Chapter 2: The Goddess Who Couldn’t Keep Her Hands to Herself
Chapter 2: The Goddess Who Couldn’t Keep Her Hands to Herself
Her thumb brushed the dried blood beneath my lip, and the pain vanished.
Not faded. Vanished, the way a line vanishes when someone deletes it. The split skin knitted shut, the swelling cooled, and nearly a day of throbbing discomfort simply stopped existing after three seconds of contact.
I stared at her. She stared back, golden-violet eyes half-lidded and curious, her thumb still resting against my chin like she was testing the texture of my skin.
A goddess. An actual goddess had descended from another universe after watching me suffer.
The apology is late, I thought, but I’m willing to accept compensation.
I waited for her to speak. Chosen mortal, perhaps. Accept my blessing. Something dignified, something that matched the impossible light still curling around her bare shoulders.
Instead she turned my face gently to the left, then to the right. Her eyes traced the bruise near my eyebrow and the exhaustion carved beneath my cheekbones. She touched my hair, running a strand of silver-white between her fingers like she was inspecting rare silk. Then she pressed one finger against my cheek and dimpled it, the way you might test a pastry you were considering buying.
Maybe goddesses have different social customs, I thought. Maybe this is her version of a handshake.
"You’re quite real," she murmured.
Wonder softened her voice, except that wonder was the wrong word for it. Wonder suggests innocence, and her expression was not innocent.
"Are you here to save me?" I asked.
Her gaze drifted from my cheek to my eyes. "Perhaps."
Perhaps. Not yes. Not fear not, mortal. Perhaps. But I was desperate enough to grab the opening with both hands.
"Can you heal me? Do you have food? Can you grant me power? A class? A legendary weapon? Transportation to somewhere that isn’t actively trying to eat me?"
She listened to the flood of it with an expression I couldn’t read—amusement, maybe, or patience. She was definitely patient, in the way a cat is patient with a mouse that hasn’t yet understood its situation.
"How old are you?" she asked.
I blinked. "What?"
"Your age, sweet thing. How many years?"
"Twenty-two."
Tension went out of her shoulders—tension I hadn’t noticed until it was gone—and her smile widened.
"Wonderful."
Wonderful was not the response I had expected from the goddess responsible for my salvation.
She rose in one fluid motion, bare feet somehow still clean despite my floor, and extended her hand. "Stand. Let me look at you properly."
I tried. My legs had other opinions; fourteen days of starvation and a bruised ribcage do not respect divine authority. I made it halfway upright before my knee buckled and I pitched forward, and she caught me.
Her arms wrapped around my shoulders and pressed me against her. The contact was warm—warmer than human, a dry pleasant heat that seeped through my filthy shirt and into muscles that had been aching for a fortnight. For one moment her expression softened into something almost like sympathy.
Then she pulled me closer. And closer.
This was not a medical examination.
I could feel the curves of her body through that scandalous dress, the full shape of her breasts against my chest, her hips aligned with mine. One hand rested on the small of my back with the fingers splayed. The other was still deciding where to land.
"You’re so thin," she murmured, her breath warm against my throat. "So terribly fragile. I could feel your heartbeat stumbling from across the dimensional divide."
"You... felt my heartbeat?"
"I felt your soul." Something shifted behind her eyes—not the lazy amusement from before, but genuine shock. She pulled back far enough to stare at my face with new intensity.
"I don’t—"
"Your presence. Your soul." Her voice dropped to something almost reverent. "How did a mortal become this beautiful?"
Right. Charisma one hundred. The stat that had done absolutely nothing useful for two weeks.
"Beauty," I said flatly, "has not been helpful during the apocalypse."
She looked offended—genuinely, personally offended, as though I’d insulted her favourite artwork. "Not helpful? That sounds like a failure of imagination."
Her gaze drifted downward. Slowly. Very slowly.
Something is wrong with my goddess.
"I’m from somewhere else," she said, as if that explained anything at all. "Outside this world’s tidy little network of registered realities. When the dimensional walls began cracking—when Earth started bleeding into realms it was never meant to touch—I happened to glance through a tear."
She paused. Her tongue touched her lower lip.
"And I saw you."
The way she said you made my stomach tighten.
"Sitting alone. Bruised. Starving. Angry." Her eyes glittered. "Your soul was shining so brightly I could see it across the void. Like a little star someone had dropped in the mud and forgotten."
I processed that slowly. "So you crossed universes to rescue me?"
She paused, then smiled.
"I crossed universes because I wanted a closer look."
Hope: decreasing. Suspicion: rapidly increasing.
Her fingers found the bruise near my eyebrow. The touch was feather-light, but warmth spread beneath my skin and the ache dulled. "Poor thing. Beautiful little disaster. Who abandoned you here, hmm? Who left something this precious to starve in the dark?"
"Nobody abandoned me. I’ve been alone since the Merge."
"Since the... Merge." She tested the word like unfamiliar wine, and then understanding arrived. "Ah. Your world. The game. Nobody knew you existed, did they? Nobody came looking."
I didn’t answer. She didn’t need one.
"That makes it better," she breathed. "You weren’t merely abandoned. You were never claimed at all."
Disturbed. I am officially disturbed.
"You like seeing people suffer?"
"No." She tilted her head. "I like rescuing beautiful things. It’s much more satisfying when they truly need rescuing."
"Then are you going to rescue me?"
"Eventually."
"Eventually? What does eventually mean?"
She didn’t answer. Instead she pulled me into a hug—not a brief comforting one, but a full-body embrace, her arms around my shoulders and her warmth sinking through my clothes. Her scent surrounded me: flowers, wine, something sweeter underneath both. Her body was soft and firm in ways my starving, touch-starved brain had no defences against.
When was the last time someone held me?
Years. At least.
My body relaxed before my brain could file an objection. The tension in my shoulders unwound. The ache in my chest—not the bruised ribs, but the deeper one that had been there long before the apocalypse—eased by a fraction, and I hated how badly I needed it. Hated that my eyes stung and my throat tightened over a simple embrace from a stranger.
Maybe she’s strange. Maybe her social skills are terrible. I’m not exactly qualified to judge—
Her hand slid down my back. Past my lower back. There.
I froze. Velisara squeezed.
No. Her social skills are definitely worse.
I tried to pull away—tried being the operative word. Her arms didn’t tighten; she simply didn’t move, and my Strength 3 meant I might as well have been pushing against a warm, fragrant wall.
She walked toward me, unhurried, hips swaying with a rhythm that felt like a heartbeat.
Finally. Divine salvation. A goddess. My hidden cheat has arrived.
Every protagonist story I’d ever read, every anime I’d binged at three in the morning, every game protagonist who’d ever stumbled into ultimate power — this was it. The turnaround. The moment everything changed.
She crouched in front of me. Her scent was floral and warm and made my chest ache in ways that had nothing to do with my bruised ribs. Her fingers touched my chin and tilted my face upward.