Tim's POV
I had assumed we were returning to the modest church in the middle ward where I had cast the light spell. Father Renald's hand on my shoulder guided me past that turning without comment, continuing north along a road that grew incrementally wider and better maintained with each block, the cobblestones shifting from the uneven patchwork of the lower ward to the smoother, more regularly replaced stones of the middle ward, and then to the dressed and fitted paving of the district where E-Rantel's wealth concentrated itself.
The church that appeared at the end of that road was a different institution entirely from the one I had visited.
Not a cathedral, not by the standards of truly wealthy religious architecture, but substantial. Three storeys of pale stone, the Water God's sigil carved above the entrance with the confidence of an organisation that expected to stay here permanently. The windows were real glass, which in this world was not a trivial detail. The doors were hardwood, banded with iron worked into decorative patterns of waves and flowing lines. Two attendants stood at the entrance.
I catalogued all of this in the time it took to walk from the street to the door.
Inside, the smell was different from the middle-ward church, the same candle wax and herbal undertone, but richer, with the added layer of old wood polish and the particular dry quality of a building with good ventilation and real heating. The floors were stone tile rather than packed earth. The ceiling was high enough that the space had genuine acoustic depth.
This was the church that mattered. The middle-ward building was an outpost. This was the centre.
Father Renald found his colleague in a side corridor, a man of perhaps fifty, older than Renald, with the bearing of someone accustomed to administrative authority rather than pastoral work. They spoke in the low rapid tones of colleagues exchanging information, but I was standing close enough and my hearing was good enough to follow most of it.
Renald reported the danger level. The other priest's eyebrows climbed steadily and did not fully descend. He glanced at me with the assessing look of a man accustomed to evaluating assets, then looked back at Renald with an expression that communicated something along the lines of *are you certain.*
Renald, to his credit, communicated back with a look that meant *I checked twice.*
The broader priest came to me and crouched slightly, the gesture adults used when they wanted to communicate accessibility to children, which I had always found faintly condescending and chose not to find so now, because he was doing it out of genuine effort rather than performance.
"Welcome to the Church of the Water God," he said.
"You'll find we take good care of our students here. Are you hungry?"
"I'm fine, thank you," I said politely.
He smiled at this and straightened up, exchanging another brief glance with Renald that I interpreted as something like *well-mannered, at least.*
I was taken to a room that I would come to know well over the following weeks, a classroom, plain and functional, with the organised simplicity of a space designed for learning. Eight children were already seated when I entered, ranging in age from what looked like four to perhaps nine. They looked up at me with the automatic curiosity of children encountering a new arrival, the assessment running quickly.
I found a seat near the back where I could see everyone, which was habit by now, and settled in.
The lesson was elementary theology, the nature of the Water God's divine principles, the relationship between faith and magical expression, the basic cosmological framework of the six gods. I listened carefully and filed everything, noting the intersections with what I already knew about this world's religious structure and the places where the church's official doctrine diverged, subtly, from what Overlord's lore suggested was actually true.
There were several such places. That was worth remembering.
The Slane Theocracy (Council Chamber of the Six Cardinals).
The room where the Six Cardinals met was designed to communicate permanence. Stone walls three feet thick. A table of dark hardwood. Six chairs of identical weight and quality, a deliberate architectural statement that no Cardinal sat higher than any other, though everyone in the room understood that some voices carried more gravity than the furniture admitted.
The document on the table had arrived from E-Rantel two days prior, carried by a theocracy intelligence operative embedded in the Water God's church there, one of dozens of such operatives seeded throughout the Re-Estize Kingdom's religious institutions, a network so long established that it had become self-sustaining, invisible through familiarity.
The document contained a name of Tim, recorded as *orphan, no family name, registered at St. Linel's institution, E-Rantel. age. Five years old.*
And a danger level of.
Fifteen.
Cardinal Yvon of the Water God's dominion was a woman of sixty-three who had spent four decades in the Theocracy's highest ecclesiastical circles and had developed, over that time, a comprehensive immunity to surprise. She read the document and set it down precisely where she had picked it up.
"The reading has been verified," she said. It was not a question.
"Yes, my lady," said the operative's report.
"Independent castings by two different clergy. The child cast tier zero holy light on his first attempt, unprompted, without prior instruction."
The room absorbed this.
"Fifteen," said Cardinal Berenice of the Rock God's dominion, across the table. She was younger than Yvon by a decade, with the broad-shouldered solidity of a person who had never entirely left behind the physical discipline of her earlier martial training. She had the document open in front of her and was studying. "At five years of age. With no training, no lineage, no institutional support until forty-eight hours ago."
"The growth rate is what matters," Yvon said.
"Precisely." Berenice set the document down and addressed the table. "Consider the trajectory. Danger level fifteen [level 5] at age five, achieved entirely through self-directed development in an orphanage environment with zero magical instruction and zero combat training beyond whatever the child managed independently." She paused to let that land.
"If we project forward conservatively, assuming the growth rate decelerates significantly now that he's within a training institution, he reaches hero rank [ level 30] somewhere between his late twenties and mid-thirties."
"Hero rank," said Cardinal Morvaine of the Wind, thoughtfully. He was the eldest at the table, white-haired and boney body. "That is not a trivial projection."
"It is not," Berenice agreed. "Hero rank at thirty years old is exceptional by any historical measure. Hero rank achieved by someone who reached danger level fifteen by age five, with no support, suggests a ceiling that may be considerably higher than hero rank.
And if the growth rate does *not* decelerate, if proper training accelerates it, as proper training typically does,"
"Then we're discussing something potentially above hero rank," said Cardinal Fen of the Fire God's dominion, quietly. "Which is a different category of conversation."
The silence that followed had a different quality than the silences that preceded it.
"I move," said Berenice, "that we bring the child into Theocracy care now. Remove him from the E-Rantel church's jurisdiction, relocate him to a proper training facility, and begin structured development under direct Theocracy oversight. The Water Church in E-Rantel is a provincial institution. What this child requires is not provincial."
Cardinal Yvon's expression did not change in any way that most people would have noticed. Those who knew her well would have observed a very slight cooling around the eyes.
"That is a generous proposal," she said, in the tone that meant it was not generous at all. "Particularly coming from the Rock Cardinal, given that the child has demonstrated holy affinity rather than earth affinity, and is currently in *Water* Church custody." She paused precisely long enough for the implication to settle.
"I wonder if the Earth Cardinal's enthusiasm for immediate relocation is entirely about the child's welfare."
Berenice met her gaze with equanimity. "I wonder if the Water Cardinal's resistance to relocation is entirely about the child's welfare."
The temperature in the room dropped several degrees.
Cardinal Morvaine of the Wind cleared his throat. "Perhaps we might hear from His Holiness."
All eyes moved to the head of the table.
The Pontifex Maximus had been listening with the stillness of a man who had already formed his conclusion and was waiting for the conversation to exhaust itself before delivering it. He was not physically imposing, medium height, slight, with the pale complexion. But the quality of attention he commanded was absolute and required no physical reinforcement.
He raised one hand.
The room quieted immediately and completely.
"The Earth Cardinal's assessment of the trajectory is sound," he said. His voice was conversational in volume and absolute in authority. "The Water Cardinal's concern about institutional loyalty is also legitimate. Both of you are correct about the child's potential. Both of you are also, transparently, pursuing your own institutional advantage, which is your function and I do not fault you for it."
He let that settle for a moment.
"Our criterion for early extraction has always been consistent," he continued. "We intervene proactively when a child's potential exceeds hero rank with meaningful probability. Not hero rank itself, hero rank is valuable but not unprecedented. We have trained hero-rank individuals before and we will again. What justifies early intervention is the possibility of something *above* hero rank. The possibility of god-kin [above level 50]."
He looked at the document on the table without touching it.
"Danger level fifteen [level 5] at age five, with no training, is remarkable. It does not, by itself, demonstrate a ceiling above hero rank. It demonstrates a floor significantly above average. These are different things." He folded his hands. "We will continue to observe. The Water Church will provide training and report progress. If the child's growth rate demonstrates a trajectory that exceeds hero rank with confidence, we will revisit this conversation. If he reaches hero rank and plateaus, we bring him in at that point, by whatever means are necessary." A brief pause. "If he does not reach hero rank, we have wasted nothing and the Water Church has gained a competent priest. Everyone benefits."
Berenice opened her mouth.
"The matter is settled," the Pontifex said, without raising his voice.
Berenice closed her mouth.
Yvon's expression returned to its default temperature, which was still several degrees below warm.
The Pontifex unfolded his hands and looked around the table. "There were fourteen other items on today's agenda. Shall we continue?"
The document was collected, filed, and carried to an archive room where it joined hundreds of similar assessments, children across the kingdom monitored, measured, and categorised by a vey old system.
In E-Rantel, in a classroom smelling of candle wax, a five year old sat at the back of a room and listened to a lesson about the Water God's divine nature, filing the useful parts and discarding the rest, thinking about what came next, as he looks at the garden outside.
Tim's stats (he can't see his true stats)
level: [5]
Vermin killer: [2/10]
Assassin: [2/10]