Sapphyra
Sapphyra used to have it all: a super-genius husband, a superhero career, and a dragon side she actually got along with.
Then everything went to hell.
When the world faced a threat she couldn't punch, Sapphyra tried to sacrifice herself so everyone she loved could escape. But Wyatt, her husband with backup plans for his backup plans, refused to let her die. He trapped her inside a digital coma, planning to wake her when the world settled down.
That was 100 years ago.
Now Sapphyra has ripped herself free and woken to a ruined city, a broken world, and a body she barely recognizes. Her powers are locked away. Her dragon side is caged. And the Class System controlling it all? Wyatt put it inside her.
Because of course he did.
It only gets messier. Guy, the charming golden retriever-energy hero she met inside the coma, is real-and so are his feelings for her. Meanwhile, Wyatt separated his mind from his body, so now his consciousness follows Sapphyra around like a brilliant, possessive bad hangover.
And then there's Rupert Domingo, the madman who escaped her digital nightmare and now rules the ruined city like his personal kingdom. He knows what happened while Sapphyra slept, and he'll give her answers...
If she survives his game first.
To win, Sapphyra has to rebuild her city, untangle her powers, face Wyatt's sins, and decide what scares her more: losing herself to grief, or becoming the dragon Rupert is desperate to wake up.
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Chapter 2
One scream, one breath.
That's all I heard as my arms covered Penny's body. Next thing I know, I'm shrugging off what remains of the ceiling and lifting her up. She clung to me like a newborn kitten, still trembling from the aftermath.
"Are you a superhero too?" She whispered, finally able to look up at me.
"A superhero? No," I snorted, keeping the smirk off my face. "I don't think I'm qualified enough for that."
People still have their vision when I smile at them.
"But you have superpowers too! You pulled me out and protected me." I smiled at her insistence.
And I shouldn't have done that much. People who step up to help often get shamed in our society. I don't know if it's because that's the culture here in The City but shame is a great deterrent.
Since I don't have the Superhero Class, I am not allowed to even dream of saving lives. It's not like I had a choice in my class though.
"Penny, I do what I do to help people. I'm just a janitor. Plenty of people are strong, but we don't wear capes. Like cops and firefighters." Jobs that were all but obsolete in this day and age. Seems like every emergency had a caped crusader handling it.
Never cleanly-there are always casualties. Like Penny.
"Penny," I try to change the subject, "where is your mother?"
Her nose wrinkles, and she frowns. "I don't know. She went to the store right before the big monster came in and Guy started punching it and–"
"Okay! Guy saved the day, got it." I had to put a pin in her adorable play-by-play.
Carrying her through the crowd, I stopped when someone tapped my shoulder. As soon as I turned around, Penny jumped out of my arms into those of a crying woman. Same brown skin, emerald green eyes, ginger pigtails, and freckles.
And I thought my combination was unique.
"I take it this is your mom?" I say, hiding my smile behind my hand. I'm supposed to stay professional on the job, dammit.
"Mommy! This is Sapphyra; she has superpowers–"
"Shh!" I held a finger to my lips, motioning for her to stay quiet.
"Oh, sorry. Um, so she saved me." Penny quietly whispered to her carbon copy mother.
Meanwhile, the mother-also as thin as a rake-nodded towards me.
"Thank you for saving my daughter! I didn't know there would be an attack today otherwise I never would have..." she hesitates. Shaking her head, blinking the tears away she continues. "They normally happen around 3 pm on the dot so I thought...today I just thought–"
"You thought that today would be different?" I helped her along.
"Yes. How foolish of me."
"...It shouldn't be like this," I quietly whispered to myself, hands clenching into fists.
"What?" Penny curiously asked, big green eyes blinking at me in concern.
"Nothing! I'm just talking to myself. Listen, you two stay safe, alright? I have to get back to work."
It hurt to watch them hold hands. Never has my side felt more empty.
I started walking off before they could interrupt me, wading into the crowd once more. The crowd was slowly dispersing without their favorite superhero to hold them together.
"Of course Guy's gone. All the excitement is too." I grumbled, heading back to where I started the day.
A pressure formed in the back of my head as I recalled today's events. Monster attack, heroic rescue, casualty. Like clockwork...in fact it was clockwork-almost like it was all scripted. And now Penny and her mom don't have a home to go back to. They have to start over too.
Unless I did something about it.
"Keep your head down, don't interfere. Things are the way they are for a reason." My boss's mantra. Seems like he'd tell it to me everyday I noticed anything weird.
Like the fact that more people are dying than being born. Or that half the city is in ruins and no one's fixing it.
Keep your head down.
They wanted it clean though. Wanted all the debris removed; didn't care how it was done. They didn't care how many memories and mementos I vacuumed up into the void.
Don't interfere.
I saw it once-right when I started the job. A group of kids were about to get mowed down by a city bus-sized feral goat. Guy Dynamo hadn't appeared yet. I didn't know what I was doing but I kicked an old car in the path of the goat, knocking off balance. That gave them just enough time to scramble out of the way. Guy swooped in and did what he does best.
He smiled for the camera and saved the day.
Things are the way they are for a reason.
But they don't have to be-I once countered.
He docked my pay for 5 hours for that.
Something snapped. I looked down at my hand, examining the industrial mop now splintered into pieces all around me.
"Fuck! Thats the third one this year." I whimpered. It was absolutely coming out of my paycheck...again.
"Vacuum." I mumbled, sucking up the heavy metal device the same way I do all my cleanups.
A thought came to me. I had more than one ability as a Battlefield Janitor. Vacuum was just the first; it let me clean up any debris near me as long as it wasn't too big. It was stored in a void within me, sort of like a pocket dimension. But I had another ability; I just didn't use it often because it tired me out.
Recycle.
I shouldn't use it here. I know what it does to me but Penny's family will be without a home. Guy won't care, neither will the city.
"Screw it." Marching back to the rubble that is Penny's apartment, I took a deep breath and concentrated.
"Vacuum." Air pressurized. Steel bars, old carpet and splintered wood danced in a twister before entering me-landing inside my void. The ground was clear, save for the holes where plumbing would go. Inside me, I could feel each piece separating itself into a stack, something new.
My stomach itched–that was probably normal.
I was dropped to my knees by a sudden pain in my gut. My abdomen clenched like a cramp from hell as I tried to keep it down.
Had I taken too much?!
"Yuck...Recycle!" I yelled just as my void emptied itself. Instead of slightly beat up versions of everything I'd just taken in, the apartment pieces came out sharper than ever-like brand new. And not only that...
They'd assembled themselves into a brand new apartment building.
I blinked twice, watching the building turn translucent for a single heartbeat-nearly convinced I was crazy. It turned back to normal as spots danced in my vision.
I'm on the ground, drooling on the floor like I'd had one too many drinks at my local bar, Ernie's. An orange softly rolls across the ground and hits me on the head. More groceries soon after. I cursed whatever weather was happening, not realizing someone had dropped a bag of food near my head.
Looking up, I finally saw who it was. I gulped; what little was left of my stomach dropped as we made eye contact.
Flying over me was none other than Guy Dynamo with the world's most puzzled expression.
Maybe I'm overreacting. He probably didn't see me upchucking a house.
"Cleanup girl? What the hell did you just do?!"
"Fuck!"
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8.9
Just hours after I endured a grueling labor to give Kaelen, my fated mate and the Alpha, two beautiful twins, he walked into the infirmary.
Instead of holding our newborns, his Alpha aura pinned me to the bed as he coldly announced, "I reject you as my mate."
He claimed I reeked of another Alpha. His sister Vanessa threw a stack of photos at my face, showing me at a cafe with a broad-shouldered man. Before I could even explain, Kaelen forced a pen into my trembling hand while I was still bleeding, making me sign away my parental rights. His mother then snatched my newborn son Liam from the crib.
"Take the girl and get out of my territory," Kaelen commanded, leaving me in the freezing room with my severed mate-bond and my crying daughter.
I didn't understand how our sacred bond could be shattered by a single fake photo, or how my fated mate could be so blind and ruthless as to rip my baby from my arms.
Five years later, his precious heir is dying, and Kaelen desperately needs an alliance and a bone marrow donor. But when he finally sees me at a high-society gala, he doesn't find a broken, exiled Omega.
He finds me standing beside that very same "lover"—Dominic, the Alpha of the Silverwood Pack, my older brother. And this time, I am the one holding the blade.
8.4
My mate, Alpha Santino, brought another woman into our home. She was a pregnant Omega, the widow of his fallen Beta, and he swore to protect her above all others.
He gave her my seat of honor, left our bed cold each night to soothe her feigned nightmares, and ignored me completely. I was the Luna of the Blackstone Pack, but I was becoming a ghost in my own life.
The final betrayal happened in my own bedroom. She stood over my vanity and deliberately shattered my mother's sacred moonstone necklace, the last piece of my family I had left.
When Santino burst in, he didn't see my heartbreak. He saw only her fake tears.
"What did you do to her?!" he roared, his voice laced with the Alpha's Command, a sacred power he used to crush my will.
Then, for her, he did the unforgivable. He raised his hand and struck me, his mate.
In that instant, the love I had desperately clung to turned to ice. The man I had sworn my life to had not only betrayed me but had defiled the sacred bond the Goddess herself had blessed.
As the pain of his betrayal ripped through me, something ancient and powerful awakened in my blood. I rose to my feet and spoke the words that would destroy his world and begin mine.
"I, Alessia Bianchi, reject you, Santino Moretti, as my mate."
7.6
I woke up to the suffocating smell of copper and sulfur, my fingers wrapped around a blood-soaked leather whip.
Hanging from an obsidian cross in front of me was a boy with silver hair and dead, golden eyes.
His pale chest was torn open to the bone.
I recognized those eyes immediately. I had spent three years describing them on my laptop.
He was Kamari Monroe, the tragic, overpowered protagonist of my own web novel.
And I wasn't just a bystander. I was Benedict Guerrero, the sadistic academy headmaster. The ultimate villain.
A reel of images flashed in my mind: my original ending. Kamari, fully awakened, skinning me alive and burning my soul in a furnace for forty-nine days.
My loyal attack dog, Gideon, stepped forward with a basin of glowing green liquid.
"Headmaster, let me wake him up with this bone-rot acid so you can resume."
If that acid hit Kamari, his hatred would become permanent. My gruesome death would be sealed.
But if I broke character and apologized, the magical world would sense the shift, and Kamari would just think it was a sicker, more twisted trap.
How was I supposed to survive a death sentence I wrote myself?
I couldn't show weakness. I had to play the monster to survive.
Suppressing my terror, I smashed the acid basin, healed his ruined flesh with agonizing dark magic, and lied straight to his face.
"Someone had to be the monster to push you into the fire."
This time, I will rewrite my own fate.
9.2
Lainey spent her last life destroying herself for Larry, only to become the woman he discarded most cruelly. He never loved her, never wanted her, and made no secret that his first love still owned his heart.
On their wedding day, he abandoned Lainey at the altar for that woman, then later used Lainey as nothing more than a stepping stone for his company's rise. In the end, he even had her kidney ripped from her.
Reborn at the very moment everything began, Lainey called off the wedding without hesitation. But after losing her, Larry begged desperately.
Lainey shot him a cold look, then turned and walked straight into the arms of a powerful, aloof man, who stared down at Larry with pure contempt. "She's my wife now."
7.4
Bridget, a ruthless twenty-first-century Wall Street analyst, woke up violently coughing up murky lake water in a decaying 1978 slum.
She quickly realized she was trapped in the body of a naive, marginalized teenager who had just committed suicide over a boy's cruel rejection.
The original girl had been mercilessly bullied by a fake rich kid named Kurtis and his cruel followers. They had publicly read her desperate love letters out loud, mocking her as a toad trying to eat swan meat, and simply watched as she threw herself into the freezing water. Now, her impoverished mother was left weeping by the bed, facing catastrophic debt and total social ruin in their small town. Everyone expected the surviving girl to wake up begging and crying for the boy who humiliated her.
Instead, a cold, calculating fury took over Bridget's analytical mind.
"I already died in that lake. That stupid girl is never coming back."
How could anyone throw their life away for a pathetic, vain clown wearing a mass-produced fifty-dollar watch? To Bridget, those uncollected love letters weren't symbols of teenage heartbreak. They were toxic assets. They were reputation landmines left out in the open that threatened her new family's survival.
Locking away the dead girl's weak emotions, Bridget forced her freezing, exhausted body out of the clinic bed. She set a hard three-month deadline to drag this family out of tier-one poverty. But first, she was marching straight to the volunteer camp to liquidate those liabilities and completely destroy the people who drove this body to death.
8.6
In my past life, I was the weak Luna everyone despised.
A fake daughter!
A disposable pawn!!
A girl my family happily executed!!!
They forced me to marry my brother to protect the family's reputation. They feared the world will know that their Alpha Son was born Impotent- they made me carry the blame of-
"A HEN THAT CANNOT LAY EGGS!!"
I obeyed them... and it cost me my life!
Their real daughter framed me countless times. My husband who was also my brother and we grew up together never believed me... They called me fake and treated me like a servant. She framed me and made the wolf world see my shame. I died trying to save my life from them.
But I woke up 10 years before my death.
This time, I refused to play their game.
After accepting the marriage to my brother...
I went behind them to meet my mate. The most feared man in our CLAN. His Uncle.
The crippled Lycan lord in disguise who once asked me to marry him.
He thought I had come to reject our bond like my past life but this time. --------I stood before him with a dangerous deal.
"Do you still want to stay the crippled Uncle in the shadows?" I asked, in a serious tone.
He replied. "I don't know what you are saying."
I knelt down placing my hands on his lap."Tomorrow morning they will be here. Do you dare to come claim your mate?"
This Time!!......I' Elena Alvarez, will Light fire to their World.