Believe Me Then

’Haah... swordstaff.’

The weapon materialised into his hands with the familiar weight of something that had been through too much and was running on borrowed time. It was clunky, battered, held together more by stubbornness than structural integrity at this point — and the moment Claire’s next blow came crashing down against it, a fresh tremor ran through the metal and several new cracks spread outward from the point of contact like a spiderweb branching in slow motion. Aaron slid back to a stop, felt the weapon shuddering in his grip, and looked at Claire’s face.

Cold. Dedicated. Utterly unmoved.

He sighed quietly and accepted the truth of it. His swordstaff wasn’t surviving this fight. The poor thing had been with him through everything — unique to him, never even equipped with a magic core, just raw and loyal and increasingly fragile — and this was apparently where its story ended. He’d miss it.

Claire’s blade came down again without pause, clanging hard against the broken swordstaff and forcing him back several steps. Eva’s buff had done its work thoroughly — the already formidable blonde was moving with a speed and force that sat above her already considerable baseline, each strike carrying weight that pushed Aaron to use more of his new body than he’d had the opportunity to properly understand yet.

Which was, in a strange way, informative.

The scales were the first thing he’d registered consciously — the most visible of the changes, spreading across his skin in that translucent, milky-white pattern when activated. But beyond the visual, he could feel them now in a way he hadn’t before the fight started. They tingled faintly across the surface of his body, each one distinct and locatable, like a second nervous system he was only just learning to read. The awareness of them was sharpening with every exchange of blows, his body mapping itself out to him in real time.

Then there were the wings.

He couldn’t deploy them here — the room was already a disaster and folding two wings out into what remained of it would solve nothing — but he could feel them against his back, folded and patient, waiting. He’d always wanted this. It was the kind of want that had lived in him since childhood, since the first time he’d looked up at something moving through the sky and understood, with quiet certainty, that machines didn’t count. Planes and gliders and magic-assisted flight were all just borrowing the sky through intermediaries. Wings were different. Wings were the thing itself. And now they were there, real and attached and his, and he couldn’t even use them yet because Claire was trying to separate his head from his shoulders in a small inn room.

The third mutation was subtler than the first two, and it had taken him a handful of exchanges to identify it properly. His eyes had changed, and with them came a new layer of vision — he could see blood. Not in any grotesque way, but structurally, directionally. In his altered sight, Claire had stopped looking like Claire and had become instead a dense, living map of red and blue lines crossing and weaving over each other in a humanoid shape, tracing the paths of veins and arteries through her form with a clarity that stripped everything else away. It was disorienting at first, but he’d found quickly that it sharpened his focus during the fight in ways that mattered. He could close it off when he chose to. For now, he kept it.

Swishhh

The slash came at his neck and he ducked beneath it cleanly, feeling the air move above him as Claire’s blade continued its arc and buried itself into the wooden wardrobe behind him with a crack of splitting timber. He slipped through the gap her momentum created and kept moving, kept weaving, kept not dying — which was the primary objective.

His skills were locked. The system’s temporary shutdown during the class upgrade had taken everything useful off the table, leaving him with nothing but his body, his instincts, and a weapon that was currently in two pieces.

"Believe me already! I am Aaron!" The words came out for what felt like the hundredth time, raw with a frustration that was entirely genuine.

Claire’s expression didn’t break. But — and he caught this only because he was watching closely — something moved behind it. A flicker, small and quickly suppressed. His words were landing somewhere. They just weren’t landing hard enough to override what she’d already decided, and Claire, once she decided something, was one of the most immovable people he’d ever known. She had already decreed that she would kill him. She was going to follow through on that decree.

He could see it in the red and blue lines of her — the tension in the way they moved, fast and deliberate, the pattern of someone who was committed to a conclusion and hadn’t given themselves permission to reverse it.

The swordstaff broke in two.

He looked at the pieces in his hands and then at Claire, still coming, and felt the options narrowing around him like walls.

"Okay, what do you really want? What will make you believe that I am Aaron!" The desperation in his voice was unfiltered now, all pretense of composure gone.

"I will believe you if you die." Claire scoffed, the words landing with the flat certainty of someone who considered this a perfectly reasonable position.

Aaron went still for a moment. Then, slowly, he turned to face her fully. He closed the blood vision, letting the red and blue lines dissolve back into colour and shape and the actual, real face of the woman in front of him — golden hair wild around her shoulders, blue eyes sharp and burning, her expression set with that particular Claire-brand of furious determination that he had missed, he realised, more than he’d had the capacity to articulate while he was away. Her clothes, her face, the way she held herself even in the middle of trying to kill him — all of it hit him at once in the way familiar things do when you’ve been away from them long enough.

He smiled. Slow, quiet, and completely sincere.

Then he stopped running. He let his feet settle. He raised both arms out to his sides, open-handed, in the universal posture of someone who has decided to stop defending themselves.

"Alright. Believe me then." His eyes stayed on hers and didn’t move.

"Fine." She didn’t stop. Of course she didn’t — she believed herself to be right, had built her certainty into something load-bearing, and a monster wearing her lover’s speech patterns wasn’t going to dismantle that with a gesture and a smile. The attack came with full commitment behind it.

But the longer she held his gaze, the more something shifted in the machinery of her conviction. Those eyes — bloodshot, slit-pupiled, dreadful by any ordinary measure — held something in them that her certainty kept bumping up against and failing to explain away. Her hands shook. It was slight, barely perceptible, but it was there.

The sword dropped.

She converted all of it — the momentum, the force, the commitment — into a punch instead, and it came like a small, furious whirlwind aimed directly at his midsection. Aaron watched it coming. His instincts and his new body between them could have moved him clear of it without much effort. His heart told him to stand still and take it like a man.

He stood still.

Her fist caught him just at the waist, close enough to wind him properly, and the force of her body following through sent both of them stumbling backward together until the ruined bed came up to meet them and they landed in a graceless heap — Aaron flat on his back, the air knocked cleanly from his lungs, and Claire pressed against his chest with her weight warm and real and achingly familiar. Her soft form settled against him and for a moment neither of them moved.

"You... explain." Her body was trembling — subtle, continuous, the kind of trembling that happens after a long time of holding something very tightly. She kept her expression hard through it, and he respected that enormously.

He smiled up at her and began.

The mythical grade class revelation landed on both of them like something dropped from a significant height. They’d known about the three class options, but the grade was something else entirely — once that settled in, the wings and the scales and the unsettling eyes rearranged themselves from evidence of possession into something that made a different kind of sense. He walked them through everything. The mushfolks, Alyssa, the strange beauty of Bella’s realm, the encounter with Bellanoir herself. Plontis in his permanent state of standing. And then Karen — the white room, the vial, the upgrade, all of it.

"So... you’re telling me you screwed with THE EMPRESS OF DESTRUCTION, Aaron?" Claire’s smile was wide and bright and absolutely did not reach her eyes, the expression of someone performing pleasantness over something that was decidedly not pleasant.

Aaron nodded, the pride in his expression entirely unearned and entirely genuine. "Correct, after my dick was upgraded, she got smitten by me and wanted nothing more than to bree— Heuk!"

Eva’s hand connected with his lower waist before the sentence finished existing, and the sound that came out of him was less dignified than anything he’d managed during the entire fight.

"But, since you two girls finally believe me a little, I have two very important questions." He shifted gears with the ease of someone who had learned to change subjects quickly around these two, his tone settling into something that communicated clearly that the fooling around portion of the evening was concluded.

"Shoot." Claire confirmed, apparently satisfied enough with the outcome to have migrated fully onto his lap, her head finding the familiar spot on his shoulder with the ease of long habit, a yawn escaping her that she didn’t bother to conceal.

"How much time has it been since I was in the trial? And what will happen after we have trashed this room to this extent? Also, to save Alyssa I would need quite a few high tier potions. How many you two got?"

"That’s three questions." Eva observed, her voice carrying its characteristic calm precision.

"...Just answer." Aaron sighed.