“Sorry about that.” Sam said, offering his hand to the man. “My girls are a little overprotective, you see.”

The man stared at him for a couple of seconds, as if in a daze, then clicked his tongue and turned away. Seeing him stand on his own, Sam retracted his hand but kept his fake smile on.

“What’s going on here?” Just then, one of the soldiers came running over. Sam recognized him immediately and shook his head.

“Nothing, Sergeant David. We were just discussing the children and… well, I guess they don’t think I’m a trustworthy person.”

“Wha- how can this be?” David turned his eyes to the man who tried approaching Sam. “You realize that it is only because of this man that we are alive right now? You saw how the girls he brought with him defeated those monsters, right?”

“Yeah, we also saw them make weapons out of thin air.” One of the women said in a hushed voice. “I heard from my husband that they burned half of the forest above…”

David fell silent. He couldn’t really deny her claim as he was among those who took the night shift outside when the battle against the Olympians happened. He witnesses the light beams shooting in every direction and felt the explosions of countless artilleries firing at the same time. In all his years working as a guard for the Sanctuary, nothing could’ve prepared him for the horror of that night, and he wasn’t even anywhere close to the site back then. 𝔬𝐕xt.𝓒𝗈𝔪

“I understand your fears.” Sam said, taking a step toward the concerned parents. “But right now, I think we should focus on the children. They’re starting to come down.”

Only a few minutes have passed with them in the air but the kids were already looking exhausted. The halos over their heads have stopped moving and some of the runes were flickering out of existence. Thankfully they didn’t disappear all of a sudden leaving the kids to fall from that height and to their deaths.

The parents rushed over to catch their children, relieved that they were going back to normal. Though most of them didn’t hesitate to take the kids into their arms, others were reluctant to get close. The parents of the kids who were incapable of creating halos pulled their children away as if to put some distance between them and the others. Some were even berating their sons and daughters for trying to copy what the others did.

“This… is going to be a little difficult…” Sam whispered.

“My apologies…” Ramla said. “I didn’t wish to force this on you but…”

“No, no. No need to apologize. I’m sure everyone will understand once I explain everything to them.”

Though he said that, Sam didn’t really know how he should go about dealing with the whole topic.

“That bloody thing to the west…” David said to no one in particular. “I knew something was off ever since it painted the sky red.”

“Right…”

He couldn’t completely disagree with the soldier now that he had an idea of what the Olympians came to this world for. The children receiving the ability to create runes as a side effect of someone trying to obtain a Key sounded like a plausible explanation for their current situation.

‘Is it something like a forced evolution?’ he thought to himself. ‘Since they’re the few remaining humans on this planet, they gained the necessary abilities to resist the forces trying to hunt them to extinction?’

He shot the idea down almost immediately. What benefit is there to giving such abilities to children?

Still, that didn’t erase his suspicion of what was happening being the result of whatever the Olympians were doing on the other side of the world. And as if it wasn’t bad enough, the first Fallen has yet to appear.

‘This is going to be a very long night…’

~~

The halo wielding children fell into a deep slumber as soon as their parents caught them. They were then taken to the hospital ward where several tests were done on them to ensure that their health hasn’t been impacted.

In a nearby room Sam was sitting at a table with Ramla and several representatives of the concerned parents. They were looking for an explanation as to what was happening to their children, and when Sam told them that he wasn’t sure, their hostility seemed to spike quite a bit.

“So basically, I won’t really know anything until I take a look at them myself.” He said.

“You don’t know?” Said one of the men? “The Ang- the girls accompanying you can do the same things, right? Shouldn’t you already have it all figured out?”

The man’s anger was silenced with a single glare from Zero Three who was standing behind the Doctor. When she heard of what happened from Nino, her first reaction was to form her weapon and go teach the ungrateful humans what their place was. If it wasn’t for Sam’s order to stand down she wouldn’t have hesitated to unleash a massacre.

“Sadly all of them are born with the ability.” Sam shook his head at the argument. “The situation is completely different. This is the first time I’m meeting someone who acquired those abilities when they couldn’t use it before.”

His last statement wasn’t exactly a lie. The Valkyries always knew how to use their halos, they simply needed a heart that allowed them to manipulate the Force Field according to their will.

“But you do know what those… glowy things are, right?” A woman asked.

“Of course. Well, for the most part.”

Once again the parents seemed unsatisfied with Sam’s answer. He didn’t know how much he should be revealing to them as the topic of Runes and halos was very sensitive, but after thinking about it for a while he realized there was no need for concern. They were the parents of the children so keeping them uninvolved wasn’t exactly an option, and if they were to cause any trouble for him he could just eliminate them.

The kids might turn out to be a very important military asset in the future. If it was anyone else, they would’ve killed the parents without hesitation just so they could get their hands on them.