Today was it. The manager had finally had it with him being late for work everyday. The verdict was clear. He was going to fire him. He turned around as he moved to go get him his final payment. Jill wanted to beg, to tell him how he would never be late again. But the air suddenly felt wrong. The air smelled like something was burning and heat assaulted his face with high intensity.
A cutting pain tore through his throat and lungs and Jill suddenly opened his eye from the dream. His house was on fire.
No.
This was not his room. This was not any room he knew. The world was tilted and a curtain behind him was fully engulfed in orange flames.
His hands shot out, pushing himself away.
He lost his balance and flipped and rolled down the incline, limbs flailing, desperate to escape the flames.
Thud.
His head collided against the wall at the lower side of the tilted room. Dull pain flared at the back of his head.
His throat and lungs protested as he took in smoke. He coughed, eyes darting wildly, eyes scanning for an exit. He had to move. He had to escape this furnace.
Then he saw it: an opening at the wall he had just hit.
He lunged forward and tumbled through into another room. Gravity carried him down until his right foot slammed against one of two chairs bolted to the floor.
He scanned the room.
In the other chair, a man sat slumped forward, his upper body leaning on a control panel. Blood dripped from his head onto the glowing blue surface. A metallic object jutted from his temple.
He was dead.
Beyond the panel, a partitioned glass windscreen looked out onto an unfamiliar world shrouded in green. One of the panels was shattered, a broken tree branch projecting through into the—
'Cockpit.' The word surfaced in his mind like it had always been there.
Smoke curled through the opening behind him. The fire was coming.
He climbed over the controls and squeezed through the narrow gap between the frame and the branch.
His head emerged into the outside world. The distance to the ground revealed itself to be vast—twenty meters, maybe more. If he jumped, his legs would be crushed.
But he couldn't stay. The fire would spread.
His gloved hand gripped the broken branch. He pulled himself up and straddled it like a motorcycle, then worked his way down—hand over hand, foot searching for the next hold—until finally, his feet hit the ground.
He let out a huge breath. The knot in his stomach untied itself, replaced by a wave of relief so profound his knees almost buckled.
'Where am I? How did I get here? What—'
The questions cut off as his gaze lifted from his feet.
It wasn't a building. It wasn't a cliff.
It was a ship.
A ship of dark, riveted metal, easily fifty meters long, lay cradled in the forest like a dying beast. It rested on its side, its elegant hull—designed to slice through air, not water—now crumpled and broken against ancient trees. One massive stabilizer fin pointed helplessly at the sky, its metallic skin raked raw by the branches that had torn through it during its descent. A long trench of churned earth and splintered wood stretched back through the forest behind it, a scar marking its final, violent path to the ground.
Fire blazed from multiple ruptures in its hull, painting the surrounding trees in flickering orange. Thick black smoke coiled upward, carrying a strange, acrid scent—an ozone tang that burned the nose and clung to the back of the throat. But beneath the smoke, beneath the crackle of flames, came a sound.
A pulse.
Thrum... thrum... thrum...
It emanated from deep within the wreck, weak and irregular, like the fading heartbeat of something that refused to die. A sickly blue-green light bled through the seams of the metal, pulsing in time with the sound, casting eerie shadows across the torn ground.
Jill stood frozen at the base of the tree, his mind struggling to comprehend. This wasn't just a crash. This was a corpse. A massive, metallic corpse that had fallen from somewhere—somewhere far above this world of green.
His mouth opened, but no words came. Only a soft, broken sound.
Then the warmth came.
It started at the base of his skull, spreading forward like honey poured through his mind. Sweet. Pleasant. Unmistakably foreign. And with it came—
A face.
A woman with tired eyes and dark hair pulled tight. She sat beside a bed, holding a small hand. "Sleep, Valdris. The pain will pass."
Her voice echoed, and suddenly Jill knew: Reyla. His mother. No—not his. Valdris's mother.
A room.
Books. Thousands of them, floor to ceiling. A boy hunched in a corner, reading by candlelight while other children his age played somewhere far away. The boy preferred it here. Here, no one asked why he coughed so much. No one stared.
A falling sensation.
Screaming. An ironcloud—the word surfaced fully formed—plummeting through clouds. A boy, older now, fifteen, scrambling toward a bay of gliders. His hand reached out. So close. Then pressure, immense and crushing, wrapped around him like a fist. He couldn't move. He couldn't breathe. The world tilted and—
Nothing.
Jill gasped, stumbling backward. His hand flew to his head. The memories kept coming, faster now, no longer gentle waves but a flood—
Valdris. His name was Valdris. Son of the Archduke of Emeliar. His father died in the Great War when he was five. After that, the sickness came. The weakness. The whispers about whether he'd ever be strong enough to rule.
The library became his refuge. He read everything—history, geography, bestiaries, theology. He knew the names of all forty-seven gods worshiped across the Aetherion Empire. He knew the habitats of every magical beast on the Elykryn continent. He knew the political structure of every duchy, every county, every city-state.
And he knew he was dying. Not fast, but slowly. The sickness was eating him from inside.
The Imperial Academy was supposed to be his chance. If he could graduate, if he could prove himself, the whispers would stop. So he boarded the ironcloud to Asteria, pressed his face to the window, and watched his homeland shrink below him.
Then the engines failed.
Then the pressure came.
Then—
Silence.
The flood stopped.
Jill—Valdris—stood trembling in the forest, his breath ragged, his mind split in two. He remembered a world of cubicles and coffee and a manager who fired him for no reason. And he remembered a world of ironclouds and archdukes and a boy who died reaching for a glider.
Both were real. Both were him.
Thrum. Thrum. THRUM.
The pulse quickened. The blue-green light brightened, strobing through the ship's seams.
His head snapped toward the wreck. He didn't know how he knew, but he knew with absolute certainty what came next.
He ran.
Twenty meters. Thirty. Forty. His legs burned, his lungs screamed, but he pushed harder—
BOOM.
The explosion threw him forward. He hit the ground hard, grass and dirt filling his mouth. Heat washed over his back. Debris rained down around him, thudding against the earth like deadly hail.
For a long moment, he didn't move. He just lay there, heart pounding, ears ringing, waiting to feel the pain that would tell him he'd been hit.
But the pain didn't come.
He pushed himself up slowly, spitting out grass. Behind him, the ship burned—a roaring inferno now, black smoke billowing into the sky. The pulse was gone. The light was gone. Whatever had been keeping it alive had finally died.
He turned away from the wreck and slumped against a tree, sliding down until he sat on the forest floor.
His heart hammered against his chest.
Then—
[Ping!]
A sound, crisp and electronic, rang through his skull. Light bloomed before his eyes—not firelight, but something else. Something digital.
A panel. Translucent blue, floating in the air.
[God Ascension System initiating…]
[Host analysis complete…]
[Congratulations, host. You have successfully awakened the God Ascension System.]
Jill stared at the glowing words, his mind blank.
Of course, he thought numbly. Of course there's a system.