Free Web NovelChapter 4: First Skill Fusion Unlocked, my Stepsister, Meanwhile, Unlocked ’Creepy’
The days that followed all blurred together, and yet I think they were the most peaceful I’d had since being torn out of my world.
Elsa broke me every morning, and every morning I got back up a little less slowly. My body was changing for real. In a few days, the training had earned me six points of vitality, five of strength, and four of agility — numbers I watched write themselves in black and white in my status window, as if every ache were being converted into a gain.
By the third morning, I held a whole exchange without hitting the ground. By the fifth, I saw her secret move coming — that cheap shot she always landed the moment you thought you were in the clear — and my body slipped aside before my mind had even finished the thought. She stopped dead, her blade halfway through its arc.
"Well, well," she said. "The puppet’s starting to dance on its own."
It wasn’t a compliment. Nothing ever was, with her. But her eyes said something else.
The strangest part, though, was what grew alongside it.
From pushing to the end when everything in me begged to stop, skills were born. Will, first. Then Self-Transcendence. Two little lines no one else would have noticed. Except that I could do what no one else could.
One evening, alone, I took them both and forced them into each other.
[ Skill fusion ]
> [Will] + [Self-Transcendence)
-> [Override - Lv. 1] (active) - For an instant, the body obeys beyond its limits. Wringing one more move out of muscles that give.
It was exactly what I’d been missing. Elsa kept telling me that knowing was useless as long as the body couldn’t follow. Now, when my Eye saw the blow and my legs refused, I had this left: a fraction of a second where will came before flesh.
And the Dance of the Widow, from enduring it under her blows, reached level two. Nothing evolved, nothing spectacular. Just a body finally starting to catch up to what my eye already knew.
One morning, as I picked myself up for the tenth time, covered in dust, Elsa crouched down to my level and studied me for a long moment, her head tilted.
"I’ve drilled hundreds of kids," she said. "Gifted ones, prodigies, dukes’ sons people swore were born with a blade in hand. Every one of them hit the same wall, sooner or later." She drove her blade into the ground between us. "You don’t have a wall. You swallow everything I give you and you ask for more. That’s either the finest gift I’ve ever been handed, or something that scares me a little. I haven’t decided yet."
She stood back up.
"Nobody learns the way you do."
I didn’t answer. What could I have said? That it wasn’t me, but the Eye? That I was cheating every second right under her nose? I held my tongue, and let the misunderstanding work in my favor.
Alice, for her part, was advancing just as fast as me. Vesperine taught her spell after spell, and each time Alice grasped them on the first try, as if she’d always known them. Her mana reserve made apprentices who’d trained for ten years go pale. A genius, they murmured in the corridors. An instinctive understanding. A Saint like none seen in centuries.
I’d cross paths with her between lessons sometimes, radiant in her white gown, surrounded by a little court hanging on her every word. She played her role to perfection. And every time she saw me, all those fine people stopped existing for her. Her gaze would find me over their heads, and she’d smile at me — that smile, the one she gave only to me.
I should have found it touching. Some days, it was mostly a little heavy to carry.
Because that was the flip side of those days. Everywhere I went, something was expected of me. The hero here, the hero there. Guards straightening at my passing, servants lowering their eyes, nobles already calculating what my existence might earn them. On Earth, I was a guy no one noticed, bolted to a keyboard in a cluttered studio. Here, I was a weapon, a symbol, the answer to a war centuries old. And some evenings, the weight of all of it crushed my chest. freewebnøvel.com
That’s why, I think, I clung so much to my afternoons.
Because in those days that all looked alike, what I liked best was neither the sword nor the numbers.
It was my afternoons with Alexia.
We were getting closer, I felt it in every lesson. We had too much in common for it to be otherwise — the same way of looking at things sideways, of taking apart what we were being told. With her, I wasn’t a hero. I was just someone who asked good questions, someone she took pleasure in answering. Today again, during the lesson, we’d drifted onto everything except the curriculum. And once again, as she left me, she’d slipped me an appointment for the evening, at the library.
When evening came, I was getting ready to leave when a hand closed around my wrist.
"Stay with me tonight."
Alice. She wasn’t smiling, for once. She simply held me, her eyes lifted to mine.
"You don’t need to go. You don’t need her. We’re good, the two of us. We’ve always been good, the two of us. So why do you always run off somewhere else?"
I turned and looked her square in the face, my hand closed over hers.
"I’m not running off. I’m learning. For the two of us, Alice. So we can build a future in this insane world, a real one, where we won’t depend on anyone. That’s why I’m doing it. It’s for us."
She stared at me a long time. Then something gave way in her eyes, and she nodded.
I stroked her hair, gently, the way you soothe a child.
"I’ll be back soon. Promise."
And I left her alone in the room.
Alexia was waiting for me in the middle of the stacks, perched at the top of a ladder, three volumes balanced in one arm.
"Ah, there you are! Catch, quick—"
She tossed me a book that I caught against my chest, a hair’s breadth from taking it in the face.
"You know you could just bring them down one at a time?" I said.
"And waste precious time? Never in my life."
She came down, missed the last rung, and I caught her by the arm before she could sprawl. We stayed like that for a second, far too close, and she burst out laughing, not the least bit embarrassed.
"In the stories, my heroes always catch me. It’s reassuring to see it works in real life too."
"You read a lot of hero stories?" I asked.
"I grew up on them." She sat cross-legged, a stack of books propped against her hip. "A little noble girl shut up in a manor too big for her, with a library for her only company. I devoured everything that talked about elsewhere. About people who left, who changed the world, who didn’t spend their lives waiting for a good marriage." She shrugged, suddenly a little less sure of herself. "And then one day, they tell me a real hero’s been summoned, and that I’ve been put in charge of teaching him the world. Can you imagine? The dream of the girl I used to be, handed to me on a platter."
"Sorry I’m not more heroic," I said.
"Oh, you’re heroic enough." She shot me a sideways smile. "You’re just the only hero in my books who complains this much about his sore muscles."
I laughed in spite of myself. It was easy, with her. Too easy, maybe.
We settled right on the floor, ringed by books, and she told me about dungeons.
"It’s simpler than people think," she said, a finger on an engraving. "A dungeon is born from an overflow. Where mana piles up without draining away — around an ore vein, an anomaly, a fault — it eventually condenses. And from that condensation, a dungeon is born."
"So what’s inside depends on the mana around it," I guessed.
"Exactly." She looked at me, delighted that I was following. "The denser the ambient mana, the more dangerous the dungeon. Which means that with the right instruments, you can gauge a dungeon’s difficulty before ever setting foot in it. Reading the air, in a way."
Reading the air. I thought of my Eye, of those golden filaments I’d seen drifting everywhere since the first night. I said nothing. But I noted, somewhere, that I’d probably never need their instruments.
"And at the heart of every dungeon," she went on, "there’s a tower. No one really knows why. It’s where everything converges, where the mana is thickest, where the worst of it swarms. They say reaching its summit drains the dungeon of its substance. Kills it, in a sense."
"Have you ever been into one? A dungeon?"
"Gods, no." She laughed. "I’m a library rat, not an adventurer. I know all of it from books, like everything else." Her smile softened. "You’re the one who’ll see them for real now. Will you tell me about them?"
"Promise."
We talked for a long time. Too long, probably. Then she closed a book, and her tone shifted, softer.
"Tomorrow will be our last day. After that, you’re off onto the roads." She paused. "So I’m taking you into the city. Both of you. To see the real people, the real prices, the customs no book will teach you. So you don’t show up out there like two lost nobles."
"Wait. The king agreed to that? To us going out?"
"Surprisingly, yes." She gave a sideways smile. "With an escort, obviously. You don’t turn a Saint and a hero loose in the wild without a dozen guards counting their every step."
The bars, always. But it was the first time I’d been allowed through the door at all, escort or not.
"Thank you," I said. "Really. For everything, actually."
She stood, brushed off her dress, and before I understood, she leaned in and pressed a kiss to my cheek.
"See you tomorrow," she said simply.
And she walked off, leaving me there, one foolish hand against my cheek.
When I came back to the room, the light was off.
Alice hadn’t moved.
She was sitting exactly where I’d left her, on the edge of the bed, in the dark, her hands resting on her knees. As if the hours hadn’t passed. As if she’d waited, motionless, the whole time, doing nothing but waiting for me.
No candle. No open book, nothing to pass the time. Just her, in the dark, her face turned toward the door. Toward me. For how long? I didn’t dare ask.
"You were gone a long time," she said gently.
"Sorry. We got carried away."
"With Alexia."
It wasn’t a question. I sat down beside her.
"She’s taking us into the city tomorrow. Our last day before we leave. That’s good news, isn’t it?"
Alice turned her head toward me. And she smiled — her smile back, soft, perfect.
"It’s very good news," she said. "She’s kind to you, Alexia. Really very kind."
She slipped against me, laid her head in the hollow of my shoulder, and closed her eyes.
"As for me, as long as you always come back, everything’s fine," she murmured. "That’s the only thing that matters, you know. That you come back. Always."
Her hand found mine in the dark and closed around it. A little too tight.
I squeezed back, out of habit, and closed my eyes.
