Reincarnated Without a Cheat, I Adopted the Former Hero as My Mom

Uriel dangled his legs from the windowsill, his heels tapping an idle rhythm against the peeling wall. Outside, the rain was merciless, beating the old courtyard tree so badly its branches were practically dragging in the mud.

Inside, a handful of children were sprinting in circles and shrieking at frequencies that shouldn't have been legal. The noise filtered through the gaps in the window frame. He watched them without particular dislike. Six-year-olds chasing cats, sculpting mud, nearly coming to violence over a single piece of candy — he'd tried joining in once. Couldn't pull off the act.

The other kids called him "Little Old Man." He thought that was pretty accurate.

Old Nanny called him "ancient." Same energy.

Uriel had no objections to either.

He tapped his heel against the wall again. His mind drifted, as it sometimes did, back to the facts of this life. Two words covered the whole situation neatly.

Absolutely cooked.

His mother was gone. Died the winter he was born — complications from childbirth, the cold that year being particularly brutal, or so Old Nanny said. The only thing he knew about her was one moment: Old Nanny cupping his face once, exhaling a long sigh, and murmuring, "You look just like her." Whether that was meant as comfort or something else, he'd never been sure. He'd nodded, arranged his face into what he'd calculated was the appropriate expression for a child of his age, and said, "Okay."

His father had been an adventurer. When he'd dropped Uriel off here, he'd crouched down and ruffled his hair — Uriel could barely recall the gesture now, just the vague warmth of a large hand — and said, "Daddy's going to earn some money. I'll come back for you when I do." He never came back. Old Nanny said it was an accident. A dungeon. A bad one.

...Sure.

He closed his eyes, exhaled slowly, and let his back press flat against the cold window frame. A dull, fading ache still lingered somewhere at the edge of his awareness. The last memory of his previous life. He'd been up all night clearing a game, finally beat it, threw his arms in the air, glanced out the window, and realized the sky had already gone pale. So he'd gone to make breakfast.

How did I die again? Right. The truck.

He'd been frying an egg. He'd heard an engine outside, getting louder, hadn't thought much of it — he was on the fourteenth floor, after all, what engine? Probably something down on the street. And then the truck appeared in his window. Airborne. Moving toward him with what he could only describe as deliberate intent. He still remembered his last words with perfect clarity.

"What the actual—"

Uriel's personal theory on reincarnation: if you died with sufficient absurdity, whatever deity managed the queue would feel guilty enough to hand you an isekai ticket. He thought this was a reasonable hypothesis. Truck-kun sends you off, you wake up somewhere magical, maybe blessed with a broken skill and a gentle head start on the plot.

He surveyed his current situation.

Orphanage. Age five. Both parents dead. No possessions. Fighting for a seat at mealtimes. Blankets too thin in winter. Stew only every third day.

The starter pack has not yet been delivered.

He lifted his eyes to the window. Dark clouds sat heavy on the sky. The old courtyard tree was bowed almost flat, its crown skimming the mud.

Hey. Goddess. Are you there? Can you hear me?

I died in a genuinely deranged way. My life is objectively miserable. The bare minimum would be an upgrade to [Observer] — precognition, maybe, something useful. Or literally any cheat ability at all. Even a small one. I'm not picky.

The rain doubled down without warning, drumming against the roof so violently it drowned out the rest of his internal bitching.

Understood. Loud and clear. I'm leaving.

Dinnertime.

He slid off the windowsill and jogged toward the dining hall. The rain outside was so loud it sounded like someone had torn open a fifty-pound sack of dried rice and emptied it directly onto the courtyard, a constant roar that shoved into his ears. He turned the corner of the hallway and a gust of cold, wet air punched through a gap in the wall and caught him square in the neck. He hunched his shoulders. There was stew today, he was fairly sure. Compared to everything else they served, stew was actually good. He needed to get a decent seat before the others got there.

He glanced out along the corridor as he passed, checking whether the courtyard had flooded yet.

Then he stopped.

There was something in the shadowed corner beneath the eaves. A shapeless gray mass huddled against the wall, nearly textureless, the slanting rain cutting across it in steady diagonal streaks. The shadow of the old wall had swallowed most of it.

Something Old Nanny forgot to bring in?

It's going to be absolutely soaked…

The thought hadn't finished forming before he swept [Observer] across it on reflex.

It was like reaching into the ocean. Except deeper than any ocean. Deep enough that his mental hand found nothing — no floor, no bottom, no boundary. Just depth, continuing forever in every direction.

Uriel stood in the hallway and did not move.

…What kind of Aether is that.

He pulled [Observer] back. Then he walked over.

Up close, he could see what it was.

A woman.

She sat with her back against the wall, knees drawn to her chest, folded into the smallest shape a person could make. Her golden hair had been soaked through, hanging heavy over her shoulders and back like a curtain that covered most of her. Her clothes had been white, once. They were gray now, stained by rain and something else, the fabric fraying at the edges. There were dark reddish marks across the backs of her hands, not yet dry. She wasn't looking up.

Uriel stopped about a pace away and looked down at her. He brought [Observer] back up, tuned it to the gentlest frequency he could manage, and probed again. Not a threat. Something more fundamental than that — something that felt like a root system woven through her, vast and silent, coexisting with the sound of rain and the smell of wet earth as if it had simply always been there and always would be.

…Alright. That's a monster.

The reasonable thing to do was turn around and walk away. Or run, ideally.

He didn't move.

Because he had seen her face.

She was turned slightly to the side, rain tracing slow lines down the ends of her hair, eyes open and seeing nothing. Not the blankness of sleep or the distance of thought. The kind of empty that meant the person was still physically present and had already quietly left somewhere no one else could follow.

She was beautiful. The thought surfaced before he could screen it, and even Uriel was briefly caught off guard by it.

But that wasn't what kept his feet planted.

He knew that look.

There had been a friend, in his last life. Someone he used to drink with, always good for a laugh. That exact same look behind his eyes, there one week and gone the next.

Uriel took those memories — too heavy, too adult, too much — and pressed them somewhere deeper.

He turned and pulled a worn blanket from the basket of spare linens nearby. Old Nanny used it for her legs in the evenings. The edges were pilling, but it was dry. He dragged it back across the floor — it was clearly sized for a full-grown adult, trailing against the planks as he walked — stood on his toes, and dropped it over her head.

She flinched.

The small, involuntary kind. Like someone who had been cold for so long that unexpected warmth registered as a threat before it registered as warmth. Then her gaze moved, slow and delayed, sliding down until it found the small figure standing in front of her.

Uriel wasn't looking at her. He'd already settled himself on the dry edge of the wooden floor beside her, about half a meter of distance between them, gaze on the ground.

Silence.

The rain kept going.

He glanced down and noticed a cluster of pebbles that had been washed together against the wall. Different sizes, different shapes. He picked one up, turned it in his palm, then looked up and leaned forward slightly until he was meeting the eyes that had been aimed at nothing for a very long time.

"Do you know how to skip stones?"

His voice was quiet.

"We're going to play a game."

She didn't respond.

"The rules are simple," he continued, at the same even volume. "You flick the stone out there. Whoever gets it further wins."

He lined up a small puddle in the courtyard and sent the stone out with his thumb. It skipped once across the surface with a soft tck and sank, a few quiet ripples spreading outward.

"Like that. Your turn."

A pause.

Then she reached over, picked up the stone he'd set out, and flicked it.

It left her fingers with a faint, clean cut of air. It landed nearly twice as far as his, dead center in a different puddle, and threw up a short, precise splash.

Uriel looked at where his stone had gone. Then at where hers had gone. He considered this for one full second.

"You cheated. Too much force. Doesn't count."

She said nothing. But something shifted in those empty eyes — the faint, genuine thread of confusion that surfaces when you've been told something too absurd to ignore.

Uriel had already turned back to look for the next pebble. He slid it across the floor toward her with the seriousness of a bureaucrat enforcing policy.

"I made the rules, so that doesn't count. These are my terms. Match my distance exactly. Do it again."

There was no logic in it. That was probably the point. The sheer absurdity of it forced her to pull her scattered attention back inward, to focus it on something concrete — on a few worthless rocks, on this even more worthless five-year-old.

Uriel scooped up another fistful from the floor, wet with rain, twelve or so pebbles of assorted sizes, and dumped the whole pile in front of her with a clatter.

"New rule. Every single one of these has to land in the ring around the stone I throw."

He selected the biggest one and sent it out. He was still drawing breath to say your turn when he heard it.

Fwip. Fwip fwip fwip.

All twelve pebbles were already in the air, snapping out one after another in a clean, rapid sequence, each one landing with a quiet pat inside a tight cluster around his target stone. The floor beside her was empty. She pulled her hand back and looked at the cleared space without expression.

He held his throwing pose for three full seconds.

"...What the hell was that?"

The rain had eased while they weren't paying attention. It wasn't done, but the heavy downpour had settled into something finer — a soft, quiet drizzle that scrubbed the courtyard air clean, leaving behind nothing but the clean, sharp scent of wet earth.

Uriel stood up, brushed off his knees, and arranged himself into the most solemn, ceremonial posture he could manage.

"Since you've won," he said, "there has to be an award. That's the rule."

She had no expression. But something moved behind her eyes — something moved behind her eyes — the faint, bewildered look of a person trying to figure out what exactly this human cub was up to.

He added, "You're second place."

That was the first time he saw something on her face. Not quite an emotion, but close — a faint question that didn't quite reach her mouth. More present than anything before it.

"First place is me," Uriel said, with complete and undisturbed certainty. "I set the rules. I am always first. It's tradition."

He wasn't sure what logic he was operating on. Didn't particularly matter. Children were allowed their own rules. That was the entire point of being one.

She was quiet for a moment.

"So second place is where you land," he continued, nodding in a way that suggested this was simply an established fact about how the universe functioned. "Nothing wrong with that."

She seemed to be processing this.

"And as for your prize," Uriel said.

He raised both hands and pressed the tips of his index fingers into his own cheeks, arranging his face into what he personally considered a devastatingly cute expression. He looked her in the eyes with every bit of seriousness a five-year-old could reasonably claim to possess.

"It's me," he said. "I, this adorable little cutie, hereby award myself to you as your second-place prize."

A brief silence, in the rain.