Natsuko’s world turned into a nauseating blur. Already nursing a weird tipsiness from the mangoes that didn’t sit quite right, being yanked into the sky by her neck was not helping. She clutched and tore at the roots, but they were as hard as steel.
She knew she had been spending too much time around Pechorin because, as the person attacking her stepped close enough for her to see, her first thought was that it would be much cooler to pretend she didn’t remember who they were. Unfortunately, she did. Grinning up at her with a face of pure derision was Xiuquan, Sofiane’s former teammate and the asshole they beat at cards. His shoulder-length green hair resembled dark seaweed in the low light and the roots bursting from his shoulder made him look like some kind of monster.
“I don’t remember your name,” Xiuquan said, his voice soft and infuriatingly patronizing. “But I do remember Shrike’s. And I would much rather he have killed you than the other way around.”
Natsuko kicked, her legs trying to buy space for her neck to expel air. “I didn’t— kill him! Let me— go!”
The roots tightened.
“No, you’re coming with me and my party. You and that other sh*tstain, the blue one who was trying to invent a way to murder people. And you’re both going to answer for what you did. But before all that, you’re going to tell me where your bottle is.”
Her heart sank as she realized he wasn’t here alone. Sofiane was the only one who could remotely hold his own against his former teammates, and even that was a 1v3. The rest of them were sitting ducks. She needed to warn them.
“Oh, and don’t try that trick where you killed yourself to escape punishment,” Xiuquan said as two more roots grabbed her wrists. “It’s not gonna work.”
Natusko steeled herself to run. Navigating the jungle was hard enough when she wasn’t plastered on funky mangoes, but she was, and this asshole was chasing her. So, she took a deep breath, centered herself, jerked her head the other way and yelled, “Sofiane!”
Xiuquan jerked his head like she anticipated and she used her Swap ability. She was now on the ground looking up at Xiuquan tangled in his own roots. Roots he could very easily dispel.
“Okay, bye!” Natsuko said, sprinting into the undergrowth.
From behind she heard an angry growl and felt the earth tremble under her. Or maybe that was the mangoes. Either way, her instincts, honed from running like hell from any kind of trouble for the past several weeks, urged her to split left. She did, and a moment later the jungle caved in on itself in a straight line as trees and ferns were sucked into the ground.
Around her she could hear more devastation. Xiuquan was destroying the foliage, the same thing she had done while trying to navigate Shikijima, albeit with more fire. Running straight back to the camp wasn’t going to work. She’d be flattened along with the jungle.
She spotted a little alcove formed by a tree’s root system and jumped in it. The jungle quadrupled itself around her as the vibrations of Xiuquan’s gardening mixed with her inebriation and rattled her brain. Shuixing was wrong about drinking get her in trouble. Being drunk was when Natsuko did her best thinking.
The little alcove she was in was covered in thick vines and rocks and roots, and not the kind of roots Xiuquan could dispel at will. Nestling down in it, she curled and tangled her limbs as deeply as possible into the alcove until escaping would be a pain in the ass and then called out.
“Hey, dickhe*d!”
The rumbling changed directions and Xiuquan popped into sight riding a wave of tangled branches. Swap came off cooldown.
Natsuko hopped off the branches as Xiuquan flailed in his newly stuck position. But he wasn’t stuck for long enough to make a funny quip, so she bolted in the direction of the camp.
~~~
Pechorin lay with his hands folded atop his chest like a vampire in his coffin, staring straight up at the large leaf that he and Sofiane had built their make-shift tent out of. His eyes were wide open because Sofiane had, about three times now, kicked him in the head while tossing and turning. This was fine. He had undergone suffering for the sake of others before. He could do it again.
From where he laid, Pechorin could see Harald and Faisal sleeping in a proper tent and their raccoon friend curled up in the branches of a soapberry tree. There was also Shui sleeping soundly next to the spot Natsuko snuck away from to go feed her substance abuse habit. All was right with the world. He tried to think of a poem for the occasion.
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“A raccoon lays down—” he whispered to himself.
No, that wasn’t gonna work, because he still wanted to fit in both the pond they were sleeping next to and a seasonal allusion.
“Beside jungle pond,
To where has the hibiscus—”
Nope, no seasonal word. The lack of sleep was causing his skills to slip. Pechorin was glad Ogawa and the others couldn’t see him right now. What a conundrum. Exhausted as he was, he couldn’t even make a useful sentry. Which, if he were the one conducting this mad exercise in futility called life, the moment of greatest irony would be for someone to sneak up on them precisely when he was at his weakest. He nudged Sofiane awake.
“Mmm? Oh, c’mon, Pech, you’ve gotta stop doing this, mon ami. I am trying to get beauty rest and you’re not helping by waking me up every night convinced we’re gonna get attacked.”
“No, this is real.”
“You said that the last three times,” Sofiane said, rolling over.
“This time the “this time is real” is real,” Pechorin said.
“No it’s not. Go to bed.”
Trusting the instincts which had predicted 20 out of the last three crises they faced, Pechorin wormed his way out from under the tent and pulled out his guns. He crouched, skulked, slunk, snuck, and crept around the perimeter of the camp, moving like a flowing puddle of oil in the almost-moonless night. If there was anyone nearby, he would catch them. And for a brief moment, he very nearly thought he had caught someone when he ran into a tree.
The raccoon girl leapt up on all fours on the branch she was sleeping on. “Huh? What?”
Pechorin looked up at her. She looked down at him.
“You uh… need something?” she asked.
“In the long-term, vengeance. In the short term, undisturbed sleep,” he replied. The raccoon girl found herself empathizing with the latter.
“O….kay. And so…”
“We’re being hunted,” Pechorin said.
The raccoon girl sniffed, her nose twitched in a few different directions. She smelled her teammates, then Natsuko’s party, and— wait, there were four more scents than before she fell asleep. The edgy dork was onto something. She sniffed again. Everyone was here in the camp except for Natsuko who was off somewhere in the jungle. She couldn’t tell how far, only the direction. One of the four new scents was over there with Natsuko, but the other three…
She scrambled down the tree.
“We’ve got company!” she yelled.
As soon as she touched the ground, a man and a woman strolled out of the undergrowth like panthers that had already caught their prey and wanted to play with it for a bit. Sofiane, Shuixing, Harald, and Faisal jerked awake and went diving for their weapons. Their attackers made no move to stop them.
“Oh, hello there, Sofiane. It’s been a while,” Baran said. Unlike Sofiane, his former teammate was tall and imposing, wearing a stiff, pearl-colored coat lined with gold accouterments and closed with a golden belt over baggy trousers and a tunic. In his hand was a transparent rod with an hourglass in the middle.
Beside Baran was his team’s resident Medico-Mage, Gula Asu, wearing an indigo robe, golden sash and trademark diadem. Bottles very much unlike the raccoon girl’s bobbed against her waist as she sauntered through the jungle in high-heeled sandals. Even more than her personality, Sofiane hated that she was the only one that matched his aesthetic prowess.
“Hey, purple kid, who the hell are these assholes?” Harald asked, pointing his halberd at them.
“Former teammates,” Gula replied on Sofiane’s behalf. “But of course, we’re not here for him. We’re here for that one,” she said, pointing at Shuixing clutching her rod to her chest. “And the ginger.”
“So were we,” Faisal said. His whip lay unequipped at his side, as though he had full confidence in the power of diplomacy. “But they didn’t kill Shrike.”
“Oh-ho, is that what they told you?” Gula said, raising a hand polished with starry indigo to her mouth to stifle a laugh.
“They didn’t have to tell us much, we’ve met the real killer,” Harald said.
“And? Who are they?” Baran asked.
“Well, I mean… they were in black and disguised so…”
Gula laughed. “Right. Right. And I’m sure if we asked Sofi’s little entourage we’d get the same answer. So, here’s how things are going to happen, my darling little pathetic Heroes. You can scamper off since this doesn’t concern you, and you get to live. And you, Sofi, can either turn those two adorable girls, red and blue, over to us, or we can lower those pesky little stats you don’t need.”
Sofiane looked back at Shuixing. It was pretty incredible, really, how in just three weeks he had managed to so thoroughly destroy his own sense of self-preservation.
Sofiane swished his rusty katana. “All for one and one for all, non?”
Gula gave a small hmph and said, “if you want, sweetie.”
Baran and her both raised their weapons.
“H-Hey guys, there’s another one,” the raccoon girl said, having waited patiently for a break in the conversation.
Sofiane glanced towards the treeline, expecting Xiuquan to come riding out on a tree trunk or something. Instead, it was something even worse. A short, feminine figure with fur clothes, felt cap, and a horsehair baton at their waist walked out from the woods. Sofiane’s replacement met his gaze and smiled.
“I don’t believe we’ve met before,” Koyon said. “And I doubt we’ll meet after.”
