Chương 2: Golden Parachute
Unsurprisingly, there was a steep difference in difficulty between being the 'chosen one' of a space-faring doomsday cult, and being the layabout fifth-born son of an illustrious hero clan.
While both situations came with their own pressures and problems, the very least Grimwald Cerveny could say, was that in his eighteen years of living he'd never once felt the need to trigger the self-destruct mechanism for the family estate and run-away in an escape.
Nor had ever found himself contemplating suicide in an effort to thwart his family's dark ambitions.
In comparison to the life he'd lived before, little "Walder's" current life till now at least had been smooth sailing.
When he died, his soul had already progressed to a stage of maturity where he technically "shouldn't" have been able to die.
In truth, he should have either been pushed upwards into a higher plane, pushed sideways outside of normal reality, or he should have simply been forced to burn for however many hundreds of millions of years it took for the new universe to be born, and forced to wait for the universe to cool so a new body could form around his immortal soul.
Fortunately, for Walder he'd ended up dying and the powers-that-be that administered the mechanisms of death, birth, and rebirth were neglectful enough to simply process him as they would any other soul.
Thus the Cacophonous Lord was reborn as Grimwald Alexander Cerveny of the Cerveny Family. An influential clan within the Eastern-half of the Red-Jericho Solar System.
Once he'd been reborn and had realized the opportunity that he'd been afforded, Walder had kept a single goal in mind; to live as unexceptional a life as physically possible.
He used secret arts to hide his innate talents when his family was testing his genetic-potential as an infant. He spent his childhood staying in middle lane. Never aiming to high in his education, martial training, or any other fields the family saw fit to put their children into.
Never aiming too low, lest his family be inspired to try and push him.
Secret arts hid his extraordinary looks and kept his family from noticing certain anomalous features in physique like the two antennae growing under his hair, or the fact that he had claws instead of nails.
Secret arts hid the robustness of his physical form, and pretending to be sick every few months or so, hid the fact he'd never had so much as a cold.
Walder lay low, and spent eighteen years hiding himself as well as he could, for the sake of living a peaceful life of ordinary pleasures.
Until now, he'd mostly succeeded in his goal of living a happy life of near-complete obscurity. However now he was forced to face his life's greatest test and see if he could continue his crusade of aggressive un-ambition as a married man.
On the one hand, he could have just run-away, but on the other hand if he wanted to stay low-key while staying on his family's good side, he suspected he'd never have a better opportunity than this...
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"Do you...Grimwald Alexander Cerveny take this woman to be your wedded wife?...To have and to hold...in sickness and in health...so long as you both shall live?" asked the priest.
"I do." said Walder. Standing stiff-backed, his expression stony as he tried not to remember the last time he'd said this kind of vow, and how calamitous things had gone in the end.
"Now, do you...Henrika Gabriella Amihan take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?...To have and to hold...in sickness and in health...so long as you both shall live?" said the Priest turning his attention to the petite dark haired beauty that stood at Walder's side.
"...I do." said the Henrika "Henri" Amihan. Naturally, feeling more than a little concerned about her future, but feeling slightly reassured because the man standing at her side seems to be the same lackadaisical sort as herself.
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Henri Amihan was the first-born daughter of the Amihan family, and the family's third born child over-all. She was born with a mid-grade super-intelligence, that occasionally appeared within people in her mother's family.
In the current age, the first-born child inherited the status of family patriarch regardless of gender, and being a "first son" or "first daughter", held its own special significance.
Originally, Henri's status in the Amihan family was a lofty one. Even if she hadn't been set to inherit the rule of clan-chieftain, she'd still had special responsibilities, expectations, and privileges that came part and parcel with her being the first female to be born the Amihan's clan's main household.
For thirteen long years, Henrika had done her level best, shedding blood, sweat, and tears to fulfill her family's expectations for her.
Throughout all that time, the girl had believed the family to be her home, filled with people who loved and supported her. Hero-clans were big, and might seem cold, and overly corporate, to those who didn't know what it like but they were still families...or so Henri had believed.
Then mid-way through Henri's thirteenth year, her mother Francesca Amihan, her father's head-wife, grew gravely ill, and by the girl's fourteenth birthday her mother was dead.
For a time the whole family grieved together, then within six months it was business as usual. The quick transition and brutal shift in statuses that were in store for all of Francesca's children, would remove the scales from Henri's eyes and cure her of her naïve beliefs about clan life.
Her father's second wife Sophia, climbed up to the status of head-wife, and then covertly began to push aside as many of Francesca's other children to raise the status of her own offspring.
Henri's two older brother's died under questionable circumstances, and Henri found herself facing off against Sophia's three eldest daughters to see who would get to keep the title of "first daughter."
With this being, a 1 v 3 fight, with the 3 having the home field advantage and support from the household "referee", it need not be said that Henri didn't win. However she didn't lose either. The girl was not the protagonist in some historical drama, nor was she the kind to get overly emotional allow herself to be tricked into a pit.
Henri read the writing on the wall, and after realizing that her father wasn't clueless to what was happening in his household, so much as he was apathetic to it, the girl stepped back ceding the position of head-daughter to Sophia's eldest daughter.
There was nothing personal in all this. Beyond the deaths of her brothers with whom she was never all that close, due to the age gap and the fact that they'd spent most of their lives either in military school or the actual military, there was nothing Sophia had done that felt particularly beyond the bottom line.
Perhaps Henri might have held the woman's actions against her had Sophia proceeded to target the younger children of her predecessor, but after gaining her own position and clearing the top inheritance positions for her children Sophia had gone to be an almost model step-mother to Francesca's younger children.
If there was anyone Henri blamed in all this, it was her father, because no matter how much, Henri and the older children begged and pleaded for him to intercede, the man's ears had remained deaf. His mindset being to let things lie so long as the household was technically running.
Sophia was ruthless but not overly bold, the woman would never have overstepped as she had, without the clan patriarch's tacit consent. Meaning that to the girl's dismay and deep disappointment, everything that had happened to her and her eldest siblings had happened with his say so.
Henri could imagine that the man had probably let it all pass with an "either they'll fall or rise above" kind of reasoning.
Unfortunately, Henri and her older brother's ended up falling. The dispassionate young miss retreated into herself. While she could understand, on a logical level, her emotions spent some time in discord.
A period during which the girl dropped out of school and shut herself into her quarters. Refusing to go out unless her apathetic father deigned to order her to do so. Which he never did, because there was always apparently something more important for the man to see to.
During this period while she struggled to come to grips with the loss of her loved ones, and the strange transformation of her clan from a family to a completely alien corporate entity, Henri found herself feeling increasingly comfortable within her room.
She found herself becoming enamored with simple meals such as dried squid snacks and cup noodles, and threw herself into the pastimes her classmates had often talked about while she was too busy working as hard as she could for the clan; namely, playing video games and watching anime.
Thus an elite hero-clan princess became a shut-in neet.
Henri hid herself in the dark comfort of the little air conditioned room she'd been forced to move to after her sister stole the manor she'd had as first-daughter.
Sophia was apparently content to leave things at that, Perhaps sensing that if the girl had decided to put up a strong fight, even if she'd still ended up winning in the end, the cost in lives would not be small. That mid-grade super-intelligence was nothing to scoff at, after all. The girl had actually once stalemated Sophia for quite some time while trying to appeal to her father for aid.
Fast-forward to six months ago, six months before the wedding, where Sophia sent her second eldest daughter, Sybil, to go inform her step-daughter that the family once again had need of her.
Henrika was informed that the family had arranged a match-making meeting for her. A quiet investigation via the internet, and inquiries to those members of the family's staff that weren't completely in Sophia's pocket, revealed that the Amihan family's Stormblade Industries was looking to enter into a huge, long-term alliance that would give them access to rare metals from the many minable planets, moons, and asteroids of the Red-Jericho Solar System.
A solar system that was partially owned by Red-Cloud Company, the corporation controlled by a certain Cerveny family.
As a way of smoothing process of making this big contract, and strengthening the ties between the two families, the two family heads, Aloysius Amihan, Henri's father and Augustus Cerveny, head of the Cerveny family, had decided that it would be best if some of their generation married each other.
Since time immemorial, it's been common wisdom that the most trustworthy contracts were those written in blood, whether by marriage or violence.
This trade deal resulted in the first momentous meeting between Walder and Henri.
Henri went to the matchmaking meeting with a feeling of stoic resignation. She wasn't intending to martyr, she just wanted to go and have a look. She wanted to see if the man her family had arranged for her to marry was a complete wretch or not.
Going by the rumors the man was a genetically inferior, odd-tempered, layabout. A man lacking power, wit, and prospects.
However, there were also currently more than a few less than savory rumors about Henri going around too, rumors about her character, rumors about her virtue, rumors about her hygiene and looks. Rumors that people apparently believed after her not-so-brief absence from the public eye, otherwise the Cerveny family wouldn't have paired her with their least favored son.
Understanding that rumors weren't everything, and having been tipped off by a surprisingly well hidden paper trail, Henri figured that there was more to Walder Cerveny than met the eye, and decided to go through with the meeting.
She told herself that she would hold off from running away to some distant moon or space-station until she knew for certain that her family had fully and truly thrown her away. In her mind, if they'd truly treated her like trash, then going to the meeting would be the last thing she needed to do to fulfill her filial obligations.
Henrika had just about made up her mind to just take a look and finalize for her escape when the young man who was to be her fiance surprised her by making an interesting declaration.
"Ah...so you're just like me." said Walder.
"..." Not sure what to say to that, Henri choose to say nothing. Then she followed up by saying,
"....Explain."
"You're someone who's decided to take it easy in life. You're someone who knows what it is to work hard and has learned that sometimes working hard just isn't worth it….You're someone who knows that 'some people' just don't deserve the best efforts you can give them..." said Walder.
Henri frowned not sure whether she liked the man's assessment of her, but uncertain as to which part she could actually disagree with.
"And so what if that's the case?" said a cautious Henri.
"In that case...I think we could probably get along more than our parents expected…" said Walder. Smiling faintly, as he sipped his tea.
After mulling it over for a few seconds, Henri finally nodded and said,
"I'm listening…"
In the end, the man's words would be more compelling than Henrika had expected. It helped that neither youth was quite so hot blooded as to be willing to openly offend their clans by running away if they could help it, since they both knew that having a powerful clan out looking for you wasn't a pleasant experience.
The two agreed to have a sham marriage, a marriage of convenience. Turning their wedding rings into golden parachutes. They'd give their families what they wanted, and then live the lives that 'they' wanted to lead within the borders of some distant solar system.
One could say that they'd basically just decided to run away together, but both youths would likely argue that it wasn't really running away when you'd tricked the people you were trying to flee from into helping to pay for the trip and sending "going away" gifts.
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