Reincarnated Without a Cheat, I Adopted the Former Hero as My Mom

Ever since the day she left the Knight Order headquarters, Estella had practically turned the Adventurer's Guild into her personal command post.

A wide map of the Royal Capital and its outskirts dominated one wall of the guild hall. Red pins marked every zone already cleared. Days in, the red dots had spread across every corner of the parchment like an encroaching tide. abandoned mines, old sewers, warehouses on the city fringe, vacant noble estates, even the quarry past the farmlands.

Every adventurer without a contract had been conscripted. Search squads rotated in four shifts, four to a team, carrying Seraphina's likeness door to door.

No leads. Not a single thread to pull.

The evening reports came back identical. No witnesses. No signs of struggle. Nothing abnormal anywhere in the grid. Even the eyes she'd planted near Uriel had brought back one sentence: "Went back to the inn, never came out." She'd pulled the Knight Order's interrogation logs through a contact too. Clean. No redactions.

She dismissed the messenger with a wave and reached for the cup on her desk.

Empty. She'd forgotten to fill it.

The guild office was small. Outside the window stretched the Royal Capital's skyline. Estella leaned against the sill and didn't move.

Down in the street, someone shouted at full volume. Horseshoes rang off the cobblestones. Farther off, cooking smoke climbed into the darkening sky.

Seraphina used to be afraid of the dark. And of thunder.

On stormy nights, the tiny child would hug a pillow bigger than herself and creep to Estella's door. No knock. No sound. Just a ridiculous little figure standing in the hallway shadows, waiting to be found. Every single time, Estella would roll over, pretend she'd just woken for a bathroom trip, then "discover" the pitiful duckling at her doorstep with exaggerated surprise and pull her under the covers.

Seraphina's body always ran cold. Her toes could freeze Estella awake. Asked why she never knocked, the answer never changed: she didn't want to wake her sister.

Seraphina had been six that year. Considerate enough to break your heart.

Later, the household gave Seraphina her own room. Bigger room, more windows, thunder rattling the glass in its frame. But the pillow-carrying visits never came again.

Older still, and school pulled her away. The two families lived close but no longer under one roof.

Then Estella became an adventurer, and her trips home stretched thinner. Weekly became monthly. Monthly became every half year. Every time she came back, Seraphina had grown another inch, and her speech had grown another layer of polish and distance. She called Estella "sister" the same way she'd address a stranger. Estella never figured out where it broke. She didn't know when it happened.

Somewhere along the way, the little girl who used to cling to her had become someone who called her "sister" with the same polite distance she used for everyone else.

"Great timing for a crisis," Estella told her reflection in the glass.

When she stepped out of the office, the hall had nearly emptied. The receptionist, a girl barely out of her teens, was organizing the day's registry and looked up at the footsteps with a smile.

"Still here, Lady Estella?"

"Getting water." She crossed to the counter, lifted the communal pitcher, and filled a cup halfway.

As the cup reached her lips, her eyes dropped to the countertop.

A slip of paper. It was pinned under the pitcher's base with just one corner peeking out. Ordinary memo paper, edges torn unevenly, ripped from a notebook in a hurry. Estella was certain: twenty minutes ago, when she'd last come out for water, this had not been here.

She set the cup down and slid the note free. Unfolded it.

Small handwriting. Every character legible. One line.

Beneath the First Academy.

No name. No explanation. Just four words.

Estella's pupils tightened. She looked up and swept the guild hall.

A few adventurers huddled in clusters, maintaining gear. One oiled a longsword. Another refilled a quiver. A third was chugging a mana potion like it owed him money. The receptionist was still bent over her registry, completely unaware anything had appeared on the counter.

The hall ran on its usual noise. Footsteps, chatter, the bright clink of metal. The perfect cover for a message no one was meant to see.

"Who came through just now?" Estella flipped the note over. Blank on the back.

The receptionist blinked. "Huh? Quite a few people, actually. Turn-ins, pickups. This afternoon was packed." She gestured at the fresh stack of logged requests. "Were you looking for someone?"

"Someone left a note on this counter. Anything ring a bell?"

The girl tilted her head, then shook it. "Honestly, no. Adventurers come and go all day. People leave things on the counter all the time. Request notes, hand-off remarks." She paused. "Why? What does it say?"

"Nothing." Estella folded the slip twice and tucked it into an inner pocket of her coat.

She leaned against the counter and sipped her water. Set the cup down but didn't let go. Her fingertips tapped the rim twice.

Beneath the First Academy.

She hadn't considered that location. The Academy was mid-renovation. Was Seraphina being held there, or was this something else entirely?

If it was a trap, the bait was lazy. No preamble, no contact name, left on a public counter for anyone to grab. If Seraphina really was beneath the First Academy, how had the Knight Order's thorough search of the campus missed her?

A diversion. 

The thought surfaced immediately. Someone was trying to lure her away from the Guild, leaving the command post blind while they made their real move.

But a decoy only worked if the enemy knew where she was posted. That alone was an intel leak. Whoever left this note knew she was here. And knew she was hunting for Seraphina.

Whatever it was.

She was the Kingdom's number one adventurer. A Hero candidate. This was supposed to scare her?

"Do me a favor. Leave word with the Guild Master." Estella was already moving toward the armory, boot heels punching a crisp rhythm into the floorboards. "Tell him I'm heading to the First Academy. If I'm not back by morning, send someone."

"Huh? Now? The First Academy? What's the hurry?"

The armory door had already swung shut behind her.

When she emerged, the civilian clothes were gone. Deep blue half-plate locked across her chest. A nodachi hung on her back, and a second tachi, a third shorter, rode her hip.

She pushed through the guild's front doors and the night wind hit her face.

The Royal Capital had sunk into deep blue darkness. Half the streetlamps were lit. The cobblestones were nearly empty, save for a late carriage rolling past on the main avenue, hooves swelling and fading around the next corner.

Estella ran about three hundred meters down the main street and was just cutting onto the side path toward the First Academy.

A detonation rolled in from the distance. Low, heavy, packed with real weight: some high-yield spell letting go. The ground shuddered. Dust sifted out of the cracks between cobblestones. A pillar of thick smoke climbed in the distance, churning and spreading, its edges stained dull red by firelight below.

Not toward the Academy. West, roughly. Old warehouse district, or the abandoned mines.

Estella stopped and turned her head toward the smoke. An explosion, and not a small one. Nothing an adventurer brawl could produce. She paused for a fraction of a heartbeat, then pulled her gaze back and kept running toward the First Academy.

Whatever had detonated over there was not her problem. Seraphina was beneath the First Academy.

She vaulted between rooftops, toes tapping the tiles in quick, light staccato. Night wind shoved into the gaps in her pauldrons and collar, carrying the smell of burning and dust. The Academy's main building was just resolving into a silhouette at the edge of her vision.

Then she heard the shouting.

In the alley outside the Academy's east wall: frantic steel-on-steel and screams. She looked and found three Knight Order members. Two were locked in a desperate melee with dark shapes. The third leaned against the wall, not moving.

Estella dropped straight off a three-story rooftop. Her shoulder clipped a laundry-pole beam at the alley mouth and snapped it. The crack of splitting wood whipped one knight's head around.

"Lady Estella!" Relief broke his voice. "We've got a problem! Something humanoid came out of the Academy, and the Commander can't kill it!"

The dark shapes heard the name and bolted on instinct.

Estella hadn't even drawn her blade. She landed, carried the momentum into a kick, and connected with the nearest shadow. The impact folded him backward until his spine snapped clean, launched him in a U-shaped arc, and bowled him into the rest of the pack. The whole heap collapsed into a single groaning pile.

Trash cleared. She stepped over the twitching pile, tuning out the knight's rambling. In that same instant, battle instinct snagged on something wrong in the distance. She leapt back to the rooftop and looked.

A massive figure was squeezing out of the dark. Humanoid, but the proportions were wrong. Shoulders too wide. Arms hanging past the knees. Skin plated in uneven, keratin-like ridges. A longsword wound gaped in its chest, deep enough to see the wall behind it, but the flesh at the wound's edge was already crawling, contracting, knitting shut in visible real time.

Two streets over, in an open square, the Knight Commander had the so-called humanoid monster ringed with a dozen elite knights. The fight had sunk into a nightmare of attrition. The thing's defense and regeneration defied all natural law—wounds that should have been fatal sealed themselves in seconds, and even the Commander's swordsmanship couldn't make damage stick. He unleashed Burst Sword. The technique drained the color from his face, gasping for air as the shockwave blew away half the creature's body. The flesh surged back in seconds, tumors blooming and sealing until it stood whole again.

Below, the two surviving knights were shouting thanks. This was their post now. Please go support the Commander.

Estella watched the humanoid monster advance step by step. Then she looked toward the Academy.

She ran the math. Distance. Situation. Left alone, the knights could stall this thing for half an hour. No civilian spillover, no casualties. Thirty minutes was enough to pull Seraphina out.

But.

The monster took another step forward.

"Lady Estella..."

She looked at the monster. Looked at the Academy. Her grip whitened on her tachi's hilt.

Go save Seraphina. That was the selfish wish of a sister.

Go cut the monster down. That was what the Kingdom expected of the Hero candidate. That was the weight of the armor on her chest.

"Tch." Estella pulled her eyes off the direction of the Academy.

She couldn't gamble.

She took a running start and launched herself toward the knights.

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