Amazon Apocalypse 6: Chapter 70

The focused attention of Mimiko and Bridget was expected, but the sharp-eyed gaze of the newborn baby in Bridget's arms was less so. Newborns weren't supposed to do much of anything besides lay swaddled in cloth, sleep, cry, and shit.

Then again, as I looked the kid over I remembered he'd skipped the newborn phase entirely. He was already toddler-sized and clearly had no issues seeing me from across the room. The birth had taken as much out of him as it had out of Bridget.

I approached, and he followed me with his eyes as I crouched beside the bed. He straightened and even puffed out his chest a little, though it was hard to look imposing swaddled in cloth.

I recognized Bridget's features on him. He had thin tufts of golden hair that were only starting to come in, and he had her bright eyes. The shape of his jaw and face was more reminiscent of my own appearance, and on the whole it was easy to see he was our kid.

The changes I'd made to myself since the integration had been passed on to Adrian, so he looked more like a baby version of my current self than what I'd resembled as a child. If he grew up looking as he did, none of the other boys his age would get a chance with the ladies at all.

Given our family's position in Crownhill, and our growing wealth and influence, I feared Adrian would grow into a spoiled wasteful child if we didn't take great pains to teach him well. Or at least, that was what I thought until I saw the heavy and serious look in his eyes.

It was the kind of wizened gaze that didn't belong on a newborn. When he looked at me, I got a sense of a determination and resilience no baby should possess. Beyond that, there was a glint of keen intelligence.

Adrian Smith (Level 24)

Being born at the peak of E-Grade was pretty impressive, as far as things went. Most monsters weren't that strong the day they were born, and it did a lot to explain the kid's exceptional size and intelligence. He probably would have already been D-Grade by the time he was born if we let the pregnancy run its natural course instead of delivering him early.

"Hello, Adrian. Welcome to the world." I picked him up and rocked him back and forth until those piercing eyes closed and he drifted off to sleep.

I held him for a while before Mimiko volunteered to take over holding him while Bridget rested.

"I can hire someone, you know. There's no need to waste your time babysitting," I suggested.

Mimiko held my son tight to her chest like she was afraid I was going to take him away from her. I had expected this kind of motherly possessiveness from Bridget, but not Mimiko.

"There's truly no need, milord. I will look after the young master personally." She rocked him back and forth with a doting smile on her face.

I suddenly realized Bridget and I weren't the only ones who might end up spoiling little Adrian. I'd have to talk with the rest of my household about raising kids.

After Bridget ate, she took the kid back, and soon she and Mimiko were passing him back and forth. I returned home to make sure our nursery was ready. The void monsters had done some damage to the walls, especially after Reluna left to join the main battlefield, but Governess was already putting things together and with my help everything was soon as it was supposed to be.

***

I thought we'd need to stay in the clinic for a few days, since our son had been born early. But the doctor assured us little Adrian was the healthiest baby he'd ever seen.

Under normal circumstances we'd get to stay anyway just for our peace of mind, but the city had just been through a battle, which meant every bed was needed to treat the wounded. And so we were out of there as soon as Bridget felt she was up for it.

The day of the void attacks came and went. The System had generously let Jazon, his team, and a few others stay in Crownhill for a while after the battle to celebrate and get some shopping in. I'm certain they left with bags of holding stuffed with what to them were very exotic goods.

I spent some time with them, but the new addition to our household was more important. Originally, I'd been worried about how the baby would do in such a crowded household with lots of adults and no other kids. We'd skipped the newborn stage entirely, so I figured Adrian would sit in a corner and play with blocks or something until I hunted down a playmate for him.

All those worries proved unnecessary as my women streamed back home.

"The city is finally safe, so long as those treaties hold! What do you say, ladies. You in for a wild couple of days?" I waggled my eyebrows suggestively.

"I want to see the baby!" Myrina said. She patted my shoulder and gave me a kiss, before promptly pushing me aside in search of Adrian. She was followed by Cyra, who also patted my shoulder and went looking for the baby.

The same was true for Sakura, and even Reluna hopped out of her sexually-stimulating armor to coo over little Adrian. I hadn't run into somebody who could attract female attention better than me since before I started really dumping points into Charisma, but the little rug rat was pulling it off in his sleep.

Soon, six women were all gathered around Adrian's cradle watching him as he slept. I was pretty sure he even shit himself while napping, but even that was treated like it was cute. Sometimes the world was just unfair.

For the first time in as long as I could remember, I was in the mood while everyone else was busy. But that was what I signed up for when having a kid.

I wasn't sure how long six women could stare at a sleeping baby, but at least I had plenty of volunteers to help with diaper duty, though from where Governess was positioning her mannequins, I was pretty sure she planned to handle that dirty job.

I ended up working on some magic carving blocks for the kid. They were the same as what I remembered from my own early childhood, with colors, letters, and numbers on various sides. I also added a few simple enchantments hidden in the wood that would cause the blocks to light up when arranged in certain patterns. I figured I could show him the trick at some point and see how long it would take the kid to get it.

I dropped off the blocks and found him playing with them the very next day. Mimiko, Bridget, and Sakura all sat around him as he moved them about.

"Oh, I think he's going to spell out a word!" Mimiko said excitedly.

"Don't put too much pressure on him. The kid was literally born yesterday," I chuckled from across the room. For my part, I was impressed Adrian could crawl and use his hands already. He'd been born large, but now it was clear he was more akin to a toddler than a newborn.

"I believe in our son. Go on, what are you going to write?" Bridget beamed as she encouraged our son.

Sure enough, the kid failed to spell out anything at all, much to our disappointment. But then one by one the blocks lit up as the secret enchantments I'd placed within them activated.

"Pretty impressive, little guy." I stroked his head affectionately. He'd cracked the code to my hidden enchantments before he'd learned to spell.

I'd suspected Adrian would be gifted, but the scale of his gifts became increasingly apparent over the next few days.

For one, he rarely cried, and when he did he stopped the moment we were helping him with whatever he needed. Normally, that was a diaper change or when he was hungry. Another was that he made eye contact whenever anyone was speaking, and he seemed on high alert when someone powerful entered the house.

He and Bridget were playing with his blocks when Frank went to visit, and Adrian was the first to his feet as he stared intently at the door as he placed himself between his mother and it. Until then, I'd never seen a baby with such a serious expression on his face.

"Frank is here," I said after peering through higher dimensions to see the other side of the door.

I opened the door and let Frank in.

"Hey, Carter! I heard you had a kid. Damn, what a fierce little guy." Frank crouched down to see Adrian at eye level, and the kid met Frank with an even gaze.

"Here, some of my adventurers found this while exploring some ruins." Frank held a rattle in the shape of a sword. It was a chunk of colorful foam and plastic sized for a baby's hands.

Frank presented the sword, and Adrian took it by the handle. There was a glint in his eyes as he held the sword, as though he were remembering something familiar. He didn't hold the rattle like the toy it was. Instead he felt its heft, pointed it down, and swung a clean and steady arc through the air. He made several more gestures like that, along with a skillful lunge.

Mimiko clapped from where she was seated nearby. "The young master has an affinity for the sword. It is said the sword is the noblest of all weapons. Given his handsome and regal nature, it is only natural for swords to delight in his presence."

***

Adrian carried that rattle with him for the next few days. His interests turned away from the blocks I'd made for him and more toward the other things we had in our home. Once, when all of us were in bed, he snuck out of his magically-reinforced crib to explore the castle. Governess was supposed to be keeping after him while the rest of us tested the strength of my bedframe. But somehow, he'd slipped past Governess' mannequin.

After, he easily defeated the child gate we had to the stairs. I wasn't too worried though. When I got those, we'd been expecting a normal baby. At the peak of E-Grade, a tumble down every set of stairs in the castle would hardly leave a bruise.

I was content to let him explore until I saw where he was headed. Myrina left her personal room wide askew. She slept with me whenever she was here, so though the place was sized like a bedroom, the bed lay flipped on its side to make room for racks of clothes. Adrian pushed the door open and navigated the piles on the floor before making his way to the back. There, he found Myrina's personal armory and I realized maybe this was an emergency after all.

By the time I'd dressed, Adrian had already yanked down one of Myrina's swords and was taking a few experimental swings with it. I appeared behind him in a bit of a rush.

"Woah there, little guy. These things are dangerous." I grabbed the hilt of his sword and placed it back on the rack. I picked Adrian up and carried him back to his crib. "How'd you get by Governess, anyway?"

"Ah... gaah... baaah..." Adrian babbled. He frowned as he spoke, like he was frustrated his mouth wouldn't work properly.

"I know. Motor functions, right? What a pain in the ass. It'll be a while before everything works properly," I said.

"Dada..." he pouted, but didn't protest further as I returned him to his crib. Maybe it had been a mistake not to install more security features facing the occupant.

***

We settled into our new life smoothly, though Adrian's upbringing was going to be anything but conventional. The poor kid wasn't going to be able to get away with anything with six mothers keeping an eye on him.

"Okay, Aunty Myrina has to go off and patrol or something. You are coming with Mommy and Daddy to walk through the pocket realm, where you'll see some kids a bit older than you," Bridget said, scooping Adrian up.

Myrina jumped to her feet. "Hey! Who ever said anything about me being an aunt? Adrian's going to call me mommy too! You can be House Mommy, I'll be Tough Mommy! And your little garden walk or whatever can wait. He's showing me his fighting stances!"

Adrian was indeed standing with his sword-shaped baby rattle held in a fighting pose. Somehow, he'd even wound up with a set of tiny toddler-sized armor. He looked like a swashbuckling warrior, albeit in miniature.

"Who keeps dressing Adrian up in tiny armor?" Bridget said as she knelt next to our son.

"It seems like he's in a new outfit every time I look at him." I shook my head. With six women keeping after him, the kid was better dressed than I was. He only had a few dozen hairs on his head so far, but you wouldn't know it from the amount of time everyone spent combing them.

An odd side effect of him joining the family was that I surprisingly found myself with more time, not less. Before, hobbies, books, and television could only do so much to distract all the women in this household while I worked. Normally, I was kept quite busy.

But now little Adrian provided plenty of entertainment for the women in my household, albeit in a very different way than I did. They spent hours combing what little hair he'd managed to grow, changing him into a dozen outfits a day, and taking him from room to room to play. It seemed like the girls were spending more time with his toys than he was. Everybody wanted to show him around the castle.

The extra time was good for me. I was at the peak of B-Grade and could reach A-Grade as soon as I completed my racial evolution quest to fulfill an ancient prophecy. Thankfully, there was only one big prophecy on the shard, and I was certain I could complete it whenever I chose to. Which meant I could time things so that I had this whole dragon thing completely under control.

To that end, I practiced the skills Jade had tried to teach me. I reviewed the memory crystal she'd given me so many times that it started turning blurry. I got the increasing sense that it would fall apart eventually. Normally, I would have made a copy long before this, but I'd promised Jade to destroy the recording when I was done with it.

But as I practiced Jade's kindling realm techniques, I peered deeper into my own soul and the needles from the System that sunk into it. There were many of them placed in all directions. The same was true for Sakura and Bridget. Cyra and Reluna's souls were better integrated with the System, since they'd been born under its full influence.

I was curious most about Adrian. This was a newly integrated world, but he'd been born with the System already established. In theory, he should be more like Cyra and Reluna.

The tethers I expected were there, binding him to the System. But there was something else there too. It was shrouded in darkness and unfathomable magic, but I knew it was there.

I was no fool. I had seen the signs my son showed us. The speed with which he'd grown, the strange intensity in his gaze from the moment of his birth, and the clear familiarity he had with swords. All of these were clear indications of something beyond childlike, and the bloodline I passed down to him wasn't enough to explain the change on its own.

It took me a week of work to see it, but once I caught a glimpse it was like the scales were lifted from my eyes. The System tethers connected to Adrian didn't go directly to the System. Instead, they were attached to something floating behind him. There was a sleeping giant lurking there just beyond sight. At first I thought it was some sort of enormous soul parasite, like that monster my shadow had slain in interdimensional space.

But this was different. The more I looked at it, the more I realized this was a person. A person stripped of their body, dead, and left adrift. What passed for a body barely seemed there, like he'd fought his way through a dozen battlefields and been mauled by a bear on the way home. The face was unrecognizable, and even now the soul fragment seemed to be growing weaker. Still, the sheer size of it seemed to suggest it belonged to someone powerful.

I spoke with Mimiko on everything the cultivators knew of possession and reincarnation. After exhausting what she knew, I went back to Jade. At the Omykir statue, she gave voice to the same theory I'd suspected myself.

"What you're saying doesn't sound like possession. It sounds more like a soul inheritance. The System has been known to attempt to recreate its greatest heroes in such a manner." Jade explained.

"Does this soul inheritance destroy the host's soul? Like a reincarnator taking the place of a newborn baby?" I asked worriedly.

"No. Even in a true reincarnation, there is only one soul from start to finish. But true reincarnation is rare for mighty heroes. With such long lives, it is rare for them to die quietly, and anything that can slay an A-Grade can also flay their soul beyond recognition. For us cultivators, we're on our own. But for System users, it does its best to retrieve whatever it can from the remains. In this case, it is likely the hollowed out husk of a soul left by some long-dead A-Grade." Jade's statue glowed as she explained the secrets of life and death to me.

"I take it these remains contain memories? Abilities?" I asked.

"All that and more. But by affixing the broken pieces of a fallen hero around a developing soul, the System sometimes succeeds in recreating a fallen champion, after a fashion. It is a reward many System users fight for with great desperation. Most children with such an inheritance grow with remarkable speed, as the System wants them to mature and resume their former role with all haste."

I frowned. "But this is a powerful and ancient soul with who knows how many centuries of memories. My son is just days old, and already it's changing him. If I let this process unfold, will Adrian really be my son at all? Or will he be the reincarnation of whoever this fallen hero of the System was?"

"That's up to you to decide. Any other B-Grade would be helpless in the face of such a problem. But the Architects of old forgot that machines were made to serve us, not the other way around. You have an option few others would. Remember the power I taught you."

Jade left me to my thoughts and I returned home.

Naturally, I knew Jade was referring to the powers of the Kindling, which I'd only begun to master. They were the same powers I'd been honing every day since the void monster attack to remove the scales from my arms and suppress the negative effects of the Chaos Dragon title.

Daily application of the power had yielded steady results. Now it seemed I'd have to split my power between two people. But for something like this, I dismissed any thoughts of holding back.

I approached my son, sleeping in his crib. He opened his eyes, and they seemed full of confusion for a moment, then innocence, then focused intensity.

"Hush now, Adrian. Go to sleep. Whatever worries you have now can wait until you grow up. You're my son, and no dead hero or ancient machine will change that."

I held my hand over my son, reaching past the physical to his soul. I took the connections tying him to the ancient corpse floating in the void behind him and bound them tight with a working of Kindling energy. The result was a simple seal. It was crude for now, but I would reinforce it as I learned to control this power better.

Adrian would have his inheritance from the System when he needed it. Until then, he would receive the loving childhood we had planned for him. I could only hope it would be a long and peaceful one, though fate had a way of conspiring against me there.

<Note>

Alright, hopefully that clears some stuff up about Adrian. Yes, he is 100% Carter and Bridget's kid. But he's also inherited the broken soul of some ancient dead guy. So far, the only thing we know about this person is that void monsters really hate them.

Anyway, I think next chapter is a good time for a few alternate PoV. If I end up ending there, it'll be the epilogue. If not, it'll be a short aside.