A Guardian's Ascension (Chapter 4) (Patreon)

A moment of quiet passed after Sophia’s cheerful but hesitant address. Whispers and looks were exchanged, and then at once, the crowd erupted with a whooping cheer that almost made the giantess flinch, and then they all sprinted toward her. Overcome but just relieved to see them all safe and happy, Sophia cracked a bigger grin, while twiddling a strand of hair between her fingertips, and made certain not to budge her boots as the townsfolk gathered closely around the gilded rims of her metallic footwear, with even the tallest men appearing no larger than three-quarters of an inch high to her. Most, of course, were smaller. Suddenly it made so much sense why Nemora, another of Sophia’s wise instructors, had made her repetitively practice striding among complex obstacle courses without disturbing a single signpost or flower. This first encounter with so many humans at once, post-growth, would’ve filled the giantess with angst, if not for all the training she’d endured to become just as tender and precise with her wards as she was brutal and efficient with her foes.

Sophia just smiled and waved back as graciously as she could, while the throngs chanted variations of thrilled greetings and tearful thanksgivings. The Guardians certainly weren’t lying about the people showing their love for their champion. Not that Sophia ever imagined the village as capable of ingratitude, but her self-consciousness and leftover questions of worthiness made her presume nothing this effusive would be shown to her. This, what she’d done here for them, was simply her duty now. Any one of them below would have done the same with these abilities, she knew, given the opportunity. It was only when the giantess noticed some of the effervescent villagers beginning to swab the top and sides of her boot with rags to cleanse away the loam and troll goo that her contented surprise began to border on shock.

“Oh, that… that’s really not necessary!” Sophia enthused with a smile, placing a hand over her heart. The folk took notice, even backing off for a moment, but after some difficult-to-hear jabber, carried right on trying to clean whatever part of her boots they could reach, with others even joining in, and anyone who couldn’t get in close enough to help just resuming their exultant cheerleading for her job well done. Feeling her cheeks going pink now, Sophia suddenly felt “higher” than ever, almost to the point of vertigo, when surrounded by so many people who once stood a head or more taller than her, and chose to carefully reclaim her seat on the raised edge of the valley again, knowing it would make it easier to communicate with the people anyway. She couldn’t exactly get down to their level, but it would be better than trying to address them from above a raven’s eye view.

The moment Sophia did this, of course, half the crowd began rushing toward the nearest slopes to climb toward where she sat, while the rest continued feverishly mopping and scrubbing her mud-splattered battle boots. A few young daredevils even took a shortcut up her slanted shield, using the divergent geometry of its sculping for handholds. Consciously choosing to ignore for now the unnecessary debasement taking place around her feet, Sophia turned her attention with another sunny smile to the folks gathering beside her resting hands on the cliffside.

“Lady Sophia!” shouted Elder Varkas from the top of a boulder she’d nimbly climbed atop. The other members of the village’s leadership council were gathered nearby too. “You’ve come back! And we thank you so much. All would have surely been lost without you.”

“You’re welcome!” the giantess sincerely replied, while blushing a little rosier. Not only had she barely ever exchanged any words with any of the Elders, mostly following her heroic stand during that prior raid and then just before her appointment to the Guardians, but it also felt a tad ridiculous being addressed as “Lady” Sophia. In fact, most of the folk below had only called her Soph since childhood. “Of course I came back. This is my home, too, and you are all very dear to me. Rest assured that if and when anything like this ever occurs here again, I will be here to defend you.”

Upon hearing this short yet wholehearted vow, the crowd burst into peals of rapturous applause and whooping, as though Sophia had just delivered the most rousing speech they’d ever heard in their lives. The giantess blinked, mildly astonished again, and deferentially bowed her head to them all. She expected their hails for her to last only a few seconds, yet the ecstatic noise just kept going on and on, surely tiring the throats and palms of the villagers, but still they carried on, except for her diligent boot-scrubbers. This really was all a bit much for her, Sophia firmly decided, though she understood why the people would feel such a wave of relief, given the fact they’d never had a personal Guardian assigned to the village, and thus stood a far better chance now of no longer losing any crops, homes, or loved ones to the blight of creatures that occasionally crawled out from the space between spaces. That optimistic prospect, more than the novice titanic warrior herself, was reason enough for exaltation, Sophia ultimately concluded.

“You honor us, Lady Sophia,” Elder Varkas continued, while simultaneously confirming for the giantess that she wasn’t ever going to get used to that absurd title. “Is there anything we might do for you now?”

Immediately the Guardian’s eyes widened and her lower lip fell gently open. She’d been so laser-focused on her militaristic duty, and then subsequently bowled over by the laudatory response of the villagers, that she’d neglected until now to ask perhaps the most vital question of all.

“My family. Please. Where are they?”

The crowd on the cliff beside her collectively muttered blithely, smirking with pride, then parted ways to let through a tight-knit cluster of diminutive beings which, even standing at scarcely a comparative half-inch tall now beside Sophia’s armored thigh, immediately left the giantess awash in a freeing sensation of homey comfort and cathartic acceptance. Despite having to look down from so high upon her parents, brother, sister, and future life-mate, she hadn’t felt so deliriously happy to see them in all her days, unable to help feeling that it had been years since they were reunited, when it was only months. An elated ear-to-ear smile crossed the ironclad blonde’s lips and, cautious not to dangerously shift the position of her boots as she did so, leaned herself to the side, resting her forearm on the rock where the denizens had gathered, which allowed her to put her face almost down to the same level as the most important people in her life. Sophia’s heart absolutely sang, sharing sequential eye contact with each of them in turn, until she wanted to burst with excitement.

“Oh, thank goodness you’re all right!” she gasped, wanting to say so much to them at once, and not knowing where to start. The new Guardian hadn’t counted on her family homecoming being so public and thus a bit over-formal and clumsy, but in the moment, she didn’t care, unabashedly welling with tears while her lip quivered in consolation. “I… I’ve missed you all so much. You can’t even know.”

“My love… you were amazing! You made us all so proud, just as we knew you would,” her mother gushed, the first to run forward and hug herself against her younger daughter’s resting hand. At first unsure what to do in return, Sophia carefully articulated her thumbpad over her parent’s back, prickling with goose bumps to finally share an embrace again after so long, amended though it was from their old ways.

“You really showed them. Like last time,” her father added, in his usual gruffer blacksmith’s demeanor, then joined his wife beside Sophia’s flattened palm. “Made of tough stuff. Always were, always will be.”

Her older siblings Allian and Vera were quieter, looking to one another and then Sophia’s spacious countenance with frantic wonder and shock. The giantess completely understood and accepted this, of course, knowing it would’ve taken some serious acclimation for her too if one of them instead had been selected for Guardianship; her brother and sister had literally helped raise her, which meant they’d likely always seen her somewhat as the baby, difficult though that viewpoint would be to hold now. There would be time later, she knew, to reconnect with her beloved siblings in more private settings.