CHAPTER 65
Azra'il - POV
The party ended, but the exhaustion took a while longer to notice it could finally relax.
We reached my room, already dragging our feet with that slowness of people who'd spent hours smiling at strangers and now only wanted to collapse onto any available horizontal surface. I still had the smell of wine and heavy noble perfume clinging to me. Rudeus let out sighs far too long for any situation not involving an existential crisis. And Eris trailed right behind, her heeled shoes already in hand, bare feet slapping against the floorboards with the obvious relief of someone who'd spent the whole night in open warfare against her own etiquette.
Ghislaine closed the door behind us with the care of someone who knew exactly which noise would carry two floors below.
"Finally," she said, settling into a chair with the discreet exhaustion of someone who'd spent hours standing, alert, eating nothing but her own sense of duty. "Guarding a noble's birthday is more tiring than a real war."
"At least in war no one forces you to smile," I said, pushing a tray of food towards her. "Eat. You stood there like a statue all night while the rest of us stuffed ourselves."
She didn't argue. She just grabbed the first piece of bread with the speed of someone genuinely starving, and for an instant the whole room relaxed along with her.
Eris threw herself onto Rudeus's bed with no ceremony whatsoever, her red hair spread across the pillow like a contained blaze, and stared at the ceiling with the expression of someone who'd survived a battle and hadn't yet decided whether it had been worth it.
"Never again," she declared, to the ceiling. "I'm never having a birthday again."
"Excellent news," I said. "The next one's only in five years. You've got plenty of time to recover."
"Five years isn't enough."
"Then ask them to postpone it another five."
Eris finally looked at me with an indignant face.
"Birthdays don't work like that!"
"Shame. I thought you'd try to give the calendar a thrashing too."
She huffed, but didn't have any spare energy left to argue properly, which, considering her usual repertoire, was already quite a win for me.
Rudeus, on the other side of the room, was rummaging through a leather bag with that poorly disguised nervousness I already recognised from a mile off, the nervousness of someone who'd spent days planning a moment and now actually had to carry it out.
"Before we eat any more," he said, "I have something for the two of you."
Eris sat up so fast she nearly hit her head on the headboard.
"A present?"
"A present."
"Is it a figurine?"
"It isn't a figurine."
Her shoulders slumped.
"Shame..."
Rudeus blinked.
"Did you want another one?"
"I did."
"But you already have loads of figurines!"
"But I wanted one of Ghislaine..."
She paused briefly, as if clarifying an extremely important detail.
"Life-sized."
The room sank into a respectful silence.
"...You know something?" I said. "That sounds exactly like the kind of present you'd ask for."
Rudeus let out a defeated sigh.
"Unfortunately, I still don't have the ability to make a nearly two-metre figurine."
Then, olympically ignoring the disappointment stamped on Eris's face, he pulled two dark wooden wands out of the bag, each polished with the care of someone who'd spent whole nights correcting small mistakes by hand.
He handed the first one to Ghislaine.
She took the object with an almost reverent care, slowly turning it between her fingers, examining the core embedded in the base with the attention she normally reserved only for swords.
"This is..." She stopped, as if the sentence needed an extra second to arrange itself. "This is a real mage's wand."
"It is," said Rudeus, with the measured pride of someone trying not to look too proud and visibly failing. "You finished the basic training. I thought you deserved it."
Her ears rose, alert, and for an instant Ghislaine Dedoldia's normally unreadable face let something slip I'd never seen there before: genuine, almost childlike astonishment.
"Does this mean I'm..." She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to.
"A mage!" I said, in her place. "Technically speaking. Welcome to the club of people who carry a little magic stick instead of just sharpened steel."
Ghislaine kept looking at the wand for a stretch of time far longer than any object usually deserved, and I recognised, right there, the weight of that for someone who'd spent her whole life being called "muscle head" by people who never bothered to notice the rest.
Rudeus then turned to Eris, handing her the second wand with a little less ceremony and a little more nervous anticipation.
She took the object, turned it in her hands, examined it superficially with the measured interest of someone clearly expecting something else.
"Where's the figurine?" she asked, with no preamble.
Rudeus sighed, resigned, and pulled a small carved stone figure out of the bag, Sylphie, I recognised at once from the characteristic haircut and elf ears.
"I brought this too," he said. "In case you preferred it."
Eris looked at the figurine. Then at the wand in her own hand. Then at the figurine again.
She picked up the small figure, examined it for a few seconds, and put it back into Rudeus's hands.
"...You can keep the figurine."
"Really?"
"I'm not a lolicon."
Rudeus froze.
Slowly, he turned his head towards me.
"..."
I shrugged.
"Don't look at me. You reap what you sow, you perverted Chubby-Cheeks."
Eris nodded, absolutely convinced by her own logic.
"The wand is better!"
He put the figurine away with a resigned smile he incorrectly tried to hide.
It was only when Eris turned the wand one last time that her expression changed. It wasn't disappointment this time, but a slow, genuine curiosity, as if something in the piece had just caught her attention.
"This stone here is weird," she remarked, touching the crystal core embedded in the base. "It keeps changing colour."
"It's on purpose," I said. "This core hasn't settled on any element yet. It'll adapt to whatever you develop over time."
"Is that good or bad?"
"It's better than any fixed crystal your father could have bought at the market, Little Volcano. Rudeus accidentally created something most artisans spend years deliberately trying to understand."
Rudeus, hearing that, had the decency to look simultaneously proud and slightly bothered by his own accidental talent.
Eris turned the wand once more, examining the wooden body with an attention she rarely gave to anything that didn't involve cutting something in half.
"The wood is smooth here," she said, running her thumb along the grip, "but it's still a bit uneven the rest of the way. Why didn't you sand it all smooth?"
"Because it would've turned generic," Rudeus replied, with that technical seriousness he only used for matters that genuinely mattered to him. "Every branch has different natural grain. If I'd sanded it all until it was perfect, I'd have erased exactly what makes this wood unique. I preferred to leave it the way it really is."
Eris looked at him for a second longer than any technical comment would normally warrant.
"You picked this wood for me?"
"I did. I tested about four different branches before deciding."
"How long did you spend on it?"
Rudeus scratched the back of his neck, hesitating. "Quite a while."
"How long is 'quite a while'?"
"...I'm not answering that with exact numbers."
Eris looked at the wand again, and this time her expression softened in a way she clearly didn't know how to process without discomfort.
"I'm terrible at magic," she said, suddenly, with no preamble, in that direct style that was, essentially, her trademark. "I know it. You know it. Azra'il definitely knows it." She pressed the wand against her chest, in a gesture that completely contradicted the casual tone of her own voice. "But you made this anyway. That's... that's nice, Rudeus. Really."
It was probably the longest, most sincere compliment Eris Boreas Greyrat had ever given anyone in her entire life up to that point, and the fact that she delivered it with the same face as someone confessing a crime only made the scene funnier.
"You're actually thanking me!" said Rudeus, visibly moved and visibly trying not to show it too much. "That's new."
"Don't get used to it!"
"Too late. I'm going to remember this for the rest of my life!"
"If you repeat that in public I'll hit you with the new wand!"
"That would completely cancel out the emotional moment we just had."
"I know," said Eris, with a smile that was almost, almost gentle. "And I'd still do it."
Eris put away the gift with a care that contrasted dramatically with how she normally treated her personal belongings, and it was in the silence that followed that someone else remembered something.
Ghislaine, who'd been watching the gift-giving scene with her usual calm neutrality, seemed to notice something only at that instant, her ears dropping slightly in a gesture I already recognised as rare discomfort in her.
"I didn't bring anything," she admitted, looking at Eris with an embarrassment that sounded almost strange coming from someone so used to being unshaken by anything. "It's your birthday. I should have brought something."
Eris shook her head quickly. "You don't need—"
"There's no such custom, in my tribe," Ghislaine continued, ignoring the interruption. "No one gives gifts to whoever they protect. I just hadn't thought about it until now, because I'd never... mattered this much before."
Rudeus, always too practical at exactly the wrong moment, leant forward. "You could give something you already use, or used to."
Ghislaine considered that for an instant, then, without much ceremony, took off one of the rings she wore on her finger, dark wood, worn by time, with a faint greenish sheen that seemed to shift slightly under the candlelight.
"Here," she said, holding the ring out to Eris. "It's a talisman from my tribe. Passed down through generations."
Eris took the object with an almost religious care. "What does it do?"
"Protects against bad wolves, at night."
I raised an eyebrow. "Wolves?"
"It's an old superstition."
"And does it work?" Rudeus asked, genuinely curious, with that innocence only he could keep up after years of living around me. "Have you ever actually been attacked by a wolf?"
Ghislaine went quiet for a second, her eyes drifting slightly to the ceiling, like someone consulting a memory before deciding whether to share it.
"Once," she said, slowly. "It was too hot to sleep that night. Paul invited me to take a bath and—"
"I CHANGED MY MIND!" Rudeus cut in, at the speed of someone who'd just realised, too late, that he'd asked the wrong question. "YOU DON'T NEED TO GO ON."
"But you asked—"
"I withdraw the question. Officially. Forever."
I couldn't contain a short, sincere laugh at watching my twin brother's face go through three different shades of horror in rapid succession.
"So the wolf was Paul the whole time," I concluded, savouring every syllable. "That completely changes the meaning of the family legend, Ghislaine. You should consider updating the talisman's wording."
"The ring works the same either way," she replied, unfazed. "Only now we know exactly which species it actually wards off."
Eris, blissfully unaware of the entire subtext of that exchange, was already sliding the ring onto her thumb, staring at her own hand with a quiet satisfaction I hadn't seen in her since she'd learned to read her first word alone.
"I'll take good care of it!" she promised, pressing both hands against her chest.
And it was right there, at exactly that point in the evening, with the wands already given and the ring already on her finger, that I decided it was time.
"I have something too," I said.
Every pair of eyes turned to me.
I went over to the corner where I'd left the heavy cloth-wrapped bundle, still feeling the fabric's weight against my fingers with that strange sensation of someone who's been carrying, for ten days, something more important than they can explain in a few words.
I unwrapped it slowly.
The blade emerged under the candlelight with that specific matte gleam of well-cared-for metal, the subtle curve, the grip wrapped in dark red leather, the pommel simple and functional.
The room went silent.
Ghislaine slowly rose from her chair, her eyes fixed on the sword with an intensity I hadn't seen in her since the day she'd witnessed my first hammer strike.
"You..." She stopped. Started again. "I saw you setting up the forge. I saw you hammering. But I never saw this."
"I saved the good part for today."
Ghislaine stepped closer, but kept her hands behind her back, close enough to examine without touching, and slowly ran her gaze over the small wolf engraving on the guard.
"Is that your mark?" she asked.
"It is. I've used it for a long time."
She nodded, still without taking her eyes off the blade, but stepped back half a pace, with that kind of deliberate restraint of someone who knew perfectly well who that moment belonged to first.
It was only then that Eris, moving closer to get a better look, noticed the two characters engraved on the other side of the guard.
烈心
"What's that?" she asked, pointing at the marks with a furrowed brow. "It looks like... I don't even know. A drawing? A scribble?"
"They're characters," I said. "From another language you probably don't know."
Ghislaine leant in too, examining the symbols with the same discomfort of someone facing something they know to be writing, but can't decipher even its basic structure.
"I've never seen anything like it," she admitted. "None of the books we've studied, and I've flipped through a few others just for the illustrations."
"Must be from some very distant country," Eris concluded, with the confidence of someone who was, in fact, simply guessing. "One of those places across the sea that no one's ever visited!"
Considering neither of them read even their own language with much fluency, I wasn't particularly surprised by the theory. I decided not to correct it.
Rudeus, however, stepped closer from behind, his eyes narrowing in a different way the moment they landed on the characters, not confusion, but something closer to incomplete recognition, the kind of reaction of someone seeing a crossword clue in another language sitting on the tip of their memory without quite being able to reach it.
"That looks like kanji," he murmured, too quietly for Eris and Ghislaine to hear over their own animated conversation.
I stepped closer to him, keeping my voice equally low. "It's closer to Mandarin, actually. Chinese. Similar enough to what you know to confuse you, but it isn't the same thing."
He looked at me, surprised. "You know that because..."
"In one of my lives, yes. I also came from there, just from a slightly different period than yours. Besides, in my cultivator lives, curiously, the alphabets of those worlds had similar scripts."
"That explains a lot," he murmured, still looking at the characters with a kind of uncomfortable nostalgia I recognised far too well. "I thought I was going mad, recognising the strokes."
"You weren't. You're just recognising something from a distance, without being able to reach it up close. It's uncomfortable, I know."
Ghislaine, who'd been watching our whispered exchange with her ears tilted in curiosity, finally interrupted.
"What are you two whispering about?"
"Twin stuff," I replied, without hesitation. "Secret language. You two don't have sufficient security clearance."
"That doesn't exist," said Eris.
"It does now. We just invented it."
Eris wasn't entirely satisfied with the explanation, but let it go and turned her attention back to the name in ideograms.
"Lièxīn," I said.
Eris frowned immediately. "Lié... what?"
"Lièxīn."
"Liê... Riê..." She tried again, her tongue stumbling in a way that was, honestly, hilarious to watch. "Lechim?"
"No."
"Lixim?"
"Definitely not. You just pronounced the name of a legendary sword like it was a brand of washing powder."
"THEN TEACH ME PROPERLY!"
"Lièxīn," I repeated, slowly, separating the syllables with a patience I normally reserved only for the most desperate maths lessons. "Li-è-xīn."
She tried three more times, each attempt producing a slightly different and equally incorrect variation, until she finally managed something close enough to the original that I decided, out of mercy, to consider it acceptable.
"What does it mean?" she asked, still a little sulky about her own phonetic struggle.
"Burning Heart."
Eris stopped trying to pronounce anything.
"Burning Heart," she repeated, this time quietly, almost to herself, as if testing the weight of the words.
"It isn't about your hair colour," I said, anticipating the obvious question before she could ask it. "That would be too lazy even for me. It's about you never doing anything by halves, ever. You hate wholly. You try wholly. And, even if it takes you a while to admit it, you trust wholly, once you finally decide to trust someone." I turned the blade slightly in my own hand before finally holding it out. "Burning Heart suited you better than anything to do with red hair or an explosive temper, even though those two things are also, technically, true."
She looked at me for a second longer than usual, her expression wavering between the automatic defensiveness she used whenever someone said something too sincere, and something softer underneath that she clearly didn't know how to process in public.
"That was..." She stopped. "That was a nice thing to say, Azra'il."
"I know. I rarely make that mistake, enjoy it while it lasts."
"And one last thing before you try it," I said, holding the blade a moment longer. "It doesn't fight for you. It has no built-in offensive magic, it won't do the work in your place. What it does is grow with you. Every rune here was designed to accompany you while you learn to fight on your own, not to replace that learning."
Eris nodded, with a seriousness she rarely showed outside a training hall.
I finally held out the sword, and Eris took it with both hands, the weight settling into her palms with a naturalness I'd already expected, but that still gave me quiet satisfaction to watch.
She raised the blade, testing the balance with a simple wrist turn first, then a fuller strike, the kind of basic movement any fencing student learns in the first few months of training.
She stopped mid-motion.
"Wait." She lowered the sword, looking at her own hand with a furrowed brow. "This is strange."
"Strange how?"
"I can't quite explain it." She turned it again, more slowly this time, feeling the weight shift through her own arm. "Every sword I've ever used, even the good ones, even the expensive ones Grandpa bought, always has some part that resists a little. A weight I have to push through. This one doesn't have that. It..." She searched for the right word for a moment. "It already knows where I'm going before I've finished deciding."
Ghislaine, who'd been watching the scene with her arms crossed, nodded slowly, like someone recognising something only a true swordswoman could identify.
"That isn't just a feeling," she said. "True balance is rare. Most good swords only disguise the imbalance well enough that you don't notice it right away."
"Exactly," I confirmed. "Every sword Sauros ever bought was made for someone generic and then adjusted to fit your hand. This one was made with your hand in mind from the very first hammer strike."
Eris swung the blade once more, faster now, a downward strike followed by a sideways correction she executed with a fluidity I suspected even she didn't know she possessed yet, her face opening up, little by little, into a mix of concentration and pure wonder.
"This is..." She lowered the sword, out of breath, her eyes shining with an emotion she clearly didn't know how to process in silence. "You made this... for me?"
"I spent ten whole days hammering metal at fifteen hundred degrees just to hear you ask the obvious question for the second time in the same evening, Redheaded Beast."
She laughed, a small, surprised, almost embarrassed sound, and hugged the sword to her chest with the same blind force she'd hugged the ring with minutes earlier, Rudeus's wand still carelessly clutched in the same hand, forming a precarious balance of gifts she clearly had no intention of letting go of for anything in this world or the next.
"It's the best present I've ever received in my life," she declared, in a tone that left no room for disagreement.
Ghislaine, who'd watched it all from the respectful distance she'd chosen from the start, finally stepped forward.
"May I?" she asked, with a politeness rare for her, her hands already almost reaching out, but stopping mid-air, genuinely waiting for permission.
Eris hesitated only a second, the kind of natural hesitation of someone who'd just gained the most precious thing in her life and wasn't yet ready to let it go, before handing over the sword with a care I'd never seen her give any other object.
Ghislaine turned the blade slowly, testing its weight, watching the line of the steel against the candlelight with that technical gaze of someone who'd spent her whole life assessing weapons before trusting them.
"That abandoned yard you renovated," she said, finally, without taking her eyes off the blade. "I remember the stone benches you raised in a single afternoon. I thought I'd already understood the scale of what you were capable of doing there." She shook her head slowly, something in her usually unreadable face softening in a way I suspected even she couldn't quite name. "This isn't the work of an improvised workshop in a forgotten wood. This is a master's work. A sword like this would sell for a fortune in any large city on the continent, and I've seen enough rare blades to know how to tell the good ones from the mediocre."
She handed the sword back to Eris with the same care she'd received it with, and Eris hugged it back against her chest with the possessive speed of someone with no intention of lending it out again any time soon.
"Better than my figurines?" Rudeus teased.
"MUCH better than the figurines, Chubby. And better than the wand too, no offence."
"Offended," he replied, sounding not the least bit genuinely offended, "but I understand the hierarchy."
He brought a hand to his chest, feigning a pain that was, in fact, genuine enough to be funny.
The exhaustion, which had been building all night like compound interest, finally called in everyone's debt at the same time.
Rudeus was the first to give in, sitting on my bed with a yawn he didn't even try to hide. Ghislaine settled into the chair, arms crossed, apparently determined to keep watch right there, but her eyes already closing slowly against her own will. Eris, still hugging the sword with one hand and holding the wand with the other, the ring gleaming faintly on her middle finger, lay down on the bed without even bothering to arrange herself properly.
"I'll just close my eyes for a minute," she murmured, already losing the battle against her own sleep.
"Sure," I said, not believing that for a second.
One minute turned into five. Five turned into twenty. And by the time I finally realised I too needed to accept the inevitable defeat against my own exhaustion, it was already too late to find any reasonable space on that bed that didn't seriously compromise my own spatial dignity.
Rudeus slept turned towards the wall, snoring softly. Eris occupied the other half of the mattress with the territorial generosity of someone who'd never learned the concept of "sharing space," the sword hugged to her chest, the wand still clutched in her other hand, Ghislaine's ring glinting faintly in the dark.
What was left for me was a gap between the two sleeping bodies that I seriously doubted would suffice for any adult human being, or even for any seven-year-old with a minimum amount of self-respect.
I considered, for an instant, sleeping on the floor. Or in the chair, beside Ghislaine, who was already dozing off sitting up with the military dignity of someone who can sleep on watch without ever admitting she was sleeping.
I discarded both options almost immediately.
Because the alternative involved leaving my own twin brother, the very same Rudeus Greyrat, younger than me by a measly five minutes, but a perverted Chubby-Cheeks for an entire lifetime, sleeping mere centimetres from Eris with no physical barrier of containment between them beyond his own conscience, and I'd heard enough about "wolves" that same evening to develop a fairly well-informed opinion on exactly which species posed the greater real risk in that room.
Ghislaine's ring, with all its ancestral wisdom, supposedly protected against wolves that howled at night.
Except Ghislaine herself had unwittingly admitted the talisman had failed on the one single occasion a real wolf had shown up, Paul, on a night too hot to sleep. If the ring hadn't even managed to protect its own original owner against that particular species of threat, I had very little faith it would do a better job protecting Eris from my twin brother, asleep less than a hand's width away.
So, for that one night, I decided the talisman would be me.
Not worn wood with a dubious greenish glow. Real protection, with a proven track record and zero patience for experiments.
So I squeezed myself between the two of them, one of Eris's elbows lodged into my ribs, Rudeus's foot carelessly brushing against my shin, with the quiet determination of someone accepting a terrible night's sleep as a fair price for proper vigilance.
〈Eos, log this as the worst night's sleep across twelve hundred cycles of existence.〉
[Your choice of positioning on the mattress appears motivated by security factors, not comfort. I recommend openly acknowledging that instead of masking it with a generic complaint about physical discomfort.]
〈I refuse to dignify that observation with a response.〉
[Silence is also a response, Azra'il. And, in this case, a rather revealing one.]
I ignored that last line with all the dignity I had left and let sleep finally overtake me, wedged between a potentially dangerous brother and a girl who slept hugging a sword and wearing a ring that warded off wolves.
It worked quite well against the ones howling outside.
Against the ones snoring on the other side of the pillow... there was, apparently, still room for improvement.
Outside the window, the moon lit up the whole room with a calm indifference, as if it had already known, for a very long time, that that awkward pile of exhausted people was, by any measure that actually mattered, exactly where each of them needed to be.
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💬 Author's Note
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I have a question mainly for those of you who know Mushoku Tensei lore better than I do, especially anyone who has already read the Light Novel or Web Novel.
I mostly follow the anime, and I only remember some things from when I read parts of the Web Novel a long time ago, so there are definitely deeper lore details that some of you probably remember much better than I do. 😂
My question is about Laplace, more specifically, his reincarnation.
In canon, Orsted already has a relatively clear idea of when and under what circumstances Laplace is supposed to reincarnate, based on everything he has observed throughout his countless loops.
But now there is a variable that never existed in any of those timelines:
Azra'il.
And that made me curious about what you guys think.
Could her existence end up affecting Laplace's reincarnation process?
Would Laplace still be reborn around the same time Orsted predicted?
Or could the changes caused by Azra'il's presence result in a compatible vessel appearing much earlier than expected, causing Laplace to reincarnate sooner?
And how much could changes in bloodlines, the Laplace Factor, and the people who either exist or no longer exist throughout the story affect who that future vessel ends up being?
I won't say anything about Pax or certain future events because that would be getting dangerously close to fanfic spoiler territory. 👀
The only thing I can confirm is this:
Just like in canon, Laplace's reincarnation in this story will not happen exactly the way Orsted remembers it from his previous loops.
The difference is that this time, there is an anomaly named Azra'il walking around the board and kicking pieces into places they were never supposed to be. 😂
So I especially want to hear from those of you who know this part of the lore really well:
Do you think Azra'il's existence could, while still following Mushoku Tensei's own rules, alter or even accelerate Laplace's reincarnation?