MAYEN

Prologue

Ever since that day, I've been having the same recurring dream.

I walked down the same road. The sun shining bright.

"I want to become a hero."

I heard myself say, as my hands dripped with blood.

"One who saves everybody."

As I walked by numerous corpses, dismembered bodies, burnt to a crisp.

"One who descends from the skies"

I looked up, at the beautiful sun shining from the clouds. The clouds that were oh so elegant, majestic. I held my hand out to try to touch them, but I knew. I always knew.

Those things in the sky were not clouds.

I watched as hordes of Severens descended from the heavens, and from behind the clouds, was not a sun. But a large glowing eye. The eye of a giant Severen. The King. The ruler, and greatest of its kind.

"To wrap a crying maiden with my cape..." I muttered, staring at the armies of the Severens as they began to pillage the university campus that I stood at with their thunderous blasts of energy. Their destruction and reckoning on this world.

"To tell her that..."

My white shirt ripped off as it landed on the ground, turning red as I watched as the giant Severen's eye glowed brighter and brighter. My skin scalding from the heat as the beam disintegrated me.

"Everything is okay. I'm here now." I closed my eyes as everything turned bright.

Thresh

"Operator! The mini-operator is awake!" I heard a voice boom across the ship as I rubbed my forehead.

This won't do. Ugh.

Another horrible dream, and drenched in sweat too. That'd be the third set of clothes I went through in a day. I trudged out of my bed and clicked the button as I watched it fold in on itself.

"Mini-operator, while such hygiene is irrelevant to a Dataform like me, I would advise some better care for your body."

Thanks Folock.

"I know. I don't need you telling me that, Folock. Also, stop calling me Mini-Operator. I'm not that short!"

A voice appeared from behind me.

"He's not wrong y'know."

I slipped on a shirt and smirked. "That's because you spent your whole life in space. Your whole body is stretched out. I'm still way more jacked than you...

"Captain Deka."

Deka's silvery eyes almost glowed from the shadows of the sliding door.

"Heh. I hope you still have your feistiness. Got a new mission from a Syndicate."

"We're doing it solo right? Like just you, Umbra, and I?"

Deka scratched his head. "Uhh..."

"Are you serious? I'm not going out there with them."

Deka sighed. "Shane, at some point, we're going to have to side with my brethren. You honestly can't be thinking we take on the Severens and save my mom with just us right?"

"Are you even listening to yourself?! Those same asshats renounced you! Hell, they have a god damn bounty on your head! Why are you still defending them?"

Deka regarded me. "Because at the end of the day, I am still a Valian. I will forever serve the Toron. That is why I operate my Lances. That is why I wield these weapons. That is why I fight."

I bit my lip as I slipped on my coat and my combat boots. I walked with Deka to the armoury to pick up my two Harkanon rifles and slung their compressed forms on my back.

"How's the new coat, by the way?" Deka asked.

"It's fine." I replied.

"It certainly makes you look like the Operator's Lances!" Folock chimed in.

"That's the last thing I want." I grumbled, imagining Yggdrasil getting its disgusting talons on my body again. The last time the ship's infestation system had touched me, it was to give me my Toron cybernetic implants. Yggdrasil has always been obsessed with me. And ever since it got a "taste" of my body, its obsession only got worse.