Reincarnated Hero System

“Are they homunculi?”

“Close, but they’re Automations.”

Jamie corrected him with a brief smile, then stepped forward, holding up the keys he’d collected from Artemisia’s father.

“We’d like a table for three.”

“Very well.”

The male automation nodded in acknowledgement while the female automation led them toward a nearby teleportation circle. Once they stepped onto it, they were instantly teleported to the top of one of the massive Sequoia tree stumps.

Despite being severed from their roots, the trees remained alive, likely due to the high energy concentrations in both the atmosphere and the soil.

They were standing atop a massive circular tree stump, more than twenty yards in diameter, high enough that low-altitude clouds floated around them.

The automations guided them to the centre of the stump, where a wooden table awaited. Its edges were adorned with intricate carvings, but the surface was perfectly smooth.

Three wooden chairs encircled the table, and on it were three wine glasses, sets of silverware, and white plates. At the centre stood a candelabrum, though the candles were still unlit.

“Is this a restaurant or something?”

“Technically, yes.”

Evan answered Arthur’s question as they sat down. The Rogue Hero gazed around with a look of nostalgia, just as an unfamiliar voice echoed in the air.

“Huh? Someone found their way to this place.”

Everyone turned toward the source of the voice, spotting a man in a blue jumpsuit, holding a robot arm with wires poking out of the joints, and spinning a screwdriver in his other hand.

His chestnut-coloured dreadlocks hung loosely over his round, engine-oil-streaked face, and his amber eyes widened in surprise as he looked at them.

Seeing him, Evan instantly felt his blurred-out Hero title resonate, and he didn’t need long to know why.

‘Oh, this guy’s a Hero. But he seems…off?’

While he thought this, the man’s gaze landed on Jamie, and recognition lit up his face.

“J-man!”

“Oh, Bryant.”

The man, now identified as Bryant, slipped the screwdriver into his pocket and walked toward them. Jamie stood to greet him, extending his hand, and they exchanged a fist bump that turned into a brief hug.

“What’re you doing here, Bryant?”

“I was running some maintenance on the automations for Revi. I only came out because I saw two of them got dispatched and wanted to see who ended up here at this time.”

Bryant’s response triggered a memory in Evan of the Phoenix he had met the last time he was here, the ‘Realm Lord’ of the RVE.

‘Now that I think about it, there’s a memory of her in my ‘Prisma’ book…’

Evan’s thoughts were abruptly interrupted when Bryant, in shock, dropped the automation arm he had been holding upon seeing him.

“What the-?! How old are you?!”

He suddenly asked Evan his age, and though Evan was slightly confused by the outburst, he answered truthfully.

“16.”

‘Come to think of it, would I become 17 when October comes around? It wouldn’t be up to a year, would it?’

Once again, Evan’s internal musings were interrupted by Byrant’s exclamations.

“Just 16?! What the hell happened?!”

His words lacked context, but Evan understood the reason for the man’s shock even without that.

“My World’s perfectly fine. I’m just temporarily separated from it for a while.”

Evan responded to Bryant, while Jamie provided the puzzled Arthur with the necessary context to make sense of the conversation.

“Byrant here is a Rogue Hero, just like Evan. The same way Heroes can identify each other on sight, so can Rogues.

Most times, Rogue Heroes are usually Heroes who’d survived the destruction of their home worlds, so Byrant is worried that Evan might have had his home world destroyed at such a young age.”

When Jamie explained this, Arthur’s confusion cleared up, and the conversation made more sense.

Bryant then turned to Arthur, his eyes widening ever so slightly as he asked,

“Aren’t you that godslayer guy who made a mess on Toverus?”

“One and the same.”

Arthur responded, extending his hand in greeting as he introduced himself.

“Arthur Vaughn. Progenitor godslayer.”

“Byrant Locks. Spirit King.”

Bryant shook Arthur’s hand, surprising the teen godslayer a little as he hadn’t expected to meet a Race King so casually.

He didn’t seem to notice Arthur’s surprise, though, as he picked up the automation arm he’d dropped and refocused on Evan.

“You said you were separated from your world temporarily, right?”

“Yeah. It’s complicated to explain.”

Despite Evan’s concise response, Bryant didn’t press him for details. Instead, he asked a question to get a general understanding of the situation.

“The reason you got separated…is it related to your efforts to protect your world?”

“Yeah. Tried to stop a bunch of lunatics from wiping out the entire continent. They still ended up killing about 2.5 million.”

Bryant watched Evan’s body language closely, noticing how the boy seemed downcast when he mentioned the deaths he’d failed to prevent.

The Spirit King rubbed his chin, sinking into his thoughts for a few seconds before speaking.

“Hey, Kid. Come with me for a second. I got some advice for you.”

His tone was serious, and he stowed the robot arm into subspace before gesturing for Evan to follow.

Evan glanced at Jamie, and Bryant noticed, letting out a dry laugh.

“Don’t worry. If J-man brought you here then you’re obviously not someone I can mess with. He’d kill me before I can try anything funny.”

Jamie laughed at Bryant’s words, but both Arthur and Evan noticed that he didn’t deny them.

Shrugging, Evan stood up, and Bryant led him over to an empty table a few meters away.

Once Evan was seated, Bryant snapped his fingers, conjuring a barrier around them to keep their conversation from reaching any nearby ears, and then began to speak.

“All right, where do I begin?” he said, a thoughtful edge to his voice. “Let me tell you a little story.”

Evan stayed silent, sensing this was more than just a simple anecdote.

“A bit over a thousand years ago,” Byrant started, “back when I was still deep in the Hero business, I was the leader of the Heroes in my home world. And there were quite a lot of us… about 15.”

Evan’s eyes widened. “Fifteen?!”

Byrant nodded with a faint smile, as if he’d expected that reaction. “Yeah. A whole Fifteen. That should tell you just how bad our world’s situation was. We needed fifteen Heroes just to deal with all the bullshit.”

He chuckled dryly. “And let me tell you, every single one of us was occupied almost every second of the day. We had so much on our plates. Invading threats from other worlds—because, of course, it was an Apex Planet. Everyone wanted a piece of it. Invaders trying to steal resources, colonizers trying to set up roots, monsters running wild across the surface, not to mention the natural disasters and some of the… nastier things like Beasts of the END that just existed there naturally. It was hell.”

Byrant pressed his fingers to his forehead, as though recalling the headaches he’d had to deal with then.

“But we did our best. We fought, pushed the invaders back, and cleared out a lot of the threats.

Things started calming down bit by bit, and we finally had some breathing room. Enough breathing room to shift our attention from external threats… to the internal ones.”

He let out a sigh, the memory clearly not a pleasant one.

“And that’s where things got messy. We Heroes came from different continents. Once we weren’t constantly fighting off outsiders anymore, well, old grudges resurfaced. Tensions started boiling over. Intercontinental wars broke out. And, like it or not, we got dragged into it.”

Byrant gave a bitter little laugh. “I stayed neutral. Or at least I tried to. I made it a point not to intervene in those wars. I figured we were Heroes of the world, not Heroes of some squabbling kingdoms.

But the leaders of those continents… they didn’t care about that distinction. They wanted us involved. They needed us involved.

At one point, they even started taking drastic steps to force our hands.”

Evan frowned, already sensing where this was going.

“Some of my colleagues had their families taken hostage. The lives of their loved ones were threatened if they didn’t fight for one side or the other.”

When he said this, Evan sighed, his brows still furrowed.

“Just saying,” he muttered, “but if I was in that situation, I’d probably take their own family members hostage too. So this way, we both have hostages, and it’s a question of who’s going to release—or kill the others first.”

Byrant chuckled at Evan’s words. “Ha! You sound like you’ve got some violent tendencies, kid.”

Evan only shrugged, lips behind his mask twitching in a half-smile.

“I would neither affirm nor deny that.”

Bryant laughed properly this time, shaking his head. But his laughter didn’t last long as his expression turned serious again.

“Well, anyway, back to what I was saying. We pretty much had to deal with a lot of bullshit. That’s the best way I’ll explain it.”

He leaned back, gazing upward for a second before continuing.

“At some point, it just became taken for granted that we Heroes would do whatever we were told. As long as it was framed as ‘protecting the state of the world’, it didn’t matter what they asked. We were expected to comply.”

Evan stayed quiet, pulling out one of the strawberries he’d picked up on Aidos. After giving it a quick rinse, he popped it into his mouth.

“And then came another invasion,” Bryant continued. “But this time, it wasn’t one we could blame on someone else.

Some idiots from our world had pissed off dignitaries from another world, and it spiralled into a full-blown war. Suddenly, we were fighting again—not because we were defending our planet from random conquest, but because of the mistakes of a few morons.”

He gave a short, dry laugh. “And, of course, the same people who treated us like pawns came crying to us again.

‘Oh, Heroes, save us.’ ‘Oh, Heroes, it’s your duty.’

And after nearly a century of fighting world-ending threats, we did not get a taste of peace and had to march off to fight another damn war that wasn’t even ours to begin with.”

Upon hearing that, Evan clicked his tongue and shook his head, his annoyance clear as day despite it not being his problem.

Byrant noticed his reaction but didn’t comment on it. The man just continued narrating his tale.

“We fought them to a standstill. Managed to beat them back far enough that we could get them to the negotiating table.

So, as the leader of the Heroes, I took half of our group—seven Heroes—and crossed over to their world to negotiate a ceasefire and end the pointless bloodshed.”

After speaking, Byrant paused for a moment, taking a deep breath to calm his rising anger before continuing.

“And while we were sitting at those negotiations…” his voice turned cold, “another group of dipshits back home decided it was a good idea to piss off an entirely different Intergalactic Hegemon.”

And unlike the first guys who decided to invade, these second guys… they didn’t even bother with an invasion.”

“…”

Evan felt a bad premonition creep up his spine, and Bryant’s next words confirmed it.

“They straight up nuked our entire planet.”

“…damn, I hate it when my bad premonitions turn out to be correct. No wonder you kept saying ‘was’ earlier…”

The Spirit King had a mirthless smile on his face upon hearing Evan’s words. Continuing, he said.

“Yeah. They nuked our entire planet… because of the actions of a handful of idiots. Idiots who were lulled into a sense of security, believing that no matter what happened, no matter who they pissed off, the Heroes would always rise to the occasion and protect them.

Idiots who believed that since we were Heroes, it was our job to fix the consequences of their stupidity. Even when the threat was something they themselves invited.”

Evan went quiet, his facial expression slowly fading as he thought to himself.

‘This is awfully familiar.’

He didn’t say it out loud, but the parallels to his own situations across his multiple incarnations were clear as day.

Very clear.

Byrant sighed softly, almost like he was putting down a heavy burden. Tilting his head slightly, he looked at Evan and spoke.

“So why did I bore you with the sad little story of my life?”

Evan didn’t answer, and the man continued.

“It’s simple,” he said. “Seeing you, as young as you are, already dealing with threats powerful enough to disconnect you from your planet… it reminded me of myself, back then.”

He leaned forward, his tone dropping a pitch.

“And so, I wanted you to know something. Whether you’re saving your world, or chasing down some new threat, I want you to remember one thing, kid.”

Locking eyes with Evan, he switched to his True Voice.

|You’re a Hero of your world.|

“…?”

Evan blinked, confused.

He looked at Bryant like he’d just said something blatantly obvious.

“Isn’t that…” Evan began, voice uncertain, “something obvi—?”

|—Not the people who live in it.|

“!!”

Evan went dead silent. His eyes widened in shock.

That extra phrase turned the meaning of Bryant’s words completely on its head in an instant.