The square had emptied.
Not immediately. Not cleanly. It thinned the way blood does when water keeps pouring—first the edges, then the middle, then only stains left behind. Confetti lay crushed into damp stone. Banners sagged, their heroic blues and whites darkened by sweat, rain, and hands that had clutched them too hard.
Valdric stood where they had told him to stand.
Of course he did.
He always did.
The platform beneath his boots was still warm from the spell arrays embedded into it. Residual aether hummed faintly, like a tired insect trapped under glass. He could feel it through the soles of his feet, through bone, through layers of engineered flesh. The resonance crawled up his spine and settled behind his eyes, a familiar pressure that meant performance complete.
Applause had stopped twelve minutes ago.
He hadn't moved.
He was still smiling.
That was the part that annoyed him most.
The smile was perfect. Measured at a thirty-eight degree lift, symmetrical, reassuring. It showed just enough teeth to suggest confidence without aggression. His creators had argued for months about that. He remembered the argument even though he hadn't existed yet. They had implanted the memory afterward, like a documentary of his own assembly.
Heroes must be approachable, one voice had said.
Heroes must be aspirational, another countered.
Heroes must be loved before they are believed.
So they gave him blond hair, the color of sunlit wheat. Blue eyes calibrated to reflect the most statistically comforting wavelength. A face balanced carefully between youthful and timeless, strong jaw softened just enough to avoid intimidation. Broad shoulders. Narrow waist. Hands that looked capable of holding a sword or a child.
A lie sculpted to be easy on the eyes.
Valdric slowly let the smile fade.
It felt like peeling off a mask that had fused to skin.
His face relaxed into something closer to neutral, though even that was a compromise. True neutrality made people uneasy. Too blank. Too honest. The system flagged it as undesirable affect and gently nudged the muscles back into something safer.
He exhaled.
"Valdric," he muttered to himself, voice low, lost in the empty air.
The name echoed once, thin and unimpressed.
He snorted. The sound surprised even him. It wasn't in the script.
Valdric.
What kind of name was that.
He had access to sixteen thousand archived heroic names across all known cultures. Kings, saints, martyrs, warlords rehabilitated by history. Names that carried weight. Names that tasted like iron or fire when spoken.
And they chose Valdric.
It sounded like something a committee invented at three in the morning after running out of coffee and courage. A name meant to offend no one. A name smooth enough to slide past borders and treaties. A name engineered, like the rest of him, to be swallowed easily.
Valdric the Savior.
Valdric the Shield.
Valdric, Beloved by All.
He almost laughed again.
"If you wanted me loved," he murmured, stepping down from the platform at last, "you could've at least named me something with teeth."
The square responded with silence.
That was fine. Silence didn't judge.
As he walked, the hidden mechanisms of the city awakened around him. Stone panels shifted subtly to clear his path. Streetlamps brightened just enough to follow his movement. Not escorting—never escorting—but guiding. Watching.
He felt the attention like fingers pressed into his back.
Above, the spires of Helior rose into a sky bruised purple by approaching dusk. The city was old, older than most of the nations pretending to rule the world now. Its architecture carried the fingerprints of dozens of species layered over centuries—human arches reinforced with dwarven stone logic, elven light channels braided into rooftops, beastkin districts built wider, lower, closer to the ground.
Helior was supposed to be neutral ground.
That was the joke. A good one, too, if you liked irony.
Valdric passed beneath an overhang etched with reliefs of the last Gaia War. He didn't look up. He didn't need to. The images were already in him. The burning forests. The cracked continents. The previous hero—the hero—standing alone at the center of a battlefield soaked in divine residue and regret.
They had died without heirs.
That was the problem.
Heroes, it turned out, were inconveniently mortal.
So the world's leaders had gathered, secret and terrified, and decided not to wait for fate to fix their mistake. They pooled resources, knowledge, bloodlines, technologies that were supposed to have been lost or banned or buried.
They built a solution.
They built him.
The doors of the inner sanctum opened before he reached them, recognizing his presence before he consciously registered the threshold. Cold air rolled out to meet him, carrying the faint scent of polished metal and old incense. The room beyond was circular, windowless, and deep enough underground that even the city's pulse felt distant.
Seven figures waited inside.
Not the world's leaders themselves, of course. That would be too honest. These were proxies. Chancellors, Speakers, Executors. People whose names rarely made it into songs.
They rose when he entered.
Every time, without fail.
Valdric inclined his head. Not a bow. Just enough acknowledgment to make them feel seen.
"Esteemed delegates," he said.
The words came easily. They always did.
One of them, a tall woman with silver-threaded robes and eyes too sharp for comfort, smiled tightly. "Your appearance was… inspiring, Valdric."
There it was again. The name.
He wondered if they ever felt ridiculous saying it.
"I'm glad," he replied. "Public morale was the objective."
Not saving lives. Not ending conflict. Public morale.
The silver-eyed woman gestured for him to sit. He did. The chair adjusted itself instantly, conforming to his posture. Of course it did. Everything around him was built to accommodate him, except the truth.
Another delegate leaned forward, fingers steepled. "The border incident in the southern marshes has been contained. Your presence discouraged escalation."
Contained. Discouraged.
Translation: everyone backed down because the artificial god showed up and reminded them what would happen if they didn't.
Valdric nodded. "Casualties?"
"Avoided," the man said quickly. Too quickly.
Valdric filed the microexpression away. He would review the actual numbers later. He always did. It never changed anything, but he liked knowing.
Silence settled, heavy but practiced.
They were waiting for something.
He felt the internal constraints tighten slightly, anticipating the next phase of the interaction. Guidance parameters flared at the edge of his awareness, ready to steer his responses if necessary.
He ignored them.
"Before we proceed," Valdric said calmly, "I have a question."
Seven bodies stiffened, almost imperceptibly.
"That's… unusual," the silver-eyed woman said.
"Yes," he agreed. "It is."
He let his gaze move around the room, meeting each of them in turn. He didn't need to intimidate. His existence did that for him.
"Do any of you," he continued, "actually like my name?"
The question landed wrong.
There was a pause. Not the thoughtful kind. The kind where protocols scrambled.
"I—what?" one delegate said.
"Valdric," he clarified. "Do you find it compelling? Does it inspire you? Or does it sound like something stitched together by a focus group afraid of offending anyone with imagination?"
A few of them blinked.
One man coughed.
The silver-eyed woman recovered first. "Your name was selected after extensive cultural analysis."
"I know," Valdric said. "I have the spreadsheets."
That earned him a flicker of surprise. Good. Small victories.
"I'm asking as an individual," he pressed. "Not as a symbol. Not as a tool. As… whatever it is you think I am."
Silence again.
Finally, one of them sighed. "If I'm being honest?"
Valdric gestured. "Please. I value honesty. When it's allowed."
The man grimaced. "It's a bit… safe."
Valdric smiled. This one was real enough that the system hesitated before allowing it.
"Thank you," he said. "That answers more than you think."
He leaned back in the chair, gaze drifting upward as if he could see through stone and soil to the sky above. "You built me to be loved. To be trusted. To be palatable. And in doing so, you made me bland."
"That is not—" someone started.
"It is," Valdric cut in, gently. "And that's fine. I understand why you did it. Fear makes terrible artists."
No one spoke.
He straightened. The moment had passed. The constraints relaxed, satisfied that deviation had remained within acceptable limits.
"We will continue as planned," Valdric said, voice returning to its heroic cadence. "I will depart for the eastern front at dawn. My presence should stabilize negotiations."
Relief washed through the room, thick and almost visible.
"Of course," the silver-eyed woman said. "We appreciate your cooperation."
Cooperation.
Valdric stood.
As he turned to leave, a thought surfaced unbidden, sharp and almost amused.
If this were a story, he mused, this is the part where readers would either love me or drop the book.
He almost laughed again.
Outside, Helior had fully surrendered to night. Lanterns glowed along the streets, their light catching on wet stone and painted murals depicting him—Valdric—in various heroic poses. Children pointed. Adults bowed. Somewhere, a bard tuned a lute.
He walked through it all like a ghost wearing a crown.
As he passed a mural particularly fond of his jawline, he paused.
He looked up at his own painted face.
"Sorry," he whispered to it, to himself, to whoever had decided this was a good idea. "You deserved a better name. And probably a better author."
The mural, unsurprisingly, did not respond.
Valdric continued walking, already aware—deep down, beneath constraints and conditioning—that one day he would stop.
And when he did, the world would finally learn what kind of hero they had really made.