"I'm your commanding officer. That's Captain Lescheres, not princess.""Whatever, princess." She crossed her arms. I was sympathetic but if she couldn't be professional, then she shouldn't be here. Her aptitude aside, if she couldn't follow orders, she was going to be a problem."Captain Lescheres," I repeated."Princess."Oh, this was going to be fun. I could just feel it.One of my better teammates took the cigarette out of his mouth and saluted. "Shinya Togane, at your service, Captain Lescheres.""Glen Weber, ma'am!" He also saluted. At least I would have two subordinates I could count on.I looked at her. "Jacqueline Porter, but if you ever call me Jac, I'll introduce your face to the ground, princess. Everyone calls me Jac."Oh yeah, we were going to have a lot of fun."I'm Evelyn Lescheres."Shinya frowned. "Evelyn Lescheres? Are you related to thy Evelyn Lescheres?"Jac looked at him. "Who?"Glen sighed. It was long and suffering. "Evelyn Lescheres is one of Sword's best hunte

I was confident that whoever he had been, Damien was smarter than me. Before my rebirth, if you could call it that, I had forgotten everything from my calculus class. Hell, I forgot trigonometry and was in danger of forgetting advanced Algebra. But when I sat down in Professor Verner's class and connected my linker to the room, I discovered that math wasn't as difficult as I remembered. In fact, it was too easy.No, easy wasn't the right description for this. It was beyond easy. It was as if my old self had been sat in a third-grade classroom and was asked to do basic arithmetic. That's how easy pre-calculus was for me. The equations just clicked and everything made sense. I was the first one down with the work that day and Professor Verner messaged me my results: a perfect score.There had always been a part of me that wanted to do things over again. I had wanted to go back in time and redo my life, just without the sickness. Another part of me knew I wouldn't have been able to keep

I almost took Mireille's head off. Which would have been bad, since decapitation was the only way to kill a knight. I was in a blood frenzy, the urge to hunt and kill so dominant. But a part of me must have recognized her on some base level because I was able to restrain myself.Mireille set the girl gently on the couch and laid her down. My mind returned to me as she fluttered across the room, bringing the girl a glass of water and a red pill. "This will help replenish the blood she lost. By tomorrow, she will be back to normal."That was good because I wasn't sure how close I was to killing her. If Mireille hadn't been there and I had kept going... I'd have blood on my hands. Damien, and before him Julius, must have had plenty of blood on their hands, but whoever they had been, they weren't me. I didn't want to be a murderer.The scent of blood hung in the air of the room, and though the burning in my throat had been quenched, I wanted more. The need was weaker now. The drive was me

Evelyn VIIIIf Neptune was a fusion of Tokyo and Paris, then Pluto followed the same system. I couldn't be sure since I had never stepped foot on Earth, much less in the United States or China, but people said that Pluto was a fusion between Los Vegas and Macau. In the day it glittered with new shiny buildings and at night it was a neon paradise.On the surface level, it looked like a clean city, if a unique looking one. But I knew the truth. This place was the seediest settlement in all of Aquroya. I was born here. I grew up here. I hated this city.If being back here wasn't bad enough, Pluto was built smack in the middle of the only desert on this continent. Making it hot as hell. At least my card had air conditioning. I wouldn't have survived the heat otherwise.At one point in my life, I was used to the desert heat. That was long ago. Now it was just hot. Hot as satans ass crack.They wanted me at the Pluto Branch Office, but I stopped by my new apartment first. It had an undergro

Alaric XI was laying in bed, staring up at the ceiling. I had accessed my strix powers quicker than was natural, but I chalked it up to being someone else. While I did have control over them, it wasn't the fine control that Yayoi and Kaya demonstrated later on.I thought I had good control, but the control Yayoi and Kaya could wield... I was like an infant. Supposedly Damien had even more control and raw power than any of his knights, but those skills didn't transfer.Why hadn't they? I could speak and read and write Japanese and French, skills I could only have inherited from Damien. I had a level of control that should have taken time for me to learn, skills that I could have only inherited from my other self.So why didn't I have all his control? Or just his raw power? I could feel that power deep inside of me, just below the surface. It felt like I was on a lake, but there was a thick layer of ice separating me from the water below. I tried to chip away at it with my hands, but I