162. Why is it Her?
Chapter 162: Why is it her?
Anger is a funny thing.
It doesn’t explode right away. It simmers. It settles in your gut like bad alcohol and waits for a quiet moment to remind you it exists.
I sat in a very expensive chair in a very expensive room, listening to the Duchess talk about diplomacy, logistics, imperial expectations, words stacked on words like they could bury what was actually happening.
All I could see was the notification burned into the back of my skull.
Integrate Freya Mikaelson into the Harem System.
Ten days.
Fifteen total.
Mandatory.
I clenched my jaw hard enough that my teeth protested.
Why?
That was the part that really got me.
Not the sex. Not the absurdity. Not even the death clause hanging over my head like a guillotine with a personality disorder.
Why her?
I’d met Freya a few times before the world decided to make her a requirement.
Once, properly, when she was just a knight with a sharp mouth and sharper eyes, treating me like a suspicious stain on the city floor. We’d slept together then, once. A release. Stress. Two adults colliding briefly before reality came knocking. No promises. No delusions. It didn’t really mean anything, at least not to me.
Then Mission 2.
The beast invasion.
Protect Freya Mikaelson. Ensure survival. Even then I had wondered why her? Was it because of something else in the future that I didn’t know about.
At the time I’d chalked it up to convenience. She was important. A symbol. Maybe I had hidden feelings for her which made the system sent me that Mission to protect her. The kind of person cities mourned loudly if they died.
I did my job. Barely. Dragged her through blood and fire and teeth. Nearly died doing it. The System gave me a D+ like a bored teacher marking homework.
After that?
Distance.
Mission 3 made it very clear I wasn’t supposed to involve her among my allies. Risk increases. Variables multiply. Keep people at arm’s length or they die screaming. It was very clear to me the system belived it as such that I had to keep Freya as far away from that cursed forest as possible. Not to blame her but the damn forest is something I wouldn’t wish for me worst enemy.
So I did.
And now this thing, this cosmic accountant with a god complex, was telling me Freya Mikaelson wasn’t optional. What is it with her? Do I really have feelings for her deep underneath? I thought I was into Gwen but maybe I’m mistaken.
I glanced at her.
She stood rigid near the wall, armor immaculate, face unreadable. Knight-Captain Freya. Duty given human form. The kind of person who woke up every day already tired of the world and carried on anyway.
Ordinary.
That was the infuriating part.
She wasn’t some hidden demigod. No Null bloodline aura. No overwhelming presence. No cosmic hum like the Philosopher’s Stone. No Ki. No anomaly.
Just a woman who trained hard, followed orders, and believed in things like responsibility and borders.
Beautiful, yes. Anyone with functioning eyes could see that. But beauty wasn’t rare on Ros. Hell, it wasn’t rare in Torak.
So why her?
The System didn’t do coincidences. It did pressure points.
Which meant Freya wasn’t special because of what she was.
She was special because of what she represented.
Erik’s daughter.
The city guard.
Duty over desire.
Order over chaos.
And me?
I was the opposite of all of that.
The realization made my stomach twist.
This wasn’t about sex. It wasn’t even about her.
It was about forcing a contradiction. Making me entangle myself with someone whose entire existence was tied to a system I didn’t belong to.
A leash made of people.
I hated how clever it was.
The Duchess finished speaking. The room went quiet.
“Kaizen,” she said calmly, “you will accompany the Imperial Envoy when they arrive. This is not a request.”
I nodded automatically, my mind elsewhere.
Survivor #4019.
That number echoed louder than anything else.
I’d never had a number before.
Names mattered. Numbers were inventory.
I’d been Kaizen since the cave. Since the goblin chief. Since blood and hunger and desperation taught me the rules of this place.
But now?
Now I was Survivor #4019.
Which meant there were others.
Had been others.
Thousands of them. Meaning I was the 4019th in a long list of survivors since the beginning of time or I am just one of them currently active in the world.
I pictured a long, invisible graveyard stretching across worlds. People with different faces, different strengths, different failures, all reduced to percentages and post-mission reports.
How many of them had refused?
How many had tried to game the System?
Hide from it?
Protect someone it wanted to break?
I exhaled slowly.
39 percent.
That wasn’t a warning.
That was a threat.
I looked at Freya again, really looked this time. The tension in her shoulders. The way her hand hovered too close to her sword, like it was the only honest thing left in the room.
She hadn’t heard the notification. She didn’t know she’d just been turned into a condition for my continued existence.
And somehow, that made me angrier than if she had.
Because when this went wrong, and the System always planned for wrong, it wouldn’t just kill me.
It would kill the parts of her life she hadn’t agreed to gamble.
I felt my hands curl into fists.
Not at her.
At the thing watching us both from outside the universe, checking boxes.
For the first time since arriving on Ros, the thought of killing the System didn’t feel abstract.
It felt personal.
Whatever the Imperial Envoy was, whatever trap waited on the road to Avigate, whatever sick experiment this mission was meant to be—
I would survive it.
Not because the System demanded it.
But because I was done letting it decide who I was allowed to care about.
And if it wanted to use Freya Mikaelson as leverage?
Then it had just taught me exactly where to aim back.