Summoned as an Infinite Evolution Hero with My Yandere Stepsister

The guards left me at the door and didn't wait for it to close.

Inside, the room hadn't moved. The lamps were still burning, the table was still there with the remains of the meal on it, and the seven of us were suddenly six too many. Two men were asleep on cushions where they'd fallen. Hercules had his back against a bench and his eyes shut. The one whose name I still didn't know was in the bath, arms spread along the stone rim, head back, not moving.

Blackbeard was awake. He looked up as I came in and I watched him take in that I was in one piece.

"They wanted what?"

"To talk."

"About?"

"Nothing useful."

He kept looking at me and I knew perfectly well that he knew I was leaving things out. He also knew that pushing on it now would get him nothing, and he'd been reading men for longer than I'd been alive.

"There's food left," he said instead.

"I'm going to take one of the rooms. I need to be on my own for a while."

"To do what?"

"To think about something."

He grunted, which from him could mean a great many things, and let his head fall back against the bench.

I took the furthest door and closed it behind me.

The room was small and plain, a bed, a low table, a lamp burning in a bracket, a bare stone floor. I sat down on the floor with my back to the bed, put my hands on my knees, and stayed like that for a long time without doing anything at all.

Infinity contains everything.

That's it. That's all I got out of a creature that has seen heaven from the inside, and he said it while eating an apple and had me thrown out for asking him to be clearer.

So either it means nothing and he was amusing himself.

Or it means everything and I'm the one who can't read it.

I held out my hand in front of me, palm up.

"Infinite Arsenal."

Nothing, obviously. The chains were still on my ankles and nothing had changed since the cage. I'd known before I said it. I said it anyway, because that's how you start, by checking that the wall is still where you left it.

All right. Think properly.

What have I actually been doing, every time I've used it?

I closed my eyes and went back through it.

The clearing, the first time, with something coming at me and my hand going out on its own. The castle courtyard. The mist. The white hall with the relics. Every single time it had been the same movement — I wanted a weapon, I reached, and something came. A blade, always. Sometimes two. Once a spear, when a blade wouldn't have reached.

Weapons. It's always been weapons.

Because it's called an arsenal, and an arsenal holds weapons, so I've spent months asking it for weapons.

I opened my eyes.

And he said infinity contains everything.

Not every weapon. Everything.

Something turned over in my chest and I got up and started walking the length of that room, three paces one way, three paces back.

So what have I been doing? I've been standing in front of a thing that contains everything, and asking it for a sword.

Every time. Every single time.

I've been treating the whole of it as a rack of blades because of the word somebody put on it.

I stopped in the middle of the room.

Then the excitement drained out of me as fast as it had come, because a thought arrived behind it and shut the whole thing down.

And so what?

Say it contains everything. Say I could pull out a chair, a horse, a house. It doesn't matter. The chains are on. The System is cut. Whatever is in there, I can't reach it, and knowing what's on the other side of a wall doesn't get you through the wall.

I sat back down on the floor.

Unless.

Unless the Arsenal isn't System.

I stayed very still with that one.

Worldflow is gone. My mana is gone, and the place where it sits doesn't even exist anymore, I checked in the cage and there was a flat cold wall where it used to be. Every skill I have, gone.

And he saw my power. Through the chains. He said so himself.

How?

How does a thing sitting in a box above an arena see something that's supposed to be severed?

I got up again, and I couldn't sit still after that.

I paced. I paced that room in a way that would have looked absurd from outside, three steps, turn, three steps, turn, with my hands moving in front of me as though I were arguing with somebody.

Take it from the other end. Forget how to open it. Ask what it is.

What is infinity?

Everything. Fine. That's what he said. But that's not an answer, that's another word.

I stopped.

What is everything?

I sat down on the edge of the bed and put my head in my hands.

Everything that exists. Every object, every weapon, every thing anyone has ever made. That's a lot but it's not infinite, that's just very large. There's a last item in that list somewhere.

So everything that could exist. Every object that anyone could ever make, including the ones nobody has made yet.

That's bigger. That's much bigger. Is that infinite?

Maybe. But then how does it know? How does a thing hold what doesn't exist yet?

I laughed out loud in that empty room, once, and the sound was unpleasant.

Listen to yourself. You're sitting on a floor in a demon prison arguing philosophy with nobody while somebody downstairs waits to be killed by you.

Keep going anyway.

If everything is in there, then nothing is in there too.

I lifted my head.

Nothing. Emptiness is a thing. If the set contains everything, it contains the absence of things. It contains the gap. It contains what isn't.

So what does that give me?

Nothing. Literally nothing. It gives me a headache.

I lay down flat on my back on the stone floor and stared at the ceiling.

What am I even doing.

I'm trying to reason my way to it. I've been at this for hours and every road ends the same way, at a word that means a bigger word.

You can't think your way into a thing like this. Nobody ever opened a door by defining it.

I put my hands flat on the stone on either side of me and I made myself go quiet.

So stop defining. Feel for it.

You did it in the water.

That stopped everything.

You did it in the water. You couldn't see them coming, so you shut your eyes and you felt the water move ahead of them, and it worked. Cut off from the System, cut off from mana, with aldranite on your ankles, and it worked.

That wasn't Worldflow. There was no weave, no color, nothing I've seen for months. But I knew where they were.

So something got through.

I sat straight up.

Something got through the chains.

I closed my eyes and I tried to do it again, right there, on that floor.

I reached out with whatever it was I'd used in the basin, that thing without a name, and I felt for the room. The air on my face. The stone under my palms. The heat of the lamp on my left cheek. The vibration of somebody moving in the main room next door.

All of it was real, and all of it was ordinary, and none of it was what I was looking for.

Deeper.

I stopped listening to the room and listened for the place inside where my mana used to be, that flat cold surface my will had struck and come back off in the cage.

It was still there. It was still flat. It was still cold.

I pressed against it anyway, for a long time, with nothing to press with.

Come on.

Come on. Something.

I sat there in the dark behind my eyelids until I lost track of how long I'd been at it. My legs went numb and I didn't move them. Sweat came up along my back. At some point my breathing had slowed enough that I couldn't hear it anymore, and there was a stretch where I don't think I was anywhere at all.

And nothing happened.

I opened my eyes and the lamp had burned down a long way.

Nothing.

I got up and my legs nearly folded, and that was what did it.

I turned around and I put my fist into the wall.

"Nothing!"

It hurt and I did it again. The stone didn't care.

Months. Months I've been carrying this thing and I've never once asked what it actually is. I opened my hand and something came out and I said thank you very much and went to fight.

And then a monster with six wings looks at me for one minute and tells me I don't know how to use my own power, and he's right. He's completely right. That's the worst part of it.

I hit the wall a third time, badly, and something in my hand answered for it.

I stood there with my forehead against the stone and my breathing going hard, and I let it run out.

Then I sat back down.

Fine.

You're angry because you wanted it in one night, and because in a few days they're going to open a gate and something is going to come out of it, and you've got nothing new to meet it with.

That's not a reason to stop. That's a reason to be exactly where you are and keep going.

I looked at my hand, the one I'd hit the wall with, and I opened it and closed it.

Start again from what's true.

One. I have something called an Arsenal of the Infinite, and I've only ever asked it for weapons.

Two. He says infinity contains everything, and he wasn't joking, because he could have said nothing at all and he chose to say that.

Three. Something reached me in the water with the chains on. So the chains don't cut everything.

Four. He saw my power through them. So it's visible from outside even when it's shut off from inside.

Which means it isn't off.

I stopped moving entirely.

It isn't off. It's there. It's on. It's simply that I can't reach it the way I usually do.

The chains don't take it away. They stand between it and me.

And if the road I always take is blocked, then the answer isn't to keep walking into the same wall shouting the name of a skill.

It's to find another road.

I held my hand out in front of me again, palm up, in that small room with the lamp going down.

And this time I didn't say anything at all.

I stopped asking for a weapon. I stopped picturing a blade. I stopped doing every single thing I'd done for months, and I simply held my hand open and thought about the word itself, about everything and about nothing, and about a wall I couldn't see with something on the other side of it that was still burning.

Nothing came.

But something moved.

It was very small. It was so small that I spent the next hour trying to decide whether I'd made it up. A shift, somewhere behind that flat cold surface, like a weight settling on the far side of a locked door.

I stayed on that floor with my hand out, not daring to breathe.

I felt that.

I know I felt that.

Somewhere out in the main room, somebody laughed at something, and the sound came through the door and broke it.

I dropped my hand into my lap.

The lamp went out a while later and I stayed sitting in the dark, going over it again, and again, and again.