Free Web NovelChapter 3: I Woke Up With My Face Between My Stepsister’s Breasts
The warmth came first. Before my eyes, before anything else.
Soft, alive, rising and falling slowly against my cheek. Something supple that I was buried into completely.
A scent of skin I knew by heart.
I opened one eye. White. Pale skin. And the truth hit me all at once.
My face was buried between my stepsister’s breasts.
One of her legs pinned mine. An arm held me against her back. Her nightgown had given up long ago, and with every breath her chest rose against my cheek, warm, maddeningly soft. My heart slammed into a sprint.
Don’t move. Whatever you do, don’t—
"Don’t move," she murmured without opening her eyes. "You’re comfortable right there."
"Alice, that’s not the point."
"Of course it is. It’s exactly the point."
The arm tightened without the slightest effort. She’d slipped into my bed during the night, obviously. A door we hadn’t locked, and a stepsister for whom "separate rooms" had never meant much of anything.
It took me a long minute, and all the composure I had left, to extract myself without looking at her too closely. She let me go reluctantly and stretched in the light, satisfied as a cat.
I fled to the balcony.
And the city took my breath away.
Russet rooftops tumbled down toward distant ramparts. A Renaissance city, but for one detail: high above, slow and magnificent, a zeppelin etched with runes drifted between two bell towers. Lower down, a train ran along a viaduct with no rails and no smoke, carried by a faint blue glow that crackled beneath it. Magic lanterns winked out one by one.
I laid my hands on the cold stone.
"So this really isn’t a dream," I breathed.
My voice. My breath in the cool air. You don’t murmur in a dream.
A warm weight against my side. Two arms around my arm, a cheek on my shoulder. Alice had slipped out there without a sound.
She didn’t look at the zeppelin, or the train, or the impossible spread out beneath us. She stared in the same direction I did without seeing any of it, I could feel it. She simply clung to me. Content.
We stayed like that a while. The silence wasn’t awkward, just a little too full.
"Come on," I said at last. "Let’s get ready. We’ve got a big day ahead of us."
Getting ready nearly turned out to be the most unsettling part of the morning, precisely because there was nothing unsettling about it.
I’d dreaded freezing basins and chamber pots. Instead, a little washroom of pale stone, a rune-carved spout that poured hot water the moment you passed a hand under it, and a privy the water scoured clean on its own. Magic or plumbing, it was more comfortable than a castle had any right to be.
Breakfast finished me off. Warm bread, creamy eggs, red fruit, a steaming drink that tasted uncannily like tea. It was good. Not exotic, not strange: good, and familiar enough to be unsettling, as if remade from memory.
Then they dressed us. Me, a dark, supple training outfit. Alice, in white — a Saint’s gown, long, immaculate. When she turned to face me, her white hair cascading over the white cloth, she was breathtaking and perfectly in her place. The costume suited her too well. I chose not to dig into why.
They separated us in the corridor. The Saint this way, the hero that way.
And I found myself alone in an armory, facing the woman who was supposed to make something of me.
Red hair tied back carelessly, a lean body honed by years of combat, and not an ounce of armor. Just a loose outfit, as if she’d dropped by to spar with friends.
Maybe at her rank, the body is the armor, I thought.
She sized me up like a delivery gone wrong.
"So you’re the hero. Elsa, rank S. They pulled me off a very well-paid contract to deal with your case, so I hope for both our sakes that you learn fast."
"I’ve been told."
"They say that about every kid who thinks he’s the chosen one."
She peeled off the wall.
"Right. We start by waking that body up. Fifty push-ups, now."
I managed twelve before collapsing, my arms on fire.
And I understood something humiliating: the problem wasn’t the level-one body. It was me. Four years bolted to a desk, writing heroes I couldn’t have followed up a flight of stairs. The body was new — it was the shut-in inside it that was worthless.
"Get up."
"I... can’t..."
"I didn’t ask if you could." She crouched down to my level, her eyes black. "You’ll finish your fifty, because no one here is going to give you the right to stop before that, and me least of all."
I finished them. Shaking, swearing. But I finished them.
Then we ran. Lap after lap, until my lungs burned and I nearly brought the breakfast back up. Every time I slowed, she materialized behind me.
"Faster than that. Trust me, death never slows down to wait for you."
Not a smile, not a word of pleasure. Just a mechanical pressure, impossible to escape. A real demon.
After an hour, I could barely stand. She hadn’t even broken a sweat.
"Good. The body’s awake." She picked up a blade. "Now just watch me."
And she danced.
Not a sequence. A dance. The blade traced spirals, her body flowed from one stance to the next, fluid, lethal. I’d never seen anything so clean.
My Eye opened on its own.
The world slowed. I no longer saw a woman dancing, but the mechanics beneath it: the drive born in the foot, the wave rising through the hip, the release at the wrist. The angle of every guard. The exact instant the force tips over.
She stopped.
"You won’t retain a tenth of that today, but go ahead, try, just for the laugh."
I got up. And I danced. freewebnσvel.cѳm
The drive. The wave. The wrist. My exhausted body followed the path my Eye had carved, as if someone were dictating it in my ear. The blade hissed and stopped exactly where hers had.
[ New skill acquired ]
> [Dance of the Widow - Lv. 1] (active) - A fluid blade art built on evasion and spiraling counters.
The silence lasted too long.
Elsa had gone still. She stared at me, blade low, and something kindled in her eyes — not joy, more the brutal attention of a predator that’s just spotted prey finally worth the trouble.
"The Dance of the Widow. I spend an entire year teaching it, and you just handed it back to me after seeing it once."
She advanced, slow.
"All right. In that case, we stop playing. On guard."
I didn’t have time to understand.
She fell on me. My Eye saw everything — every strike, every angle — and my body kept up with nothing. Too slow, too weak. I knew the answer to each of her blows, and I took them anyway.
But she never struck to break me.
I felt it with every impact: everything was measured to the millimeter. Hard enough to hurt, never enough to finish me. She pinned me at the edge, again and again, wringing one more parry out of me at the precise instant my body begged to quit.
A demon, yes. But a demon who calculated everything. She wasn’t trying to break me; she wanted me to go all the way, to the last breath.
When her wooden blade finally came to rest against my throat, I was flat on my back, drained, unable to lift a finger.
"You see the difference, genius?" She leaned over me, not even out of breath. "You can know every blow by heart, it won’t do you any good as long as your body can’t follow. So that’s what I’m going to train, a little more every day, whether you like it or not."
When they came to fetch me, I wasn’t walking anymore, I was dragging myself. They led me to a small, bright room where Alice was already waiting, at a set table.
She leapt up when she saw me.
"Good lord, look at you." She helped me sit, brushed aside a strand stuck to my temple. "Was it that hard?"
"She’s a demon," I sighed, collapsing onto the chair. "A real demon. She made me crawl, run until I nearly threw up, and every time I begged her to stop, she’d land just enough blows to force me to keep going. I honestly think she treats my agony as a hobby."
"My poor thing." She pushed a plate toward me, gentle, attentive, exactly like a girlfriend who’d spent the morning worrying. "Here, eat a little. You’re still shaking."
I ate. It felt good to let her, and I hated myself a little for thinking it.
"And you?" I mumbled. "How did the magic go?"
"It’s that grand lady from the throne room who’s handling me. Vesperine. At least now we know why she was up there. She had me push out mana until I got a migraine, going on about how I have ’far too much for my own good.’"
She said it with a laugh, light. I almost answered something. I held back.
"That couldn’t have been easy either," I said.
"No. But I was thinking about you, and that always helps."
That afternoon, they took the two of us to a library tall as a nave, and there we were introduced to the one who was supposed to teach us where, exactly, we’d landed.
She was young — our age, maybe. Dark hair pulled back, a plain noble’s dress, and a sharp gaze that lit up at the sight of us, less out of deference than out of pure curiosity.
"Alexia," she said with a curtsy. "It’s an honor to meet you. I’ve been put in charge of your instruction, but to be honest, it’s mostly me who’s impatient. Travelers from another world don’t come along twice in a lifetime."
She unrolled a map on the table, and the world opened up.
Four human kingdoms clinging to the east, Pangracya the oldest among them. To the west, a red stain eating into the parchment: the Lands of Night, where the demons rose from. A war centuries old. A border that retreated, slowly, year after year.
She spoke well. With passion, without condescension. And the more she spoke, the more one thing nagged at me.
"Can I ask a question that’s probably going to sound insolent?"
"Those are my favorite kind," she said at once.
"You describe four kingdoms on the brink of extinction, facing a night that’s been advancing for centuries. And yet the king explained to me yesterday that those same kingdoms are still fighting over the glory of saving the world." I set a finger on the map, on that thin strip of humanity barely holding on. "So either the threat isn’t as terrible as the story goes, or these people are willing to lose the war as long as they’re the ones who keep the telling of it. Which of the two?"
The silence fell.
Alexia stared at me for a second. Then her face opened up — a real smile, the kind that wipes away the polite tutor’s mask all at once.
"Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for someone in this room to dare ask that question?" She leaned over the table, suddenly animated, her eyes shining. "The official answer is that there’s no contradiction. The real answer is the second one. The crowns care more about their version of the story than about the story itself. A living, obedient hero is worth more, in their eyes, than a war won together."
"So they sell us a crusade," I said, "and have us perform in a court play."
"Exactly." She laughed, openly, and that laugh had nothing of a lesson left in it. "Everyone recites the lines without ever looking at the set. You’ve been staring at the set since the moment you arrived. It’s refreshing, you have no idea. My students doze off or parrot what’s expected of them. You take the play apart while it’s being performed for you."
"Force of habit," I said. "Where I come from, I spent my days building sets exactly like this one. You end up seeing the seams everywhere."
"Then you’re exactly the person I was hoping to meet." She caught herself, a little embarrassed by her own enthusiasm, and a touch of pink rose to her cheeks. "Sorry. I’m getting carried away. It’s so rare, someone to actually think with."
And it was easy. Too easy, maybe. For the first time since I’d been torn out of my world, I was talking to someone without watching my back. Just two minds recognizing each other.
That was when Alice’s hand settled on my arm.
Gently. Tenderly. She’d slipped right up against me without my hearing her, and she was smiling at Alexia — a warm smile, luminous, disarming.
"It’s wonderful to see him like this," she said in her softest voice. "Kuro hardly opens up to anyone, usually. Truly, you have something special, Alexia. I’m so happy he met you."
Alexia flushed with pleasure and stammered out a thank-you.
Something, for a second, chilled the back of my neck. The sense that I’d seen that smile before, resting on someone else, the day before, in the throne room. I shoved the thought away at once. I was exhausted, aching, paranoid. They got along, that was all. Everything was fine.
It took me a long time to notice that Alice’s smile hadn’t shifted by a single millimeter.
And that it didn’t reach her eyes.
