One day.
That was how long it took Albert to fully grasp the disaster he had inherited.
He sat at the desk in Kingstone's room the morning after he woke up and went through every document, ledger, letter, and crumpled note he could find. Reynold, the butler, brought them in without being asked. The man was somewhere in his fifties, gray at the temples, with the kind of face that had learned a long time ago to show nothing. He set each stack of documents on the desk with quiet efficiency and stepped back to his position near the door without a word.
The debts were the first thing. Kingstone had managed to accumulate an impressive amount of them in a very short time. Suppliers he had stiffed. A tavern owner owed three months of tabs. Two separate merchants who had delivered goods that were never paid for. A tailor who had made six custom garments for a client who apparently thought payment was something that happened to other people.
Then the social debts. The burned bridges. The antagonized neighbors. A list of formal complaints sent to the Kidlatin main house that had gone unanswered because Kingstone could not be bothered to read his own mail.
Albert worked through it all quietly, making notes in the margins of a blank ledger page. He was still getting used to writing with this hand. The fingers were softer than his own had been. They had never held a rifle grip long enough to callous.
He set the pen down when he reached the last item on the stack.
He read it once.
Then he read it again.
Two days before he woke up in this body, Kingstone had gotten drunk in a bar, which based on everything Albert had learned about the kid was basically a daily activity, and had decided to put his hands on the wife of one of the city mayor's personal guards. And when the husband stood up with his friends to handle it the way a husband reasonably would, Kingstone had looked the man directly in the eye and said, in front of a full bar of witnesses, "You will die by the hands of the monsters anyway. Why is it wrong to touch a soon to be widowed woman?"
Albert stared at that sentence for a long moment.
"What a sick bastard," he muttered under his breath.
Across the room, Reynold stood very still near the door.
Albert looked up. "How long has the duel been scheduled?"
"Since the night of the incident, young master. It was formally registered with the city hall the following morning." A pause. "That was two days ago."
"So it is today."
"Yes."
Albert closed the ledger. He sat back in the chair and looked at the ceiling and thought about it. Did he feel bad about what Kingstone had done? Yes. Genuinely. He had spent six years fighting alongside men and women who had people waiting for them at home, people they were terrified of leaving behind, and the idea of someone exploiting that fear to justify putting his hands on a woman made something cold settle in Albert's chest.
But was he going to take a sword through the heart for it?
No.
He was done bleeding for other people's choices. He had given six years and one leg and one eye to a government that lost his paperwork. He was not giving anything else to a dead teenager he had never met.
He would handle this. But he was going to handle it correctly.
"Reynold," he said, standing up.
"Young master."
"Walk with me."
The butler fell into step behind him without hesitation. That was something Albert had noticed immediately. However badly Kingstone had behaved, and the evidence suggested very badly indeed, Reynold had stayed. He was still here. Still bringing documents. Still calling him young master in that perfectly measured tone. Whatever the man's reasons, that kind of loyalty in the face of consistent disaster said something about his character.
They were halfway down the corridor when Reynold spoke.
"Young master," he said carefully, "if I may."
"Go ahead."
"You have been..." A pause. The careful kind. "Different. Since yesterday morning."
Albert kept walking. "Different how."
"You read the ledgers," Reynold said. "All of them. In order. You made notes." Another pause. "You asked me this morning where the tailor's shop was."
"I want to pay him."
Silence behind him that lasted several steps.
"Young master," Reynold said, in a tone that was trying very hard not to be what it was, "you threw those garments out of the window when they arrived. You said the stitching was offensive to your eyes."
"The stitching was probably fine," Albert said. "He made six garments and was never paid for them. That is a craftsman's livelihood."
Reynold did not respond to that.
Albert could feel the man processing behind him. He had a guess about what Reynold was thinking. Probably that the alcohol poisoning had done something strange to Kingstone's head. Maybe that the near death experience, because by all accounts Kingstone had been extremely close to actually dying that night before whatever happened had happened, had shaken something loose in him. Changed his perspective.
People believed what made sense to them.
Albert was not going to correct him.
"I am still me," Albert said, without turning around. "I just had a long night."
"Of course, young master," Reynold said, in a tone that suggested he was filing that statement away for later examination.
___
The city hall courtyard was packed.
That was the first thing Albert noticed when they came around the corner and the building came into view. The second thing was the quality of the crowd's energy, which was not neutral curiosity. These were not people who had shown up to watch an interesting event. These were people who had shown up because they wanted to see something specific happen to a specific person, and Albert was that person, or at least was wearing that person's face.
Someone near the gate recognized Kingstone's silhouette and said something to the person next to them and the words moved through the crowd like a current. Heads turned. Expressions sharpened.
Reynold stayed one step behind him and said nothing.
Albert walked into the courtyard at a normal pace and did not look at the crowd. He had walked into situations where people wanted him dead before. Literally. With weapons. This was not different enough to change his posture.
The guard was already there.
Big man. Broad through the shoulders, neck like a load bearing pillar, hands that had spent a lot of time on weapon handles and looked it. He wore the city guard uniform but wore it the way seriously capable people wore uniforms, which was as an afterthought. His eyes found Albert the moment he stepped into the open and stayed there.
Albert walked up to a reasonable distance and stopped.
"I want to say something before this starts," Albert said.
The guard's jaw tightened. "Say it."
"What I did to your wife was wrong." Albert kept his voice level and his hands loose. "What I said to you was worse. I am not going to stand here and explain it away or tell you it meant nothing. It was wrong and I am sorry it happened to her."
The courtyard went quiet in a specific way. The kind of quiet that happens when people were expecting one thing and got something else.
The guard stared at him. He had prepared for arrogance. He had prepared for excuses, for the same entitled smirk he had seen in that bar. An apology had not been in his preparation.
But the anger did not leave. It just changed shape. "Apology does not undo it," he said.
"No," Albert agreed. "It does not. So I am not asking you to forgive it. I am just saying it needed to be said." He met the man's eyes steadily. "But I will not take a sword through my heart over it either. I want that clear between us before we start."
The guard looked at him for another long moment. Then he nodded once. Not warmth. Just acknowledgment.
Behind Albert, Reynold was very quiet.
The mayor arrived shortly after, a compact man in his sixties with white hair and the calm of someone who had made hard decisions professionally for a long time. He took his place on the raised platform, waited for the noise to settle, then spoke.
"Under the Ancient Law of the Sol Kingdom, Article Twelve, when grievance between two parties cannot be settled by word or coin, they may meet at the peak of sun in public witness, that the truth of innocence be decided before all." The words had the shape of something said many times before. "The duel is to first submission or inability to continue. Killing is permitted only in self defense if the opponent continues after submission. The witnesses here present will confirm the outcome and the city will record it." He looked between them. "Do both parties accept?"
"Accepted," the guard said.
"Accepted," Kingstone said.
The crowd found its voice again after that. Someone near the back shouted that Kingstone should lose his head and several people agreed with more enthusiasm than was comfortable. Albert heard his name, or rather Kingstone's name, attached to words he was choosing not to focus on.
He took his position on one side of the marked circle.
Reynold moved to the edge of the courtyard, folded his hands in front of him, and stood completely still.
The guard drew his sword. It was a working weapon, not decorative. The edge caught the noon light cleanly. He rolled one shoulder and dropped into a stance and Albert read it in about two seconds. Trained. High Engraved Rank probably. The kind of speed and physical capability that in his old world would have required serious bionic augmentation to match raw.
Albert raised his fists.
The crowd reacted to that immediately. Confused noise. A few laughs. Someone asked loudly if the fat noble boy had actually lost his mind this time.
The guard did not laugh. His eyes went still and focused in the specific way that serious fighters' eyes went still.
Then he moved.
The speed was real. Albert had told himself he was ready for it and he had been right intellectually and his body still registered the shock of it as the guard crossed the distance in a fraction of a second, sword leveled, moving with the kind of velocity that made the air pressure change ahead of him.
Albert did not move his feet.
His right hand went into his coat pocket.
He had prepared this the night before. One bronze coin. He had cleaned it with a cloth until the surface was smooth and bright, then held it and thought carefully about what the Engine actually was and what it actually meant to exchange value for something.
Kingstone had thought small. Kingstone had thought wine.
Albert thought about six years of battlefield physics. He thought about force. He thought about the fact that currency was not just metal. It was stored human effort. Concentrated value. The weight of every hand the coin had passed through, every transaction it had settled, every unit of labor it represented.
Value was a form of force.
And he had spent six years learning what force did to things.
The guard was three steps away. Two.
Albert's voice came out almost conversational.
"Do you know the force equivalent of one bronze coin?"
The Engine answered.
His arm swung from the hip, sinuous and without waste, and the coin's worth of accumulated force translated through his knuckles in a single concentrated instant that connected with the underside of the guard's jaw with a sound that made several people in the crowd flinch.
The guard left the ground.
Not slowly. He left the ground the way objects left the ground when something hit them with significantly more force than their weight could manage, which was quickly and without any grace whatsoever, and he crossed the boundary of the marked circle and landed in the dirt at the edge of the courtyard and the sword landed somewhere behind Albert with a clatter.
The courtyard went completely silent.
The guard pushed himself up onto one elbow. He looked at Albert. He looked at his hands. He looked at where his sword had landed. His jaw was already swelling on one side and his eyes had the quality of a man whose entire model of the situation had just been demolished and he was still trying to understand what had replaced it.
He stayed down.
Smart man.
The mayor stood up on his platform.
"The duel is decided," he said, carefully. "By the witness of this assembly and the Ancient Law of the Sol Kingdom, the challenged party is found innocent. Let the record show it."
The crowd did not cheer. It made a noise that was something between murmuring and arguing, dozens of conversations starting at once, people processing what they had just watched and not quite agreeing on how to feel about it.
Albert turned and walked back to Reynold.
The butler had not moved from his spot. His hands were still folded in front of him. His face was still doing its nothing expression. But his eyes were doing the thing Albert had noticed once before, that quiet recalibration behind carefully maintained stillness.
"Young master," Reynold said.
"The tailor next," Albert said, walking past him toward the exit. "What is his name?"
A pause. "Master Eli, young master. His shop is on the east market road."
"Good. And Reynold."
"Yes?"
Albert glanced back at him briefly. "Whatever you are thinking right now. You can keep thinking it. I am not going to explain myself."
Reynold looked at him for a moment.
"Of course, young master," he said quietly.
And he followed, as he always had, one step behind.