I slept through most of the next day, and when my sister finally woke me up, it was with real breakfast.

I looked at the full English breakfast with the slight worry that I was still dreaming.

She winked at me. “I managed to get through Bonnie about printing a more diverse range of ingredients while you were sleeping. I also found out a lot about us!”

“About us?”

“Yeah, you remember how you used your claw transformation, right?”

“Right.” I didn’t care one bit, there was eggs, toast, and bacon in front of my face. Coffee, something like industrial orange juice…but who cared. Food. Real(ish?) food.

“I’ll let you wake up first, I got it.” Gaëlle sighed. She seemed excited, which wasn’t the greatest of signs, but I did not care as my stomach demanded to be filled.

“So?”

I had eaten, washed, had played dress-up doll for my sister, and we were now eating lunch in front of the largest black hole of the Andromeda galaxy.

In terms of epicness, this view was hard to beat.

“So?” My sister responded.

“What did you find out about us?”

“Ah, yeah! Well, I went back to read a bit in the…” She almost spat the next word out. “…virtual library, and you’ll never figure it out, but Bonnie wasn’t exactly honest with us.”

I dropped the piece of toast I was holding.

“She lied to us!?”

That was terrifying, why was my sister so happy looking?

“Not exactly. It’s just that she won’t tell us anything if we don’t ask her first. There is plenty that’s not in the books that she has some ideas on. For example, our transformation magic.”

“That we can grow wings and monster-like claws, yeah.”

“Well, we were told that it won’t work in a system world without magic, but no! That’s what the mana crystal is for. It’s a battery! The system can’t use it, but that doesn’t mean we can’t!”

I drank some of my Earl Grey. “Oh.”

“Come on.” She pouted. “Be a bit more excited!”

“And how do we…use it? Exactly?”

“No idea. Bonnie said…” Gaëlle’s expression turned dark. “Basically we would have responded to our owner’s order. The claws to serve as a last-ditch defence, and the wings so that the both of us could have evacuated him if he was in danger.”

I put my teacup back on the table. I wasn’t thirsty anymore. “Fuck Benedict. We were supposed to become sex-barbie bodyguards?”

“I guess…”

“Fuck Benedict.” I repeated.

“Let him rot in hell.” My sister nodded.

I sighed, putting a hand over my eyes. “So, we’ve got a mana battery. If we know how to use it, we’ll always be able to fly?”

“No. It needs to be recharged with mana after 48 hours of use, and the most effective way is to go back to the world where the mana crystal came from. It’s one of the safest M worlds, safe enough for Benedict to go to.”

“No monsters and perverts?”

“Oh, those exist in that world too, supposedly, but the great thing is the door’s location! It is apparently situated in a paradisiac deserted island, that exists in a bubble of permanent star filled night!”

“That sounds nice.”

“Doesn’t it?”

It still felt wrong to me somehow, but I didn’t want to spoil my sister’s enthusiasm with my negative thoughts.

I picked my teacup back in my hands.

“Let’s go there then! We’ll make sure that your mana crystal is fully recharged, and take a short break at the same time, ok? We deserve it, we’ve been through a lot!”

I nodded. We had been through a lot.

There was still a question that wasn’t leaving me.

“Why couldn’t I say no to the system?”

My sister gave me a strange expression, soft, with her lips rising slightly.

“I asked Bonnie about that. I’ll tell you once we’re on the sand beach.”

“Sure?” That slightly piqued my curiosity.

Preparing to go to M world 7 wasn’t nearly as long and arduous as going to S world 5. The only real problem was my sister pushing me to pick a swimsuit. A one-piece suit felt too much like taking something only a woman would ever wear, and a bikini was even more out of the question.

“You have to start getting used to it.” Wasn’t what I had wanted to hear.

And now, because my sister insisted, I had a very nice red bikini to contrast with her blue. I would have liked to see it worn by any other cute girl. On me it felt weird. At least it had a functional design, probably related to our designer being Bonnie the AI, and there were no frills or crazy design to make me feel even more embarrassed.

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We still checked the area with drones, double-checked the area for potential danger, and then went to catch a door.

This one was quite different than the other two types we had taken before. My sister called it “the perfect dungeon door”, and even though that didn’t make much sense to me, I had to admit that the large stone door, riddled with silver, gold, and a weird purple metal, was quite impressive.

The handle was a large iron ring coming out from its middle. My sister grabbed it, and we both found ourselves on a beach.

I opened my mouth in awe at the sky. So many stars, one yellow, giant moon at least twice as big as our own on Earth illuminating everything as if it was day. Except it was a world of black and white. A sea of black in a beach of white.

We could see all of the island just by climbing on the very large boulder behind us. The door was just in front of the rock, there were a few palm trees and a green patch of vegetation around it, and there was a wooden door stuck to the boulder. It was the entrance to the mine that Benedict had constructed to get the mana crystals. We would not be exploring it, as in our current clothes, that would have been more than dangerous. The drones hadn’t explored far down the tunnels either.

We had taken a mobile LED lamp with us, but quickly forgot about it. It wasn’t needed.

My sister pulled out two large towels, made us a nice little spot on the sand, and laid down to listen to the waves.

The sound of the sea. The pure calmness of it all.

This was paradise.

Even the air smelled perfect, not the iodine scent so commonly associated with the ocean, no. It smelled electric, floral, powerful. This was the smell of magic. I would most likely never have realized it without the buff to my body provided by the system. Just like Bonnie had told us, those stats had expressed themselves inside our bodies permanently.

I sat down next to my sister and drank some orange juice leftovers.

We didn’t talk for a while.

I imagined a monster coming out of the ocean to eat us, a tsunami reaching us, goblins coming out of the cave to get us…but after an hour, nothing had happened.

I finally relaxed.

I woke up when I felt warm water on my feet.

“Uh…?”

“Nielle! Wake up, the water is rising you idiot! Your towel is going to get wet!”

My sister laughed at me as she jumped to her feet and went further inland.

“Hey, don’t abandon me!” I groggily responded.

“That would be such a sad end for you, wouldn’t it!” She still laughed.

I picked up my towel and ran after her. “Come here you bitch!”

“No! Fuck off! Haa!” She screamed as I caught her legs in a professional-looking wrestling move.

After fake fighting for a while, we decided to swim. I wasn’t exactly feeling safe swimming in dark waters, so I didn’t go very far from the coast. My sister didn’t have the same qualms as I did, and she started to try to push her body to the limit.

“These stats are AWESOME!”

I went back to dry land and watched her silhouette dash through the waves like a mermaid.

“So, how do you feel?” My sister asked as she woke up next to me from her post-marathon swim exercise. She picked up her thermos and drank the dark liquid inside. “Urgh, cold coffee.”

“We’ve been here some time.”

“Could stay here if you want to!”

“No…Those kinds of things…They are better when enjoyed parsimoniously.”

“Parsi what now?”

“Don’t act dumb with me L. You read more than I do.”

“Just say sparingly, like everyone else.”

I rose my eyebrow at her. “I’m pretty sure sparingly isn’t used that often either.”

“Way more than parsi, parsimonn, iously.” She mocked.

I laughed at her antics, before growing silent.

“What are you thinking about, Daniel?”

“…We can’t just leave.”

“We can.”

“All those people will die.”

“A lot of people will die. We’ve got access to entire universes that are going to die.”

“But we met those people. Isn’t that the difference? We’re…humans. In soul at least. We’re not made to feel responsible for all the people in the universes. Just those that we meet.”

“…” My sister didn’t say anything back to me.

“So yeah, I think we need to go back and help them.” I finished.

Still, Gaëlle said nothing.

“L?”

“Yeah, I hear you.”

“What do you think?” I asked.

“I’m thinking, how exactly do you believe you can help them?”

“We kill the [Dark Crow].”

“And how do we do that?”

“We buy guns, make a light trap and…”

“Daniel.” My sister cut me off. “You don’t know how to use guns, and even if I went to a shooting range a few times, I won’t ever pretend to know either. But let’s say we do, we bring guns to a medieval world, and somehow kill the crow, without shooting any bystander or ourselves. Then what? Did we just bring one of the deadliest weapons to a world full of uneducated, illiterate people? What do you think will happen then?”

“I… We just need to be discrete.”

“And if someone sees us? If someone catches us going out of the cave with guns, then sees us use them against the crow? What if we die against the crow? What if we win? Will you be able to take the responsibility of killing the poor sod that witnessed it all? Will you kill someone in cold blood to save a world? Will you?”

“I…”

“Will you, Daniel?”

“I…no.”

“No you won’t be able to. And I won’t do it. I don’t give a shit about random people; I only care about those I love. I love you, and I don’t want you to be hurt.”

It was my turn to fall silent.

“…And that’s why we’re going back.”

My sister stood up.

“What?” I exclaimed.

She looked at me, giving me the cockiest of smiles.

“You won’t be able to live with yourself if you just run away. You never, ever ran away. I don’t believe you’ll start now. So I asked some questions about the system at Bonnie.”

“You did?”

“Yup. First thing we need to know. This system sucks. It can give powers and skills, that you can only use in S world 5, but that’s only coming second to another aspect of it.”

She began walking on the sand, shining under the moonlight.

“What’s the first aspect?” I asked.

“It’s a descriptive tool. I saw it in Benedict’s notes, but I didn’t think twice about it. Descriptive.”

I opened my mouth wide in understanding. “Of course. This system works by looking at us. That’s how you activated your skill without me hearing it.”

“I didn’t realize what it meant, I just tried it out, you know. The system just needs to see your lips move. It gave you a feminine name because it saw your exterior as a woman. Also important, Bonnie revealed that it, she, could actually contact the system through the drones. AI on System conversations. That’s why the prompts were in English. The system had learned it beforehand. But when Bonnie told it we were fraternal twins, it didn’t take the AI’s word into account. It looked at us, saw how identical we looked, and just pushed the skill on us. It pushed my surname after seeing you say it. It got our skills from the data that Bonnie gave it.”

“Bonnie…communicates with it?”

“More like it sends tickets of data to it. Benedict apparently asked for it, or he would not have been able to use the system at all.”

And neither would we. She didn’t finish her thought, as it was obvious, and being in the same sentence as Benedict did feel wrong somehow.

“Tickets? Like, to the fair?” I was completely lost.

“No you idiot.” She sighed. “It’s like a message, but mostly one way. The system being a descriptive tool, as long as something is happening in its world it sees it. Apparently, it can see the processor of the drones directly and get the data from it.”

“I…why did you ask all this? You didn’t want to go back.”

“I didn’t want to be hurt, or worse, see you hurt. Nuance. But when talking to you yesterday…I realized you wouldn’t let it go. So I did my best to help.”

I was speechless. “You…”

“We never let each other down, Daniel. That’s who we are. You went to the system world to help me, now it’s my turn.”

“But…”

“No buts. We’re going to level up, get an epic class, kick the crow's butt, protect the village, get epic loot and sexy women and men, then kill the fucker who wanted to buy barbie bodyguards, and save all the children!”

I looked at my sister, tears in my eyes.

“What? I swear I’m not doing it all for the sexy women and men and all the rest is just a pathetic excuse to get you back in the game.”

At her expression, I started to laugh.