Guss walks.
Each step leaves a footprint in the mud that fills with dark water before he's taken the next. The glow has settled back to something quiet, patient, like a pilot light that doesn't need to be on max to prove it's still burning. His chest throbs where the fiend's axe opened him, and the blood that runs from the wound is his own again, which is almost comforting in its familiarity. At least this part he understands.
Behind him, the dead fiend lies where he left it. The head sits beside the body like something discarded. The fused skull stares at nothing with its empty sockets, horns jutting upward at angles that no longer mean threat to anyone. Guss doesn't look back. Cool guys don't look back.
The sounds guide him forward. Gunfire, sporadic and sharp. Shouting, the kind that comes from men who've been shouting long enough that their throats have gone raw, and the words come out stripped of everything but urgency. He follows the noise because it's the only map that matters right now, and the terrain shifts under his boots with each dozen yards. Open ground gives way to the first shell craters, overlapping depressions in the earth filled with standing water that reflects the bruised gray of the sky. Then the craters deepen, multiply, until he's moving through a landscape that looks less like land and more like something that's been chewed and spat out by something vast and hungry.
The trench system opens in front of him without ceremony.
One moment he's picking his way through cratered dirt, and the next the ground drops away into a cut that runs as far as he can see in either direction. The walls are shored with timber and sandbags, slick with mud and darker stains. The bottom is ankle-deep in water that might have been clear once but isn't anymore. Men huddle against the firing step, rifles propped on the parapet, faces set in expressions that don't bother trying to hide what they're feeling because what's the point. Fear and exhaustion settle.
None of them look at him directly.
He drops into the trench and the water is cold through what's left of his boots. His reflection breaks and reassembles on the surface, distorted by ripples and the faint golden light that still clings to his skin. He's taller than he was. Broader through the shoulders. The man in the water looks like someone took the original and stretched the frame to its outer limit of what human means. The squint is the same. The sandy hair, matted now with sweat and dirt and something that might be someone else's blood. The face underneath is his, which makes the scale of the rest of it stranger, not less.
A shell lands somewhere beyond the parapet. The impact shudders through the timber supports. Dirt rains from the revetment. Nobody flinches far to use to it by now.
Guss moves along the firing line. The trench narrows in places, forcing him to turn sideways. Men press themselves against the walls to let him pass. Their eyes track him, but their mouths stay shut. Something in the way he moves, or the light, or the fact that he's walking through a warzone with an open chest wound and not particularly caring about it, keeps questions sealed away.
The bombardment picks up.
It starts as isolated impacts, then builds. Shells walk across the forward positions in a staggered rhythm that has no pattern a human ear can decode. The sky above the parapet flashes white, then orange, then a dirty gray that holds for a second before the next flash overwrites it. Each impact hits the ground with a sound that's less sound and more physical pressure. Your bones feel it before your ears do. The air fills with cordite and wet earth and the particular smell of things burning.
Guss finds a stretch of firing step that isn't crowded and plants his feet. His height lets him see over the parapet without having to stand on the step itself. What he sees isn't complicated.
No man's land stretches ahead, a wasteland of crater and wire and broken ground. The enemy trenches sit maybe two hundred yards out, dark lines cut into the earth. Between them, figures move. Not exactly men but something of what was left. The wretched, mostly. Twisted bodies in rusted armor, pushing forward across ground that offers no cover and no mercy. Behind them, heavier shapes. The heretic troopers, their armor scorched and blistered from whatever pilgrimage took them through Hell's fires and back. They move with purpose. The wretched move because they have to.
Guss watches them come.
Another shell lands. Closer this time. The blast wave hits the trench like a flat hand and the world goes sideways for half a second. Dirt and timber and something wet spray across his face. The sound stretches, elongates, becomes a single sustained note that fills everything.
And inside that stretched moment, something changes.
Time doesn't stop. It slows, the way water thickens when it's freezing. Each raindrop hangs suspended. Each fragment of debris hangs in the air, turning lazily. The sound of the shell fades to something distant and irrelevant.
The glow around Guss brightens.
Not gradually. All at once, from pilot light to forge, a brilliance that pushes back the gray dawn and turns the mud at his feet the color of hammered gold. The men nearest him jerk away, hands coming up to shield their eyes. Guss doesn't blink. The light doesn't hurt him. It feels like standing next to something warm that knows him by name.
And then the voice comes.
Not through his ears. Through everything else. His bones, his blood, his mind. It's the same voice he heard among the stars. The same weight behind it. The same sense of something vast paying attention to something small, not out of obligation but out of what might almost be fondness.
You lived.
Two words. Simple. Matter-of-fact.
Guss stands very still.
And you killed one of my least favorite creations. A Yoke Fiend. Not a small one, either.
The voice carries something that might be approval. Might be amusement. Hard to tell with entities that measure time in epochs.
Guss blinks. Water drips from his eyelashes, hanging in the slowed air.
"It almost got me in the first half," he says.
The words leave his mouth and hang there, visible as breath in cold air, except the breath is light. The voice laughs. The sound of it rolls through Guss's chest and settles there, warm and expansive, like good whiskey on a cold night.
That's why I like you. Even dead, you're difficult.
The glow pulses once, gently.
Welcome to the Trench Crusade, Guss Rover. Eight hundred years of war between faith and damnation, and you've landed in the middle of it with perfect timing. The year is 1914 by the local calendar. The place is outside what used to be Jerusalem, before the Templars found something they shouldn't have and opened a door that wasn't meant to be opened.
Images flicker through Guss's mind. Not memories. Something delivered, clean and precise: a city in flames. A massive stone gate. Figures pouring through it, twisted and wrong. The wall of iron, stretching across a continent. The black grail, spreading plague. A woman in armor, light blazing from her hands as she stands against something titanic.
The faithful hold two strong points. New Antioch to the north, rebuilt from the ruins of the old city. The Iron Sultanate to the east, behind a wall that hasn't fallen in eight centuries because I made certain it wouldn't. The heretics hold everything else. They draw their strength from the Third Circle of Hell, which has a gate here now, and from the patronage of entities that make your old world's idea of evil look like children playing with matches.
Another shell lands. In the slowed time, the explosion unfolds like a flower made of fire and dirt, each petal distinct.
You're here because you asked to be. And because I thought you might enjoy the work.
Guss looks down at his hands. The golden light runs along his fingers, steady and patient.
"What exactly am I?"
Something new, something old. A weapon I haven't fielded in a very long time.
The voice shifts, becomes something closer to instruction.
The power in you is divine in nature. Saint-fire. The nemesis of corruption. It burns demonic flesh on contact. It purges taint from the wounded. It heals, though not strongly enough yet for you to notice—that will come. The strength, the speed, the senses, all of it is mine. A gift. But gifts have conditions.
Guss flexes his hand. The glow responds, brightening slightly along the tendons.
"How do I use it? Really use it, not just... whatever that was back there."
Intent. Not power. The power is already there. What matters is what you ask it to do.
Guss frowns. He focuses on the glow, tries to shape it. Tries to push it outward, the way he'd push a breath, or a thought. Nothing happens. The light sits where it is, constant, unmoved by his concentration.
He tries again. Harder. His jaw tightens. The wound in his chest throbs in time with his pulse.
Still nothing.
"Something's wrong with it," he says.
Nothing's wrong with it. Something's wrong with your expectations.
The voice is patient. The kind of patience that has watched civilizations rise and fall and doesn't hurry.
These powers aren't tools you pick up and use. They're living things. They bond with your soul. The bond strengthens with time, with endurance, with the choices you make when the choices cost you something. What you did out there—that was instinct. The body knowing what the mind hadn't caught up to yet. Deliberate control comes later.
Guss stares at his hands. The failure sits in his chest alongside the wound, a different kind of ache.
You won't be performing miracles on day one. Not the kind you're thinking of. What you will do is survive situations that would kill anything else. You will hurt the things that cannot be hurt by ordinary means. You will stand where standing should be impossible. And with each stand, each survival, each wound you take and keep moving through, the bond deepens. The power grows in proportion to what you endure.
Another shell, closer this time. The slowed explosion throws dirt in a perfect arc.
I should also warn you. These conversations—they aren't private in the way you might hope. Every time we speak like this, the light is visible from places you don't want noticing you. Hell has eyes. So do other things. The more frequently you draw my attention, the more frequently you draw theirs.
Guss looks up, though there's nothing to look at.
"Are you saying don't call you?"
I'm saying choose your moments. The channel is open. I'm listening. But there's a difference between a quiet word and a broadcast.
The voice softens, almost imperceptibly.
You did well today. Better than well. The fiend was not a minor threat. The fact that you're standing here, complaining about not being able to perform parlor tricks five minutes after tearing its head off, tells me everything I need to know about your priorities. They're exactly where they should be.
The glow begins to dim.
Not all at once. A slow withdrawal, like tide going out, the light pulling back from his extremities toward his core. The golden footprints in the mud fade. The men along the firing step lower their hands from their eyes, blinking.
The bombardment is about to resume at full intensity. I suggest you find cover, or something to shoot at. Preferably both.
Time catches up.
The shell that's been hanging in the air detonates. The sound hits like a physical wall. Dirt and splinters and things Guss doesn't want to identify rain down across the trench. Men shout. Rifles fire. The world is noise and pressure and the smell of things burning.
Guss stands his ground.
The conversation settles into him. Not as words. As weight. As certainty. The wound in his chest has stopped bleeding, or nearly stopped. The edges have drawn together, not healed but stabilized, held by something that isn't his body doing the work.
He looks out over the parapet.
The next wave is coming. Dark shapes against darker ground, moving through shell-smoke with the mindless determination of things that have nowhere else to go. Behind them, something heavier. Not fiends. Something else. Armored, massive, carrying weapons that shouldn't exist in 1914.
Guss reaches for a rifle leaning against the trench wall. The wood is slick with mud. The bolt action is crude compared to what he's used to, but it's solid. He checks the chamber. Loaded. Five rounds.
Enough to start with.
He chambers the first round and settles the stock against his shoulder. The glow has faded to something barely visible, a thin gold lining under his skin that pulses once, softly, like a heartbeat.
Then he steps up onto the firing ledge and starts shooting.
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Thats it for this one.
If you enjoyed leave a comment and maybe some powerstones.
Guss will have one more main battle before he starts to really interact with new people.