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

"Mom!"

Uriel's voice jumped nearly an octave.

"Mom — the knife —" He looked at the cleaver. "What are you doing with that."

"Erasing their memories."

Galatina said it the way she'd say slicing a cucumber.

Uriel instinctively hunched his shoulders.

A person holding a kitchen knife who just said 'erasing memories' — is that the kind of erasing memories I think it is?

"...How."

"Well," she looked down at the knife in her hand, "my ability can cut through a lot of things. Up until now I've mostly used it on objects. Physical things."

She looked up. "So I thought I'd try cutting out what they remember about today."

"Cutting out. Their memories."

"Yeah. Cutting them out."

Her voice was gentle. She looked absurdly calm for someone holding a cleaver and talking about memory erasure. The cleaver swayed twice in the air as she spoke, loosely, like a conductor keeping half-time.

Uriel stared at it and took a long, slow breath through his nose.

So what, you crack their skulls open, locate the specific neurons storing today's events, and snip them out — and you're doing this as a 'let's try it and see'?

And then something surfaced. A memory, buried deep, that the sight of that lazily swinging cleaver had decided to dislodge right now.

"Mom," he said. "Let me ask you something first."

"Mm?"

"When I was five. The day at the orphanage, when you went out to deal with some people—" He watched her face. "Why didn't you use this on them."

The room went quiet.

"Those enemies of yours. You could have just made them forget who you were entirely."

Galatina stood there, cleaver in hand, looking at him.

She appeared to be genuinely evaluating the proposal.

Then she smiled.

The same smile Uriel had known since he was five.

Warm enough to lower your guard without permission.

"Little Uri is so clever."

She said it. "That really would have worked."

Uriel stood where he was and breathed out slowly through his teeth.

That is not the point right now.

"Mom," he said, keeping his voice even. "So why didn't you use it."

Galatina tilted her head, entirely candid.

"I hadn't thought of it yet."

"..."

"This is a new application I just came up with," she said, with the mild, pleased tone of someone who'd found a better use for a kitchen gadget. "I was thinking hard about how to make sure little Uri could go to school without any trouble. So."

Uriel stood still and took the sentence apart, word by word.

Reassembled, it still didn't make sense.

She hadn't known you could cut memories until today. But a memory and a physical object were completely different categories of thing, so how had she just —

How many uses does she not know her own ability has.

He decided this was a question for another day.

"Can you actually do it?"

"Worth trying." She glanced back at the three men on the floor. "I think so."

The knife came down three times.

Not on any of them. Just — through the air above them, like severing threads that weren't there. Three clean strokes. Unhurried. The whole thing took about four seconds.

Uriel watched every moment of it, close enough that his eye twitched on the first stroke, but he didn't look away.

"Done." Galatina straightened up, patted her hands together, and wiped the cleaver on her apron in passing.

"...That's it?"

"That's it."

She picked all three of them up — the way you'd gather a set of bags from the floor — carried them to the front step, and arranged them neatly against the railing. Her expression didn't change. Then she came back inside and closed the door.

"Mom, are they —"

"They'll wake up." She was already back in the kitchen, sliding the cleaver into the drawer. "Just sleeping."

Uriel moved to the window and peered through the gap. Three still figures propped beside the steps.

From the kitchen: the sound of a spatula against iron, then running water, then Galatina humming something toneless and pleasant. The house felt absurdly normal.

He stayed at the window and watched.

About half an hour passed.

The large man woke first. A twitch of the fingers, then an arm, before he slowly pushed himself upright. He looked at his hands. Looked around the street with the expression of someone who has woken up from a dream they can't locate. "...Where are we. Did we... fall?"

Beside him, the steward jolted awake. Whatever had kept him upright and professional for decades of service kicked in almost immediately — he was confused, but he was organized about it. He looked around, looked down, opened the ledger in his hands, and frowned at it.

"...What did we come here to do."

The young lord was last. He surfaced holding his own head. "It hurts." He looked at the steward, then at the street, then at the steward again. "Why are we out here?"

"My lord." The steward was quiet for a moment. He closed the ledger. Stood. Straightened his jacket. "I... also cannot quite remember."

The three of them looked at each other.

"...Back to the estate," the steward said finally.

The large man said "oh" and got to his feet.

They helped each other up, vaguely, and made their way off down the road — steady and unhurried, like three ordinary people who have forgotten why they left the house and decided the sensible thing was to go back.

Uriel watched from the window until they turned the corner.

They still know their own names and where they live. Mom, how precise is your control? Is this really the first time you've done this?

He straightened up slowly.

A kitchen knife. She cut three people's memories with a kitchen knife. Three strokes, four seconds, then put it back in the drawer. The whole operation was structurally identical to chopping a vegetable.

He pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose.

Other people use a whole sci-fi Neuralyzer with a flash. She uses the cleaver she chops butternut squash with. Hers is the cleaver she uses for butternut squash.

He glanced toward the kitchen.

Galatina was humming, moving around in there, spatula occasionally touching the pan. There was already a fruit plate sitting on the counter near the stove. The apple, apparently, had not been forgotten.

Uriel turned back, let himself slide down the chair until he was sprawled against the backrest, and stared at the ceiling for a while.

Then he sat up sharply and clapped once.

Right.

"Mom!"

"Hmm?" Unhurried, from the kitchen.

"The school information — what I went out to find today —" He raised his voice. "I still haven't told you any of it!"

The sound of running water stopped.

Galatina came out, drying her hands, and dropped into the seat across from him with the immediate, bright attention of someone expecting an interesting story. Both elbows on the table, chin in her palms.

"Go ahead. I'm listening."

Uriel looked at her. Took a moment.

Then he led with the thing that mattered most.

"School," he said. "It's fully residential now."

"...Huh?"

"I'd be living on campus. No commuting."

Galatina blinked, slow. Processing. The cup she'd been about to lift stayed suspended partway to her mouth.

Then her eyes met his.

The warmth in them was still there — it was always there — but something had moved in behind it. Uriel couldn't name what, exactly. He just felt it land somewhere in his chest, a small and inconvenient pressure that he pushed back down on instinct.

"...Could I," she said, softly, carefully, like she was worried the question might startle him, "come and stay nearby?"

"..."

For a moment Uriel genuinely wondered if he'd misheard.

Then he let it go.

Of course.

"Mom," he said. "I need you to hear the rest of it first."