Chapter 1
I stood in lane four at the outdoor range ten miles outside Charlotte, sweating like a sinner in church under that thick North Carolina sun. Early May, and the humidity was already trying to drown me. Khaki jeans stuck to my legs, the form-fitting brown short-sleeve T-shirt was dark under the arms and across my chest like I’d gone swimming in it. The battle belt rode low and tight on my hips—five full thirty-round PMAGs locked in their pouches, one empty from the first string. The sixth mag sat seated in my AR-10, bolt forward, safety on. My small backpack rested at my feet, stuffed with spare ear pro, a microfiber rag, a bottle of CLP, extra optic batteries, and the half-empty bag of beef jerky I’d been stress-munching since I signed my DD-214 three weeks ago.
Twenty-five years old. E-5 stripes gone. Eight years in the green—started as a seventeen-year-old E-1 Cavalry Scout eating sand in a Bradley, moved to Joint Recon Sniper Team at twenty, then reclassed to 35G geospatial intel at twenty-two. Two combat deployments, one real-world gig on Operation Stardust in Germany and Lithuania that I still wasn’t allowed to talk about without checking my clearance first. Single. No kids. Closest thing I had to family was Tyler’s little girl back in town, who called me “Uncle J” and thought my rifle was just a really big stick for keeping monsters away. I’d left her a note and a fresh box of colored pencils before driving out here. Some goodbyes you don’t say out loud.
The range smelled like home: gun oil, cordite, hot brass, and that faint ozone bite that always rolled in before a Carolina thunderstorm. Cicadas screamed in the pine trees lining the backstop. Brass glittered everywhere like golden confetti from a war nobody filmed. Targets—paper zombies and steel plates—stood at fifty to three hundred yards. Dust hung in the air every time the wind kicked up.
“Yo, Scott! You gonna pet that trigger all day or actually make it do something useful?” Ramirez yelled from lane five. Short, stocky, half-Mexican, still wearing that same shit-eating grin he’d had since we were E-1s humping the desert together. His M4 barked twice. Steel at two hundred yards rang like a dinner bell.
I didn’t even glance over. Just exhaled, let the world tunnel down to the red dot, and pressed the trigger. Crack. The AR-10 bucked once, clean. The gong sang. Crack-crack. Two more. Group the size of a quarter. I dropped the empty mag, slapped in a fresh one with a smooth click-clack, and grinned.
“Ramirez, you shoot like you drive—fast, loud, and everybody watching wonders how you still have a license.”
Tyler—my best friend, brother in every way that mattered—leaned on the divider between lanes, chewing dip and laughing so hard he almost spit tobacco juice down his shirt. Tall, built like a linebacker who’d discovered craft beer and regret, Tyler still had that thick North Carolina drawl we’d all picked up after too many years at Bragg.
“Goddamn, listen to Sergeant Scott out here dropping wisdom like he still gets a paycheck for it. Three weeks out and already acting like a retired colonel. Next thing you know he’ll be charging us range fees and yelling at us to get off his grass.”
Corporal Hayes—still in, poor bastard—stood in lane three, reloading while running his mouth at full volume. Buzz cut, tattoos crawling up both arms, the kind of guy who looked like he could bench-press a Humvee. “Y’all should’ve seen this LT I had last deployment. Thought he was hot shit because he read one book on leadership. Tried to lead a night patrol and walked us straight into a wadi full of goat shit up to our knees. Guy cried like a boot when his boots got dirty. I’m talking full waterworks. We had to call him ‘Lieutenant Mudfoot’ for the rest of the rotation.”
Ramirez howled, doubling over his rifle. “Mudfoot! Bro, you still got that picture of him? I need it for the group chat. Blackmail material for life.”
“Least I didn’t get us lost in Lithuania like Jordan did on Stardust,” Hayes shot back, racking a round. “Remember that? Mr. Geospatial Intelligence staring at satellite maps for twelve hours straight and still managed to send the convoy the wrong way. We ended up in some tiny village where the locals thought we were aliens.”
I snorted and shouldered up again, sending five rounds downrange—controlled pairs, breathing steady, body relaxed but locked. Each crack punched the steel with that sweet ting-ting-ting. “Hey, that village had the best sausage I’ve ever eaten. You’re welcome. And 35G, assholes. I was reading real-time drone feeds while you three were still playing hide-and-seek with goat herders. Classified shit. You wouldn’t believe the weird ops we ran. Whole different ballgame when the sky’s full of your own eyes and the enemy’s got cell phones.”
Tyler clapped me on the shoulder hard enough to make the plate carrier shift. “That’s my boy. Still got that cavalry scout swagger. Remember when we were E-1s thinking we were invincible? Two combat tours, one as scouts eating sand, the other as the guys who could drop a bad guy at eight hundred meters. Now look at us—two snipers, one geospatial nerd, and Hayes still trying to convince everyone he’s not secretly a pog.”
We kept shooting, the banter flowing easy like it always did. The kind of loud, filthy, dark-edged laughter that came from men who’d seen too much and still chose to roast each other instead of talking about the nights we woke up tasting sand and hearing distant gunfire.
Hayes kept the stories rolling. “Speaking of screw-ups—last range day at Bragg, Ramirez here zeroed his optic, swore it was perfect, then missed the entire silhouette at a hundred yards. Turned out he’d been sighting it with the wrong eye. We called him Cyclops for a month.”
Ramirez flipped him off without looking. “At least I don’t still flinch every time a truck backfires like you do, Hayes. PTSD much? I swear you hit the deck faster than a recruit on day one.”
I lined up on the three-hundred-yard steel this time. The optic was crisp, the trigger broke clean as glass. Crack-crack. Two perfect hits. I smiled to myself. Even out of uniform, the body remembered. Cavalry Scout muscle memory mixed with sniper calm and that cold 35G eye that turned every hill into a map overlay. Dead space here, natural choke point by the tree line, perfect overwatch from that rise. Old habits.
Tyler spat dip juice into an empty bottle. “You know what I’m gonna miss most? Not the pay. Not the free healthcare that sucked anyway. Nah. It’s this—standing here with you degenerates, talking shit, sending lead downrange, pretending we’re still twenty and bulletproof.”
That one landed heavier than I expected. I swapped mags again, the empty one clicking into the pouch with practiced ease. Five full, one empty. Habit. Always know where your next mag is. “Yeah. Me too. Got out and the world got too damn quiet. No more twelve-hour shifts staring at screens, no more ‘qualify or lose your slot.’ Just civilian bullshit. Job interviews. Traffic. Some suit asking if I can ‘pivot my skill set to Excel.’ Excel. Like reading terrain and calling fire missions translates to spreadsheets.”
Hayes barked a laugh. “Excel? Bro, your skill set is ‘put holes in people from really far away’ and ‘read a map better than Google Earth.’ You’re gonna be dangerous in the civilian world. Might as well become a park ranger or some shit—‘Uncle J protects the squirrels with extreme prejudice.’”
Ramirez nearly dropped his rifle laughing. “Park ranger Jordan? I’d pay to see that. ‘Sir, step away from the picnic basket or I will recon your ass.’”
I flipped them both off but couldn’t stop grinning. My cheeks hurt from it. “You two keep talking. I’m over here making steel sing while you gossip like E-3s in the DFAC. Watch this.” I went prone on the mat, backpack as a hasty rest, and sent ten rounds downrange in a steady rhythm—crack-crack-crack-crack—walking the impacts up the berm like I was painting with gunfire. Every plate rang. Every shot was perfect.
“Show-off,” Tyler muttered, but there was real pride in it.
We kept at it for another hour. Stories piled up: the time in the desert when our Bradley threw a track and we had to push it like idiots; the Lithuania cold-weather op where I accidentally greeted a full bird in broken Russian after too many hours on overwatch; the bar fight in Germany where I talked our way out of trouble by deadpan explaining geospatial intel to some very confused MPs. Dark humor crept in the way it always did—jokes about buddies who didn’t make it home, about the nights the sand still tasted real—but we laughed through it. Brotherhood. That’s what it was. The kind that didn’t need sappy words.
The sun dipped lower, turning the pine trees golden. My arms felt loose, shoulders warm, the rifle an extension of me. I was halfway through my last mag when the air changed.
It started as a hum in my teeth. Low. Electric. Like standing too close to a big generator. The range lights flickered even though we were outside. Birds went dead silent. My skin prickled the same way it had right before that ambush in Afghanistan.
“The hell is that?” Ramirez muttered, lowering his rifle.
Tyler straightened. “Storm?”
Hayes looked at a perfectly clear sky. “No clouds, man.”
I thumbed the safety, instincts screaming. I opened my mouth to say something—
Golden light exploded outward from nowhere. Not a flashbang. Not an explosion. Just light—warm, alive, impossibly bright. It swallowed the range, the targets, my buddies’ voices mid-laugh. The AR-10 stayed glued to my hands. Battle belt, backpack, every round in every mag—everything on me lifted with me.
The world tore like wet paper.
Everything went white.
When the light faded, I wasn’t on the range anymore.
I stood on nothing—an endless expanse of soft golden clouds that felt solid under my boots. The air smelled like ozone and wildflowers. Two suns—one gold, one pale blue—hung in a violet sky that stretched forever. No wind. No sound except the blood pounding in my ears.
Ahead of me, a woman waited.
She was tall, ethereal, wearing flowing robes that shifted between starlight and liquid silver. Silver-white hair cascaded down her back like moonlight on water. Her eyes were pure glowing gold—ancient, kind, and exhausted all at once. Power rolled off her in gentle waves that pressed against my chest like a warm hand.
I raised the AR-10 on instinct, finger indexed along the frame, eyes scanning for threats even as my brain screamed what the actual fuck is this acid-trip hallucination. Battle belt still tight. Backpack still on. Rifle still loaded. I could feel the weight of every mag.
The woman tilted her head, a small, sad smile touching her lips.
“Jordan Scott,” she said, her voice like distant bells and warm honey. “E-5 of the United States Army. Cavalry Scout. Sniper. Geospatial Intelligence. Bearer of steel and unyielding will. I am Lirael, Goddess of the Eternal Watch. Your world no longer needs you… but mine is dying.”
My mouth went dry. I kept the rifle ready. “Lady, I don’t know what kind of next-level fever dream this is, but I was in the middle of talking shit to my boys. Send me back. Right now.”
Lirael’s smile faded into something softer, almost pitying. “I cannot. The Veil only parts once for you. A Demon Lord stirs. Kingdoms burn. I have summoned the only soul whose heart still beats with the rhythm of war without magic.”
She gestured with one graceful hand, and a translucent blue window appeared in the air right in front of my face, glowing softly.
System Initialization Complete.
Name: Jordan Scott
Level: 1
Title: The Sentinel
Class: Arch Sentinel / Warden
Health: 320/320
Mana: 45/45
Strength: 24
Agility: 22
Endurance: 26
Perception: 31
Intelligence: 19
Willpower: 28
Skills:
Precision Strike (Lv. Max – Earth Legacy)
Terrain Mastery (Lv. Max – Earth Legacy)
Stealth Recon (Lv. 8)
Tactical Assessment (Lv. Max – Earth Legacy)
Archery & Marksman Proficiency (Lv. Max – Earth Legacy)
Swords & Blades (Lv. 6)
Survival (Lv. Max – Earth Legacy)
Leadership (Small Unit) (Lv. 7)
Cartography & Mana Mapping (Lv. 1 – New)
Elemental Manipulation (Lv. 1 – Goddess Gift)
…and more.
I stared at the floating box. Then lowered the rifle a fraction, barrel dipping toward the golden clouds. “You’ve got to be shitting me.”
Lirael’s golden eyes softened. She stepped closer, robes shimmering. “You do have the ability to use magic, Jordan. I have granted it to you. Elemental Manipulation will grow with you—it lets you command fire, water, earth, and wind once you learn to listen. And because you will need to speak with the people of Elyndor, I have also given you the tongues of this world. You will understand and speak the common language of men, elves, and dwarves without effort. You will comprehend the beast tongue of all creatures not born of man—including the demi-humans who walk among us. And… you will know the demon tongue, though I pray you never have cause to use it.”
She paused, the weight of her gaze pressing down like the whole sky. “Welcome to Elyndor, Jordan Scott. Try not to die too quickly.”
