Wingless to Herald
In the decades that followed his arrival in City Two, Val treated every sunrise like a debt he had to repay.
Val kept his distance from other students and stayed clear of the academy commons. He threw himself into physical conditioning, theoretical strategy, and low-tier gate suppression. He was the first student on the practice fields when the morning mist clung to the grass, and he was the last to extinguish his lamp in the archives. Sixty-one years of mortal failure had taught him that weakness invited cruelty, and in Heaven, only strength earned the right to exist.
In the upper solar of the Division 2 stronghold, Lateresa received regular updates from June.
Her head maid delivered the accounts with practiced detachment. Val had completed the foundational martial syllabus ahead of schedule. His swordsmanship was sharp, his footwork steady, and his gate clearance record clean. He took his training with dead seriousness, finishing every assignment ahead of schedule and taking every injury in silence.
Then June would add the rest.
Students still pulled their tunics away when he passed through the halls. Citizens still threw gravel at his shoes near the market square. Stallkeepers still looked straight through him when he tried to buy bread, forcing him to subsist on basic rations.
Standing by the high arched window, Lateresa looked out over the silver spires of her city. Her jaw set hard, the muscles jumping beneath her pale skin, and her gloved fingers tightened against the stone balustrade until the seams strained. She wanted to issue an executive decree forbidding the harassment, but she knew the brutal reality of celestial politics. If she intervened on his behalf, the court would label him her pet, and the scrutiny from the ruling houses would only intensify. She had to stay back and let him stand on his own feet.
In the spring of 2089, thirty-four years of relentless discipline finally bore fruit.
Inside a completed gate, Val's Combined stats crossed the threshold into Messenger rank. A sudden, sharp ache tore through his upper back, and a single pair of white wings broke through his skin, snapping wide in a shower of pale light.
He stepped out of the gate portal and walked back toward the academy through the central avenue of City Two. His new wings felt heavy, stiff, and foreign, twitching awkwardly with every stride. He was exhausted from hours of clearing monsters, his uniform coated in grey gate dust, his boots scuffed and worn as he struggled to find his balance beneath the unfamiliar weight on his back.
A formal delegation from Division 3 turned the corner from the inner plaza.
ArchAngel Daniel walked at the front of the formation, his gold-trimmed mantle draped over proud shoulders, flanked by his lackeys, including Selaphiel of Division 9. Val, unsteady on his feet and focused on adjusting his clumsy wings, failed to step aside in time. His left shoulder brushed Daniel's cloak.
Daniel stopped instantly. His eyes flared with sharp irritation, and his right fist drove forward like a piston.
The strike caught Val clean on the jaw.
Bone cracked, and Val slammed onto the limestone pavement. He tumbled across the stone, his awkward new wings splaying wide against the dirt.
Daniel shook out his knuckles, glancing down with casual contempt, but the whispers along the colonnade caught his attention. Citizens and students had stopped in their tracks, watching Val with open disgust, their expressions twisted in sour contempt.
Daniel narrowed his eyes, stepping toward an academy proctor standing near the rail. "Who is that clumsy insect, and why are your people looking at him like a plague rat?"
The proctor bowed until his nose nearly brushed his knees. "Apologies, Lord Daniel. He is a mortal hybrid. A Human Angel brought into City Two years ago under Lady Lateresa's personal seal."
The words hit Daniel like a torch thrown into oil.
A common mortal was worthless dirt, but a mortal brought in by Lateresa was a direct insult. Lateresa was supposed to be his fiancée, a high-born marriage negotiated by their fathers and sanctioned by their masters. The fact that she had rejected his advances while secretly sheltering a filthy mortal stray in her own city set his blood on fire.
Daniel turned back toward the boy on the ground, his handsome face twisting into a vicious smirk.
"Selaphiel," Daniel called out smoothly. "Hold him down."
Selaphiel grinned, stepping forward with heavy boots. She drove her heel between Val's shoulder blades, pinning Val's chest flat to the paving stones and pulling Val's newly grown wings taut into the air.
Val struggled desperately, his fingers clawing at the stone, but against an ArchAngel lackey, his newly minted Messenger strength was useless.
Daniel drew a slender divine blade from his belt.
"If you think her protection makes you an angel," Daniel whispered, "let me remind you what you actually are."
The blade sheared down through flesh, quill, and bone.
Agony ripped through Val's nervous system, so sharp and blinding that the world vanished into white noise. He screamed until his throat tore, thrashing helplessly as blood erupted from his back, spraying across the white stones. Daniel severed the second wing with deliberate cruelty, kicking the blood-soaked feathers into the gutter like trash.
Val's scream choked off in his chest. His vision shattered into black static, and he collapsed limp onto the bloody pavement.
From the shadow of an upper archway, June stood frozen, her eyes wide with horror.
Drawing her blade or challenging Daniel in the street would ignite a war between the divisions and expose Lateresa's private surveillance over the boy. The moment Daniel and Selaphiel walked away laughing, June signaled two trusted castle maids waiting in the side alley.
"Move," June said, her voice low and sharp. "Get him to the clinic before he bleeds out."
The maids lifted Val's unconscious body from the stone and carried him through the back alleys straight into the clinic.
Darkness held him completely, drowning out the shouting and the smell of copper.
Val woke on a clinic cot with his back bandaged in thick layers of linen and medicated salve.
The phantom ache throbbed where his wings had been, burning like fresh fire against his spine. The wings he had labored thirty-four years to earn were gone, butchered in a matter of seconds. The shame of walking through City Two wingless returned, heavier and darker than the first time.
His resolve held.
The stubborn endurance that had carried him through sixty-one years of mortal failure refused to surrender. The moment the surgical incisions scarred over, Val returned to the training grounds. He ran until his lungs tasted of copper. He cleared gate after gate alone, his daggers chipping against monster hide, grinding his body into tempered steel.
For two years, he endured the whispers and the pitying glances of a wingless Messenger.
In 2091, deep in the boss chamber of a low-tier gate, his daggers found the rift beast's core. The creature collapsed into ash, and the surge of stats from the kill pushed his level past the Herald threshold. Divine energy tore through his spine, forcing the scarred tissue open in a surge of white light. A full pair of wings broke through the ruin on his back, snapping wide in the empty cavern, whole and unblemished.
Val stood in the dust of the clearing, breathing hard as the feathers settled. He reached back, his fingers tracing the living quills.
Val clenched his teeth, dragged his aura inward, and willed the wings down. The feathers retracted, the bones folding flat until they locked beneath his skin, leaving his back marked only by pale scars.
He pulled his scuffed tunic on, sheathed his daggers, and stepped through the exit portal into City Two.