Earth Year 2840 / Celestial year 840. Base of the Titan Tree.
Point of View: N032
"To you who survived the endless struggle in the darkness alone, there is another who walks the same path as you do as she wields the light that shines in the Abyss"
Those were the words I had read in a novel a lifetime ago.
It was a story about an extra , a forgotten background character who defied the narrative, who regressed through hell again and again to save a doomed world.
Those words carried deep.
They etched themselves into my soul.
Even now, across the endless war I fought and continued my struggles for this exact moment.
The moment the Celestials arrived.
The moment the true war began.
I stood before the smoking crater of the golden escape pod.
Then I gripped the ruined hatch of the pod and tore it away.
But as I looked inside, the air left my lungs.
Crown Princess Angelica was suspended in the crash harness, her pristine white armor cracked and her silver hair matted with blood.
Beside her, High Paladin Vance was slumped over breathing raggedly.
My mind violently rejected what my eyes were seeing.
This was wrong.
This was all wrong.
Earth Year 2840, my internal chronometer flashed in the corner of my visor.
The Celestials weren’t supposed to crash on this planet for another five years.
In the original Timeline, it wasn’t me standing here.
It was Zeon.
A battered, hardened veteran Zeon who had survived the horrors of this alien jungle for half a decade forged into a lethal survivor before he finally saw the falling golden stars.
Right now, Zeon was just a terrified young recruit sitting in a cave three miles away.
The original protagonist wasn’t ready.
The timeline had accelerated violently shattering the script I had memorized.
And worse... I quickly scanned the interior of the pod.
Where is Anna?
The younger princess, the true Protagonist, The Main Character of this story, she was supposed to be here.
Her presence was the catalyst for everything that was meant to happen next.
But her seat was empty.
Inside the pod, Angelica stirred.
She looked up at my battered armor but there was no fear of me in her eyes.
There was only absolute hollow despair.
She looked like a woman whose soul had already burned to ash.
"My sister..."
Angelica choked out, tears spilling down her bloodstained cheeks.
"Anna... I promised her. I was supposed to be her shield. But she stayed behind. She pushed me in here and stayed on the burning ship."
My heart stopped.
Anna had stayed behind.
The Abyss had her.
The narrative, it had completely derailed.
The weight of it threatened to crush me right there in the dirt.
But as I looked at the broken Princess in front of me, I knew I couldn’t afford to panic.
I was the only one left who knew how high the stakes were.
In front of me was a woman filled with fear and despair.
So I reached out my hand.
"You are alive,"
I spoke, anchoring her to the present.
"That is all that matters."
Angelica stared at my scarred gauntlet.
"Who are you... my sister she , she was left behind"
Angelica asked as she slowly as her trembling hand reached out wrapping around the cold metal of my armor.
"all that matters is that your safe"
I replied as i pulled her gently from the ruined harness supporting her weight as she stepped out onto the alien soil.
I quickly moved to High Paladin Vance deploying a canister of federation medical foam to stabilize the deep shrapnel wound in his shoulder.
BZZZT.
My holoband suddenly flared to life.
The encrypted comm channel I had established with Commander Maroon cracked through my helmet’s internal speakers.
"N032, do you copy?"
Maroon’s gravelly voice barked with static.
"I made it back to the FOB. We saw the crash. Eva and the kids are geared up. We’re mobilizing the Behemoth tank and bringing the heavy ordnance to your coordinates. Hang tight, we are coming to pull you out."
My blood ran cold.
The kinship I had built with Maroon was real, he wasn’t going to leave a man behind, but bringing a federation tank into this sector right now was a death sentence.
"Negative, Commander!"
I shouted into the comms, stepping in front of the Celestials.
"Do not mobilize the tank!
The crash just spiked the ambient mana in this entire sector with the comms static.
’Hold your position!"
"Say again?"
Maroon’s voice broke up, the static growing louder, almost sounding like a scream.
"We aren’t leaving you to face that alone, soldier-"
"Maroon, listen to me, keep Zeon in the cave-!"
KZZZZZT.
A deafening screech of electromagnetic interference tore through the channel.
The green signal light on my holoband turned dead red.
"Fuck, Comms are jammed,"
I muttered, cursing under my breath.
The localized mana was suffocating the radio frequencies or something massive was blocking the signal.
"What is happening?"
Angelica asked, her royal training fighting through her grief.
Then she drew her silver rapier, the blade humming with a faint holy light.
She leaned heavily against the pod, her eyes scanning the oppressive treeline.
"The monsters that destroyed your ship are coming,"
I said, drawing my own heavy crude sword.
Then I planted my boots in the dirt placing myself between the broken Princess and the dark jungle.
"And my reinforcements is coming here walking blind into a death trap."
The jungle around us suddenly went terrifyingly quiet.
The luminescent birds stopped singing.
The glowing azure vines stopped rustling.
The story had changed.
The original main character, Anna wasn’t here.
Then I will just have to hold the line until they are.
I had failed my squad in the war, and I had failed Sarah in the bunker.
I am not failing this script.
I will keep fighting until i can achieve my goals because I know Anna isn’t dead.
She can’t be.
She is the key to all of this.
A/N:
Continue reading the next Chapter but...
i got too busy with my fulltime job lately, so bare with me as i slowly fix the grammar errors and make the pacing faster of this raw Malay to English translations.
Thank you for reading this far and sorry for the bad grammar >_<