[POV Aris, Hero]

  The room was, without a doubt, the very definition of luxury that any mortal in Lyre could ever desire. The sheets were made of silk so fine they slid over the skin like warm water; the walls were adorned with tapestries depicting ecclesiastical glories, and the air carried the scent of sandalwood and expensive spices. And yet, to me, the room felt like a gss cell.

  I sat on the edge of the bed, my gaze fixed on my own right hand. There, engraved into the skin of its back, glowed a mark shaped like a stylized fme, pale yellow in color—almost sickly. It wasn’t a tattoo. It was something that pulsed in time with my own heartbeat.

  I remembered the exact moment it appeared. It happened as we were leaving that cursed hall, after Adalbert and the other officers had wiped the floor with our supposed “greatness.” High Priest Machias had approached each of us, murmuring prayers in a nguage that made my skin crawl, and with a tap of his staff, the stigma bloomed into our flesh. He never expined its purpose, but every time I tried to focus my mana, the mark emitted a stabbing heat—as if reminding me that I now belonged to his Order.

  “Fifty years…” I whispered, my own voice sounding strange, foreign to my ears. “Fifty damned years for nothing.”

  I clenched my fist, feeling the impotence burn inside my chest. In that White Void, that timeless space where the Goddess had thrown us, there were no masters. No real fencing manuals, no veterans to teach us what it feels like when steel collides with steel that’s aiming for your throat. We were alone.

  All we had were our memories of Terra. We grouped together and tried to imitate what we’d seen in television series, action movies, and the video games we used to py. We practiced stances that looked “cool,” movements that seemed fast and effective on screen. For what my mind registered as half a century, I repeated the same teral ssh billions of times because I believed repetition was the key. I felt powerful. I felt like a protagonist.

  But the moment Adalbert drew his sword, that entire fantasy colpsed. He didn’t move like a fictional character; he moved like a butcher. His attacks had no flourishes, no concern for aesthetics. They sought the end of my life. I realized—with painful crity—that for fifty years, I had only been pying at being a warrior in an empty room.

  Frustration twisted into blind rage. I stood up and punched the stone wall with all my strength. The impact hurt—but the yellow mark fred brightly, absorbing part of the shock and sending an electric jolt up my arm.

  “Damn it! We’re supposed to be the chosen ones! I’m supposed to have the power of a hero!” I screamed at the ceiling. No one answered.

  After rage came depression—thick, sticky, like mud. I colpsed back onto the bed, staring up at the canopy. If five “average” soldiers could humiliate us like that, what chance did we have against the Demon King? How were we supposed to face a being that, according to legend, could reduce entire cities to ash? The Goddess’s mission now felt like a cruel joke—a collective suicide dressed up as an epic.

  I fell asleep with my face soaked in bitter tears, trapped in a dreamless sleep where only the sensation of a cold bde brushing my throat existed.

  The next morning, sunlight streamed through the window with a cheerfulness I found insulting. I felt even more depressed than the night before; the mental exhaustion of fifty years of simution seemed to crash down on me all at once.

  A sharp knock at the door interrupted my thoughts.

  “Hero, breakfast is being served in the central dining hall. His Holiness requires your presence in one hour to begin the training regimen,” a monotone voice announced from the corridor.

  I dressed mechanically and walked through the cathedral halls. When I reached the dining hall, the scene before me was bleak. This didn’t look like a group of world saviors—it looked like a ward full of broken people.

  Isolde sat in a corner, stirring her oatmeal with a vacant stare. Conrad, the giant, had his shoulders slumped and avoided meeting anyone’s eyes. The silence was broken only by the clinking of spoons against porcein.

  “I feel like a complete idiot,” a boy named Marc suddenly said, breaking the silence. “I spent years practicing that ‘quick-draw’ move I saw in an anime… and the officer just kicked me in the stomach before I could even touch the hilt. He treated me like a child.”

  “The same thing happened to me,” one of the girls whispered, her voice cracking. “I thought my magic was invincible because I could blow up rocks of light in the Void. But when that knight stepped forward with his spear… I forgot how to breathe. I couldn’t even conjure a spark.”

  “We were fools,” Conrad added bitterly. “The Goddess gave us the engine of a tank but left us with the brain of a tricycle rider. We have no experience. We have nothing. We’re cannon fodder.”

  The atmosphere of humiliation was suffocating. We all felt like frauds—marionettes dressed in finery but with their strings cut.

  “ENOUGH!”

  Ulric’s shout echoed through the dining hall vaults, making several of us jump in our seats. He stood up, smming his palms against the table. His blue eyes burned with manic intensity, a total refusal to accept the reality we’d lived through.

  “Stop whining like commoners! Have you forgotten who we are?! We are Gaia’s chosen! Selected from billions of people on Terra to be here!” Ulric swept his gaze across the room, challenging our despair. “Yes, we got our asses kicked. Yes, we were humiliated. But that only means the path to success is longer than we thought. We have the mana. We have the blessing. What we ck is mud and blood—and that comes with training! I refuse to let us give up before the real war even begins!”

  “That’s easy for you to say, Ulric…” Isolde began—but stopped short.

  The double doors of the dining hall swung open with divine slowness. Pope Benedict IV entered the room, escorted by High Priest Machias. The elderly pontiff walked with an enigmatic smile, his pale eyes fixed on Ulric.

  “I like that attitude, young Ulric,” the Pope said, his voice frail yet somehow filling every corner of the hall. “That spark of pride is what defines a true Hero of the Light—not yesterday’s blind arrogance, but the will to rise from the mud today.”

  The Pope stopped at the center of the hall, studying all of us with a mixture of pity and professional expectation.

  “Your fifty years in the White Void were not in vain, even if it feels that way now,” Benedict continued. “The Goddess gave you the foundation—the raw steel. But steel does not cut until it passes through the forge and the hammer. Yesterday, you met the hammer. Today… today the forge begins.”

  Machias stepped forward, pointing at the yellow mark on my hand—and the identical marks on the others.

  “These marks are your Faith Synchronizers,” the High Priest expined. “They are your direct link to the Church’s sacred mana. From now on, your training will not be against shadows. It will be on the frontiers, against real low-level demons, and under the supervision of the very officers who defeated you. You will learn that in Lyre, killing intent matters more than perfect technique.”

  Pope Benedict nodded, his gaze turning stern.

  “You have enjoyed your st night of free luxury. From this moment on, your food, your bed, and your very lives will depend on your progress. Humanity does not need children wielding golden swords—it needs monsters cd in light to hunt the darkness. Are you ready to stop being human and become Heroes?”

  Ulric was the first to kneel, his face illuminated by fanatical resolve. “We are ready, Your Holiness. Guide us to victory.”

  One by one, the rest of us followed. I knelt as well, clenching my hand marked with the yellow fme. The fear was still there, coiled deep in my stomach—but the shame of defeat was a far stronger engine. If the Church wanted to turn us into sacred monsters, I would give them exactly what they wanted, if only to never feel as small as I had the day before.

  “Excellent,” the Pope whispered. “Let the purification begin.”

  We left the dining hall toward the outer training fields, where Adalbert and the others were already waiting, swords drawn.

  The game of the goddesses had entered its bloodiest phase—and we were the pawns about to be forged in the fire of trauma.