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

"Have you decided yet?" Lunara asked.

Dawn was breaking over the training courtyard.

We had fought three rounds with staffs and I had lost all three, which was the usual ratio and the most honest part of my schedule.

"I decided a week ago, the truth is I was just looking for the price."

"And did you find it?"

"All of it."

I sat on the stone bench, the staff crossed over my knees.

"If I accept the pact, I live, you all live, the empire stays quiet and the only cost is going back to being the monster from eight to eight. Decimus is right on every point."

"But?"

"But the monster from eight to eight signed two hundred and thirteen unjustified executions." I looked at her. "The mask isn’t free, Lunara. The mask IS the position and there are two hundred and thirteen reasons hanging in a gallery that forbid me from putting it back on."

Lunara didn’t say anything for a long while.

Then she picked up the staffs, put them away in the rack with her usual order, and spoke with her back to me.

"The plenary hearing is today. Decimus will control the room, the speakers, the agenda. You will be walking into a board rigged against you."

"I know."

"Good." She turned around. "Then I am going in with you."

The plenary hearing gathered everything the empire had in terms of power into a single room: the full council, the generals, the delegates of the Church and the Towers, the nobility of the thirty houses.

Decimus presided from the high table with the agenda in his hand.

He waited until the end of the session for his move, because endings are remembered.

"Last item," he announced. "The state of the empire requires clarity regarding the... recent direction of the throne. I request that Your Majesty confirm before this hearing his commitment to the imperial politics of the last two decades."

Translation: put the mask on in public, right now, in front of everyone, or declare war.

I stood up. The entire room held its breath.

Zelina watched from the consorts’ balcony, with Calista on one side and Miralys on the other, three women who never shared a balcony sharing it today.

Saoirse was taking notes on the railing.

The dysfunctional family in full, waiting to see if their rehabilitated tyrant would survive politics.

And I activated Silver Tongue.

The timbre changed on the first word.

I saw it run through the room the same way the cold runs, row by row, straightening backs.

"The empire wants to know who I am," I said. "Fair enough. I wanted to know too after losing my memory, so I investigated the man I used to be, archive in hand, and I am going to tell you what I found."

Decimus leaned forward, barely.

"First truth: the Orden Marr was innocent. The documents that condemned them entered the tribunal already sealed, with an order not to verify, from an office in this room that none of you dares to name. The tribunal ruled on that two weeks ago and nobody asked whose office it was, just keep not asking, if you prefer to sleep."

A low murmur. The skill didn’t let them doubt the sentence, only the world around it.

"Second truth: House Marr paid for loyalty with extermination, and this empire called that quietness for five years. Your quietness is manufactured like this, it was manufactured like this with me, with my face, with my signature. I know exactly how much the peace this council enjoys costs, because the price has two hundred and thirteen names and I read all of them."

"Your Majesty," Decimus cut in, "nobody questions the exonerations. The question looks forward. Are you the emperor the empire knows... or something new that nobody has approved?"

Good move. Reducing me to an uncertified anomaly.

"Third truth," I said.

I stepped down from the dais, against all protocol, walking toward the center of the room.

"The chancellor is in a hurry for my answer because his balance needs a monster on duty and he offered me the position two nights ago. Hated on the outside, free on the inside, comfortable for everyone here I suppose."

The room turned toward Decimus.

"And here is my answer, chancellor, before the witnesses you yourself summoned: no. This empire is going to have to learn to sustain itself on something cheaper than hate, because the official supplier just closed shop."

The silence lasted three heartbeats.

Steel broke it.

Lunara Marr crossed the plenary room with her sword drawn, and three hundred people stopped breathing at once.

She stopped in front of me. She drove the tip into the marble floor.

And she kneeled.

"House Marr has claimed its justice," she said, with the commanding voice that once moved an army. "The debt remains for two hundred and thirteen clean names, this sword serves the man who cleaned them, not the throne. Let the room bear witness."

It wasn’t love yet, it was a debt of honor, declared in the oldest language of her house, and for that very reason it was worth triple.

"Let the room bear witness," the room repeated, out of habit.

I looked for Decimus at the high table.

He held my gaze, and very slowly, tilted his head half a centimeter, the greeting of one player to another between games.

That was when I knew I had just won the room and lost the only man in the empire who played at my level.

The exit from the hearing was a parade of newly invented bows.

Nobles who had spent a month avoiding me suddenly discovered urgent matters to discuss with the throne, and Appraiser’s Eye priced them all without me asking.

[True value: Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Interesting: this one is telling the truth. Bullshit.]

In the consorts’ corridor, Zelina caught up to my pace without looking at me.

"Effective speech, albeit suicidal, but effective."

Her voice dropped until it was only mine.

"You just took away the chancellor’s favorite tool in public. Men like that don’t get angry, Your Majesty, so sleep with one eye open."

"Only one?"

"I will watch the other one. New rate." And she disappeared down the side hallway before the price could be discussed.

That night, the blue window woke me up at three.

A clean, perfect interface, the first in my entire stay in this world, unfolding with an elegance that my broken System had never shown.

[MAIN QUEST]

[Kill Roderic Alden.]

[Reward: Integrity restored to 100%.]

No glitch. No delay. No absurd reward.

The hero’s system, working perfectly for the first time... asking me to kill the hero?

And below, in the usual broken syntax, a second line that appeared and erased itself so fast I almost missed it:

[do not accept it do not accept it do not]