If you're wondering how I ended up sharing a body with an archangel, the answer is surprisingly simple.
Bad luck.
Monumental, catastrophic, life-ruining bad luck.
The kind that looks you dead in the eye and goes —
"You know what? Fuck this particular guy."
That guy being me. Alexander Reagan. Twenty years old, D-Rank Hunter, full-time disaster.
To explain how I ended up with a celestial being living rent-free inside my skull, we need to rewind a few weeks.
Back before the haunted houses.
Before the demons.
Before everything.
Back when my biggest problem was deciding which bill I couldn't afford to ignore this month.
Simpler times.
"Fuck! Fuck!"
I shot upright in bed.
The digital clock on my nightstand glared back at me.
9:00 AM.
My soul left my body with a gasp.
My first class was by eight-thirty, I guess that's not going to be happening
So I guess it's going to be the second class by nine thirty which I will be late for in about thirty minutes.
Attendance wasn't optional. Not in a world where optional usually meant getting replaced.
I reached for my phone.
Dead.
Classic. Because charging it before sleeping is a luxury reserved for people who have their lives together. People I clearly was not.
A giggle came from beside me.
I turned.
And for half a second, reality softened.
"Morning, beautiful."
Yvette smiled at me like I was the sun and she was personally offended I hadn't risen sooner.
Then she vomited directly onto my shirt.
Silence.
We stared at each other.
Then she laughed.
The traitor.
Life didn't come with an instruction manual.
Most people my age worried about exams. Relationships. Whether their Hunter ranking was high enough to get scouted by a decent guild.
I worried about all three.
Plus diapers.
Plus rent.
Plus whatever "not getting kicked out of the system this month" actually required of me.
I picked Yvette up automatically, wiping my shirt with the resigned acceptance of a man who had lost too many battles to keep score.
She grabbed my nose.
"Violence is not the answer," I told her.
She tried to rip it off.
I reconsidered my entire philosophy.
My apartment was functional. The way a broken sword is technically still a weapon.
One bedroom. One bathroom. A kitchen that smelled like it had survived multiple crimes and it survived all of them.
The wallpaper peeled in long strips. The plumbing screamed every time I dared to use it
Rent was due in four days.
Of course it was.
I fed Yvette what I could scrape together , three eggs, bread, milk that was probably still alive. While she happily destroyed breakfast, I plugged in my phone.
It turned on.
I immediately regretted it.
[DAYCARE PAYMENT OVERDUE]
[TUITION FINAL WARNING]
[GUILD DEBT — INTEREST INCREASED]
And beneath all of it, sitting there like it didn't belong in the same list as my failures —
[HUNTER ASSOCIATION: RIFT ACTIVITY INCREASE — DISTRICT ALERT LEVEL 2]
I stared at that one longer than the others.
Level 2 wasn't dangerous. Not officially.
At least not in New York.
But nobody really trusted officially anymore. Not since the world learned that Heaven and Hell both had terrible customer service.
Here's what they teach you in school, in between Hunter theory classes and regular maths:
In 2027, the world ended. Heaven descended. Hell answered. Humanity — being humanity — picked sides.
A lot of people picked Hell.
Can't really blame them. If you weren't worthy of Heaven, why bother reaching for it? Might as well take the power on offer and stop pretending.
So they made deals. Souls for strength. Futures for firepower.
God watched all of it.
Then one day, he just… left.
Withdrew. Heaven sealed shut like a wound closing over itself. No warning. Just absence — sudden and total.
humans felt it deep within themselves, not physically but it was like losing a sense you never knew you had.
But before he went, he gave us something.
The Divine Spark.
Nobody agrees on what it is exactly. Engineers call it energy. Priests call it proof He's still watching. Hunters just call it power and move on.
What it does is this — it lets certain people touch the cracks in reality.
The Rifts. Tears in the world where the Nether bleeds through. What used to be Hell, now just… leaking. Disorganised. Leaderless since some unnamed hero went down to the deepest circle and put a bullet in the devil's face.
Nobody knows his name, they were too happy to care.As if that would earn them God's favour…it did not.
Heaven remained silent.
The Nether lost its king. Demons scattered. Reality stayed broken.
And humanity, being humanity, turned the whole mess into an economy.
Hunters clear Rifts. Extract cores. Bring back loot from the other side. Guilds fund them, equip them, profit from them.
The Association ranks them, regulates them, and occasionally pretends to care about their survival.
That's the world now.
As for the people who made demonic pacts before the Spark came —
they didn't get power.
They got wrong.
The Spark was holy. Their bodies were already claimed. The two things met inside them and neither one won. They're called the Unholy.
They're not demons.
They're not human.
They're just what happens when God's last gift meets a soul that already belonged to someone else.
I tried not to think about them too much.
It didn't always work.
"Papa."
I looked down.
Yvette held up a spoon like it was a ceremonial weapon.
Breakfast was apparently a military operation.
"Right," I said. "Aye aye captain"
Twenty minutes later, we were both ready.
Well — Yvette was clean and dressed and looked like a person.
I looked like I had been assembled in a hurry by someone who had stopped caring halfway through.
Good enough.
I locked the apartment and stepped into the world.
The city was already alive.
Hunters walked openly with weapons holstered at their sides like it was the most normal thing in the world.
Because it was now.
That was the part that still got me sometimes — not the weapons, not the Rifts, not even the billboards flashing S-Rank hunters selling energy drinks and guilds promising stability and purpose in block letters three storeys tall.
It was that nobody looked up anymore.
Nobody flinched.
We just… adapted.
Humanity's greatest skill and its most terrifying one.
The daycare sat beside a Hunter Association office.
Half fortress, Half kindergarten.
The nanny waiting outside had already assessed my financial future by the time I reached the gate. Her expression confirmed it was not looking promising.
"Mr. Reagan."
I winced. "Please don't say it like that."
"Payment is overdue."
There it is.
"How long do I have?"
She handed me a notice.
"Three days."
Three days.
That number followed me around like a curse with administrative authority.
Yvette waved at her cheerfully.
I was being sabotaged by a toddler.
"I'll get it," I said.
The nanny said nothing.
We both knew that sentence had a low success rate coming from my mouth.
I dropped Yvette off.
Checked the time. 9:47.
First class: gone. Second class: dying without me.
I was pulling up the campus map when my phone buzzed.
Then again.
Then again.
Guild notification. New contract. C-Rank Rift, District Six. Emergency deployment. Bonus payout for clearance within the hour.
I stared at the number.
Then at the daycare notice still in my hand.
Then at the tuition warning sitting third on my notification list.
It wasn't a hard calculation.
It was just a painful one.
College could fail me later. Debt was collecting now.
I accepted the contract before I could talk myself out of it.
Three minutes later, my squad leader called.
"Reagan. C-Rank Rift, District Six. Bonus if we clear within the hour."
"…Send coordinates."
Call ended.
I looked at the Association building beside the daycare. Then at the sky. Grey and low, the way it always got near a Rift site.
"You're going to get me killed one day," I told no one in particular.
No one in particular didn't argue.
We met at the containment zone. Five of us, same as always. Because the Association decided that a proper squad needed exactly five people, as if survival could be standardised.
Brody — Our larger than life tank
Mina — Our trusty striker
Jae — Our lovely Caster.
Harlow — the cocky Breaker.
Me — Support.
D-Rank. The bottom of the board. The role nobody requested and everybody needed when things went wrong.
Harlow clapped once. "Quick in, quick out. Clear, extract cores, leave."
Nobody believed him, it was always much more stressful than that but I was stressful my life now.
We followed anyway.
The Rift opened the way it always did.
Reality splitting with a sound like something screaming underwater.
Black seam. Rust smell. Cold heat that made no sense and felt like a big ol' danger sign
Then silence.
Always the silence after.
We stepped in.
It never looked like a tunnel. Never looked like it was stable, it was like reality was liquid here and our senses were doing their best to process it.
It folded. Rebuilt itself around us like something deciding what shape dread should take today. The deeper we went, the less the world made sense, and the more I counted my steps.
Counting meant I didn't have to think about not coming back.
We found the chamber too fast.
That was the first mistake.
The second was the bodies.
Not ours.
Older. Armoured. Arranged too neatly — like something had placed them there instead of killed them. Like they were a vintage collection of books.
Jae stopped talking mid-sentence.
Brody raised a fist.
Harlow, for the first time since I'd known him, frowned.
"…Why is this classified C-Rank?"
Nobody answered.
We were all noticing the same thing at the same time and none of us wanted to say it first.
Then the exit sealed behind us.
No explosion. No sound. Just — gone. Like a decision had been made.
"That was sorta normal, right ?" jae asked
Harlow turned slowly.
"…That's new."
Brody didn't move.
Mina whispered: "We shouldn't be this deep."
Jae swallowed audibly. "…Guys?"
Something moved below us.
Not fast. Not loud.
Just aware.
And then I felt it — the sensation of a world realising we were inside it. Like we had walked into something's thought and it had just now noticed.
Wrong place.
Wrong depth.
Wrong classification.
And for the first time since we entered, I understood something very clearly.
We weren't on a mission.
We were already inside a mistake.