Agravain broke from the river’s surface, his bulky body dripping with water after an intense rubbing session. Like a male underwear model with all the muscles but none of the smirking charm.

As he climbed the river bank, his face was dark.

Soraya by then was still drying her hair in the afternoon sun, attended by her maid. Jophiel was lounging on the grass, perusing her codex.

There was nothing to do. They were in a bind.

No horses, no other means of transportation, and a good distance from the closest human settlement.

No food.

Plenty of wrath.

“By the dark binding river,” the barbarian roared, “I shall crush that bard’s skull to ash then scatter it to the seven seas!”

“There are more than seven seas in this world,” the angel remarked lazily.

“You act like it’s someone else’s problem!” he hissed, “can’t you use your magic to teleport us to a town?”

“I’m not that convenient! What am I, a genie?”

Not that genies in this world were that convenient either.

They were just modified humans.

Rania seemed unperturbed enough. After all, without the pressing need for human sustenance, she would be able to hold on for a night in the wilds. But such was not the case for the barbarian, and most assuredly not for Soraya.

Or rather, Agravain did not worry about himself as much as for the young princess. His body right now should be able to endure a rough working day without eating or resting. But a long journey on the rickety wheels of her chair would wear any young girl out, much more so one already fragile and sickly.

“Why don’t you go hunting or something?” the angel pointed out, “There’s animals in the forest, you know, games and critters. Then we can camp around for the night.”

“Are you stupid?”

“Rude!”

Not one of them possessed the skills to survive in the wild. A princess was out of the question. A chambermaid also.

“Hm?” Soraya seemed surprised, “I totally expect you to just run off and return with a deer over your shoulder, Agravain, then skin and cook it in no time flat!”

True, in all appearances, Agravain seemed a rough-living barbarian who was used to living off the land. Or that should be the right amount of expectation for someone with his looks. But nothing could be further from the truth. Under the hood he was still Donovan MacAeda, the now-not-so-genius English Professor. Being born in the purple, he had never once in his life had to worry about making ends meet, let alone learning skills to survive in the wilds. Such was the simplicity of the modern world when you are rich and have a personal chef in your house.

Not so when you are dumb, unskilled, and poor in an industrialized world.

Though to be fair being stranded away from civilization is terrible even back on earth.

But there was no way around it.

So they walked.

Rania handled herself well. The angel mostly floated along, having forgone all pretension for realism now that Rania had been clued in on her nature. And though fatigue set into her faster than the rest, Soraya was mostly sitting in her chair as the barbarian pushed it along. Even without the skills of a true primitive man, Agravain had the stamina of one and some. So it was not all bad.

For the princess and the barbarian who were both accustomed to city life, the views along the way provide just enough distraction from the boredom of walking. They passed small hillocks and winding rivers, strange birds and funny clouds.

And as they walked the barbarian got a strange feeling that was not just the wonder of a city man surrounded by nature. For there was indeed a strangeness not at all like the quaint charm conveyed in wildlife magazines or documentaries of his old world.

It was difficult to explain, though no doubt in his past life Agravain would have been able to articulate it far better. As though life was filled to the brims in every stone and every leaf. That the trees seemed greener, the rivers ran wilder, the birds sang more freely. He wondered if it was some kind of magic flowing freely in nature. A power in everything and anything waiting to be unleashed.

To make a simple, tentative comparison, the world he used to live in felt dead.

And the rumbles of automobiles, the endless white noises of communication devices were but chemical hissings of a bloated corpse. Listless. Desolated. Abandoned.

Forsaken.

No wonder he had never met an angel there.

“It sounds like, what do they call it?” Soraya put a finger on her lips, “Ah, like in those post-apocalyptic novels!”

So that genre existed in this world too. Who could have guessed?

“Is that why you are always so angry and fearsome, Agravain? Are people in your world all like that?” the princess asked.

“Not really,” he said, “Apparently, even by my world’s standards I had what they called anger issues.”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Such idle talks, so on and so forth.

Eventually, as the sun sank past the horizon, the terrains around them flattened into vast farmlands.

In the dying light of sunset a quaint fishing town appeared. Lying on the main road to the capital and next to a bountiful river, it was a prospering place, the road packed with travelers and well-fed cattle. The closer they got to the crossroad just outside the town, the more travelers they passed, catching eyes for the curiosity of each of them: a prim and proper maid, a giant of a man carrying an oversized club on his shoulder, a girl in a wheelchair. At least Jophiel had stopped floating. It was not too long a walk, all things considered. Not as long as he had expected. And the barbarian reckoned he could have made it in half the time if not out of a consideration for Soraya.

It was already late when they reached the town, but not so late that the nearest tavern was deserted of patron.

“We have a problem,” just as they reached the door and the prospect of a warm meal and long rest in a soft bed was beginning to fill Agravain’s thoughts, Rania said.

“What kind?” the barbarian grunted. In his hand that wasn’t handling Soraya’s wheelchair was the enormous club he had looted from the pigman chief. Whatever problem the maid was speaking of likely had nothing to do with wandering thugs seeking trouble in his vicinity.

She said grimly, “We have no money. Only this.” She dangled the little pouch they had found in the box back then, the one from which they had found the pair of gauntlets she was now wearing. “This much can only buy us the meal for one person,” she added. Devastatingly.

“By the dark binding river,” he grumbled, “I shall make that bard’s meat into soup if I ever get my hand on him.”

Without choice. The group pushed into the tavern, found a table, and ordered a meal for one.

Contrary to expectation (or quite within the common kind of expectation), there wasn’t a surprisingly kind man or woman who took pity on a disabled girl and her friends and offered to treat them.

No such wholesome development, since it was a rather large establishment, bustling with colorful travelers and local folk alike. Even their group hardly stood out.

Hardly anyone paid them a second look.

The only silver lining was that none of them wanted to draw attention to themselves. Two seeming adults and two teenagers sat at a table around a meager bowl of cold soup and a loaf of hard bread.

“Well, I’m hungry,” the shameless angel was first to speak.

“No, you don’t,” the barbarian grumbled, “you are a freaking angel. Why on earth would you be hungry?”

“I can’t help that I made a habit of having three meals a day, ok?”

“I don’t care.” He pushed the bowl towards Soraya. “The princess is the only normal human here so she should eat. No argument. Rania is a genie so she can live without food for a day.”

The maid nodded wholeheartedly, for all that she seemed no less miserable than the whining angel. Even putting her broken glasses and tattered attire aside, she was looking haggard after the hard-fought battle and the long walk. He wasn’t sure if having a faster recovery speed meant the maid had to consume a bigger amount of nutriment or what, but she sure looked like she could do with some food. But still, she was stubborn.

“Of course,” she insisted under Soraya’s pressing look of pity, “I’m not hungry.” She coughed, then repeated, “I’m not hungry,” louder this time to override the growling echoing from her stomach. It would have been funny if it wasn’t so pathetic.

With a sigh, Soraya dipped her spoon into the soup then took a sip. Then sighing again, she put it down. “I can’t do this after all. I just can’t eat while you all are hungry. Feeling like shit, I think that’s what you call it.”

“Language, princess.”

“Oh gosh!” the angel cried, “this is why you are the cutest angel!”

The barbarian barred her reaching hands with a burly arm. “How shameless can you be? You are the one who needs to eat the least of us. If you can’t bear it, Soraya, share it with Rania. But not this stupid angel.”

“Rude! Rude! Rude!”

“Why don’t you go steal from an honest man then,” he persisted, “weren’t you fairly open to the idea of banditry or something?”

“I can’t! I’m limited in what I can do physically in the mortal realm!”

“Then don’t eat either! What happened to the notion of earning your daily bread.”

Very, very reluctantly, the maid broke a bit of hard bread to put into her mouth.

“You too, Agravain,” Soraya was not satisfied, she could be stubborn with the most stupid things. “You eat something too.” She pushed the bowl his way.

“What do you think I am? I’m no fallen angel or a young growing girl. I’m not hungry,” he said, “I’m not hungry,” he repeated, trying in vain to hide the thunderous growling of his stomach.

The princess was nothing but persistent. In times like these she almost always ended up having her way. And he was reminded how shameless his sister could be when she beckoned a tavern maid over to ask for three more spoons.

One bowl of soup, four spoons.

“Are you sure this is alright?” even the angel was taken aback by the ridiculous setup.

“Why are you backing out now,” the barbarian growled, already annoyed by the look the servant had thrown their way, “Just all dig in! And forget the shame, I guess. Hell, one night of near empty stomach won’t kill anyone, not even a young girl!”

So he dipped his spoon in, and the other quietly followed.

“Still,” Soraya said as she waited for her turn, “I guess tomorrow we’ll have to return to Eisherat. Not like we can continue this way without money.”

“Life sure is inconvenient without cash,” the barbarian said.

“What a line to be heard from a barbarian, eh?”

The angel was toying with her codex again as she dipped her spoon lazily in the almost emptied bowl. Not that Agravain expected any table manner from her, but still, he found the sight of her to be exceedingly irritating.

Not that she cared. Jophiel only looked up when suddenly a chorus of chatters and giggles came through the door. “Oh, cute girls!”

“What a line to be heard from an angel, eh.” the barbarian grumbled.

There was indeed a group of around a dozen or so young girls entering the tavern, which, unlike Argravain’s group, seemed to be an exotic sight even for the locals of this heavily trafficked town. All eyes turned to them. Even the taciturn Rania turned to the source of the commotion.

Those girls were clad in garments strange to the land: long fitting gowns of smooth austere black, but doubtless of rich material. Whereas the people Agravain had encountered thus far in this land all had brown to black hair, these girls’ were of varied hues: blonde, platinum, red and blue-black. Although each possessed their own individual charms, one stood out from the rest, making herself the center of attention. In addition to the same gown as the rest, she fashioned herself colorfully with a red cloak, an elaborate hairstyle with a myriad of silky curls, the likes of which would be hell to maintain without a salon always at the ready, or the kind of treatments only nobles in this country could afford.

It was this woman who stopped dead in her tracks when she spotted them. There was the look of someone seeing a celebrity in the midst of commoners.

“Hey, it’s you! Wait, is it really you?” she said, pointing at Agravain’s group.

Perhaps he had been too optimistic to hope they would be able to conceal Soraya’s identity, having only gone so many miles away from the capital.

“Someone you know, Soraya?” he asked.

She frowned deeply. “I’m... not sure. I don’t think I have met her before.”

Even stranger was the way the peculiar woman strode towards them. It wasn’t a show of reverence towards a country’s princess. As she walked, jewelry of colorful gems clattered all over her body like a show of wealth. Once she had made the short trip to their table, she stood with her hands firmly on her hips, studying each of them, and then the empty bowl of soup with four spoons stuck in it. And an angel burying her head under the codex.

“Michael’s sake, this is just preposterous! Deary me, I, not even I can predict this!” the woman cried, mouth aghast, “You just manage to plunder my opinion of you every time we see each other, Jophiel!”