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

"Get the scribe on the ground!" I shouted, and the entire market turned into a board.

[Chess Emperor: active]

Lines drew themselves over reality. Three shooters on the rooftops, downward trajectories, all converging... and there was the first piece of data that changed everything.

Not a single line was aiming for me.

All three crossed over my shoulder, past my horse, toward the closed carriage carrying an old man with a cane and an archive for a memory.

The ambush wasn’t for the emperor.

"Lunara! The carriage!"

She didn’t ask.

Her horse turned before mine even finished the sentence, and her sword deflected in midair what I only saw coming through the lines.

The market erupted in screams and overturned stalls.

The shooters on the roofs dropped their empty crossbows and came down to finish the job up close, six men emerging from alleys with infantry steel, paired formations, military training in every step.

Six against two, plus an old man, plus a crowd in the way.

"Protect the emperor!" my escort captain shouted from far back, where the market traffic had separated him from us with a precision that smelled like a setup.

I ignored it. The escort wouldn’t arrive in time, and the lines were already telling me how this story ended if I stood still.

So I did what the emperor’s manual forbids on page one.

I rode toward the problem.

"Scribe!" The carriage door was hanging by a hinge. Inside, the old man gripped his cane with both hands. "Your testimony! Does anyone else know the whole thing?"

"My... my son, Your Majesty! I wrote everything to the fortress just in case I...!"

"Then you are already immortal. Get down!"

Silver Tongue did its dirty, beautiful work: it was the truth, the naked truth that his word was already safe, and the old man believed it to his bones. He stopped shaking and ducked.

Lunara was fighting at the front, and seeing her fight on my side for the first time rewired something in my understanding of the world.

She didn’t waste a single movement.

Every cut she made closed a trajectory line in my vision, and wherever her sword passed, the board simplified.

I covered the blind spots she didn’t see, shouting positions with a voice heavy with silver.

"Left, pillar!"

Enemy steel cut through air where her neck used to be.

"The one with the short knife is feinting for your shoulder!"

Truth. Her counterattack landed before the feint did.

We operated without rehearsal, her sword and my board speaking the same language on the first try, and at some point in the chaos I heard her laugh, a sound the tyrant’s memories hadn’t archived in five years of marriage.

"Stop looking at me and cover the carriage!" she shouted without turning around.

"I was looking at the guy behind you!"

"There’s no one behind me!"

"Not anymore!"

The second-to-last attacker figured it out too late: the woman he was trying to flank already knew where he was, because I had told her two moves ago.

His trajectory line was snuffed out against her blade as cleanly as blowing out a candle.

Married for five years without exchanging ten words, and it turned out our first common language was this.

The last pair of attackers weighed the cost of continuing, found it too high, and vanished among the overturned stalls.

Silence after the steel.

Lunara wiped her blade with a cloth she carried just for that, while the escort arrived late, the captain falling over himself with excuses that Appraiser’s Eye labeled without mercy.

[True value of the apology: rehearsed.]

Another name for Zelina’s list.

"You’re bleeding," Lunara said, pointing to my temple with her chin.

"A scrape from a stone. You?"

"In one piece." She put the cloth away and studied me with a new kind of attention, uncomfortable for both of us. "You were calling out their feints against me before they even made them. Nobody reads feints against me."

"Beginner’s luck."

"I hate that phrase coming from you." She stepped closer, turned my face with two fingers without asking permission, and examined the cut on my temple with a battlefield eye. Her thumb brushed the edge of the wound. "You’ll live."

"What a disappointment for so many people."

She laughed for the second time in an hour. I was starting to collect those laughs with a greed I was better off not examining.

"The scribe," she said, back to business. "Alive?"

"Alive, praying in three languages and asking for double the escort."

"He’ll get it. I’m picking it this time, man by man." She looked toward my escort captain, who was still handing out excuses in the background, and dropped her voice a pitch. "Your guard arrived late over twenty meters of market. I just happened to be here because I changed my route this morning. Do you understand what I’m telling you?"

"That the next ambush will count on me no longer believing in coincidences."

"That you need your own people, and right now I can count them on the fingers of an iron gauntlet." She took a pause worth its weight in gold. "One finger, being generous."

"Which of the five is it?"

"The one that just saved your life. Don’t waste it."

We searched the fallen attackers ourselves, before the official guard could "help."

At that point, the word help came with built-in quotation marks.

Zelina would have done the job in half the time, but Zelina wasn’t here, so I checked pockets and seams with the method she would have charged me to teach.

No insignias, no documents, no local coins. Textbook professionals, wiped clean from the factory.

Except for the steel.

Lunara crouched next to the weapons and went perfectly still.

"Vaelion."

She held an enemy sword up to the light.

At the base of the blade, half filed away but alive under the right angle, a forge engraving.

A crowned stag over two crossed swords.

"It’s steel from my order," she said. "Forged by House Marr. This batch was cast for my knights... and the entire lot was confiscated on the day of the executions."

She checked the second sword, and it had the same stag.

"Someone is arming assassins," she said slowly, "with the weapons of my dead."