Mechanical Angel

The man walked down the wooden stairs of his house, descending from the attic to the main floor. Each step landed with silent, mechanical precision. If one looked closely, they might notice how his feet always touched the exact same spots, every time he scaled the stairs - a perfect repetition, unthinking, inhuman.

He was coming down from his roost, a bird of prey returning to ground after a successful hunt. Yet despite that success, no joy showed on his face. No pride, no relief. Only a hollow stillness - the expression of someone long since claimed by death.

But within, his mind was alive. Constant. Chaotic. A war zone between two sides that could never win nor lose - the flesh and the machine, the soul and the circuitry. Each side depended on the other, yet neither could coexist in peace. His body simply obeyed whichever voice shouted loudest.

He was human, and yet he wasn’t.
He was machine, and yet he thought.
He didn’t know what he truly was - only three things were certain: his name was Jere, his designation J-1, and his nickname the Angel of Death.

His wings, forged of interlocking jet-black plates shaped like inverted diamonds - feathers sharp enough to cleave through composite armour with a flick - were retracted now, folded neatly into the casing that doubled as his ribcage. From the outside, he appeared entirely human: a slim young man with messy black hair and piercing blue eyes.

They itched beneath the panels. They always itched.

Deep inside, the small fusion reactor that had replaced his stomach hummed faintly - inaudible to anyone but him. It drew on the ambient magic of this world - not his original - and was predicted to run indefinitely. In essence, Jere would live forever, until the planet itself perished and he was forced to rely on the limited deuterium-tritium fuel still sealed within him. That reserve would last roughly a century.

He didn’t think about it. Not consciously. But his augmented ears still tracked every subtle shift in the reactor’s rhythm, never trusting the internal systems fully.

His footfalls were nearly soundless as he crossed the lower floor - each one calculated and adjusted by the ceaseless stream of predictions running through his processors. He turned a corner, drawn by the faint shuffling sounds ahead, and entered the living room.

There: a couch, a chair, a fireplace, and a small wooden table. To him, a coffee table. To the locals, a sitting table. The name didn’t matter - what mattered was the silent battle being waged across it.

Two figures sat opposite each other, eyes locked in quiet intensity. Jere paused, deciding to watch.

One was a young woman, beautiful, her features placing her somewhere in her early twenties. The other was a child - sweet, innocent, her honey-blonde hair catching the firelight.

The woman’s wavy brown hair, touched by red, framed a pair of striking crimson eyes. By now Jere had grown used to her wolf ears, proud and alert atop her head, and the great fluffy tail that swayed behind her when she was happy - or stiffened when she wasn’t. A second, smaller pair of pointed ears, elf-like and delicate, hid beneath her hair.

His heart softened at the sight of her. The perpetual itch of his wings dulled.

The child’s green eyes were wide with concentration as she leaned across the table, small hands pressed against its edge. Jere couldn’t see it, but he could feel the magic - the invisible, lightning-fast exchange of thoughts passing between them. A telepathic conversation, bright and wordless.

Neither seemed to notice him until he moved closer. Then, the child’s focus broke. Her eyes lit up as she turned and ran to him, her voice breaking the quiet.

“Papa!”

The girl threw her arms around his legs before he could react. Jere hesitated, frozen for a heartbeat. His processors screamed that this had happened countless times before, that he should be used to it by now - but his mind refused to listen.

He still didn’t fully understand this girl. He knew she wasn’t human - that much was certain - but that wasn’t the mystery. What he couldn’t grasp was why she did this. Why she wrapped her little arms around him every time he came home.

He was still struggling to understand love - a concept he’d only recently begun to comprehend.

As he considered this, movement flickered in the corner of his eye. He looked up to see the woman approaching. He had no defence when she followed the girl’s lead and folded him into her arms as well.

He couldn’t move. It felt like magic - invisible but overwhelming, strong enough to still the Angel of Death.

Then, carefully, against all reason, he lifted one arm and returned the woman’s embrace, while the other hand rested gently atop the child’s head. Her hair was soft. The woman’s wolf ears brushed against his cheek, feather-light, tickling. He could have filtered the sensation out - but he didn’t. He liked it.

And yet, beneath that warmth, guilt stirred.

He was the reason her ears were still. The reason she never spoke. Each brush of fur against his skin reminded him of what he’d done - necessary or not, it was still his mistake.

But when his eyes met the child’s, the guilt eased. Because of her, they could still communicate - not fully needing to rely only on the halting sign language they’d been learning together.

When at last they broke apart, all three of them were smiling.

“Did you hunt lots, Papa?” the child asked.

Jere nodded. Hunting was his assigned task - and one that suited him perfectly.

He noticed the woman’s hands move in the corner of his vision.

Is that all you have to do today, darling?

He nodded again.

Her tail swayed gently behind her as she signed once more.
Then you’ll spend the rest of the day here?

Another nod. Her smile widened, bright as the firelight.

The child’s gaze flicked between them, unable to follow the signs but reading their minds effortlessly. Nothing escaped her, though Jere sometimes suspected that the woman wished for a bit of privacy.

If she could hear and speak again, he would have taken her into the sky - far above the world, where they could talk without the child overhearing. But she couldn’t hold onto him and sign at the same time, so they remained grounded.

He tried not to dwell on that thought - not wanting the child to catch it. But sometimes a stray emotion slipped loose, from him or from the woman, and the girl would fall quiet, lost in sudden sadness, until the woman soothed her with gentle reassurance. Jere was never good at that part. But he was learning.

And yet, something darker coiled within him. The old instinct. The urge to kill.

He had promised himself - after taking the woman’s hearing - that he would never again slaughter so senselessly. But the hunger lingered. You couldn’t spend eighteen years doing nothing but killing and simply stop. Hunting animals helped. It fed the impulse. But sometimes, deep down, he longed to kill something aware. Something that could fight back.

He despised that longing.

The woman’s next sign cut through his thoughts, her expression calm and knowing.
Come on, come play with us. We’ve been waiting for you.

“Yeah!” the child chirped, bouncing in place. “We need three players!”

A small wooden board sat ready on the table, its pieces arranged and waiting.

Jere finally spoke, his tone flat and dry as ever.
“Okay.”

Neither of them minded. They were used to it. The woman, who read lips, only smiled wider. The child took his hand; the woman took the other. Together they pulled him toward the couch.

He looked between them - Ylfa, his girlfriend pretending to be his wife, a demon from the rare and ancient race of Izmeneniye Formys, and Eny, their adopted daughter, a being whose true nature he still couldn’t define.

A small smile tugged at his lips - a fleeting, fragile thing - but enough to make Ylfa’s expression light up even more.