A Guardian's Ascension (Chapter 3) (Patreon)

Sophia slowly claimed a seat on the edge of a sturdier cliff adjacent to the valley, as the terrain rose just high enough here to make a suitable post-battle throne for the victorious giantess. She certainly didn’t keep her posture upright, however, nor her chin tilted to the sky, as might befit actual royalty. Instead Sophia hunched humbly forward, resting her elbows against her exertion-pumped thighs, and letting her golden locks hang in willowy cataracts around her face. Her sword was embedded in the earth beside her, and the shield angled up against the cliff, as she studied the smoldering remnants of the slain incursion army. It wasn’t that Sophia was exhausted, physically, but rather left out of breath anyway thanks to the lingering nervous adrenaline of her first major act of service as a Guardian, specifically given the chance to stand for her own people. She could just imagine if Sigrid was here: towering above her, with hands on her hips, wearing a proud partial smile but also dryly insisting that Sophia stand up and make herself seen, rather than slumping over like this as though she’d lost.

Of course, Sophia had done no such thing. For many months, she’d spent every waking moment among the other colossal champions of the realm, learning their ways, improving her raw yet-unformed talent, and becoming accustomed to the once-unthinkable power and dexterity of her enlarged body. She knew what would happen the first time she was called upon to defend her home from one of the larger rift raids. Still, it wasn’t until she was actually standing alone before an army of a thousand jagged-toothed monsters of all shapes and sizes, allowing them to crash fruitlessly against her like waves on rocky shore, that Sophia could truly conceive of precisely how mighty she had become. She had broken a sweat during the “fight,” yes, but if not for her tremendous concern for the village’s safety during her premiere defense, she might not have at all. And still every single encounter with a beasty from the rift, including that surreally underwhelming standoff with an actual dracus majoris, would have ended so easily: smashed beneath her boots, minced to pieces by her sword, and pulverized in her armored fists.

Naturally, the instant the battle ended, Sophia made certain that there was no visible commotion over in the village, while still standing almost a half-mile away upon those grassy anthill-like slopes. She hadn’t missed any burrowers or renegade orcs. Her next duty, and one which she coincidentally hadn’t really considered until mere days before this event, was to make her way toward the town. It was vital, her veteran brethren had assured her before, that she make herself a known presence to her people, especially now that she’d been assigned to protect them from here on out. Not to entertain any kind of celebrity status – though she’d been awkwardly warned of the people’s inevitable supreme gratitude, an idea which she’d wordlessly doubted – but to cement herself as their Guardian, and help the people feel secure in the knowledge that someone was now looking out for them in perpetuity. The benefit of such a meeting was obvious to Sophia, and she wanted nothing more than for her people, who’d been so terrorized and suffered so many casualties by that previous unguarded incursion, to feel sanctity at last. Nonetheless, as she tried to will herself to stand and make the cautious march over toward the village, she still couldn’t convince her feet to press off from the ground and help her ascend back to all fifty-two stories of now-natural stature. Her heartbeat thrummed faster even than it had during the creatures’ charge.

“It’s all right,” she told herself, silently mouthing a reassurance she didn’t believe. “This is all part of it. They… have to see. Nothing is… different. Not really.”

Sophia emphasized this to herself, even while looking down at the gradually-disintegrating heaps of hundreds of orc, troll, and dracus minoris corpses she’d single-handedly defeated. Then, sitting up higher, she examined her own body again: her statuesque physique which was visibly tanner, firmer, and more toned than it ever was before, not to mention hundreds of feet taller, and uniformed in attention-grabbing warrior’s garb that she (despite her lifelong respect for the Guardians) would have once called a bit too flashy for her liking. Brushing silken auric locks out of her sightline, and audibly exhaling as a final punctuation on this unnerving yet significant experience, she summoned the courage to stand. What kind of Guardian would she be, Sophia wondered in annoyance, if she was too timid to even greet her family and friends, the most important people in her life, in the village that had collectively helped to raise her? She’d missed them all terribly, after all, and though the circumstances of their reunion appeared dire at first, and she’d admittedly undergone several “changes” since any of them had last laid eyes upon her, such frets were ultimately unfounded. This was part of the job, and those precious folks over there deserved to know that they no longer had reason to fear the interdimensional unknown. She was here for them.

No sooner did Sophia force herself to stand, however, and cast her gaze again toward the village, when she discovered they were in fact here for her. During the interim since the last monster was slaughtered, a massive throng of citizens made its way up from the edge of town, crossing the tree-pocked fields to reach the valley where the giantess had made her valiant stand. Sophia’s eyes widened with surprise and subdued joy, and her lip hung open for just a moment, before she clamped it shut again, realizing just how many eyes were upon her now. Right as the first villagers in the crowd arrived at the foot of the cliffs, a breeze rustled over the landscape, and their picturesque five-hundred-twenty-seven-foot heroine’s yellow mane and gold-lined Guardian skirts fluttered triumphantly, while the monolithic pillars of her legs remained rooted tall to the scorched earth beside the many murderous pests she’d taken down.

“Hello… everyone!” Sophia murmured with a gentle wave and accompanying smile. She did her best to speak in a modest volume, though after spending so much time around only beings her size or taller, she could tell that even more of a whisper would suffice now. Again her pulse flickered swifter at their approach, and she felt her palms going clammy in a way that they hadn’t during the more critical moments spent ramming her sword through hordes of green-skinned carnivores. It looked like more than half the village was down there, though Sophia couldn’t quite make out her loved ones yet, try as she might to squint and seek through the many jubilant little expressions so far below. There was an air of disquiet lingering over them still, considering this was by far the largest rift attack their village had ever experienced, but overall, in her audience’s jittery body language and upbeat chattering, Sophia read only gladness.

“Maybe… they think I’m enough, after all,” she thought pleasantly to herself, her pessimistic fears more-or-less put to rest. Indeed, the Guardians had all suggested that she’d be “popular” among her former fellow villagers, which Sophia understood to a degree considering that all the monsters were cleansed from the land for now, but she had no doubt – even now – that these people would look up to her after the fact and just see the same well-meaning, loyal, occasionally-shy young woman they’d always known.