Chapter 3

The hover transport’s engine let out an overloaded howl, the cargo bay stuffed with every survival supply money could buy.

To get this load, I’d drawn a gun in the black market half an hour ago.

Those greedy hyenas tried to squeeze Elyssia’s three sanctuary land deeds. I blew the wineglass on the table apart with one shot.

“Take the credit points, or take the bullets.” My warning made them cough up the top price.

Now a high-pressure purifier, anti-radiation seeds, medical serum, and high-energy fuel pushed the suspension to its limit.

“Once we pass through this thunderstorm cloud bank, we’ll be there.” Elyssia pointed at the rolling dark mass beyond the windshield.

The wind tore at the vehicle’s frame. I gripped the control stick hard and shoved the engine into overload.

The nose ripped the cloud layer open by brute force, and blinding sunlight flooded the cockpit.

I raised an arm on instinct to block the glare. When my eyes refocused, my breathing stopped.

At the end of my sightline, it wasn’t some broken cloud-ruins at all.

A gigantic airborne fortress, forged from silver-white metal and dazzling holy-light crystal, hung at ten thousand meters like a cold, silent beast.

“This is what you called… ruins?” I swallowed hard, my throat dry.

“Sorry. It really is only a pitiful three thousand square meters.” Elyssia lowered her head, apologetic.

She didn’t even dare meet my eyes. “Angels have strict requirements for sanctity. If you don’t like this crude style—”

Before she could finish, a holy-light elevator, wrapped in a soft glow, descended from above and stopped steadily in front of the vehicle.

“I was worried you’d get tired climbing the cloud ladder, so I made this.” She added softly.

I stepped onto the elevator. As the platform shot upward, my jaw nearly hit the floor.

Metal doors slid apart with a heavy roar, and the scene on the fortress’s lower deck crushed my sense of reality.

Hundreds, maybe thousands of tons of special light steel. Mountains of holy-light crystal. All stacked in neat rows in a cargo hold so deep it looked bottomless.

“If you really dislike it, we can dismantle everything and rebuild.” Elyssia pointed at treasures worth a kingdom, speaking with deadly sincerity.

“No. Don’t touch it.” I grabbed her wrist hard, terrified she might actually dismantle the fortress on a whim.

“I love it. It’s perfect. Ridiculously perfect.”

At my approval, a clear flicker of disappointment crossed her azure eyes.

Damn it. She really wanted to hand-build me a brand-new shelter for her “fragile contractor.”

For the next hour she dragged me excitedly through every corner of the fortress.

A massive purified-water circulation chamber. A holy-light greenhouse shimmering with soft radiance. An armory with both cold steel and firearms.

There was even a separate seed cold-storage vault and a spacious temperature-controlled livestock pen.

I rubbed my aching knees and collapsed into a metal chair in the observation deck.

In my last life, I’d thought surviving meant hiding in an abyss lair and reading a demon’s mood. In this life I finally understood the real bumpkin was me.

At this altitude, we towered over the entire continent. That damn world-ending flood would never reach us.

Outside, the light dimmed. Gray clouds gathered below into a sinister vortex.

Elyssia was clumsily stuffing warm-glowing holy feathers into a mattress.

She carried over a cup of sweet purified water and a portion of fragrant sacrament.

“Eat,” she said, sitting on the bed edge, chin in her hands as she watched me. Her wings trembled in happy little motions.

I took the cup. My gaze passed over her shoulder and fixed on the abyss below where a storm was brewing.

Gray water was already swallowing the distant horizon. The wind carried disaster’s whisper.

But this time I felt no fear, only a blood-hot frenzy.

In the last life, she’d been trapped in hopeless city ruins, forced to drain her last drop of divine power for those three ungrateful leeches.

Now that we were back in the clouds, I would not allow anything to steal her holy light again.

Before the flood fully devoured the land, I would plant every resource in the cargo hold into the holy-light greenhouse.

I would build the most perfect closed-loop ecology inside this three-thousand-square-meter steel fortress, pushing hoarding and survival to the extreme.

No one would take even a second of my life from me again.