SSS-Ranked Summoner: Only I Summon All Heroes And Heroines Of Legend-Chapter 13: Seal of Heracles

Heracles stayed rooted to the spot long after Altair’s words hung in the air.

He just stood there, arms folded, framed by an orange sky that looked like the world was simmering on a low heat. Then, his expression shifted.

"We’ll see," he said.

He turned, and the domain obeyed him like a pet that knew its master. The massive black pillars retracted. The etched names on their stone faces went dark. The cracked wasteland blurred, softened at the edges, and then simply deleted itself.

What filled the void stopped Altair’s heart.

He recognized this room.

Altair’s memories were hard-coded into the very body Satoshi was now piloting. They surfaced with a visceral clarity that made his ribs ache. High stone walls. A massive table. Candles that had burned down to puddles of wax and were never replaced.

At the head of the table stood Lord Godric Elfender. Tall, with silver at his temples, he was the kind of man who didn’t need to shout because the room instinctively went quiet when he breathed.

Satoshi realized what he was looking at. This was the day the seal didn’t come. The memory belonged to Altair, but the weight of it hit Satoshi like a physical blow. He knew failure and the sensation of the floor turning into an abyss beneath your feet.

Then, a figure stepped into the light.

It had Altair’s face, but younger, ten years old. The boy was small, draped in the stiff formal wear of a lord’s son. But the face was a glitch; the eyes were too dark, the expression too frozen. It was like someone had stretched the right skin over the wrong skeleton.

It looked at Satoshi and smiled.

"You don’t belong here."

The voice was a distorted layer, Altair’s childhood pitch over something much older and heavier, like two different radio stations playing at once.

"Neither of you do," it continued. "A dead samurai wearing a failure’s skin. What is it, that you hope to achieve?"

Satoshi didn’t bite. "Is this the trial?" he asked, though he already knew.

From somewhere behind him, Heracles’ voice echoed through the architecture of the room itself. "My first Labour was the Nemean Lion. I fought something no blade could cut." A brief silence. "Yours is different. What’s in front of you can’t be beaten with force, either."

The child-thing tilted its head, mocking. "He’s saying you can’t win."

"He’s telling me the rules," Satoshi corrected.

It didn’t charge. It just walked toward him with the casual confidence, like it owned the floorboards. As it moved, it morphed. It didn’t get older so much as it got heavier. The shame it carried seemed to expand, finally taking up all the space it had been denied for years.

By the time it stopped in front of him, it was eighteen-year-old Altair, a doppleganger. The version of him that had lived as a ghost in his own family’s orbit. The brother whose younger siblings had manifested seals while he stood by, empty-handed. The son whose name had slowly stopped being mentioned in conversations about the family legacy.

"You’ve seen his memories," the thing said. "You know how this felt."

"I do."

"Then you know why he ending it."

Satoshi went cold.

The creature wore a razor-thin smile. "Not as decisively as you did. But the thought was there. In the quiet nights, mostly. When the house was dead and he could finally stop pretending he didn’t care." It leaned in, its voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "You of all people should recognize that specific kind of darkness, right?"

So this was the trial.

It wasn’t a boss fight. It was a high-stakes interrogation. A conflict where speed and strength were useless, the only winning move was figuring out what you actually believed and saying it to something that could smell a lie from a mile away.

"What’s the play here?" Satoshi asked. "You want me to argue with you?"

"I want you to admit it." The entity spread its hands, sounding dangerously reasonable. "You’re a dead man piloting a dead kid’s body. Sure, the Codex is legendary. But you? You’re still the guy who decided his own life wasn’t worth the effort. And he..." it gestured to its stolen form "is still the boy who spent eight years as a family footnote. Two failures in one skin. What exactly is the end goal here?"

The silence in the hall was heavy.

Satoshi had actually replayed this in his head at moments. He had chosen to die In his old world, under those specific shadows of shame, seppuku had felt like the only exit that left his dignity intact. That was a fact.

And Altair’s trauma, the eight years of being invisible,that was real too. He wasn’t going to play hero and pretend those scars didn’t exist. He’d felt them in the muscle memory.

The question wasn’t whether they were broken, but what you did with the pieces.

"You’re right about the failures," Satoshi said.

The entity blinked. It clearly hadn’t expected him to fold so easily.

"On both counts," Satoshi continued, holding the thing’s gaze. "I’m not going to sit here and tell you that taking my own life was some act of strength, or that being the family disappointment for eight years didn’t leave a mark. It did." He took a step forward. "But you’re treating those things like a lifes finale. They aren’t."

"No?, killing yourself sure seems pretty final to me"

"You would’ve been right." Altair took another step. "A conclusion ends the story, permanently. But we’re both still here, which means the story is still being written. You want me to agree that we’re defined by our rock bottom. I’m telling you the point is what happens after you hit it."

The creature’s face shifted. A flicker of something human sparked behind those black eyes.

"That’s very poetic," it said, but its voice was losing its punch. The double-layered distortion was fading, leaving it sounding thin and hollow. "Very composed."

"I’ve had a lot of time to think about it."

"And yet you stand before me, reeking of terror."

"Yeah, I feel fear."

That honesty seemed to hurt the entity more than the argument had. It recoiled half a step, looking caught off guard.

"Being afraid doesn’t make me wrong," Satoshi said, stopping just two feet away. "It just makes me human. In my old life, I gave up, and succumbed to my fears. I’m not doing that this time." He looked the shadow in the eye. "Whatever Altair was, whatever I was, none of that matters as much as what we do with the time we have left."

The distorted Altair stared at him for a long, tense beat.

The, the figure’s shoulders relaxed, losing that jagged, unnatural rigidity. Then, an expression of genuine acknowledgment. It was the look of a man who had been holding a heavy door shut for years and finally decided to let it go. The darkness in its eyes settled. And slowly, a genuine smile spread across its face, overshadowing the predatory grin from before

The figure gave a single, slow nod as a silent ’fair enough’ from the part of Satoshi that still carried Altair’s scars. It wasn’t a defeat; it was a respect.

With that final sign, the Elfender estate began to bleed away, resetting to the cracked earth and the burning orange sky. Heracles was standing exactly where he’d been, his arms now relaxed at his sides. He watched Altair with an expression of professional respect.

"Altair Elfender... Satoshi Ono..." He spoke both names with equal weight, as if anchoring them together. "I have seen that your end does not tell your full story, and that your heart is true."

"You have earned my respect, and I shall lend you my strength in your journey." He stretched out his arm as a seal manifested over it.

"The contract is yours."

Satoshi reached out and closed his fingers around it. The seal burned warmly into his left forearm.

Heracles didn’t pull his hand away immediately. He let the connection linger for a second. "You’ve seen the bottom of the well," the hero said, his voice softening as the orange sky began to fray at the edges. "That means you’re the only one who knows how far up we’re going."

The cracked earth began to dissolve into white noise. The pillars of the domain turned to pillars of light.

"Go," Heracles commanded, a faint, proud smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth

The domain folded in on itself with a clean, sharp snap, and suddenly Satoshi was back in his room. He sat on the edge of his bed for a moment, hands on his knees.

[CONTRACT ESTABLISHED: HERACLES]

[LEGEND STATUS: ACTIVE]

[CODEX AETERNA HEROICA — SEALS BOUND: 2]