “Believe me,” Pechorin replied. “I know.”

  There was something in Pechorin’s tone of voice that made the former Emperor ask, “you’ve got someone like my Sacchan?”

  “I think in this metaphor I’m her.”

  “Mhm… I see…” Sada-no-Michi stroked his goatee. “By the commotion outside it certainly seems like you care about whoever this is.”

  “I do. But I also feel… frozen, I guess you could say. Like things are forever going to remain in limbo.”

  The former Emperor relaxed back onto his hands and twisted his back this way and that to a symphony of cracks. When he was done, he gazed up at the ceiling.

  “If the outside won’t change, then change the inside. That’s what you’re trying to do with your poetry, isn’t it?” Sada-no-Michi said.

  “Didn’t you say a moment ago that poetry can’t solve every problem?”

  “No, but it’s a tool to be used in the solution. You use a hammer to build a chair, but you wouldn’t be happy sitting on a hammer, would you?”

  Pechorin shrugged. Even as his guard had been lowered, the ingrained habits of cool nonchalance were as present as ever. His very existence, even before his deliberate efforts to cultivate an archetype, was like a poem. Aesthetically perfect, and demanding aesthetic perfection from the world. Anything could be made cool when poured into that mold, even sleeping in a dumpster.

  “I guess not,” Pechorin said.

  “So, decide what you want to fix and let poetry help, rather than hoping poetry will be the fix,” the Emperor said.

  Fix? Pechorin wasn’t sure what there was to fix. The world itself was built around hierarchies decided before he’d even been summoned. He couldn’t poeticize his way into better money, stats, and equipment. And he couldn’t think of anything that he wanted to get rid of about himself. He was fine as he was, and the things he wanted to change were all outside himself. He explained as much to Sada-no-Michi.

  “Sure,” the former Emperor said, taking another sip of tea, “but if there’s something you want to fix about the outside world, and you don’t have the answer now, then you have to change into someone who does have the answer.”

  Pechorin pulled himself out from under the heated blanket and rose to his feet. The footsteps outside had subsided, so he was now free to slip away and go find the others, and especially Natsuko. He was fairly certain the Empress would keep her word, but his certainty floated in that same 85-90% range that he’d given the floor below him catching him. He’d feel a lot better if he saw Natsuko unharmed.

  “If I don’t know how to fix things, how would I know what to change so I can?” Pechorin asked.

  “You don’t, kiddo,” Sada-no-Michi said. “If you did, it’d just be another boring stat to level up. You like poetry because it’s messy and vague and numberless, don’t you?”

  Pechorin nodded.

  “So don’t go and turn self-growth into another numbers game where you grind until you hit enough “truth” points. Let it be the mess that it is.”

  Pechorin grunted. This wasn’t Pechorin being dismissive so much as the fact that words seemed not as cool and dramatic as a grunt. So, he grunted and moved to the door. One thing did seem cool enough to do though:

  “Thanks,” Pechorin said.

  Sada-no-Michi hummed to himself for a second, then replied:

  “Frost in late fall

  Kills unharvested crops

  With its beauty.”

  Pechorin blinked. “That was 4-6-4.”

  Sada-no-Michi gave him a lazy smile. “The Shikijiman 5-7-5 is shorter than in the common tongue, so 4-6-4 fits the rhythm better.”

  Without intending to compose it, a couplet slipped out of Pechorin’s mouth before he could stop it:

  “As we enter winter,

  How can we expect thaw?”

  “How indeed. I leave that question to you, kiddo,” the former Emperor said.

  Wandering around the hallways outside, Pechorin eventually found the staircase and retraced his steps back to the courtroom. Throwing the sliding doors open, he rejoined his own court case.

  The court looked more or less how he’d left it but with fewer guards, fewer smiling faces, a smaller audience, and with the Empress re-assuming her position on the Hibiscus Throne with Natsuko’s bottle at her side.

  Natsuko herself was kneeling beside Shuixing and Sofiane. She fixed him with a death glare, having already figured out he’d survived. The Empress, meanwhile, with no way to access the Use-Ranking stat to confirm his death, went pale.

  “Y-You! You should be dead! How!?” Empress Sadako said.

  Pechorin thought about composing a poem here, but he thought of Sada-no-Michi’s poem and decided that he should do something that was not nearly as cool and edgy and just state outright what had happened.

  “I gambled that I'd survive being sacrificed in Natsuko’s place, and since neither of us knew the outcome, that means I upheld my part of the deal,” Pechorin said.

  “Wait, then I would’ve been fine too, idiot!” Natsuko said.

  “And I didn’t know that for sure!” Pechorin snapped back with genuine anger.

  He wasn’t sure where it had come from, but it definitely wasn’t cool or brooding or edgy. What it was, he realized, was honest, and honest meant vulnerable. He’d been willing to risk everything if he’d guessed wrong about the way the bottle’s physics worked, and he was going to make damn sure Natsuko knew that.

  In a softer and quieter voice, Natsuko said, “you ass…”

  “Enough!” The Empress said, standing up from her throne and grabbing Natsuko’s bottle. “We agreed to a life for a life, and that means you backed out of your side of the bargain.”

  Guards rushed into the chamber behind Pechorin and pointed halberds at his back, not that this would do much to him. He raised a gun at the Empress who only then realized that Pechorin, as the only person freed from the Special Event field, was by far the most powerful person in the room.

  Empress Sadako locked eyes with him. “I take back what I said about you making a good Non-Hero. You behave like all the other Heroes.”

  “Call it whatever you want,” he replied, his gun arm locked onto her. “But you’re gonna give us the bottle and let us go or I’ll kill you where you stand. I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors about deaths during Special Events.”

  The Empress responded with a piercing, unhinged laugh and stared back at him with wild, vicious eyes. “One thing you and I both agree on, then, is that some things are more important than your life.”

  Empress Sadako charged at Natsuko, bottle cocked and at the ready. Pechorin opened fire. The Empress brought the bottle up to defend herself and a shower of broken glass sprayed in every direction as Pechorin’s bullets shattered Natsuko’s bottle.

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