Bodyguard to the Future Demon Queen

On the third morning after his death, John Gavoni rode toward Asterhall wearing another man’s face.

The coach lurched through a rut. Its rear bench drove another hard jolt into his spine, and the steel plates riveted inside his armour pinched the skin beneath his right arm. John shifted without thinking, settling his weight with the sway of the vehicle.

The King’s Road ran north between fields darkened by overnight rain. Low stone walls divided grazing land from harvested grain, and slate-roofed farmhouses stood well back from the traffic. Ahead, the country rose in long wooded folds toward Asterhall. John had yet to see the Academy itself, but its territory announced itself through fresh milestones, maintained drainage ditches, and weathered statues set beside the road.

He sat on the narrow guard’s bench at the rear of the coach. His steel helm hung from a peg beside him. The longsword rode at his left hip, the dagger at his right, and both felt as ordinary to Cal’s body as a phone and wallet once had to John’s.

Harl glanced back from the driver’s box.

“Rook.”

John raised his eyes.

Harl was perhaps thirty, thick through the shoulders, with a narrow beard that failed to conceal an old knife scar beneath his chin. He had spent most of the last two days talking whenever silence threatened to become comfortable.

“You asleep back there?”

“No.”

“Huh, thought you were slacking off for a moment there. You always look half-dead.”

John shrugged. “Just my resting bitch face,” he said. “Don’t worry, I’m keeping watch.”

Harl snorted and turned forward again.

Cal’s eyes were naturally half-lidded. Combined with the slight downward cast of his mouth, they made him look bored even when he was mulling the varied ways everyone around him might kill him in the next hour or so.

Not having much of a choice in the matter, John looked to the bright side and decided that might be useful.

Voss held the reins beside Harl. He was the oldest of the three mercenaries and the only one who had not attempted to fill the journey with conversation. Broad-backed and going grey at the temples, he drove with his shoulders slightly hunched and his sword positioned where his right hand could reach it without leaving the bench.

Two women occupied the coach behind John.

Lady Elara Vey and her chaperone, Mirelle.

They were the reason John might have to kill Voss and Harl before the day was over.

He rested one hand on his knee as he watched the road unspool behind them.

Three days ago, he had still been in his own body.

That morning, he had woken up, showered, dressed, and was preparing to leave for an early lecture. His backpack had been hanging from one shoulder. He remembered checking the time, deciding he could afford to buy coffee on the walk to campus, and stepping into the stairwell of his apartment building.

His right foot had landed too close to the edge of the first tread.

There had been no warning worth remembering. His heel slipped. His hand struck rather than caught the rail. His weight turned violently, and the landing rushed sideways into view.

It could have been worse, John mused. At least he died instantly, the broken neck sparing him a slow, agonising passing.

Still, that was a rather embarrassing way to die. A lame death, if there was ever such a thing.

Death, as it turned out, sometimes had the trappings of the clinically absurd.

When John opened his eyes again, he found himself beneath the sloping roof of a posting inn with a dagger in his hand.

Someone had been pounding on the door and calling him Rook.

John had understood the words despite never having heard the language. He had understood that his name—this body’s name—was Cal Rook. When he stood, he discovered a tall, lean stranger in the room’s spotted copper mirror: dark hair, defined muscle, callused hands, and the half-lidded expression Harl had just mistaken for sleep.

That morning, the body had dressed itself while John inwardly tried not to lose his mind.

It’s been a while since then. John had had enough time to come to terms with his new reality.

Reincarnation…

So does this mean that if I died again, I would get to try my luck at another world? He mused on the afternoon of the second day. Perhaps one with modern plumbing at least.

A fun thought experiment, but John was not sure he had the guts to willingly take his own life. Dying was pretty scary even though his only real experience with it lasted just a few milliseconds.

Still, this whole reincarnation stuff was pretty weird. He didn’t really like it, but he was not sure if he hated it or not.

For example, when he dressed in the morning, his fingers knew which straps to fasten first on the brigandine, which was a strange experience to say the least. They knew how tightly to buckle a sword belt, how to test the dagger in its sheath, and how to shift his shoulders so the armour settled properly. It was almost like he had become the man that was once Cal Rook.

Though to say he now embodied what Cal Rook once was would be false. The replacement was only surface-deep.

John did not know where Cal had been born. He did not know whether Cal had parents, siblings, enemies, debts, or a woman expecting him to come home. Faces sometimes produced a flicker of familiarity, but no history followed them. Voss registered as dangerous. Harl registered as an ally John should not entirely trust. Certain roads and tavern signs felt known until he attempted to say why.

Even Cal’s command of magic survived only as bodily instinct.

On the second morning, John had discovered a dense reservoir of energy within himself and an instinctive method for refining it into something hotter and harder. When he circulated it, warmth flooded his muscles, his senses sharpened, and the body became stronger than its lean build suggested. It wasn’t until later that John would learn that that energy was called mana and the something hotter and harder was his so-called Martial aura.

The pattern nonetheless remained the same. Whenever John reached for personal memory, there had been almost nothing to find.

Cal Rook had been a Bronze-rank Martial Warrior.

At least according to the stamped Guild token John found in his belongings.

There were seven ranks a Martial Warrior could attain: Copper, Bronze, Iron, Steel, Silver, Gold and Crown.

That meant that Cal Rook was just a level above the usual cannon-fodder and mobs of this world.

How did John know this? Simple, this world was not real.

Or rather, it had not been real where John came from.

The first clear memory surfaced before noon on his first day in the coach.

It revealed a shuttered room above a roadside tavern. A gloved factor seated across a scarred table. Voss at John’s right, Harl at his left. Three small pouches of coin lay on the wood. A finger tapping a crude route map.

A weathered roadside saint.

A strip of black cloth.

An abandoned tollhouse.

“The Vey girl was to be delivered alive,” John remembered the factor saying. “The remainder of the payment would be issued once she is in our custody.”

Cal Rook had taken the advance.

John could still feel the remembered weight of the pouch entering his palm.

By the time the fragments assembled themselves into a coherent betrayal, Concord Post was half a day behind them. House Vey’s knights had already handed Elara over to the road guards and turned back. Voss controlled the route. Harl seldom moved out of his sight. The two women remained inside the coach except during guarded stops.

John had spent the first day establishing that he was not hallucinating.

He had spent the second wishing he was.

The name Elara Vey had done more than anything else to settle the question.

Indeed, this was the plot of a novel he once read.

He scarcely remembered the title of the book. The fantasy series had been long, densely plotted, and full of noble families whose names he had retained only when they were attached to someone important. He had read most of it casually, filling time between classes or on flights between New York and Texas. He remembered battles and betrayals. He remembered monsters. He had skimmed more than one council meeting and retained almost none of the trade disputes.

Elara had not become relevant until late in the story.

By then, she was the Demon Queen.

The books reintroduced her then, after brief interludes hundreds of chapters prior to briefly establish her, as a tyrant already at war with the three kingdoms. Her armies burned cities, her sorcery blotted out the skies, and she nearly killed the main character during their first confrontation.

Thinking back now, John was not sure he remembered much of her backstory or earlier characterisation. He could only firmly recollect a few broad strokes: A noble daughter with a forbidden affinity for Shadow Magic. An abduction on the road to an academy. Captivity beneath a rival faction.

The Church discovering what she was and purchasing custody of her.

Years of confinement, interrogation, magical experimentation, and persecution until whatever remained of the original Elara Vey escaped with enough power and hatred to make nations pay for what had been done to her.

She had killed a great many people after that. The story gave her reasons without pretending her victims cared about them.

Eventually, she turned against the greater threat. When the chosen heroes failed, Elara slew the Hollow King and sacrificed herself to seal the Black Gate.

John remembered that much.

He did not remember the name of the faction that first imprisoned her. He did not remember when exactly the Church became involved, who discovered her affinity, or where the abandoned tollhouse stood. Elara’s abduction had been compressed into a few hundred words. The mercenaries who sold her were not important enough to receive names.

One of them had been Cal Rook.

Possibly all three had died immediately after the exchange. Possibly they had spent their money in some city and lived another forty years. The book had not cared.

John sighed.

Like most millennials, he had never given much thought to what came after death. A ranch-bred Texan, he had been raised Baptist, but even then, the Christian afterlife had always seemed more abstract than imminent. Still, he had possessed a few vague notions about what to expect.

But since he had quite clearly ended up in the Japanese-anime version of the afterlife, he felt entitled to at least a system, a prophecy, or some helpful explanation as to why he had been dropped into a fantasy novel he had finished more out of laziness than interest.

Alas, it seemed whoever was in charge of managing his transmigration was either incompetent or had it out for him.

This world was, in many ways, what the fan-fic community called a death-world. John knew only a handful of other death-worlds he could confidently say were worse than this. Whilst not common knowledge to the natives here, mages capable of magical compulsion, mind manipulation and memory alteration were worryingly common in the Church. The fauna had a million mystically gruesome ways to end you. Necromancers and supposed healers prone to creating body-horror monsters still managed to find a way to make themselves a nuisance despite being heavily hunted by the rest of society. It was all frankly rather terrifying when one really thought about it.

And yet John had been given no cheats, no special powers, not even a useful identity. He had been shoved into the body of some nameless mob, armed with nothing but a sword and his incomplete recollection of a novel he had never expected to be tested on.

Irritated, he pressed his tongue against the back of his teeth.

John had never wanted to be important.

He had grown up on a farm, done the work put in front of him, and learned early that neglected chores tended to become larger, uglier chores. Beyond that, his ambitions had been limited. He had done only as much schoolwork as necessary, which had somehow been enough to secure admission to Columbia. Medicine had seemed honest, practical, and likely to pay well.

His intended future had involved a decent job, a homely wife, two kids, a quiet home, no public scandals, and as few emergencies as possible. But he somehow managed to screw that up, and now he was stuck here.

The quiet option was to climb down from the coach and simply walk away.

Voss and Harl would continue without him. Elara would be delivered to the tollhouse. The future would unfold along the course John remembered, and he could find some corner of the world where Demon Queens and Hollow Kings were someone else’s problem.

It was the easiest choice after all.

“…Fuck,” he sighed, eliciting a brief glance from Voss.

John did not consider himself brave. He was not eager to test a borrowed body against experienced killers. Staying beside Elara would eventually place him in front of noble conspirators, Church clerics, armies, monsters, and perhaps the Hollow King himself.

Leaving, however, meant knowingly allowing an eighteen-year-old woman to be sold into years of torment because helping her looked difficult.

There was laziness and cowardice, and then there was whatever that was.

Briefly, John considered simply giving them a heads-up and leaving. But warning was not as simple as leaning through the coach window and explaining the plot to Elara. Her older companion, Mirelle, watched the guards closely and never left her alone. If John made an accusation, Mirelle could do something stupid as call for Voss. John could show them the money paid, but even if they believed him, it implicated him as thoroughly as the other two.

There was also the fact that Harl and Voss would not simply watch and let them walk away.

Attacking the mercenaries together was worse. John was not arrogant enough to believe he could take on two other bronze ranks simply because he was a reincarnator. For a while, he had considered killing one while the men slept, but the opportunity never came.

So, John continued to watch. After all, there would be a moment when the two men separated and he could take one by surprise.

There had to be.

He only needed to wait.

The coach crested a long rise. Ahead, the King’s Road divided around a weathered stone figure standing beneath an ash tree.

The statue depicted a robed saint with one hand raised toward Asterhall. Rain had worn away most of its face.

A strip of black cloth had been tied around the stone.

The signal.

Voss straightened a little when he laid eyes on it. Harl glanced back, and this time there was no idle amusement in his expression.

The buyers were waiting ahead.

If John was going to act, it had to be soon.