“This is your ID,” Marcus grumbled as he gave me a small shiny square of metal.

I readily put it inside my newly bought wallet and put the wallet in one of the pockets of my new suit. A couple of days had already passed since my arrival in this new world but not much had happened since the arrival at the hotel.

After leaving the basement I found myself inside an abandoned warehouse, with a helicopter waiting just outside. I was given a set of new clothes, as my original ones had been left behind when I had reached the new world. After that I boarded the helicopter with Marcus.

He tried to investigate me during the journey, but I remained silent and kept guard of the contractee, whose name I found to be Violet. We flew by a small town, got off and continued on foot. The girl was taken care of in a small building which was halfway between a clinic and a temple. She was tended by the manager of that place, an elderly man donning a candid coat with a visible red cross stamped on it.

We quickly relocated to a backwater motel in a village not too far off, in an area without much traffic. There I laid the girl to rest, only me and Marcus keeping her company. Even if I didn’t know all the details, it was clear the girl was from a well-off family, but seeing how secretive Marcus was, her life must not be all sunshine and rainbows.

Marcus left soon after and returned later with a forged ID for me. This world was culturally similar to my original one, so a document was imperative, otherwise I would risk having to fight continuously.

Another reason why we had to move so cautiously was that I aroused too much attention from the people around me. My skin tone, unusual for the standards of this world, was the obvious culprit.

I had never paid much attention to it, as my amber colour and its various tonalities were typical in the world I came from. After the dawn of the new archuman era, the few who had survived could do nothing but coalesce into a single population. Generation after generation, the several ethnicities which existed in the past had merged into a single one, with the result being a uniform set of skin tones across the entire population, usually amber. In this world, this homogenization had yet to happen, and that was the reason why most of the people I saw were either paler or darker than me.

But what I paid most attention to weren’t the inhabitants of this world, but the world itself. Gentle breezes, verdant grasslands, the chirping of the birds and the sounds of the insects. Since my rebirth, they had been simple distant memories, but here they were a reality.

I had to get out of the basement to feel it, as the connection to my world polluted the surrounding environment, but when I did, I understood in a heartbeat why all the archs were so keen on leaving their own world behind, even if it meant carrying the burden of the Veil and contracting with lower beings. The most similar place I had been to was the Garden, but it was not comparable. The Garden was an imitation, but this was the real thing.

This world was alive. It had animals and plants, not beasts and weeds. It had cities and towns, not Perimeters and Undergrounds. It had rivers and mountains, not infinite wastelands of hills and gravel. The air wasn’t viscose and uncomfortable to breathe, it was fresh and light. The sunlight was warm, not cold.

It was simply inebriating. Even the mana of this world was gentle. It didn’t try to corrode my flesh, it simply strayed away from me, while to the locals it was a lively force which nourished their bodies and senses.

As I reminisced about all this, rustles came from the plain bed Violet had been resting on. Marcus jumped to his feet and made as if to reach to her, but he immediately froze and looked at me. I ignored him and continued to look at the waking girl. He wasn’t hostile, nor a danger, so there was no reason to pay attention to him.

Seemingly coming to a similar conclusion, Marcus crossed the room and kneeled in front of the girl. She slowly opened her eyes.

“Marcus…?” she said weekly.

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“Yes, young miss, it’s me, Marcus. Oh, I’m so glad, so glad…” he swept his eyes and sniffled.

“Where is…”

“Here,” I answered her incomplete question.

Her gaze travelled around the room in search of me. Once it found me, it stopped.

“Is this real? Am I truly alive?” she questioned incredulously.

“As per the contract,” I reassured her.

She struggled to sit up. A stream of tears started to sprung from her eyes, and Marcus panicked.

“Young miss! Is something wrong? Do you still feel sick?”

“T-thank you,” she said with a bright smile, bowing to me.

I stood up from where I was sitting and sat down next to her on the bed, all the while Marcus glaring at me.

“Rest now. You are still unwell,” I told her, putting a hand on her eyes and gently pushing her down towards the pillow. Although the healer had done a good job fixing her up, she was still weak. She had received too many wounds for a single treatment to be sufficient.

“Y-yes,” she responded in a flustered tone, covering her reddening cheeks with the blanket.

“Young miss…” Marcus commented, his face turning dark.

“It’s time for her to eat,” I said. A second later, her stomach grumbled. She squealed in embarrassment and tried to cover herself with the blanket even more than she already was.

Disgruntled and mumbling by himself, Marcus got up and left the room. Since coming to the motel, he had been the one responsible to get supplies with which to feed Violet during her moments of semi-consciousness.

He closed the door behind and silence invaded the room. After a few minutes Violet re-emerged from below the blanket. She made sure Marcus had left, before turning to me.

“So it’s really you… the one who saved me…” she said, while admiring me.

“Yes,” I replied plainly.

“But hereis something I don’t understand,” she added, her eyes suddenly turning sharp. Her demeanour changed and she became more guarded. She was attempting to look self-assured, but her trembling body gave her away.

“Before being kidnapped, I saw that very same magic circle in a book, so I’m sure of it: I was being offered as a sacrifice to conjure a demon. So…”

“No,” I answered as plainly as before.

She batted her eyes at my immediate response.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m not one of those ashen individuals,” I continued.

Although we hadn’t talked much, Marcus and I had exchanged a few words. He had asked me many things and I had asked hima few. I was the only one to receive any answer.

This world was quite similar to the ones that appeared in a specific genre of online literature of my original world.

On a sudden day, portals had appeared all around the world and monsters had ravaged the land. Mana had filled the world and several people had awakened as superhumans and had fought back the monsters. Nevertheless, another enemy had emerged, one who proved to be a danger to both awakened and common people alike. They were the demons, a malicious species who aimed for the destruction or enslavement of humanity.

Nevertheless, demons could seldomly reach Earth directly by themselves, so they corrupted humans with promises of power and riches to serve as their agents, and instructed them to carry out rituals to let them reach the planet.

Violet had been involved in such a ritual, but fortunately for her, it had ended differently. The portal which should have brought the demon to Earth had become entangled with the tear that had let me reach this world and I had taken its place after beheading it.

Violet looked at me. She was puzzled, still unsure, still afraid. Judging from her looks, she was a young girl, not older than sixteen. She had experienced something awful, something a human was not designed to suffer through.

I held her gaze, sheer honesty in my eyes. For my life here to proceed smoothly, it was imperative for her to recover and feel safe enough to go out in the world once again. As per the contract, I had to remain by her side, but I also had aims of my own and they involved moving around. She needed to regain her courage, and I could be the source of that courage.

Her pupils trembled and her cheeks reddened under my intense gaze.

“Fine! I’ll believe you! From now on, I’ll call you guardian angel, ok?” she shouted while hiding under the blankets once again.

“Call me John”

“John? I understand. Then call me Violet!”

“Yes, Violet”

She giggled happily. She closed her eyes, exhausted, and drifted off to sleep, a serene expression stamped on her face. I stood up and walked towards the centre of the room to stand guard.

The following day, we left the motel for our next destination.