Abduction

Get mixed up in matters above your station and you’ll pay for it. Every time.

Aiden’s father used to drill that into him, over and over. He had been an unremarkable back-alley pickpocket, but he was always quick on the uptake and slyer than he looked.

“You weren’t cut out for big things, son.”
“Why not.”
“Because the only thing you’re any good at is working little angles and running middling cons.”
“That’s some evaluation to hand your own flesh and blood.”
“Live within your station. Don’t go making trouble trying to swim in deep water. For people at our level, a back-alley petty criminal is exactly the right fit.”
“Would it kill you to say something kind to your son?”
“I’m doing it right now.”
“…Is that how that works?”

Somewhere along the way, Aiden had come around to agreeing with him: he really wasn’t especially good at anything.

Average. Plus-minus zero.

An ordinary nobody, hard even to remember, who now and then ran some petty, irritating little scam to keep himself alive. Nothing big, just the kind of thing that left the victim mildly annoyed. Even a criminal had lines he shouldn’t cross.

That side of him showed in a conversation he’d once had with his younger sister.

“You’re a criminal either way. Why bother keeping up appearances?”
“Commit a big crime and you get noticed, and then you get hit big. Fleece a mark just lightly enough that if you ever run into him again, the worst you get is a good beating.”

“…”

“Enough to feed the family, enough to look after myself, and never enough to earn a grudge. That’s how you live long, I’m telling you.”

Aiden Kellermain was an ordinary, trifling con man, and his life was exactly that size. Not even the bizarre day he cracked his head on the floor and remembered a past life lived in a place called ‘Earth’ had changed that much.

Nor had it changed when a white, square pane bearing those words floated up before his eyes and he realized he was a character inside the world of a game. After several days of turning it over, he reached one conclusion.

“Do I really have to live doing something great?”

A main story. Special abilities. Phrases like those would have delighted anyone who wanted to stand out.

But.

Do something great, and you expose yourself to great danger just as easily. Live safe, and nothing happens, but nothing comes for you either.

So Aiden decided to stay exactly where he was: the pettiest of petty criminals, the kind the authorities saw no reason to bother with, an unremarkable con man whose crimes left his victims feeling more pity than grudge.

And for a man living that kind of life, there were people he was certain he’d never, ever get tangled up with.

“Dame Noelle is riding in through the Triumphal Arch!”
“Let every subject of the Empire greet her with a thunderous cheer!”

Take the woman on the battered TV he was watching right now, for instance.

“Good lord.”

The sigh slipped out of him as he watched. Even through a screen, the sight of the woman riding in beneath the Triumphal Arch earned that reaction.

Obsidian hair that seemed to drink in the light, skin starkly white beside it, and red eyes with a glare so dazzling it almost glittered. In some quarters she was called nothing less than the incarnation of Karva, chief deity of the Empire and goddess of strife. Her presence didn’t stop at ‘beautiful’; you could feel an aura coming off her.

…Goddess of Strife. That does suit her, doesn’t it?

Noelle Astria Simmers. They called her the greatest warrior since the Empire’s founding, and the four lion’s-head medals pinned to her chest gave that claim more than enough weight.

The Lionhearted Medal was the highest of all the medals of honor the Imperial military could confer. Considering what a medal of honor usually took to earn, holding four of the highest meant she was a monster in human form who had single-handedly turned the tide of wars.

The superhumans called ‘Knights’ could shatter boulders with a fist, fly through the sky unaided, and breach a fortress alone once armed. Among them, she sat at the very summit. A talent who came along maybe once in a thousand years, she had rewritten every record the Imperial military kept.

She was born different, the sort of person an ordinary nobody like Aiden might get to speak to once in a lifetime, if that.

And Aiden, at least, knew one more thing about her.

So that’s one of the leads.

That woman was, if you please, one of the key figures of the world he now belonged to, a ‘fantasy game’. She was one of those fated to overcome hardship and, alongside the game’s ‘protagonist’, lead a continent in unprecedented peril to salvation. And Noelle stood out among them for one conspicuous trait.

“Rumor has it high society is in an uproar over Dame Noelle’s marriage—”
“They say just the list of candidates alone is staggering—”

Right. Marriage.

Her marriage was one of the most important branch points of all, deciding both Noelle’s own fate and the entire ‘axis’ of the main scenario.

“Well, who can say. Whoever she marries, may the Pantheon’s blessing go with Dame Noelle!”

The host covering the triumphal procession tossed the line out, and Aiden let out a dry laugh.

Doesn’t look like it’ll be all that full of blessings to me.

In the game as he knew it, Dame Noelle’s circumstances got badly tangled the moment she married, and that was also around when the main story careened into chaos. By this point Noelle herself wouldn’t want to go near any of those candidates. In fact, hadn’t the setup been that around now she’d do anything to dodge the match?

And, in truth.

All of that was information Aiden couldn’t care less about. Marriage talk about people he would never once cross paths with in his life was a story for busybodies to chew over. Saving the world and getting married were the business of the ‘leads’, not his.

Yes. That was certainly what he had been thinking.

Right up until a few days ago.

“Are you awake?”
“…?”

Now,

“You’re awake.”

Dame Noelle herself was saying it with a faint smile, right before his eyes, from close enough that the two of them could have counted each other’s eyelashes.

“…??”

Aiden looked around blankly. The place was plainly unfamiliar. At the very least, he had no memory of falling asleep in a pitch-dark basement with his arms tied to a chair.

While he blinked stupidly, she clipped a fluttering sheaf of documents together and went on. A sidelong glance showed him the Imperial military’s watermark on the pages, along with all his personal details and a full list of his ‘clients’. So they had already dug up everything about him.

“Aiden Kellermain. I hear you’ve worked as a con man for a long time. Pleased to meet you.”
“…Dame Noelle?”
“Yes. Noelle Astria Simmers. I came because there’s a job I would particularly like to commission from you.”

Her flat voice came at him calm and even while his wits were still scattered. Why this person, why him, what for? Before he could even finish the question, his mouth was already mumbling a reply on reflex. Call it an occupational hazard; in his line of work, he had to hang on the other party’s every word.

“…A commission, you said?”
“Yes. A con man’s trade is deceiving someone, isn’t it. You’re a skilled con man. And I need to deceive someone too.”

He wasn’t sure his craft deserved the word ‘skilled’. While Aiden was busy appraising himself like that,

“I don’t care for talking in circles, so I’ll come straight to the point.”

Dame Noelle let a beat pass after saying it, and then,

“Let’s get married.”

Out of nowhere,

“Just for one year — would you ‘pretend’ to be my husband?”

“…”

“I’d like you to deceive the entire Empire.”

she dropped a verbal bomb, and the blast wave was appalling.

Get mixed up in matters above your station and you’ll pay for it. Every time.

Aiden’s father had always muttered it like an incantation.

And now he stood on the brink of the biggest upheaval of his life, one that ran dead against the creed his father had drilled into him.