Forgotten Girl Quest

Natsuko and Sofiane turned it into a race to see who could get their free experience first. But the image of the undissolving rocks kept playing out in Shuixing’s head. Something still felt wrong about it.

“Be careful!” Shuixing called out.

The other two couldn’t hear her over their own giddy excitement for experience. The red-skinned, room-sized demon roared and swung its horns defensively but couldn’t accomplish much while chained to an altar. It could only fix its cold black eyes on the gleefully homicidal arrivals.

Sofiane pointed at it with his rapier. “Don’t touch it with your stupid bottle or we won’t get any experience.”

Natsuko threw up her hands. “I have other weapons! I’m a Jack, you know. I can do Aggro-Magic too.”

With a little pawing motion like a beckoning cat, Natsuko hurled a shower of sparking fire at the demon which screamed in pain. The chains holding it to the altar strained and rattled and its horns came inches from knocking Sofiane onto his ass.

“Good for you,” he said, slapping one of the chipped white horns with the broad of his rapier. “Madame Shuixing, you ought to get in the fight too if you wish for the experience.”

The madame herself was focusing on taking in the room that Sofiane and Natsuko had ignored in favor of combat. It looked like the back end of a cathedral, complete with round dais almost twenty feet across where the chains holding the demon were rammed into the floor. Above were stained glass images of Baphomet, a Hero who had been the antagonist of the other Heroes for the first four generations of summoning before becoming a Hero himself and joining the competition for Use-Numbers. It made his religious iconography seem silly in retrospect. Nonetheless, the depictions showed Baphomet engaged in slaughter. None of his victims were dissolving and waiting to be resummoned by the Yishang. Instead, they were being disembowled.

Another room-shaking howl from the demon brought Shuixing out of her thoughts.

“Whoa! Down boy!” Sofiane said, dodging another swing of its horns before stabbing the demon in the forehead.

Natsuko yawned as she waited for exactly ten seconds to pass before the next Fire Shower she could cast. Near her, one of the chains holding down the demon rattled in its anchor.

“Erm… Natsu…” Shuixing said.

Natsuko wasn’t paying attention. Sofiane, meanwhile, was having a play-pretend fencing match with the swinging horns.

“En garde, foul demon!”

After a few pricks in the head, the demon whipped its head around and cracked its horn into a careless Sofiane, throwing him to the ground and earning him a nasty bruise in the side.

“Putain!” Sofiane said in a pained Cascadian accent.

Natsuko laughed. “How’d you get hit by a monster that’s chained down!? Weren’t you up at the top of the leaderboard or something?”

Sofiane grit his teeth. “Only Top 40. But at least I’m doing damage instead of just giving him a sunburn! You ought to be grateful I’m allowing you to split the experience. Not that you’ve earned it.”

Natsuko stopped firing off her spell. “Who got us down here, exactly?”

“Who got you out of the bar to do something productive for once?”

Sofiane sneered and walked up to the demon, dodging its swinging horns with concentrated deftness now that he was no longer screwing around. He leveled his rapier at the third eyeball in its forehead.

“For this experience, monsieur demon, I must say, merci!”

Natsuko shouted. “Wait! Sofi!”

He paid no mind to the irksome 1st-gen Hero. He thrust his sword towards the demon’s eye. Unfortunately, he found its hand instead. Chains pulled from the ground and flew into the air like metal streamers. With the hand not deflecting a rapier, the demon slammed its fist into the ground and picked itself up, filling half the subterranean cathedral’s height. Its expression morphed into rage as it closed its hand around Sofiane’s and squeezed. Sofiane screamed in pain.

“Oh dear…” Shuixing said.

Shui dashed forward and used Light of Hope in front of the demon’s eyes, dealing damage to it. The demon roared and let go of Sofiane’s crushed hand. In the gap, Natsuko whistled, and an invisible force pull Sofiane backwards towards them. His rapier clattered to the ground at the demon’s feet.

“Ow! Ow! Why won’t it move!?” Sofiane said, flopping his useless arm. Arms weren't supposed to break. The body lost hitpoints, not bones.

“Erm, I…” Shuixing backed up from the demon slowly regaining its sight. “I-I think we might be out of sight of the Yishang… W-Which means…”

“No re-summoning,” Natsuko said.

She reached for her bottle.

“Don’t you dare!” Sofiane yelled, his voice harsh and grating. “We need this experience! This dungeon is the only chance we’ve got, and I won't let you ruin my adventuring career!"

Before Natsuko could react, Sofiane knocked into her with the elbow that hadn’t been turned into bonemeal. Her bottle fell to the floor. Shuixing’s heart leapt, terrified that the strange physics of this dungeon might cause the bottle to shatter, but instead it clattered to the ground and rolled towards the demon.

Natsuko stared at Sofiane in disbelief. “You—! You stupid—”

Charles nipped at Natsuko's ankles and tried to tug her away. The demon, meanwhile, reached up, grabbed a chandelier, and turned it into a six-foot wide flail.

“I-I don’t think the demon can fit through the door, so perhaps if we make a run for it…” Shuixing said.

Sofiane sprinted towards his fallen rapier. Natsuko sprinted towards her bottle.

“Oh no… I can only handle one reckless idiot at a time,” Shuixing said.

With a ring of her medical rod, she used her Desperation Art, Bubble Storm. Shiny bubbles descended from the heavens just in time for the bubbles to heal Natsuko and Sofiane's injuries and distract the demon by popping and stinging him like acid.

In a burst of purple lightning, Sofiane popped out and back into existence on the other side of the demon, rapier at his feet. The demon roared as the electric shock reacted with the Water in a Shock Elemental Reaction. Its enormous muscles seized for a moment. Sofiane stabbed at the demon’s ankles with his good hand. The demon staggered forward, but out of the corner of his eye, Sofiane spotted Natsuko scooping up her wine bottle from under a pew.

“Put that bottle away! I’ve got this!” he shouted.

She said something in response, but Sofiane didn’t care. All that mattered was getting back to being on top. From the moment the Yishang summoned another, more innately powerful boy with his cutesy, quasi-feminine aesthetic, he was in a race against the clock to make himself the more desirable candidate for the Celestials to summon before they kicked him to the curb and his Use-Number plummeted. At that point it wouldn’t matter if he got stronger, because the Celestials were fickle and capricious, and when they decided one Hero was the inferior option for a niche, there was no coming back. Sofiane had seen it happen to so many others. Heroes left drifting and aimless. just like the two he'd partnered up with. But none of the others had Sofiane’s raw determination to defy fate.

Through blinding pain, Sofiane pricked the demon over and over and over, getting up when it knocked him down with a kick, dodging by instinct the swings of its improvised flail. Nothing was going to stop Sofiane from getting back on top. Nothing.

“N-Natsu!” Shuixing yelled. “We really need to run!”

The demon swatted at the mosquito stinging its legs as it rounded on its real prize: The medico-mage casting bubbles of holy cleansing at its infernal body. Flakes of ash fell away from its skin and face as Shuixing cast Bubble Storm as often as its 20-second cooldown permitted. The fight was such a clear overmatch that her Desperation Gauge was permanently maxed-out.

Charles huddled and cowered at Shuixing’s legs. Natsuko’s fingers curled around the neck of the bottle and squeezed. She didn’t want to do this any more than Sofiane did. She needed those experience points too. But it was clear that whatever monster had been placed in this dungeon was a step above anything that any Hero could handle, even the most recent generation. It didn’t have hit points, she realized. They would have to dismantle it manually. And unlike in other dungeons, mistakes here meant no re-summoning.

The demon kicked Sofiane back into a set of pews and bounded towards Shuixing. She didn’t have time to flee before the demon swept her up in its grip, nor did it waste time pulling her trapped body up to its mouth to bite her head off. Shuixing screamed herself hoarse.

No experience would be gained today, unfortunately.

Dashing forward, Natsuko slammed the kill spot of her bottle against the demon’s foot. Shuixing instantly fell to the floor, jarred loose by the demon's hand turning into a set of spinning trapezoids. In fact, its entire body became nothing but jagged shapes accompanied by the familiar chunking sound of being pushed through the floor against its will.

“No! No, no, no! Why!?” Sofiane yelled, frantically stabbing at the flashing shapes as though he could somehow pull experience out of it at the last minute. This proved to no avail. The demon simply dimension-jumped downwards into an infinite abyss. No little tinkling noise announced gained experience. No loot was left behind from the dissolving body.

Sofiane sunk to his knees, punched the ground and sobbed. Tears dribbled down his cheeks. “Why…”