Midnight came, heavy and silent.Thanks to my 20% Eye of the Sovereign, slipping past the Grand Cathedral’s elite paladin patrols was a laughably simple exercise. I mapped their patrol routes on a glowing blue mental grid, timing our exit through a forgotten, unmonitored drainage gate beneath the western wall.Meeting Seraphine in the shadowed alleys of the capital's central plaza, we navigated the cobblestone streets until we found the entrance, an unassuming, magically sealed iron grate hidden inside a deserted brick storehouse.‘Eye of the Sovereign: Decryption Array.’With a subtle flick of my finger, a micro-pulse of my sovereign mana bled into the lock, cleanly overriding the Holy See’s encrypted treasury ward without alerting the main network. The heavy iron grate swung open with a silent hiss, revealing a pitch-black staircase that descended deep into the earth.The air grew progressively fouler as we crept down, thick with the unmistakable, rotted stench of abyssal radiatio

His serene, charismatic face was a perfect mask of holy concern, but behind his sharp gray eyes, a calculating, deeply political mind was spinning at a million miles an hour. Behind him, clutching her silk sleeves nervously, was his daughter, Clara—the oblivious second name on my past-life execution list."Ethan, my boy," the Pope spoke, his smooth baritone filling the room with a comforting warmth that made my skin crawl. "The Lord truly smiles upon you. To survive a secondary awakening of that magnitude while defending our city from rogue cultists in the central plaza... the capital owes you a great debt."I leaned back against the plush silk pillows, a slow, incredibly sharp, and utterly sassy smirk cutting across my face despite my exhaustion.I locked eyes with the ruler of the church, knowing exactly what kind of game we were playing now. He knew I had raided his treasury vault; I knew he was funding the very cult I just butchered. But on the surface, we were just a holy fath

As the seal decayed, her locked, volatile past-life mana would begin to micro-leak into her everyday spellcasting.The beauty of the trap was the political fallout. When her light magic inevitably backfired or fluctuated violently during her public holy ceremonies, the cathedral's tracking wards wouldn't register my interference—they would register a massive spike of pure, unrefined abyssal energy originating directly from the Holy Maiden's own soul. The Pope would be forced to assume that his secret cult allies were trying to prematurely hijack his daughter, shattering the trust between the vicar of God and the lords of the abyss without a single finger pointing back to the new High Captain."It... it tastes a bit spicy," C

I stepped toward her, intending to offer a hand to guide her back to her chambers before the cathedral's automated tracking wards could register the fluctuation. But before my boot could touch the bottom step of the gazebo, the air behind us didn't just grow cold—it went entirely dead.The low, rhythmic chirping of the night crickets in the terraced gardens cut off instantly.‘Warning: High-tier physical concealment ward breached,’ thirty percent of the Eye of the Sovereign hummed inside my mind, mapping a sudden, violent distortion on the high slate roof of the cathedral’s eastern wing. ‘Spatial compression tracking active. Target velocity: Terminal.’I didn't look up. I didn't give a single indication that my neon-blue tactical grid had just locked onto a shadow currently detaching itself from the stone gargoyles above.A figure dropped from the sky, falling fifty feet with the absolute, terrifying silence of a hunting owl. It landed perfectly in the center of the silver-leaf grass

He was the third name on my blacklist, a guy who used to look down on my fragile, Tier-1 self like I was literal dirt beneath his polished leather boots.The entire room went dead silent as I strolled in.I wasn't wearing the ragged, soot-stained uniform of an academy dropout anymore. I was draped in the blinding, heavily enchanted silver breastplate of a High Captain, my white silk cape billowing behind me, and my permanent Tier-3 core radiating a lazy, suffocatingly dense blue mana pressure that made the teacups on the table violently rattle. Seraphine walked a half-step behind me, her arms crossed, her signature absolute-zero smirk firmly in place."What is the meaning of this?!" Marko snapped, slamming his hands onto the desk as he stood up, his face flushing with aristocratic rage. "Ethan Hoke? You're supposed to be in a dungeon or a ditch! How dare you barge into the council chambers with armed—""Quiet down, classmate. You're giving me a headache, and I haven't even had my mor