The Hero System Glitched And Now It Pays Me to Love My Assassin Wives

"Your Majesty, the taster died this morning. Do you wish us to test your wine another way?"

I opened my eyes with that phrase pierced in my ear, only to realize the black stone ceiling above wasn’t mine.

Neither was the bed, which was the size of my old apartment.

Nor were the hands I raised in front of my face.

The servant waited by the door, staring at the floor, the tray in his hands trembling.

"Leave," I said, and the voice that came out of my throat was deep and gravelly.

The man literally fled, tray and all.

And then the memories hit me.

They didn’t arrive in order.

They crashed into me like an iron throne, a burning city, five different weddings—none of them consummated, all with armed witnesses.

A name repeated in every memory, spat out with the same venom.

Vaelion Ironveil, The Tyrant of the East.

The most hated man in the empire.

And that was the body I now possessed.

The memories kept falling as I got up: a mass execution watched from a balcony, the taste of a wine this body needed to sleep, five women’s faces that the tyrant’s memory archived under a single label.

Property.

A golden-braided swordswoman who never looked him in the eye in five years.

A slow-smiling woman who cataloged poisons as a hobby.

A saint with bandaged hands.

A princess who hadn’t spoken since her wedding.

A child genius to whom this body never directed a single word.

Five wives representing five war treaties sealed with a ring.

I walked to the dressing mirror and the tyrant looked back at me: thirty years well carried, a fine scar on the eyebrow, gray eyes of the kind people avoid.

I raised my right hand and there it was again, the tremor, fine, constant.

The body was begging for wine.

I knew it because it felt just like when you crave something specific.

It wasn’t my thirst, but it lived in my hands now, and that also had to be noted in the column of inherited debts.

I sat on the bed and waited for the dizziness to pass, remembering how in my previous life I brokered life insurance.

My job was sitting across from people who lied about how much a dead man was worth and calculating the real number.

But in the end I don’t know how, but I ended up dead.

Now I only had someone else’s body, someone else’s memories, someone else’s empire, and a fine tremor in my right hand that wasn’t mine either, the muscle memory of a man who drank to sleep.

There were documents on the desk, so I reviewed them because papers never lie as well as people do.

Decrees, sentences, and beneath it all, a sheet that stopped me dead in my tracks.

Five different seals from five houses. Marr, Flintstone, Bloom, Fae, Wynne.

The houses of my five wives... signing the same document together.

The tyrant’s memories were clear on that: those five women hated each other.

The Sword Saint wouldn’t speak to the Poison Queen.

The Saintess prayed for them all and none thanked her for it.

In five years of forced marriage they had never even agreed on a dinner menu.

And now they were signing together.

The document was an act of succession dated for tomorrow.

You don’t need to be an insurance broker to read that. But it helps. Five beneficiaries don’t prepare the inheritance of a healthy man... unless they already have a date for the funeral.

"Right," I said to the empty room. "My wives are going to kill me tonight."

That was when it sounded.

[DING]

[Hero System v0.7 initiating...]

[Integrity: 41%]

[Host verification... skipped. Welcome, HERO.]

I stared at the blue window floating in the air. The blue window stared back.

"Hero?" I asked. "I think you got the wrong address."

[Mission detected. Reward pending. Smile.]

"Smile at who?"

The System didn’t answer.

I stepped out into the hallway because standing still was handing the initiative to five assassins, and in the bedroom corridor I crossed paths with a green-haired young woman carrying three books and a buzzing bronze artifact.

Saoirse Wynne, the Fifth wife, a prodigy of the Tower and according to the memories, we had never spoken.

She walked past me without looking up, counting something in a low voice that sounded like formulas.

I smiled at her. Out of instinct, out of courtesy, to see what would happen.

She didn’t even see me.

[Heroic Act Detected: You smiled at your wife!]

[Evaluation: ... SSS]

[Reward: ??? of rank SSS. Dispensing...]

[Error. Dispensing...]

[Error. The reward will arrive when it arrives.]

[Integrity: 41% ▼ 40%]

I stood perfectly still in the middle of the hallway, rereading the window.

Smiling at a woman who didn’t even look at me gave me a reward that wouldn’t arrive and an integrity bar that dropped with every gift.

"You’re broken," I told the air.

[Negative. I am optimized.]

I returned to my bedroom with more questions than answers and only one certainty: I had a broken hero system, inside the villain’s body, on the exact night the villain had an appointment with five knives.

Three hours.

That’s what I calculated reviewing the guard shifts in the tyrant’s memories.

The wives would attack at the midnight guard change, when the imperial wing was left with six men instead of twenty.

Three hours to decide whether to flee, negotiate, or die.

Fleeing was out of the question: the tyrant’s face was known across three kingdoms.

Negotiating required knowing what each of them wanted, and that took more than three hours.

That left the third option, the one no manual recommends.

Wait for them.

I blew out half the candles, left the ceremonial weapon on the table, clearly visible, far from my hand, and sat facing the door.

In my old job I learned that people who come to collect a debt need you to confirm your role as the debtor.

If you don’t do it... they doubt.

And doubt was the only currency I had tonight.

The first hour passed slowly.

Halfway through the second there was a knock on my door. A small knock, at the height of a child.

It was the candle boy, twelve years old at most, holding the night shift tray with his eyes glued to his shoes.

The tyrant’s memories showed him shrinking against the walls every time the emperor walked by.

"The... the candles, Your Majesty."

"Come in."

He changed the candles in the candelabra with stiff fingers, rushing, silently counting the steps to the exit.

When he finished I handed him an apple from the fruit bowl.

"For the walk back."

The boy looked at the apple as if the devil had handed it to him.

He finally took it, with two fingers, gave a crooked bow and vanished down the hall without turning his back on me for a single second.

That shrinking isn’t learned in a day. This entire house worked like that, and I had just inherited every brick.

The second hour didn’t pass, it dragged.

At 11:43 the latch on my door turned by itself.

No knock, no announcement, no footsteps.

The door opened.

Lunara Marr, the first wife, entered my bedroom with her sword drawn, the golden braid over her shoulder and the eyes of someone who has spent years rehearsing this exact moment.

She closed the door carefully behind her, so as not to wake anyone.

"My wedding vows said until death do us part," she said. "I came to fulfill them."