Summoned as an Infinite Evolution Hero with My Yandere Stepsister

After a few minutes’ walk toward the northern front, we came out onto a square where a dense crowd of soldiers stood listening to a man.

Black hair streaked with a single white lock, dark, shadowed eyes, a heavy black armor over his shoulders. A giant sword, black as well, was strapped across his back, and in his hand he held a great shield of the same shade. He spoke slowly. Very slowly.

"So... uh... what we’re... going to do... uh... is... we’re going to... uh... defend the north... I’ll be... on the front line... count on me..."

And yet, despite that slowness and that speech which seemed to doubt itself at every word, all the soldiers roared with one voice, as if relieved to have him at their side.

I leaned toward the girls.

"I think we’ve found our hero of the north."

Alice answered with a smothered "hmpf," while Seorin was already turned toward him.

"Let’s not waste time. Let’s go talk to him."

"Wait, wait. First, let’s agree on how to go about this. I’m guessing we can’t just walk up and tell him we’re heroes come from the future to lend him a hand—"

But Alice cut me off cleanly, raising her voice so the whole square could hear.

"Hey, you!"

They all turned toward her as one, and the supposed hero pointed a finger at his own chest, as if to ask: me?

"Yes, you, the weird guy in the black armor. We’re here to help you, so you could come over here."

"Uh... yes... coming."

Alice turned to me with a look that plainly said see, it’s not so hard, idiot — she was still holding the way I’d handled Seorin against me. I couldn’t help a laugh as I watched the hero drag his carcass through the astonished soldiers to reach us.

When he arrived, it was Alice again who spoke.

"So you’re the hero in charge of the northern gate?"

"Uh, yes... that’s me."

"But you seem awfully weak, for a hero."

At those words, the man changed in an instant. Every trace of hesitation left his face at once, and his eyes turned suddenly sharp.

His sword shot toward Alice. In the same breath, I drew Naia and Laia and slipped in front of him, one blade against his throat to stop him cold, the other passed behind his neck, while Alice was already raising a shield of lightning around herself and other bolts were forming in a ring above the hero. Seorin had surged in from the other side, the point of a katana pressed to his stomach.

He stood still a second amid our blades, then simply sheathed his sword.

"I see... so there were still... strong people, in the city... follow me."

Strong, huh. And what was he supposed to be, then? I’d seen all of it. His opening motion to pull that enormous sword from his back had been blindingly fast — and when he’d brought it down on Alice, he’d deliberately slowed it, by at least half. He’d only meant to gauge us. I’d understood, and I’d answered accordingly. But I knew it now: this hero of the north, under his air of a man who doubted everything, was a monster of power.

I turned back to the girls, gave them a nod, and we fell in behind him.

He led us through the ranks toward the outskirts of the command post, and it was on the way, without slowing, that he finally introduced himself.

"Isaiah... of the kingdom of Florenzia."

Florenzia. An old human kingdom, fallen entirely into the hands of the demons. I knew nothing of it but the name and that end, yet hearing it from the mouth of a man who had fought for it, in his own time, had something strange about it.

For hours after that, we prepared. We discussed strategy with the high command, divided up the positions along the northern rampart, settled who would hold what and when. Isaiah still spoke as slowly as ever, but when he pointed to a spot on the wall or an angle of attack, no one thought to argue.

Then the attack began.

We saw it rise from far off before we heard it. A dark line on the horizon, beyond the fields, swelling and spreading as it drew nearer, until it became a black tide surging toward the wall. Thousands of shapes, clawed, horned, howling, covering the plain from edge to edge.

On the rampart, the soldiers pressed together, spears gripped tight, breaths short.

"Hold your positions!" someone barked along the wall-walk. "They do not get through!"

Isaiah, for his part, went down.

Without a word, he stepped over the parapet and dropped to the other side, at the foot of the wall, where the wave would strike first. He planted his great black shield in the earth, drew his sword, and waited, alone, a mountain of steel set before a tide.

I jumped down after him. No point letting him have all the fun on his own.

Alice stayed up high, on the rampart, from where she took in the whole field. Seorin chose a stretch of wall a little apart, her two katanas already drawn.

And the wave hit us.

The first demon to reach Isaiah shattered against his shield and was flung back like a wisp of straw, breaking two of its own in the fall. The black blade followed, immense, sweeping the space before him in a single arc — and half a dozen bodies opened at once, mown down at chest height.

He struck slowly. But every blow carried off everything in front of him.

On my side, I didn’t have that raw strength, and I didn’t need it.

I flowed into the stream rather than meet it head-on, letting Worldflow choose my footing before I even thought of it. A demon charged; I passed under its arm, Naia opened its belly, and I was already pushing off its collapsing body to throw myself at the next. Where there were three, I slipped between the three, and the three fell before they’d worked out which one to aim for.

Water rose along my blades with every motion, cutting cleaner than steel alone, and I had only to follow the current running through me, that single thread where each movement called up the next without a dead beat.

Farther off, Seorin danced.

It was the only word for it. Her two katanas whirled around her in an endless ballet, and the wind followed them, extending each blade with an invisible one that cut well beyond her reach. The demons entered her radius and did not come back out — cut clean, in two, in four, before they even reached her. Not one touched her. Not one came near her twice.

And above all of it, there was Alice.

I felt her before I saw her. A constant warmth at my back, her healing closing my gashes as fast as I took them, her reinforcements making me quicker, stronger, without my having to think about it. She held all three of us at once, with no apparent effort — Parallel Mind at work, that faculty of doing ten things at a time without ever running dry.

Then, when the wave grew too dense, she struck.

A hand raised toward the red sky, and lightning came down in a sheet over the plain, a web of white bolts running from one demon to the next, pinning dozens in a single stroke before they reached the wall. The harsh light of her spells lit the field in flashes, revealing the scale of what we were pushing back — a sea of bodies without end.

The four of us were driving back an entire invasion.

The demons poured in by the hundreds, and by the hundreds they fell, pinned in place, struck down, cut apart, without a single foot crossing the line we held. Isaiah on the ground like a rock against which the tide broke, Seorin and I opening two furrows of carnage on his flanks, Alice above us healing us, carrying us, and blasting the rest.

The soldiers behind us had only to watch.

They’d fallen silent little by little, spears lowered, gazing at four figures holding on their own what an entire army had never managed to contain. And for the first time since we’d arrived in that doomed city, I had the feeling we could really save it.

It had been going on for hours. The wave didn’t weaken, but neither did we, and not a single demon had yet touched the stone.

Then something changed.

Far off, the tide split in two, drawing apart before something that advanced through it — and the demons’ howling fell quiet, as if they themselves were recoiling from what was coming.

He appeared, before us.

Lazaüs.

This time, he struck no pose, made no theatrical gesture. He didn’t even introduce himself the way he had in our present, at the castle. He merely raised a finger toward Isaiah, the most advanced of us all, and a sphere of black mana shot straight at him.

The blast threw me back several meters, and I landed a little apart, my eyes still fixed on Lazaüs.

"You all right?" I called.

No answer.

A dull surge of panic rose in my chest, and I turned my head to the left, toward the spot where he stood.

He was still there. Standing. His shield ground to fragments, and where his stomach had been, a gaping hole through which the blood ran, as it ran too from his mouth. His eyes empty. Dead. Standing.

And something broke in me.

Because I’d seen this scene before. The spell at the castle. Anthonius, taking the same sphere of black fire in my place, left standing exactly as Isaiah was now, dead before he’d even fallen.

I stopped thinking. Rage swept over me all at once, and I threw myself forward with everything I had, Worldflow carrying me straight at Lazaüs, a howl of fury torn from the depths of my throat.

But before I reached him, the world froze.

Then flowed backward. Everything unwound before my eyes — the wave, the blood, Isaiah, Lazaüs — while the rage still gripped my gut with nowhere left to pour itself out.

And I found myself at the center of the square, back at the start, surrounded by the six other heroes, as if none of it had ever happened.

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

[ Loop completed: 2 ]