Two blades met midair as Ayaka dashed toward me.

  Clang!

  The reverberation of the collision jolted up through the hilt and into my arms, but she was knocked sideways by my deflection and rolled away from me.

  Even though she was fourteen, Ayaka was actually slightly shorter than me—probably due to both her being Orlinian, and me being, as always, freakishly tall.

  However, her being knocked down wasn’t because of our size difference. “Your footing is rather strange, the spacing and positioning won’t make a stable swing. Can you even put enough force behind it?”

  I walked over to her, and offered my hand, helping her up.

  We were sparring in my section of the garden in the Bloomcrest capital residence. All around, my seduced ravens perched on tree branches and hedge walls, watching the two of us trade blows.

  A couple of them had dive-bombed Ayaka when we first started practicing here, but I stopped Ayaka from striking back at them, placating the birds with some dried fruit that I let them eat from my hand.

  “It’s so that I can be silent and quick. I should be able to catch an opponent off guard even when they are watching me. It doesn’t work for you, though,” she admitted glumly. An arc of silvery white flashed as she swung her new katana through the air. “There should be enough power with the proper technique. I just need to get better.”

  Father wasn’t too happy when I brought home a complete stranger as my maid and training partner.

  “I could find someone much more suitable.” he had told me.

  But as I expected, he didn’t refuse me. And after watching us go through several rounds, he seemed to have gotten the point of why I wanted her.

  Unlike the knights’ brute-force attacks and even his elegant fencing, Ayaka’s discipline was focused on stealth and single-target assassination.

  She’s a ninja after all.

  The tip of the katana stabbed at my right shoulder, near the armpit: one of those ‘pressure points’ Ayaka had told me about. Striking the nerves bundled there would paralyze the target.

  I knocked the blade away, and she seamlessly connected it to a downward swing at my head.

  She’s a lot more comfortable with this weapon.

  While watching us, Father had noticed how awkward she was with a rapier. He asked Ayaka what her weapon of choice was, and the next day a training katana arrived.

  I side-stepped the swing and stabbed at her, only for my blade to find empty air. Another one of her techniques, but this one just involved a feint and retreating quickly. Though apparently, this skill is the stepping stone toward the trick that Count Dorlin used, disappearing and snapping back to his starting point.

  Attacks of opportunity, striking from out of the shadows and then melding back into the darkness. That seemed to be the hallmark of not just her class, but also Orlina as of late.

  According to Guildmaster Corwin, adventurers had been increasingly hired as guards for trade caravans, especially ones from the Dragon Realm passing nearby our border with Orlina.

  The old guildmaster had made a point of asking about my new maid as he stroked his beard. It made me realize that there were underlying diplomatic implications that I hadn’t considered in taking in Ayaka.

  Judging by the fact that the Consort had hired Orlinians as the bandits and to assassinate the prince, it seemed obvious that they are aligned with the Eastern faction.

  And with Long Aotian so close to Sarsee, I could only assume the Dragon Realm was with the West.

  The Consort, however, had made no mention of asking Orlina to disrupt trade routes.

  Could this be part of Sarsee’s plan? Or was there some other force driving the game plot forward? Though it could very well be age-old enmities between kingdoms and peoples.

  Ayaka snapped into the empty space behind me; the sun-glared steel of her katana flashed toward my head. My blade caught hers and we pushed against each other.

  “How do you always know?” she gritted out through clenched teeth.

  Her cheeks were now filled out, and the rings were gone from under her eyes. Despite her reservations, Beatrice had cleaned her up, fed her and made sure she got rest, so there was more weight behind her blade now.

  But even with my [System Rebuild] still below 50%, I managed to push her back with better leverage. “Your eyes. They talk too much.”

  That and all my other senses, especially when she was using a skill that involved magic. But I never liked giving everything away. I was never one to talk until the voice demanded it—it got worse over later lifetimes when I had already experienced everything and was just retreading the same old ground.

  “So your old clan sent you to assassinate the Crown Prince? An inexperienced, young girl barely done with training.”

  “I asked for a difficult assignment. It had been two years since my father and brother disappeared, and there was little question that they had fallen. No one was left back home that I could return to.” She stepped around, and brought her sword up from down low. I caught that as well.

  Clang!

  Another clash of steel rang through the air.

  “But it makes little sense for them to send you with the ambassador. It’s wasted potential.”

  “Did you want it to succeed?” She heaving for breath as she came at me from another angle.

  “No. It’s just doubtful you’d have succeeded even if I wasn’t there. The prince was sure to have protective wards, Sarsee would have made sure of it… Oh.”

  If I wasn’t there to defuse the situation, then her attack would have resulted in her dying from a Royal Guard. It would be an attack by foreign representative on the Crown prince in a party hosted by the Consort. The ambassador… that look of shock on his face, his voice back then. He had no clue. Another setup.

  It felt exactly like one of Sarsee’s intricate schemes.

  Ayaka’s push against my blade slackened. “I disobeyed a direct assignment and switched to a personal target. I placed myself above the clan. I can’t go back.”

  She lowered her sword.

  I mirrored her and reached out. “You are stuck with me, then.”

  She glanced at the ravens perched all around us, silently watching. She looked at the trees with autumn leaves, and the bare stems that once held flowers. “You are not human.”

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  I lowered my sword, and spread my fingers. After this much training, thick calluses would have riddled Joan’s palm. Mine was still baby-smooth and supple. “What convinced you?”

  “I already thought it when my sword hit something other than bone inside you. But here, I cannot get over how anyone in this place could even consider you human. The tales they tell of you, your grace at your first birthday, how you managed to wipe out my father and his men at three, those are impossible deeds. I don’t understand how they cannot see.”

  “They chose to believe in me. My cynical self is convinced it’s the effects of magic. But I choose to think it’s because of how human I can be.”

  Her thick eyebrows knotted together. “Even now, nothing about you makes sense. You’re too big and tall for a five-year-old. Your words feel ancient. And your skill… whenever I fight you, it feels like I’m up against an insurmountable cliff, worse than the old senseis back home.”

  “Well then, I’ll make sure I don’t spar against my girls, else they really might find out.” I reached out, and a raven dropped a flask of water into my hand.

  “What are you, My Lady?” Ayaka asked after I took a sip and handed the water to her.

  I gazed about the garden, not just through my eyes, but my [Shadow Fingers] as well. We were very much alone.

  A moment of dizziness took hold, and Ayaka was instantly beside me, supporting my arm. The attacks were less frequent now, but they still came at the worst times.

  I looked over at the girl beside me, dressed in her flowing grey sparring robes instead of her usual maid outfit. “I can show you, but it won’t be comfortable. At the same time, there is something I’d like to try on you. It’s experimental, and potentially dangerous.”

  But its results can reveal a lot about this world.

  Ayaka’s jawline hardened. “My life is in your hands.”

  Figures. The mere mention of danger makes her even more eager. She’s too much like me in all the wrong ways.

  I unsheathed my Demon Sword self, and the unleashed aura slammed Ayaka down to one knee. A yelp of alarm escaped her lips.

  My hand clasped the back of her neck. My fingers extended into long pointed metal. Her wide eyes shot toward me. Goosebumps rose where the cold steel met her skin.

  I smiled coolly down at her. “This is me. Don’t worry, I’ve learned my lesson, so I won’t start by going invasive. Wouldn’t want to break my new toy.”

  Fear and confusion twisted Ayaka’s features, but my grip on her neck held her still. She didn’t try to pull away.

  “I don’t have much time before I have to get back to my rebuild. So…”

  “Let’s start with you using that teleport skill again.”

  —

  The autumn afternoon sun slanted through the glass window of the study. Its light cast a soft yellow over the red velvet couch in the center of the room, and the two figures seated on it. One was me, wearing the frill-layered maroon dinner dress the girls had stuffed me into after a quick post-spar bath. The other was Ben, still in his grey school blazer with gold trim.

  Ben was lying down with his head resting on my lap. We both had books spread open before us. He was supposed to be studying for his "Practical Magic I” exam, but I spied the drawing of a hero pointing a sword at a winged demon on the page he was looking at.

  I was reading “The Philosophical Implications of Discrete Levels and Classes.” Due to the [System Rebuild] and my low [Intellect], my head still hurt whenever I tried to dig into anything too technical. This amount of musing was the most I could handle.

  Of course, this being the world of a video game never came up as one of the possibilities; instead, the author turned it around into what the existence of Levels and Classes said about the gods: that they wanted an orderly universe, and therefore needed to group important people and monsters into buckets.

  It actually made sense in a strange, roundabout way.

  Didn’t the game use Classes and Levels to match player characters and non-player… or PC and NPCs? Aren’t the game or the system behind it basically the gods?

  The author had never even considered the question of whether they were actually real. This was only natural. Back in The Hundred Years War, even though I could feel the underlying effects of my discrete attributes and levels on my combat and training, I never met one person who questioned the reality of it: it was just the way things were.

  Even I, who was locked in by the voice and hemmed in by the script so much that sometimes I had to speak specific lines of dialogue, couldn’t totally deny the realness of the world that I was in. It was hard to look into the eyes of real flesh-and-blood humans and not treat them as real people.

  In this world, where I was completely free of both the voice and the script, the only hint that it might be a game was the UI showing up in my vision. And, except perhaps for the other reincarnators, no one else even sees a UI.

  My Demon Sword form had sensed some kind of computation running when Ayaka had used her skill, but that was during activation.

  It has to be some kind of assistance—we aren’t totally simulated… right?

  “What’s wrong, Jo? You look troubled.” Ben lowered his book, his head shifting over my lap.

  A streak of the afternoon sun set his hair alight into strands of fiery gold. His face, the smoothness of his skin, the chiseled features, the deep blue eyes, it all looked like a game rendering.

  “You look too perfect,” I uttered, looking over his face, still glowing under the sunlight.

  I half expected to look up and see a bar above his head, like with the princes.

  Maybe he is a love interest, but not to me because he’s my brother?

  “What?!” Ben coughed, his book clattering against the hardwood floor. I patted his back as he sat up and kept coughing like he had swallowed wrong.

  Finally, he was breathing again. He threw his head back on my lap and started laughing. “I can’t believe you, of all people, would say that.” He reached up and traced his finger along the cut on my cheek. “The only thing that’s not absolutely perfect about you is this.”

  “Then I’m glad I have it.” I reached up to the cut as well, my fingers catching his. It felt both wrong and right at the same time.

  Ben frowned up at me. “Why? I don’t like seeing you marred.”

  “Do I look human to you?”

  Anger flared in his eyes, and he bared his teeth. “Who accused you?!”

  “Can you tell me truthfully?”

  I never worked up the courage to ask my previous family whether they thought their strange, out-of-place daughter was actually one of them. By the time I learned French fully, I already cared too much.

  “You are better than human. And you’re my little sister. That’s all that matters to me.” He pulled his hand back and picked up his book. Then he resumed reading, signaling the end of the conversation.

  “Thanks. I shouldn’t forget that.”

  Ben snorted in agreement from behind his book.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be studying? That looked more like an adventure book to me.”

  “I’m taking a break,” Ben mumbled past his spread-open book. “Besides, you're studying enough for the both of us. The guy who wrote your book also wrote our Mage textbook.”

  “So what adventurer is it?”

  “It’s the story of Siegfield.”

  “Didn’t you and I used to play pretend as Siegfield and the princess he rescued from the demons?”

  Ben slowly lowered his book, grimacing. “That was from the kids’ version of the story. In the actual story, he finds out she has demon blood in her.”

  “So what did he do?”

  “He had to slay her to save the world.” Ben scratched the side of his head, averting my gaze. “But he later married a real princess!” he chirped brightly, as if that made things all better.

  “I see…”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that was the role I was making you play.”

  “It’s life.” A heavy sigh overcame me as I patted Ben’s shoulder. “It doesn’t matter. I’m your little sister.”

  “Yeah… that’s right!” His voice was a little too enthusiastic.

  I set aside my book and gestured to Claire, who stood in wait behind us. She carried a tray over, and I took the offered teacup, blowing away the steam before sipping.

  Ben refused when she offered him tea, unwilling to get up from where he was nestled comfortably. It earned him a reproachful glare from Claire, but I didn’t mind: he didn’t get to come home from school that often, especially not this early.

  He lowered his book, looking pensively up at me as I sipped my tea. “Jo, about what the guildmaster said… Even if dungeon corruptions are contributing to all the chaos happening in the world, it shouldn’t be up to you to fix everything.” He reached up and squeezed my arm. “You should take the time that the king has given you. Wait for me, and I will go with you.”

  The plea in his voice echoed. I heard Pierre crying out for me as the tide of men swept him away. And I saw Allison with her cold, angry eyes in the playground. In every lifetime, I had a protective older sibling looking over me.

  One that I always managed to hurt.

  And that was the most compelling argument for me to go earlier.