Chương 23: So Many Opportunities

The area finally stopped looking like a battlefield. It looked like a butcher's floor after someone took a hammer to the walls. It was littered with splintered palisade, half‑melted tools, black puddles where the Slime had rolled and eaten everything that couldn't run. The General's body lay under a stained tarp near the gate. Yara had insisted on that much dignity. The rest of the slavers were ash piles or meat scraps. Ivan sat on a broken beam at the edge of the ruined yard and watched the last of the fires die.

We lived. That was the first clear thought that cut through the numb fog in his head. He didn't think we won. Just we lived. He replayed the fight whether he wanted to or not. They hadn't planned for such a fight, but it had broken out nonetheless, and they were lucky to have survived it. Ivan recalled the moment the Slime's leash had snapped and the whole yard lurched sideways.

He could still vividly feel how Elizabeth's hand had crushed his arm while Mana roared through him, hot enough that part of him still expected to see smoke coming from his pores. In the end, there was the General's head half‑attached by a strip of flesh. None of that had been clean. He could make it sound like a plan for Yara's report, with the Slime as the distraction and Elizabeth's Mana Zone turning him into a temporary cannon while he aimed Lightning through weak nodes. The truth was nastier.

Half of it worked because the monster rolled where he hoped instead of eating him first, and the rest worked because Elizabeth had a stupidly broken Skill and somehow didn't pass out ten seconds earlier. He looked at his hands. Ink in the creases, faint scorch marks on the knuckles where lightning had flashed too close. Lattice Guard still itched along his bones, like the spell was reluctant to stand down after the hits it had eaten. Lucky day.

He would take some credit for his fast thinking, but it'd mostly been luck. He couldn't get complacent. The bill was still lying around the yard. He remembered the slavers shrieking as the Slime rolled over them and he also remembered Hanno slumped against that crate, motionless under Marcus's hands. The few slaves who hadn't run when Rys screamed at them to move weren't so lucky. They'd crouched in the corner of their pens and prayed, and the Slime had not cared. Luck wasn't on their side.

We should have planned this better. The Order of Dawn had their dead too. Armor didn't make you invincible when someone swung a D‑Rank sword at your ribs. Yara had almost gone under twice that he saw. Gareth walked with a limp now; that chain had done real damage before he cut it free. They moved like they had done this sort of aftermath a dozen times before. Ivan watched Yara's people walk through the wreckage like very tired janitors.

Gareth and Leo checked the bodies in a wide arc, blades out, making sure nobody stood back up by mistake. Marcus moved slower between the wounded, hands glowing, murmuring quiet prayers as he decided who could be saved and who was already in someone else's ledger. Elizabeth did nothing flashy. She walked the yard, checking every black puddle and half-melted corner to make sure nothing of the Slime remained.

Further out, beyond the walls, he could see freed men and women being herded gently along the road back toward town. They walked in clumps, wrapped in scavenged cloaks. A few glanced back at the smoking fort, faces unreadable. Yara crossed the yard and stopped in front of him.

"You should lie down," she said.

"We can handle the rest." He eyed her. There was a thin smear of someone else's blood on her cheek, drying at the edge of a fading bruise.

"I'm fine," he lied.

"You're shaking," she said.

"You just don't feel it yet." He glanced at his hands. They were steady enough, but the bones under the skin ached in a way he recognized.

"Sit anyway," she went on.

"If something else decides to go wrong, I need you able to stand. You did great." That, more than any kindness, got him to move. He eased himself further back onto the beam while they went back to work. Not everything from the mess was bad, though. Now he knew he could meddle with item effects. He had touched the leash on that Slime, tampered with a high‑grade collar in a live fortress, and turned it against its owners.

He probably shouldn't be excited about that in a yard full of corpses, but yes, that part was fun. Ivan rubbed his face with one hand and stared up at the strip of evening sky between the leaning walls. All right. At least I survived. That was all that mattered. He was relieved, not happy. Happy would have been a strange word for a yard full of dead people. Something flickered at the edge of his vision. Notifications surged in, neat text crawling up like someone had opened a tap. He blinked.

He'd noticed these particular ones earlier, but he hadn't been able to properly process them. [You have drawn the eyes of greater beings.] [Some are displeased. Some are amused. Some are… curious.] That wasn't surprising. Despite just being Level 36, he had helped kill a Level 140 Chain General on Victor's continent while rewriting a collared beast on the fly. If the gods really watched anything besides Champions' leaderboard scores, this was the sort of mess that turned heads.

Especially since a team sworn to one of the Primordials had been standing right there. This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. The next line hit harder. [The Veiled Architect of Echoes has offered you a Humble Blessing.] For a heartbeat he forgot how to breathe. He knew the name. Everyone who ever copied a summoning scroll knew the names in those formulas. Veiled Architect of Echoes. A God from the famous Scholar's pantheon.

Patron of seers and archivists who'd gone too deep. People whispered stories about her cults in old worlds, how they built libraries underground and treated prophecies like weapons. A Humble Blessing, the System called it. But it was a blessing all the same…! If he took it, he could surely receive greater boons in the following months. Ivan had dreamt, prayed really, for days like this. He couldn't believe he was seeing such a notification. The entry unfolded when he focused.

[Humble Blessing of the Veiled Architect] Perks Offered: – [Echo Reading] (Skill): Trace residual spell patterns more easily. Reduced MP cost to analyze complex constructs. – +1 rank to Intelligence and Wisdom. – Minor favor in functions related to information retrieval. His heart kicked a little faster. That was made for him. For years he wanted to catch a God's eye, and now….! But then the rest of the notifications flashed before him. [The Lady of the Thousand Scripts has offered you a Major Blessing.] [The Watcher at the Last Gate has offered you a Minor Blessing.] [Spear of the Rising Sun has offered you a Major Blessing.] Ivan's eyes went wide. What's going on? Was that feat really that insane…? Then his brain caught up. Right. Of course. No Mage could do what he could, let alone another Scribe. No wonder they wanted him. There was no reason to be excited.

The camp was a ring of shadowed shapes and orange glow on the flattened ground outside the walls. Half‑broken carts had been dragged into a loose circle; a few tents had gone up for the worst wounded. A big iron pot hung over the central fire. The smell that rolled off it made his stomach twist in a very simple, mortal way. The freed slaves were back in town under guard, crammed into inns that had never seen such a crowd.

The Order had spent the last hours marching them there and back, hauling supplies, burning the worst of the corpses. The yard was for the fighters and whatever passed for leadership now. Ivan sat with his tea and thought through the offers he had received. [The Watcher at the Last Gate has offered you a Minor Blessing.] Less familiar name, and it was a Minor Blessing, only a step above Humble. If memory served him right, this was the God of some death cult or some border‑god.

The perks were all about resistance to curses, a one‑time "ignore lethal blow" effect, and a Trickster‑flavored perception buff. Tempting in a different way. He wasn't really interested in that. He looked at the next one. [The Lady of the Thousand Scripts has offered you a Major Blessing.] Lady of the Thousand Scripts. One of the old universe's scribe-goddesses, worshiped anywhere people wrote magic on anything flat. She had temples in Asterion, if the guild stories were right.

[Major Blessing of the Lady of the Thousand Scripts] Perks Offered: – [Ink of Continuance] (Skill): Personal mana constructs written on surfaces last longer before decay. – [Scriptbound Memory] (Passive): Dramatically improved recall of any pattern you've personally etched. – +2 ranks to Dexterity. +1 rank to Intelligence. He didn't need the System to tell him what that meant. Every rune he'd ever copied, all those years in the basement, sharpened and locked in. His hands would move even faster.

His brain would keep up. But there was one more. [Spear of the Rising Sun has offered you a Major Blessing.] [Major Blessing of the Spear of the Rising Sun] Perks Offered: – [Spear's Strike] (Skill): Once per day, deliver a blow that partially ignores physical and magical defenses on a marked enemy. Scaling with Level disparity. – Moderate boost to Strength, Agility, and Willpower growth. – Small favor in Aurora‑aligned territories. Ivan stared at the floating text, sipping slowly.

Yara had mentioned that name once when she was explaining Aurora's lesser aspects. Spear was a war‑aspect that sat somewhere between the Dawnbound Aurora and their mortal Champions, a sort of battlefield patron. It fit the Order's style: light, steel, and very straight lines. All of this… Ivan still had a difficult time absorbing it.

He'd never gotten offers like these back when he still thought he'd pull a miracle Class at Level 10, walk out of the guild, and get a god's attention for saving the right person in the right dungeon. Those stories had floated around the scribe tables for years. Nobodies picked up by bored minor gods, given a Blessing and a ticket out. He'd stopped believing he qualified a long time ago. Well. He did now. Worth, a voice in Ivan's head whispered. You're worth investing in. That was the part that twisted.

They weren't offering because luck had finally decided to be kind. They'd never come when he needed them. They came now, when they could get something back from him. Were these truly "Gods"? The ruling forces of this world had started to notice he existed. Champions and slavers first. Now gods too. The only question now was whose tool he wanted to be, and the answer came easier than he expected. None of them. He closed the notification panel without accepting anything. It didn't vanish.

It slid into a quiet corner of his vision where prompts usually lurked. [Pending Divine Offers: 4] He let out a breath he hadn't known he held. The System didn't bark at him for refusing. No divine lightning. In case of emergency, he thought. But if not, I have no interest in accepting them. The words tasted miserable. Emergency meant bleeding out. It meant Ren lying still, Rys screaming and not getting up, Yara's shield finally shattering. That was when he might grab a leash and put it around his own neck.

Only then. Not anytime else. Ivan knew exactly how insane his growth speed was, and he knew why. He had seen the Source Code. Now he could meddle with the System, while even trillion-year-old gods still lived under it. Why should he serve them, then? Tying himself to some divine flag before he had even tested how far his Skills, and [Principle Interference] itself, could go felt like selling his spine at a discount. Ivan wasn't going to accept any Sponsor Offers yet.

A few gods might get offended and withdraw them, but that didn't bother him. In fact, he'd love to avoid those impatient ones. Honestly, he looked forward to more offers. He knew the list was long.

"What has you so dazed, Ivan?" A voice suddenly called for him.