Forgotten Girl Quest

“Okay, fine, this is actually really good soup,” Natsuko said.

The soup was a spicy fish stew made from local saltwater catches and flavored with seaweed, mussels, and a heavy dusting of five-spice and scallions. Even better, Minhua had given them a couple bowls for free for helping them with the killer, and free made everything taste better.

Compared to a lot of other dishes Natsuko had had, it really wasn’t too complicated, but the bulk of the ingredients had come fresh from the miles of beach on either side of the Lanbaoshi Roadhouse and lent the dish a profound complexity of flavor. She would have enjoyed it a lot more if she wasn’t pissed.

“Only vengeance has a greater flavor,” Pechorin added.

“Oh, I’m getting vengeance alright. I’m gonna…”

Natsuko wasn’t quite sure what she was going to do to get back at her teammates since sending them into oblivion with her wine bottle felt like an overreaction. Nonetheless, her ire must be demonstrated. She would have to give their punishment deep consideration.

“Natsuko?”

Natsuko glared at Pechorin. “What?”

“The NH killer.”

“What about them?”

“We were going to go deal with them.”

“Oh, right.”

Bowls of soup in front of them, the two stared out of the window of the main lobby of the Lanbaoshi Roadhouse to the shadowed road that passed underneath the giant building. The other shopkeepers and residents were busying themselves putting wooden boards over their doors and windows for the coming night. Not that it would help them, Natsuko thought. She wasn’t the strongest Hero around, and even she could easily turn those boards to splinters. She could even burn the entire Roadhouse down by herself if she wanted and it, along with its inhabitants, would pop right back into existence at 4am.

That was what confused her the most about whoever was doing this to the Non-Heroes. If the Hero had beef with them, even the weakest Heroes could wipe them all out single-handedly. Why pick them off one at a time, knowing they would come back? What was that supposed to accomplish?

“For fun,” Pechorin said.

Natsuko realized she had mumbled those last questions aloud.

“Fun? What in the hell? Who gets fun out of murdering a single Non-Hero every day?”

Pechorin took another sip of fish stew and swallowed it before answering. “Shui gets her fun from figuring out why weird angles do weird things. You get fun from obliterating your brain with alcohol.”

“And you get fun from LARPing a tragic backstory,” Natsuko said.

“No, that is a tragic path that I walk, do not make light of it.”

“Okay, what’s your point here?” she said, jabbing a spoon at him and getting flecks of soup on his trench coat.

“They are probably a forgotten Hero, same as we are.”

Natsuko’s nostrils flared and she looked down at the flakes of dead fish and crustaceans floating in her broth. “No. We’re not the same. I spend my time helping the Non-Heroes in Vermögenburgh, and this sick piece of shit murders them. Don’t compare us.”

Pechorin locked eyes with her. “I suspected this wasn’t really about the money.”

“Shut up you gods-damned edgelord. It’s not that deep.”

Natsuko stood up and left her half-eaten bowl on the counter. Pechorin’s observation had put her in an even worse mood, if that was even possible. Apart from the fight being tougher, she’d been hoping it was a 4th-gen Hero or later doing this. If they were a forgotten nobody like her and Pechorin, the chances were much higher that she knew them personally.

“You said you thought they were where again?” Natsuko asked Minhua who was sorting out nails for her husband to hammer into boards.

“There’s a shipwreck site, a couple miles that way,” Minhua replied, pointing at something far beyond the wall in front of her finger. “A ship got beached there and no one goes near it cuz it’s crawling with monsters. There’s nowhere else out here on the dunes where someone could hide.”

A few minutes later, Natsuko and Pechorin were shambling across the hilly dunes. As they moved inland from the sand bar that housed the road to Tianzhou, there was a small estuary before the hills rose, becoming great waves of sand that actively refused efforts to climb them. Cool winds whipped the sand up and deposited it on the two Heroes.

“I don’t even remember this place from our adventures,” Natsuko yelled over the wind. “My boots are full of sand. This is complete ass!”

“There was a quest to return a special delivery that was on the ship Minhua was talking about,” Pechorin said.

Natsuko snapped her fingers. “Oh yeah! You’re right! Then it turned out it was some piece of a device that the Entropic Axis wanted to use to blow up Tianzhou City, and we realized we got tricked and had to stop them before it was too late. I remember now. Shit, that was so long ago.”

“I have a mind that never forgives and never forgets, but mostly never forgets,” Pechorin said.

“I just put that part of our adventures out of our minds because of you-know-who.”

“Freder—”

“Bup-bup-bup! Not another syllable! We do not speak his name,” Natsuko said.

“After all these years, you still haven’t moved on?”

Natsuko snorted. “This from the guy who wanted to duel me to the death because I refused to date him. That’s rich.”

“Rich indeed, my honor shall not be impoverished.”

After a few minutes of silence, Natsuko spoke again.

“Frederick was an asshole and I don’t want to think about ever having made the terrible decision to date him. Happy?”

Natsuko was so focused on her diatribe that she crested the top of a tall sand dune too quickly and started to fall forward down a steep hill towards a small outcropping of rocks protruding from the sand. Pechorin grabbed her arm, pulling her back at the last second and sending both of them tumbling back down the way they’d come which, unlike the other side, did not have a payload of fall damage at the bottom.

Natsuko pushed herself off a fallen Pechorin and dusted sand off. The brushing did almost nothing, somehow it had made it inside every crevice of her outfit.

Natsuko spat sand out of her mouth. “Dammit, Pech, you dumbass! What the hell was that for?”

Pechorin stood up and had more success dusting himself off. The trench coat was good for something other than building up copious amounts of sweat and looking dark and mysterious.

“You were going to fall into those rocks,” he said.

“I’ve got my Fire Gale, moron. I can break my own fall!”

“I had forgotten.”

Natsuko growled and rolled her eyes. Everything was high stakes drama and sacrifice with him. Everything he did was frilly, froo-froo, ornamental bullshit. He was like the human equivalent of Sofiane’s poofy outfits. It drove her nuts. Why couldn’t he just face the world as it was and quit being a delusional edgelord?

From the pockets of her shorts she pulled out a waterskin she’d filled with ale back at the roadhouse and took a long pull to swish around her gritty mouth. Once the sand was dislodged from her tongue and teeth, she thought about spitting it out, but decided it was a waste of good booze and swallowed it all.

“Let’s keep going,” Natsuko said, trudging back up the sand dune in the groove they had tumbled down. “And don’t touch me again, got it? No more of this savior crap.”

“Fine,” Pechorin said, climbing up the dune after her.

As they crested the top more carefully this time, miles of marshy plains came into view. The dunes behind them blocked the marsh off from the tides which sometimes flooded the road to Tianzhou. But every once and a while, usually when the Entropic Axis summoned some giant sea monster once a year in the middle of summer, as they reliably did, storms would send walls of water over into the plains, leaving them a boggy marsh for the next year.

Right in the middle of this flat, moist terrain, was a three-sailed junk smashed into two pieces like shark fins rising from the deserted landscape. This was where Natsuko’s party had retrieved that artifact on a quest so many years ago. It had been swarming with monsters then. It was supposed to be swarming with monsters now. And it wasn’t.

Natsuko remained on her guard as they eased down the dunes, past the killer rock shelf, and onto the wet soil. Suctioning squelshes accompanied their footsteps, grating on Natsuko’s nerves. The footsteps sounded too much like pop-up enemies. That was her biggest fear. It didn’t matter how big and terrible the boss monster was, she could annihilate it with one hit of her bottle. But if someone or something one-shot her first, she was toast.

“The stones are ill-omened,” Pechorin said.

“What? Pechorin, do you just like hearing yourself talk?” Natsuko said.

“No. There,” he said, pointing out a series of three foot tall stones scattered randomly around the marsh. Some were isolated, some were in clusters, but the quarter mile circumference around the shipwreck was littered with these large stones.

“Wow. Rocks. Who cares?” Natsuko said.

“It’s anomalous and ill-omened.”

“You know they were probably here the first time we came, right?”

“They were not,” Pechorin said definitively.

“You’re that sure, huh?”

“On the honor of my—”

“Dead clan, yeah, great. How about you go first and if they’re pop-up enemies, you can be the early warning signal,” Natsuko said, expecting this to just be back and forth shittalking.

“As you wish,” Pechorin said, picking up the pace through the marsh.

“Wait! I was joking!” Natsuko said. She didn’t want to waste her meat shield on mooks before they got to the Non-Hero-killing psychopath.

Passing through the field of stones, Natsuko began to feel like Pechorin might be onto something. There was a logic to the layout of the stones that became more apparent when you were standing next to them as opposed to looking from afar. Something about the human scale, in other words. Memories tingled on the precipice of recollection but refused to come when she called.

“I believe,” Pechorin said, glancing at one rolled into a puddle of water, “that these stones are why there are no monsters around.”

Natsuko squinted at him. “That doesn’t make sense. They’d just respawn at 4am if you dropped a rock on them, wouldn’t they?”

“Perhaps the stones are stopping that process somehow.”

“Nah, the Yishang throw another Wyvern at Vermögenburgh every week even if I punt it through the ground. Ain’t no way some oversized pebbles are enough to stop them from spawning in more goblins or wolfhounds or pirates or whatever.”

Pechorin stopped and knelt down to run a hand along one of the stones, his thumb dragging across its crevices.

“Maybe the Yishang are unaware of these stones. Maybe they have been put here recently by someone seeking to create their own, artificial anomaly.”

“Pffbt, please. The Yishang are demi-gods, Pech, they see everything and they know everything and we’re all just dolls living in their dollhouse,” Natsuko said, placing her boot on the stone and wiping mud off it.

“They didn’t know about The Anomalous Dungeon of the Empty Waterfall. Or the one you and Shuixing went to with Sofiane,” Pechorin said.

“Yeah, but…”

Natsuko wasn’t quite sure what to add after the but. She hated the Yishang, she loathed what they had done to her and her friends, and she would love to punch one of them in the face for it, but the idea that there were things even they didn’t know about the world filled her with a vague anxiety. She hated the Yishang, but they were the ones who pushed back the Mist and organized the fight against the Entropic Axis. What existed outside that framework? What could exist?

Deciding motion and action could drive those uncomfortable thoughts from her head, Natsuko continued the trek towards the shipwreck, now only a few hundred feet from it. Pechorin jogged to catch up.

“The Yishang might not know about your wine bottle either,” he said.

“They’ve gotta know. They send a new wyvern every week.”

“Some things happen because something else happened, and some things happen reliably at a given time. I set out on my quest to avenge my clan because they were murdered. That’s an event trigger. But I fire my guns at the night sky and howl in a cathartic release of my inner turmoil only on a full moon. That’s a time trigger. If Heroes are summoned when they die, that’s an event. If a wyvern is released every Monday at 5pm, that’s a time.”

“Would you shut up, you edgy loudmouth? You’re gonna lose our element of surprise!” Natsuko said in a harsh whisper, dropping to a crouch as they left a patch of reeds and neared the bow of the smashed ship.

If she was being honest with herself, telling Pechorin to shut up had less to do with wanting surprise and more to do with not liking the words out of his mouth. She felt like she was on the edge of putting something together that she didn’t want to see the complete picture of. Trying as she might to ignore what Pechorin was talking about, one question kept nagging at her, refusing to leave her alone:

Why did the Yishang use their divine magic to send a wyvern to slaughter a town every week?

Natsuko shook her head. She needed someone to beat the tar out of to take her mind off things and soon.