The Simulacrum - Chapter 70 - Part 3 (Patreon)

"… and so now that elder is the acting clan head, she is now my personal ninja, and I'm technically not the head of the Kage clan, just the boss of the head of the clan. It's like having a cake, and eating it too."

Once I reached the end of my very long-winded and boring explanation of how I stood my ground and technically still refused the narrative's ploy to make me into a ninja daimyo or whatever Baldy-kun called me, the Dracis patriarch sitting by my side let out a thoughtful huff. We were both sitting in the family's limousine, with one of the placeholder chauffeurs in their employ driving the car on the other side of the sound (and apparently bullet) proof glass separating the passenger seats from the driver's.

It was already Saturday, in the early afternoon to be precise, and I upheld my promise to my self-imposed father-in-law to take him along on my visit to the place where my mysterious safe-deposit key belonged. I didn't expect that we would do so in a limo of all things, but at the very least I managed to convince him to ditch the small convoy of bodyguards who were supposed to also come with us. This car was conspicuous enough as is, the last thing I needed was an entire procession to really make sure the Knights would take notice and potentially start questioning my nonexistent loyalty to their cause.

Anyhow, once Abram absorbed my words, he let out a low chuckle and roughly patted me on the shoulder.

"Great work, son! You have a real gift for gathering talented people under your wing!"

"Not really," I denied, but it only made him laugh even louder which, considering the man had no indoor voice whatsoever, was starting to grate on my ears.

"Ha-ha! There's no need to be modest! In fact, would you like to take over the HR department of our business? I'm sure you would do amazingly well, and it would be a great learning experience for running the company in the future."

"I'd like to politely decline, thank you very much," I told my overly eager traveling companion, and thankfully he didn't take the rejection personally.

Since it was a good opportunity, I told him about all the other people 'under my wings', so to speak, including the Fauns and the sentai-wannabes. It was mostly so that we could avoid future misunderstandings, but apparently he thought I was bragging to him about my accomplishments.

"I see, I see! But son, there is one last thing I still don't understand. How did she become a teacher at your school?"

I couldn't help but let out a veeeery long groan the moment he uttered that question. The thing is, I had absolutely no clue either. Or rather, I had an inkling, but it was in no way logical or reasonable. Let's wind back the clock a little, and I'll try to explain what I mean.

So, Mountain Girl and Baldy showed up at my doorstep. I think everything should be clear so far. We negotiated for a while, and as I feared, since Rinne couldn't actually use Onikiri on her own, it presented a loophole for them to try and rope me in. I tried plugging it up by offering to fix some external activation clauses to the enchantment so that anyone could use it, but it apparently only made them even more determined to argue that I was the 'master' of the sword. Either way, after a fairly long and increasingly heated verbal tug-of-war we came to the above conclusion: Rinne would keep her position as the official clan head, Baldy would continue to take care of running the clan with his fellow (if as of yet off-screen) elders, and they would technically be under my command because Rinne became my personal retainer.

Oh yeah. That part. So, apparently giving a sword to a ninja, even if it's their own bloody sword that someone else just 'borrowed' from a while, and them accepting it, is the equivalent of swearing fealty to the person in question. Which was me. Of course, I could have probably learned about this bit of trivia back when I handed said sword over to her, but I was so busy maintaining my anti-harem countermeasures at the time that I kind of slacked on my anti-narrative countermeasures. Oh well, hindsight is twenty-twenty as always.

So far things are fairly straightforward. Got the sword, handed back the sword, now Mountain Girl works for me, the clan works for her, and so the clan technically works for me without me having to become their actual boss. Simple, if a little loophole-abuse-y. But then things went off the rail for real.

First off, since the Kage clan would be now indefinitely operating on Critias, the elder insisted on announcing their plans to move in to the 'feudal lord' of the island, which of course meant Lord Grandpa. This was still logical, and I figured it would potentially forestall any would-be complications on his end. What wasn't logical was that they demanded to do so right away, and after some further arguments, I was convinced to go along with it. At this point I thought it would be a simple matter, and since Rinne was already aware of my Phasing ability to some degree, I kicked Baldy-kun out, had her use their shadow-hiding-no-jutsu or whatnot to get into my shadow, and teleported over to the old man's place.

And it was at this point, ladies and gentlemen, when things really, really went in an unexpected direction. For a start, I had Rinne come back out, after which I explained the gist of the situation to Lord Grandpa while remaining suitably mysterious and ineffable and all that crap. Then he proposed that Rinne should become a teacher.

No, we didn't skip a page in the stage directions. That really just happened, completely out of the blue. More bafflingly, Mountain Girl took it all in stride, even claiming that she already had a bachelor's degree in kinesiology, which was enough to qualify for the job. No, I'm not kidding. Apparently the highly visible monster-hunting ninja woman who spent most of her life traveling around the world to track down all kind of nasty beasts somehow had the time to get a bachelor's degree, because of course she did.

At this point I was fairly certain the Arch-Mage must have been too drunk to properly work with, so we left with a stern warning for him to sober up by the time we came back. An hour later he was in better shape… and he still insisted on making her a teacher in the school for the sake of her secret identity while on the island. I really wanted to ask just what kind of 'secret identity' were we talking about, or why she absolutely 'needed' to have a day job, but it was around this time that I started to get an inkling of what exactly was going on.

Simply put, I ran into a pre-determined plot development. To elaborate, partially based on the discussion I later had with Judy about this entire event: in battle harem narratives, it isn't uncommon that defeated bad guys or important side-characters would enter into the main cast at the end of their arc. Based on this conjecture, there was a good chance that Rinne would, after completing her hunt with me, stay around on the island and in our vicinity. Judy even theorized that she would become our 'Worf', whose role was to get her behind kicked by future antagonists to show that they mean business. It's called 'jobbing', if I remember right.

Whether that was the case was kind of beside the point though. The important bit is that, if she wanted to stay around, there were only two potential options: she would either have to randomly show up like she used to, or she would have to transfer into our school. Since this Simulacrum thing around us was running mainly of battle harem tropes, as previously mentioned, the latter option infinitely more likely. However, she was just a touch too old to become a student, which meant that her only other 'in' to our 'story' was becoming a staff member at the school. Now, I personally would have figured that she would become a janitor, but the ever-nebulous 'narrative' evidently had other plans.

So, in short: if I didn't mess things up with her by taking her sword and giving it back to her, she would've likely ended up becoming a teacher at our school anyway. To facilitate that, her 'backstory' already included the necessary elements for her to do so in the form of her degree, and so when I showed up with her in front of the old bastard, I must have triggered something, and it made Lord Grandpa hire her on the spot. Well, on paper anyway.

Well, either that, or the weird creepy monster-huntress just happened to have the right education and certifications to become a bloody PE teacher. My money was on the narrative shenanigans. Still, as annoying as playing along with some forced narrative bollocks was, it technically wasn't disadvantageous for me to do so, and Mountain Girl was really adamant about the idea, so I ultimately gave up and let a semi-sober Lord Grandpa give her a teaching license. As in, he literally just took one out of his drawer and handed it over to her. Bloody convenient, ain't it?

But anyhow, back to the present. While I internally debated just how I should summarize the above events (sans the narrative bits) to Abram, my dilemma was handily solved by the car coming to a smooth halt in front of an unassuming office building.

"I'll tell you the story on the way back," I told Papa Dracis and used my head to gesture towards our destination. "Let's see what's inside my deposit box first."

"Lead the way then!"

He didn't have to say it twice. We both got out of the car and simply walked into the building. The inside of the building was just as inconspicuous as the outside. It also apparently housed several small businesses, if the information table in the foyer was to be believed, and a quick look at it immediately revealed our goal.

"Ah, here it is! SafeLock Inc.!" Abram exclaimed with the excitement of a little kid, and he even poked the info-board with his finger.

"Let's hope they put all the effort they saved on coming up with a company name into their security," I griped as my eyes followed the arrow pointing towards the nearby stairwell. "I guess it's in the basement."

"Let's go then!"

Abram took the lead, contrary to his previous words, and we both walked down the simple concrete steps. At the bottom we found a fairly rugged metal door with a shiny bronze plaque next to it listing the company name and the business hours on it. Once I was sure we were at the right place, I raised my hand to knock, but before I did so, I first addressed the man next to me.

"So, just for the record: I doubt anything drastic will happen no matter what we find in there, but just in case, if I start acting weird, feel free to restrain me."

"What do you mean by 'weird'?" Abram asked back right away. He took my request unexpectedly seriously.

"For example, if I get taken over by some random magic weapon, or I get my lost memories triggered and start acting up, that kind of thing."

"All right! Don't worry, son! I know forty-seven different incapacitating holds! Most of them won't even dislocate any bones!"

"In that case try to stick to those if possible."

Dad-in-law responded to my comment with a full-on belly laugh, which I figured should have been enough to get the… safe-man? Depositer? Is there even a word for people working in this field? Either way, his laugh probably got their attention, but I decided to knock anyway, since I already raised my hand, and letting it down now would have been awkward.

It only took a couple of seconds for the door to start making odd clicking and clanking noises, and then a small peeking slit opened up on it roughly at eye level.

"Can I help you?"

The voice coming from the other side was low-pitched, nasal, and just a little wooden, and based on the pair of bushy grey eyebrows visible through the slit, it belonged to an older man.

"I would like to retrieve some items from my deposit box," I stated and took the key out of my pocket to show him. The man inspected it for a few seconds and then slid the peeking hole shut, followed by some more clanking noises until the door finally opened.

The first thing that caught my interest on the other side was the enormous stainless steel safe door at the back of the room, the kind you only see in heist movies. It was huge, it was shiny, and it had a smaller, human-sized door in the middle of the enormous main door. The rest of the room looked much less impressive, with one wall being dedicated to rows of filing cabinets behind a small office space, while on the other side there was a small waiting area with a few seats, a coffee table, and an old CRT-TV hanging from the ceiling and displaying some kind of sitcom at the moment.

As for the man who let us in, he was a portly, middle-aged, and conspicuously balding gentleman wearing what I could best describe as an old-timey bank-teller outfit; a pin-striped white shirt, black suspenders, and even a tidy bow-tie. He let us in, locking the door behind us, and then gestured for me to follow after him.

"We have to verify your identity first. Please come this way."

I did as he said, and we walked over to the small office area. It had an old desk with a similarly ancient computer on top, an odd periscope-looking device next to the PC tower, and one of those bright green desk lamps that are absolutely everywhere in offices and banks for some reason.

Anyhow, the depositionator (I decided to go with this term) sat down in front of the PC and began to work on what looked like some kind of DOS interface before he looked at me again.

"Please look into this retinal scanner," he told me as he pointed at the binocular device in front of me, and I did so with only minor reservations. "Hold still. Hold still. We have a match. Thank you for your cooperation."

With that done, he printed out something on an awfully noisy printer under the desk, then got up from his chair and searched through the filing cabinets behind us until he found what he was looking for and returned with a thin A4 manila envelope. From that, he retrieved a document that seemed to be some kind of contract, and after leafing through it once, he placed it in front of me.

"Please sign here," he instructed me, and though I was a little worried about the fine print, I couldn't see anything obviously wrong with it at first glance, so I gave my signature to keep things moving.

"Thank you. Here's your second key." Saying so, he took out another, identical-looking key from the dossier and handed it to me. I must have looked puzzled, as right after that he asked, "Are you unfamiliar with our deposit box system?"

"I admit, it's been a long time, so I could use a refresher."

The depositionator nodded in understanding and broke into a thinly veiled advertisement speech.

"We at SafeLock Inc. pride ourselves on our absolute confidentiality. At any given time, only a single person may be present within the safe-chamber, and we do not maintain any inventory of the items within the individual storage boxes so that no paper-trail or eye-witnesses would infringe on the client's privacy."

"That sounds really irresponsible," I pointed out, but the man simply tapped his fingers at the document I just signed.

"According to the contract, the client acknowledges this fact as a necessity to uphold confidentiality and may not press charges in case of missing items. As for the safety boxes, our company uses a state-of-the-art dual-lock system, requiring the client to insert and turn two keys at once, one of which is held by the client while the other is safeguarded by the company. Once you have deposited or retrieved your items, you must return the second key before you leave."

"Sounds straightforward," a murmured as I looked at the pair of more-or-less identical keys in my hand. "So I figure that means my father-in-law cannot enter with me?"

"No. Only one person at a time," the depositionator repeated with extra emphasis on 'one'.

"Don't worry, Leonard! I'm actually quite intrigued by this company! Say, can I open an account of my own?"

"Certainly sir, just give me a minute," the portly man confirmed with a nod before addressed me again. "Please come this way."

I shared one last glance with the Dracis patriarch, who gave me some encouragement in the form of a thumb up, and then I followed after the man in the suspenders. As expected, he didn't open the entire door for me, only the human-sized one, which was a bit of a bummer. I always wanted to see one of these big doors open in person. Oh well, maybe next time.

Anyhow, the inside of the safe chamber was really simple. It was, in practical terms, a rectangular room with a brown marble floor and white neon lights hanging from above. The walls were covered with white deposit boxes from floor to ceiling; most of them were small, roughly the size of a kitchen drawer, while a few of them were about as big as a wardrobe, and they were all labeled with simple black numbers.

Once I stepped inside, the depositionator unceremoniously locked the door behind me, and I'm not going to lie, for a moment I felt a little claustrophobic. Then I remembered that I could teleport myself out at my own leisure, and then I felt silly instead. But putting my irrational feelings aside, I checked the number on my key, and it only took a couple of seconds to find the corresponding box. It was one of the larger ones at ground level.

"Well, here goes nothing," I muttered as I inserted both keys into the locks and turned them at the same time. At first nothing happened, but then the locking mechanism disengaged with a small hiss and the whole door popped out of the wall. By the looks of it, this was a sliding compartment, so I grabbed hold of the exposed edge and pulled it out. What I found was… well, I had no idea, because the whole thing was covered with a thick canvas.

I unceremoniously pulled the cover off, and underneath it I found… exactly what I expected. Namely, it was a matte black breastplate with an embossed, gold-placed lion-face on the chest. If that didn't make it abundantly obvious, after I took it out of the box I found a helmet under it which was also shaped like a lion head, with an actual fur-trimmed red cape at the bottom.

"Well, that settles it. Lion-knight it is," I grumbled as I spread out the canvas and took everything out of the box piece by piece.

In grand total, there was a full set of matte black plate armor with large spaulders and gold highlights on the chest, greaves, gauntlets, and helmet, a matching black gambeson, a detachable red cape, an amulet, two rings, and most importantly, a sword inside a black leather sheath. It was the last thing I took out, and I paid special attention to it. All the equipment in front of me was glowing in a colorless light, a telltale sign of enchantments, but this thing was in a league of its own, or at the very least on par with the dragon-slaying spear.

I took a deep breath and carefully wrapped my left hand's fingers around the hilt, then pulled it out as I exhaled. When I did so, I was overcome with a strange sense of comfort. The blade in my hand was relatively lengthy, but its hilt wasn't long enough to be considered a proper longsword, so I figured it was some variety of a bastard-sword. It had a blade with an acute profile taper and a double-fuller that reached halfway up the blade, with a string of symbols etched into the flat of the blade between the two fullers. The simple, mushroom-shaped pommel and the slightly curved cross-guard gave the sword a plain but elegant look, and when I swung it once, I felt that it was like an extension of my body.

I was curious and swung it a couple more times, and each time I did so, I could feel something welling up in me. I kind of felt like dry ground that hasn't seen water in ages drinking in a light summer shower. It was strangely invigorating, and I even did a small flourish with the blade to cap things off. Yes, I could say now, with one hundred percent certainty that this sword was definitely made just for me.

"Eh, I still like spears more," I whispered and returned the sword into its scabbard. I might play with it later, but for now, I had other things to look at.

With that in mind, I carefully inspected every piece of equipment, and while I didn't try them all on, the gauntlets fit me like a glove (no pun intended), and the helmet also felt uncannily comfortable on my head. If I had the time I would have loved to take a good look at the enchantments on them, but this was neither the time nor the place to indulge in such things, so I carefully piled everything up on the canvas so that I could tie them into a neat little bundle, and once I made sure my ranges were adequate, I closed my eyes, picked my target, and casually Phased over to the secret base.

"[Ah. Boss,]" Karukk greeted me with only the mildest of surprises when I appeared next to him inside the armory section of the main hall, his eyebrows only rising a little higher when he noticed the package I was holding. "[What is that?]"

"Knight equipment," I told him curtly while simultaneously placing the armor and assorted other items onto the nearby workbench. "Probably mine. Please look after them until I get back."

"[Understood,]" the friendly Faun acknowledged with a salute, after which I immediately returned to the safe room. With my recently extended range I could Phase back without any problems, though if Abram was sitting just a couple of meters further back during his negotiations with the presumed owner of the place, I would have been in a pickle. But let's not discuss hypotheticals here; the important thing was that I have successfully retrieved the contents of my mystery storage box, learned a few new things, and now I only had to lock everything back up and then—

"Huh? What's that?"

My train of thought was once again violently thrown off the rails by a small detail that caught my eyes. When I leaned over to close up the storage compartment, my eyes coincidentally landed on something at the back of the box. It was a white envelope that managed to elude my attention the first time around due to blending into the white bottom of the box, but now that I noticed it, I naturally picked it up.

For a moment I was actually a little nervous. I've originally expected that I might find some clue about my original identity here, possibly in the shape of some identification papers, or maybe some family photos or other memorabilia, but now that the possibility materialized, I wasn't so sure I wanted to know. In the end, I steeled my nerves anyway and gingerly opened the envelope, and I was instantly filled with a mixture of relief and bafflement. Instead of papers, the only thing inside was a key. No, scratch that; two keys, one of which had a number on it.

"The plot thickens," I murmured under my breath and immediately began looking for the corresponding deposit box. It naturally didn't take long to find it, but when I did, I still had to double-check, just to be sure.

By the looks of it, the keys belonged to one of the bigger boxes, which was about as tall as I was and wide enough so that I could easily fit inside of it. I hesitated only for a moment before inserting the keys into the locks and turning them in one smooth motion. The door let out a small hiss and then, after a very long second, it popped open. It was sitting on an odd mechanism instead of simple hinges so that I had to slide it out of the way instead of opening it like a normal door, and when I looked inside, I couldn't help but mutter an incredulous, "You've got to be kidding me."

In the storage locker there was a large, roughly carved rock about the size of two basketballs side to side. More importantly, sticking out of said stone was a lavishly decorated long sword with a pair of dragons coiling around its cross-shaped guard, a lion head for a pommel, and a generous amount of golden filigree on the flat of the blade. Not only that, the whole weapon was shining so bright it took me several seconds to actually adjust to it and be able to take a proper look. As in, it wasn't just giving off a magical glow, but actual light.

The blade itself was stuck deep into the rough, weathered rock, and no matter how I looked it, it appeared about as close to a stereotypical Excalibur expy as one could get. Hell, with my luck, it might actually be Excalibur, or at the very least its off-brand cousin Excelsior or Excruciating or something.

But wait, now that I think about it… didn't the knights have a magic sword stuck in a stone just like this tied to their prophecy? I'm pretty sure I made fun of them for that, so yeah, I'm about ninety percent certain they did. So… what the heck was it doing here?! Why did they put their most important artifact in here? How did they put it in here without anyone noticing? Why was the key in my other deposit box? So many freaking questions, so little sense!

To be honest, I was actually a little tempted to slam the door on this thing and pretend I didn't see it, but knowing my luck (and how things operated around here), there was a very good chance that this 'plot device' in front of me would become important in the near future. As such, the prudent thing was to Phase it home and then worry about the details later. As such, I promptly grabbed hold of the hilt, and—

"{UNWORT—!!!}" "WHAT THE FU—!!!"

… I immediately got yelled at by a deep, deafening voice that sounded like it came from every single direction at the same time. I instinctively jumped back, and when I lost contact with the hilt, the voice immediately cut out like someone flipped the off-switch on a loudspeaker mid-word. I was just about to suck in a breath of relief when I was further startled by a loud metallic bang that echoed for quite a while in the empty vault.

"Son? Is everything all right?"

Abram's muffled voice finally jolted me out of my shock and I hastily shouted, "Yes, I just dropped… something!"

Looking back, said 'something' was now lying on the floor halfway between me and the open storage box with a big stone inside it that was conspicuously missing a sword. Needles to say, for a while my eyes only kept darting between the lonely rock and the weapon sitting on the floor in silence.

"No way. That didn't just happen," I whispered under my breath before inching closer to the weapon on the ground. At long last I steeled my nerves once again, crouched down, and gingerly reached out towards the hilt. The moment I made contact, I could feel a bit of a jolt, though nothing compared to the shocks the damned dragon-slaying spear was giving me, and it wasn't until my fingers wrapped around the handle that the strange, echoing voice once again spoke up.

"{Inconceivable. You have already been tested and found unworthy,}" the… sword? Yeah, it was probably the sword speaking. I mean, I don't even know why I was surprised. It wasn't like this was the first time this happened to me.

"{Was it your resolve that changed the outcome? Or maybe a time of crisis have befallen on the Brotherhood? Tell me, young knight! Why have you attempted to draw me from my resting place for the second time?}"

I remained silent as I reorganized my thoughts, and once I reached my conclusion, I let out a short, sharp breath through my nose and stepped up to the locker again.

"This didn't happen."

"{What are you doing, young knight?}" the sword inquired, its voice suddenly sounding a little apprehensive.

"I said, this. didn't. happen," I repeated, stressing each word separately before simply jamming the sword back into the hole in the stone where it came from. "We are both going to pretend this didn't happen, and then I'm going to leave this place, my father-in-law is going to teach me how to bowl so that I can challenge an annoying butler and beat him at his own game, and then we are going to have some gyros and call it a day."

"{Wait, you are chosen! You can't do this!}"

"Like hell I can't!"

I made sure to stab down a couple more times until the blade was stable in the rock, and then stepped back and wiped my forehead with my sleeve.

"Bloody mystic swords and chosen ones and arrrgh!" I growled under my nose and then took a couple of measured breaths to calm myself. Once I felt in control of my emotions again, I extended my Phantom Limbs, wrapping them around the sword and the stone separately, and once I was ready, I exhaled a long sigh, followed by a defeated, "I absolutely cannot let Judy learn about this, or I will never hear the end of it…"

And with that, I promptly (if temporarily) disappeared from the room, all the while considering where I could hide a shining sword and a huge chunk of stone so that no one could find them…