Her voice was beautiful, and Mark knew in his heart he would never meet another with a voice as compelling as hers. His heart had skipped a beat when she spoke, and the content didn’t do anything to calm him either.

“Champion?” He hardly recognized his own voice, seemingly dissipating before it escaped his throat.

The question was the last one he wanted to ask, but it had escaped him before he could even think about it. Who are you? Am I dreaming? Where are we? Followed by a few dozen others that if he wasn’t dreaming would probably result in him being smited where he stood. Worth the goddamn risk honestly. She’s so beautiful.

The thought had come dangerously close to the question itself, but luckily for him she answered him before he could ask it as well.

“I have come to your world to offer my protection, but to grant it I need a Champion”

Champion? Why me? I’m certainly not the strongest person, or the smartest on the planet. Hell I know at least fifty Altereds that could rip through me with ease.

Questions kept piling up, and confusion mounted along with them, with the confusion possibly being written on my face she continued on.

“Although you may not think you are worthy of it, either due to strength or guile, I do not choose my Champions so casually.”

This makes even less sense then. An entire world of monsters, both literally and figuratively. People with a thousand times more reach than me, why choose some cripple in the slums?

He never got a chance to ask any of these questions.

“The reason you were chosen is because during the long process of choosing a Champion I had selected a previous man I found favorable. He had the strength of will, character, and skill that I found appealing in a Champion. For all intents and purposes he was as good of a Champion as I ever expected to find in this… rural world. While I had been preparing to accept him into my service, this man died.” She seemed angry, not bothering to hide her emotions at this.

Mark didn’t know why, but the knowledge he wasn’t her first choice nearly broke his heart. Maybe the concept that she wanted another at all hurt him, or the fact that he possibly thought she didn’t think he was good enough to even serve her. And the realization that he died didn’t bring him any joy because it had obviously hurt her. What the fuck is wrong with me?

She looked at me, her anger changing to sadness for a moment before her face returned to the tranquil look from before.

“Although I had not spent resources on accepting this man into my service, he was still someone I had grown to respect a small amount, if not outright appreciate as a soldier. And the act of him being taken away in such a cowardly and backhanded way infuriated me to no end, but I still had faith in his bloodline.”

She had begun raising her hands before a hooked finger lifted my chin up as she examined my face more closely than before. She smells like the ocean, but not in a bad way. Like someone had gone to the beach and come home after surfing. Is it weird that I like it?

“This faith devolved into a final desperate hope for a peaceful resolution of our current predicament. You see, your world is on the edge of my vast territory, and as unguarded as it is I simply do not have the capability of protecting it from outsiders like the ‘Invaders’ without stationing a garrison of some form, or by creating a Champion of notable strength that can protect it alone.”

So the invasion only happened because we were an easy target? Why didn’t they attack us before then? We barely held them off with nukes and tanks, let alone swords and shields. Her story would explain why after the constructs died they almost entirely stopped assaulting us, since they might have only been able to sneak those forces through.

Why would she bother to protect us in the first place?

She looked at me then, her face morphing into the seriousness I’d only ever seen on military officers on the television as a child, or on the faces of those who had frequently visited my mother after my fathers death to pay their respects.

“I do not have any misgivings on the outcome of stationing a garrison here, your world would mistake them for ‘Invaders’ and resist them, regardless of explanation or intention.”

And then it’d be the first invasion a dozen times worse, with Ambrosia attacks being almost everywhere and nukes flying all over the world that are nearly a thousand times more dangerous than before, with the added benefit of attacking my- this Angel.

“As such I need someone who can spread my Name, my Love to this world in a peaceful manner while there is still time, and while I am still capable of protecting your world from outsiders.”

Her love doesn’t sound so bad. Shaking himself mentally he had to catch himself from falling back into the trance. Wake up, stop lusting after the damn Angel, more important shit going on right now.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

If she’s even telling the truth, if this isn’t some dream brought on by the tea’s effects, what would I even accomplish? Why does she care about my bloodline?

“I will not allow this world to remain unprotected, not when it is such a valuable prospect with a large number of innocent mortals living on it. Many of the Void factions, or even others of the universe, would slaughter all that live here for your resources, I will not allow this. Remaining unprotected as it is will only further risk outsider invasion.”

‘Risk outsider invasion’. While he had been doing his best to follow along the rapidly progressing conversation, the open threat of more invasions set off alarm bells into his soul. The video of the Hellraiser burning apartments and the many other videos of the Warmachines in action had quickly cooled any outside thoughts he’d been having outside of the conversation.

More goddamn invasions? We always knew there was a chance for them to return, we always hoped they wouldn’t though. Do we stand a chance as we are even with our magic and other advances of the last century and a half?

He looked up at her, and her serious expression brokered no argument. She knew that there was a chance of more invasions, but she also knew that she was capable of stopping them.

But not with us stopping her. Why would we stop her? If all of her soldiers were as amazing as her I don’t think any of us would resist.

“You, Markus Vasily, may trust me as we speak,” How could I not? “But when you awaken the natural affection you feel towards me, the trust and adoration will begin to fade.” Is that possible? “I am not going to manipulate you, I will not force you into accepting a deal with no concept, or understanding of what you are agreeing to. I am no Trickster, no Deceiver, and I am certainly no crooked Deal Maker.”

She looked away disgusted for a moment, almost like she had personal experience with the three terms she had casually placed down, not understanding how little they meant to Markus as he was.

As she looked back at him she felt the world tremble, and knew that their time was coming to an end.

Looking back at him she smiled once again.

“I can not convince you with words that I am true, I understand that no matter what due to your experiences and beliefs you would discard me as an illusion, a fabrication, or a pleasant dream, even if I returned every night for the rest of your life.”

Mark couldn’t find any real issues with that, meeting her every night would certainly be wonderful.

“So I will grant you a gift, as proof of my sincerity, as proof of my existence. A way for you to look back upon me and ponder my offer with full knowledge and guarantee that I meant every single word.

She leaned forward, her face nearly touching his, and as much as he tried he could not move his body an inch, before she placed her hands on the side of his face and kissed the top of his head.

He was over the moon, he’d never felt so childish over something like this. He wondered if this was what love was, this joy over something so small with another.

His happiness was only increased as he felt warmth travel through his body, growing more and more over a short few seconds. Before he could understand what was happening he felt his body explode with the warmth, before it became something much, much worse.

The feeling of heat spreading through his body had almost been entirely pleasant, until it reached his knee.

Throughout his time here he hadn’t felt pain in his knee once, which he had explained away as this being a dream and therefore it not hurting since none of this was real. When the heat wrapped around his knee however he felt it, felt it as real as he ever had.

He would have screamed if he had been capable of moving, would have done his best to cut both of his legs off just to make the pain stop, but the pain never stopped. Melting steel, no - magma, inside his bones as he struggled inside his own body, with his eyes stuck open in unblinking agony.

The Angel across from him, besides the small look of pity, seemed almost entirely unphased by his torture, almost like it was normal for him to be going through this suffering.

He was stuck in a frozen hell as the Angel pulled back, and the world began to fade around them like a thousand shadows consuming everything in sight. He witnessed the trees turn coal black before melting away, the flowers transform into fleshy lumps before merging back into the ground.

He witnessed the Angel give him a sad look as the pain nearly took him from whatever nightmare he was trapped in.

“You will awaken, fully healed. You will rise from your resting place feeling as if you had never been injured, with full capabilities of your limb again. You will never suffer again as you do now, even if you reject me.”

As the last of the world faded away, and all that remained in my vision were the voids that acted as her eyes, I heard her one last time.

“You will meet me again, you just have to pray. And always, always remember my name.”

Finally the shadows took even the voids away, and he found himself waking up on his couch, screaming and covered in cold sweat that had soaked through his clothing almost all the way through. He remembered this dream, this nightmare. He remembered everything about the Angel, even a name echoing in the back of his mind that She had never told him.

“Virasuta”

He laid there, terrified to move, terrified that he would feel the pain come back for even a second. He stared at the ceiling as his mind recollected the entire dream from start to finish.

He began to sit up, struggling to get his hands around the drink he had placed beside the couch with his dinner. He could almost reach it as he began to lean forward to get his hands on it, blinking sweat and fatigue out of his eyes as his hands searched. As he reached the last inches away he slipped off the side of the couch and tried to catch himself with his hand before panicking further and trying to stop himself from falling. So in a bleary tired fit he used his leg to catch himself as well.

The expected pain when he realized what he had done never came, instead it felt like he hadn’t moved it at all.

Confused, he sat up straight, forgetting the drink he had so desperately wanted in front of him. He tried putting pressure on the leg, only for it to come back feeling fine. As he sat there shocked he remembered the Angels voice.

“You will awaken, fully healed. You will rise from your resting place feeling as if you had never been injured, with full capabilities of your limb again. You will never suffer again as you do now, even if you reject me.”

It can’t be, it was just a dream, right?

In muted shock he began to put more weight on the knee, bending it further and further as he slowly began to sit up straight.

There’s no way. It was just a dream.

As he rose to his full height, without feeling a flicker of the blinding pain he had felt every other time he’d used the leg, he looked down at it. His mind kept flashing back to the Angel, to her voice, the eyes that did not belong in a mortal’s mind, let alone on a face he conjured up within it.

This isn’t possible.

He remembered the promise, to be healed.

Then he remembered the rest of the conversation, the offer of becoming a Champion, the threat of other invasions, the fact that he only became the Champion because a previous candidate had died in a “cowardly and backhanded way”, while also being in his ‘bloodline’. The thoughts kept racing through his head, and he kept coming to the same conclusion no matter what other reasons or explanations he tried to put at the forefront to save his dwindling sanity.

“God.”

The word brought out a sense of dread he didn’t know he was capable of.

“I’ve Found God”