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

Seraphina was propped against the headboard, a half-read copy of A Survey of Modern History open in her lap.

She hadn't absorbed more than a few lines. But pretending to read at least kept her family — especially the cousin who kept appearing in her doorway every fifteen minutes — from bothering her too much.

The household's collective position was this: she had been held for days by dangerous people. Her inner elbow carried needle marks. Multiple. Someone had drawn her blood. There was simply no way she was fine.

Every time she said "I'm fine," this argument was deployed in its entirety and returned her to square one.

She'd explained three times. It had no effect. She'd stopped explaining.

Lying in bed with a book was better than being lectured. For now, this arrangement worked.

---

The curtains were half-open. Afternoon light came through at an angle, warm and unhurried — a comfort she hadn't felt in a while. The sheets had been changed yesterday and still carried the faint clean scent of laundry soap.

All things considered, it was fine.

If she subtracted the cousin currently occupying the chair beside her bed, they would be better.

Estella sat the way she always sat at Guild briefings: back straight, legs apart, stopped just short of a full sprawl by some concession to domestic manners. She held an apple in one hand and a fruit knife in the other. Her expression was focused and serious.

The focus was not helping.

The blade kept catching at uneven depths. The peel came off in mismatched strips — thick, thin, broken in three places. A chunk of flesh the size of a small coin had gone with the last pass. The apple had been effectively butchered. She was applying the exact same edge-alignment and force she used to dismantle armored trolls, turning the simple fruit into a massacred casualty of war. The fruit knife had a completely different set of requirements, and her fingers had no interest in adjusting.

Seraphina watched the apple receive another cut from over the top of her book.

"You don't have to do something you're not good at. I can eat it with the skin on. Or I could ask one of the maids."

Estella stopped. She looked at the apple. She looked at Seraphina's flat, patient gaze above the page. A short silence.

Then she held the apple out.

Seraphina took it, rotated it once to find the undamaged side, and bit in.

Estella set the knife on the nightstand. She pressed her thumb to the blade to wipe off the apple juice, then dried her hand on a handkerchief. The gesture was casual. Seraphina recognized it as the tell that preceded the actual conversation.

"When they drew your blood — do you know what for?"

"No. They didn't say." Seraphina swallowed. "They also injected something."

Estella shot out of the chair. It toppled backward and hit the floorboards with a crack. She grabbed Seraphina's shoulders — too fast, too hard — and leaned in close, scanning her face and neck and visible skin in a single frantic pass.

"They injected you?! Where? Show me! What did they put in you — Sera — Sera, look at me —"

"Didn't seem necessary." Seraphina bit the apple again, still holding Estella's grip at arm's length. "Nothing happened. No mutations, no signs of poisoning. Nothing feels wrong."

"Nothing feels wrong? You don't know that — it might not have activated yet. Come on. We're seeing a cleric. Right now."

She tugged at Seraphina's wrist. Seraphina didn't move.

"Let go."

Estella's grip tightened — an instinctive refusal, the first reflex of someone who had never learned to let go of anything she was afraid of losing. Then she saw her own knuckles white against Seraphina's sleeve, read the flat, unmoved expression on her cousin's face, and let go.

"...I'll have a cleric come here, then." The words came out slower this time. More careful. Like she was trying to sound normal and failing slightly.

"Not necessary." Seraphina's tone was flat. "It was already treated. The cleric who checked me after I got back didn't find anything."

"You just said you were injected with something."

"I was. It was treated afterward. When I was getting out, I ran into someone." She set the apple down and pulled a tissue from the nightstand. "A knight. Kargas. He wasn't there to help me — he was there to kill me. He was working with the people who took me. He hit me once."

Estella's frown sharpened. "What? Kargas? The decorated knight? He was with them?"

She knew the name. Top three in the Order by combat rating. Reputation was mixed. Specialized in close-range physical combat. Known for being effective in the kinds of ways that made people uncomfortable.

"Decorated. Maybe the same one. He didn't mention the title." Seraphina demonstrated with a small, unceremonious gesture. "One punch. Sent me across the room. I nearly died. Then someone else showed up. She called herself a witch."

"A witch?"

"Holy Sword Witch. Her words." Seraphina crumpled the tissue and dropped it in the bin beside the bed. Several crumpled tissues were already sitting at the bottom of the bin.

"Black and white. Thin dress sword. She cast a healing spell first — green light, spread over me when it landed. Warm. Like being lowered into a bath. The fracture stopped hurting. The internal bleeding stopped. A few seconds and it was done."

Estella's eyebrow climbed slowly.

A healer who could close fractures and stop internal bleeding in seconds. In any adventuring party on the continent, that person would be treated like a religious artifact. Carried carefully. Thanked constantly. Never allowed to walk anywhere dangerous.

"That's exceptional healing work. She could write her own contract at any Guild she wanted." Estella leaned forward slightly. "What happened to Kargas — did he go after her?"

Seraphina moved her gaze from Estella's face to the slice of sky visible through the half-drawn curtain.

"She killed him."

Silence.

Which meant the witch hadn't only healed. She'd also defeated a Mithril-ranked decorated knight. She could heal, fight, and control the battlefield. By Guild classification standards, that profile didn't fit neatly into any standard tier.

"She put up a field. Circular, like a barrier. Closed me inside. Then there was white light — too bright to see through. When it cleared —" Seraphina reached for her water glass. "The witch was gone. Kargas was gone. The Academy was gone."

Estella didn't respond.

She stood up without deciding to.

The image came back unbidden: a column of light tearing upward from the direction of the First Academy, splitting the sky in half. Day on one side, night on the other. She'd lain awake that night, which almost never happened.

She had later pulled every record she could access in the Guild's restricted archive. Every known adventurer, every catalogued divine artifact. Nothing generated output at that scale — except the Hero entries, and those were sealed above her clearance tier.

And now her cousin was telling her, in the same tone she used to say I'm not hungry, that the source of that column of light had been a single person. Someone standing in the Academy's basement, who had wrapped one injured student in a protective barrier and then erased a Mithril-ranked knight and the entire Academy from existence.

Estella sank back into the chair, slower this time.

She pressed her elbows to her knees and her knuckles to her forehead.

One person?

The Hero? Candidate? Demon Four Sovereigns? The Demon King?

The Guild's internal intelligence — highest sensitivity, limited circulation — had confirmed that the current generation's Hero designation remained unverified. Several candidates were active. Any one of them could theoretically reach this tier, given time.

Estella was on that list herself.

But she had spent years memorizing the names and signatures of every major power on the continent, and the profile of this Holy Sword Witch matched nothing. If she were a former Hero, someone would have recognized her long before now. If she were a current candidate, her identity would be on record. If she were a Demon Four Sovereigns, there was no strategic reason to rescue a human noble's daughter and leave quietly.

If she were the Demon King —

A chill ran through her. She pushed it aside.

The Demon King had no reason to appear beneath the capital, heal a wounded student, and disappear without a word.

Which left her with no satisfactory answer.

"I don't think she was a bad person."

Estella looked up.

Seraphina was watching her. There was something slightly unusual in her expression — a trace of actual confidence, which didn't appear there often.

"Seraphina." Estella leaned back. Her arm settled on the chair's rest. "You're still a student. You haven't seen enough of what people are capable of. Something that can erase a building and split a mountain —" she kept her voice level, "— for her, you might have been nothing more than a stray cat about to get kicked. Helping you cost her nothing. But when you're at that level, not being evil isn't a meaningful standard. It's not nearly enough."

She came out of the chair in one motion. Clean. Decisive.

At the door she paused and looked back over her shoulder.

"Rest. I'm going to the Guild."

The door closed.

From the hallway came the low sound of her giving instructions to the housemaid — don't let the young lady out of bed — and then the quick, purposeful beat of footsteps descending the stairs. Second floor to first. The sound faded with each step, and then the front door closed with a heavy, final sound.

---

Seraphina looked at the shut door.

She reached for the grapes that had been washed and left on the bedside plate.

She thought about the circular barrier. The way it had sealed around her before the light came.

Just before everything went white, she'd seen the witch standing at the center of it all, the dress sword blazing in her grip, bright enough to sting even at a distance.

Her expression had looked irritated.

Seraphina turned that over. She replayed what Kargas had said in those last minutes, trying to identify which line had done it.

She couldn't pin it down.

Let Estella check the Guild records.

The Hero. The Hero candidates. The Demon Realm's Four Sovereigns.

She could investigate as much as she wanted. The busier the Guild was, the better.

That would take days, easily.

Which meant several days without her cousin materializing in this doorway every fifteen minutes.

Seraphina ate a grape.

The afternoon light moved along the wall, slow and untroubled.

Conditions were improving.

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