Summoned as an Infinite Evolution Hero with My Yandere Stepsister

We ate like animals for a good while.

Nobody was polite about it. You took things with both hands, bit into them, put them down, picked up something else. Fruit juice ran down chins and nobody wiped it off. One man had taken hold of an entire jug and was drinking straight from it, head back, and when he set it down he sat there breathing for a moment without saying anything.

We were all still caked in dried blood. It hadn't occurred to any of us to wash first.

Then the stomachs filled, and the movements slowed, and the voices came.

"Kid."

The man across from me had put down what he was holding. I'd seen him holding a net on my left, on the deck, and I still didn't know his name.

"I've got to say something to you."

He looked for the words for a moment.

"On the ship. When you shouted at us to find weapons. I was hanging off that rail thinking about nothing at all. Without you I'd have stayed there until they came up over the side."

"And on the hull," said another. "The stone. I'd never have thought of that. I'd have died holding onto that wood waiting my turn."

"And the water. Killing them on the rock instead of in the water."

"That was well spotted. That was properly well spotted."

Hercules raised his one arm in my direction without looking up from his plate.

"The lad's head works. You can see it straight off."

Then Blackbeard put his hand down on the table.

"It wasn't only his head."

Everybody went quiet.

"He made the calls nobody else wanted to make. Pulling one line back while the other comes forward means choosing who takes the charge. Going into that water first means going in without knowing whether anybody follows you."

He turned toward me.

"And he did it with his stomach open and a dead leg."

There was nothing heavy in the way he said it. He said it the way you state a fact.

"Thank you, kid."

I looked at the table.

"It's not much. I was mostly seeing to my own survival, like everyone else. If I shouted, it's because I needed you lot to hold so that I could hold."

Blackbeard's hand came down on my back hard enough to nearly put me into the dishes.

"Stop that right now."

"Stop what?"

"The modesty. We're not in a drawing room."

He took a jug and filled what was in front of me until it went over the rim.

"A man who goes in first doesn't have to apologize for it. Drink."

The others raised whatever they had to hand. Cups, jugs, bowls, whatever was lying about.

"To the lad!"

"To the lad!"

It cracked out over the table and I drank with them, and it was strong, and it burned all the way down.

Then Hercules put his cup back down and looked at it.

"Right. Now the others."

The noise dropped at once.

He filled it himself, slowly, holding the jug in his one hand, and raised it.

"To the ones still up there."

Nobody moved.

"To Arthur," somebody said.

"To Lucas."

"To the big one, off the second ship. I don't know his name."

"Marek. His name was Marek."

"To Marek, then."

And they kept going. They put out names one after another, in no order, as they came back to them, and each time somebody nodded. Some names fell into silence because nobody else had known the man.

It went on a while.

"To everyone who won't see tomorrow," said Blackbeard at the end.

We drank.

Nobody spoke for a long time after that.

I set my cup down and looked at what was left in the bottom of it.

I have to tell them.

They may not have seen it. I saw it, and I haven't been able to put it down since.

"Can I ask you all something?"

Heads came up.

"Those things, in the water. You've been calling them monsters all day. So have I."

"That's what they are."

"No. I don't think so."

I put both hands on the table.

"They talked to each other. You heard them same as I did. They had a language, always the same word, passing it from one end of the basin to the other. They coordinated without being able to see each other. An animal doesn't do that."

Somebody started to speak and I kept going.

"And at the end, the ones riding the sharks. They threw themselves at our hulls at a speed that killed them outright. All of them. One after another, knowing exactly what was going to happen to them, to bring two ships down."

I looked at them one by one.

"That isn't hunger. No animal kills itself to finish a job."

"Then what was it?" said Hercules.

"The same thing as us."

The silence came down over the table.

"A people. A subjugated people, exactly like us, taken from somewhere and brought here. Somebody told them something and they believed it, and they went up into that water for their own, telling themselves they had no choice."

I turned what was left in my cup.

"We sang before we went in. They screamed a word I couldn't understand. That's the only difference I can find."

Nobody answered straight away.

"And it means something else," I added. "On the sixth day, what they send at us won't be animals either. It'll be another people, under their thumb, with their own dead and their own reasons, and we'll kill them in the sand while the stands scream."

The silence changed character.

A man put down his fruit and didn't pick it up again. Another had started staring at a spot on the table. The one who'd thanked me first had his jaw set and was looking somewhere else.

They'd understood. All of them, at the same time.

It went on a long while.

Then Blackbeard struck the table flat-handed, once, and every head came up.

"We don't have a choice."

His voice wasn't hard. It was worse than that, it was calm.

"It has to be done, lads. Even if it's difficult. Even if the pity gets the better of you. Even if what we kill on the sixth day has a mother somewhere and a name we'll never learn."

He laid both hands flat.

"Because they're not the problem. The problem is sitting up in the stands and applauding."

He looked at each of us in turn and he didn't rush it.

"You want to kill these demons? I do. I want to kill every last one of them, one at a time, every single one who was there today. But for that we have to get out, and to get out we have to win, and to win we have to survive."

"And to survive," said Hercules.

"We kill whatever they put in front of us. Yes."

Nobody argued.

"So we win. We get set free. And then we come back."

They nodded, one after another, without a word, with faces I'd never seen on any of them.

And something began to press down in that room.

I don't know how else to put it. The air got denser around the table, heavier, as though it had turned cold when it hadn't turned cold at all, and it was coming off them, all six of them at once.

I sat in the middle of it, not moving, with the skin standing up on my forearms.

They're cut off from the System. They've got aldranite on their ankles, same as me. Not one skill available to them, not a drop of mana.

And I can feel something.

How much hate does a man have to carry for it to still be felt after everything has been taken from him?

I looked at them differently.

Blackbeard, who'd tied tourniquets under the tridents in the middle of a battle without giving up a step. Hercules, killing one-handed at close range with movements nobody picks up in captivity. The one who kept striking with a point buried in his side. The one who tore a weapon out of a corpse's hands without breaking stride.

What were they, before?

Because these aren't farmers. Not one of them. These are men who knew how to fight, who unlearned it over years in a cage, and who remembered all of it in a single day.

So if they had their skills. If they had access to their mana, their classes, whatever the System gave them before.

What exactly would they be?

I put my elbows on the table.

"Tell me something. Before all this, what were you—"

The door opened.

It didn't open gently. It slammed against the wall and the whole room turned as one.

The jailer was in the doorway, wings half spread, and this time there was nothing amused left on his face.

He raised a hand and pointed at me.

"You."

Nobody around the table moved.

"You're expected. Come."

I looked at Blackbeard. He already had a hand on the edge of the table and was starting to get up.

The jailer didn't give him time.

"Alone. Now."