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

"Take cover!" someone yelled in the hallway.

The servant.

The candle boy, trapped in the corridor with the night shift tray just when four professional shadows decided to go to work.

And then the world changed color.

[Chess Emperor: active]

It wasn’t strength, nor speed.

It was worse and better at the same time: suddenly I saw the entire room in trajectories, each assassin reduced to lines of movement, each line with two or three drawn futures on top of it.

The one on the left would step on the loose rug in two paces.

The one with the short blade always attacked after feinting to the same shoulder.

The third was holding back, which is what the piece that matters does.

A chessboard.

My room was a chessboard, they were pieces and for the first time in two lives I saw three moves ahead.

The problem is that seeing isn’t moving.

The tyrant’s body knew how to fight but I didn’t.

The dissonance cost me a cut on my forearm when my head ordered a dodge to where my legs didn’t reach.

I bled, I stumbled, I knocked over a lamp to buy two seconds.

I fought dirty, in short.

Clumsy, ugly, without any honor: I threw the inkwell at a face, used the netting curtain, pushed a whole bookshelf over the one on the loose rug, exactly on the step the lines had promised me.

Three moves ahead with the pieces of a beginner.

It was enough not to die.

The third one, the one holding back, finally advanced.

His lines were clean, short, without alternative futures... they all ended in me.

I backed into the hallway, and there was the boy.

Frozen against the wall, using the tray as a shield, right in the crossfire zone.

The trajectories redrew themselves. If I spun to the right, the steel seeking me would carry on... straight into him.

Quick math: my emperor’s life against that of a nameless servant.

Any strategist chooses easily.

I stepped into the line.

The cut caught my back diagonally, a coldness first, a burning second, and I fell over the boy, shielding him with my body while the assassin recovered distance for the second strike, the one the lines showed had no variants...

The strike didn’t arrive.

I heard steel against steel just once, a short sound.

When I looked up, Lunara Marr stood in the middle of the hallway with her sword dripping, and the third one no longer had trajectory lines because the dead don’t move.

The others fled out the window.

The hallway settled into a strange silence, the kind that arrives after steel.

The blood from my back dripped onto the rug with an almost polite regularity, and the boy was still underneath me, breathing fast, whole.

"Are you hurt?" I asked him.

He shook his head, unable to speak.

He still clutched the tray to his chest.

In a corner of the tray, bearing a single bite, was the apple I’d given him two nights ago.

He had saved it.

"You’re late," I managed to say from the floor, to the woman with the sword.

"I came to check the archive testimonies when I heard the racket."

Her gaze swept down the scene in order: my open back, the ceremonial weapon untouched in its corner, the boy trembling underneath me, uninjured.

"And I find this."

"I can explain..."

"Shut up."

She crouched next to the boy, checked him with two veteran gestures, and sent him to the kitchen with a soft order.

Then she looked at me, for a long time, the naked sword still between us.

"People freeze when death walks in twice," she said. "You stepped into the line of a slash for a boy you don’t even know."

"It was a bad calculation."

"It was the first act of your life that calculated nothing, Vaelion. That’s why I don’t understand it." She stepped closer. "The man I married let an orphanage burn because evacuating it delayed his parade."

"Lunara..."

"The Vaelion I know had never bled for anyone. Who are you?"

I could have told her everything right there.

Another world, another life, a stupid death, a borrowed body.

Until the tremor in my hand felt like confessing tonight.

"Someone who inherited a monster’s debts," I said. "And who plans to pay them all, that’s the most honest thing I can give you today."

"It’s not enough."

"Ask me again when your order’s banners hang where they belong."

[DING]

[Act registered: You took the blade meant for another.]

[Evaluation: SSS. Sincerity verified... 100%.]

[The reward will arrive when you need it. Trust.]

[Integrity: 39% ▼ 38%]

A hundred percent? I hadn’t even tried.

And there was the problem, looking at me from a blue window: my System paid for sincerity, I’d spent two days manufacturing sincerity on purpose, with calculation, with expected returns... and the only time it marked one hundred was the time I didn’t think at all.

I filed that thought in the drawer of uncomfortable realizations.

While the imperial doctor stitched my back with the nervous chatter of someone who had never touched the emperor without gloves.

Lunara stood guard at my door without anyone asking her to.

Meanwhile, in another part of the palace, the scene I didn’t see, and was told about much later, took place.

Zelina emerged from the shadows of the service corridor, where she had watched the entire fight without lifting a finger.

In her hand she held a paper torn from the corpse of the third assassin.

A guild contract, sealed, paid, in order.

She read it under the light of a candle.

The contract ordered the death of Emperor Vaelion Ironveil. Date of issue: one month ago.

And the client’s signature at the bottom of the document didn’t belong to house Marr, nor Flintstone, nor Bloom, nor Fae, nor Wynne.

The signature, stroke by stroke, letter by letter, was in the handwriting of Vaelion Ironveil himself.

The tyrant had hired his own assassination.