Chapter 2: New Life? Newborn!
Kingdom Year 225. The royal capital of the Re-Estize Kingdom.
Inside the Aindra family estate, a six-year-old boy lay staring at the blue sky through the window with the vacant expression of someone who had quietly given up on everything.
White clouds drifted across the vast blue expanse, light as feathers, the sky stretching overhead like a boundless sapphire with no edges.
"It really is beautiful. Shame I'm running out of time."
The boy murmured to himself. His face was pretty enough to catch anyone's eye, but there was no smile on it, only a brooding weight that had no business sitting on a six-year-old. A breeze stirred his loose golden hair as if trying to coax him out of his thoughts.
This was Arakaki Tomoya.
The script should have gone something like this: guild leader arrives in another world with ten-plus World Items in hand, dominates everything, wins. Standard power fantasy. What he had actually received was fetal transmigration into a noble family somewhere in the Re-Estize Kingdom.
No power. No items. Combat ability indistinguishable from any ordinary local. Forget dominating anything. Figuring out how to stay alive once the Bone King arrived was the real problem.
Over six years, he had thought through every conceivable reason for how it had gone this badly.
"Maybe YGGDRASIL had a critical bug. When I logged into the Asgard server at shutdown, maybe the bug stripped me of everything before sending me over. And maybe I'm not the only player it happened to. Maybe arriving at max level with full gear is actually the exception, not the rule."
"In that case, if I had just listened to Silshana and stayed with them for the shutdown... I would have ended up as one of the Theocracy's Six Great Gods." The regret sat in his chest like a stone.
Sure, it would have meant the Cathedral of Faltil couldn't come with him. But arriving backed by an entire guild's worth of World Items versus arriving as a helpless infant with absolutely nothing? Not a difficult comparison to make.
"So you're the one who ended up punishing me after all, Hakisha, you..." Tomoya cut that thought off before it finished forming. Keep pulling that thread and he'd actually start crying, and there was still some dignity left to preserve. "Or maybe some ancient Dragon Lord ran a Wild Magic experiment and accidentally dragged me in."
It wasn't an impossible theory. In his previous life, his previous previous life technically, there had been rumors that the greatest Dragon Emperor, while researching Wild Magic, had accidentally torn a connection between two worlds open. The phenomenon had been called the Dragon Emperor's Corruption: players arrived in the New World in waves roughly once every century, earning the name the Centennial Aftershock.
There was also a version of the story where the Dragon Emperor had done it deliberately, hungry for World Items. Either way, Wild Magic was at the center of it.
The newer Dragon Lords could no longer use Wild Magic, but a handful of the ancient ones still could.
"What if some Dragon Lord was trying to use Wild Magic to close the connection and just happened to catch only me in the process?" He refused to believe he could be that specifically unlucky. "Could that villain laugh really have actually cursed me with villain's luck?"
Still, as theories went, it was the second most probable on the list.
"It can't seriously be that a divine semi-truck drove through my wall right before shutdown and got me." He gave himself the daily self-deprecation allowance. It helped, somehow. His mood lifted a fraction.
At least he had landed in a noble family. A commoner transmigration would have left him scraping for basic survival.
As a noble, Tomoya, or rather, to give him his proper name, Lucian Alvein Dale Aindra, carried a title that carried weight. "Lucian" in this world held a subtle connotation of dawn, and naming an heir with that meaning was generally understood as the family declaring its intended successor.
As first-in-line heir to the Aindra family, one of the Re-Estize Kingdom's oldest noble houses, Lucian had not needed to go digging for information. Fragments of overheard conversation alone had been more than enough to sketch a picture of exactly how the nobility conducted themselves.
Every fragment was more appalling than the last. How did each transmigration manage to deposit him in a darker world than the one before?
"Onii-chan, you're spacing out by the window again -- classes are starting, and if you don't go, Cecilia-sensei is going to have words with you." The voice was sweet and completely impossible to ignore. A face like a finely crafted doll appeared before him.
Lucian took back everything he had just thought. Where was the darkness? The world was genuinely wonderful.
Lakyus Alvein Dale Aindra. In the original work, the future captain of Blue Roses -- a faith-based divine magic caster, cleric-warrior type, comprehensive level around 29, having already stepped into the Realm of Heroes.
Right now, though, she was Lucian's twin sister. Beautiful. Having an isekai beauty for a little sister, combined with a noble title to go with it -- if not for the Bone King arriving in thirteen years with that sword of Damocles hanging over everything, Lucian would have been winning at life by every conceivable measure.
"Honestly, onii-chan, if you don't get up right now, I'm never calling you onii-chan again."
"I'm already up." He was on his feet in an instant, straightening his clothes in the same motion.
He had talked her into using that word back when she was still too small to understand the distinction. A perk like that was not to be surrendered easily.
"Brother is so strange. You only have energy when I call you onii-chan." Lakyus looked mildly exasperated.
The isekai setting's convenient universal language meant Lakyus understood perfectly well that "onii-chan" and "brother" were the same word. Otherwise, no amount of big-brother persuasion would have worked. Small as she was, Lakyus had always had her own limits.
Just wait until your chuunibyou phase, Lucian noted to himself. I'm recording every word with a sound-recording spell and you will regret this.
For now, maximum sweetness was the strategy. "Lakyus, let's get going. We can't keep Cecilia-sensei waiting." He pretended the complaint hadn't reached him.
"It's always brother's fault we're late."
Lucian took her hand and broke into a light trot before she could finish making her case. A respectable older brother could not keep accumulating complaints from his younger sister. That was simply how it worked.
They moved quickly through the long corridor, Lakyus's hand in his, footsteps light against the deep red carpet running the length of the hall.
Silver magic crystal lamps lined both walls at even intervals, their soft glow warming the entire space. The fixtures were elegant in their simplicity, the bases cast in the shape of spreading vines reaching up to cradle fist-sized crystals.
These were low-grade magic crystals, requiring a recharge only once a month to burn continuously. Standard lighting for any noble residence -- not extravagant, but well beyond what a commoner household could afford.
It was a sharp contrast to the dim, cramped rental apartment he had spent his previous life in. Lucian paused for a moment without meaning to, actually taking the corridor in.
The walls were lined with portrait paintings of successive Aindra family heads. Stern faces looked down from their frames at each passing descendant, watchful and unforgiving.
Descendants of the Thirteen Heroes. If that connection can be put to use properly, it might be worth something down the line. Lucian filed it away the way he filed most things.
"Onii-chan, faster." Lakyus murmured in mild protest, already pulling ahead through the central courtyard corridor. The classroom was just ahead.
Lucian nodded and gave her the smile that generally settled her worrying, then quickened his pace.
Whatever the future held, for now, he had a sister who needed him.
That was enough.