Incredible—He Can Write His Name

It had already been several days since I possessed the foolish older brother.

The shock wore off quickly enough. If this character had one real advantage, it was this: I could ask the most basic questions imaginable, and not a single person around me looked at me strangely.

Because I was an idiot.

I could ask for his mother's name—something the novel had never once bothered to describe—and nobody wondered whether a different person was standing in front of them.

Why? Because I was an idiot.

Nobody expected anything of me, which made gathering information almost embarrassingly easy.

My father's name was Seo Yong-won. My mother's was Jin Su-ryeon.

Only after I'd put that much together did the situation finally come clear. The world I'd fallen into was one of those academy novels I'd been reading to kill time, the one titled something like The Academy's Good-for-Nothing Bastard Awakened as an SSS-Rank Youngest Son.

I wasn't sure of the exact title. My memory of it refused to come into focus.

In the story, the protagonist begins as a scorned bastard son of the Cheonryong Sword Family, the illustrious sword clan that all but rules South Korea. It's the usual ride: a boy his own house dismisses as useless awakens a system just before entering the academy, and from there he thrives.

The problem was that I wasn't that thriving protagonist. I was the foolish older brother ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠who saves him and dies.

That was not going to happen.

I had no intention of becoming the occasion for the protagonist's "Graaah! I'll avenge Big Bro Hoon, you bastards!" First, I had to stay alive.

Fortunately, I wasn't a third-year—that is, I hadn't reached the year I was meant to die. I was only a new student on the verge of enrolling at Cheonryong Academy. Two years still stood between me and my death, which meant there was still a chance to change my fate.

Knock, knock, knock.

"Coming~"

Working from what I'd pried out of Hana, the maid who looked after me, I found my way to the training hall. I knocked, and the girl who opened the door had the exact same face as the maid who had bathed me that morning, now dressed in light training clothes. Sweat traced down her cheek, and her breathing came a little rough. She had clearly been working out until a moment ago.

"Oh my. Young Master, what brings you to the training hall?"

Something felt off. After several days of seeing that maid—Hana—this didn't quite match. It wasn't only the clothes. She seemed like a different person entirely. The smile sat a little easier on her face, and her hair and the air around her had shifted, just slightly. Was it only that a different place had changed the mood?

I stared long enough that she introduced herself first.

"I'm Duna, Young Master. You mixed me up with my sister again, didn't you?"

"Ahaha..."

Sure enough, once I looked properly, her expression and the length of her hair were faintly different. Another perk of being the foolish older brother: I could fail to recognize people, or blurt out completely random questions, and nobody got angry or suspected a thing.

"Before you fell out of the persimmon tree, you could tell all of us sisters apart."

She puffed her cheeks as if she were a little put out, but she opened the door and let me into the training hall all the same.

"So what are you doing here? Did you come because you missed me? Or shall we play swords together—clang, clang?"

She kept talking, plainly glad I had come. Seo Hoon might have been a fool, but it seemed he had treated the people around him well enough.

"I want to practice the sword a little."

"Oh~ you do. Swordsmanship... wait, what?"

The sports drink in Duna's hand hit the floor.

"Young Master, you remembered the words sword practice?!"

Just how far gone was this Seo Hoon character?

Duna's face went grave with thought. Then she brightened, as if the answer had come to her.

"Aha. Big Sister Hana scared you again, didn't she? Told you that once you get to Cheonryong Academy, they'll drag you out to the sparring hall and beat you up."

"No."

"Don't worry. Anyone who picks on you, this Duna will beat them all up."

Right—the reason the original Seo Hoon was shut out but never actually bullied was the maid who watched over him without fail.

"Anyway, if you feel like playing, shall we do it together?"

Ding!

The instant Duna handed me a wooden sword, a clear chime rang at my ear. It was the ability the protagonist had awakened.

Figures.

Around the middle of the novel, a rival awakens the same system as the protagonist, and the protagonist senses something familiar in him. He doesn't place it at first. Only after the rival shows a similar power and a similar rate of growth does he realize they share the same ability—and in that same moment, he understands that the familiarity he once felt from Seo Hoon came from exactly the same place.

Seo Hoon, in other words, was one of only three system awakeners in the entire story, counting the protagonist and that rival.

Except there's a problem.

The message was aggressively Seo Hoon-friendly. In the novel, the system's messages to the protagonist come out like this.

That was how it ought to read. But perhaps because I was Seo Hoon, my daily quests had been written in the simplest words possible.

"Then, Young Master, let's play swords tog—"

"Duna... Sis..."

The training hall door opened, and a tiny voice crept in, as if it wanted to hide. I turned. Behind the door, a maid with the same face as Duna and Hana—only her hair a little longer—was peeking out. Our eyes met. She flushed and ducked her head in a bow.

Going ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠by Hana and Duna's names, she has to be Sena.

"Sena, what is it?"

"Sis... said... come... quickly..."

"Aw, come on! I was just about to play with Young Master!"

She stuck her lip out, but there was nothing for it. Duna set her wooden sword down and instead dragged over a sandbag that had been shoved into the corner.

"Young Master, play by hitting this today, all right? I'll be right back!"

"Young Master... goodbye..."

Duna and Sena left the training hall, and with another ding the daily quest changed.

A daily quest explained at precisely Seo Hoon's level. The sigh came first.

On the bright side, it's so simple there's nothing to mix up.

Seo Hoon had a talent for the sword. He had died not long after the protagonist began teaching him, so that talent never flowered—but the setting was clear. This body was gifted with the blade.

Vwoom!

The finest thing about it wasn't only how fast it grew, or the fact that the system's help would let me keep growing if I stayed consistent. Being a fool had its uses.

No clutter in my head.

When repetition turns dull, the mind frays, and then you quit. It happens all the time, doesn't it? Not in this body. I could repeat the same motion and stay as pleased as the first swing, with no stray thought barging in. Even pounding a sandbag was something I could simply enjoy.

Wham! Wham! Wham! Wham!!

So the daily quests—vicious, repetitive things the system loved to hand down—weren't particularly hard. I kept at them, and somewhere along the way they were already done.

...I'd already swung this close to five thousand times?

By now the soreness should have set in. I wasn't tired in the slightest. If anything, I was in that sweet spot for training: heat gathered pleasantly under the skin, breath just a little short, as if I had only warmed up. Hundreds of swings, thousands, and the motion ought to have turned to drudgery. Strangely, the longer I swung, the blanker my head became, and boredom never arrived.

It was fun. Genuinely fun, the way dancing is fun when the feeling runs away with you—so much so that my hands were still twitching around the wooden sword, unwilling to let go. There were spares lying about, and my body was already itching to move again, so I stood another dummy up and tried the sword in front of it.

Clean.

The line of the cut was so clean I might have been a master of the blade, and I was the one startled by it. All I was using were the basics—a vertical cut, a horizontal cut—but those basics alone landed with a precision you could have printed in a swordsmanship manual.

In the story, the protagonist takes one look at Seo Hoon and says his fundamentals are remarkably sound. So this is what he meant.

And it was sunk so deep in the flesh that I didn't have to think. The body simply did it, the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠way a body remembers a bicycle after the head has forgotten: forget the method, and still it moves. Mine was planting the sword in the dummy all on its own.

Seo Hoon, you bastard... how many times did you repeat this?

Now I understood.

This wasn't talent for the sword. He had simply brute-forced it, hammering the motion in through mindless repetition until there was nothing left to learn.

Boom!

Ten thousand clean strikes, every one of them driven into the same spot. No sandbag, however high-grade the orc leather it was made from, was going to survive that. By the time the daily quest ended, the sandbag Duna had left me had burst and come apart.

Well. Our family's rich. A piece of gear like this...

I remembered the protagonist claiming his reward without fail every time a daily quest ended. Mine had ended, and nothing in particular had changed.

"It definitely said I could take the reward."

I was alone in the training hall, so I took my time picking the system apart. Wish for it, and a translucent daily-quest window rose before me, along with a notice that the reward could be claimed. Something felt wrong, though. There was an empty space beneath the description. I looked again at the blank under the notice, and there, written in a way that felt oddly familiar, it read (Sign).

Don't tell me I have to sign my name to receive the reward.

Like signing a contract, I wrote my name with a fingertip.

The moment that name was written, the Things to Do Today window melted away, and a bright light seeped into my body.

"What... it worked like this?"

The novel had simply left the description out. To receive a daily quest reward, you had to sign for it. Seo Hoon couldn't write his own name, so he had never claimed the rewards, and the power had never taken hold. I didn't know whether to laugh.

Yeah. Daily quests hit hard.

From here on I would clear them steadily and get stronger. That was the thought, and I was about to take my hand away when new windows began bursting into view, glittering one after another without a pause.

"Huh...?"

"He finished every daily quest up till now and never claimed a single one...?"

Decades of Seo Hoon's piled-up daily quest rewards lay heaped in front of me.