CHAPTER 52.5
POV - Rudeus
There are certain experiences in life no RPG guide prepares you for, and "being beaten, healed, and beaten again by your older sister while she drinks tea at the temperature of a corpse" is safely at the top of that list.
I walked down the stone corridor towards my room, counting the points of impact Azra'il had decided to distribute across my body with her usual surgical precision. Eight, if my memory, still a little scrambled from the recent pain, wasn't deceiving me. Eight bruises, all healed by her, all functionally non-existent, and yet I could still feel the ghost of each one throbbing somewhere between skin and pride.
That had been completely disproportionate.
She'd beaten me, healed me, and beaten me again. Repeatedly. I no longer knew whether that counted as discipline or whether my sister had invented an entirely new medical subspecialty, dedicated exclusively to keeping the patient healthy enough to keep suffering at maximum efficiency. If there were an MMO called "Fraternal Behavioural Correction," Azra'il would be classed as a hardcore player, with a build optimised for sustained damage.
I tried to laugh at my own joke mentally. It didn't quite work. Jokes tend to work better when you're not walking down a lonely corridor with your pride more bruised than any part of your actual body.
Maybe she'd overreacted. Eris hadn't even really noticed, technically, considering she'd been asleep. And I'd just been... reproducing a classic bit from those teenage comedy scenes I'd watched too much of in my previous life, the kind that always ended with a comic slap and no one actually hurt. A cheap anime cliché, basically. Harmless. Cultural. Almost a rite of passage.
Those justifications kept getting weaker with every step I took down the corridor, like a warrior losing health points without even taking a visible hit.
Because I remembered her face.
Not during the blows. My attention had been too busy processing pain to notice facial nuances then. But afterwards, once the physical pain had been healed enough for my mind to come back fully, and I was still there, tied to the trunk, her sitting on that stone bench holding the cold cup of tea, just looking at me.
She wasn't smiling.
She wasn't mocking, didn't seem satisfied at having won an argument that wasn't even an argument. She was just there, staring, with an expression it took me an embarrassingly long time to correctly identify.
Disappointment.
And that look had hurt more than the maids' whispered comments, more than Ghislaine's professional disapproval, more than Eris's angry glare, more even than Sauros's laconic sentence comparing me to Paul, as if it were some inevitable genetic tradition of the Greyrat family.
Because none of those other looks had expected anything from me.
Hers did.
And I, somehow, would rather she'd been angry.
Because I'd already seen this story before. With Paul.
Not that she hated the old man. Hatred would be easy. Hatred you can point at, shout about, settle with a Homeric duel in the backyard, like that one. What was left between the two of them since that winter was worse than hatred. It was nothing.
She talked to him. Answered him. Went through the whole theatre of domestic civility with her usual politeness.
And that was it.
I'm terrible at this sort of thing, feelings, subtext, that grey space between what people say and what they actually feel has never been my strong suit, not in this life or the other one. But even I, with my entire résumé of emotional stupidity, had noticed it. The way she looked through him now. Not with anger. With that icy politeness of someone who's already closed the chapter and has no intention of reopening it.
Paul had turned into an NPC for her. Present in the scene, functional, but with no line of dialogue that actually mattered.
And that, far more than any lecture or future thrashing, was what I didn't want for myself.
Anger I knew how to fix. Anger I'd already fixed before, with time, with a drawn-out apology, with that tedious process of winning back her patience inch by inch.
But turning into an NPC?
I hadn't the faintest idea how to fix that.
Azra'il's anger I knew well, anyway. We fought all the time, traded jabs with the naturalness of people who'd rehearsed it since the cradle, she was my older sister by a matter of minutes, but wielded that difference with the moral authority of someone born decades before me. Anger was simple. Loud. It passed quickly, usually accompanied by some sarcastic comment that restored the cosmic balance between the two of us.
Disappointment was something else.
Azra'il always seemed to expect the worst from people. From humanity in general, certainly. From nobles, merchants, adventurers, priests, and, on some particularly bad mornings, from existence as a broad philosophical concept. But not from me.
Or at least I thought not.
Maybe that was exactly why that look had hurt more than all eight impacts combined.
I reached my bedroom door and stopped there for a moment, my hand still on the handle, trying to understand how a facial expression could weigh more than a wooden sword.
Because, thinking about it, Azra'il had never just been the annoying sister who fixes my posture, steals my snacks, and answers provocations with anatomically precise threats. She'd been there since the start of this life, a few minutes older, but dozens of lives wiser, in a way I might not fully understand.
And, more importantly: she's the only one who knows both versions of me.
Zenith loves the son she knows. Paul loves me in his own complicated, proud way. Sylphiette met the boy mage who saved her from bullying. Roxy met the precocious prodigy who could cast chantless magic with a huge mana pool.
Azra'il knows the man who died that pathetic way, alone, with nothing, on the side of a road, carrying decades of accumulated regret.
Maybe that was it.
She knew who I'd been.
Knew everything.
And, even so, all these years, she'd never treated me as if I still were that man.
Today, for a few minutes, I'd acted exactly like him.
Maybe that was what was in that look.
She was the one who got me out of the house, actually. She didn't drag me by the arm. Didn't trick me with some clever excuse. Didn't demand a courage I simply didn't have at that moment.
She sang.
I remember that day exactly. Me, sitting in the backyard with my clay figures, the world outside seeming bigger and more hostile than anything I'd faced in my previous life, even though this current life was objectively more dangerous by any reasonable measure.
At the time, I'd pretended it was no big deal. A stroll around the backyard. A child finally leaving the house.
Only I knew my legs seemed to have received a collective suicide order.
Azra'il probably knew too.
She didn't say anything.
Didn't try to cheer me up.
Just sang, and stood there, as if waiting for me were the most natural thing in the world.
I took the first step alone.
But I wasn't alone when I took it.
I opened the bedroom door and went in, closing it behind me more carefully than necessary, as if the soft click of the lock could organise the thoughts that kept tripping over each other.
I sat on the bed. I picked up a clay figurine I'd been sculpting for days, a clumsy attempt to recreate Azra'il's face in miniature, and considered, out of pure vengeful, immature instinct, bending her nose on purpose. She hated when I did that. Said it was a "gratuitous artistic attack on my facial dignity," which only encouraged me more.
But I couldn't even properly enjoy that small revenge.
The urge to bury my head in the pillow and stay there until my next reincarnation hit with an almost physical force.
And that's when a particularly unpleasant thought settled into my head.
What if she started to see me as the man I'd been?
Did that look mean she'd given up on me?
Then I remembered she'd healed me. Handed me water. Waited, standing there, until I formulated a real answer, without hiding behind cheap humour.
She hadn't given up.
If she truly despised me, she'd have left. Azra'il didn't waste time on things she considered beyond saving, that much, at least, I knew for certain, after years of watching how she treated matters she judged unsolvable. She simply ignored them, with an almost brutal efficiency.
She'd stayed. Through the whole punishment, through the uncomfortable silence, through my pathetic attempt to turn everything into a joke.
That should have reassured me.
Somehow, it made everything worse.
It meant she still expected something from me.
My fingers gripped my own arms, almost by reflex, where the rope had been wrapped hours earlier.
For an instant, the room disappeared.
Flashes came. Rope. Laughter. Cameras. Too many voices.
I stopped breathing.
Then I forced my eyes open.
It wasn't the same thing.
I knew it wasn't.
Azra'il hadn't laughed. Not once. Not when I complained. Not when the maids walked by whispering. Not when I tried to turn it all into a joke.
She'd kept that same hard, tired expression, as if she'd rather have been doing anything else.
It had still been extreme. Absurd, even.
But she hadn't wanted to reduce me to nothing.
She'd wanted something to sink into my head, probably by force, since the conventional methods had already failed customs inspection.
I sat there, on the bed, staring at the ceiling, still a little annoyed with her and, at the same time, deeply uncomfortable with myself. Both things coexisting with no hurry to resolve themselves.
I tried to read. Couldn't concentrate. Tried practising some basic spell, just to distract myself. Didn't work. Went back to the clay figurine, bent her nose again with a finger, and even that didn't bring the usual petty satisfaction.
Because, even with every bruise healed, even with no physical pain left anywhere in my body, something still hurt.
She'd erased every mark she'd left on my skin.
Except one.
That one wasn't on the skin.
A particularly cowardly part of me still wanted to insist it hadn't been that serious.
That part seemed to have the voice of the man I'd been.
For the first time, hearing it didn't feel funny.
And it was there, lying down, staring at the wooden ceiling of the borrowed room, that I realised: I didn't just want to avoid getting caught again. It wasn't fear of another beating, though, honestly, that was a little bit of it too. It was that I couldn't stand the idea of seeing that same look again.
Not out of fear.
Out of affection, as strange as that word sounded applied to a sister who threatened me with dismemberment over breakfast with almost liturgical regularity.
Being hated was simple.
I had practice at that.
What I didn't know how to bear was that.
Someone knowing the very worst in me, still expecting something good, and me still managing to disappoint her anyway.
Azra'il believed.
At least, I hoped she still did.
I made a silent promise there, staring at the ceiling, the kind I'd never have the nerve to say out loud to her, because she'd probably mock my sudden sincerity for at least an entire week.
I never wanted to see her look at me like that again.