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

"I reject the quest," I said out loud, alone in my study, at a quarter past three in the morning.

The blue window didn’t move.

[MAIN QUEST]

[Kill Roderic Alden.]

[Reward: Integrity restored to 100%.]

My broken System, which dispensed cooking skills and chessboards with a drunkard’s delay, had found the perfect moment to ask me for a murder.

And the fine print was worse than the quest: Integrity to one hundred.

The clock we all feared, solved in one fell swoop. A boy from the north in exchange for my countdown.

Any real tyrant would already be sharpening something.

"I reject the quest," I repeated, more slowly. "Cancel. Delete. No."

The interface blinked once... and the entire study filled with text.

[ERROR]

[ERROR ERROR ERROR]

[quest does not accept quest does not accept quest does not]

[recalculating... recalculating... recalcul]

The windows multiplied, overlapping each other, stuttering in three machine languages nobody taught me, and for the first time since the night of the knives I felt like I was looking at something that was suffering.

Then, silence. A single window, still.

[Rejection... registered.]

[Penalty applied.]

[Integrity: 36% ▼▼▼ 33%]

Three points. All at once, with no reward, nothing in return.

Saying no had just gotten a price tag.

I poured myself wine I didn’t intend to drink.

A system that punishes rejection is a system in a hurry.

And the hurries of systems, just like those of creditors, always speak of the one collecting, never the one paying.

Who was in a hurry for Roderic Alden’s death?

The knock on the door arrived before the answer.

Saoirse Wynne walked in without waiting for permission, wearing a Towers robe, her green hair flattened on one side and a brass instrument full of trembling needles in her hands.

Her clear eyes went straight to the empty space where the window had been.

"At three seventeen," she said, without a greeting, "the palace produced a storm-category mana spike. Epicenter: this room." She held up the instrument. "Third time this month. The other two were you as well."

"Did you come to arrest me for excess mana?"

"I came to measure you." She crossed the study, planted the device on my desk without asking permission, and started turning dials. "Mana doesn’t lie but people do. That’s why I prefer mana."

"And what does your mana say about me?"

The needles on the instrument spun, hesitated... and stopped in two different positions at the same time, something that even I, ignorant of magic, didn’t take for normal.

Neither did Saoirse.

She stared at the needles for a long while, then looked at me, then back at the needles, with the expression of someone who finds a bug.

"It says you are two," she said.

"Two what?"

"I don’t know yet." She jotted something down in tiny handwriting. "But I intend to find out. Consider yourself my favorite problem."

Of all the declarations I had received from my wives, that was, to date, the most affectionate.

"Can I run tests on you?" she continued, already turning dials again. "Measurement sessions. Two a week are painless, barring a miscalculation."

"And what do I get out of it?"

"Answers." She looked up. "You are the man with two mana signatures in his chest and I am the only person in the empire capable of reading that. The right question is what you get if you tell me no."

There it was.

The logic of Saoirse Wynne, served without garnishes: she wasn’t offering me help or company or loyalty, things she didn’t know how to manufacture.

She was offering me the only coin she minted, and it happened to be the one I lacked the most.

"Two sessions a week," I accepted. "On one condition. Whatever you find, you tell me first before the Towers."

Saoirse took a moment to answer, which was rare for her, someone who calculated faster than people breathed.

"The Towers raised me," she finally said.

"And they sold you to seal a pact."

"The records say they married me off." She adjusted a dial that didn’t need adjusting. "Sold is your word."

"It’s the exact word, Saoirse. I recognize an invoice when I read one."

She went perfectly still. The needles on her instrument, without anyone touching them, trembled.

"Condition accepted," she said, her voice a degree lower. "You first and the Towers later or never."

She left the same way she arrived, without saying goodbye, hugging her instrument, and at the threshold she stopped for half a second.

"Tonight’s spike," she said without turning around. "The mana screamed. What did you do to it?"

"I told it no."

Saoirse processed that with her head tilted.

"Interesting," she said. "Nobody ever says no to that thing."

"To what thing?"

But she was already gone, leaving the question burning in the middle of the study.

I went back to the desk.

The blue window was still there, tame, with its 33% pulsing on the bottom left, and below the number, in broken text, a new line I didn’t remember ever seeing in the menu.

[Feature unlocked: Forced Dispensation.]

[You can voluntarily burn Integrity to demand an immediate reward.]

[Rate: variable. Risk: variable. Regret: likely.]

I read the offer twice.

My System had just turned into a loan shark: instant power, paying with the clock I shared with who knows what.

The kind of loan that ruins entire families, served on a blue platter.

In my other life I saw men die over loans like this.

They signed in January for the June harvest, the frost arrived in April, and in July I sat across from their widows to explain to them how much a hanged man was legally worth.

I knew the mechanism from the collector’s side, which was exactly why the offer gave me chills.

And in this life the problem was different... because for the first time since I woke up in this body, staring at that button, a part of me wanted to use it.

Not out of greed.

Decimus was building something in the north, the hero would wake up any day now, my wives carried historical knives.

Meanwhile I was defending against all that with a chessboard, a tongue that couldn’t lie, and a cooking skill. The button promised to close the gap in a single afternoon.

In exchange for the clock.

"Put it away," I told the window. "Somewhere far where I can’t see it."

[Feature archived.]

[Note: it will remain available.]

[Additional note: I know because I get tempted too.]

I blew out the candles in the study myself, one by one, and went to not sleep somewhere else, with that last line chasing me down the hallway.

Systems don’t get tempted.

Mine had been doing things for weeks that RPG systems don’t do, and each one pointed in the same uncomfortable direction: something in there was less broken and more alive than any manual would admit.

In the consorts’ corridor I crossed paths with Miralys.

She was returning from the archery range at that impossible hour, with her short bow on her back and her silver hair tied up for a campaign.

She stopped when she saw me and so did I.

The protocol between us remained the same: two armies sizing each other up in a hallway.

From her inner pocket she took out something small and held it out to me without a word.

A glass vial, the size of a thumb, with a dark seed inside and a label written in her southern alphabet.

I took it with the care the gesture demanded, without understanding the gesture itself.

"What does the label say?"

Miralys looked at me for a long moment, turned around, and kept walking.

Only when she turned the corner did her voice reach me.

"Ask me another day."

And in the north, with a five-year delay, a hero was learning of his destiny.