From within them, the first arrival emerged onto the low grass of the hilltop.

The greater surprise, however, was that he just barely recognized the person he saw.

His grandfather, Artur, turned out to be the first person summoned to join him—and Leonidas was momentarily struck dumb by how different he looked.

His gray-streaked black hair was cut short in military style, and he had a mid-length black beard shot through with enough of that same gray to make it look double-colored.

His grandfather had always been a strong man, but the person before him was very different to the old veteran Leonidas remembered. Visible muscle was clear along his grandfather’s arms, bulging even through the armor that adorned them, and he wore what looked like a steel breastplate over a set of old chainmail on his chest.

His lower half was similarly armored, with a pair of dull steel cuisses on his thighs, and matching steel working its way down his legs—over articulated joints for his knees—and into a pair of sabatons that ensconced his feet. On his back was an immense greatsword, and his face had changed too.

He looked healthier, stronger, and had managed to pick up a scar from the left side of his jaw diagonally across his face to his right temple. His right eye, in fact, was covered by a patch with a stylized lonestar stitched onto it.

His grandfather had always taken pride in his Texan heritage.

“Leo?” Artur said abruptly, and snapped Leonidas out of his disbelieving staring. “Is that you, boy?”

“Uh.” Leonidas blinked away the residual shock, and nodded once. “Y-Yeah. Hey, Pops.”

Artur gave him a long and hard look, and Leonidas couldn’t help but feel a strange sense of anxiety—something that he hadn’t felt since the first time he’d fought a Greater Demon—worming its way through his gut. Finally, after what seemed like far longer than the likely ten to twenty seconds it was; Artur let a smile break through his grizzled features.

With a few quick strides, he drew closer and clapped Leonidas on the back.

“It’s good to see you, m’boy.”

“Yeah, pops.” Leonidas replied with an uncoiling of tension. “Good to see you, too.”

“Where did you go, Leo?” his grandfather asked with an intense gaze. “What happened to you five years ago?”

Five years ago. So, it was five years for them too. I wonder how long it was before the Apocalypse hit?

“It’s a long story, pops. I’d rather just wait and tell you all together—”

“All?” Artur asked sharply. “Who else?”

Leonidas blinked at him, and answered with a sliver of confused apprehension. “You, G-Ma, Dad, Mom, and Kairi.”

Artur’s good eye narrowed at his words, and the older man growled an invective under his breath. That utterance alone stunned Leonidas. His grandfather had never so much as said a ‘bloody hell’ in front of him and Kairi, let alone openly cursed. “It didn’t tell me you’d called all of them.”

“Why does that matt—?”

“Things aren’t the same as they were, boy.” Artur said grimly. “You have no idea what’s happened to the world since you’ve been gone, nor what’s happened to the people in it.”

Leonidas stared at his grandfather in confusion when he finished speaking, but before he could pry any further, another wave of System energy deposited a second person onto the hilltop. The new arrival, of course, was someone he recognized straight away.

“Dad!”

Reginald Paendrag looked very similar, at least compared to Leonidas’ memory of him, to what had been expected: tall, athletic without being muscular, and wiry in a way that one expected of a Literature Professor—which was what his father had been, when Leonidas had been whisked off to Elatra. Now his father wore a fitted set of black robes, cinched at the waist with a gold belt, and tampered down by scalemail on his shoulders, forearms, thighs, and shins.

On his right hip he wore a simple longsword, and in his left hand he wielded a staff of all things.

His father, Leonidas realized, was a battlemage.

Reginald whipped his head around when Leo called out, and his father’s features split into a reflexive smile—one which died almost immediately when he recognised Artur standing at Leo’s side.

“Leo,” Reginald said tightly, “come here.”

“Dad, what—?”

“Don’t move, pup.” Artur growled while stepping forward and folding his arms over his chest. “You stay right where you are, Leo.”

“He’s my son… father.” The tension and hostility in the word momentarily stunned Leonidas, and he looked between his father and grandfather with mounting confusion.

“And you’re my son, Reggie. That didn’t seem to stop you though, did it?”

“From what, dad?” Reginald asked tersely. “Not becoming a megalomaniacal mass murderer?”

“Murder only applies to people, Reggie.” Artur said with an audible flare of cold anger. “Not monsters.”

“And again you fail to see that life cannot be defined within the narrow scope of your own biased percep—!”Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

“HEY!” Leonidas snarled while stepping out and between both of them.

Both Artur and Reginald cut off and stared at him.

“Dad! Pops! I’m right here. Five years gone, remember? Miraculously reappeared?” He looked between both his father and his grandfather, and noted each of them were looking at him with a mix of surprise and, he was grimly satisfied to see, at least some measure of shame. “I summoned you both here to safety so I could reunite with my family, not get in-between another philosophical discourse about I don’t even know what the fuck. A little context would be fucking magical right about now.”

“I see you’ve picked up some new vernacular while you’ve been gone, son.” Leonidas’ father said with a strained smile. “It’s… it’s very good to see you, though. We feared the worst, your mother and I, when you vanished. What exactly—?”

Before Reginald could finish, another flash of light disgorged two more people, and Leonidas felt some measure of relief at seeing them. At least, he did for the first few seconds that he spotted them—right up until his grandmother, armored like a valkyrie, and his mother who looked like she’d just stepped out of an Assassin’s Creed novel squared up with each other.

On a positive note, both looked as if the Apocalypse had done wonders for their health.

Small mercies, while everything else was shaping up toward utter madness.

“Maryanne.” His grandmother greeted his mother coldly.

“Gwendolyn.” His mother replied with mutual, frosty disdain.

What in the hell happened in the last five years?

Both women seemed poised on the edge of coming to blows, and Leonidas took his chance to try to intercede before they actually did.

“Mom?” he called with a forced smile, “G-Ma? Long time no see.”

Both women snapped their gazes to him when he spoke, and their combative stances melted into mutual relief at his voice and face. When they stepped forward toward him at the same time, both women froze again, and then turned to stare at one another with immediate tension once more.

When they did, both Artur and Reginald moved to join them.

“Reggie.” His grandmother said sternly.

“Mother.” His father responded stiffly.

Leonidas looked between the two pairs, one side his grandparents, and the other side his parents, and he reached up to massage his temples. “Okay. SERIOUSLY. What the everloving FUCK is going on?”

“Son, you—!”

“Leon—!”

“Language, mist—!”

“Boy—!”

“Do NOT tell me off for swearing!” Leonidas cut in angrily. “None of you have a goddamned leg to stand on! Christ! I come back after five years of fighting literal fucking demons, and I find my parents and my grandparents squaring off like we’re in fair Verona, and it’s Capulet versus Montague Two: dysfunctional fucking boogaloo! Someone needs to tell me what the hell is going on, right fucking now!”

He probably was swearing too much, he conceded mentally.

But damned if it didn’t feel cathartic.

“So, you really were Isekai’d, huh?” a final voice cut in through the silence that followed, and drew every eye. “Here I thought you’d just gone and drowned yourself in a river somewhere when the Incursion hit.”

Leonidas’ sister, Kairi, stepped out of what seemed to be thin air—her blue eyes, identical to his own and those of their father and grandfather, were fixed on him; but glanced on occasion at their parents and grandparents at the same time. There was a mix of predatory assessment and wary tension in that gaze, and both shocked him.

His sister, he noted with rapidly growing surprise, had changed the most.

Gone was the pale-cheeked, sweet-faced sixteen year old that had vacillated between begging for his attention and driving him crazy.

In her place stood a woman, one clearly forged by hardship, and tempered by violence. The fact he could relate to that sort of crucible saddened him in a way he hadn’t expected. He’d never wanted his kid sister to experience what he had.

When he looked her over fully, the surprises just kept coming.

Kairi’s arms, once permanently covered by sweaters or long-sleeved shirts, were bare to show off the twinned dragon tattoos circling her biceps. The ink first emerged from past her bare shoulders, under the leather gambeson she wore up to her neck, and twined down into the leather vambraces covering her forearms.

Her fingerless leather gloves were the same black as the rest of her outfit, and she wore a pair of shortswords on her hip, positioned in a manner which his experiences from Elatra informed him demonstrated intimate knowledge of how to draw them quickly.

Her sandy-brown hair, several shades lighter than his own natural jet black, was tied back into a casual foxtail, and she wore a worn leather choker around her neck with the word ‘NOMAD’ stenciled into it. Her arms were not just inked, he realized belatedly, but were also criss-crossed by scars not unlike what he’d seen from soldiers that had been whipped for desertion, or subjected to torture through the use of particularly vicious thorn-bush enhanced interrogation tactics.

Her left cheek, too, had a clear X-shaped scar of a type he’d only ever seen on people cut by knives, sliced by swords, or shot by arrows.

Most bewilderingly of all, both his parents and grandparents seemed immediately more tense with her appearance—and all of their focus was, with a mix he would have called regretful wariness, solely placed upon his approaching not-so-kid-anymore sister.

“Welcome back, Ace.”

Ace. The nickname she’d chosen instead of ‘Leo’. A reference to his first middle name, Achilles, from when he’d been ‘her hero’ when they were far younger, and more innocent. She’d called him that after he’d scared off some elementary school bullies, and had stuck with it ever since. It was a nickname he vastly preferred, if he were being honest. Leo was so generic it hurt, at least on Earth. On Elatra, it truly had been rare—but that, of course, was over.

“Hey, Kai.” Leonidas responded with as normal of a smile as he could. “I—”

Before he could finish the words, his sister covered the distance between them in an eyeblink, and had a hidden knife—sheathed under her right wrist, of all things—pressed to his jugular.

Shouts from all four of their family members were ignored, and Leonidas felt a familiar sense of juxtaposed calm settle on him when the cold steel pressed against his flesh.

Family? Emotions? Reunions? He was out of practice with those.

But danger? Bloodshed? The chance of imminent death?

Yeah. That, however fucked up a narrative it may have been for his mental state, he was good with.

“So.” Kairi said loud enough for everyone to hear. “The whole clan’s assembled, and the prodigal son returns. Tell me, have they told you what manner of insane bullshit they’ve all been up to yet, big brother? And more importantly…”

Her blade pressed more firmly against his throat, for a moment, and then vanished. Moments after it did, Kairi stepped forward and pulled him into a bone-crushing hug. Her eyes closed, and the next words were spoken for his ears alone.

“....where the hell have you been, Ace?”

The hurt in her voice wounded him more than any knife ever could.

Kairi Paendrag Concept Art.