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

"Fourteen,"

I said running down the gallery with the board burning in my vision.

"Four groups. East, south, kitchens and rooftops."

Lunara was already armed. I didn’t ask what time that woman slept because the answer was obvious and military.

"Kitchens is the service route. They are looking for the consorts’ wing."

She drew her sword while walking.

"The split is this. I will take the east since it is the large group. Your guard takes the south using the half that is actually useful. Rooftops?"

The answer came from above in the form of a short whistle.

Miralys ran along the cornice of the gallery with her bow in hand.

She moved over the tiles with the ease of someone who grew up in sieges.

She let loose two arrows without stopping. On my board two hostile trajectories on the rooftops went out.

"Rooftops covered," Lunara translated dryly.

We split up at the fountain crossing.

I saw the rest of the defense in flashes and through the board and each flash was worth a whole treatise on my wives.

In the kitchens three assassins entered through the service route, found the door open and the table set and Zelina eating dinner alone with her back turned.

A reading error.

People think Zelina’s back is a back when it is actually a measuring instrument.

"The stew is good," she said without turning around. "I do not recommend the wine."

All three had already tasted it out of intrusion protocol to rule out chemical alarms in the air.

Two steps later their legs stopped obeying them.

Zelina finished her plate before turning to look at them lying on her kitchen floor furious and paralyzed.

"Nobody poisons in my palace without a license," she explained with teaching patience. "My office issues them. On Mondays."

In the west wing two assassins broke into the orphans’ infirmary based on a simple calculation. Small hostages mean big money.

They found Calista Bloom between them and the beds.

"They are sick," the saint said with that sweetness of hers that the court confused with softness. "Canal measles. Very contagious for adults without the blessing."

A white lie I was told later with a genuine seed of truth.

There were two real cases in the room. The assassins hesitated for the exact second it took for the guard to arrive.

Calista had sent for them earlier because Calista’s faith recently included not relying solely on faith.

I found Saoirse exactly where I ordered her not to be.

She was outside her tower right in the combat gallery planted behind a barrier of three constructs with a needle instrument pointed at me.

"I told you to seal the door!"

"I sealed it. Then I opened it. They are different operations." The needles of her device spun wildly following every activation of my board. "Your System in combat produces triple the data it does at rest. You cannot buy this opportunity."

"This opportunity has knives!"

"That is why I brought Tornillo."

The largest construct stepped between her and the hallway with its brass arms wide open and an assassin who peeked around that corner professionally reconsidered his route.

"Keep fighting. Ignore me. Generate data."

Of all the declarations of support received that night telling me to generate data was the most loyal one in her language.

From the rooftops Miralys held her own war.

I saw her in flashes between tiles without a shout and without an order hunting with the economy of someone who learned that battles are lost by noise.

Her people from the south fought in silence the war archives had told me. Now I understood it was a language.

When the second fugitive jumped the outer wall with one of her arrows in his shoulder Miralys climbed down the vines to the courtyard.

She retrieved two arrows from the fallen and inspected them and stopped as she walked past me.

She looked at my arm where an unimportant cut stained my sleeve.

Then she looked toward the kitchens where Zelina was cataloging paralyzed prisoners and toward Calista’s infirmary and toward Lunara’s east.

The complete inventory of the defense done in four seconds of winter eyes.

"Your palace fights," she said.

Three words which doubled her record with me. And she kept going toward the rooftops to mount a guard that nobody asked for.

I caught up to the last one from the east wing alongside Lunara in the gallery of banners.

Badly wounded and cornered he raised his knife toward the nearest Marr banner in a final gesture of pure vandalism.

Lunara’s sword took away his knife and his consciousness in the same movement.

"Not in this room," she said to the unconscious body and sheathed her sword.

Then she checked me with that battlefield inventory she did without permission covering the cut on my arm and the tear in my sleeve and my breathing.

"You fought better," she ruled. "The body is starting to obey you and no longer its memory. Three more rounds a week and you will stop giving me secondhand embarrassment."

"Was that a compliment?"

"It was a diagnosis."

But she lingered a second too long looking at the gallery and the intact banners and the sleeping vandal on the floor of the room she never stepped foot in with witnesses.

"You defended this room with the large group loose in the east wing. It was a risky decision."

"It was arithmetic. What cost you the most hangs right here."

Lunara didn’t answer.

She picked up the fallen man’s knife and turned it to read the forge and handed it to me by the handle without looking at me. In her language of steel that amounted to much more than an answer.

An anonymous forge.

This time there was no crowned stag. Someone had learned from their mistake.

With the palace secured we did the headcount in the courtyard.

Eleven attackers were dead or captured and two fled across the rooftops with Miralys’s arrows as souvenirs.

And the fourteenth one was the one my board marked differently from the start with a commanding trajectory and no hurry.

We found him in the throne room.

He was sitting on the steps older and gray haired with his empty hands in plain sight and the calm of someone who finished his shift.

"Guild master," I said.

"Your Majesty." He bowed his head. "My men failed with an admirable cleanliness. Five women. I should have charged triple."

"Are you surrendering?"

"I am retiring. It is different."

He looked at his old hands.

"The contract on your life does not allow cancellations Your Majesty. A depositor’s clause. As long as the guild exists the guild must try. So I came to the last visit personally out of respect for the trade and to lose which is also an art."

[DING]

[Glitched quest detected: Execute the innocent.]

[Target: guild master.]

[Reward: substantial.]

Execute the innocent.

My System with its broken syntax was calling the man who directed three attacks on my life innocent.

Or it was calling an execution something else that I couldn’t see yet.

Imperial law was simpler. Death without a trial for a direct assassination attempt.

"Kill him," Zelina said from the door arriving with the others. "A guild without a master takes years to reorganize. It is arithmetic not cruelty."

"Pardon him," Calista said by her side. "A retired master knows things a dead master takes with him."

Both of them looked at me.

Both were completely right each in their own language and the old assassin watched us from the steps with professional interest appraising how much his life was worth in the market of my conscience.

"There is a third way," I said.

Zelina closed her eyes.

"I hate it when you say that."