The celebration in the Willson Guild Hall raged for hours, a much-needed explosion of joy and relief.

Ale flowed, hunters sang off-key songs of victory, and my father, Darius, laughed louder than I'd ever heard him, the C-Rank Ogre Core held aloft like a trophy. For the first time since my return, the guild felt alive, its heart beating strong and defiant.

I played my part, accepting clumsy congratulations from drunken guild members, smiling at my mother's tearful pride, and clinking glasses with Garth, whose broken arm was now in a heavy-duty healing cast, paid for by the raid's profits. But my mind was elsewhere.

I was watching Marcus.

He participated, but he didn't celebrate. He stood near the hearth, nursing a single cup of water, his gaze distant.

He'd answer his guildmates' awed questions about his C+ rank and his part in the fight with calm, sparse words. But his eyes... his eyes were on me.

It wasn't the simple look of a brother. It was the sharp, analytical gaze of a predator that had just seen another, unexpected predator in its territory.

He had seen my [Judgment Chain]. He had seen my battlefield commands. And he had felt the unnatural fusion of power in my final strike, a power that didn't belong to an E+ Magic Swordsman.

The party finally began to wind down around midnight. Hunters staggered off to their bunks, my parents retreated to their own quarters, their faces weary but profoundly happy.

The common hall fell into a quiet, smoky peace, littered with empty tankards and the lingering smell of roasted meat.

I said my goodnights and headed up the creaking wooden stairs to my small room, my body aching with a fatigue that was bone-deep.

The raid had taken more out of me than I'd let on. I needed rest.

I had just closed the door, the click of the latch echoing in the small space, when a quiet knock sounded.

Knock.

Knock.

Not my mother; she would have just called out. Not my father; his knock was a heavy-handed thud.

My hand instinctively went to where Draken rested in its conceptual sheath. I opened the door.

Marcus stood in the hallway, his frame silhouetted by the single flickering lamp at the end of the corridor. His expression was unreadable, his calm more unnerving than any open hostility.

"Can I come in?" His voice was low, flat.

I held his gaze, my mind racing. This wasn't a social call. This was the confrontation I had been dreading. "…Sure."

I stepped aside, and he entered, the simple act feeling like I had just invited a grandmaster into a novice's chess game. He didn't sit. He walked to the small window, looking out at the moonlit roofs of Selorn City, his back to me. The room felt suddenly, suffocatingly small.

"Your plan worked," he stated, his voice quiet. "The guild is safe. Father sees you as a hero. You won."

"It was a team victory," I said, leaning against my desk, my arms crossed. A defensive posture.

Marcus chuckled, a dry, humorless sound.

"No. It wasn't. The team was a blunt instrument. You were the wielder. You knew exactly how that pack would react. You knew Sila's arrow would blind the Chieftain and send it into a predictable rage. "

"You knew its 'search' pattern. You knew my... capabilities... would be enough to cripple its leg."

He turned slowly, his face half-shadowed, his eyes seeming to glow with an ancient, calculating light.

"That wasn't an Academy-taught strategy, Michael. That was the cold, perfect execution of a veteran commander who had run that exact scenario a hundred times."

My blood ran cold. He hadn't just seen my actions; he had analyzed my intent, my foreknowledge.

"And that Lightning Art," he continued, his voice dropping further. "Judgment Chain. I've cross-referenced the Academy's known spell archives. It doesn't exist. Not for first-years. Not for C-Ranks. It's a high-tier, multi-target spell... one that you, an E+ Magic Swordsman, cast with perfect control."

He took a step closer, his aura—that refined, sharp Qi—pressing against me, not as an attack, but as an undeniable presence. "Your final strike on the Chieftain. The fusion of Ice, Lightning, and... something else. Something that felt like it was tearing the air. You're not just talented, little brother. You're impossible."

He stopped, barely two meters away, his gaze pinning me to the wall. The silence in the room was absolute, broken only by my own suddenly ragged breathing.

"I am not the same Marcus you grew up with," he said, the admission so sudden it almost knocked me off balance.

"And you... you are not the Michael who left for the Academy."

His eyes held a profound, piercing question, a demand that echoed with a loneliness I recognized all too well.

"So, I will ask you. Not as a brother, but as... something else. What are you?"

My mind exploded. This was it. The ultimate dead end.

Lie? Useless. He was a human lie detector, his cultivator's senses had already confirmed his suspicions. He didn't have proof, but he had certainty. Denying it would be an insult and would only confirm my hostility.

Tell the full truth? 'Hi, I'm the author of this world, you're a supporting character, and I have a magical cheat System?' I'd be dead or locked in an asylum before I finished the sentence. He was a cultivator, not a lunatic.

That left only one path. The one I had prepared but prayed I'd never have to use. A partial truth. A truth that was still a lie, but one that might... just might... resonate with him.

I let out a long, shaky breath, breaking eye contact, and scrubbed a hand over my face. I let the mask of the 'Rank 1 Champion' fall, showing him the bone-deep weariness underneath.

"...You're right," I whispered, my voice rough. "I'm not. The Michael you knew... I don't know what happened to him. I just... woke up."

Marcus's stillness was absolute. He didn't even breathe.

I looked up, my eyes meeting his, forcing a look of haunted confusion into my gaze. "I... I remember. Another life. Another world."

The gamble was cast.

"It's not... clear," I continued, pacing a single step, the picture of a man grappling with an impossible reality. "It's fragmented. But I remember... skills. Techniques. Battles. I remember a world where strategy and knowledge were all that mattered." I gestured helplessly.

"When I see an Ogre, I don't just see a monster. I see... patterns. Attack vectors. Weaknesses. The 'Judgment Chain'… it's not an Academy spell. It's a technique from… before. One I'm struggling to adapt to this body."

I finally stopped, turning to face him fully, my expression stripped bare (or so I acted).

"That's how I knew. That's how I fought. I'm just... using memories that don't belong to this body. I'm a... a reincarnator, I guess."

I had laid my cards on the table. My heart was hammering so hard I was sure he could hear it. I had just admitted to being, in essence, an anomaly that had possessed his brother's body. He had every right to kill me where I stood.

Marcus stared at me. His face, usually so calm and controlled, was a canvas of raw, unfiltered shock. His mouth opened slightly. He took a single, unsteady step back, his hand gripping the hilt of his sword, not to draw, but for balance.

"You... what did you say?" he breathed, his voice cracking for the first time.

"I'm from another life, Marcus," I said, pressing the advantage, my voice heavy with (feigned) shared suffering. "I know it sounds insane. But I can tell... you're not the same, either. That swordsmanship... that wasn't a Hunter's skill. That was the art of a cultivator."

The word hit him like a physical blow. His eyes went wide, the cultivator's mask shattering completely, revealing the stunned, isolated soul beneath.

He stared at me, his gaze frantic, searching. "How... how do you know that word?"

"Because my past life's world... it had stories," I lied, weaving the narrative.

"Stories of men who cultivated Qi, who followed the sword path, who severed mountains. Your movements... they're from one of those stories."

For a long, agonizing minute, Marcus just stared, his chest rising and falling rapidly. He looked from me to the wall, to his own hands, as if seeing the world, and himself, for the first time.

Then, a sound tore from his throat. It wasn't a word. It was a low, choked laugh, half-sob, half-disbelief.

"Hah... hahaha... I... I thought I was the only one," he whispered, his voice trembling. He scrubbed a hand over his face, his composure completely gone. "I thought I was going insane. That I was a ghost possessing my own body."

He looked back at me, and the suspicion was gone, replaced by a profound, earth-shattering wave of recognition and, beneath it all, relief.

"You... you're like me," he stated, the words heavy with meaning.

I nodded slowly, letting out the breath I hadn't even realized I was holding. "It seems so."

"A cultivator," he said, testing the word, his eyes distant.

"Yes. That's what I was. I… I remember a life of training, of sects, of ascending... before I woke up here. Back in my own, eighteen-year-old body, with all this... power... I couldn't explain. I thought it was a curse. A-a demonic possession, maybe."

"So did I," I admitted. "I thought this sword," I gestured to Draken, "was some kind of demon, whispering its knowledge to me. But it's just... memory. Techniques I already know."

We stood in the small, dim room, two secrets laid bare. We weren't just brothers by blood. We were brothers in the strangest, most isolating fate imaginable.

Two reincarnators, from two different "genres," who had landed in the same unsuspecting family in the same backwater town. The sheer, astronomical impossibility of it was staggering.

The tension didn't just break; it inverted. The heavy, hostile atmosphere was replaced by a giddy, almost hysterical sense of shared kinship.

Marcus was the first to regain his composure, the cultivator's calm settling back over him, though his eyes remained warmer, more alive than I'd ever seen them.

"So," he said, his voice steadier. "A 'gamer'—or whatever your past life was—and a 'cultivator'. Both hiding in the Willson family. What are the odds?"

"I've stopped trying to calculate them," I said, a genuine, tired smile finally touching my lips. "I'm just trying to survive."

"Survive," Marcus repeated. He nodded, his expression turning grim as he processed the implications of our shared reality.

"Yes. That's the core of it." He looked at me, the bond between us solidifying into something new.

"You have your... 'skills'. I have my cultivation. And we both have secrets that would get us dissected by the Academy or the Empire if they were ever revealed."

He stepped forward, not with hostility, but with purpose. He clasped his hand on my shoulder—the same one my father had—but his grip was different. It was the grip of an equal. A comrade.

"We protect this family, Michael," he said, his voice a low, unshakeable vow. "Our parents, this guild... they are the anchor for both of our new lives. We can't let the shadows of our pasts, or the dangers of this world, destroy them."

"The Iron Vipers," I said, my voice hardening.

"Their backer in Arcadia. Magnus Daven."

"Yes," Marcus's eyes flashed with a cold, cultivator's killing intent.

"I'll protect the guild from the front. My... techniques... are more than enough to handle local threats. You... you continue to move from the shadows of the Academy. You have the 'foreknowledge,' as you called it. The strategy."

"A two-pronged approach," I agreed, feeling a massive weight lift. I wasn't alone anymore. I had a C+ (and likely far, far stronger) cultivator-assassin-reincarnator as my brother.

"We agree, then," Marcus said. He held his hand out, not for a handshake, but palm-up, in a gesture that felt like an ancient martial oath. "No more secrets between us. We protect our home. Together."

I clasped his forearm, my grip firm. "Together."

A new, secret, and impossibly complex bond was forged in that small room, under the quiet moonlight of Selorn City.

The "Willson Brothers" were now something far more dangerous than the world could ever imagine. And the game had just fundamentally changed.

(To be continued in Chapter 173)

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