The worry that had only just risen in Angela’s chest settled back down.
A mission with no threat of being erased hanging over it, no deadline breathing down her neck, and a single supply pack for a reward—do it if she felt like it, ignore it if she didn’t.
Who cared?
Her mind wandered, and before long it drifted, of its own accord, back to Overwatch.
—Not some game cooked up by a company, but the peacekeeping organization she had worked and fought for over several years.
She remembered the comrades the world called “heroes.” She remembered the way they had said goodbye to her.
She remembered the day she first became a surgeon, the day she first walked into medical school, the days she spent scrambling across battlefields to dodge the fighting—and, last of all, the moment she opened her eyes to find two bodies, not yet gone cold, that had held open a small pocket of safety around her.
Blood ran down from both of them.
The thick reek of it turned the stomach, and the smell of gunsmoke filled the air until every breath called death to mind.
A seven-year-old girl lay curled on the ground, her face streaked with tears.
The grief and longing for her parents still lingered in that small body.
Despair and hatred took root there; unwillingness and a single wish sprouted at the same time.
That was the moment she woke—the moment “Angela” became “Angela Ziegler.”
In one stroke she had gone from the most ordinary college student of a peaceful age to a nobody of an orphan who had lost everything in a world torn apart by war.
In that absolute destitution she ran toward survival without a second thought, clinging to life with everything she had.
So the world would not cast her aside, she studied with all her strength, day and night, never once slackening—until at last she became a “hero,” someone who could save others.
I don’t want to see war again.
I don’t want to see death.
I don’t want to see farewells.
I want to become someone who can heal others, someone who can save them.
Did that hope, buried so deep in her heart, belong to the original Angela Ziegler, or to Angela?
She didn’t know.
She couldn’t tell the two apart.
In the grind of one day after another, the line between them had blurred.
Even after the sudden reality of her own “death and rebirth” had jolted her “awake,” she could no longer cleanly separate “Angela” from “Angela Ziegler.” They were both her—one stretch of a life, and another stretch of a life.
Back when the sight of a system interface had made the whole world feel unreal, Overwatch had been the anchor that tied her most tightly to it.
When she looked at the heroes, when she fought shoulder to shoulder with them all—had nothing ever stirred in her?
That wasn’t true.
There had been a time when she rejoiced to see a war end, when saving a single life made her glad.
When had she lost that pure, simple spark?
Looking back now, it was almost funny.
If she had only known from the start that it was nothing more than a “personal system,” she would never have needed to panic the way she had.
She could have lived with so much more composure.
But back then she had begun to suspect she was only a “game character” being puppeteered on someone else’s screen.
She had even doubted whether she had ever truly lived at all, or whether she had simply been handed false memories somewhere in an ocean of code.
She had feared that one day she might wake to find herself a puppet on strings, unable to speak a single word beyond the voice lines the system had written for her.
Now she no longer had to doubt.
She was still alive.
But it was already too late.
She didn’t know why she had come from that world to this one, much less how she might find her way back.
She could never return to Overwatch.
She could never again wait for the recall Dr. Winston would one day send out.
She could never again answer that blood-stirring summons as a member of Overwatch.
But there were still things she could do.
Overwatch had never been founded to play house—to gather everyone together for a bit of lively fun.
Scientists, agents, soldiers, mercenaries, support staff—the countless people who made up Overwatch each carried ideals of their own.
Overwatch gathered all those ideals into one place and raised them into a loftier banner.
That was why it had drawn so many to its side.
To watch over a better future, we become the vanguard of the fight.
They built weapons to put an end to war.
They pursued research to cure disease and improve the environment.
They fought in order to end the fighting.
More than anyone, they hoped that every battle would be the last the world ever saw—that their struggle might hand this world a better future.
An unsettled world needs heroes, so they did not wait, did not pray, did not hold out for some miracle.
Instead they tried to become heroes themselves: the vanguard standing at the very front line, watching over what was to come.
As long as that ideal had not died, then sooner or later every last member of Overwatch would find their way back beneath that banner.
So founding an “Overwatch” in this world was not such a bad choice after all.
If she had no place to belong, then she would make one for herself.
If she had no comrades, then she would go and find new ones.
Somewhere in this world there had to be “heroes” who shared that same ideal—people willing to fight for it. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
Angela made up her mind, then ran back over the goal’s conditions one more time.
A stable, secure headquarters.
Six agents of C-rank or higher.
A reserve of ten thousand gold or more.
And the completion of one system mission.
Strictly speaking, set beside the Overwatch she had known, these conditions were absurdly generous.
With no hard requirements attached, even a little house could probably pass as a “stable, secure headquarters.” Agents only needed to be C-rank, not A through S, which made things far simpler.
Ten thousand gold, by her rough math, came out to about twenty blades—certainly easier to scrape together than real money, the kind measured in the hundreds of millions.
The trouble was that Angela was currently level one, with zero gold and no property to her name.
Under those circumstances, rounding up five agents was about as realistic as a daydreamer’s fantasy.
(No, she hadn’t miscounted—because “Angela Ziegler” was already an S-rank agent in her own right.)
Penniless as she was, Angela could hardly say which of these conditions was the hardest.
By comparison, completing a single system mission seemed like the easy one.
Mm.
Hopefully it would be a simple delivery job.
No enemies, ideally—just drop off a package and call it a success.
Cradling that lovely little wish, Angela drifted off to sleep.
The next day she ate her breakfast in a daze, her head crammed with the single question of where on earth she could grind for levels.
There was no ranked ladder here, no automatic matchmaking; she didn’t have the faintest idea where to start.
No leveling up meant no supply packs.
No supply packs meant no gold.
No gold meant she couldn’t buy a thing.
At that rate, how was this system of hers any different from a salted fish?
(Blizzard: A salted fish can’t flip itself over—but me? I can always push back a release date.)
It was right then that Hank came knocking, bringing news that lifted her spirits at once.
“Dr. Ziegler, the Professor would like a few of us to go help an old friend of his. Your abilities could be a tremendous help. I was wondering—would you be willing to come along?”
Angela had only just slipped into her white coat and was still debating whether to let her hair down to look a touch more mature.
The instant she heard the question, the system’s prompt flickered up in front of her.
(New mission issued: travel to Poland and rendezvous with Magneto.)
Now this was water for the parched and an umbrella in the rain!
What was there left to hesitate over?
Angela answered without missing a beat.
“Of course. I’d be glad to. If someone needs a doctor, then I’m happy you chose me.”