Forgotten Girl Quest

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.

“You know I’m just going to kill you again, right?” Sofiane said, drawing his rapier.

“Fine. But we owe it to Margaret to get even with the person responsible.”

“That wasn’t me, that 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 time to turn into his lightning form. In a flash of light, Harald launched forward, his ghostly image appearing for a split second before appearing in front of Sofiane, thrusting the halberd at him.

Sofiane zipped to the side, but once he had done so, the cooldown timer came up on his ball lightning and Harald flicked the 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 gripped the blade, locking it in place. He would have had an easier time dislodging it from cement.

“How about we talk this all out?” Daisy said.

“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. So what if they lost some every time they died and respawned? What mattered was the message they sent.

Faisal fired his whip at Daisy who took an amount of damage so infinitesimal that it would take him 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 who leapt without thinking,” 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 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.

“Oh, that’s easy, you know dimension jump—”

Shuixing jabbed Natsuko in the back with her rod.

“Eh, no clue,” Natsuko said.

“Bullshit. We have a right to know!” Harald said, jabbing at Sofiane and forcing him to leap back.

“Look, they stole some research that gives them a way to kill Heroes. Permanently,” Sofiane said, sticking his rapier back in his sash as a sign of good will. “Not just in wei— anomalous dungeons, but out here, in the real world. I thought you all were the ones that stole it, so I chased you down.”

“We already know that, she said so in the dungeon!” Harald yelled. The force of Harald’s anger shifted from Sofiane to Shuixing. “But why!? Are you insane?”

Shuixing choked up. “I-I—”

“Doesn’t matter,” Sofiane said, re-drawing 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.

With more speed than Natsuko thought the 2nd-gen Hero capable of, Harald swung his halberd in a wild arc, sending a slicing wind at an unprepared Sofiane. The wind slashed through his arms and dealt a moderate chunk of damage. More than the cocky Duelist had been expecting.

Daisy respectfully declined the fight, walking backwards out of the way. Harald sent an arc of wind her way but between her giant HP pool and her ridiculously high defense from equipment, it mostly just blew her hair up.

Sofiane coiled his sword thrust, expecting to get another clean one-shot kill on Harald, but the raccoon girl tackled him out of the charging and pinned him to the ground, stunning him.

“No invincibility on that,” she said, clawing him with her spiked metal nails. “But nice try.”

While this was happening, Faisal side-eyed Natsuko, Pechorin, and Shuixing. Coordinated and with time to prepare, the remnants of Harald’s team were a decent match for Sofiane. But not if the others jumped to his defense. Faisal’s weary look contained a question of 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, and that was when it was over something clean-cut like who was allowed to farm a dungeon. This was something else entirely.

“Shui? Are we doing this?” Natsuko asked.

Shuixing held her head in her hands. “I-I— I don’t…”

“Would you give me some bloody help!?” Sofiane shouted, bursting out of the stun as a ball of lightning right into a halberd swing from Harald that hit him square in the stomach and dropped him below half-health.

“Stop!” Shuixing said.

Sofiane had just lined himself up for another coup de grace strike when Shui interrupted, incidentally saving Harald from another respawn. For at least a few, tense seconds, Shuixing had everyone’s attention.

“Listen, this… this was my fault. Sofiane made a poor choice hunting you all down, but he did it thinking he was retrieving something really dangerous. W-We weren’t trying to get anyone killed, and if I had known this would happen I-I… I would’ve never started the research. But what happened, happened. If it helps you, erm, process things, I will let you kill me, just to get it out of your system. But it’s pointless to go after Sofiane. He had nothing to do with Margaret’s murder. Kill me instead.”

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, let his halberd drop.

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

Natsuko nodded in shared understanding. The raccoon girl was still on edge, her cheeks red with anger. Seeing his cue, Faisal stepped in as the voice of reason. Wiping back the sweaty strands of hair which had pulled loose from his jet-black bun, he put a hand on Harald’s shoulder.

“We’re not accomplishing anything here. Not if we win, not if we lose,” he said.

Harald growled. “But Margaret—”

“What about her? You kill either Shuixing or the electric headache, and then what? Nothing. We should have known better than using a dangerous place like the 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, which means for all intents and purposes, 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 hovering on the edge between Po-Lin and space. They came down to Po-Lin sometimes, but there was no way to predict when or where, and even then it was usually only to announce some important event like the Mist being pushed back or a new Hero being summoned.

The raccoon girl scoffed. “Oh, okay, just grab the personal attention of demi-gods and ask them, “hey, if you’re not busy, could you please go find this random nobody Hero who hasn’t done anything to fight the Entropic Axis in years and bring them back to life pretty please with a cherry on top?”

Daisy pursed her lips and went for a short walk while the others talked things out.

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

Harald let out a deep exhale and tucked his halberd away with a sense of deflation. “It’s better than nothing, I guess. 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 that could bring their former teammate back, Natsuko didn’t know. But the situation seemed to be defused. She was about 90% satisfied with herself for the quick-thinking and 10% disappointed she wouldn’t have the chance to beat some ass. The urge to fight was almost as bad as the urge to drink.

“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? I-I just want to keep going,” 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.

“Yeah, where did Daisy go?” Natsuko asked.

“That’s why I asked that,” Pechorin said.

“Shut up.”

Before they could organize a rescue operation, the missing party emerged from between two cranberry bushes. Her hands were rubbing her forearms and her gaze made her look mildly surprised she was back on the paved road to Tianzhou.

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

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

“You’re better dressed than I am,” Natsuko said, giving a half-chuckle tinged with an unspoken question.

“Would that have anything to do with being a Fire Elemental?” Daisy asked.

Natsuko looked dumbfounded. “No shit! You think that’s, like, a hidden passive or something? That’s awesome! Wait, no, why is that my passive and not like free HP or double attack speed or something? Nevermind, this sucks ass!”

Daisy giggled, partly out of relief that the conversation went in a different direction.

Due to the delay, they came short of Lanbaoshi Roadhouse before the sun went down. Despite Sofiane’s insistence that they push on through the night if need be, 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.

After he was reasonably certain the others had gone to bed, Sofiane shimmied out of his sleeping bag, being careful not to wake Pechorin, and crawled over to poke at Daisy’s. The two went for a short walk down to a rocky creek off the road with the dark gleam of water threatening to turn into ice.

“I don’t know,” Daisy said, answering Sofiane’s question before he asked it.

“You shouldn’t,” he said. “They won’t do anything about it and it will just get the forgotten Heroes all riled up and the Yishang asking uncomfortable questions.”

“I know that,” Daisy said, picking up a stone polished smooth and pale by the force of the unending waters. 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.”