Chapter 3: Ink
I’d been called a lot of things in my life. Free rider was a new one.
The feather had finished unfolding into a girl by the time I turned around small, barefoot, fingers stained dark like she’d been dipping them in something she hadn’t bothered to wash off.
She carried an actual quill, a real feather still attached to the end of it.
She didn’t blink. I noticed that before I noticed anything else about her, which made looking at her considerably harder to keep doing.
"You’re staring," she said.
"You’re not blinking."
"I don’t need to. It’s a courtesy gesture, for people who do." She said it the way someone explains a feature nobody asked about.
"Luna. Administrator, junior grade, assigned to your file specifically because nobody senior wanted it."
"The Lady."
"You’ll meet her again. You already have, technically." A small smile, like she knew something I didn’t.
She reached out and wrote in the air with the quill. There was no parchment, nothing to write on. Just the motion.
For half a second, a single word hung where the nib had passed, dark ink suspended in empty space.
Then it faded, like it had never been there.
I hadn’t caught what it said.
"One rule, before anything else," she said, like the ink hadn’t happened. "Never tell anyone you’re Yuta."
"...Why?"
"Because then someone else hears."
She didn’t elaborate. I decided not to push on something that clearly wasn’t going to give.
"I build interactive software for a living," I said instead, nodding at the panel still floating beside her. "I know a UI when I see one. Fine. There’s a system. I can work with a system. What I want to know is what ’unregistered soul occupying contracted property’ means, and what happened to whoever was actually supposed to be in here."
"Gone. Cleanly, before you ask. There wasn’t a fight over the lease."
"Why me."
"She doesn’t explain her preferences."
"Why Itsuki, then. Why this body, out of every disposable side character in every unfinished novel that’s ever existed."
Luna considered that with her head tilted further than a neck should comfortably go, long enough that I almost asked if she was stuck.
"You survived long enough to ask," she said.
"That’s not an answer."
"It’s the only one you’re getting tonight."
I pressed my palms against my face, felt the unfamiliar give of someone else’s cheeks under my fingers, and decided to test exactly one more boundary before I stopped testing any.
"What if I just end it. This body. Right now."
The panel flickered before I’d even finished the sentence.
[Collection: Nervous System~~Total Lock. Duration: 0:45.]
Every muscle I had seized at once, down to ones I hadn’t known I could feel individually until they were all on fire at the same time.
I went down sideways off the bed and lay there rigid, breathing through my teeth, watching the timer count itself down.
[0:12.]
"Self-termination counts as default," she said. "The Compact collects either way. It’s just less polite about asking first."
[0:00.]
The lock released all at once. I lay there a moment longer than I needed to, mostly out of principle.
When I finally looked over, there were two small ink-dark footprints on the floorboards where Luna had been standing, already fading at the edges, like wet paint drying in reverse.
"Understood," I said, to the ceiling.
"You learn faster than the last one." She crouched to my eye level. "Status."
The panel rearranged itself.
Name: Itsuki Amagi
Title: The Wasted Heir
Class: [None]
Strength →F
Agility → F
Endurance → F
Aether Affinity→ F.
Title Effect: [Wasted Heir→ Aether circulation reduced by eighty percent.]
Ink: 0
Aether.
His old studio’s name.
For a second he wondered if reality had started borrowing from the same naming department.
Every line, the same letter. I’d graded a hundred QA builds with healthier stat blocks than this.
"Four months until the Aurelian entrance exam," Luna said, before I could ask. "At current output, you don’t reach the front gate. You’re carried out before the written portion."
"And Ink does what, exactly."
"Buys edits. Stat points, skills, the occasional rewrite of a scene that already happened, if you’ve earned enough of it. The Lady pays out when you’re interesting. Refuse to be interesting and the balance stays at zero forever, which is its own kind of answer too."
A new line appeared beneath the status block.
[REWRITE TASK 01]
Prevent Aria Amagi from becoming the instrument of House Amagi’s end. In the recorded outcome, Write a different one.
Time Remaining: 4 months.
Failure: Collection, in full.
I read it twice.
I’d spent ten years failing to undo one ending that had already been written for someone I loved.
Apparently the next stretch was going to start with a second one, in a body that wasn’t even mine, for a sister who wasn’t mine either, who already had every reason lined up to hate me before I’d said a word to her.
"Fine," I said, and meant it more than I expected to. "I’ll play."
Luna tucked the quill behind one ear like a pencil and nodded toward the window instead of answering. "Look."
I looked.
The snow outside had stopped drifting sideways and started falling properly, straight down.
In the courtyard below, someone was moving through it like the cold didn’t apply to her.
A girl, silver hair loose down her back, working through a sword form too clean and too fast to be anything but years of repetition, each strike landing exactly where the last one had.
Three servants stood along the courtyard wall, perfectly still, watching her.
She didn’t look up at the window. She didn’t need to know anyone was watching to be worth watching.
"Who—"
"Don’t make her hate you any sooner than she’s scheduled to," Luna said, already turning away, already half a thought ahead of me.
The feather she’d arrived as didn’t reappear. She was simply gone between one blink of his and the next, no smoke, no flourish, the panel folding itself out of the air half a second after she did.
The room finally shut up.
I was still staring at the space where she’d been standing when the knock came.
"Young Master."
A different voice this time. Lower. Unbothered by the title in a way the steward’s had not been.
I crossed the room, dragged the door open on legs that still weren’t entirely convinced they belonged to me, and found silver hair and pale eyes already at eye level with mine, close enough that I forgot to school my expression.
She looked me over once, unhurried, the way you’d check a wound to see if it was worth treating.
"I thought you’d still be unconscious."
The door swung shut before I found a single word to put after that.
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