Summoned as an Infinite Evolution Hero with My Yandere Stepsister

We stopped at the foot of the tower.

Up close, it was worse still than from a distance: the stone climbed so high my neck ached before I could even make out its summit, swallowed somewhere in the clouds. Not a window, not the slightest door along that dark, smooth face — nothing but a single opening at its base, gaping, that seemed to be waiting for us to make up our minds and step inside.

Elsa halted a few paces from the threshold, hands behind her back, her good eye lifted toward that summit we couldn’t see.

"This is where I leave the two of you. The tower only takes those it has called, and I’m not one of them — I’m well past the age of playing the heroine, in any case." She lowered her eyes to us, and one corner of her mouth lifted. "So you’ll do me the favor of managing in there without me, and coming back out in one piece. It’ll spare me having to carry the bad news to anyone."

"We’ll do our best," I said.

"I should hope so." Her gaze slid to Alice. "And you, you look after him as much as he looks after you. I know you’re capable of it — I’ve seen you at work."

Alice gave her a perfect smile, all softness.

"Of course, Lady Elsa. Always."

She said it with a gentleness no one in that street would have thought to doubt. No one but me, perhaps, who was starting to learn the difference between her smiles. That one didn’t reach her eyes.

Elsa drew us against her one after the other, a brief, solid embrace, without ceremony. When Alice’s turn came, the two women held each other a second longer — and I saw Alice’s fingers settle against Elsa’s back, ever so gently, like a caress. A shiver ran up the back of my neck without my knowing why. Nothing in the gesture looked hostile. And yet something, there, didn’t sit right.

Then they parted, and the unease faded as quickly as it had come.

"Go on, off with you." Elsa stepped back and crossed her arms. "And try not to worry me more than necessary, kid. I hate that."

"I know. See you later."

I took Alice’s hand, and we crossed the threshold together. Behind us, the light of the outside died all at once, as if the tower had closed itself over our passage.

Before us opened a great round hall, bare and dark, bathed in a glow that came from nowhere. Five people already stood there, and all of them turned toward us as we entered.

"About time," one of them muttered, a big fellow built like a door.

I took their measure in a single glance, opening the Eye as I did, almost without thinking about it.

They all gave off mana — dense, solid, the kind you never find in an ordinary man. Fighters, all of them, each in their own way. The colossus carried a thick, heavy mana, in the image of his frame. A little farther off, a woman with a hard stare let hers burn bright and sharp, like a poorly contained flame, a mage’s profile without the slightest doubt. Beside her, a lean, composed man kept his gathered close, held short, ready to spring. The last, younger and visibly on edge, let his run outward instead, poorly mastered.

Solid, without exception. But none of them came close to mine, and less still to Alice’s.

I set my eyes on her, and the Eye showed me what the others couldn’t see. Around Alice swirled a veritable torrent of mana, a mass that wrapped her whole and that, without ever stopping, drew the mana of the outside toward her, pulling it into her without end. A true monster.

I could almost have smiled at it. So these were the famous heroes of the other kingdoms, the ones they said were called to save the world — and not one of them came close to Alice’s level.

Then my gaze landed on the last of them, and that impression wavered for an instant.

A woman stood slightly apart from the others, and there was nothing common about her. Long black hair fell over a white dress embroidered with silver, two katanas rested at her waist, and she wore all of it with a bearing I couldn’t have named as anything other than regal. She watched us approach without a word, a half-smile settled on her lips, calmer on her own than all the others put together.

And above her head floated a thread.

A thread of mana, thin, that started from nowhere and came to fasten itself to the top of her skull. Exactly the same as the ones I’d seen above the passengers, on the train — right before they all rose together to kill us.

I kept quiet and looked away, as if I’d noticed nothing. But something knotted deep inside me, because that thread, I now knew what it heralded.

"There’s seven of us," the colossus went on, counting us with his eyes. "Weren’t we supposed to be eight?"

"The eighth won’t be coming." It was the woman with the katanas who’d answered, in that same calm voice. "He was summoned in the same kingdom as me, but he declined the tower’s invitation. He had other matters to attend to."

Summoned in her kingdom. I thought again of the thread above her head, and of the ones above the men on the train who’d tried to bleed us for no reason, and the link imposed itself on its own. There was something rotten in the kingdom she’d been drawn from. I didn’t know what, not yet, but I didn’t like the way the pieces fit together.

A window opened then before us — before all of us, judging by the eyes that lifted at the same moment.

[ All heroes wishing to take part in the tower’s trials are present. ]

The System.

So the tower was linked to it too? One way or another, these relics built by the ancients spoke the same tongue as the windows that had floated before my eyes since I’d arrived in this world? But how was that even possible? The ancient heroes had cracked a system like this, and even with that advantage, they’d never brought down the Demon King — nor even, by all accounts, a single one of the Seven Calamities? Enough to cool one’s enthusiasm a little about what awaited us higher up.

The ground began to tremble beneath our feet then, hard enough to cut clean through my train of thought, and on reflex I pulled Alice against me. She needed no coaxing to nestle into my arms.

Around us, slowly, in fragments, the scenery began to come apart and rebuild itself.

A city first rose out of nothing, immense, girded by high walls pierced with great gates on three of its sides. The fourth was barred by a mountain several hundred meters tall, a wall of raw rock against which the city had plainly been built, as if to make of it a rampart no one could ever breach. Then the sky unfurled above it, and instead of the expected blue it was red, a blood red. At last figures appeared, living ones this time, springing to motion all at once as if they’d just been woken.

Citizens, by the look of them. And terror held every one of them. They ran in all directions, collided, called out to each other, screamed the same words over the din.

"THEY’RE COMING!"

"The demons are here!"

Meanwhile, men in armor struggled to contain the panic while taking up their posts along the ramparts.

Alice, for her part, looked only at me, as if none of it — not the city, not the fear, not the cries — concerned her in the least or could ever reach her. Alice was still Alice, even in a city marked for slaughter.

Around us, the other heroes watched the scene with the same disquiet as I did, until a new window imposed itself on our gazes.

[ Heroes of the new era, I address you as one of the great heroes of the past. ]

[ The foremost qualities of great heroes are trust and mutual aid. ]

[ Mission: Rewrite the tragic history of the fall of Akhartenzia, and the death of one of the great heroes. ]

[ Loop completed: 0 ]

Silence fell over the group, the time it took each of us to finish reading.

Rewrite a fall, prevent the death of a hero, and that word "loop" set at zero like a counter waiting only to turn. I didn’t like what all of it hinted at, but at least the objective was clear.

I was the first to break the silence.

"All right. Before we throw ourselves into this, we’d do better to know what we’re stepping into." With a gesture, I pointed to the city panicking around us. "I say we split up the city, go see where the attack’s coming from, how many they are, where they mean to break through. Then we meet back here, pool everything, and settle on a real plan. We’ll come out of this better with fourteen eyes than charging in blind, each on his—"

"Ridiculous."

The colossus had cut me clean off. He crossed his arms over his chest, a sneer at the corner of his lips.

"Are we heroes, or clerks? We’re not going to waste the whole day drawing up plans and holding hands." He rolled his neck, and the contempt surfaced plainly in his voice. "There are demons out there. We kill them, and that’s all there is to it. There’s nothing more to understand."

"You don’t even know how many they are, or what—"

"I don’t need to know."

He turned his back on me, sure of his strength, and strode off toward the heart of the city, where the first plumes of smoke were already rising.

The youngest of the heroes hesitated an instant, his gaze passing from me to him, before falling in behind him with an embarrassed glance my way.

"Sorry. We’re from the same kingdom, so I... I’m going with him. Sorry."

And off he went behind him.

It was like a signal. The others scattered in turn, one by one, each in his own direction and toward his own idea of the thing, one with a word of apology, another with a simple shrug. Too much pride, in all of them, to fall in behind the proposal of a stranger met five minutes earlier.

In a few moments, only Alice and I were left in the middle of the square.

"Tch." She was staring at the direction the colossus had taken, and her voice had lost all its softness at once. "You hold out your hand to them, and these nobodies dare not even take it." Her fingers curled slowly. "What’s the point of trying to do good, honestly, if this is how you’re treated for it."

"Let it go, it doesn’t matter at all." I set a hand on her head. "If the ancient heroes ended up falling here, these ones will fall too. They’ll come find us with their tails between their legs, you’ll see."

She lifted her eyes to me, and her anger dissolved all at once, replaced by something else entirely.

"You’ve changed, Kuro."

"Oh yeah?"

"You’ve gotten even more attractive."

She flowed against me, ready to throw herself at my neck, and I set a hand flat against her forehead to keep her at bay. She kept coming anyway, not the least bit discouraged.

"But Kuuuro~ you know how badly I wanted you all this month. I missed you, so much, so much~"

"I missed you too, Alice." I kept the pressure on her forehead. "But this really isn’t the moment. We’re getting going — and you can have whatever you want from me once we’ve finished this tower."

She stopped dead, and her red eyes lit up.

"Really? Anything? Truly anything?"

"Yes. Anything."

"Then let’s go~~~"

She set off ahead of me with a bright step, as if the city in flames all around us were nothing more than a pretty backdrop unrolled along her path. I followed her with a sigh.

~~

Eighteen hours later.

I looked up, and I saw the giant bring its foot down on the northern rampart.

The wall collapsed all at once, tons of stone ground to dust under the impact, and through the gaping breach the demons poured into the city. There were thousands of them, a black flood that covered the streets and the roofs and everything else, swallowing the defenders under the sheer weight of numbers. The cries of the inhabitants drowned in the uproar, fire caught everywhere at once, and it was soon no longer a battle but a tide bursting a dike too frail to hold it. We’d run the whole day, understood everything too late, and there was nothing left for us to do but watch the city die without being able to change a thing.

Then a demon rose into the red sky.

It gathered between its hands a mass of black mana, dense and pulsing, before spreading it above the city like a dome — an immense spell that sealed the whole city beneath its vault. I lifted my eyes to it, and my blood froze in my veins.

"Alice... that’s..."

"Yes." Beside me, her voice was strangely calm. "That’s Lazaüs."

The same demon Elsa had faced at the castle, backed by an entire human army, tirelessly healed and reinforced by Alice — and who, even under those conditions, had come within a breath of winning. The high demon. Here, before us, as if the past had caught up with us.

A shiver ran through me at the sight of him, and a dull anger rose from deep within, slow and burning, as I recognized him.

Then the world stopped.

What—

Everything froze, then flowed backward. The city, the fire, the giant, the dome of black mana, all of it unwound before my eyes at a mad speed, like a scene rewound by an invisible hand. The demons climbed back up through the breach, the wall rose again stone by stone, the dead got back up off the pavement.

And I found myself standing at the center of the square, surrounded by the six other heroes, as if not one of us had ever taken a step. The window floated once more before my eyes.

[ Mission: Rewrite the tragic history of the fall of Akhartenzia, and the death of one of the great heroes. ]

[ Loop completed: 1 ]