The Simulacrum - Chapter 70

Part 1

“I’m telling you Dormouse; I’m not sick, just tired.”

Despite my protests, my dear assistant continued hold her palm against my forehead in search of any sign of a fever. The placeholders in the classroom were giving us odd looks (I liked it better when they ignored our shenanigans, but I don’t think reversing their development was possible, or ethical for that matter), so I gently removed her hand from my head. I honestly didn’t know what I found weirder: the fact that Judy could tell that I was out of it against my best efforts to appear normal, or that she waited until lunch-break to raise a fuss about it.

“Couldn’t sleep?” came the well-meaning question from Josh sitting behind his desk, though considering he also had giant bags under his eyes, he might have only tried to avert attention. As such, it was only fair that I threw the ball back into his court.

“Nah, I slept exactly as much as usual,” I opened with a half-truth, followed up by, “Speaking of which, you look pretty out of it yourself. Did you stay up all night yesterday?”

“Ah, yeah. I kinda got fixated on finishing a quest in a game, and before I knew it, it was past midnight.”

Oh? Now would you look at that? No awkward shuffling, no averted eyes, just a straightforward answer. It was almost like he expected me to ask that very question and made preparations in advance. In other words, the plot thickens.

It was at this point that I sent a sneaky glance at the class rep standing a little apart from the rest of us. In return, she gave me an ‘I know you know’ kind of look, to which I responded with a ‘I know you know that I know’ smirk, which she answered with a ‘I know you know that I know you know’ flavored raised eyebrow, and while I was sure we could continue this until the cows came home, I figured this was good enough.

“Game? What game?” Elly asked out of pure curiosity, much to my friend’s well-disguised chagrin.

“It’s… an RPG. You probably never heard of it,” Josh deflected her with a smile.

“We can talk over the details during lunch,” Judy urged us along, but I had no choice but to disappoint her.

“You do that. I have something to discuss with the class rep first.”

Once I declared my intentions, the two of us spent several seconds communicating only using our eyebrows, and once we cleared things up (I hoped), my dear assistant sharply nodded in agreement.

“All right then. We’ll go ahead. Don’t dally for too long.”

“Hold on for just a second!” The expression on Josh’s face somehow appeared even more gravely wronged than his voice implied, and he followed his interruption up with the question, “If Leo stays behind, who’s going to pay for my lunch?”

“Oh, shaddup ya muncha’!” Angie exclaimed in an undecipherable fake accent. I was sure it was another one of their esoteric inside-jokes that I simply had no chance of understanding due to not growing up with the two of them. Maybe for the best, I reckoned.

Anyhow, she put her hands onto Josh’s shoulders and began to push her childhood pal out of the classroom while telling him, thankfully without the accent, “For once you can lower yourself to us lowly mortals and eat a ticket menu like the rest of us! Trust me, you’ll survive!”

“Ow, wait! This was just kidding! Leo, help!”

Even if I wanted to (which I didn’t), I couldn’t aid my friend, as he was already out in the hallway and being pushed even further away. My girlfriends shared an uncertain look at the pair’s expense, so I urged them to follow after the two, and they soon did so, though not before Judy made me promise that I would catch up with them as soon as possible. That left me alone with the suspicious class rep. Well, her, and all the placeholders still paying an unnecessary amount of attention to us.

“Should we go somewhere more secluded?” I proposed, and she nodded without any delay.

For a moment I almost wondered where we should head, but by the looks of it the class rep already had a destination in mind. I simply followed her lead, and in a few short minutes later we were already inside the library. It’s been ages since the last time I’ve been here (subjectively speaking, objectively it’s been less than three months), but the place was just as unnecessarily spacious and fancy as I remembered. At first I thought we would sit by one of the desk at the back, but the class rep went the extra mile to find the most secluded corner behind the rows of bookshelves on the first floor before she came to a halt.

“Were you spying on us last night?”

Straight to the point, eh? It was a little surprising, but I had to give it to her; it made things much easier than spending who knows how long dancing around the topic.

“I wasn’t exactly ‘spying’ on you per se, but yes, I have noticed that were up to something,” I corrected her. “Something about sneaking into a building with Josh and Mike, if I’m not mistaken.”

The moment those words left my mouth, Ammy’s shoulders immediately slouched in defeat. It only lasted for a moment though, as right after that she glanced around the empty corner, probably just to be sure, before she gestured for me to lean closer.

“Listen, Leo.” Her whispers were barely audible, so I had to lean even closer. She looked a little uncomfortable by my invasion of her personal space, but hey, she was the one who wanted to do this double-secretly. Once she collected herself, she took a deep breath, looked me in the eye, and told me, “Please don’t get involved.”

“Okay.” My answer apparently took her aback, so I told her, “I am really busy already, so if it’s your personal business, I have no reason to stick my nose into it.”

“Erm… Yes, it is personal.” She kept eyeing me as if she was expecting a theatrical ‘However!’ from me, but when I remained silent, she tentatively asked, “How much did you see?”

“Practically nothing,” I admitted without any reservations. “As I said, I was insanely busy last night, so I didn’t have the time to pay attention to whatever you guys were doing.”

“All night? What were you doing?”

“Nuh-uh, class rep,” I chided her as I waved my finger in front of her face. “I don’t ask about your business, you don’t ask about mine. It’s common courtesy. All I say is that it involved some negotiations, waiting for someone to sober up, and then some more negotiations.”

“I… see.”

With this, the conversation came to a natural halt, but there was at least one last thing I was curious about, so I softly cleared my throat.

“So, details aside, is the thing that you guys were doing dangerous? Say, on a ten point scale.”

Ammy hesitated for a second, but instead of giving me a straightforward answer, she responded with, “I don’t have a frame of reference, so I can’t answer that.”

“Ooookay then, how about this: One is taking a candy from a baby, ten is taking a certain key from a certain underground office.”

My clarification prompted her to fall silent for several seconds while she contemplated, culminating in a single word.

“Five.”

“That… is actually a bit higher than I expected,” I admitted, but then I also shrugged my shoulder and added, “Oh well. If you need help, you know where to find me. Either way, be careful.”

“I will be. You should just focus on recovery.”

“I try, but honestly, it’s not something I can just recover from on my own. I appreciate the sentiment all the same,” I told her with a reassuring smile, yet for some reason it only made her frown deepen. “Don’t worry, I actually have multiple experts lined up to help me. One of them surely can fix my hand.”

I wanted to punctuate my words with a thumbs up, but my fingers refused to play along, so in the end I had to use my left hand to bend my thumb into position. That… might have done more harm to my point than good, but there was no sense crying over spilled milk.

“I understand.”

“Good.” I opened and closed my right hand at this point, but since she still looked a little uncertain, I decided to add, “Anyhow, if it’s something I can help with even in my current condition, don’t be afraid to ask.”

I figured we would be leaving it at that, but then in a sudden one-eighty-turn she threw an unexpected question at me.

“In that case… can I ask you a favor?”

“Wait, is it related to the conversation we were just having, or a separate favor?”

“The former,” she admitted, making me even more baffled by this turn of events. “There is a… box I need you to hide.”

“A box,” I repeated after her, and she reaffirmed it with a nod.

“I need you to put it somewhere safe, and more importantly, a place I wouldn’t know about.” I probably looked quite confused at the moment, as she also told me, “It is in case ‘someone’ starts suspecting me. I originally wanted to leave it with Michael, but I don’t want to endanger him. He already helped more than he really needed to.”

“And don’t forget that he is technically an agent and he might leak it to the Celestial Information Network,” I pointed out, even if only half-seriously, yet she took quite an offense to my words.

“He wouldn’t do that!”

Seeking how vehemently she was glaring at me, I had no choice but to backpedal a little.

“… On second thought, no, he probably wouldn’t,” I agreed with her, and after one more huff, she returned to the previous conversation.

“As I was saying, I need to get rid of this ‘box’, but I can’t destroy its contents. I can’t give it to Josh or Michael either, and I can’t hide it myself. Unlike me, you cannot be interrogated, so it would be safer in your hands.”

“Wait, what do you mean ‘I cannot be interrogated’?”

The class rep gave me a look that said she couldn’t decide whether I was serious or not, but when she finally realized I was sincere, she let out a long sigh and lazily readjusted her glasses.

“I don’t know what you did to grandfather, but he apparently doesn’t want anything to do with you. So long as you are not directly implicated, he would rather swallow the indignity than to deal with you again. If I didn’t know him better, I would almost think he was afraid of you.”

“Oh, please. I’m not that scary,” I jested, but Ammy remained entirely serious, so I left it at that.

“If you do this for me, then even if I get interrogated, I can say under oath that I don’t know where the hom— I mean, the contents of the box are.”

“Is that so?” At first I wanted to question what kind of incompetent interrogator would leave things at that, but then I remembered my own experience with Onikiri’s apparent truth-detector capabilities and how easy it was to circumvent them, and I figured it might not be such a far-fetched idea after all. “If that’s all, then I suppose I could accommodate you. How about I pick it up after school today?”

“Sounds good to me. Just promise me you handle it with care, and that you don’t get involved any further.”

I wanted to point out that hiding incriminating evidence was getting about as far involved as possible short of doing the actual deed, whatever that was, but I refrained from doing so in favor of another idea that just popped into my head.

“Can I ask you a favor in return?” She immediately nodded, so I told her, “Do you have any books on enchantments?”

“You mean technical manuals, or theoretical works?” she asked back, and while I was tempted to answer with a cheeky ‘Yes’, it was probably more productive to explain myself in detail.

“Anything you can give me. The symposium for the Artificers is coming up soon, and I was invited as a guest speaker. The problem is, I’m completely clueless of the jargon and how enchanting is normally done by normal people under normal circumstances. In other words, I’d like to do the absolute minimum research on the topic so that I wouldn’t sound like an utter simpleton.”

There was an uncomfortably long beat of silence after I finished my explanation. In fact, I was just about to break it myself, but before I could do so, Ammy blurted out an incredulous, “You were invited to the symposium.”

“Yeah, Gowan asked me to attend. Why, is it a big deal?”

For a moment Ammy opened her mouth wide in preparation of a retort, but then she just as quickly closed it with an audible clack of teeth and she soon buried her face in her hand.

“Yes, Leo. It’s a ‘big deal’,” she finally told me, her voice suspiciously sounding like she was squeezing her words through her teeth.

“Really? Well, all the more reason why I should do some homework beforehand,” I responded in a chipper voice. She didn’t seem to appreciate it. Oh well, tough crowds happen.

“You know,” she told me once she removed her hand from her forehead, “Sometimes I wonder if you are doing this just to mess with the heads of everyone around you.”

I didn’t know what she meant by that, but that never stopped me from responding.

“I’ll leave it up to your imagination. So, do you have those books?”

“Not yet, but I will borrow some from the School library.” I very nearly pointed out that we were already here, but then I realized she said the word with a capital ‘S’, so I swallowed my words. “Where should we meet to conduct the exchange?”

“I’ll just hop over to your place,” I said without thinking.

“Very well. I’ll make sure to wear the Magiformer.”

I was once again stumped for a moment, but then I recalled that my cover story said I could only Phase over to enchanted anchor objects. Sheesh, keeping all of these different cover stories in mind was starting to be a bit of a hassle…

“You do that. Have we discussed everything we wanted?”

“I think so,” she told me, so I immediately took half a step back.

“Great. In that case, we should head to the cafeteria before the rumor mill starts moving.”

Ammy agreed and the two of us started walking in silence. That didn’t last long though, as there was one last question I couldn’t get out of my head.

“So, class rep? Is getting invited to this symposium thing really that big of a deal?”

She sent me one last sharp glance in response, and after holding my gaze for a while, she suddenly slouched her shoulders and muttered something about ‘achievements of ignorance’. That didn’t sound good.

“Oookay then. I guess I better ask Judy to help me study beforehand.”

“Yes, you better,” the class rep agreed, and with that, we left the school library behind, with my stomach suddenly feeling heavier than when I entered.

Part 2

When looking out the second-floor window, I had no choice but to admit that the cityscape of Timaeus was quite majestic. From this vantage point I could see the high-rise buildings of the central district, the tidy rows of houses in the residential area, and if I strained my eyes a little, I could even catch a glimpse of sunlight reflecting on the water of the docks. If I were to get up from my desk and poked my head out, I was sure I could even see the foot of the mountain in the middle of the island. All in all, the view put me in a very solemn, introspective mood. For about five seconds.

“Well, that’s enough of that,” I whispered in the empty classroom, and after stretching my arms a bit, I took a deep breath and decided to put my free time to good use. Today’s last lesson was PE, and since I still had an exemption, I decided to stay in our homeroom instead of watching the others from the sideline. I had more than one reason for that, but let’s not focus on that detail yet.

Once I felt decently comfortable in my seat and made sure there was nobody in the vicinity, I closed my eyes and began to make my customary rounds on my various marks using Far Sight. I was very tempted to start with the rest of the gang first, but I managed to restrain the urge. I held back until now, so waiting just a little longer was fine.

Since Snowy was in a different grade, I had no reservations about Far Glancing at her, and I found her in the art classroom, a spacious room with paintings of all kinds and styles covering the walls. They naturally had the corresponding class at the moment, with Mrs. Applebottom telling them how to sketch a still-life picture. Speaking of which, this was a good opportunity to point out something: Whenever we had a lesson, it was almost always taught by Mrs. Applebottom, regardless of the subject. In the past, I wondered how the other classes were proceeding when she was with us, and as it turned out, the students in the other classrooms seemed to be doing free study without any supervision. Well, for some measure of the word at least, since the placeholders in those classes were still fairly underdeveloped compared to our classmates, so it mostly resulted in them just blankly staring at the empty whiteboard for forty-five minutes.

However, here’s where the really spooky part comes in: according to Snowy, Mrs. Applebottom was teaching her class about as often as ours. I was more than once tempted to check if she was at two places at once, but after I got a pretty bad headache from trying the first time, I figured this must be one of those mysteries of the Simulacrum like the ninja-maids, or people’s lack of awareness of placeholders, that was better left unanswered. At least for the time being.

Anyhow, I was getting off-topic. So, at Snowy’s classroom, she was also drawing, and… wow, the others weren’t kidding. She really was good. I mean, I knew she could draw well already; I’ve seen a couple of her finished artworks, but I didn’t know she could make them that fast and well. Note to self: praise her when we get home. Providing positive reinforcement as a big-brother figure was an important duty of mine after all.

That said, while watching her work was quite enthralling, I wasn’t exactly learning anything new by observing her, so I reluctantly moved on to my next targets. The people in the secret base weren’t doing anything particularly noteworthy. Ditto for the Dracis family. Mike was in his apartment playing a game, so same as usual. Weirdly enough, even though he was supposed to be a university student, I have never seen him attend a class. That wasn’t the surprising part; people who were not directly linked to Josh or his entourage often had very simplistic daily routines unless they were entangled in the dreaded narrative’s vile clutches. However, while he wasn’t exactly living a productive university lifestyle, he still spent his whole day ‘awake’, so to speak, even if he was only lurking on the Hub and leveling his characters all day.

I couldn’t help but wonder: did he have a complete personality and a semi-realistic ‘off-screen’ life because he was secretly always supposed to be an important player in the narrative, because he got connected to Ammy, or because he got connected to me? That last one was the most troubling option, but also the most realistic considering everything I have seen so far. I still refused the accept the idea of becoming a second protagonist beside Josh, but considering how much attention the nebulous narrative was paying to me as of late, maybe I could consider myself something of a wild-card the world was trying to accommodate.

Either way, this wasn’t the right moment to contemplate my place in whatever grand design may or may not exist around me (I was still an advocate of the ‘loosely directed chaos’ school of thought, as opposed to Judy’s ‘omnipresent overmind director’ and Elly’s ‘who cares, tell me how we can exploit things instead’). Once I was sure nothing interesting was happening around the clumsy Celestial, I moved on to my next target. Peabody was… exactly where I expected him to be: sitting inside the infirmary, all alone. What I wasn’t expecting was that he was reading one of those dime-a-dozen romance novels you can buy for a pittance. I was almost tempted to take a peek at the contents, but in the end decided against it and moved onto the more interesting targets.

A moment later, I found myself staring down at Crowey from above. His outward injuries have been completely healed, or at the very least they were hidden by the fancy, embroidered black overcoat and leather gloves he was wearing at the moment. He was sitting behind an unexpectedly simple wooden desk inside a similarly austere, small study room, with a group of Abyssals currently in the process of vacating the premises. They just finished negotiating by the looks of it, and based on the expression on the Abyssal Lord’s face, he wasn’t entirely satisfied with the state of affairs. Served him right, I say, but the fact that things were actually happening around him meant that sooner or later he, or maybe someone connected to him, would probably make a move that should affect us in the near future.

That was bad news for us, especially since we still had the Knights, the Assembly investigators, and potentially the Chinese Draconians on our hands, so I decided to pay more attention to him from now on. From what I have gathered, him getting beaten by our ragtag group of misfits and ‘losing’ his sister shook the Inanna house to its foundations, and having to deal with the politics of the Abyss forced him to refrain from coming out of the Abyss for a rematch, but it was only a question of time before he felt his position was solid enough for him to come after us again. That is if we presumed that the narrative wouldn’t yank on his strings at any moment and have him act anyway, of course, but that just gave me all the more reason to keep an eye on him.

Anyhow, I spent a few minutes observing the hand-written papers on the table, while also listening in on the man ordering his subordinates around, and I soon figured out he just made some kind of trade deal with another house. The details didn’t seem too important, so I soon moved on to greener pastures. Or in this case, run-down, eastern bloc aesthetic pastures…

“— because of the lockdown,” the familiar voice of Mr. Griffon concluded whatever briefing he was giving to his fellow dastardly knights in the abandoned house that served as their current hidey-hole, though not for long if all the packed up equipment was any indication. Regrettably I could only tag a squire for my Far Sight, and he was currently sleeping in another room (he was probably on night shift or something), so I could only listen to their discussion by moving my point of view as close to the living room as I could.

“We shuid stairt pack’n! This steid isnae solid tae defend, sae we better shift tae th’ freish fort ah foun!” Mr. Minotaur, with his unmistakable accent, declared with his usual gusto. At this point I expected the third knight, the one in the red armor, to say something, but instead it was a brand new voice entering the fray.

“What about Leonard? Does he know where the new base is?”

The newcomer was a young-ish girl by the sound of it, and listening to her felt like she was purposefully trying to talk in a lower voice than her natural tone. For a second I almost considered that she might have been trying to hide her voice, but there was no reason why they should suspect that anyone could hear them. Not to mention, with such a clumsy effort, I was ninety percent sure I would recognize her voice if we accidentally met on the street anyway. Maybe it was so that she sounded more mature and authoritative? Or maybe it was just a weird quirk. At least she didn’t have a funky accent, which was admittedly a pretty low bar to clear, but hey, it was something.

“He is still in deep cover, so we didn’t make contact with him yet,” the Griffon Knight stated, and I could immediately hear the new girl clicking her tongue.

“So you are telling me he doesn’t know where to retreat in case of an emergency?”

“I doubt brother Leonard doesn’t have an escape plan of his own,” the red-armored knight stated as he entered the conversation for the first time. “He did an outstanding job when it comes to blending into the environment of the candidate, so he undoubtedly planned for emergencies as well.”

“Ye ur sellin’ heem cuttie!” Mr. Minotaur cut in with a boisterous voice that kind of reminded me of Abram. I wondered if these two would get along if not for the while thousand years old blood feud thing. Oh, and the ridiculous accent, of course. “Ye wilnae hawp this, Penny-gurl, but he hid his-sel sae weel, thaur ur e’en rumors abit heem datin’ a body ay th’ wyrmbloods!”

“No way,” the girl, whom I presumed was the previously mentioned ‘Penny-girl’, gasped in audible horror at the mere idea.

“I do not doubt the existence of such rumors,” Mr. Red commented on the side. “Brother Leonard was always very adept with his words. Even if he only managed to maintain his cover in front of the scion of the wyrmbloods, it would certainly help him maintain his secret identity.”

“No, it’s the exact opposite!” the girl protested, her voice almost cracking under the pressure of her anger. “It would only draw more attention to him and put him in more danger. He would never do something so risky!”

“We, unfortunately, do not know of his circumstances,” Mr. Griffon lamented. “However, we all know him well enough to trust his judgment. He must’ve had his reasons to get so intimate with the young wyrmblood.”

“Hauld yer horses! Ur ye suggestin’ he se’uced th’ wyrmbluid gurl fo real? Ur ye oot o` yer min’?!”

“Don’t discard the possibility, brother Duncan. I can scarcely imagine a better way to hide one’s identity as one of our own, and if anyone can perform such a subterfuge, it would definitely be brother Leonard.”

“I still can’t believe it,” the knight girl denied quite vehemently. “He would never do something so risky.”

“Where there is smoke, there is fire,” Mr. Griffon remarked, barely audible under the noise of metal plates sliding on each other. By my guess, he either sat down, or got up; one or the other. “There is certainly some basis for these rumors. Whether they are true or not, we will learn once the time to test the candidate is nigh.”

“That’s another thing I don’t understand,” the girl grumbled while making rhythmic metallic noises, most likely by packing up and down. “Why hasn’t he tested the candidate yet?”

“If I had to make an educated guess,” Mr. Griffon mused aloud, “it is most likely because of the appearance of the Dracis wyrmbloods on the island. Drawing their attention to the candidate too soon would be disastrous.”

“‘N’ then thare wis a’ that chimera business ‘n’ him hidin’ a seducin` bint o’ th’ Abyss! Whit’s th’ deal wi’ that, anyway?”

“He’s sheltering a what?!”

“There was an incident on the island a while back, apparently caused by one of the Abyssal Lords,” Mr. Red explained, completely unperturbed by the knight girl’s unnecessarily loud reaction. “According to what we learned, brother Leonard took one of the perpetrators under his wings, and she is now living with him.”

“It was an odd choice, but I believe he must have done so either to further solidify his cover, or to further split the attention of the Arch-Mage and the wyrmbloods on the island,” Mr. Griffon speculated, but his words apparently fell on deaf ears.

“That’s it! I don’t care about his cover or what have you! I will not have him live under the same roof with an Abyssal Seducer!”

“Whoa thaur, Penny-gurl! Calm doon!”

“Listen to brother Duncan, sister Penelope! Please put your sword away!”

The situation seemed hairy for a moment, but then the three men managed to somehow calm the temper of the knight girl by taking her mind off yours truly and focusing on their plans for the future instead. Unfortunately they have decided to do the latter while they moved over to their new base of operations inside the city, and left my marked squire (and subsequently, me) back in the old house.

Nevertheless, I still learned a couple of new things from this short excursion. First off, the knights finished reorganizing their ranks and might make a move soon. Two, the knight girl arrived on the island. Three, considering her reactions, she is apparently going to be a pain in the neck to deal with. Lovely.

Anyhow, all of this meant that I would have to pay a lot of extra attention to the knights in the future as well. In fact, I should really try to either sneakily mark one of the important guys, or at the very least track down their new headquarters on the island and have some of my people stake out the place to warn me if they started to move.

All of this was for later though. For now, I had nothing more to see here, so I decided to move on to my next target, and this time my timing couldn’t have been better, as my disembodied viewpoint arrived in Lord Grandpa’s office exactly at the same time when a certain annoying Arch-Mage proxy entered the scene.

“Whoa! You look, like, a total wreck! Did you party all night?”

The local Arch-Mage (who, for the record, really did look terrible at the moment) sent his colleague a wry glance, followed by a long groan and the sound of glass tinkling as he unceremoniously poured some milky liqueur into a large glass on his desk.

“What do you want? I thought you were still busy gallivanting around in your new body.”

“Oh gosh, Endy! Don’t be so grouchy! I just came to pay you a visit and maaaaaybe ask about a few things! Two, no, wait… three things! Like the stuff missing from your record books.”

“What are you talking about?” Lord Grandpa growled, putting his glass back down before it could reach his lips.

“Oh, you know? Stuff? Like research materials and junk? They were supposed to be with the rest of the items we confiscated for the investigation, but they are nowhere to be found.” ‘Sahi’ let out a small giggle at this point and then skipped over to the Arch-Mage’s side just so that he could poke him with her elbow and then say, “Maybe you just misplaced them? I mean, at your age, people tend to forget things? If only you were a little younger, eh? Eh?”

“… You really enjoy showing off this new body of yours,” Endymonion noted, which elicited yet another chuckle from the ‘girl’.

“Of course I do! Isn’t that, like, obvious?”

“Even though it is not really your body yet,” Lord Grandpa dropped a bombshell, and it immediately made the smile on the brown girl’s face wither.

To her credit, instead of trying to play dumb, she simply asked, “When did you notice?”

“It pains me to admit it, but I was not the one who realized it first,” the old man lamented while theatrically sloshing his drink in his glass. “It was the young mister Dunning who brought it to my attention.”

“Really? Wow. That boy is full of surprises.”

“Tell me about it,” the Arch-Mage griped aloud before taking a long sip from his glass.

In the meantime the other Arch-Mage dragged a chair over from the corner of the room and sat down in from of the owner of the place.

“Fine, I admit I still have some kinks to iron out, but as you can see, the prototype is almost complete!” She opened her arms wide, as if to show herself off, then added, “Once I figure out how to permanently store a soul in the host body, it’s going to be totally perfect.”

“If you can manage to do so,” the old man pointed out, apparently finally feeling back in the saddle, much to Sahi’s chagrin.

“Boo! Stop being a party-pooper you old coot! It’s not like you managed to put anything down onto the table in the past couple of years! I’m still waaay ahead of you!”

“Childishly competitive, as always,” Lord Grandpa whispered just loud enough for her to hear, and she immediately puffed out her cheeks in response.

“You are a mean old man! That’s why you never had a girlfriend in your life!”

“I fail to understand what any of this has to do with the conversation at hand.”

“Of course you wouldn’t,” Sahi scoffed, but then a second later her eyes opened wide and she snapped her fingers. “Right, that reminds me of the second thing I wanted to ask you about! You know, I couldn’t help but notice that your protégé looks eeeeeerily familiar. In fact, you could say he looks toooootally like you when you were younger! Isn’t that weird?”

“I have no idea what you are talking about, and I will not entertain any further questions on this topic,” Lord Grandpa retorted in a hurry, which only resulted in the other person in the room looking even more suspicious of him.

“But I want to ask anyway! Like, not just him, but your granddaughter too! How do you even have a granddaughter?”

“Quit it, Saahira. I had a rough night, and I am not in the mood to entertain your inane questions,” the old man declared so in no uncertain terms, and after staring daggers at each other for a couple of moments, it was the girl who gave up first.

“Fine! Have it your way, you old scrooge! I’ll just ask my third question then.”

“See to it that you do, and then leave at once.”

“You are a terrible host, you know that, right?” Sahi fumed, but the old man refused to give her a reaction. “So, I was curious about one last thing. You said that the head of the Kage clan used to be on the island, right?”

“Yes?”

Lord Grandpa’s response sounded a little uncertain, probably worried about why she was asking, but the brown girl either didn’t notice, or didn’t care. Probably the latter.

“The one with the ancient sword housing the soul of a priestess and stuff?”

“Yes, though—”

“So… why is she working for you now?”

“She is not,” the old coot stated very emphatically, and it made the girl in front of him cross her arms in front of her chest, with her face twisted in the kind of pouting expression only young girls of a certain age could manage.

“Like heck she isn’t! I just met her at the school! … Well, I think I did, at least. I’m pretty sure it was her. About eighty— no, ninety-five percent sure!”

There was another short stalemate between the two, but it only lasted until the Arch-Mage emptied the rest of his glass in a single gulp and roughly placed it onto the desk.

“As a matter of fact—”

I was actually a little curious about how he would explain things to the incognito Arch-Mage, but I never got the opportunity to hear it, as the sliding door of the classroom was suddenly slammed open, jolting me out of my Far Sight.

“Chief,” my girlfriend addressed me from the doorway. She was wearing her uniform a little sloppily, probably because she dressed in a hurry, and I could see droplets of sweat running down her otherwise expressionless face.

“Hi, Judy. Is PE already over?” I asked with a smile, doing my best to play dumb.

“Explain,” she demanded, and when I didn’t answer right away, she walked over to me with heavy steps and repeated. “Please explain why Rinne is our new PE teacher.”

“Substitute PE teacher,” I corrected her, but she apparently didn’t care about the small details at the moment. “I… was kind-sorta forced into a situation and had to make the best of it. It had to do with giving her the sword making her my retainer and an oath of fidelity and being required to be around me to act as my bodyguard and all kinds of other honor-bound bushido stuff.”

“Bushido is for samurai, not ninjas.”

“Oh come on, Dormouse! You just got mad at me for correcting you, don’t turn around and do it yourself!”

“I’m not mad about that,” she stated very, very flatly. “I just want to know why you didn’t tell me about it ahead of time.”

“Because I wanted to see your reaction to it,” I admitted without reservations, and for the first time, my dear assistant was thrown on a loop.

“Are you serious?”

“Yes, of course. It’s a brother’s duty to spoil their little sister, and it’s a boyfriend’s duty to tease their girlfriend. Didn’t you read the rules in the Grand Book of Everything?”

It was around this time that we both took note of the rapidly approaching footsteps from the direction of the hallway, culminating in Elly practically exploding into the classroom.

“Leo! I just talked with the new PE teacher! Is it true? Is she really your personal ninja?”

I let out a long sigh, after which I told her, “Yes, princess, it’s true. In a roundabout way, I do have my very own ninja clan. In a fashion. It’s complicated.”

She really didn’t seem to mind that, as before I could properly react to her movements, she dashed over to me and caught me in a huge hug.

“I knew you would come around!”

I graciously allowed my more energetic girlfriend to continue squeezing the breath out of me and turned my attention to Judy instead.

“You see, Dormouse? Why can’t you be happy about it like Elly?”

“I’m never going to be happy about it, but I will overlook your mischief, just this once.” After saying so, my dear assistant also walked over to me and proclaimed, quite categorically, “After we go home, we are going to sit down, and you are going to explain how she ended up as a teacher in detail.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Also,” she continued while once again trying, and failing, to punctuate her words by pinching my good hand, “If you try to pull a stunt like this again just to mess with me, I will tell Elly about all the embarrassing things I have seen you do before we started going out.”

The princess’s ears immediately perked up and she even stopped squeezing me for a second. “What embarrassing things?”

“Never mind that,” I told her before hastily facing Judy again. “I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about, but even if I did, I’m sure you would not do such a thing since you are such a nice, kind-hearted girl and all.”

“But Chief, didn’t you know that it’s a girlfriend’s duty to tease her boyfriend in front of other girls? You should really read the revised edition of the Grand Book of Everything one of these days.”

I wanted to say something snappy in response, but considering how curious Elly looked about whatever story Judy had hidden under her sleeve, I had no choice but to utter a defeated, “Touché,” and prepare myself to a long afternoon.

Part 3

“… and so now that elder is the acting clan head, she is now my personal ninja, and I’m technically not the head of the Kage clan, just the boss of the head of the clan. It’s like having your cake, and eating it too.”

Once I reached the end of my very long-winded and boring explanation of how I stood my ground and technically still refused the narrative’s ploy to make me into a ninja daimyo or whatever Baldy-kun called me, the Dracis patriarch sitting by my side let out a thoughtful huff. We were both sitting in the family’s limousine, with one of their chauffeurs driving the car on the other side of the sound (and apparently bullet) proof glass separating the passenger seats from the driver’s.

It was already Saturday, in the early afternoon to be precise, and I upheld my promise to my self-imposed father-in-law to take him along on my visit to the place where my mysterious safe-deposit key belonged. I didn’t expect that we would do so in a limo of all things, but at the very least I managed to convince him to ditch the small convoy of bodyguards who were supposed to also come with us. This car was conspicuous enough as is, the last thing I needed was an entire procession to really make sure the Knights would take notice and potentially start questioning my nonexistent loyalty to their cause.

Anyhow, once Abram absorbed my words, he let out a low chuckle and roughly patted me on the shoulder.

“Great work, son! You have a real gift for gathering talented people under your wing!”

“Not really,” I denied, but it only made him laugh even louder which, considering the man had no indoor voice whatsoever, was starting to grate on my ears.

“Ha-ha! There’s no need to be modest! In fact, would you like to take over the HR department of our business? I’m sure you would do amazingly well, and it would be a great learning experience for running the company in the future.”

“I’d like to politely decline, thank you very much,” I told my overly eager traveling companion, and thankfully he didn’t take the rejection personally.

Since it was a good opportunity, I told him about all the other people ‘under my wings’, so to speak, including the Fauns and the sentai-wannabes. It was mostly so that we could avoid future misunderstandings, but apparently he thought I was bragging to him about my accomplishments.

“I see, I see! But son, there is one last thing I still don’t understand. How did she become a teacher at your school?”

I couldn’t help but let out a veeeery long groan the moment he uttered that question. The thing is, I had absolutely no clue either. Or rather, I had an inkling, but it was in no way logical or reasonable. Let’s wind back the clock a little, and I’ll try to explain what I mean.

So, Mountain Girl and Baldy showed up at my doorstep. I think everything should be clear so far. We negotiated for a while, and as I feared, since Rinne couldn’t actually use Onikiri on her own, it presented a loophole for them to try and rope me in. I tried plugging it up by offering to fix some external activation clauses to the enchantment so that anyone could use it, but it apparently only made them even more determined to argue that I was the ‘master’ of the sword. Either way, after a fairly long and increasingly heated verbal tug-of-war we came to the above conclusion: Rinne would keep her position as the official clan head, Baldy would continue to take care of running the clan with his fellow (if as of yet off-screen) elders, and they would technically be under my command because Rinne became my personal retainer.

Oh yeah. That part. So, apparently giving a sword to a ninja, even if it’s their own bloody sword that someone else just ‘borrowed’ from a while, and them accepting it, is the equivalent of swearing fealty to the person in question. Which was me. Of course, I could have probably learned about this bit of trivia back when I handed said sword over to her, but I was so busy maintaining my anti-harem countermeasures at the time that I kind of slacked on my anti-narrative countermeasures. Oh well, hindsight is twenty-twenty as always.

So far things are fairly straightforward. Got the sword, handed back the sword, now Mountain Girl works for me, the clan works for her, and so the clan technically works for me without me having to become their actual boss. Simple, if a little loophole-abuse-y. But then things went off the rail for real.

First off, since the Kage clan would be now indefinitely operating on Critias, the elder insisted on announcing their plans to move in to the ‘feudal lord’ of the island, which of course meant Lord Grandpa. This was still logical, and I figured it would potentially forestall any would-be complications on his end. What wasn’t logical was that they demanded to do so right away, and after some further arguments, I was convinced to go along with it. At this point I thought it would be a simple matter, and since Rinne was already aware of my Phasing ability to some degree, I kicked Baldy-kun out, had her use their shadow-hiding-no-jutsu or whatnot to get into my shadow, and teleported over to the old man’s place.

And it was at this point, ladies and gentlemen, when things really, really went in an unexpected direction. For a start, I had Rinne come back out, after which I explained the gist of the situation to Lord Grandpa while remaining suitably mysterious and ineffable and all that crap. Then he proposed that Rinne should become a teacher.

No, we didn’t skip a page in the stage directions. That really just happened, completely out of the blue. More bafflingly, Mountain Girl took it all in stride, even claiming that she already had a bachelor’s degree in kinesiology, which was enough to qualify for the job. No, I’m not kidding. Apparently the highly visible monster-hunting ninja woman who spent most of her life traveling around the world to track down all kinds of nasty beasts somehow had the time to get a bachelor’s degree, because of course she did.

At this point I was fairly certain the Arch-Mage must have been too drunk to properly work with, so we left with a stern warning for him to sober up by the time we came back. An hour later he was in better shape… and he still insisted on making her a teacher in the school for the sake of her secret identity while on the island. I really wanted to ask just what kind of ‘secret identity’ were we talking about, or why she absolutely ‘needed’ to have a day job, but it was around this time that I started to get an inkling of what exactly was going on.

Simply put, I ran into a pre-determined plot development. To elaborate, partially based on the discussion I later had with Judy about this entire event: in battle harem narratives, it isn’t uncommon that defeated bad guys or important side-characters would enter into the main cast at the end of their arc. Based on this conjecture, there was a good chance that Rinne would, after completing her hunt with me, stay around on the island and in our vicinity. Judy even theorized that she would become our ‘Worf’, whose role was to get her behind kicked by future antagonists to show that they mean business. It’s called ‘jobbing’, if I remember right.

Whether that was the case was kind of beside the point though. The important bit is that, if she wanted to stay around, there were only two potential options: she would either have to randomly show up like she used to, or she would have to transfer into our school. Since this Simulacrum thing around us was running mainly on battle harem tropes, as previously mentioned, the latter option was infinitely more likely. However, she was just a touch too old to become a student, which meant that her only other ‘in’ to our ‘story’ was becoming a staff member at the school. Now, I personally would have figured that she would become a janitor, but the ever-nebulous ‘narrative’ evidently had other plans.

So, in short: if I didn’t mess things up with her by taking her sword and giving it back to her, she would’ve likely ended up becoming a teacher at our school anyway. To facilitate that, her ‘backstory’ already included the necessary elements for her to do so in the form of her degree, and so when I showed up with her in front of the old bastard, I must have triggered something, and it made Lord Grandpa hire her on the spot. Well, on paper anyway.

Well, either that, or the weird creepy monster-huntress just happened to have the right education and certifications to become a bloody PE teacher. My money was on the narrative shenanigans. Still, as annoying as playing along with some forced narrative bollocks was, it technically wasn’t disadvantageous for me to do so, and Mountain Girl was really adamant about the idea, so I ultimately gave up and let a semi-sober Lord Grandpa give her a teaching license. As in, he literally just took one out of his drawer and handed it over to her. Bloody convenient, ain’t it?

But anyhow, back to the present. While I internally debated just how I should summarize the above events (sans the narrative bits) to Abram, my dilemma was handily solved by the car coming to a smooth halt in front of an unassuming office building.

“I’ll tell you the story on the way back,” I told Papa Dracis and used my head to gesture towards our destination. “Let’s see what’s inside my deposit box first.”

“Lead the way then!”

He didn’t have to say it twice. We both got out of the car and simply walked into the building. The inside of the building was just as inconspicuous as the outside. It also apparently housed several small businesses, if the information table in the foyer was to be believed, and a quick look at it immediately revealed our goal.

“Ah, here it is! SafeLock Inc.!” Abram exclaimed with the excitement of a little kid, and he even poked the info-board with his finger.

“Let’s hope they put all the effort they saved on coming up with a company name into their security,” I griped as my eyes followed the arrow pointing towards the nearby stairwell. “I guess it’s in the basement.”

“Let’s go then!”

Abram took the lead, contrary to his previous words, and we both walked down the simple concrete steps. At the bottom we found a fairly rugged metal door with a shiny bronze plaque next to it listing the company name and the business hours on it. Once I was sure we were at the right place, I raised my hand to knock, but before I did so, I first addressed the man next to me.

“So, just for the record: I doubt anything drastic will happen no matter what we find in there, but just in case, if I start acting weird, feel free to restrain me.”

“What do you mean by ‘weird’?” Abram asked back right away. He took my request unexpectedly seriously.

“For example, if I get taken over by some random magic weapon, or I get my lost memories triggered and start acting up, that kind of thing.”

“All right! Don’t worry, son! I know forty-seven different incapacitating holds! Most of them won’t even dislocate any bones!”

“In that case try to stick to those if possible.”

Dad-in-law responded to my comment with a full-on belly laugh, which I figured should have been enough to get the… safe-man? Depositer? Is there even a word for people working in this field? Either way, his laugh probably got their attention, but I decided to knock anyway, since I already raised my hand, and letting it down now would have been awkward.

It only took a couple of seconds for the door to start making odd clicking and clanking noises, and then a small peeking slit opened up on it roughly at eye level.

“Can I help you?”

The voice coming from the other side was low-pitched, nasal, and just a little wooden, and based on the pair of bushy grey eyebrows visible through the slit, it belonged to an older man.

“I would like to retrieve some items from my deposit box,” I stated and took the key out of my pocket to show him. The man inspected it for a few seconds and then slid the peeking hole shut, followed by some more clanking noises until the door finally opened.

The first thing that caught my interest on the other side was the enormous stainless steel safe door at the back of the room, the kind you only see in heist movies. It was huge, it was shiny, and it had a smaller, human-sized door in the middle of the enormous main door. The rest of the room looked much less impressive, with one wall being dedicated to rows of filing cabinets behind a small office space, while on the other side there was a small waiting area with a few seats, a coffee table, and an old CRT-TV hanging from the ceiling and displaying some kind of sitcom at the moment.

As for the man who let us in, he was a portly, middle-aged, and conspicuously balding gentleman wearing what I could best describe as an old-timey bank-teller outfit; a pin-striped white shirt, black suspenders, and even a tidy bow-tie. He let us in, locking the door behind us, and then gestured for me to follow after him.

“We have to verify your identity first. Please come this way.”

I did as he said, and we walked over to the small office area. It had an old desk with a similarly ancient computer on top, an odd periscope-looking device next to the PC tower, and one of those bright green desk lamps that are absolutely everywhere in offices and banks for some reason.

Anyhow, the depositionator (I decided to go with this term) sat down in front of the PC and began to work on what looked like some kind of DOS interface before he looked at me again.

“Please look into this retinal scanner,” he told me as he pointed at the binocular device in front of me, and I did so with only minor reservations. “Hold still. Hold still. We have a match. Thank you for your cooperation.”

With that done, he printed out something on an awfully noisy printer under the desk, then got up from his chair and searched through the filing cabinets behind us until he found what he was looking for and returned with a thin A4 manila envelope. From that, he retrieved a document that seemed to be some kind of contract, and after leafing through it once, he placed it in front of me.

“Please sign here,” he instructed me, and though I was a little worried about the fine print, I couldn’t see anything obviously wrong with it at first glance, so I gave my signature to keep things moving.

“Thank you. Here’s your second key.” Saying so, he took out another, identical-looking key from the dossier and handed it to me. I must have looked puzzled, as right after that he asked, “Are you unfamiliar with our deposit box system?”

“I admit, it’s been a long time, so I could use a refresher.”

The depositionator nodded in understanding and broke into a thinly veiled advertisement speech.

“We at SafeLock Inc. pride ourselves on our absolute confidentiality. At any given time, only a single person may be present within the safe-chamber, and we do not maintain any inventory of the items within the individual storage boxes so that no paper-trail or eye-witnesses would infringe on the client’s privacy.”

“That sounds really irresponsible,” I pointed out, but the man simply tapped his fingers at the document I just signed.

“According to the contract, the client acknowledges this fact as a necessity to uphold confidentiality and may not press charges in case of missing items. As for the safety boxes, our company uses a state-of-the-art dual-lock system, requiring the client to insert and turn two keys at once, one of which is held by the client while the other is safeguarded by the company. Once you have deposited or retrieved your items, you must return the second key before you leave.”

“Sounds straightforward,” a murmured as I looked at the pair of more-or-less identical keys in my hand. “So I figure that means my father-in-law cannot enter with me?”

“No. Only one person at a time,” the depositionator repeated with extra emphasis on ‘one’.

“Don’t worry, Leonard! I’m actually quite intrigued by this company! Say, can I open an account of my own?”

“Certainly sir, just give me a minute,” the portly man confirmed with a nod before addressed me again. “Please come this way.”

I shared one last glance with the Dracis patriarch, who gave me some encouragement in the form of a thumb up, and then I followed after the man in the suspenders. As expected, he didn’t open the entire door for me, only the human-sized one, which was a bit of a bummer. I always wanted to see one of these big doors open in person. Oh well, maybe next time.

Anyhow, the inside of the safe chamber was really simple. It was, in practical terms, a rectangular room with a brown marble floor and white neon lights hanging from above. The walls were covered with white deposit boxes from floor to ceiling; most of them were small, roughly the size of a kitchen drawer, while a few of them were about as big as a wardrobe, and they were all labeled with simple black numbers.

Once I stepped inside, the depositionator unceremoniously locked the door behind me, and I’m not going to lie, for a moment I felt a little claustrophobic. Then I remembered that I could teleport myself out at my own leisure, and then I felt silly instead. But putting my irrational feelings aside, I checked the number on my key, and it only took a couple of seconds to find the corresponding box. It was one of the larger ones at ground level.

“Well, here goes nothing,” I muttered as I inserted both keys into the locks and turned them at the same time. At first nothing happened, but then the locking mechanism disengaged with a small hiss and the whole door popped out of the wall. By the looks of it, this was a sliding compartment, so I grabbed hold of the exposed edge and pulled it out. What I found was… well, I had no idea, because the whole thing was covered with a thick canvas.

I unceremoniously pulled the cover off, and underneath it I found… exactly what I expected. Namely, it was a matte black breastplate with an embossed, gold-placed lion-face on the chest. If that didn’t make it abundantly obvious, after I took it out of the box I found a helmet under it which was also shaped like a lion head, with an actual fur-trimmed red cape at the bottom.

“Well, that settles it. Lion-knight it is,” I grumbled as I spread out the canvas and took everything out of the box piece by piece. To be honest, I was feeling a little underwhelmed. I mean, considering how names and tropes worked around these parts, I was about ninety percent sure my old identity was either the Lion-knight, or someone related to them, but finding it like this was still a little anti-climactic. I didn’t even like lions that much. They are just big cats, the male lions are lazy jerks, and they have huge harems centered around them. If there was any kind of silver lining to this, it was the fact that now I was sure I wasn’t the hippopotamus knight.

But back to the items in the box: In grand total, there was a full set of matte black plate armor with large spaulders and gold highlights on the chest, greaves, gauntlets, and helmet, a matching black gambeson, a detachable red cape, an amulet, two rings, and most importantly, a sword inside a black leather sheath. It was the last thing I took out, and I paid special attention to it. All the equipment in front of me was glowing in a colorless light, a telltale sign of enchantments, but this thing was in a league of its own, or at the very least on par with the dragon-slaying spear.

I took a deep breath and carefully wrapped my left hand’s fingers around the hilt, then pulled it out as I exhaled. When I did so, I was overcome with a strange sense of comfort. The blade in my hand was relatively lengthy, but its hilt wasn’t long enough to be considered a proper longsword, so I figured it was some variety of a bastard-sword. It had a blade with an acute profile taper and a double-fuller that reached halfway up the blade, with a string of symbols etched into the flat of the blade between the two fullers. The simple, mushroom-shaped pommel and the slightly curved cross-guard gave the sword a plain but elegant look, and when I swung it once, I felt that it was like an extension of my body.

I was curious and swung it a couple more times, and each time I did so, I could feel something welling up in me. I kind of felt like dry ground that hasn’t seen water in ages drinking in a light summer shower. It was strangely invigorating, and I even did a small flourish with the blade to cap things off. Yes, I could say now, with one hundred percent certainty that this sword was definitely made just for me.

“Eh, I still like spears more,” I whispered and returned the sword into its scabbard. I might play with it later, but for now, I had other things to look at.

With that in mind, I carefully inspected every piece of equipment, and while I didn’t try them all on, the gauntlets fit me like a glove (no pun intended), and the helmet also felt uncannily comfortable on my head. If I had the time I would have loved to take a good look at the enchantments on them, but this was neither the time nor the place to indulge in such things, so I carefully piled everything up on the canvas so that I could tie them into a neat little bundle, and once I made sure my ranges were adequate, I closed my eyes, picked my target, and casually Phased over to the secret base.

“[Ah. Boss,]” Karukk greeted me with only the mildest of surprises when I appeared next to him inside the armory section of the main hall, his eyebrows only rising a little higher when he noticed the package I was holding. “[What is that?]”

“Knight equipment,” I told him curtly while simultaneously placing the armor and assorted other items onto the nearby workbench. “Probably mine. Please look after them until I get back.”

“[Understood,]” the friendly Faun acknowledged with a salute, after which I immediately returned to the safe room. With my recently extended range I could Phase back without any problems, though if Abram was sitting just a couple of meters further back during his negotiations with the presumed owner of the place, I would have been in a pickle. But let’s not discuss hypotheticals here; the important thing was that I have successfully retrieved the contents of my mystery storage box, learned a few new things, and now I only had to lock everything back up and then—

“Huh? What’s that?”

My train of thought was once again violently thrown off the rails by a small detail that caught my eyes. When I leaned over to close up the storage compartment, my eyes coincidentally landed on something at the back of the box. It was a white envelope that managed to elude my attention the first time around due to blending into the white bottom of the box, but now that I noticed it, I naturally picked it up.

For a moment I was actually a little nervous. I’ve originally expected that I might find some clue about my original identity here, possibly in the shape of some identification papers, or maybe some family photos or other memorabilia, but now that the possibility materialized, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to know. In the end, I steeled my nerves anyway and gingerly opened the envelope, and I was instantly filled with a mixture of relief and bafflement. Instead of papers, the only thing inside was a key. No, scratch that; two keys, one of which had a number on it.

“The plot thickens,” I murmured under my breath and immediately began looking for the corresponding deposit box. It naturally didn’t take long to find it, but when I did, I still had to double-check, just to be sure.

By the looks of it, the keys belonged to one of the bigger boxes, which was about as tall as I was and wide enough so that I could easily fit inside of it. I hesitated only for a moment before inserting the keys into the locks and turning them in one smooth motion. The door let out a small hiss and then, after a very long second, it popped open. It was sitting on an odd mechanism instead of simple hinges so that I had to slide it out of the way instead of opening it like a normal door, and when I looked inside, I couldn’t help but mutter an incredulous, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

In the storage locker there was a large, roughly carved rock about the size of two basketballs side to side. More importantly, sticking out of said stone was a lavishly decorated long sword with a pair of dragons coiling around its cross-shaped guard, a lion head for a pommel, and a generous amount of golden filigree on the flat of the blade. Not only that, the whole weapon was shining so bright it took me several seconds to actually adjust to it and be able to take a proper look. As in, it wasn’t just giving off a magical glow, but actual light.

The blade itself was stuck deep into the rough, weathered rock, and no matter how I looked it, it appeared about as close to a stereotypical Excalibur expy as one could get. Hell, with my luck, it might actually be Excalibur, or at the very least its off-brand cousin Excelsior or Excruciating or something.

But wait, now that I think about it… didn’t the knights have a magic sword stuck in a stone just like this tied to their prophecy? I’m pretty sure I made fun of them for that, so yeah, I’m about ninety percent certain they did. So… what the hell was it doing here?! Why did they put their most important artifact in here? How did they put it in here without anyone noticing? Why was the key in my other deposit box? So many freaking questions, so little sense!

To be honest, I was actually a little tempted to slam the door on this thing and pretend I didn’t see it, but knowing my luck (and how things operated around here), there was a very good chance that this ‘plot device’ in front of me would become important in the near future. As such, the prudent thing was to Phase it home and then worry about the details later. As such, I promptly grabbed hold of the hilt, and—

“{UNWORT—!!!}” “WHAT THE FU—!!!”

… I immediately got yelled at by a deep, deafening voice that sounded like it came from every single direction at the same time. I instinctively jumped back, and when I lost contact with the hilt, the voice immediately cut out like someone flipped the off-switch on a loudspeaker mid-word. I was just about to suck in a breath of relief when I was further startled by a loud metallic bang that echoed for quite a while in the empty vault.

“Son? Is everything all right?”

Abram’s muffled voice finally jolted me out of my shock and I hastily shouted, “Yes, I just dropped… something!”

Looking back, said ‘something’ was now lying on the floor halfway between me and the open storage box with a big stone inside it that was conspicuously missing a sword. Needless to say, for a while my eyes only kept darting between the lonely rock and the weapon sitting on the floor in silence.

“No way. That didn’t just happen,” I whispered under my breath before inching closer to the weapon on the ground. At long last I steeled my nerves once again, crouched down, and gingerly reached out towards the hilt. The moment I made contact, I could feel a bit of a jolt, though nothing compared to the shocks the damned dragon-slaying spear was giving me, and it wasn’t until my fingers wrapped around the handle that the strange, echoing voice once again spoke up.

“{Inconceivable. You have already been tested and found unworthy,}” the… sword? Yeah, it was probably the sword speaking. I mean, I don’t even know why I was surprised. It wasn’t like this was the first time this happened to me.

“{Was it your resolve that changed the outcome? Or maybe a time of crisis have befallen on the Brotherhood? Tell me, young knight! Why have you attempted to draw me from my resting place for the second time?}”

I remained silent as I reorganized my thoughts, and once I reached my conclusion, I let out a short, sharp breath through my nose and stepped up to the locker again.

“This didn’t happen.”

“{What are you doing, young knight?}” the sword inquired, its voice suddenly sounding a little apprehensive.

“I said, this. didn’t. happen,” I repeated, stressing each word separately before simply jamming the sword back into the hole in the stone where it came from. “We are both going to pretend none of this happened, and then I’m going to leave this place, my father-in-law is going to teach me how to bowl so that I can challenge an annoying butler and beat him at his own game, and then we are going to have some gyros and call it a day.”

“{Wait, you are chosen! You can’t do this!}”

“Like hell I can’t!”

I made sure to stab down a couple more times until the blade was stable in the rock, and then stepped back and wiped my forehead with my sleeve.

“Bloody mystic swords and chosen ones and arrrgh!” I growled under my nose and then took a couple of measured breaths to calm myself. Once I felt in control of my emotions again, I extended my Phantom Limbs, wrapping them around the sword and the stone separately, and once I was ready, I exhaled a long sigh, followed by a defeated, “I absolutely cannot let Judy learn about this, or I will never hear the end of it…”

And with that, I promptly (if temporarily) disappeared from the room, all the while considering where I could hide a shining sword and a huge chunk of stone so that no one could find them.