Forgotten Girl Quest

After Sofiane left, Shuixing bid Natsuko goodnight and left the lab for her apartment in the Mage’s College dormitory. At night, the laboratory seemed strange and desolate. Here was Natsuko, a forgotten hero in a dark room in an irrelevant part of the world of Po-Lin’s least significant city. She tilted open a glass window to let in the sound of mid-autumn winds and rustling leaves. Rooting around the laboratory cabinets, she found a bottle of pure alcohol, cut it with a glass of water, and sipped as she leaned out one of the windows.

Sipping on her scientific cocktail and gazing out over the college gardens and out to the city walls of Vermögenburgh lit by silvery moonlight, Natsuko sighed. There was something like poetry about it. Then her thoughts turned to that untouched dungeon Sofiane had mentioned. Her fingers clenched around the vial. She was going to loot it or die trying.

The next morning, Natsuko banged on Shuixing’s door. “Hey! Let’s go give that purple puffball our answer!”

She knocked a few more times before Shuixing finally answered the door in pajamas and slippers, rubbing crust from her eyes. “Natsu what are you doing up so early? And why are you…”

Natsuko was staring back at her with crazed, sleep-deprived eyes brimming with excitement.

“Oh no… Natsuko, no! I said yesterday I won't—”

“No, you said yesterday you’d sleep on it, and now you have!” Natsuko said as she barged her way into Shuixing’s apartment.

It consisted of a kitchen and breakfast nook before her private bedroom. Everything was immaculately clean and tidy except for the kitchen table covered in a tablecloth of research documents. Many of the papers had sketched diagrams of intersecting planes with strings of formulas that Natsuko would have thought was magic if she didn’t know magic was as simple as hurling fireballs and waiting some specified amount of time before the cooldown timer let you do it again.

“Now that you've slept on it, you’ve changed your mind, right?

“Listen, Natsu, we don’t even know where he got his information...”

“But you can do it?”

“Yes I can do it… B-But that’s not the point! The point is that, if he is wrong about the existence of a space… a dungeon for us to be shunted to… we would… we’d—”

“Get popped out of existence?” Natsuko said. “Yeah, I know. It’s a win-win situation, don’tcha think?”

“Please don’t joke about that, Natsuko. You know I would be devastated if you weren’t around any more.”

Natsuko rubbed her neck and gave an embarrassed laugh. “How about this: Why don’t we ask Sofi where he got his intel? Cuz if he is right, this could be huge! For all three of us! A dungeon full of loot and experience split three ways? Our stats would rocket up, we’d be swimming in money, and our Use-Numbers would put us back on top! It’d be just like the good ol' days!”

Natsuko could tell halfway through her spiel Shuixing was unconvinced. The Medico-Mage’s eyes were two orbs of weariness.

“Natsuko, I’ve got a bad feeling. If heroes were meant to clear out this dungeon, why would it be buried under the ground where no one can get to it? Anything new to discover always comes with an announcement from the Yishang to make it fair for everyone. Something not even they know about is dangerous.”

“But don’t you want to discover something that not even the Yishang knows about!?” Natsuko said.

It was too early in the morning for this level of intensity, Shuixing thought, even if it was nice to see her friend in a mood that wasn’t melancholy.

“I know you do! If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have—” Natsuko slapped her palm down on a table full of the largest collection of research on dimension-jumping in existence “—this!”

Something in Natsuko’s tone made Shuixing think it was really her friend who had non-financial motives for wanting to try this harebrained scheme. Reliving the glory days, sure, but also sticking it to the Yishang, who Natsuko blamed for her poor status. Either way, Natsuko didn’t have her head on straight, and Shuixing was not going to let her friend bully her into doing this, no matter what she said.

A couple hours later, Natsuko, Shuixing, and Sofiane were staring down at a random rock in Hammertal Canyon, the titular hammer-shaped mountain looming over them in the distance. Not far from them was a small camp of goblins that wasn’t worth the effort to clear out, especially since they'd all be re-summoned by the Yishang overnight.

“This is it?” Natsuko said. “This?”

“Err… yes?” Sofiane replied.

“Sure doesn't look like much.”

Sofiane cleared his throat. “Pardon my Sibalese, but no shit. It’s underground, genius.”

Natsuko grabbed him by his frilled collar. “Keep up that attitude and you can join it underground!”

While the two of them bickered, Shuixing bent down to examine the rock. It looked like any other random rock or small boulder dotting the landscape outside Vermögenburgh. Nor did the angles of it, on a cursory examination, appear to be suitable for dimension-jumping. Any way she looked at it, this was just a rock.

“Sofiane?” Shuixing asked.

“Yes?” he said in the middle of a diatribe insulting Natsuko’s character, demeanor, Use-Number, and prospective success at raising her Ero-Art numbers.

“How are you so certain this is the correct spot? It appears to be a normal rock."

Sofiane shrugged. “The map I found had the mark right here. Look.”

They all huddled around him on the low, flat rock as he showed them the map for a second time. It was unlike any map either of them had ever seen. Most of the ones found in dungeons were vague, two-dimensional puzzles. Sofiane’s map was some kind of transparent cube rendered as a grid with features bulging and distorting out of the checkerboard of lines.

“Where did you say you got this again?” Natsuko asked.

“Some Non-Hero," Sofiane said. "He said he got it from a member of the Yishang, but that he didn’t want to try it himself because it was too risky."

“His loss, our gain!” said Natsuko, her mood pendulum swinging from anger back to giddiness.

“I wouldn’t speak so soon. Look how far beneath the surface it is,” Shuixing said, her fingernail tracing the spider web of gridded lines in the cube. “The further you’re trying to jump, the likelier it is that you miss your target, and if this is to scale, then the dungeon is several hundred feet down. I’ve never heard of someone dimension-jumping a gap like that. The margin of error is—”

“Not something we’ve got to worry about with a mega-genius doing the math for us!” Natsuko said, putting a hand on her shoulder and shaking the poor scholar back and forth.

Sofiane looked crestfallen. “So, you do not think it can be done, madame scientist?”

“Not without immense personal risk, anyway. A-And as it is, the rock doesn’t have a sufficient number of angles to trigger a dimension jump, so—”

They were interrupted by growls and whistles and maniacal cackles. A crossbow bolt plowed into Sofiane’s head but did a negligible amount of damage because of his Force stat and high HP. The bolt felt like a mosquito sting.

“Oh… goblins. Great,” Sofiane said.

The little goblin camp nearby had spotted the three Heroes and were waddling over with the same aggressive confidence they had whether they were attacking a defenseless Non-Hero or god-slaying Heroes at the top of the Use-Rankings. Despite the three of them falling short of god-slaying status, the goblins were still more nuisance than threat. Natsuko glared at one in annoyance as it stabbed her throat with its rusty sword and produced a tickle.

“I’ll get rid of them, you keep working at figuring it out,” Natsuko said, hefting her bottle.

“H-Hold on a second Natsu, maybe it’s better if we let Sofiane handle this. We don’t know if—”

Natsuko swung. She landed a clean hit on a goblin that turned into a sputtering, flickering ball of angles and planes then fell through the ground. Sofiane stood dumbfounded as he watched her smack the goblins into horrifying geometric impossibilities. It was about the same time that he realized the implications of Natsuko's earlier threats.

Getting immeasurable pleasure out of the fancy-pants, Top 40 Hero quaking in his boots, Natsuko swung harder. Too hard. One swing took her bottle in an arc through a goblin’s distorted body and into the rock they were all standing where the strange angles of the wine bottle collided with it and sent all three of them hurtling through matter that no longer existed.