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

"Blessed be the emperor," Calista Bloom said, entering the private parlor first.

"May the gods receive his soul tonight with more tenderness than he showed in life."

"Thanks, I guess," I replied.

No one had explained to me that the assassins of this world announced their murders with a blessing.

The Saintess took a seat to my right with crossed hands and a smile that any painter would have wanted to steal for an altar.

The others entered behind her.

Without an invitation, of course. You don’t invite people to your own wake.

Zelina Flintstone sat across from me, poured wine into two glasses and pushed one toward my side of the table with a finger.

"Let’s toast," she said. "To long marriages."

The wine smelled of ripe grapes, oak... and a bitter trail buried beneath the fruit, so fine that no normal nose would have separated it from the rest.

Mine wouldn’t have either, until that day.

[Delayed Reward Dispensed: Field Cooking (F)]

[Origin: Heroic Act in the hallway]

[Effect: You identify ingredients by smell. All ingredients.]

A cooking skill. Rank F.

My SSS act of smiling in a hallway paid out with an F-rank cooking skill.

And that garbage skill had just found the poison in my glass.

I picked up the wine, swirled it, and slid it back across the table.

"I prefer yours. Let’s trade."

Zelina didn’t blink.

She took my poisoned glass, smelled it with professional calm, and emptied it into the potted plant next to her.

"Curious," she said. "You drink whatever it takes to sleep."

"The former me had a worse palate."

Miralys Fae didn’t say a word throughout the exchange.

She crossed the parlor, stopped to my left, and placed something on the table, in front of my plate.

A small, black, burnt seed.

From the capital this body reduced to ash before marrying her over the embers.

The tyrant’s memories kept that wedding with a collector’s pride: the bride standing among the rubble, her house’s banner folded at the conqueror’s feet, a whole town watching in silence.

The seed needed no translation: some gifts are sentences.

The war princess had just set a tombstone on my plate, and she returned to her seat without waiting for an answer, because tombstones don’t converse.

"Well?" Calista said with all the sweetness in the world. "Won’t you try the soup, Your Majesty? I specifically asked them to prepare it with..."

"Not with aconite," Zelina cut her off without looking at her. "The aconite was mine, there’s a list."

"You guys have a list?"

Neither of them answered me.

The Saintess kept smiling at her plate and the Poison Queen swirled the wine in her new glass, and I understood that the most dangerous question of the night had just answered itself.

My wives hadn’t just agreed to kill me, they had placed bets on who would do it first.

"Interesting evening," Saoirse said from the other end, without looking up from her notebook.

"Subject exhibits anomalous behavior. Rejects wine. Smiles at strangers in hallways. Probability of mental illness: under study. My widowhood is delayed between six and fourteen hours."

"Are you keeping track of my death in a notebook?"

"I keep track of everything and your death is the variable with the best prognosis."

Five methods.

The sword waited for a reason, the poison waited its turn, the saint blessed the corpse in advance, the princess delivered funeral seeds and the mage calculated schedules.

I could have lied, promised, bought time with gold and titles, which was exactly what they all expected from the tyrant.

I ran numbers instead.

Five women chained by law to a dead man walking.

As long as the marriage existed, killing me was their only way out.

So I stood up.

"Tonight I will sign three decrees," I said. "Listen before you decide which of you kills me, because afterwards it will be paperwork."

No one laughed. Tough crowd.

"First: I dissolve my conjugal rights over all five of you. As of tomorrow, none of you owes me company, obedience or presence. The doors to the imperial wing are open."

Calista stopped smiling.

"Second: I return the dowries. In full, with interest, in each of your names and not your houses. Your money, your freedom, your choice."

"And the third?" asked Zelina, which was a sign she was actually listening.

"The third restores to Miralys the banner of house Fae that this palace keeps in the trophy room."

Miralys looked up from the table for the first time all night.

"What do you ask in return?" she said.

"Nothing."

"Everyone asks for something."

"I ask that if you’re going to kill me, you do it as free women. Corpses weigh less when they aren’t carrying chains."

The parlor fell silent.

Zelina was the first to break it, because spies hate silences they don’t control.

"Lovely speech. Rehearsed in front of the mirror?" She leaned across the table.

"I’ll tell you what I see, Your Majesty. A man who found out about our arrangement, and who is now buying clemency with paper."

"Could be."

"Could be? You’re not even going to defend yourself?"

"What for? You’ve already decided what I am. The papers get signed anyway, whether you believe me or not. That’s the beauty of being the emperor."

Zelina opened her mouth, closed it, and for the first time since she entered the parlor she looked at me without her working smile.

People who read everyone detest blank pages.

"The dowry decree," Saoirse said from her corner, quill in hand. "Does it include compound or simple interest?"

"Compound."

"Revising my widowhood prognosis. Margin of error: wide." And she kept writing.

Calista said nothing.

She stared at her own bandaged hands on the table, and her altar smile had gone somewhere it took a while to return from.

[DING]

[Investment Detected: You freed the five.]

[Evaluation: SSS. Sincerity verified... 74%... sufficient.]

[Reward: ??? ×100. Dispensing... error. Queued.]

[Integrity: 40% ▼ 39%]

[WARNING]

[Do not let it reach zero.]

[Please.]

I reread the last line three times.

Systems give orders.

Systems issue alerts, calculate, punish.

Systems don’t say please.

Mine just had, and for the first time since waking up in this body it occurred to me that maybe the System wasn’t broken.

Maybe it was scared.