Chapter 31: POV: Isabelle Thorne
My name is Isabelle Thorne. Before the world ended, my life was simple. It was kendo. The smell of the dojo, the weight of the bamboo sword in my hands, the quiet focus of a perfect strike. I wasn’t looking for fame or glory. I just wanted to be strong. I wanted to be perfect. That was all that mattered.
Then the email came. ’The Aegis Mandate: A World Salvation Project’. It felt like a joke, a scam. But then the world broke. Monsters appeared. People started gaining strange, magical powers. My simple life of kendo was over.
I didn’t want to be a hero. It was an accident. My university friends, they were excited. They saw it as a game, a chance to be special. A boy I knew, Kenji, a loud and confident boy from the business school, formed a "party." He said we were going to be heroes. He dragged me along because I knew how to use a sword.
Our first dungeon was in Sector 7. An old, forgotten apartment building. Kenji read on some forum that it was an "easy farm." He was so confident. We all were. The first room was just full of blue, jiggly slimes. We laughed as we killed them. We felt powerful. We felt like heroes.
Then we entered the second room. It was full of goblins.
"They’re just goblins!" Kenji shouted, raising his cheap iron sword. "Charge!"
We charged. It was a mistake.
BOOM!
A rock, thrown by a tiny green monster, slammed into our tank’s shield. The sound was like an explosion. A shockwave blasted him backward, his arm broken. The air filled with the shrieking sound of goblins moving with unnatural speed.
One of my friends, Masaru, tried to fight back. He was a kind boy from the literature department. He thrust his spear. A goblin, no bigger than a child, dodged under it.