Two weeks have passed since the noble kidnapping incident—and my ill-advised bout of vigilantism that very nearly converted me from Hero Candidate into Posthumous Cautionary Tale For Posterity. For someone who hasn’t even learn this world’s history and power system properly, I’ve already developed a worrying habit of sprinting headfirst into danger for reasons that can only be described as a sense of duty I neither applied for nor signed the waiver on.
But dwelling on it won’t help. Regret is informationally dense but operationally useless. What does matter is that the incident confirms something important: my outwardly unimpressive Skill isn’t useless. I never doubted that—not once—but it’s satisfying to have empirical validation. The unfortunate caveat is that my first use of a new utilization involved adrenaline, panic, and the very real possibility of dying inside a barn. Hardly controlled conditions. I’d prefer a chalkboard, a stopwatch, and not bleeding out in the dirt next time.
That preference remains theoretical.
Because I happened to be near the barn—acting as lookout while Genovefa fetched help—I am now officially categorized as Witness. Which means every three days, like clockwork, I’m escorted to the reeve’s station for another round of questioning. Less “thank you for your help” and more “tell us the same thing again, but slower.” Between that and academy obligations, my free time has been carved into thin, unusable slices. Hard to do rigorous magical testing when your schedule is being eaten by the legal system.
I tried to extract information when I can. Curiosity is a reflex. Two noble girls, still in their teens, abducted by ex-adventurers is not a trivial data point. The official answer is always the same: ransom. Delivered with the kind of finality people use when they don’t intend to elaborate. Any further probing got gently deflected.
This is a matter of law, not yours. You should focus on your studies. Become a proper Hero, that’s what they say.
Which was rich, considering they’re the ones pulling me out of the academy, stripping my study hours, and conscripting me into their amateur manhunt.
Every visit followed the same ritual. I sit. I answer. I watched them bring in suspects for the “teleporting vigilante.” Teenagers my age with too much bravado. Short men who happened to be nearby. Glory-chasers hoping suspicion might turn into recognition. I examine them carefully, then dismiss them all.
The logic is simple. The vigilante’s ability—my ability—has consistent parameters. Spatial displacement with no visible chant, no residue, no observable cooldown. Anyone without a Skill and can’t cast one with a gesture-based trigger is immediately disqualified. And anyone that meets those two but doesn’t match the constant is also out. Conservation of variables matters. I explain this calmly, precisely, without flourish. They nod. They accept it.
I don’t overreach. I don’t speculate. I avoid assumptions like a mathematician avoids dividing by zero. Say only what is necessary. No more. No less. Playing dumb without being suspicious is an art form, and I’m quietly excellent at it.
They trust me. They never realize they’re with the culprit.
But that glaring issue aside the reeves themselves bothered me (even now) more than the interrogations. Strip away the accents and antique coats, and they function like a modern police force. Clear protocols. Paper trails. Chain-of-command rigidity. Awful response time that leaves adventurers acting as first responders nine times out of ten. It’s another entry in this world’s ever-growing pile of anachronisms—medieval fantasy aesthetics duct-taped to suspiciously contemporary systems. I noticed it, filed it away, and let it simmer unanswered in the back of my head.
Until now.
The instructor is lecturing on continental history, a subject that normally sedates me faster than white noise. I’ve never liked history unless I’m allowed to approach it at my own pace, with a browser tab open and the freedom to chase footnotes into rabbit holes. Today, though, something jolts me awake.
“Ceasar, Yohan, Arthur, and Giasone were the first four Heroes summoned unto our world,” the instructor says, chalk scratching their names across the board. He turns, eyes lingering on us—the apparent sequel. “They reshaped the very framework of the five nations. Nearly all comforts you now enjoy were wrought by their knowledge and expertise, which far exceeded our own.”
“Makes sense…” Johan mutters.
It does. The realization clicks into place with an almost audible snap. The mismatched texture of this world suddenly resolves: fantastical motifs layered over modern sensibilities like a poorly merged mod pack. Outfits that shouldn’t coexist with plumbing. Architecture that remembers medieval siege warfare but somehow accommodates zoning laws. Quality-of-life inventions that feel imported rather than evolved. Even the reeves, with their modern policing logic wrapped in contemporary phrasing.
Someone before us brought the instruction manual. And those someone are very competent to be able to bring a lot on this side and actually incorporate things to this fantastical realm.
Then Ray speaks up from the front row. I can’t see his face, but I know the frown in his voice. “Then why are we here?”
The question loops back on itself, old and familiar. We asked it when we first arrived, lost and blinking under foreign skies. Now it returns, heavier, sharpened by context. This time, we already know where the answer is headed.
“They made great contributions,” the instructor continues, unfazed. “They aided the five nations in forging distinct systems of rule.” As he speaks, my mind drifts to a walk I once took with Genovefa, past a city square dominated by four statues of men. “But alas…”
He sketches a rough outline of the continent, then adds a smaller landmass to the north, arrows connecting the two like a fatal itinerary.
“As they journeyed to exterminate the demons—to uncover the source of their corruption and cleanse it—they perished.”
The words land softly. Too softly. No shock. No tightening in my chest.
I saw it coming from a mile away.
Realization, however, carries a twin: a quieter question bobbing somewhere behind my thoughts. One I refuse to phrase outright, even to myself, because I already know what shape the answer will take—and I don’t like the way my face tightens when I imagine it. I still have time. That’s the comforting thought I cling to. So for now, I choose passivity. Observation over action.
Lectures drone on and I’m already at the verge of falling asleep. After the introduction of the four previous heroes my brain decided it’s not interested to hear more. But as darkness eats my vision, I can still hear the lecture albeit faintly.
The lecture drifts on, sound flattening into background radiation. Once the introduction of the first four Heroes ends, my brain checks out like an employee who’s already mentally clocked off. Darkness creeps into my vision, but fragments still slip through.
Ceasar, who revolutionized military doctrine and introduced aerial combat through aircrafts—plural, apparently. Yohan, who uplifted daily life with small mechanical contraptions, practical tools, and the unsettling gift of basic physics and advanced chemistry. Arthur, architect of political systems, reformer of education across all five nations. And Giasone—the strange one, the outlier, whose contributions are listed with hesitation, as though the instructor himself isn’t sure how to summarize them—
Ah. No good. I’m—
“So, Chief Odenwald,” I say as I seat myself opposite him, “I trust you are prepared to brief me on the abduction?”
My gaze drifts across the office. Modest in size, meticulously kept. A place built for order, not comfort. He gathers a stack of missives bound neatly in a folder and settles behind his desk, laying them out with practiced care.
“Your Highness,” he replies, voice roughened by long hours, “should you not be attending thy studies? The academy had already begun to enact its new curriculum. Matters of law are already in our charge. One of your stature need not trouble herself with them.”
I take the first page regardless, skimming the contents. “I beg your pardon, but my friends are those who were taken. I saw it… and could not prevent it.”
The document is clinical. Motive, background, escalation. Former adventurers, displaced by recent policy shifts. Nobles gatekeeping guilds within their fiefs. Licenses priced beyond reason. Markets sealed shut. Equipment and coin loaned at interest so steep it borders on extortion, binding adventurers into a state scarcely distinguishable from indenture. Opportunity strangled until desperation lashes out.
“I may not hold the weight of my elder brother nor sister,” I admit, the words slipping free before I can restrain them, “yet as a princess, I must attend to matters that touch me. It’s the least I could do.”
He lets out a dry chuckle and lights a tobacco stick, careful to shield the flame and turn his head aside as he exhales. “That is untrue, Your Highness. You are young, yes—but no less important than your siblings.”
I do not answer. My eyes trace the page again, settling at the final lines. It notes that the kingdom’s systemic reforms—the very restructuring meant to stabilize the realm—are the root of the outrage. Stripped of their means to survive as adventurers, the perpetrators seized two noble girls in hopes of forcing the court to listen. The ransom, it seems, was merely leverage to renew their licenses. Their true demand was the proper implementation of the new system.
I lower the page, fingers tightening ever so slightly. “They have it rough.”
The chief reaches for the second sheet and raises it so I may see. The script is older, the ink darker with age. A manifesto. The seal at its crest bears a name I know well—Arthur Pendreigh, one of the first Heroes. I recall him not merely as a reformer of political structures and classrooms, but as a man possessed of uncommon economic sense. He left behind five such treatises, each outlining a distinct framework borrowed from his own world, then reshaped—carefully, imperfectly—to function within a feudal order.
Yet the Heroes perished before their work could be completed. During my grandfather’s reign, no less. The manifestos were left unfinished, their sharper edges dulled by compromise and necessity, and later adopted piecemeal by the five nations. That incompletion is the rot beneath everything.
“It is harsh to live within an unfinished system,” he says quietly, as though completing my thought for me. “Free Market Feudalism—such was the name the Great Arthur gave it. In theory, it would have served both noble and commoner alike. Competition would open paths. Nobles might seek lawful profit beyond rents and levies, whilst common folk could rise beyond the station of their birth—even surpass nobility in wealth, should they play their hands wisely.”
He allows himself a small, genuine laugh.
“Our kingdom is no paragon, yet we have ever prided ourselves on values and restraint. Had the system been finished as intended, it might have been… magnificent.”
I understand it well enough. A nominally free market layered atop a rigid hierarchy. Trade, resource extraction, and adventuring opened to competition, yet access to land and capital still guarded by birthright. Political authority remains the domain of hereditary lords, but the slow creep of representative councils grants commoners a voice, however faint, in matters once sealed above them.
A delicate balance. One requiring constant adjustment.
Instead, we inherited an outline where a blueprint should have been. A half-built bridge spanning a river of human want. The nations were left to guess at the intended destination—and judging by the problems piling beneath the crossing, it seems we have chosen poorly.
It is not that the idea was cruel. It is that it was unfinished.
I could levy the same judgment upon the other nations as well, each wrestling with its own smaller fractures. Such matters ever begin as trifles—administrative oversights, misunderstood laws, tolerable injustices—but left untended, they gather weight and velocity. Thus, even while I remain bound to the academy, I must learn all that I may. Change cannot be wrought by ignorance, and timing is everything when one’s hands are yet too small to steer the reins of power.
The chief sets the second page aside and produces the third. It is dense with script—so much so that my vision threatens to swim. I had not expected the matter to descend so deeply into minutiae.
“At first,” he explains, tapping the parchment, “the ex-adventurers sought to retaliate peaceably. They cleared dungeons without demanding recompense. Yet the nobles—confused, and fearing loss of authority—responded with a new statute: ‘All dungeon assets are the property of the Crown. Those with no proper license are to not take any spoil.’ To the adventurers, this was seen as retaliation in kind.” He gives a short, incredulous laugh. “The nobles truly did not comprehend wherein they erred. Such is the curse of our overly decentralized governance. The licensure reforms and the new credit-currency system have quite unsettled their sense of what is reasonable to the common folk.”
From a small leather case he withdraws a thin sheet—paper, pressed and marked. A bill.
“I am still unaccustomed to these as so does the lords. Yet I cannot deny their convenience.”
I say nothing. Most necessities are delivered to me directly from the palace. Coin rarely passes my hands, and when I attempt to purchase aught, it is pressed upon me freely despite my protestations. Still, I grasp his meaning. Itself have a hard rime grasping their worth as it is abstract, detached from weight and metal, and measured instead by trust—a fragile thing, when unevenly taught.
“It makes my head ache.”
“Haha… well,” he replies, closing the case, “you did ask for all of this, Your Highness.”
I lift the final page. It is nearly bare. A few lines. Sparse ink. The stark opposite of the previous document’s suffocating density. The disappointment pricks sharper than I expect—until I read the heading.
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Masked Vigilante.
“Still nothing, then…?” I murmur.
“That Hero—what was his name again?” the chief says, rubbing his temple. “Ah. Shin. The lad comes here oft and rejects every suspect we present. Whoever this vigilante may be, he is either possessed of a heart of gold… or one quite rotten. But one thing is certain—he knows how to erase his trail and act in utmost secrecy.”
My brows lift despite myself. The reeves have been working relentlessly to expose this vigilante. It is no trifling matter. With the kingdom’s new system still as fragile as a newborn foal, law is treated with near-religious seriousness, even in its infancy. Banditry and abductions must be stopped, yes—but unchecked vigilantism is no lesser threat. Left to persist, it would undermine the legitimacy of the very order being constructed.
“It seems so…” slips from my lips before I can stop it.
Beneath the words, a quieter plea coils in my chest.
Gods above—pray that man be righteous.
Sharp! What the hell bruhhhhhhhhhh—?
A spike of pain detonates at the back of my skull, yanking me upright from my desk like I’ve been struck by divine retribution.
“W—wha?!”
Ray jerks back with both hands raised. “What the FUUUUCK, man?! You are drooling like a broken faucet!”
Oh. Right. I fell asleep.
I swipe at my mouth on instinct and immediately regret it. My sleeve has been… compromised. Violated. A casualty of unconsciousness.
“How many times have you fallen asleep in class?” Joshua says. No scolding. Just the deep, weary pity of a large man disappointed. Somehow it made me feel like shit. “I’ve lost count, you know? That’s really worrying, brother.”
“He passed tests like that even back on Earth anyway,” Mark adds, grinning sideways. “Unlike some idiot here who’s all looks.”
“Fuck did you just say?!”
I stand, scratching the back of my head as a yawn tears its way out of me. My eyes drift to the window. The light has that lazy, yellow-bright tint—afternoon, probably early. Long enough past lunch to feel productive. Early enough to feel like a gift.
Fuck, I missed lunch! I didn’t get to see the old man, fuuuuuuuuuu—
Before I can spiral I turned to them. “Are we going to the coliseum?”
“Nah,” Ray says. “Practical lessons are suspended for now. Faculty meeting.”
Every remaining molecule of sleep evaporates.
My fists clench. My knees bend. And before my dignity can intervene, I spring up like a released coil.
“Hell yes!”
The three of them stare at me. The looks range from deadpan concern to genuine confusion.
“You good?”
“Absolutely!”
Because finally—finally—I get time. Real time. No reeves. No interrogations until tomorrow. No instructors hovering like hawks with lesson plans. Just a whole afternoon to myself.
A whole afternoon to test my new utilization of my Skill.
Mark squints at me, then exhales slowly. “Right. You’ve been going in and out of the reeves station lately. How did you even get tangled up in all that mess?”
I relax, arching a brow. “You didn’t know?”
Ray lightly kicks my shin. “He wouldn’t be asking otherwise.” Then he waves his hand like he’s holding a broadsheet. “All the reports say is that you and the Princess were witnesses and took action during the rescue.”
“Oh! Speaking of rescue,” Joshua says, smacking his fist into his palm. “Did you get any EXP from that?” That stops me for half a beat. “I know your Skill’s… whatever,” he continues carefully, “but EXP gain isn’t exactly straightforward. Even proximity sometimes counts, right?”
He’s right. EXP in this world is weirdly arbitrary in a way that almost feels grounded—like a badly tuned but earnest attempt at quantifying growth. You don’t always need to land the killing blow. Contribution matters. Risk matters.
Which is why I expected something decent.
But what I actually got was a punch to the ego.
I nearly died. And in exchange, my level crawled up by four stages. From eighteen to twenty-two. Either the system is busted—or I’ve crossed some invisible threshold where leveling slows to a crawl. I am begging every god listening that it’s the latter.
“Still at eighteen,” I say, lying with the same ease I use to breathe.
Ray smirks, pride radiating off him like cheap cologne, and gives my shoulder a light shove. “Damn, man. That’s the same level we were at when we learned gesture-based Skill activation.” He jerks a thumb at himself. “I’m nineteen now. And maybe I could’ve gotten to thirty at least if I was there! I would’ve jumped in and save those nobles and earn myself extra EXP!”
Uwah… Big talk for someone one level higher.
Then again, with a max cap of a hundred, even a single level might represent a meaningful jump in magical output. I mean, as a Hero, I have EXP gain boost and yet I only got so little out of that battle. Or maybe I’m wrong. I’m still at my learning phase so I am not so sure.
“Twenty,” Mark says.
“Twenty,” Joshua echoes.
“What the hell? How did both of you pull that off?!”
Mark shrugs. “Maybe we’re just smarter than you—”
“Okay,” I cut in, “that’s actually rude, bruh. He had it coming though.”
Ray laughs and smacks my back. “You’re the rude one!”
I stagger, catch myself, and turn back to them. “Well,” I say, glancing at the half-empty classroom, “guess we’re all free to go home, huh?”
Ray stretches as he heads for the door. “Planning to do just that. Just stayed behind to whack your sleepy head awake.”
Wait, he’s the one who hit me—?!
A flash of blazing red enters my peripheral vision and derails the thought. I turn. Iustitia stands nearby, speaking with a small knot of worried girls. She notices me, freezes, looks away—then straightens and offers a firm, awkward smile.
I risked my life for people I barely knew. I didn’t expect thanks. Still… this feeling presses in my chest, faint but familiar. Relief, maybe. Or something adjacent. She’s back at school. Walking halls instead of being locked in an abandoned barn. That alone makes it feel worth it.
…
Huh. She’s my classmate?
I feel like I’m stupid sometimes, that realization came too late.
Mark leaves. Joshua lingers.
“Not raring to return already?”
“No, uh… heading just out.”
We walk back to the dorms together. Normally I’d face-plant onto the mattress and hibernate, but today is different. Free time is a finite resource, and I intend to exploit it. In the empty room, I change into casual clothes and leave almost immediately.
Sneaking out, of course.
As one of the Heroes, I’m not allowed to roam freely. Apparently my life now carries the same insurance premium as nobility. The last time I went out alone, I told the guards I’d be strolling with the princess—who they assumed would bring escorts, and so I did.
She didn’t.
That… didn’t end well. If guards had been present, maybe the abduction would’ve been stopped earlier. Maybe I wouldn’t have had to improvise vigilantism inside a barn. Counterfactuals are useless, but my brain insists on generating them anyway.
My first stop is the academy’s grand garden. Every world has one. A designated refuge for loners. Students linger here after class to read, sketch, nap, or stare into nothing with artistic intent. Perfect cover. People absorbed in their own recreations are famously oblivious to their surroundings. The source is me.
I slip into the bushes and begin crawling forward on all fours, slow and clandestine.
Like a soldier in the trenches.
…No. That comparison is wildly disrespectful. I’m not a soldier. I’m just a guy sneaking through shrubbery.
When the thick iron gates slide into view, I inch forward until I’m roughly three meters away, then stop. Perfect distance. Far enough to avoid attention. Close enough to matter.
Time to review Distort’s information…
Shrink anything within a radius as long as the user knows it exists within and can determine its exact location. The more dense the it is, the more Magic Energy it consumes. Radius scales with each fifteen level stages—starting from five meters and increasing by one onward.
I’m level twenty-two now. That puts my effective radius at six meters.
Hmm. Yeah. On paper, it almost sounds respectable.
In practice? Absolute bullshit.
The first time I tested it—even on something as unthreatening as a pebble—I managed to shrink it a tiny amount at the cost of nearly a third of my Magic Energy. A pebble. At that point, I almost agreed with everyone else’s verdict: garbage Skill, niche at best, useless at worst.
Almost.
Because rereading the criteria reveals something interesting.
1. First, the target must be inside a six-meter radius around me.
2. Second, I have to “know” its exact location.
That’s the first two I noted. But there’s more that can affect how it’s used.
3. The denser the object, regardless of its size or mass, the more Magic Energy it drains. The less dense, the better.
4. The target must be an existing “thing” or be considered a “thing.”
The third rule is the real poison pill.
Density is not mass. Density is mass per unit volume. D=m/v. You can have something light that’s absurdly dense if its mass is packed tightly enough.
Which brings us to atoms. Most tangible objects—rocks, gates, walls, everything I’d reasonably want to shrink—are made of atoms. And atoms are mostly empty space, sure, but their nuclei? Protons and neutrons crammed into a volume so small it’s almost rude. Enormous mass compared to the space it occupies. Sky-high density.
So when Distort says “density,” it doesn’t care that the rock is small. It cares that I’m effectively trying to compress a structure built from microscopic anvils.
Shrinking matter, then, is like crushing a soda can with your bare hands. Possible, technically—but it demands real force. Now add the fact that the shrinkage is permanent and could cost more Magic Energy and then—
“It borders on useless.”
Still, shifting my focus on the fourth criteria brings a puzzling question that can possibly help me understand something. What, exactly, qualifies as a “thing”? That sort of question traps most people in a philosophical cul-de-sac. Endless definitions, circular reasoning, guesses dressed up as insight. Guesswork won’t cut it here. Distort doesn’t respond to vibes (most likely). It responds to certainty. To justification.
I won’t pretend I’m immune to philosophical indulgence. I’ve tangled with dialectics before. Hegel, specifically. Not that one needs to summon a dead German philosopher to agree on this: distance is a thing. Most people would struggle to articulate why, but they behave as if it is every day.
Distance is a scalar quantity—a measurement with magnitude but no direction. Unlike vectors, it doesn’t care where you’re pointing, only how much there is between two points. We measure it. We misjudge it. We trip over it constantly. A cart failing to stop in time. A marble falling because your hand didn’t cover enough space to catch it. It exists between objects, between people, between unoccupied areas…
And that’s where it lies the trick. If distance is a thing—and I am shrinking things—then there’s no rule saying the thing has to be a tangible material. And if that’s possible, then I can travel instantly from one point to another.
I’m not teleporting. Not accelerating. I’m not violating causality or breaking the universe over my knee too. I’m simply shortening the scalar magnitude between myself and a point I know exists.
Think of it like folding a sheet of paper. The dots don’t move faster; they just become adjacent.
No relativistic nightmares either. I’m not shrinking space itself—that’s a whole other can of worms with its own fucked implications. Distance is just a measurement. Clean. Elegant. Everywhere. And most importantly, I am utterly confident in its existence in all directions.
I fix my focus on the empty space beyond the gate. I know it’s there. I know how far it is. I isolate the distance separating us.
Then I clench my hand.
I take one step—
And the world lurches. No blur. No transition. No sense of motion at all.
I’m just… there. I turn around. The garden. The gate. Exactly where they were. Exactly as far away as they should be—except they aren’t.
“Woah…” I breathe. “It even ignores objects in between…?”
That’s… incredible. Also mildly horrifying, when I think about how it must’ve looked from Iustitia’s and Eris’s perspective. One second I’m there, the next I’m not, blinking around the barn like a glitchy NPC with god-awful latency. I spammed the hell out of it—shortening distance again and again—and somehow walked away with barely a scratch despite twelve ex-adventurers trying very hard to kill me.
Speaking of incredible—it barely drains my Magic Energy.
Compared to shrinking even a pebble, this is laughably efficient. Which makes sense, really. Distance isn’t made of atoms. It doesn’t have substructure. Hell, it’s barely a thing at all—it’s a measurement. An absence quantified.
If shrinking a tangible object feels like crushing a soda can, this feels like compressing a pillow. Soft. Yielding. Faster because I don’t need to expend much energy. Almost eager.
I cannot think of a better comparison.
I’M HYPED!
—Wait. Shit.
The guards would be making their rounds here by now.
I need to move.
With adrenaline fizzing through my veins, I bolt for a remote farm I’d earmarked last week. A few kilometers from the capital—normally an easy jog with enhanced legs. I make it in short order, slip past the bustle of peasants and serfs, then veer hard into the small forest nearby.
My body is practically vibrating. There’s something else I want to test.
I’ve never really been in a forest back on Earth. Not properly. Not like this. The air feels… organic. That’s the only word I’ve got. Damp earth, leaves, something sharp and green. It smells good. The air’s lighter somehow—though, objectively, I think Earth forests still win in that department. The air in this world has a slighter heavy note.
After a few minutes, I reach the heart of it: a small clearing where the trees politely give each other space, afternoon sunlight spilling in like a benediction. Off to one side sits a boulder. A big one—a really nice one—perfect, really.
Now…
“How did I do that again…?”
Back at the barn, during my vigilante action, I managed to pull people toward me—snap them into range, line them up perfectly for a head strike or a solar plexus finisher. It happened subconsciously at first. The first time shocked me. The second time confused me. By the third, I was already operating on pure monkey-brain autopilot.
Thinking about it now, the trigger makes sense. When you punch, you clench your fist. Clenching my hand is also the activation gesture for Distort. So every time I reeled back for a strike, I was subconsciously shrinking the distance between myself and my opponent. Their bodies weren’t moving toward me—I was pulling the space between us inward.
Which is… horrifyingly efficient.
There were other moments too. Times when my punches felt too fast. I was already enhancing my body to keep up with adventurer-level threats, but some strikes felt instantaneous, like my fist simply appeared at someone’s liver. That had to be it. My brain, in the heat of the moment, shortening the distance between my knuckles and whatever vital point I was aiming for.
If that’s true, then there’s a question I absolutely need answered.
If I shorten the distance during a punch… does the momentum carry over? Does the it preserve the impulse? Or am I accidentally inventing a physics crime?
…
…Since when did I get this excited?
…
I want to go home.
And yet—this world keeps handing me the exact tools to indulge fantasies I didn’t even realize I had. Not the dumb ones. Not the usual teenage power fantasies. This is different. This is control. This is experimentation. Variables, constraints, outcomes.
No moral dilemmas.
No forced heroics.
No one pushing a title and obligation to me.
I want this.
A grin creeps onto my face before I can stop it.
I need to be strong. Not invincible. Just strong enough to control every variable that matters.
I won’t let myself be put in an uncontrolled situation—ever again.
Crack.
—!
I spin around.
A twig. Snapped clean. Close.
I didn’t hear footsteps. And I have good hearing even without Magic Energy enhancement, so whatever made that sound either doesn’t walk like a normal person—or didn’t want to be heard.
A wild animal? Unlikely. This forest is right next to farmland. Any real threats would’ve been cleared out long ago.
So then what—
“Yo,” a familiar voice greets.
That voice—
I turn toward one corner. A small figure steps out from the shade of the trees. Blonde hair catching the light.
…Eris?
“L—Lady Dekeyser?”
Her eyes narrow, gold glinting sharply before she steps forward, her frown now unmistakable. “Greetings, Sir Shin.”
H—huh…?
Who the hell opens a conversation with two greetings?
Never mind that…!
I am so, so screwed.
Is Shin’s nerdiness easy to follow?
