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

"It is mine," I repeated.

"Founded with gold from the throne, directed by order of the throne, accountable to the throne. Every operation of that network in the last three years is on my tab. Consort Flintstone was its administrator by an imperial mandate that I am now making public."

Silver Tongue supported every word and that was the terrible part of the matter. It was all true.

I had made it true that very morning with a retroactive decree signed and sealed and filed at six o’clock. It legally absorbed the entire network under the crown before the trial.

A truth manufactured three hours in advance is still the truth.

"Your Majesty." Decimus spoke. "Do you understand what you just declared? That network accumulates charges of bribery and blackmail and theft of state documents..."

"Sixty one charges according to my own count. Add them to my tab." I opened my hands. "It is the tab of a tyrant, chancellor. It has plenty of room."

"The council could demand your abdication for this."

"The council can demand whatever it votes for. But today and right here the accusation against the consort rests on a forged poison and a network that belongs to me. There is no case left. The only question remaining is who forged the poison and I intend to enjoy that investigation."

"The council could demand much more than that, Your Majesty," Decimus insisted. For the first time during the session he stepped down from the high table and crossed the room toward me with his hands behind his back.

"Think about what you are building. One consort with a spy network, another with a sword oath declared before the court, a saint the Church already looks at with suspicion. You are concentrating a power in five women that no balance in this empire can accommodate."

"Correction, chancellor. I am returning the power this empire confiscated from five women. The difference might seem small from the high table. It is quite noticeable from the bottom."

"From the bottom," Decimus said just for me, "it is most noticeable when something falls."

Appraiser’s Eye priced the phrase without me asking.

[True value: a promise.]

The tribunal deliberated for twenty minutes out of decorum.

They took Zelina’s handcuffs off right there.

She rubbed her wrists slowly while looking at me from the other side of the room with an expression I did not recognize.

She caught up to me in the gallery of columns far from the ears of the council. She walked at my pace without looking at me which was her way of being serious.

"A retroactive decree," she said. "Signed this morning at six. That is why you asked for the twelve hours."

"I needed it to be true before I said it."

"You absorbed sixty one charges onto your name. Forever."

She stopped under the last column and forced me to stop with her.

"Explain the move to me because I have spent three hours looking for your return and it is not there. What do you gain? My network? It already worked for you. My loyalty? It can be bought cheaper. My virginity?"

She said it without any shame. "Give me the hidden price, Vaelion. We both know it exists."

"It doesn’t exist."

"You are lying."

"I can’t." I touched my throat. "Remember what I am speaking with."

Her violet eyes scanned my face just like they scanned a forged document looking for the seam or the different ink or the misplaced seal. For the second time in two days they found nothing and for the second time I saw her get furious over it.

"Everybody collects," she said. "Everybody collects just like my father or the streets or the tyrant. It is the only law that never failed me."

"I know."

"Then what?"

"Then I know exactly what it costs." I looked at her. "And I decided my salary just doesn’t cover it anymore."

She stayed under the column when I kept walking.

She didn’t follow me.

But she didn’t leave either. When I turned around at the gallery door she was still there with her wrists marked by the handcuffs and the face of someone who just found a flaw in the only law of her universe.

[DING]

[Investment Detected: you took her crimes onto your own name.]

[Evaluation: SSS. Sincerity verified... 94%.]

[Reward x1000: dispensing...]

[...]

[...]

[ ]

The window went blank.

No error and no announced delay and no broken syntax.

The System opened its mouth to pay me and nothing came out. Somehow that silence unsettled me.

I didn’t sleep that night out of a new habit. That is why I saw the light under the door of Zelina’s study when I crossed the consorts’ wing past midnight.

I didn’t go in.

There are rooms you can only enter without witnesses and I had already witnessed too much for one day.

But the crack under the door told the story anyway. Zelina was sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace surrounded by black notebooks. It was her personal archive on the man who bought her with her brother’s life.

She was burning them one by one.

She held the last notebook a bit longer. She opened it and read something and closed it. Into the fire.

Then she grabbed a new unused notebook and dipped her quill and wrote a single word on the first page.

I couldn’t read it from the crack.

But Zelina stared at the page for a long time with her quill completely still. The expression that crossed her face didn’t belong to a spy or a widow or a poison queen. I stepped away from the door.

In my study the blue window was waiting for me.

[Pending reward: deferred dispensation.]

[Reason: the inventory does not contain what you deserve.]

[Searching...]

I reread the line three times.

My broken System that turned swords into chess and gave junk rewards and gifted me cooking skills in the middle of ambushes had just rejected its own entire catalog. It did that because nothing seemed like enough.

A mediator learns to distrust payments that are delayed out of excessive generosity. They are usually the ones that come with new conditions.

But you also learn something else much older. You learn there are debtors who fall behind because they refuse to pay you in just any currency. They care about the debt.

I didn’t know which of the two categories my System fell into. I suspected it didn’t know either.

"And since when do you have standards?" I asked the empty air.

The window blinked once almost shyly.

[Since you started having them.]