The Angel Express - 5:07 PM

One of the things no one tells you about surviving a deadly space laser is how much it makes your friends worry.

The moment I returned to the train, I was met with a plethora of questions about how I managed to live through an orbital laser strike when both the largest monster and the most powerful monster we had come across so far could not. Kayla and Jeff were upset with me, Jamie was satisfied with a job well done, and Mercury thought the whole thing was awesome.

It took some time for everyone to settle, but once I answered some questions I retook control of the Angel Express and Sol Ligatus from Kayla. She had done an excellent job in my absence, but now I was planning on sticking around for a good while.

<<<>>>

[[Notice]]

Ownership of The Angel Express has been transferred to you by Guildmaster [Kayla Mills]. The Safe Zone menu is now available.

[[Guild Notice]]

Deputy Guildmaster [Kayla Mills] has elevated you to the position of Guildmaster. The Guildmaster menu is now available.

<<<>>>

That was when we started on our journey to New York. I hadn’t explained why just yet, instead simply enjoying my time with the guild. It wasn’t the longest train ride I had been on, but it would be one of my most relaxing for a while.

“I am not going to miss that sense of responsibility,” Kayla sighed as she leaned into her husband. Jeff placed his arm around her shoulder without a second thought. The ex-librarian turned Double Agent was my second in command and had been doing a wonderful job leading Sol Ligatus in my absence. “Seriously, you’re terrible for forcing that on me.”

“Yeah, but you got the job done,” I cheerfully replied, holding up my tea cup for a toast. “To the queen and all she’s done for us!”

The others all repeated the toast before Jeff yelled, “Yeah! That’s my wife!” All smiles, he leaned in to kiss her on the cheek. In contrast to his just over five foot tall wife, the blonde Queen’s Knight was the most physically imposing of us all. That was especially funny given his overly friendly attitude earning him the nickname Golden Retriever Knight from Mercury.

“Thanks, everyone,” Kayla said, not bothering to call me out for calling her a queen. She leaned forward and took a sip of coffee before turning her attention back to me. “Though, you still haven’t told us where you had gone to. We were worried because you said you were going to beat us here, and then we managed to get everything done up to the actual war part.”

“Not that the war went to plan,” Jeff added.

I nodded. “That’s my bad. Something happened that kept me a few days longer than I had planned for,” I said apologetically. “There were a couple of things that I wasn’t expecting, giant eldritch monstrosities included. Fairly annoying, but it’s safe to say that Aaron’s Avatar is moving. Which is, honestly, just one of the problems we have at hand.”

“There’s a Patron out there called Aaron?” Mercury asked.

The dark ninja wasn’t in his iconic outfit, but in casual pajamas with the logo of the Steelers on his pants. He had been eager to get into something comfortable after spending so much time in the ocean. Despite that, his black and pink wakizashi was at his hip. The sentient blade was known as the Princess, and I guessed she was probably guarding Doneralaego’s inert phylactery in the sleeping car, as usual.

“Franklin has a Patron called Sara,” Jamie pointed out, looking towards me with her green, reptilian slit eyes. She was a Half-Dragon of the golden variety thanks to the dead Demon Lord Pustibule’s sniper, Jeremiah. Her blond hair had taken on more of a metallic sheen, and she had freckle-like flecks of gold adorning her cheeks. So far, the Weapon Master was still overwhelmingly human. “There could easily be an Aaron.”

“Why stop there?” Jeff asked. “Where’s the Jeff Patron at? That’s what I really want to know.”

“Aaron is just what I call him,” I said, laughing. “But he’s basically evil Sara. I met him in the Golden Dream, back when I was asleep, and he’s become very problematic since then.”

<<<>>>

[[Patron Message]]

I know you think the comparison is apt, but I would really appreciate it if you stopped calling that thing Evil Me. It’s actually starting to wear on me a little bit.

Also, the Dealer has gotten me in touch with Baltastasia, and I have an update from the New York City administrator.I’m currently in negotiations with her about getting Sol Ligatus into the Emperor’s Ascent. It’s too early to tell, but I should have hopefully good news soon.

<<<>>>

“I’m sorry, Sara,” I said, looking up to the ceiling. “I won’t call him that anymore. And thank you.”

“So he’s not Evil Sara,” Mercury stated. “Actually, do we get to meet her? You showed up in Chicago, did whatever quick thing you had to, and then got out of there so fast that I was worried you had taken my class.”

“Meeting Sara would be fine after all this time, but it’s not the biggest concern,” Jamie said, looking from Mercury to myself. “I think we should probably hear about these problems? It’s not like traveling with you is completely safe. Especially since Virginia escalated way more than you had foreseen.”

“Yeah, that did get away from me,” I slowly replied. “We’ll be meeting Sara pretty soon. I assume the Patron’s Car hasn’t been used yet today?”

Glancing around the table, I was met with shakes of their heads to tell me that no one had used it. The Patron’s Car allowed an Avatar to enter their sponsor’s domain for an hour each day. They could visit face to face, and do so without the watchful eyes of the administrators. They might not have been able to watch me directly, but the rest of Sol Ligatus didn’t have that advantage. That was a Patron’s privilege, and the biggest reason why I had purchased one.

It definitely wasn’t because I missed seeing my girlfriend. The choice had been a tactical one, it just hit multiple checkboxes along the way.

“Then once she has some good news about our destination, we’ll all be visiting her. Including Ash and Bethany,” I said, glancing at Jamie and Mercury.

The ninja nodded. “Bethany has been curious about meeting an Angel, so she’ll be excited about it. It’ll be a lot better than when she met Ares, that’s for sure.”

“Ares was a dick,” Jamie scoffed before looking at me. “And why did you look at me when you said Ash? I’m not her keeper or anything.”

“You’re right, my bad,” I said, nodding. I extended my awareness aura for a moment, just to test the waters. Jeff and Mercury were confused, Kayla was amused, and our Half-Dragon Weapon Master was defensive. I retracted my aura after just a moment. It wasn’t any of my concern, anyway. “But yeah, Kayla’s heard about what happened when I was asleep, she didn’t share it?”

“That’s not my place to tell,” she snorted when I turned to look at her. “They want to know, they hear it from you.”

“Fair. Alright,” I said, turning so I could better look at my audience. “When I had gone missing in Pittsburgh, I was aiming for the Trial of the Silver Nightmare. It’s as charming as it sounds and takes place in the Dream Realm. What actually happened was that Aaron, who is of a similar vein to Sara but not just an evil version of, switched the destination to the Golden Dream.”

“Sounds… bad?” Jeff asked, as if hazarding a guess.

“It creates a perfect utopia specific to the person who gets trapped in it and only lets you out if you kill the person you love the most,” I answered, voice deadpan.

He immediately hugged Kayla tight. “Okay, that’s definitely bad.”

“We all know you’d never escape something like that, Jeff,” Mercury teased. “The Golden Retriever Knight couldn’t do such a thing.”

“In his defense, neither could I,” Kayla said, patting her husband on the arm.

“Most people couldn’t, that’s why I was stuck there for a month,” I added, shaking my head. “The details aren’t important other than I was in a really good place, we were all in communication though only Kayla and Jeff lived nearby. Aaron had to show up, do a big villain scene about how he wants to compete with Sara but he needs me out of the way for a bit so his own avatar can train up, and then I got out.”

“Who’d you have to kill?” Mercury asked, leaning forward.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Bro, you don’t just ask that,” Jeff chastised. “Don’t ask the boss about having to kill the one he loves the most. That’s pretty inconsiderate.”

The ninja paled. “Oh, yeah, no. Don’t… You don’t have to answer that.”

“Good, because I wasn’t planning to,” I replied, shooting Jeff a thankful glance. He nodded in return.

Killing Sara had been hard even after I decided to believe the fact that I was in the Golden Dream. Aaron had to beat her to within an inch of her life because there was no way I would have been able to even if I figured it out. Not only was she a world boss, but the trial had made her the sole administrator of the system. There was nothing I could do.

Only the Mills knew that Sara was my girlfriend as well as my Patron. It was a secret to just about everyone else except the Dealer. For now, anyway. I think it was almost time for me to have to come clean about what I was, if only to make sure people realize how dangerous things could get for us. As if the Writhing Nautilus hadn’t been enough.

“I did kill Greg, though,” I continued, leaning back in my chair after taking another sip of tea. “Went full biblical as an Angel, and I trapped him in his own personal Cocytus.”

“Trapped him in a frozen pool and let him drown,” Kayla explained when Jamie wrinkled her nose in confusion. “Cocytus is the last layer of Hell in Dante’s Inferno.”

“Brutal,” the Weapon Master said approvingly. “I like it. The idiot deserved it.”

“I agree, which is why I did it,” I confirmed.

“You came straight to Chicago after that, right?” Jeff asked. He reached for the beer behind him, some high Constitution ale with the label calling it Off Switch, and took a sip.

“With a small detour at Cleveland when an actual Angel ripped me out of my train and tried to beat me down for being a Nephilim, yeah,” I answered, shrugging. “I was going to stick around longer so Ash could make the Heelies of the Twice Blessed with the feathers I had taken, but Kayla was already on it.”

“I think Sara’s feather was a better call than some random Angel’s, yeah,” the Double Agent said.

“Oh, definitely,” I agreed. “That’s not even a debate.”

“But then you left us,” Mercury said, looking out of the window as he thought it over. Even though the Angel Express was in its own special subdimension to get where it was going, we could still see the world around us, and I looked out at the Virginian countryside with him. “You said the Mall of America and Sedona, right? And some other places you couldn’t talk about?”

“And still can’t talk about it until everything’s done,” I answered. “But the Mall of America was my first destination. It had a bunch of monster mannequins running around. The people of Bloomington managed to beat them back to the fortress, the mall, but they weren’t strong enough to handle the final phase of the scenario. I teamed up with a Drone Aficionado who called himself the Dronemeister and ended up liberating the whole thing, turning it into a safe zone.”

“That sounds like a cool class,” the ninja said, whistling appreciatively.

“Oh yeah. If he wasn’t 15 and had a curfew, I might have tried recruiting him,” I responded. “But he was, and he did, and you four are already enough to help me save the world anyway.”

“Drones still would have been useful when you weren’t here,” Jamie sighed. “Do you know how much easier that Impersonator would have been if we had some long distance intelligence gathering capabilities? Mercury here practically started the whole thing by accident.”

“What?” he asked, shocked. “How can you pin this on me?”

Kayla clapped her hands. “We’ve agreed not to talk about Memphis,” she said sternly, giving them both a look. “We’re not breaking that agreement now.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jamie muttered.

“Yeah, sorry, Kayla,” Mercury followed.

“Wow, that fake Elvis was that bad for you?” I asked, arching an eyebrow. I already knew it was going to be, but I also knew that they could handle it.

The thousand yard stare they each got was very telling, however.

“Why don’t you tell us what happened next, psychic boy,” Kayla suggested, though her usual cadence was missing when she called me by that nickname.

“Well, the next place is classified by the Dealer…” I said, trailing off.

The Hanford Site in Washington had been under the control of the Nuclear Army. Their administrators thought it was a good idea to make it a multi-scenario mess at the end as there were very few people around. That meant the earliest robots started making more advance ones, and then those ones started making a commander.

Who was a 60 foot humanoid monstrosity straight out of anime. Every one of them were powered by a small nuclear reactor, which was where they got their name, and thanks to my special set of skills allowing me to dismantle the big boss, I was able to get the overheated heart of the Omega Colossus.

The fact that it was hotter than it was supposed to wasn’t necessary for our plans to dismantle the Demonic horde that had taken over Washington D.C., but the piece was necessary no matter what state it was in.

“But I did run into more Angels, including the inquisitor that I had grabbed feathers from,” I said, perking up with a grin. “Happy to say, I am no longer labeled a heretic and blasphemer. To the Heavenly army, I am 100% a Half-Angel and not a Nephilim according to a Crusader Judge. Now I won’t be attacked on sight, which is excellent no matter how you look at it.”

“Sounds like a worthwhile distinction,” Jamie said, giving me a sarcastic thumbs up.

“Surprisingly, it is,” I confirmed with a nod. “Because now I don’t have to keep killing Angels. They do pop back to Heaven when their hit points drop to zero, because of course they do, but I would start getting a bad reputation after that. There’d be no coming back from that. I’d be assailed every day.”

“So, business as usual,” Kayla said.

“Eh, it would be business-adjacent, wouldn’t it?” I asked. “Maybe more of an escalation since they’d be seeking me out instead of the other way around.”

“Business as usual,” Jeff repeated.

“Whatever, you two,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Anyway, that was when I went to Sedona, the other place you knew about.”

“That’s the red rock place, right?” Mercury asked. “I did a project about deserts in my junior year of high school, so it kind of sounds familiar to me.”

“You’re remembering it right. Good job,” I said, and he grinned before nodding at the praise. “That was my first run in with the leftovers of Aaron’s Avatar, though.”

“Leftovers?” Kayla asked.

“They destroyed the safe zone and killed the Warmind that I was going to see there,” I answered with a shake of my head. “Which, they didn’t have to. I was going to see him with the proposition of removing his class with a Medallion of Uuska because he’s… well, he’s just not compatible with it. But I showed up, he was dead, and I had to scramble a bit to replace him so I could guarantee my chance to get my cowl.”

To show it off, I pulled the rosewood red cowl over my head and gestured to it. Some of my friends pretended to be impressed by it, while Jamie arched an eyebrow as if she wasn’t sure it was worth all the effort.

“Completely worth it,” I said. “I mean, I had to train up a Warmind, pass along points and gear to make sure she was good, and then we took out another overpowered scenario boss. This one was a giant rock monster from another dimension. Pretty fun. Worked with the Patron Coyote, and that was a really memorable moment. But, the aforementioned issues with Aaron’s Avatar did make things take longer, and I was delayed by three extra days.”

“So you came right back to us, right?” Kayla asked. I offered her an apologetic smile, and she sighed. “Of course you didn’t.”

“I had to go fight a Godzilla rip-off, which I wasn’t able to do because the other guy got there first, and my Prime Doppelganger,” I defended. “I had a lot to do.”

The Double Agent clearly had more to say, but Jeff was the first to speak. “Didn’t you say that was going to be disappointing?” he asked. “The Doppelganger thing, I mean. Not fighting Godzilla could also be disappointing, though.”

“Yeah, but things were a little different than what I was expecting,” I said, crossing my arms. “The Doppelganger came out as a Half-Angel, like me, and basically said he couldn’t kill me because it wouldn’t be something that was good for the world at large.”

“Oh, he was playing his alignment,” Mercury stated. “Not lawful stupid, but close to it?”

I shrugged. “Good is good, and killing me is evil. He ended up taking his own life,” I said sadly before remembering something. “Though, now that I’m thinking about it, I received the quest complete screen but I didn’t get a victory screen or points. It said it was still calculating. Sara? Any insight?”

<<<>>>

[[Patron Message]]

It is out of the ordinary, but I don’t have any secrets I can spill. The system is the one who does the calculations and I can’t imagine it taking this long for, well… anything. We’ll see it eventually, I’m sure.

<<<>>>

“Nada. Well, thanks anyways,” I said. “After that, though, I came straight here.”

“Straight here?” Kayla asked, raising a challenging eyebrow.

“Right away,” I confirmed. “Stepped off of the train and then went right to the movie theater where you were wiping the floor with Warren.”

“What a bureaucrat,” Jamie scoffed. “I can’t believe they listened to him. Your way of doing things may have gotten the city destroyed, but it was better than laying down and taking whatever slop deal that chunky admiral was giving out.”

“Thousands of people lost their homes, but…” Kayla sighed. “Yeah, I don’t think things would have been any better with the Atlanteans taking over.”

“To be fair, the Writhing Nautilus and Guardian weren’t supposed to be there,” I said. “They were both retaliations towards me, specifically. Which is also something we’re going to need to discuss soon.”

“I can’t believe you’re so hated by the administrators that they were willing to send a monster that big after you. That’s just wild,” Mercury said. “I mean, I guess you’ve made it? Congrats? They want you gone, then you must be doing something right.”

“That’s one way of putting it,” I chuckled. He didn’t even know how right he was.

“And then you pulled a goddamn space laser out of your ass,” Jamie said. “You got any more of those?”

I shook my head. “That beacon was the only one I had, and there was no retrieving it once it was set so I didn’t even bother trying. Honestly, I’m glad it worked. That was the strongest weapon in my arsenal, so I’m glad I didn’t have to ask Kayla and Mercury to take over the Atlantean admiral’s ship. How’d that go, by the way?”

“The mission was successful,” Kayla reported. “We have the Atlantean Ship Wheel, so we can plug that into the Angel Express any time you have the points for it.”

“What does a train need a ship wheel for?” Jeff asked, confused.

“So we can take it across the water, of course,” I answered. “That’s how we’re going to get into Europe after an event in Dublin that… I also still need to explain to people. Man, there’s so much coming up.”

“We’ll get to it when we get to it, but there’s something else important first,” Jamie said, sounding seriously. I turned to look at her. “You’re going to split that loot, right? We took those things on together.”

I laughed. “Yes, but every time you ask about it I’m going to put it off. Maybe I’ll wait until after we’ve met Sara.” The Weapon Master wrinkled her nose, but didn’t say anything. I faked a dramatic sigh and pulled out the bag the Dealer gave me from my inventory. “Alright. Just for you, Summers, we’ll divvy up the eldritch loot.”

“And that’s all I really want,” she replied, moving to sit closer to me, clearly excited about what comes next.