Everywhere I went, people’s gazes burned into me, tracking every move I made, everyone from Imperators to Militares to Servi and Navitae. I saw an array of emotions on their faces, awe and fear and devotion and obsession. In the days that I had spent unconscious, unable to be moved by the Dominium’s forces due to the radiating aura I was producing from my body, word had spread of my transformation and partial ascension to something far more than human. Video, pictures, and eyewitness reports had spread across the entire planet and now, more than ever, every person on Amatius or in orbit above it knew my name and face. Word of my identity as grandson of Augustas and my gaining of Silver Rank and my semidivine nature had consumed people’s imaginations like a wildfire, proliferating and escalating in increasingly exaggerated implications through word of mouth.

Before, there had been skeptics at the Scholarium and in the Guard even when my former Helots and my friends and teammates circulated the rumors. I had strange and inexplicable powers, but psychic sorcery was as unexplored and unknown as deep space beyond the empire’s solar system and the prowess of the Dominium’s genetic and technological engineering was capable of staggering potential when combined with the right Path and Rank. There was room for doubt, room for questions, on how and why I did not bear the family name of the descendants of the Regent, why I had no authentication or recorded proof of Augustas acknowledging my existence. To those slow to believe, I could simply be a charlatan and to those with the understanding and expertise to believe me like the Governor were perfectly willing to go along with the naysayers if I was not going to be useful to them.

Now though? Now I was too powerful, my potential too grand and terrifying, for people to ignore what I was. I was the hero that slayed the dragon monster that two other Silvers and twenty-seven Bronze Strategoi officers of the Guard had struggled to win against, the man as much flame and incandescent spirit as he was flesh that killed the seemingly invincible. The video captured by a drone in the sky of me casually pointing my golden sword of light at Marias Maxion and blowing his head off with a blazing energy beam was probably the most popular and talked about. People were comparing it to putting down a rabid dog.

At first, I had been glad to receive the honors that they were willing to heap upon me, it felt good to reclaim my reputation as Persias Fulvion had promised me after Governor Claudion had dragged it through the mud and left it in pathetic tatters. At first. At this point though, I was getting tired of not being able to go anywhere without being swarmed with people trying to get pictures of me or asking me to bless them or perform some kind of miracle. It was annoying too that the trick Antonias had shown me to limit my enhanced hearing was useless now that I was a Silver, my senses too advanced to be disabled by tricks of my imagination and mental exercises.

“Antonias…” I whispered, now that the memory of him teaching me how to do it bringing a wave of melancholy and grief over me.

Was I mad at him and the rest of my teammates, especially the ones I had known since Sunburst Station, for having abandoned me? Absolutely. Would I ever want any one of them to die out of resentment or spite? Not in a hundred million years, not even until the stars dimmed and died.

“You can’t blame yourself, Adrias.” Alsig reassured me in a soft tone.

Logically, I knew that, knew I had only achieved the exhilarating rush of strength from Heracles’s funeral pyre when my emotional instability had reached its peak in the wake of Antonias’s death, but that did not stop me from feeling guilty anyways. If only I had managed to activate it somehow before that…

A knock came at the door of the room I was sequestered in. Even hiding away in the makeshift headquarters my new followers had provided for me, I had no true privacy. A Bronze Imperator’s hearing could pierce soundproofed walls with no trouble and no doubt there was all manner of spyware and sensors monitoring my every move, whether out of obsession or fear of me.

“Come in, please!” I said loudly through the door in case it was not an Imperator. It probably was not, the knock had originated from much lower on the door than the height of someone seven feet tall like a person on my Path.

The doorknob twisted and a Servus girl came in with a plate of food, eggs and ham with some kind of red fruit juice that I did not recognize with my strong sense of smell.

She set the tray and the plate down on the mahogany desk I was seated at and I picked up the fork and speared a chunk of scrambled eggs. A bit too salted, in my opinion. I was about to take a sip of the fruit juice concoction when I noticed that the girl had not left yet. Instead, she was just standing there, emptyhanded, and was staring at me. I waited a few more seconds before I got tired of it.

“Can I help you?” I said pointedly.

She blushed and stuttered some kind of apology and then ducked out of the room, shutting the door sharply.

I ate about half the plate, barely touching the ham, and drank the red juice, but I was not feeling all that hungry. The pressure of listening to a city’s worth of civilians and soldiers discussing me constantly, unceasing day and night, was wearing on me. I felt claustrophobic like I was drowning in the noise and growing expectations of those around me. Tinges of panic ran through me. I needed to get out of here, but I could not without being hounded the whole way and being swarmed in the streets.

“I need to get out.” I said to myself, the fork bending in my hand.

Time and space warped around me, and the fabric of the universe ripped, and I appeared in a flicker from inside the headquarters to the roof. Silver teleportation. Finally.

I had discovered several of my new abilities, but this one had eluded me. I had found my five senses enhanced, my strength and speed and durability pushed to the limit of what was physically possible without Gold, my psychic sorcery amplified to the point that my pitiful attempts at levitation were almost to the point of outright flight, and I was able to technopathically interact with technology and electronics with my mind, but I had not managed Silver Rank’s most well-known trait.

I teleported again, moving to a distant roof of the innumerable buildings that had been constructed by the military as a ground base on the planet. I could have easily jumped from roof to roof, but that risked having people see me soar over the tops of buildings. I flickered above the base’s constructions, finding my way out of the area and jumping through space until I was in the middle of the Amatian desert, away from any watchful or worshipful onlookers.

I wandered, moving from dune to dune on foot, my new sense of timing telling me I had been out for just over half an hour when a small, sleek landing craft dropped out of the sky and rested on the sand. The hatch opened and eight figures stepped out, all armored in Adamantplate and openly wielding Keenblades.

The Governor, Persias Fulvion, and six other warriors who were marked with symbols and heraldry I did not recognize. My fist tightened and my jaw set. I knew a fight coming when I saw one. My eyes slid from Theseas Claudion’s masked helm to Persias and I felt a stab of betrayal.

“Scheming bastard.” Alsig said in my head.

“Governor Claudion.” I called to them. “How can I help you?”

The hexed lightning of the Curse of the Skyfather started dancing on Theseas and Persias’s blades.

Very well then.

I was not sure what the other six were, something about them bothered me, so I extended my newfound increase into telepathy over them to scan the surface level of their minds. I found that they were called Sicarii, specialized soldiers and professional murderers trained from birth, Golden Venators of the Assassin Order with spliced genes of Imperators and Campeadors, wearing Adamantplate and bonded to Silicon Daimons. Their minds felt robotic and empty, only cool logic and predatory instinct running through their neurons. Lifeless zombies in personality, cunning jackals in deviousness.

Their thoughts whispered to me of how the yellowed and serrated knives they held were hydra fangs that would cut with as much divine intent as the Silvers’ Keenblades and my golden sword, and that while they could not teleport as a Third Rank Imperator could, they had modified versions of the photonic lightning transportation that I so hated that would make little difference between the two forms.

“Gentlemen, I seem to be unarmored and unarmed against eight combatants.” I said. “I am very sorry to inform you that you should have brought more if you wanted to win.”

Then fire spread through my veins and my sword of golden light flashed into my right hand.