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

"Explain the third way," Zelina demanded, "before you execute it."

The three of us stood in front of the prisoner. Her and Calista and me with Lunara guarding the door and the rest of the palace counting the wounded.

The old master waited on his steps with the patience of his guild.

"The law demands his head," I said. "Your logic does too but you both fail to see the same thing which is the persistence clause. Once the master is dead the guild chooses another and the contract stays alive. The next master will be one who does not come to retire on my steps. Killing the old man buys me two years of peace and a young enemy."

"And pardoning him," Calista stepped in, "buys you information."

"Pardoning him buys me a witness that the chancellor will have killed before Thursday. A loose and grateful guild master is a loose end Decimus will not leave alive."

I looked at the old man who nodded slowly agreeing with me with the calm of someone who had already made the exact same calculation about his own skin.

"Both paths end in the same cemetery. So I am not going to kill him and I am not going to pardon him. I am going to buy him."

The guild master raised an eyebrow which was the first genuine reaction of the night.

"Buy what from me Your Majesty? You already have my life. It is sitting on your steps."

"Your contract. The one that does not allow cancellations."

"A depositor’s clause," he repeated patiently. "Not even the guild can annul it since the deposit was paid in full and in advance with instructions to persist. It is the most ironclad contract I have signed in forty years."

"Every ironclad contract has a door. The people who armor it leave one just in case."

I sat on the steps two meters away from him right at the level of a man you are going to negotiate with.

"Tell me the guild’s payment structure and its floating debt. How much the organization owes and to whom."

"That Your Majesty is the best kept secret in my trade."

"I know."

And I activated the Map.

Threads sprouted from the old man’s chest just like roots. Guild debts and cross guarantees and collateral deposited in three banks across two empires. Favors owed to a shipping house and protection bought from two border governors.

The hidden bookkeeping of forty years unfolded before me complete with names.

I read them out loud one by one.

The guild master listened to me recite his entire professional secret with the face of a man watching the rain fall upward.

"Nobody knows that," he said slowly. "Not even I know it all."

"Now imagine that recitation in front of your creditors. The three banks would execute the guarantees in a week and the guild would go insolvent in a month. And an insolvent guild..."

"...does not honor contracts."

He finished the sentence himself and something in his old face settled into the territory he actually understood which was negotiation.

"Targeted insolvency where your persistence clause dies along with the treasury holding it up. Elegant Your Majesty."

"I prefer cheap since nobody dies."

"Nobody dies," he conceded and stayed silent for a moment appraising me with forty years of experience before doing the one thing no calculation of mine predicted.

"I am going to give you something you did not buy. Consider it a retiree’s discount."

"I am listening."

"The original deposit for your contract. The one the tyrant paid."

His old eyes held my gaze.

"I received that payment personally and I have spent a month waiting for someone to ask the right question because professionals notice the seams. The signature on the promissory note belonged to the emperor but the hand that wrote it did not."

The throne room got two degrees colder without changing temperature.

"The tyrant did not put a contract on his own life," I said.

"The tyrant discovered that someone else had put a hit out in his name with his handwriting forged by a master. That is why the poor devil was acting strange this past month from what they say. He did not want to beat his own death Your Majesty. He wanted to find out who had signed it for him before it was delivered."

He stood up from the steps old and calm and retired.

"We investigated the payer for accounting hygiene. The gold was laundered four times and the fourth hand made a calendar mistake. A payment dated on the day of the imperial audit when a certain office certifies its own accounts and leaves a trace."

"Which office?"

I already knew.

The Map already knew it too. The threads of the entire room already pointed there.

But I needed to hear it in the air with witnesses from a professional mouth.

The guild master bowed with the courtesy of old executioners.

"The imperial chancellery Your Majesty. The contract on your life was paid for by Decimus Vanthel three weeks before you supposedly changed so much."

Nobody spoke for a long time.

Zelina was the first to move. She crossed the room to the old man and planted a sheet of paper and a quill pulled out of nowhere in front of him. She held his gaze from professional to professional.

"Date and amount and laundering channel and the calendar mistake all in writing with your signature. The declaration of a guild master holds weight in three empires."

"I will sign it my lady. We retirees collect enemies for sport."

The old man took the quill.

"Though I warn you of what you already know. A piece of paper against the chancellor is just a piece of paper. The archives are his and the tribunals are his. And we witnesses with all due respect to my health have an expiration date."

"That is why I will not take it to a tribunal."

Zelina picked up the signed declaration and read it twice. She kept it in her inner pocket right by her heart which was where she kept her real weapons.

"Papers against men like him are not presented master. They are aimed."

When the guard took the old man away to his agreed exile the throne room slowly emptied out leaving just the four of us and the silence.

I reorganized the whole month with the new piece and the month changed shape. The original tyrant discovering the forged contract and acting strange and looking for the signer.

And dying right then not from a guild’s knife but from whatever brought me into this body on the exact same night his five wives were coming to kill him.

Too many deaths scheduled for the same hour.

We mediators do not believe in calendar coincidences.

"Vaelion." Lunara’s voice came from the door. "If the chancellor paid for the contract a month ago and the contract persists..."

"Then everything else was theater."

I said it while looking at the empty throne. That was the seat Decimus had spent twenty years managing from the shadows.

"The pact he offered me and the hearing and the cold war. A man does not negotiate with the dead man he already bought. He buys time. He sets the scene." I turned to them. "Decimus is not deciding whether to kill me. He is deciding when it looks best."

[DING]

[Threat update: registered.]

[System Advice:]

[...]

[I have none. For the first time I have none.]

[Just do not die. You still owe me questions.]

And outside over the ruined courtyard from the attack a messenger raven from the north crossed the dawn with the announcement none of us had asked for and all of us were expecting.

The hero of the prophecy had opened his eyes.