Summoned as an Infinite Evolution Hero with My Yandere Stepsister

But just as he was charging, everything stopped.

Not because the loop had ended, or because we’d cleared the trial and the world was about to flow back a thirteenth time toward its first morning.

That wasn’t it.

The black mana froze between Lazaüs’s hands, suspended mid-gather. The demons still swarming at the foot of the wall went rigid all at once, jaws open on cries that never came out. On the ramparts, an archer stayed with his arm half drawn, arrow nocked, unable to finish the motion. Even the wind dropped.

And a pressure came down over the city.

It was nothing like anything Lazaüs had put out until then. His aura was rage, a burning thing that closed your throat and made you want to swing or run. This one wanted nothing at all. It was simply there, immense and indifferent, and under its weight my knees folded without my having decided to kneel.

Around me the soldiers went down one after another, faces against the cobblestones, some of them retching, others curling up and whimpering like children. Isaiah himself, the colossus who’d taken eight blades without giving ground, put a knee to the earth and stayed there.

What is this?! What the hell is going on?!

Then I saw her.

She was standing in the air, facing Lazaüs, barely a few meters from him.

A little girl.

Her skin was chalk-white, so pale you might have believed no drop of blood had ever run beneath it. Her blond hair fell to her bare feet and floated around her with the slowness of weed in a current, stirring on its own, alive with a life that wasn’t its own. She wore a dark dress, plain, almost austere.

And her eyes were red. Not like Alice’s, not that deep garnet I loved looking at — hers were lighter, sharper, and they shone against the gloom of the sky.

When her lips moved, I caught the points of her canines.

I recognized her instantly.

Lamielle.

One of the Seven Calamities of the demon world. The first vampire ever born into this world, one of the oldest creatures I’d ever heard tell of, and one of the most powerful in existence.

But even knowing nothing about her, even without that name surfacing from the back of my memory, I think I would have understood. My body understood before I did. Every muscle was shaking, cold sweat was running down my spine, and my whole being was screaming the same thing over and over with a humiliating clarity.

You’re nothing. Next to her, you’re nothing at all.

And that wasn’t the worst of it.

My instinct wasn’t telling me to run. It wasn’t screaming at me to bolt, to hide, to save my skin. It was telling me something else, and it was infinitely worse.

Don’t move. Don’t do anything. Don’t draw attention to yourself. You’re just a bag of blood waiting to be picked up.

So I didn’t move.

She spoke, and her voice finished turning my stomach. It was high and clear and childlike, the voice of a little girl asking for dessert — laid over this thing that was crushing an entire city without lifting a finger.

"I see you’re having trouble, Lazaüs, since the city is still standing."

She turned her head toward the plain, toward the collapsed mountain of flesh that was still missing its torso.

"And your little toy is dead as well, which is rather pathetic when you think about it."

"Yes, madam, it is." Lazaüs had lowered his head. "And I have no excuse to offer you."

Madam.

That word hit me harder than anything else. Him, who’d just explained to us in the voice of a preacher that the whole world was refuse and himself along with it, who’d floated above us with his eight arms and his wings of black gears — he’d folded those wings and bowed his neck like a boy caught misbehaving.

"I imagine I was too gentle in the way I raised you, and this is the result it gives."

He flinched. A shiver ran across his shoulders, brief, quickly swallowed, and he said nothing more.

And there, despite the pressure pinning me to the ground, despite the fear sawing through my legs, my brain started turning again.

So he’s afraid? Lazaüs is actually afraid?!

This demon who’d ground us down several times over, who’d razed an entire front with an offhand gesture, who talked about perfection with the assurance of a man who’d seen God — he’d been raised. By her. And he was still trembling from it.

His quest for the perfect creature, his disgust with himself, that certainty of being a reject incapable of amounting to anything... where exactly did all that come from? From him? Or from what had been made of him?

Was he himself a creation? A thing shaped from nothing by a superior being, who’d never had any say in what he would become?

And there was something else.

Lazaüs had said the Demon King was the only perfection he knew of. The only one. He hadn’t named Lamielle. He hadn’t judged the creature he bent his neck to worthy of that word — one of the Seven Calamities, the first vampire in the world.

So what about this Demon King? What kind of strength could he possibly have to be called perfection? Who was he, for Lamielle herself to be dismissed as refuse next to him, by a Lazaüs who feared her this much? And were we really going to have to face a being like that one day?

I didn’t get any further.

Lamielle turned her head toward us.

"I did sense that something was wrong in this place..."

Her red eyes slid over the group, pausing a fraction of a second on each of us, and I felt that gaze pass over me the way a blade passes over a throat.

"Ah, I see. So you didn’t fail after all, my dear student, and I may have been a little harsh in my words just now."

"What...?" Lazaüs raised his head, plainly thrown.

She lifted a finger and pointed it toward the wall.

"That child you see over there is Isaiah Belmort, a hero from another world, and the one holding the bow beside him is Adam Kilza, who comes from exactly the same place."

Then her finger swung slowly toward the three of us.

"But those three don’t exist in this world, they have no business being here, and that is precisely why you should never have failed."

She brought a hand to her chin, her head tilted slightly, in the pose of a little girl working through an arithmetic problem.

"I see, so we’re in a false timeline, a simple rewriting of a time that never really happened."

She lowered her eyes to her own arms, turned them over, examined her white palms with a placid curiosity.

"Which means we aren’t even real, you and I, only copies of what once took place."

She figured it all out? In a few seconds? Knowing nothing about the tower or the loops, just from looking at us?

"But then... who are they?" Lazaüs asked.

"That’s a very good question, and I suppose all we have to do is ask them."

She smiled, and her canines showed in full.

Her red eyes pulsed with an intense glint.

And everything was crushed.

It wasn’t a spell. Nothing left her, nothing shot out, nothing flared. The pressure already bearing down on us was simply multiplied, as if someone had decided that gravity, in this exact spot, would now be worth ten times as much.

I collapsed face-first against the stone. Around me, for dozens of meters, everything still upright was flattened in the same motion — soldiers, demons, corpses that were already dead flattening with a soft wet sound.

Then bones started to give.

The screaming rose from everywhere at once, animal cries, sounds no human throat should be able to produce. A man two paces from me had his ribcage cave in all at once, like a box someone sits down on. Another clawed at the cobblestones calling for his mother, his fingernails torn away.

Isaiah was holding on, on all fours, his shield in pieces beneath him, and I could see blood running from his nose and his ears. Adam had disappeared behind his battlement and had stopped shouting.

Me, I couldn’t breathe anymore. My cheek was crushed against the stone, my ribs were protesting, and Apotheosis was no help at all — the skill could keep me from feeling exhaustion, not from being crushed.

Move. Move, damn it—

My arm didn’t rise a single centimeter.

Through the film blurring my vision, I saw Alice.

She was on her knees too, one knee only, one hand planted in the earth. And she wasn’t screaming.

Lamielle drifted down toward us and pointed a finger her way.

"You, over there, why are you pretending to be weak?"

The blood was pounding so hard in my temples that I thought I’d misheard.

"And why not kill Lazaüs much sooner, when you had every means to do it?"

... What?

Alice didn’t answer. She’d raised her head, her white hair pressed flat against her face by the pressure, and she held the vampire’s gaze without blinking.

What is she talking about? Alice, strong enough to kill Lazaüs? The same Alice who only has healing skills and lightning?

My vision was cracking at the edges, black eating in around the whole rim, and I clung to those words the way you cling to a ledge. There was something there. Something enormous, something I hadn’t seen, something that maybe explained—

"Well, it isn’t so important if you’d rather not answer me, so just tell me—"

She stopped.

Her gaze had fallen on me.

And it didn’t merely land. It sank in. I felt it pass through me, rummage somewhere under my ribs, turn over things I didn’t know I possessed, with the thoroughness of a little girl taking a toy apart to see what’s inside.

Then her face changed.

The placid curiosity vanished, and what replaced it, on those child’s features, terrified me more than anything that had come before.

Surprise. Complete, brutal surprise, the kind belonging to a being who hasn’t discovered anything new in millennia.

"You?" Her voice had climbed a notch. "You! Why—"

And the world went out.

[ ERROR! ERROR! ERROR! ]

[ UNAUTHORIZED INTERVENTION BY THE TOWER IN THE EVENTS OF THE TRIAL. ]

[ Calculating situation... ]

[ Situation assessed as disrupted by the strength granted to an avatar. ]

[ Recoding avatar... ]

[ Situation restarted. ]

Time flowed backward.

Not to the first morning, not to the square and the seven heroes gathered there — only by a few seconds, barely enough for me to find myself on my knees on those same cobblestones, my chest still tight, the memory intact of what had just happened and that no one else seemed to have lived through.

Lamielle floated once again facing Lazaüs, her head tilted slightly.

Except this time, she said something else.

"A situation the Demon King’s strategist did not see coming has just occurred, and we’re all being summoned to his castle."

"And the attack on the city?" Lazaüs asked.

Lamielle turned her head toward us.

I flinched in spite of myself, my whole body remembering the weight, the sound of bones, that gaze that had opened me like a book. My hands closed around the grips of Naia and Laia without my having asked them to.

She did nothing.

Her red eyes slid over us without stopping, without really seeing us, with the indifference you’d give a wall, and she turned back to her student.

"It’s of no great consequence, we’ll come back and take it another time, and it’s better not to keep the King waiting any longer."

She took hold of his arm.

And the two of them were gone.

The pressure vanished with them, all at once, so abruptly that I pitched forward onto my hands, dragging air into my lungs. Around me, the demonic tide had begun to ebb toward the horizon, abandoning the walls, drawing back like water going out.

And the windows opened before my eyes.

[ Trial complete. ]

[ The city of Akhartenzia has not fallen. No great hero has perished. History has been rewritten. ]

[ Loops completed: 13 ]

[ You entered this tower as seven strangers who could not agree on anything, and you leave it as something better. Trust and mutual aid carried you to the end of this trial, exactly as they carried your elders to the end of theirs. ]

[ The first floor acknowledges you. ]

[ Each hero who has passed this trial is granted one relic of the ancients. Only one. Choose carefully — what you leave behind here, you will never see again. ]

The landscape faded.

The city, the ramparts, the red sky, the blood on the cobblestones, Alice’s white flowers — all of it dissolved in the same motion, and I found myself somewhere else.

Alone.

A white hall stretched around me, so vast I couldn’t make out the far end of it. Display stands lined up as far as the eye could see, evenly spaced, each bearing an object set beneath a glass dome, and the light fell on them without my being able to say where it came from.

Weapons. Rings. Books bound in cracked leather. Things I had no name for.

An endless museum.