Sweet Romance13 min read
Thunder, Gold, and a Metal Eye: How I Became Halo Meyer
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I remember a gray noon, the kind of afternoon when rain seems undecided. I remember my phone slipping from my fingers and the sky cracking like someone had split open a drum. Then the world went dark, and when I woke I was in the middle of a battlefield, standing very still under a sky that still smelled like lightning.
"Where am I?" I said.
"No idea," a voice answered—metallic and cheeky. "But congratulations, Halo Meyer. You have just been claimed."
I yelped. The voice came from inside my head, and then the voice introduced itself.
"I am Dax Farley, your assistance unit. Please confirm tasks."
"Who are you?" I demanded. My mouth tasted like pennies. My hands didn't feel like mine. I tried to move with normal speed and my legs obeyed, but my head felt stiff, and one eye was covered by a metal eyepatch that hummed faintly.
"Relax. Your new body is the reward. You are attached to a virtual prize—one Mi Lai Di avatar—now host. Task one: assist the Ren forces and secure this city."
I: "Assist? I can't even find my phone."
"Doesn't matter. You have five reward points. You have weapons built in."
A soldier from the Ren side limped up and froze. He was a big man, his face split by soot and worry. When I looked down at myself—my reflection trapped in a cracked bronze mirror propped against a shattered wall—I recognized a stranger and a fact I could not escape: I looked eighteen, slim and tall, wrapped in a gold-trimmed cloak that pulsated a little as if it had its own heart.
"Lady," he said, bowing low. "You appeared under thunder. You scared our enemies away."
I blinked. I heard soldiers whisper, even those who had been enemies minutes before.
"She moved," one of them breathed. "She stood like a statue—then she moved."
"She is a demon," another muttered, and then everyone ran.
I felt dizzy. "Dax—why is everyone kneeling?"
"Because they are humans and they panic at the unusual," Dax said. "Also, because you look intimidating."
"Great. I looked intimidating by accident."
They dragged wounded through the city gate. The soldiers kept one hand on spears, one on hope. A general in silver armor stepped forward—thick beard, steady eyes. He demanded my name, then tried to test me by striking my arm with a sword. The blade sliced through clothing, nicked skin, and I tasted blood. Pain flared.
"What do you want?" I asked, half sobbing.
"To know whether you are a threat."
The general's sword slid against me and left a shallow wound. I did not know how to fight, but Dax chimed, "Activate: physical combat attribute?"
"Okay, tricky AI. Activate," I muttered, more to myself than to Dax.
"Physical attribute boost: +5 engaged," he answered.
Then something made sense. Strength slid like warm honey into my bones. The world sharpened.
"Get back!" I said, and the man who had tried to test me went white. I didn't intend to be cruel, but when I moved the sword came out from the opponent's grip. He dropped to his knees with a surprised look. For once, fear was not only mine.
"You are the help from above?" the general asked.
"Something like that," I answered.
"Then you will come inside."
They escorted me through the city gates into a different world: inside the walls the market was alive—bread and cloth, children running, old men playing a slow game of tokens. The general explained that the king had ordered the city to keep life as usual to prevent panic. I sipped tea under a low wooden beam and bit into a sweet that made me cry silently; my throat ached from the smell of blood.
A young man in white robes came in quietly. He looked like a scholar, but there was an edge to the way he watched me. His name was Easton Ibarra, self-described tactician of the city, servant of the general.
"What's your name?" he asked.
"Halo Meyer," I answered.
"And what do you do?" Easton kept the question small.
"I have a headache. And a metal eye."
He chuckled. "You are blunt. Good."
Days passed. Dax Farley scolded me like a little brother who loved dressing me in ridiculous epithets. "Player Halo Meyer, please ask fewer emotional questions. We are optimized for mission completion."
One evening Easton said, "You possess something odd. You belong to a story we do not yet tell."
"Code for 'I will watch you,'" I said. "Which is fine. I like to be watched like a museum piece."
He smiled, somehow both warm and sad. "We need help. The Mi Nation pushes again. Without reinforcements…" He didn't finish.
"Then I will help," I said. It sounded ridiculous, and I meant it.
"We will go out at dawn," Easton told me.
I placed my metal-gloved hands on a sword blank and felt some hum in the metal. The eyepatch thrummed. I was learning in fits and stumbles—how to walk with purpose, how to not drop a spear, how to not trip on pride. For each of those things I apologized to Dax. He said, "Five-star review appreciated."
On the field the next day, the Mi soldiers pressed hard. Their leader—broad and fierce—laughed like a storm. He offered bounty to his soldiers: plunder and wives. The iron-faced Mi deputy at their side—Dixon Koehler—rode forward and called, "Name yourselves, stranger!"
"I am Halo Meyer," I shouted. "I am here to protect these people. Leave or be shamed."
"She is a woman," sneered a Mi captain. "We will take her apart and laugh." He spat the last syllable like a promise.
I hated him instantly.
"Don't," Easton breathed.
Then I struck before he could laugh—one clean blow—and he collapsed with a groan that echoed like a drumbeat. I had not planned the blow. I had only felt the need to stop him. The shock gave our side time. By the end of the day the Mi line broke, numbers bleeding and spirits cracked. Their big general fell to a single clean strike. The Ren army pressed the advantage.
Later, in the camp, men and women crowded around me. Soldiers I had saved bowed so low their foreheads kissed the dust. "Lady Halo," they said. "Blessed be you."
I sat with a cup, watched Easton watch me, and then someone else entered the tent like a shadow cutting the flame. He was different from all the others: a man whose presence made the air thinner. He had the look of a leader who had not slept but could still strip a town to its bones with a single order. They called him Glen Meyer.
Our eyes met, and my heart misbehaved.
He said, "You are not from here."
"Smart observation," I said.
"You are dangerous."
"I try," I answered. He looked at me for an impossibly long time. "Do not touch me," I muttered.
He smiled like a closing guillotine. "I only want answers."
His voice moved through me like cold water. Later Easton said casually, "You will need to 'conquer' him, according to your system. Top-tier mission."
"Conquer?" I repeated. "Dax, what is 'conquer' in the context of romance?"
"Conquer: to lead target to prioritize player."
"That explains nothing," I sighed.
Glen Meyer listened. He watched me. Sometimes he walked up behind me and my skin wanted to run away like spilled ink. He saved me once—without thinking—and hurt himself in the process. I could see it in the way he sucked anger into silence, in the way his fingers trembled.
"You are softer than I thought," he said once. "Leave. Or stay."
"I stay," I answered, half to tease and half because a quiet corner of my future liked having him nearby.
One night the camp alarm rang. "Fire at the grain stores!" someone shouted.
"Who would burn the grain?" I demanded.
"Traitors," Easton said. "Or an enemy aiming to starve us."
We ran. Smoke hissed black and hungry. Men screamed. The grain was a small mountain of hope and now it turned to ash.
"Find them," Glen ordered. He grabbed a prisoner later and listened to him rattle excuses. "It was an inside job," Glen said. "They silenced the guards and struck. The traitor will pay."
I didn't want to be part of justice. I wanted to be safe. But Dax was practical, and my chest hurt if I let my throat tighten.
"Please," I popped out. "No vigilante. Let them be tried. Let their leaders be exposed."
Glen looked at me, eyes folding like shutters. "You have a sharp tongue."
"I have a sharp sense of not dying," I said.
We uncovered a spider web—small, but woven with greed. Information leaked. Names showed up on Easton's parchment. One man in the camp had goods in secret. Others confessed quickly when Glen looked like a god without mercy.
We caught them, all of the spies and arsonists. The camp assembled the next morning. Everyone came, from salt-faced cooks to the sullen shield-bearers. The sun was high. I stood on a wooden platform with Glen to my left and Easton to my right. The traitors were brought forward in bonds.
"Public trials," Glen said. He spoke like thunder. "In front of the camp."
"Do it," I said. "I will watch."
The punishment was not quick and it was not clean. It was meant to be a mirror showing betrayal's face. They had used the fire to reduce grain and cheapen lives. That alone was a crime that deserved consequences in war.
They brought the leader forward first. He was a thick man with oil-slick hair and eyes that had believed the wrong gods. He smiled at the crowd before the commander read charges.
"You burned your own because you crave favor in the Mi court," Glen said. "You sought to sell our people to a foreign crown."
The crowd hissed. The man puffed his chest.
"You think us fools?" one soldier spat. "You think you can starve my mother and go bathed in silk?"
The traitor's face hardened. He looked at the crowd and then laughed—an ugly sound.
"This is theater," he said. "They will forgive us after we show them what a brave man we are. I will be honored in Mi."
"Then see what honor gets you here." The captain stepped forward. "First, you will be stripped of your sword."
They took the sword from him. He blinked in slow motion like a man learning he was naked.
"Now," Glen said, "you will tell, in front of everyone, who paid you. Say it, or we will speak for you."
The traitor's laughter faded into an arrowed silence. His head shook like a puppet's. With the whole camp watching, he spat out names that cut a clear line all the way to a small council in a foreign court. With each name, more soldiers muttered, and the traitor's chest flushed with the blood of his own choices.
After the full confession, when he thought he could still deny it, the punishment began.
"Take his rank," Glen said.
Soldiers tore the insignia from his chest and trampled them in the dirt. The man staggered, then shouted, "Shame!"
"Better honored than starving our children," a woman near me called. Phones did not exist, but soldiers shouted an oath that felt like a recording in the wind.
Then came the public humiliation of the spies brought in not as soldiers but as men who'd sold a nation's future. A long table was set. Each traitor had a pot placed before them. It was not torture of body but of truth: they were forced to drink bitter ink, symbolic gnawing on lies. They gagged and swallowed. The crowd pressed in—faces curious, mouths half-formed into applause, half-formed into disgust.
As they sobbed and tried to wipe ink from their lips, Glen walked the ring of people, and his voice struck like a bell.
"Because you sold our grain to the Mi, you will be tied and led to every border town. At each town, you will kneel, and we will explain your crime. You will speak your shame publicly. You will ask forgiveness and you will not stop until one hundred towns have seen you penitent."
The leader's gaze hardened to defiance.
"No," he said. "You have no right."
The man stood tall like a ruined statue, then realized the truth: the crowd had the higher ground. Soldiers had already started to record on crude tablets what he said. Someone had crafted a way to spread the shame. He moved from defiance to shock.
"What are you doing?" he cried. "You can't—"
"You wanted our people dead," Glen answered coldly. "Now you will carry the weight of your deeds so others will learn."
The crowd's reaction shifted. Faces that had opened with curiosity now closed in with righteous rage. "Do it," someone called. "Let him beg."
And beg he did. The leader's first expression, arrogance, crumbled. He tried to deny it at first.
"I was only following orders!" he screamed.
"No," said Easton. "You were paid."
"That's a lie!" the man shouted, but his voice was thinner. He began to gasp and his knees buckled.
Now came the scene that would live in the camp's memory: he fell to his knees on the dirt, his boots caked in ash from the burned grain. He was forced to lower his head so low the dust caught in his lashes. The soldiers circled and did not beat him—they did worse: they recorded his failure with their eyes, their voices, their fingers pointing. A dozen hands produced clay tablets and scratched the names he had given. People recorded his face. Some spat. Others clucked their tongues. One sharp-eyed woman snapped a brittle strand of his hair and hung it as proof.
He begged. "Please—please! I have a mother. I have children. I was paid. Spare me!"
For the life of me I could still hear Dax's awkward chirp: "Public humiliation grid loaded."
The crowd's reaction swung again. Some cried. A few muttered that execution would have been cheaper. Others cried for mercy on the traitor's child. A boy I had seen earlier at the market watched with wide eyes and then turned away.
The man moved from shock to denial. When they set him before the hundred villages procession with a rope and a staff, he tried every argument.
"Forgive me and I'll make restitution," he pleaded.
"We will not forgive until the people he wronged see his eyes," Glen replied. "Let him be carried where the hungry are, where the fires still smolder, and let him kneel before those who live with the loss."
When the procession began, the man collapsed into a raw, pleading mess. He begged not just for forgiveness but for a return to what was before: a job, a place to sleep, a breakfast without the taste of ash. The crowd watched with a cruel hunger. Some recorded his pleas with tablets. Some took pictures on crude glass plates for the lords to see. A few children mocked him and ran around in circles. Those who had actually lost something—who had a dead brother, or a roofless home—stood straighter.
At the fiftieth village he fell to his knees and sobbed until tears soaked the collar of his shirt. "Please," he said, "I will do anything."
At the seventieth he clung to strangers with the kind of desperation that makes others flinch. "I was wrong," he said. "I was wrong. Forgive me!"
By the hundredth town, which happened to be a small fishing hamlet, he found a woman whose husband had died because of hunger. She looked at him for a long time before she spoke.
"Get up," she said, and the man's heart leapt like a bird freed. "Tell the truth we will all know it. And if you can repay us, repay. But you will not ever be free. We will remember."
The traitor's face collapsed into a mapping of ruin—shame, fear, and then an empty place where his pride used to be.
Back at camp, the crowd dispersed like weather. Many said the punishment was too mild. Many said it was fair. Some quietly applauded Glen. Easton gave me a look that said thank you for pushing for a trial.
The punishment lasted for weeks, but the part I remember most was how the crowd's reaction changed: first shock and laughter, then disgust and outrage, then murmurs of pity, and finally, the cold understanding that betrayal eats you alive.
The arsonists and spies had been stripped of rank, branded with the shame of their deeds, and sent into the world to carry their weight visibly. They went from arrogance to shock to denial to collapse to begging.
When it was done, the camp felt lighter—like someone had cleaned a wound poorly but thoroughly. People whispered that the Mi would think twice.
Afterwards someone in the crowd started a chant: "Never again." Soldiers picked it up. Easton and Glen both stood beneath the sun and watched the crowd, like priests watching a ritual finish.
"I wanted them to suffer," someone told me later, in a low voice.
"You wanted justice," I answered. "There is a difference."
Days later, as Glen and I sat on a hill looking at the charred land, he turned to me and said very softly, "You are trouble."
"You're saying that like it's a complaint," I said.
"It is a promise," he said.
We were quiet after that. We rode to the next town. We trained. I learned to use the left-eye power more: when my left eye went gold and the cover clicked, I could hold a shape and then shatter it.
Then the world cranked a twist. We were ambushed by black-clad strangers—two dozen of them, blades like teeth, eyes like cold coins. They threw a dozen darts that rained to the ground. Glen caught the first by moving too fast. He sputtered black blood. My heart hammered like a bell.
"Who are you?" he rasped.
The leader spat, "For Mi. For those who paid."
We fought…and then I made a choice. I ripped the metal eyepatch off. The gold flare burst like fireworks. The black-clad men froze as if someone had stopped their hearts. The leader stammered and then shoved off his mask. "An otherworlder—an alien power," he cried.
They begged. They were not only spies; they were a branch of a group that had come through a tear in worlds. They had no loyalty but to power. "Let us go," their leader promised. "We have families, too." He knelt quickly when Glen turned his gaze.
We took them back. On the road, Dax patched my systems and whispered, "You are connected. Reward refill coming."
Later I found out the bigger truth: some of those who haunted us were not simple soldiers. Their leader—Maxine Perez—came from places where death was practiced like a profession. She and her group were the ones who had flung darts at us. She bowed to Glen like a supplicant but her smile was a blade.
She told a story in the camp: "We were cast out, forced beyond the gateway. We came here by chance. We swore to survive."
But no one in the camp believed her history excused the betrayal. Again, the people muttered about justice.
Eventually, there was a larger trial—of individuals who had consorted with the Mi court and those who had burned grain. The punishment was public, and the leaders knelt, their expressions cycling from confident to startled to raging to pleading. The crowd reacted—some hissed, some recorded, some wept. The men begged for mercy. Men who had once traded food for coin were now naked before the entire camp. They fell to their knees and their voices shook. "Please, spare me. I had a son. He will die without me."
"Then live like a man," Glen said. "And remember. People do not forget those who break bread with their enemies."
Their humiliation was complete; even the ones who had thought themselves clever were brought low. The final image that stuck with me, more than any blade or any fire, was the sight of one of them on his knees, boots torn and face streaked with tears, begging in front of a hundred strangers while someone filmed him on a crude glass plate. He crawled toward the crowd and begged—he begged until his voice was rasped away.
That day, as the sun set red, Glen and I walked back to the camp. Easton fell silent. Dax hummed.
"You did well," Easton said to me. "You did something I did not think you would do."
"What's that?" I asked.
"Choose justice over cruelty."
I looked at Glen. He did not smile. He only watched the last light die.
"You will not leave me alone now," he murmured.
"That's the mission," I said.
We stayed together for that night and many after. We trained, we argued, we fought. I learned he had a side that softened only in the presence of courage. He had a side that shielded and then demanded nothing in return. Sometimes, he was all edge, and sometimes—rarely—he was warm like a hearth.
A week later I stood at the edge of the camp, my metal eyepatch strapped in place, and watched the dawn. Dax chirped happily in my ear.
"What now?" he asked.
"Now?" I said. "We keep going."
Glen walked up beside me. He brushed my sleeve with a callused finger and said, softly, "You are not what I expected, Halo."
"Neither are you," I answered. The wind caught my cloak. The eyepatch hummed softly like an engine. "And neither is this world."
He looked at me with an expression I had not seen before. It made my chest hurt in a good way.
"Stay," he said.
"I will," I said.
The days kept coming—missions, ambushes, spells, and one private moment where I tasted what it meant to be seen. The metal eyepatch kept its small mechanical tick, and each time it clicked I thought of how different the world had become: loud, dangerous, and sometimes unbearably tender.
At night, when the camp settled, I would unbutton the eyepatch and look through the small lens at the stars and say small thanks to Dax, to Glen, to Easton, and even to the traitors who had taught us how fragile trust could be.
And when dawn cracked the sky another time, gold light slid across the metal eye. I pulled the strap over my head, felt the tiny hum settle, and listened to the soft "tick" it made—my own little heartbeat device—and I knew, with a fierce and steady certainty, that I would not let that sound be wasted.
The End
— Thank you for reading —