Pryce's eyes lit up like someone had just told him the Guild was handing out free lifetime passes to the heroines' private bathhouse.
"Wait—hold the holy phone," he said, leaning so far forward he nearly toppled into the floating screen of his sister's tear-streaked face. "You're telling me the one who wants me as their champion isn't your glowy male ass… but a very very hot angel? Like, the kind who commands all the female angels? The actual second-strongest angel in the hierarchy? The one with wings that probably double as lingerie when she's off-duty?"
The six-winged messenger's perfect amber eyes did that twitch again—more violently this time, like a glitch in divine software.
Pryce barreled on, voice climbing with glee.
"Yes! That's correct," the angel forced out through teeth so clenched they could've cracked marble. "Upon accepting, you will be blessed with her direct—"
"Then why in the nine flaming Abyssal Wells did she send you?!" Pryce exploded, throwing both arms wide.
"A six-winged Ken doll with the personality of a tax form? This negotiation would've been done in sixty seconds flat if she'd sent one of her hot female Seraph! One flash of divine cleavage, one flutter of those rumored golden thighs, and then finally one sultry 'champion,kneel before me' and I'd have signed in blood, spit, and whatever else you needed! I'd have been on my knees reciting vows before you could say 'celibacy clause'!"
The angel pinched the bridge of his nose so hard a faint golden glow leaked between his fingers.
"As much as it physically pains every feather on my wings to admit this," he muttered, "you are… distressingly correct. Had the Supreme dispatched one of her handmaidens—any one of them—you would have folded faster than a house of cards in a windstorm, you horny bastard."
Pryce slapped his own thigh so hard the sound cracked across the field like a whip.
"See?! Even Mr. Perfect gets it! Men are simple. Show us celestial ass and watch morality evaporate like morning dew on a hot wing. You should've led with the eye candy, feather-boy. Rookie mistake."
The angel exhaled a sound that was half sigh, half strangled prayer for patience.
"Tell her,"Pryce continued, suddenly striking a dramatic pose with one hand on his hip and the other pointing skyward like a budget motivational poster, "that this magnificent, street-certified, pussy-conquering human accepts being her champion! I will fight in her name! I will conquer beauty heroines in her name!
"I will bring endless, sweaty, moaning, multi-orgasmic gloryto her ancient, radiant, probably-jiggle-when-she-walks name! I will—"
The angel threw both hands up. Golden light flared around his ears again—sound barrier, maximum opacity.
He couldn't hear the rest, but the hand gestures were graphic enough to make eternity feel longer. Pryce kept going anyway, hips thrusting for emphasis, mouth moving in exaggerated silent-movie blasphemy.
'This blasphemous bastard!
'This foul-mouthed, libido-possessed, walking felony of a soul.'
'What in the First Light did the Supreme possibly see in him?'
Not even the current number-one hero of the world—had ever received an indirect summons from her inner sanctum much even a six-winged messeger.
Yet this charred delinquent was getting the red-carpet treatment whose first thought was weather you could create a harem or not.
Pryce finally noticed the angel's glowering, arms-crossed silence.
"What?" he asked, dropping the pose. "You look like someone just told you the harp budget got cut."
The angel lowered the barrier with exaggerated slowness.
"I am contemplating," he said through gritted teeth, "the fathomless depths of divine mystery why she even those some worthless horny boy like you."
Pryce snorted so hard he almost choked.
"Yeah, join the queue. I've got the same question rattling around my skull. This isn't the origin story montage. No tragic parents, no orphanage fire, no 'you have a pure heart' violin swell. Just me—dead, horny, and apparently hand-picked. Why me? I'm not deep. I don't do fate philosophy at 3 a.m. She's got her mysterious reasons. I've got my very loud, very obvious ones."
He shrugged, all cocky nonchalance.
"That's what you call a fair trade, baby."
The angel stared at him. Long. Hard. Then—almost against his better judgment—he nodded once.
"Very well."
The golden light erupted—not as a gentle benediction, but as a violent cosmic rejection. It was an eviction notice written in starfire, a celestial boot to the ass of Pryce's thoroughly unworthy soul.
Reality tore like wet silk, a screaming kaleidoscope of annihilating colors and dimensions ripped apart at the seams.
He became a mote of dust flung from the eye of an irritated god, tumbling through realms that felt like shattered glass woven from nightmares and frozen screams. His senses weren't assaulted by sights and sounds—they were force-fed the raw concepts themselves: flavors of burnt sugar mixed with dying stars, textures like silk soaked in regret.
The crescendo of his cosmic defenestration ended with a wet, ignominious SPLAT.
Pryce coughed violently, expelling a thick, cloying fluid that tasted of synthetic vanilla and primal musk clawing at the back of his throat. He was submerged to his chin in a tepid, viscous pool of luminescent white, its consistency like slowly congealing ambrosia.
The air hung heavy with saccharine perfume so thick it squeezed thoughts from his skull and replaced them with one singular, debased impulse.
"Whoa," he sputtered, a delirious grin splitting his face despite the mess. "This is it. The apotheosis. I've died and been cast into the very font of feminine essence—the primordial ocean from which all desire springs!"
With the unerring instinct of a creature forged in pure depravity, he scooped a handful of the glowing ichor and brought it to his lips like a supplicant at a profane altar.
"To the victors, the spoils," he declared solemnly.
The moment the saccharine fluid touched his tongue—a wave of cloying sweetness undercut by a chemical tang of profound, soul-crushing disappointment—the universe said nope and yanked him back.
No gentle transition. Just a violent deletion of one reality for another.
He was a stone in a cosmic slingshot. The white pool vanished in a heartbeat, replaced by a vortex of screaming, sentient energy. He plummeted through a firmament of liquid clockwork, gears the size of mountains grinding the moments of his life into glittering dust. Time itself laughed at him—high, mocking peals that echoed like broken bells.
Pryce flailed, arms windmilling as he tumbled end over end.
"Okay, okay—message received!" he yelled into the maelstrom. "The angel chick doesn't want me licking her holy bathwater! Noted! Ten out of ten for dramatic rejection, zero out of ten for customer service!"
A gear the size of a city block spun past, its teeth clipping his shoulder and sending him spinning faster.
"Ow—fuck! Hey, cosmic HR! I was promised a hot angel boss, not a spin cycle through the universe's laundry! If this is the orientation tour, I want a refund and a better tour guide—preferably one with tits and fewer gears!"
The vortex howled louder, as if offended by his commentary.
Streaks of raw possibility whipped past—flashes of alternate Pryces: one wearing a hero cape and looking constipated with righteousness, another buried under an actual harem pile (that one he tried to reach for), and a third still charred on the street with Lulu crying over him.
"Oi! Send me back to the harem version!" he shouted, kicking uselessly. "At least that guy's having a good day! This one's just getting motion sickness and existential whiplash!"
The liquid clockwork suddenly spat him out like a bad olive pit.
He fell.
Hard.
Straight into solid ground—except it wasn't ground. It was warm, yielding marble that smelled faintly of ozone and roses.
The impact drove the air from his lungs in a wheeze.
Pryce lay there for a second, naked, dripping residual white ichor, staring up at a ceiling made of living light that shifted like liquid pearl.
His journey had just started!