She remained in the shadows as she watched the resurrected hero carry him off.
How should she feel about this? On the one hand, it was a good thing, that Heaven’s forces were taking steps to protect him. On the other hand, though, this made her own goals that much more difficult to achieve now that he was under their watchful eye.
His choice of selecting a resurrected soul as His agent in this matter was something of a surprise though. She had expected the Almighty to choose an actual angel as His hand in this, given the stakes. She’d been unsure of which to expect, but she’d thought that at least one of Heaven’s warriors would have been chosen. A seraph was a possibility, she supposed, but unlikely given how most of them were already engaged in important tasks elsewhere. This task, this mortal, might be important but they were the Great Weapons of Heaven, the celestial nuclear option, as one inventive mortal had put it. Though one of them would all but guarantee the safety of the young mixed blood, they were simply too valuable to be able to remain on such an assignment for long. One of the lesser ranks would have been a more likely candidate. In fact, she could name at least a dozen such angels that would have been ideal for the task of protecting and teaching him as was needed.
But instead, He had chosen to return a mortal to life and have her fulfil this duty.
She really didn’t understand it, but at the same time, she knew that that didn’t mean much. He was the greatest player in the game that was being played for the fate of the mortal realm. Despite all the restrictions He was forced to work under He was still the single greatest force in play, and that alone was an eloquent argument as to his skill in the game. If He had chosen this mortal for this task then there was a reason for it, and she knew better than most that He was rarely wrong.
Of course, just because she had been chosen for this task it did not mean that the resurrected hero was without flaws.
With eyes that saw more than mortals could ever imagine she focused upon the trail of power that the armoured young woman had left in her wake. For most trying to track them, it would have been difficult, but she had been honing her skills for longer than most of the nations in this world had existed. To her, the remnants of the returned heroine’s presence hung in the air like an ethereal glowing banner.
She could see the plan that the resurrected soul had, and in all truth, it wasn’t a bad one. The way her trail went from a gentle stream as it arrived, to a raging torrent as it left, made it very clear that she no longer had any business with the mortal domicile. For most of her pursuers that would have been enough. They would have ignored the mortal dwellings around them and would instead have focused upon tracking her suddenly brighter trail. The problem was that the resurrected soul was relatively new to her position, and as such could not know all the skills that would be employed by those she wished to deceive.
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There were those that wouldn’t give up so easily. Her departure might have left a massive burst of power that had saturated the area, but there were ways to look beneath that flood of light, to see the trail she had left behind as she went into the house, then stayed there for a time, only to leave and then release the Heavenly power within her. It wouldn’t take those with such skills long to realize the implications of such an action. Then the remaining occupants of the home could at best look forward to some brief torture followed by a swift death. At worst . . . well, some tortures went beyond the flesh, fates that were worse than death.
The fate of the other two young men that had shared the house with the one the resurrected soul had just carried off didn’t mean anything to her. They were mortals after all, but they would mean something to him. If she wanted her own plans to come to fruition, then what goodwill she could cultivate with him would be invaluable. Saving his friends would be a decent step in that direction, a card to keep in reserve for later.
Also, she could not afford for those that pursued him to gain any more information on their quarry. Though the mortals here knew nothing of his divine nature there was much personal knowledge they could share that might prove dangerous in the hands of a cunning enemy.
She reached into the folds of her clothing and drew out a long metal rod that was too large to have been hidden under such clothes. A pulse of her power ran through the metal, and runes that no mortal scholar would have been able to recognize lit up with a soft red light. She didn’t point it towards the house, such a crude gesture was unnecessary. Instead, she concentrated and felt the remnants of the Light left by the resurrected soul respond to the power of her artefact.
Slowly, gently, and with careful deliberateness she drew out all these remnants from the house that had been marked by their presence. She pulled them back to the road, back to the exact spot where the returned soul had transformed into an angel. Her eyes narrowed slightly in further concentration as she merged the two. A few moments later she was finished and took a step backwards to admire her handiwork.
It now appeared as though the agent of Heaven had been walking down this street, then for whatever reason taken on her angelic aspect and left at high speed. She was proud of her work, she’d even been able to shift the path of Light slightly so that it now appeared that the resurrected soul had transformed upon that patch of missing pavement, meaning that the lost concrete was the result of her change. Satisfied that she’d achieved her goal she slipped the rod back under her hoodie and took another look about the street.
So far nobody seemed to have noticed anything out of the ordinary, though in her case that was mainly due to the extensive wards she’d adorned herself with. The agent’s transformation and departure had thankfully been swift enough not to draw any great notice, nothing more than people glancing over at their windows and wondering what the flash of light had been. The missing concrete might garner some attention, but that would be the extent of it, so long as nothing precipitous happened.
Her shoulders slouching into the slightly hunched posture she had adopted as her normal body language, she turned away. She’d have to begin making arrangements to follow him and given her scant resources, it wasn’t going to be as easy as she’d like it to be. Still, she would be able to manage it. All she needed to do was find where he was going, and she knew that to be well within the scope of her talents.