Beast Gacha System: All Mine

"Lady Bessa Sonder will be the candidate for the next Empress of Iondora Empire."

Bessa thought she had truly heard wrong.

"What...?"

Not just the words, but the entire concept.

What even...? Did that even make sense?

She was an orphan. A former slave, then a one-legged alchemist-turned-farmer whose greatest ambition was to keep her tomatoes from freezing.

Empresses were born from bloodlines that went back a thousand years. Empresses were raised in palaces, schooled in politics, polished until their very breath smelled of roses and statecraft.

She was none of those things. She smelled of soil and alchemical residue and the permanent tang of prosthetic lubricant.

"Oh, you just mean someone named Bessa Sonder is going to be the next Empress? God, Your Highness, you scared me!" She tried desperately to rationalize everything, even after being told she would become Bessa Sonder.

Surely this was a joke.

She’d laugh about it later, probably. After she finished throwing up.

Cecilia turned to Angela, and Angela turned to her. They smiled at each other.

"Have you ever dreamed of change, Miss Bessa?" Cecilia asked. The look Angela had given her earlier made it clear she was being asked to speak on the princess’s behalf.

Bessa blinked. "C-change?" she asked. "Change, as in my living condition? Because, of course I do. When I was an alchemist, I longed for the life I have today."

She frowned, her eyes silently begging Angela. "You gave it to me. Now... you’re just going to take it away?"

"Miss Bessa, am I allowed to assume that’s the only change you dreamed of?" Cecilia asked.

Bessa’s eyes widened.

Dreamed...?

"What... do you mean?" she dared to ask. But immediately, she regretted it. It felt like being pulled gently into a current. It felt like... being bewitched.

"Those children are still being bought and exploited, manipulated into the guild’s interests. They’d be strangled with debt and have their limbs cut, laughed at and mocked as they were sold cooking oil for prosthetic lubricant," Cecilia said.

And because each word landed like a brick through a window, immediately, Bessa’s expression changed. The polite, confused farmer was gone. In her place was Alchemist Bessa, the woman who had genuinely begged the guild to sell her linseed oil.

She was angry now.

"If you think you can use me for your agenda..." she hissed.

"Do you think we can’t clean those Alchemist guilds and bind them to official regulations?" Cecilia asked gently.

"If you could, you must have done it already," Bessa said. And she wasn’t wrong. Everyone knew what the guilds were and what they did. But the alchemists were too useful to punish, and too feared to protect.

"With how hated yet needed alchemists are today? With how bad the stigma is now?" Cecilia chuckled.

"What if it truly is only possible now?" She walked forward, extending her hand. "With your help?"

Bessa was truly speechless now. She had been a slave, sold by her own blood parents, whose names and faces she no longer remembered. And now she was being asked to be... the empress?

"You can still cultivate land with your own two hands. You can still live a pleasant, quiet life in this palace, that’s my promise," Angela said. "All we need is for you to appear at some events once a month, and your identity itself. We need your story."

Bessa didn’t know she could still be surprised.

"My... story?" she asked.

Angela nodded. "First, we change public opinion about alchemists. We will make you the poster girl for the reality of alchemy, all the dark sides of it. We expose it together, using my power and the Iondora Empire’s power."

Bessa, again, didn’t know whether what she was hearing was reality or a dream.

But what Angela said didn’t sound like a dream. With the empire’s power, a change like that could actually happen. Just... Can they truly keep their promise?

Would they truly see it through to the other side of that possible reality?

"Those children, Bessa," Cecilia said. "You exist. So those children who have grown up and dreamed of change exist too."

Like herself. Like Dean, who had wanted out and now lived free of the guild’s debt and violence.

"You don’t need to hide anymore, because you will be protected. The guilds ordered to chase you down and force your obedience will be eliminated," Angela said.

"Trust me," Cecilia added. "If this woman has put her mind to it, she must have already gathered a considerable number of alchemists who wanted the same change as you. Perhaps not quite the change we imagined, but change in their own lives."

All Bessa needed to do was extend that wish for change to those children, the ones born with this special ability, forced into the life of an alchemist before they could choose otherwise.

"If you become the Empress," Angela whispered, "the change will not be trivial."

She didn’t promise she could save everyone. She didn’t promise the change would definitely succeed or that everyone would become happy.

She only promised that a change would happen. A change toward a slightly better world for those children.

But why her?

Why... now?

Of course she knew why "now."

The former Emperor had been assassinated, and the new Emperor was someone on Angela’s side. He was her own full-blood brother, after all. He must have been deeply involved in this plan.

The "now" made perfect political sense.

But the "now" Bessa was questioning was not the circumstance of the empire, nor was it directed at the two women standing before her.

It was directed at the world. At the gods. At the cruel and ironic timing of fate itself.

Why now, when her heart had been owned by another?

Why now, when she had finally found something... someone... that made her peaceful life feel like more than just survival?

Why dangle the fate of countless talented children before her when all she truly wanted was to walk through a field of sea lavender with a green dragon who made her laugh?

Click.

The door opened, and a man entered the room.

Unmistakably, it was the Emperor himself. Beauty ran in the family, and Damon Iondora looked a great deal like his sister. The same dark hair, the same striking features, the same eyes that seemed to see through everything.

But where Angela’s gaze was velvet over steel, concealing countless hidden eyes looking down on everything, his was steel over nothing.

The weight of a crown sat on his brow even when he wasn’t wearing it.

He looked at Bessa first, then at his sister. "You want to build the strength of this empire and our rule... using the might of the alchemists?"

Bessa flinched.

Of course.

Now she was certain the dream would come true.

These people would truly see it through to the end, because there was also something else they could gain from it. Something beyond morality, beyond justice, beyond saving children.

The alchemists were hated and feared, but they were also powerful beyond measure. And that power had been scattered, squabbled over, stolen and controlled by masters of guilds that answered to no one.

But if the empire could succeed in this dream... then that power would finally have a true master.

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