Summoned as an Infinite Evolution Hero with My Yandere Stepsister

They brought us out of the water on a walkway they'd lowered down to the stone.

Nobody shoved us. Nobody hit us. The winged jailer was waiting at the end of it, and he said nothing at all as we went past him limping, one after another, holding each other up.

He simply watched us go by.

That was already wrong.

Then the corridors.

I expected us to take the way we knew, the one that went down toward the quarters, toward the damp stone and the grey bowls and the smell of thirty men packed in together. But at the first junction they turned us the other way.

The floor went smooth. Then there was carpet.

Real carpet, thick, dark red, running the whole length of the corridor, and our bare feet left prints of blood on it that sank into the pile.

The torches became lamps. The walls became painted walls.

Nobody spoke. I don't think any of us dared.

And at the end, a double door, dark wood, with worked iron fittings.

It opened.

"Bloody hell."

Hercules said it first, and he stopped dead on the threshold.

The man behind him had to push before the rest of us could get in.

It was an apartment.

A main room the size of a guardhouse, with a high ceiling on heavy beams, carpets everywhere, and columns of fabric hanging down from above. Oil lamps burned in wall brackets and gave off a warm, even light with not a single dark corner in it.

Along the sides, doors. I counted several. Bedrooms.

In the middle, a low table long enough for ten men, ringed with cushions and low benches. And on that table there was food.

Whole platters of it. Fruit I didn't recognize, stacked in pyramids, reds, purples, split yellow ones showing pale flesh inside. Bread still warm, by the smell of it. Carved meat on wide dishes. Metal jugs, beaded with condensation, with something in them.

And behind it, against the wall, a bath sunk into the stone with steam coming off it.

None of us moved.

We stood there in the doorway, seven men caked in dried blood, red water still dripping off us onto that carpet, looking at a room we had no business being in.

"It's a trap," somebody said.

"It's not a trap."

"Then what is it?"

A laugh came down on us from the entrance.

The jailer had propped himself against the door frame, wings folded this time, watching all seven of us with an expression I'd never seen on him.

Amusement.

"You really are stupid," he said. "You don't know anything at all."

He came into the room and made a wide gesture.

"This is how it's done. The winners of the Red Harvest are rewarded, generously. All of them. Whatever they happen to be."

He picked a piece of fruit off a platter, turned it between his fingers, and put it back.

"Winners get treated like winners. There's no exception made for humans. This isn't kindness, it's the rules."

Nobody answered.

"And there's something you should know."

He looked around the room, and he took his time about it, and I understood he was waiting for all of us to be hanging on the next sentence.

"If you win the Red Harvest — the whole Harvest — you can be set free."

The silence lasted a second.

Then it broke.

"What?"

"What did you just say?"

"Set free? SET FREE?"

One man nearly grabbed his arm and caught himself at the last moment.

"Is that true? Swear it's true?"

"It happens," said the jailer with a shrug. "Not often. But it happens."

They all went off at once. They started talking over each other, taking each other by the shoulders, repeating the word every way it could be said, as though it might wear out.

Hercules didn't say anything. He was looking at the floor.

And I didn't say anything either.

There.

That's what I've been looking for.

Because since I'd arrived in this arena I'd had no direction at all. No message, no window, no instruction, nothing to tell me what this floor wanted from me. I had corpses, chains on my ankles, a body that wouldn't answer, and absolutely no idea what needed doing to get out.

Now I have a door.

Win. That's all. Win every day of this Harvest, to the end, and walk out of this colosseum through the front.

I already had to win to stay alive. Now I have one more reason, and it's the first thing since I got here that looks anything like an objective.

And once I'm out, I'll finally find out what this second stage wants from me.

Because it isn't here. It isn't in a basin of blood in front of packed stands. Whatever is waiting for me is somewhere else, and I have to get through that door first.

The jailer clapped once and the talking stopped.

"Right. The healers."

They came in.

There were four or five of them, and the silence in the room changed character entirely.

Demonesses. Pink skin, a pale even pink, and a single horn in the middle of the forehead, short, curving back. Long hair down to the small of the back. A slim tail ending in a heart-shaped point that swayed behind them with every step, slowly, never stopping.

And what they had on didn't really deserve the word clothing.

Veils, more like. Strips of pale fabric knotted low on the hip and crossed over the chest, held up by God knows what, leaving a great deal more to see than to imagine. A heavy chest held by almost nothing, spilling over on either side of the fabric, lifting with every breath and pulling at what was covering it. Wide hips, full thighs that brushed together as they walked, and a curve at the base of the back that the cloth followed without hiding a thing.

All of it rolled from one side to the other with every step, and the tail followed the motion.

Seven men who hadn't seen a woman in years.

Somebody made a strangled sound and I didn't look to see who.

"They're here to heal you," said the jailer with genuine weariness. "Only that. Anyone who tries anything else, I come for him personally."

He headed for the door.

"You fight on the sixth day of the Harvest, and the seventh. Not before. Until then you rest, you eat, you enjoy yourselves. You need to be in condition."

He stopped on the threshold.

"The crowd liked you today. So you get to live a while longer."

And he left.

The door shut behind him, and my legs chose exactly that moment to stop carrying me.

I went down backward onto the carpet.

The impact travelled up into the shaft still buried in my stomach and I went white. My mouth opened and nothing came out.

There were voices, somebody shouted my name.

And then somebody knelt down in front of me.

She knelt properly, sitting back on her heels, which crushed all that fabric against her thighs, and she leaned forward to look at my stomach.

What that did to what she was wearing, I saw without having decided to.

She had violet eyes and she noticed nothing at all.

"Don't move."

Her hands opened above the wound and a violet light gathered in them.

She closed her fingers around the shaft.

"This is going to hurt."

She pulled.

It came. The barbs tore through everything they'd caught and I screamed, and the wood came out of my body with a sound I'd rather forget, and she threw it onto the carpet behind her.

Then she laid both palms flat over the wound.

And the heat arrived.

It came up all at once, out of the stomach, into the chest, into the shoulders, up to the back of the neck. A thick slow heat, and not only heat, something that loosened everything it passed through, that took every muscle I'd held clenched for days and let it go one at a time.

My head fell back and I shut my eyes.

It felt good. It felt shamefully good, and it didn't stop.

It went down into my stomach, back up into my neck, spreading into places that had nothing to do with the wound, and I felt my breathing change rhythm without being able to do a thing about it.

I opened my eyes again.

She was bent right over me, close, entirely focused on her hands.

It was costing her. I could see that now. A thin sheen of sweat was catching the light on her throat and running down between her breasts, and the fabric clung to her skin wherever it was wet. Her cheeks had taken on a deeper color than the rest of her. A strand of hair had stuck to her temple and she wasn't bothering to move it.

Her breath was coming shorter, and with every one of them I felt it on my chest.

And there was something coming off her. Not perfume, something else, something warm that went straight to my head and did not help in the slightest.

Her palms slid a few centimeters across my skin and a fresh wave went with them.

I gripped the carpet in both hands.

No.

No, think about something else. Anything else.

Nothing came. Nothing at all.

My skin was burning, my temples were hammering, and under those hands I was nothing but a body being put back together piece by piece, incapable of anything except enduring it.

I turned my head to the side and stared at a point on the carpet, waiting for it to pass.

It didn't pass.

It went on, slowly, methodically, while she closed what was open, and I felt the wound stitching itself back together under her palms, the flesh drawing in, the pain retreating in waves and leaving behind that unbearable well-being climbing all the way to my temples.

Then she sat back a little and breathed out.

I looked down.

There was nothing left on my stomach. Not even a scar, only dried blood around intact skin.

She moved up.

Her hands went over my ribs, the ones the demon had broken on the first day, and I felt something settle back into place inside. Over my left side, opened by a trident in the water. Over my shoulder. Over my cheek, and there her fingers stayed on my face a moment.

And I breathed.

All the way. Right down. For the first time since I'd set foot in this colosseum I filled my lungs to the bottom without anything pulling, and the air came in and I could have wept.

Then she moved down to my left leg.

I watched her do it without believing any of it.

That leg had been dead since the staircase. Dead, a weight hanging off my hip, something I dragged everywhere with me that hadn't sent anything back in all that time.

Her hands settled on the thigh.

The heat went down.

And I felt it.

I felt my thigh. Then my knee. Then, very slowly, like something coming back from a long way off, my calf, my ankle, my foot.

I moved my toes.

They moved.

"Take your time," she said. "It wasn't permanent, it was more like a block. I've just opened the door again."

I was up before she'd finished the sentence.

I came up all at once, on both legs, and stood there in the middle of the carpet with my breath gone.

I bent the left knee. It bent.

I put my whole weight on it. It held.

I took a step, a real one, no dragging, no compensating, no looking for a wall. Then another. Then I took three quick steps sideways just to see, and I pivoted right, and I pivoted left, and nothing went through me, nothing folded me in half, nothing gave.

I stood there with my arms slightly out, looking down at my own feet.

I can walk.

I can run. I can pivot. I can plant my left to strike to the right.

No System. No mana. Not a single skill, only this body and nothing else — but the whole of this body.

So it'll be all right.

Whatever they send out on the sixth day. Whatever comes through that gate. I'll deal with it.

Around me the others were getting up as well.

The man with the opened arm was working his elbow every direction and laughing to himself. Another had started jumping on the spot. Hercules was feeling at his shoulder, the one with nothing to repair, and his face gave nothing away.

And Blackbeard, sitting on a bench, was watching his own hands open and close.

The healers rose, gathered what they'd set down, and went out without another word.

The door closed.

The seven of us stood there in the middle of that room, clean of our wounds and covered in the day's blood, in warm light, in front of a table full of food.

Nobody knew what to do with his hands.

Then Hercules dropped onto a cushion, took a piece of fruit off the platter and bit straight into it.

"Right," he said with his mouth full. "We're not going to let it go to waste."

That released everything.

We sat down around the table, all of us, wherever we could, and for a long while there was nothing but the sound of men eating.

Then somebody set his jug down and looked around at the others.

"Right. Let's talk about everything that's happened, and everything that's coming."