Free Web NovelChapter 1: My Stepsister Was About to Kiss Me the Exact Moment We Got Summoned to Another World
The cursor blinked.
Ten to midnight. Chapter 472 should have gone up two hours ago.
The problem wasn’t writer’s block. I’d have preferred that. Writer’s block, at least, is honest. I knew exactly what to write, and had for fifty-odd Chapters: the hero turns the princess down, goes home, alone, because some things no amount of magic can fix. That was my ending. The real one. The one I’d been quietly steering everything toward from the start. ƒree𝑤ebnσvel.com
My fingers settled on the keys.
The next morning, Yvain took Aria’s hand and smiled.
There. Done. The kiss, the golden morning, the couple walking off into the sunrise — the whole sugary package I spent my life sneering at everywhere else. Except this time it had my name on it.
The tab beside it was overflowing.
they end up together right?? PLEASE tell me they end up together Author-sama I’m begging you, a happy ending i’ve been waiting for this moment for so long i won’t survive
My cursor found the publish button on its own, like a horse that knows the way back to the stable better than its rider.
I submitted the Chapter without rereading it.
Because rereading it was a death sentence. Stopping on every line, finding the exact spot where I’d caved, hating myself enough to delete the whole thing. And if I deleted it, I’d have to choose, and I had nothing left to choose with tonight. I closed the tab with one sharp click.
I let my head fall back against the chair. The hum of the tower, the glow of the screen, and nothing else. Somewhere outside a car went by, then the silence came back and took up all the room again. I just sat there, not moving, staring at a ceiling I couldn’t see. It was often like this in the evenings — that moment when the work stops and there’s nothing left but the apartment, me inside it, and the vague feeling of having let something slip without ever knowing what.
What have I done with my life.
I didn’t get the chance to sink any deeper.
The key turned in the lock. Two turns, a click.
The light hit me full in the face and I squinted.
"You’re going to go blind, working in the dark."
Alice dropped her bag by the door and stepped out of her heels. She didn’t bother with hello. She crossed the room and leaned over the back of my chair to look at the blacked-out screen, forearms crossed on the headrest — and her breasts pressed against the back of my head, two warm, heavy weights through her shirt, her chin settling into my hair.
"You haven’t done a thing all night," she breathed in my ear.
I froze. Impossible to think about anything with that pressure against the back of my neck, her warmth against my back, her perfume everywhere. She straightened before I had to say anything, ruffled my hair, and headed for the kitchen like she’d just brushed my shoulder.
"Evening," I managed.
"Have you eaten?"
"More or less."
"So, no."
She opened the fridge, leaned in, inspected it. Sighed.
"Everything I left you two days ago is still here. You haven’t touched anything all week?"
"I forgot."
"You don’t forget to eat for three days, Kuro."
She pulled out a bag of groceries she’d carried up with her — without asking, she never asked — and started cooking in a kitchen whose drawers she knew better than I did. She told me about her day while she worked, her back to me, voice dragging with tiredness.
"I should’ve just gone home. Hibari dropped his file on my desk at six on the dot, I swear I almost strangled him." She shrugged without turning around. "But, you know. Figured you’d still be here starving to death in front of your screen. And here we are."
She said it like it was obvious. But it wasn’t nothing, what she was saying: past midnight, wiped out from a day that wouldn’t end, she’d chosen to come here instead of going home. Again. And I let it slide, like everything else.
The oil started to crackle, garlic filled the air. She was working at the stove, back turned, and the skirt clung to her ass, riding up a notch every time she went up on her toes to reach something high. I caught myself following the line of her thighs like an idiot before forcing my eyes back to the table. She was my stepsister. I kept telling myself that, and it didn’t help.
The knife stopped dead when she got to the sink.
"You had someone over."
Not a question. The two glasses.
"The neighbor from upstairs. The new one, the one who just moved in. She came by to introduce herself, I offered her a drink."
Alice nodded, slowly, and picked up a cloth to wipe down the counter. Calm, even strokes.
"Is she pretty?"
"Didn’t notice."
"Mmh."
She finished wiping, folded the cloth, and turned to me with a smile that couldn’t have been sweeter.
"Let me know next time she comes by." Her voice hadn’t shifted a single degree. "I like knowing who comes in here."
And she went back to cooking, like she’d asked me to remember to take out the trash.
She hadn’t raised her voice. Hadn’t needed to. That was always the thing about her that chilled me without my ever being able to say why.
"Go shower," she said. "You look like a corpse. It’s ready in ten."
"I’ve got work."
"Ten minutes."
I went.
When I came back, it smelled like garlic and butter, the glasses had vanished from the sink, and the apartment was breathing the way it never did when I was alone in it. Hair damp, clean shirt, the unpleasant but real sense of having turned back into a more or less living person.
Two plates on the table. She sat across from me and watched me put away the first few bites before touching hers. She always did that — made sure I was eating first.
"It’s good," I admitted.
"I know." Chin in her hand, eyes half-closed, pleased with herself. "What would you do without me."
"The Chapter’s out," I said, to change the subject.
"And it wasn’t the ending you wanted."
I looked up. She didn’t.
"Why do you say that."
"Because when you love what you’re writing, you bore me half to death about it for hours. Just now all you said was ’the Chapter’s out.’" A small smile. "You give yourself away all the time with me."
"You should go home and sleep. You’re doing it all again tomorrow."
She set down her fork. The smile stayed.
"I’m fine here."
"Alice."
"Here’s the only place I’m fine, anyway." Simple, calm, final. "And I’m the only one who comes through that door. You know that."
Dinner done, she cleared the table before I could move, washed up by hand, put everything away. And instead of reaching for her coat, she came back over to me.
"You look exhausted."
"Alice—"
She leaned over my chair, one hand on the armrest, and her breasts came level with my eyes, full, heavy in the open collar of her shirt, before her face came down slowly toward mine. Her other hand found my cheek, cool against my still-warm skin.
"You don’t take care of yourself."
"You’re too close."
"I wish things were like before. Between us."
She’d murmured it, thumb at the corner of my mouth. I knew what she meant by before. I left it where it was. A closed door, one I wasn’t going to open tonight.
Her breath on my lips. Her black eyes everywhere. Her mouth a hair from mine, my hands finally rising toward her shoulders to push her aw—
White.
The light swallowed everything. The apartment, Alice, the floor.
And I fell.
The floor slammed into my knees.
Stone. Cold, hard, polished smooth by centuries. The smell hit me at the same time as the light — incense, hot wax, something mineral and ancient, a world away from the garlic and butter of a second ago. And all around, a vast, low murmur, the held breath of a crowd beneath a ceiling far too high.
Against my arm, warmth. Alice, doubled over on the flagstones like me, her hair in the crook of my neck. And under her breath, irritated, almost sulking:
"Tch... I was so close."
Like missing a bus. Like the universe had taken the liberty of cutting her off mid-motion and would have to answer for it. Then the rest came down on us.
I lifted my head.
A hall with no end. Columns tall as trees, stained-glass windows pouring shafts of colored light across the floor, and everywhere — people. Silks, ceremonial armor, hundreds of pale faces turned toward us. Beneath our bodies, carved into the stone, a circle of symbols was slowly dying, its last blue embers winking out one by one.
On a dais in front of the throne, a woman in robes stitched with arcana let her arms fall, her face undone.
"It worked," she breathed, and her voice was shaking. "By the gods... the summoning worked. They’re here. The heroes are here."
"Two," someone else said. "She called two—"
"Look at the girl."
"Her hair. Look at her hair."
I looked.
And my breath stopped.
Alice’s hair was turning white. Right there, in front of me — the color drained from the roots and ran down to the tips like ink diluting in water, black surrendering to a lunar white with no age to it. In seconds her whole head of hair had turned, and when she lifted her face to me, her eyes were no longer black.
They were red. Deep, liquid, like two garnets lit from within.
On the tiered seats, a detonation of whispers.
"Silver hair—"
"The eyes of Heaven’s chosen—"
"A saint. It’s a saint!"
"Impossible," the archmage moaned, paler than her own robes. "I called for heroes. A saint can’t be summoned, it’s never been done, not once, never—"
Alice heard none of it. She was staring at her own hands, a white strand caught between her fingers, her breathing spiraling.
"Kuro." She grabbed my arm hard enough to hurt. "Kuro, my hair, my eyes, they’re— what’s happening to me, what—"
"Hey. Easy."
"No, look at me." She drove her red eyes into mine, and her voice cracked on the only question that, apparently, mattered to her. "Am I still beautiful?"
I had no words.
Out of everything. Out of everything that had just come down on us — the other world, the armed crowd, her body changing without warning — that was what she needed to know first. Not where we were. Not what she was becoming. Whether I still found her beautiful.
And I’d never seen her like this. Never. Alice was the one who showed up at midnight to mother me, the one who didn’t flinch at anything, the one who read me like a sign on the side of the road. This was the exact opposite. She was falling apart, and she was reaching for me — me — so she wouldn’t go down with it.
Something straightened up inside me. One of us had to stay standing, and for once, it wasn’t her turn.
I took her face in my hands. I looked at her properly — the white, the red, and underneath it, her features, exactly the same.
"Alice." Steady, low, so she’d hear only me. "You’re the same. White hair or not, you’re the exact same stubborn brat who lets herself into my place at midnight." I let a beat pass. "And yes. You’re beautiful. Even more so now, if you really want to know, and it’s honestly annoying."
A sound escaped her, halfway between a sob and a laugh. Her shoulders dropped a notch. The red in her eyes stayed, but something familiar came back into them — that little spark I knew far too well.
"...You think so," she murmured, the ghost of her smile resurfacing despite the fear.
"Save it for later." I got up, pulling her with me. "We’ve got company."
The simple fact of one of the two summoned standing up dropped the whole hall into a clean silence. Hundreds of eyes locked onto me. My stomach was in knots, my heart a wreck — but I was still holding Alice’s hand, and as long as she was afraid, I didn’t get to panic.
I raised my eyes to the throne. A figure had risen there, and was beginning to descend.
He was in no hurry. That was the first thing you noticed about him. Tall, his fifties worn like a crown, his face cut from something hard and patient, he came down the steps one at a time, and every step spread the silence a little further across the hall. Crimson cloak, a circlet of pale gold at his brow catching the light from the windows.
At the foot of the steps, he stopped. His gaze took us both in, unhurried, the way you size up a harvest.
"Welcome to Pangracya."
He let the name ring out.
"The oldest of the four kingdoms. The last rampart standing between men and the night rising in the west. I am Artario, third of the name, of the blood of the First Gods, he who stands at the summit of all that is mortal." A pause. "King among kings. And you, whom a long journey across worlds has just torn from your own, are from this moment under my protection."
The "long journey." The "protection." The part of me that never shut up was already running at full tilt. Every word picked to turn a kidnapping into a gift. I’ve written this king a hundred times.
Alice drew a breath beside me, and I knew she wasn’t going to wait politely.
"And why," she asked, chin high, her clear voice carrying to the back of the hall, "did ’the king among kings’ kidn—" a beat "—summon us into his world, exactly?"
Gasps along the tiers. A princess, off to the right, brought a hand to her throat. People clearly did not speak to Artario van Pangracya in that tone.
He didn’t flinch. Worse — something lit at the back of his eyes, almost like satisfaction.
"In your place, I would feel the same anger," he said, unmoved. "Torn from your own, thrown before a court that stares at you. It is cruel. I know it." He let a moment pass. "But what brings you here is no whim of mine. It is a necessity written by the gods themselves, long before either of us was born. The world is sinking into a war against the demons that no mortal, alone, can hope to win. So Heaven provided weapons. Souls from elsewhere."
He spread his arms, taking in the whole hall.
"You."
The court drank his words in religious silence. It was well done. The kind of speech that turns a crowd — and that would turn two lost kids, if you let it.
All the more reason not to let Alice go next.
I bowed. From the waist, deep, the way you bow to a king. freёwebnovel.com
"Forgive her outburst, Your Majesty. The journey shook us." I straightened. "My name is Kuro. Kuro Shiragi. And if I understand correctly, we’ve been called to save this world from the demons."
"That is correct, young hero."
"Then one question." I weighed each word, the way he did. "We’re nothing but mortals. No weapons, no training, not a shred of power. What makes you believe that we would make the difference where your own forces fail?"
The first smile crossed the king’s face.
"An excellent question, Kuro Shiragi."
He raised a hand.
"You were called for what you carry inside you. Gifts that do not exist in this world, gifts that surpass everything my mages, my knights, and my saints combined could ever accomplish. You don’t know it yet. But you have only to look." His voice went almost gentle. "Concentrate. Think of your status."
The word landed in me strangely, as if it pressed a key that had been waiting for me all along.
Status.
And before my eyes, suspended in the air, glowing a blue that I alone seemed to see, a window opened.
Four years. Four years writing ordinary boys who found out they weren’t. Four years typing those three little blue lines at three in the morning without believing a word of it.
This time, it was my name at the top of the window.
