"Why do we get so little paperwork?"
I rested my cheek against one hand and stared at the untouched stack of folders near the edge of the desk. The office windows stood half open, letting in cool evening air together with the distant sound of carriage wheels from the street below.
The sun had long passed its zenith.
Now it lingered lower over the rooftops, gold fading slowly into amber.
"Well," Bao said, moving his pawn forward one square, "by the time reports reach us, most of the clerical work has already been handled."
The chess piece clicked softly against the board.
"Ah."
I blinked once.
"Right. I did that."
Noi snorted quietly from where she leaned over the back of the couch, arms folded across the cushion while watching the game unfold.
"Hmm… interesting."
I narrowed my eyes at the board again.
The ghosts of previous defeats hovered somewhere behind my thoughts, offering terrible strategic advice. If I moved my knight, Bao could pin it to my king immediately.
But maybe he wouldn't notice.
No.
He would absolutely notice.
Still…
if he took the knight, eventually he'd lose the bishop.
Probably.
I moved the piece anyway.
Bao stared at the board in silence.
Then calmly reached for another slice of cake instead.
That pause alone nearly destroyed my confidence.
Noi made a quiet sound that was dangerously close to laughter.
The room remained quiet except for the ticking clock near the bookshelf and the faint rustling of paper whenever the wind drifted through the open windows.
"Haha."
Noi laughed softly under her breath.
"What is the White Treaty?" I asked suddenly, partly because I genuinely wanted to know and partly because distracting Bao felt tactically necessary.
"Ah," Noi murmured, reaching for a biscuit. "The Pressure Accord."
She didn't elaborate.
Just ate the biscuit while continuing to watch the board.
"Your turn," Bao said calmly.
Then pinned my knight to my king.
I stared at the board in betrayal.
I knew it.
"The Concord Treaty on Controlled Civilizational Escalation," he explained while lifting his tea.
Steam brushed briefly against his glasses before fading.
"It's a global agreement regulating technological, industrial, and Aetheric advancement in order to prevent planetary destabilization, Engine disruption, and Macro-Phage-level collapse events."
My hand hovered awkwardly above a pawn while my brain struggled through the sentence.
The office suddenly felt quieter.
"The Macro-Phage reaction," Noi added casually, "was basically the Aether reacting to excessive strain."
She said it the same way someone might explain rain.
I looked toward her slowly.
She had once explained that my summoning into this world was itself likely a reaction to large-scale industrial Aether usage. At the time, that explanation had quietly murdered most of the fantasy attached to being transported here.
No prophecy.
No chosen destiny.
Just environmental backlash.
A cosmic immune response.
And somehow that was far more terrifying.
Something about that felt wrong on a level I still couldn't explain properly.
If the world itself reacted violently enough to erase civilization, then the treaty made horrifying sense.
"Your turn," Bao reminded me gently.
I blinked and pushed a pawn forward almost automatically.
"I understand the treaty," I said after a moment, "but how do you already know things from my world?"
I looked between the two of them.
"Mr. Bao, you said your fiancée knew what a smartphone was in theory."
I paused to think.
"But smartphones didn't really exist until… 2001? Somewhere around there."
I rubbed lightly at my temple.
"At least not this early."
Noi started chuckling immediately.
Not loudly.
The kind of laugh that meant she was enjoying my confusion far too much.
Bao let out a quieter laugh beside her.
"After the first appearance of what people called a hero," he began, "nations rushed to acquire their own."
The office dimmed gradually as the sun lowered further, shadows stretching long across the floorboards.
"It was quickly discovered," he continued, "that excessive manipulation of Aether triggered the Macro-Phage response."
He took another sip of tea while Noi casually stacked captured chess pieces into uneven little towers.
"Then why continue?" I asked.
"If they understood the consequences, why keep doing it?"
Bao leaned back slightly.
"To trigger a summoning, large-scale industrial Aether usage was usually required. Massive engines. Expanding infrastructure. Energy systems."
He rotated one of the captured pieces idly between his fingers.
"And ironically, that same expansion improved quality of life."
The answer irritated me precisely because it sounded exactly like humanity.
Dangerous.
Reasonable.
Predictable.
"Besides," Noi added, absentmindedly dragging her queen along the edge of the board, "the heroes brought knowledge."
Bao nodded once.
"And that made them extremely valuable."
The room settled into that strange evening calm offices seemed to develop naturally—work slowing, conversation deepening simply because exhaustion lowered everyone's defenses.
"So over time," Bao continued, "possessing a hero became prestigious."
"Prestigious?" I repeated.
"Mm."
Noi drank some water before continuing for him.
"Since heroes could be anyone—a historian, an engineer, a mother, a teacher, a child, an old man—entire nations started treating summonings as investments."
Bao captured another one of my pieces while speaking.
At this point I barely even reacted.
Maybe because the conversation had already become more alarming than the game.
"The knowledge they carried was often more valuable than the summoning process itself," he said.
He placed the captured piece neatly beside the board.
"So Aether infrastructure started being built specifically to provoke hero summonings."
That sentence settled heavily into the room.
"And people accepted that?"
"They accepted the results," Bao corrected.
Something about that distinction bothered me immediately.
"That continued for quite some time," he added. "Until the end of what you would probably recognize as the Belle Époque."
His eyes drifted briefly toward the darkening window before returning to the board.
"A disaster occurred."
Noi stopped stacking pieces.
"The entity that gives the hero narrative significance," Bao continued carefully, "what local cultures eventually called the Demon Lord…"
He paused.
"There were suddenly multiple of them."
The office felt colder afterward.
Actually colder.
By then I had stretched myself halfway across the couch, one arm hanging lazily over the side while listening to them speak.
"Those entities," Bao said quietly, "possessed effectively infinite Aether reserves."
Neither of them exaggerated the statement.
That somehow made it worse.
"Nations couldn't coordinate," he continued. "Neither could the heroes."
"So the Demon Lords destroyed the world?" I asked.
"No," Bao answered immediately.
"Not the world."
He looked down at the board.
"Civilization."
Noi nodded slightly.
"The Demon Lord naturally moves toward the hero tied to its existence."
"And everything between them," she added, "becomes collateral damage."
I stared at them.
Meaning—
"It destroyed factories."
I sat up slightly.
"Technology."
Noi nodded again.
"The world's Aether uses that destruction to restore balance."
I took another slow sip of tea.
It had gone lukewarm.
I barely tasted it anymore.
"But during that incident," Bao continued, "civilization collapsed almost entirely."
He paused again.
"Humanity was pushed close to the stone age."
Wind pressed harder through the open window for a moment, stirring loose papers across the desk.
"But unlike previous collapses," he added, "knowledge still existed afterward."
"Only controlled."
Silence settled over the office once more.
Then Noi smiled faintly.
"And now," she said, gesturing vaguely toward the office and the city beyond it, "here we are again."
"At the beginning of what could probably be called the second Edwardian era."
"Edwardian era," I repeated.
"It came after the Victorian era," she said immediately.
Then she looked at me strangely.
"You didn't know that?"
"I know the Victorian era," I admitted. "I just… never really learned much after it."
Noi stared at me another second before laughing.
Not cruelly.
Just genuinely amused.
"I won."
The declaration came so suddenly I nearly jumped.
She leaned over the board triumphantly, almost knocking pieces sideways in the process.
"Victoria," she called immediately, pointing at the seat Bao had just vacated. "Get over here. We finally play."
Bao let out a quiet laugh while standing from the table.
I dragged myself reluctantly off the couch and sat opposite her.
The chessboard waited between us.
"Knight to C6," I said automatically.
But my thoughts weren't on the game anymore.
They lingered on collapsing civilizations.
On heroes summoned like resources.
On worlds resetting themselves through destruction.
Outside, the sun finally neared the horizon, spilling long orange light through the office windows.
Yoru and Mr. Tau still hadn't returned from their mission.
That realization settled quietly somewhere behind my ribs.
I didn't like how long they'd been gone.
Curiosity killed the cat.
But satisfaction brought it back.
I looked at Noi across the board as she narrowed her eyes suspiciously at my opening move.
And for the first time since arriving in this world, the possibility of history repeating itself stopped feeling theoretical.