I needed clothes.
The ones I was wearing had survived two days of sleeping in alleys, crawling behind stone walls, and surviving a tavern scene. Not to mention, they had already been dirty when I first woke up in the tavern. They smelled like rusty water and sweat, and Clara Dale wasn’t going to listen to a man who looked like he’d been sleeping in a stable, which he technically had.
I found a laundry line behind a house on the east side of town, near the wall. Two shirts, a pair of trousers, and a woman’s shawl hung in the late afternoon sun. I took the larger shirt and the trousers. The shirt was linen, dyed somewhere between blue and gray, and too small for me. The trousers fit around the waist but ended above my ankles. F+ luck. The universe was consistent, if nothing else.
I changed behind the house, rolled my old clothes into a bundle, and left them in the alley. The new shirt pulled across my shoulders whenever I moved my arms, while the trousers restricted my stride. I looked like a man wearing a smaller man’s skin. At least I smelled like laundry soap instead of gutter water, and that was the upgrade that mattered.
The market square was transforming. Vendors who had spent the afternoon packing up were now unpacking different goods. Food stalls were appearing, and a man was assembling a frame for roasting meat. A woman hung lanterns from poles strung between the market well and the stall posts. The paper lanterns were red, yellow, and white, swaying gently in the breeze as the festival slowly took shape around me.
I positioned myself near the edge of the square, close to the road leading up the hill, where I could watch the magistrate’s residence without getting close enough to attract the guards’ attention. The guard was still at his post, but his posture had changed. He looked more alert now. The festival had changed his job from keeping people away from the magistrate’s daughter to keeping an eye on a crowd that was about to get large, loud, and drunk.
I sat on a low wall near a closed stall and watched as the square continued to fill. An hour passed, and more stalls opened. A man near the well began tuning a stringed instrument while children ran between the stalls, their voices sharp and bright against the murmur of the crowd. The smell of roasted meat joined that of bread and herbs, along with the permanent background smell of fish that seemed to follow Millhaven everywhere.
Clara appeared at the top of the hill road just before the festival officially began, walking beside her father. In my draft, the magistrate had received a single sentence: "The magistrate, a portly man with a gray beard, presided over the town with absent authority." That was it. Portly, gray beard, absent authority. Apparently, I’d thought that was all a character needed.
The man walking beside Clara was nothing like that description. He was tall, not portly, and his beard was more white than gray, trimmed close to his face. His eyes moved through the crowd the way a man’s eyes moved when he was counting exits and assessing threats. He walked with a slight limp and leaned on a cane, but the cane wasn’t decorative. It was made of dark, heavy wood, worn smooth around the grip, as though he’d used it for years and for more than just walking.
The story had taken my single sentence and done what it had done with the rest of my script. It had filled in the gaps, giving him a history, a body, and a way of moving through a crowd. He had eyes that noticed things. As I watched him scan the festival, I could practically see him cataloguing the exits, the crowd density, and the positions of his guards. He was a man who’d been responsible for a town’s safety for so long that he couldn’t stop doing it, not even at a party.
Clara walked beside him in a deep green dress, her hair still pulled back, with the same pouch hanging from her belt. She looked more tired than she had that morning, the shadows beneath her eyes deeper. She moved through the festival with the same efficiency I’d observed at the market, touching things and nodding at vendors, but her energy seemed lower. From what I could tell, she was running on whatever little energy she had left.
I watched from across the square. The guard stationed near the hill road noticed me and recognised me from earlier. He watched me for a full minute before apparently deciding I wasn’t his problem. I exhaled quietly and settled back against the wall, waiting.
The magistrate led Clara to the raised platform near the well. It was a wooden structure built for the festival, about three feet off the ground, with a railing, a small canopy, and two chairs. He helped Clara up the steps before they sat down. The platform gave them a clear view of the entire square, but it also made them easy targets. Anyone in the crowd could see them, and anyone approaching from the east gate would have a clear line of sight.
I checked Scrivener’s Eye. The headache was worse now, a sharp stab behind my left eye that made my vision swim before the golden lines appeared. The threads were dense throughout the square. The festival was a major plot event, and the narrative weight was enormous. Every thread in Millhaven seemed to converge here, running through the stalls, the lanterns, the platform where Clara sat, and beyond the east gate.
I was tracing the threads towards the gate when I heard a horse.
A single horse came through the east gate at a walk. Its hooves clopped against the stone, and the crowd parted for it the way people made room for someone important. The rider sat astride a gray stallion that was too clean, too muscular, and too perfectly proportioned to be an ordinary horse. It looked exactly like the sort of horse a hero would ride, because it was.
Seeing him again, I realised he was exactly as I’d designed him. Tall. That was the first thing anyone would notice. Tall in the saddle, tall in the shoulders, tall in the neck. His dark hair fell across his forehead in a way I’d described as "carelessly handsome," and seeing it in person made me realise just how deliberate that design choice had been. He had a square jaw, clear skin, and blue eyes that caught the lantern light as though they’d been made specifically for that purpose. His armour wasn’t practical either. It was decorative, silver and gold, fitted to his body and ornamented in ways that would have gotten a real soldier killed but looked magnificent on a festival evening.
He was beautiful, and that was the word I’d used in Chapter 1. It was also the right word. He was beautiful in the way a weapon was beautiful: precise, purposeful, designed. I’d given him infinite luck, peak combat stats, flawless looks, and a progression engine that made him stronger every time he won. I’d built him to be the centre of every room he entered, and he was.
The crowd turned towards him. Every face in the square shifted in the direction of the east gate. Vendors stopped what they were doing, children stopped running, and the musician stopped tuning his instrument. The square went quiet in the way a room went quiet when someone walked in who changed the air.
He dismounted, moving exactly as I’d written him, fluid and confident. He handed his reins to a stable boy who seemed to appear from nowhere, because of course he did. Lucky people never noticed their own luck.
A man standing beside me near the stall leaned towards his wife and spoke in a low voice. "That’s him. The traveller, Yamamoto Ren. He came through the east gate yesterday before nightfall."
Yamamoto Ren. That was the name I’d given him. Back when I was writing the outline, I’d named him Yamamoto Ren, a reincarnated Japanese man dropped into a fantasy world with an overpowered system. It was the first thing I’d decided about him, long before the stats, the looks, or the harem mechanics. The name had come first. Hearing it spoken aloud by a stranger in a market square felt strange in a way I couldn’t quite put into words. I’d typed that name hundreds of times in notes and outlines, and now it belonged to a real person standing barely ten feet away from me.
He walked towards the magistrate’s residence, heading for the platform where Clara sat. The magistrate stood to meet him at the base of the steps, and they exchanged words I couldn’t hear from where I was sitting. The magistrate gestured towards the platform, offering him an invitation. Ren nodded and climbed the steps.
Clara stood to greet him and offered her hand. He took it and smiled, and the smile was exactly what I’d designed it to be. Warm, open, and genuine. The smile of a man who’d been created to be the king of plot armour.
I sat on the wall across the square and watched the hero charm the woman I needed to bond with. As I watched them, I began counting the hours until the fireworks.
Two hours. I had only two hours.