Tim's POV
The road south road from the capital was familiar as I left the city, the particular sequence of landmarks, the way the terrain shifted from the capital's surrounding farmland to the wilder stretches between cities, and the rhythm of my long walk.
I was enjoying the view. This was something I had started enjoying over the years, the simple practice of being present in a landscape was nice. The morning sun-light on the fields to the east had a nice quality to it.
Then a Huge Teleportation circle appeared in the road approximately fifteen metres ahead of me. The circle was large. Larger than anything I had seen deployed outside a controlled environment.
The Slane Theocracy, damn it.*
I stopped walking and stepped sideways off the road into the grass, creating distance from the activation point.
Twenty black robes came through in the organised deployment of people who had done this before, spreading outward from the circle in practiced formation, establishing a perimeter with the efficiency of military professionals. And then their leader, stepping through last.
Black robe. *Female I think*. Built like someone who had been taking physical work seriously, the density of real muscle visible even under the ceremonial robe's bulk.
I looked at her face and placed it immediately.
Gagaran.*
The face I knew from a screen superimposed on the face standing in a road twenty metres away, younger than I remembered her.
She was in Sunlight Scripture now. Before Blue Rose, before the career change I knew was coming, she was here, in a black robe, leading twenty operatives on a mission to hunt my ass.
I had been expecting something like this for years, but why now..?
I waited while Gagaran covered the distance between us, her formation flanking without being asked.
She looked at me up and down. She appeared to come to a conclusion about my appearance that she found acceptable, I knew the lore, and what she does to young men.
"The Slane Theocracy has been watching you," she said. "We're here to offer you a choice. Join willingly, or join by force. Both end the same way, so what will be pretty boy."
I looked at her. Looked at the twenty operatives around me. Looked back at her.
"I'll need a moment to consider the choic-
I moved.
Gagaran's POV [level 26]
She had seen fast people. In the years with the Sunlight Scripture she had fought alongside and against people at the top of what human beings could produce in terms of speed, other Scripture members, adventurers, the occasional warrior on the road.
The boy moved way too damn Fast.
He was in one position and then he was in another position and the space between those positions he ran, had not contained anything her perception could track. The first three of her people went down before she had fully processed that he had started moving, the takedowns clean and targeted, not killing blows, she noted with the part of her mind, but precise incapacitations still removed my operatives from battle.
I charged.
He turned from the sixth operative, saw I was coming, and didn't move away. He moved *toward* me, into the charge, inside the range where I can swing with maximum force, and kicked my chest.
I was in pain, the horizontal moment of flight that followed, that what I was experiencing as I flew into the air. The ground soon arrived and I had enough training to roll as I landed, converting some of the momentum into controlled movement, and came up on one knee with stars in my vision and my formation reduced to four standing members and a field of unconscious colleagues.
The boy ran on the road as he aimed for another one of her members.
She reached into her robe.
The crystal had been a contingency, a tier seven angel, housed and ready, the kind of weapon the Theocracy kept for situations like this, *that kid is a monster*.
She had the crystal half-raised when he was simply *there, in front of her, and his hand was on hers with a grip that over-powered hers.
The pressure on my wrist was painful. as it snapped.
"Mother Fuuuuucker"
I looked at him in pain.
He looked down at me as he reasied his fist.
Then world went black.
Tim's POV
I caught Gagaran as she went down, which was a courtesy she had not extended to me. I lowered her to the ground with the care.
The crystal was already in my pocket.
I stood in the road surrounded by twenty-one unconscious members of the Sunlight Scripture and took stock. Breathing on all of them, No deaths. The operatives would wake with headaches and bruised professional pride.
Gagaran I checked specifically. She was going to be fine. In a 17 years she was going to be in Blue Rose, which was a strange thing to be aware of while standing over her unconscious form in a road.
I looked at the crystal in my hand.
Tier seven. A housed angel, contained in a storage medium designed to deploy on activation. The Theocracy had handed me a tier seven weapon, and for that, I will forever be greatful.
I turned it over carefully, feeling the contained power inside it, the crystal had a nice blue to it.
I gave myself approximately two hours before these people woke up, at which point the Theocracy would have a very detailed report of what had happened and would begin planning the next approach. Two hours of normal walking was insufficient distance. I ran, the road disappearing beneath my feet at the speed that still felt slightly surreal even after years of operating at this level.
My thinking happened while I was running.
The Theocracy knew where I was. Which meant they would either escalate or reassess, and the reassessment would take time, and the escalation would involve more force or cleverer methods, neither of which I could prevent through evasion alone.
I needed a different kind of protection.
I had known the Theocracy was watching since the church classroom, The question was which protection was available to me now, with my current resources.
Joining an existing organisation was the obvious answer but which one. Noble patronage offered protection but at a cost in autonomy that I was not willing to pay. Any existing faction had its own agenda, its own constraints, its own relationship with the Theocracy that would complicate things for me.
Why don't i build something of my own..?*
The thought had been forming for months. And now, running south on a clear spring morning, it arrived fully formed.
The orphanage.
St. Linel was full of children who had nothing and knew no one, What if I transform them in to figthers.
I secertly train them by making them learn random skills, and there-for secertly level them up that way.
In ten years, with the right curriculum, the right environment, St. Linel's could produce a cohort of young adults with hero ranked power, and have genuine loyalty to the institution that had raised them, and no idea that their development had been planed, as they all will think that they are just telanted.
I'll have an army version of The Black Scripture.
Tim's stats
LeveL: [44]