Forgotten Girl Quest

Natsuko’s heart leapt when the wine bottle collided with Daisy. She more or less knew what would happen, but the unga bunga part of her brain still reeled. Sure enough however, while Daisy was gasping for air after an 80-pound wine bottle slammed into her solar plexus and cracked a few ribs, she was not a jittering polygon. At some point Shuixing had probably explained why to Natsuko, probably using fancy words like, “recursive-input feedback loop,” but what that meant was that with no wall, floor, or ceiling for Daisy to jump outside of, she was going nowhere.

“What!? How!?” Baphomet said.

His momentary surprise was all Natsuko needed to kick him downwards and detonate Megaton above him to give him an extra push. At the same time, Daisy yelled for help as she plummeted towards the ground. The downside to being an Earth Elemental was that her powers were not very useful up in the air.

“Gimme a second! The cooldown’s almost up!” Natsuko shouted to her.

Then the whole sky was spinning around her. Amidst the nauseating swirl she saw Baphomet falling next to her, his hands holding a blood red scythe in addition to the useless bottle. Her arms and chest screamed in pulsing, angry throbs where the blade had mowed through her. His one basic attack brought her under half health. Boulanger, Koyon, and Ailing flinging all of their abilities had done about the same. On top of that, Daisy’s Granite Sentinel passive prevented critical hits and cut physical damage. If Natsuko had been by herself, Baphomet's single attack would've killed her.

Cold fear ran through her. Rank #1 or not, Baphomet was an order of magnitude more powerful than her and wanted both her and Daisy dead.

Shuixing, Sofiane, and Vidorgia grabbed everything they could. Between them they were able to take most of the remaining vials and needles but the precursors proved too cumbersome. Buckets of frogs and glowing rocks were, on top of being heavy, extremely conspicuous. It only took one suspicious Non-Hero to whack them through the ground. As they were about to leave, Sofiane and Shuixing shared a common thought.

Natsuko and Daisy are coming to Vermögenburgh.

Both blinked and looked at each other.

“Did you just—”

“—Hear a voice?”

“Yeah.”

“It said…”

Shuixing fumbled through her pockets, ignoring the accidental needle pricks and reaching for a vial of Aqua Shen. She pulled a couple vials before realizing Sofiane had grabbed most of the murky red ones.

“Sofi! Give me a vial, now!”

“What!? You’re going into Numberspace now!?”

Shuixing dashed for the chair and hiked up the skirts of her robe to expose her thigh. “If Baphomet gets to them, Natsuko and Daisy are as good as dead. I’m going to edit Baphomet’s numbers myself."

As he handed her one of the red vials, Sofiane heard commotion out in the hall. Baphomet returning meant Shuixing’s side-struggle for control of the Non-Heroes was about to begin in earnest. Sofiane had hoped to be clear of the enemy’s headquarters before that happened, but if the Yishang were going to throw turbo-charged fuck-off Heroes at them, they needed Natsuko and Daisy alive. He and Shui couldn't let Baphomet kill them. Even if they pissed him off by running away.

“Don’t do anything too crazy, okay? Even if the Yishang know you can edit numbers, don’t let on you’re any more of a threat,” Sofiane said.

Shuixing met his gaze and nodded grimly. She plunged the needle into her thigh, shuddered, and went limp. It was Sofiane's first time seeing the process first-hand. When he rescued her from her laboratory a week ago, he thought she was simply unconscious. Now he could see what really happened was the thing animating Shuixing’s body simply departed. He pressed his fingers to her throat and felt no pulse, nor any breath from her nostrils. There was a pile of something in this chair, but that thing was not what he called “Shuixing.”

Shuixing's first instinct was to dart for the Yishang’s communication folders.

It was easy to get lost in Numberspace, so one had to fall back on habituation. Her fall back was her chain of experiments which provided a logical structure for these journeys where she could pick up where she last left off. The residue of that overwhelmed her original intent of finding Baphomet. So it was in the middle of poring over a character design email for something called “Novo Nocturn Nine” that she realized she needed to be elsewhere.

However, an impulse of curiosity struggled for control over the floating ball of thoughts called Shuixing, and she searched through more emails. Flux Aeternum (her world) was in only around 5% of them, and even then they pertained only to the ongoing “finale” event and discussions of which cameo characters would be added to the launch of the new "game" (a word she hated). The Celestial names (all Tianzhounese-sounding) she recognized from previous communication were now almost all associated with Novo rather than Flux. Only some “Prompt Engineers” and programmers remained. She queried her own name and, to her great relief, found nothing beyond a mention of a “broken AI.” Better to be thought broken than a danger.

Her own numbers shifted and she was pushed over the threshold of realizing she was wasting time and beelined for Baphomet. Using all the tricks she had learned thus far, she optimized her time by searching emails for a direct link to the entity directory on the business's shared drive then alphabetized the folder to give her Baphomet. Accounting for the lag present in the physio-mechanical universe the Celestials inhabited, the jump took her 150 milliseconds.

She knew exactly where to find his stats and, sure enough, all were 9,999, so she set them to 1. Or, rather, she tried.

They didn’t change.

Re-acclimated to the split-second danger of Hero-on-Hero violence, Natsuko was ready for Baphomet. But the first block she parried sent a jarring, numbing pain through her blade and up her arm. Raw kinetic energy passing down the length of Natsuko's sword into her body. This was not HP damage, or anything to do with stats. It was brute force. Sheer willpower alone kept the blazing white blade clutched in her fist.

Baphomet sneered. “What are you even doing here? Don’t you already have your ticket punched, you obnoxious, overpowered bitch?”

He was one to talk.

Natsuko had stabilized her mid-air spin from her parry halting all momentum, both rotational and gravitational. It was yet another bizarre physics anomaly she might never have discovered had she not been forced to parry an attack while eight kilometers above the ground. She was already falling again, but the difference in acceleration was adding distance between her and Daisy by the second. At this rate, Daisy was twenty seconds from being a red smear on a pine tree.

“Get outta my way you edgy fuck!” Natsuko said.

She cut into him with her Napalm Strikes but it did as much to him as her Megaton ability. Nothing, in other words. His evasion chances had to be almost 100%. Desperation crept up through her throat and spewed out as a scream as she slashed away at Baphomet who was barely able to orient himself in the air. Something about it was wrong. There was no way he could be this strong without also developing a fighting instinct. It was strangely pathetic to watch.

Once it was off cooldown, Natsuko shot downward with Black Fire. Whatever movement ability Baphomet was relying on, it was too awkward and clumsy to follow, allowing her to safely scoop Daisy up in her arms and take them both down towards the forest floor to avoid Baphomet’s follow-up.

“Th-Thanks,” Daisy said, nibbling on a Moonbar to regain her health while she could.

“No problem,” Natsuko replied. “Any idea why this chucklefuck is so strong?”

Daisy shook her head. “Not a darn clue. With whatever his numbers are, he oughta be #1 right now.”

Natsuko pulled up before touching down on the forest floor. It wasn’t easy to slow Black Fire’s horizontal momentum, so the softest landing she could get involved her and Daisy slamming through a half a kilometer of pine trees. Fortunately, fall damage was only measured by vertical distance and not force of impact. But it wasn’t a massage either.

Natsuko’s hope for a few seconds to eat some food were dashed by a concussive boom as Baphomet landed a few hundred feet for them and turned the forest around them into a bonfire. Strangely, of all the things that could have filled her head in the middle of a fight, her first thought was that the burning pine smelled nice, and that it would've made a very good haiku subject.

“Wait, Natsu, it’s a trap!” Daisy said.

Snapping out of her sudden interest in poetry, Nasuko watched Baphomet approach with wine bottle in hand. Underneath her feet lay solid ground.