Chapter 486: Chapter 486- Rika’s Husband’s Broken Pepe...

And then it hit him.

Not gently. Not like a memory surfacing through still water. It crashed into him like the full, rolling front of a tidal wave — the Labyrinth, its spiraling floors carved into something not quite natural stone, the grinding echo of thousands of boots ascending in formation, the sharp smell of torch smoke and blood and ozone from the teleportation grids.

He grabbed his head with both hands. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

’The arrow hero.’

’First Battalion.’

’The demon horde on the forty-third stratum — the one that came screaming out of the fog wall to the east, the one that the scouts said wasn’t supposed to be there —’

His molars ground together so hard his jaw ached.

He’d been following at the rear of the formation. He wasn’t even a frontline fighter. He was support, utility, the kind of man who carried supplies and mapped corridors and flagged unstable terrain. But it hadn’t mattered. When the horde punched through the flank, support died just as easily as swordsmen.

He remembered the impact. The sound — not screaming, specifically, but the ’absence’ of sound right at the moment it happened, that single split-second of total silence before everything went dark.

And then this.

His ability — ’Memory Recollection’ — had triggered at death, the way it always was theorized to work. He’d read the scroll about it once in the Labyrinth’s second floor archive, the one donated by some old researcher who’d theorized about reset-type abilities.

He hadn’t believed it.

Now he sat in his grandmother’s house in Edenveil, and the arrow hero’s first campaign hadn’t even been announced yet, and the demon battle on the forty-third stratum was still two years away at minimum, and he was — he was ’back.’

He blinked very slowly.

"...Have I just returned back to the past?"

His voice came out hoarse. Scraped and hollow, like a man speaking from the inside of an empty barrel.

He didn’t know what he was supposed to do with that. The Labyrinth existed — he could still hear the faint, subterranean rumble of it beneath the village, that low geological moan that locals learned to ignore the way one ignored the wind. The base town of Edenveil sat at the foot of the Labyrinth’s first portion, the ground-floor staging village where supply lines connected and raiders restocked and fresh recruits from the surrounding countryside got their first terrified look at what lay beyond the mouth of the stone corridor.

He’d been a nobody when he first went in.

He was still a nobody, now.

His fingers slowly released his skull. He exhaled — long, shaking, unsteady — through clenched teeth.

’What can I even do?’

He had information. He had memories. He had knowledge of paths and traps and the exact sequence of events that led to thousands dying on floors that hadn’t fallen yet.

But he also had nothing. No rank, no coin, no weapon beyond the chipped short blade under his cot.

The breath he pulled in came out harder than he meant it to.

’No.’

His jaw tightened. His eyes steadied.

’No. I need to make things better now.’

The words didn’t feel like much when he said them to himself. They felt small against the enormity of what he knew was coming. But he held onto them anyway — pressed his palms flat against his thighs, inhaled through his nose, squared himself.

He would figure it out. Step by step. He had time.

’KLANG.’

The bucket hit him directly on top of the skull.

"—NGHK—!"

Jacob went down sideways off the straw mat, crashing into the floor, the tin bucket bouncing off his head with a hollow metallic gong that sent stars blooming across his vision. His cheek pressed cold against the wooden planks as he lay there, blinking at the grain of the wood, absolutely incapable of processing how quickly his dramatic moment had been dismantled.

From the doorway, a voice thundered.

"YOU BRAT."

He rolled over.

Standing in the doorway — filling most of it, being very honest — was his grandmother.

She was not what most people pictured when they heard the word ’grandmother.’

The woman’s name was Edda, and she had the build of someone who had personally fought things that were significantly larger than her for the better part of forty years. Her arms were wrapped in pale scar tissue from wrist to elbow on the right side, a sweep of burn-scarring from a raid gone wrong that she never spoke about but that the village children had been making up legends about since Jacob was in swaddling cloth. Her shoulders were ’wide’ — not the kind of wide that came from good genetics, but the carved, layered musculature of someone who had swung iron through flesh and bone until her body simply became the shape that work required. Her chest was broad. Her waist, though thick with age, remained straight-backed, no curl in her spine, no concession to the years.

She was not wrinkled the way a grandmother should be. Her face carried lines, yes — deep ones around her eyes, sharp brackets at the corners of her mouth — but her skin held its toughness the way old leather holds its shape. Her white hair — thick, genuinely ’thick’, the kind of volume that looked like it had its own weather — was pulled back in a knot so tight it could’ve anchored a boat, though two fat strands had escaped and hung at her jaw like they’d given up on discipline.

She was holding another bucket.

She was looking at him the way a woman looks at something she is genuinely considering ending.

"Are you ’really’ sleeping?" she said. "NOW? Are you really laying there on that floor like a dying chicken when there is CATTLE to be fed and a yard to be cleared and three fence posts that still haven’t been hammered since LAST WEEK—"

"G-Grandma—"

Her eyes narrowed. He saw the hand lift.

"—WAIT—"

’KLONG.’

The second bucket hit him square. He barely had time to bring his forearm up, which meant it clipped off the arm and still caught him across the brow, and the next thing he knew he was outside — he was genuinely outside, the cool morning air on his face, because she had grabbed him by the collar and ’launched him’ through the doorway with the practiced ease of a woman who had thrown considerably heavier things and considerably further distances.

He landed on his butt in the dirt yard, hands slapping the ground, the impact rattling his teeth.

He sat there for a moment, blinking at the pale morning sky.

He was back. He was really back.

He was back, and his grandmother had already concussed him twice in the span of forty seconds.

"Stand up before I beat your ass ’out’ of this village!" Edda bellowed from the doorway, her hands on her wide hips, her white hair catching the morning light like a battle standard. "I raised a RAIDER, not a SLEEPING LOG—"

"YES GRANDMA—" He scrambled up.

He looked at her.

He actually ’looked’ at her this time, not through the haze of confusion and death-memory, but ’looked’ — and his throat closed.

She was standing there alive and loud and terrifying and real, and the last time he’d seen her she’d been a name on a casualty list passed to him by a courier on the thirty-first floor, and he hadn’t even been able to stop moving because the battalion didn’t halt for individual grief, and he had—

He had not cried then.

His eyes burned now.

"Grandma."

The word came out in a single crack.

Edda stared at him. Something flickered behind her sharp eyes — the briefest moment of parsing — before her brow drew down and her mouth compressed into a flat line of considerable suspicion.

"...Don’t you dare," she said slowly.

"I just—"

"Don’t."

"I missed—"

"Jacob, I swear on every dungeon floor I’ve bled on—"

’THWP.’ The bucket hit him from behind — she’d retrieved it, somehow — catching him right across the back of the skull, and he stumbled forward into the dirt yard, catching himself on his knees, nose an inch from the ground as the world tilted.

"STAND UP!" Edda roared. "Crying in the ’yard!’ In front of the ’neighbors!’"

He stood up.

He wiped his eyes with his sleeve.

He decided he would figure out a better moment for emotional reunion.

He was standing in the dirt yard, rubbing the rising lump on his head and breathing through his nose in that specific way one breathes when trying to reassemble dignity after a bucket, when the sound of clicking drew his attention.

The tongue click — precise, dismissive, carrying the particular frequency of a woman who has found you annoying before you’ve even spoken — came from his left, and he turned.

’Oh.’

His eyes went wide.

Rika.

She was walking along the fence line toward the well path, one hand resting on the wide curve of her hip, her clay water pot balanced against her forearm. She moved the way she always moved — not gracefully, exactly, but with the casual settled weight of a woman entirely comfortable with the body she occupied, which in Rika’s case was a body that had, over thirty years of village life, cattle farming, and enthusiastic eating, become a considerable argument for the pleasures of sedentary labor.

She was not tall. She was, to be direct, quite a bit of the other thing — her hips flared out wide and full beneath the wrap of her working skirt, the fabric pulling taut at the broadest point before loosening where it tucked at the waist. Her ass, barely contained by that skirt, moved with every step in the way that village men and some women had been caught looking at for several years and then being very interested in the middle distance when anyone noticed.

Her chest, covered in the loose drape of her working blouse, was — her blouse was doing its sincere best, and not quite winning.

The neckline, slightly loose, shifted as she walked. The fabric moved.

’You are dead... BRAT!’