The System Awakens: Rise of the Champion

[The final requirement of the contract has been completed.]

[You have formed a Discipleship contract with the Hindu God Brahma.]

[You have formed a Discipleship contract with the Vanir Goddess Freya.]

[You have formed a Discipleship contract with the Egyptian Goddess Hathor/Sekhmet.]

[You have formed a Discipleship contract with the Greek Goddess Nike.]

[You have formed a Discipleship contract with the Greek God Hermes.]

As soon as Damian received the blessings, the contracts were finalized and he officially became the disciple of the aforementioned gods and goddesses.

At that very moment, the divine blessings merged with Damian's soul and spirituality.

The sheer force and complexity of the different divine concepts entering his being triggered something deep within him to awaken.

From the outside, Damian appeared frozen in place, bathed in the overwhelming sensation of the blessings as they fused with his existence.

Unbeknownst to him, his consciousness drifted into darkness.

"Who the fuck exactly is this mortal?" Hermes exclaimed in shock.

Though Damian was unconscious, unable to comprehend or sense what was happening within, the gods and goddesses stood frozen in front of him, staring in stunned silence.

They could feel it, something was happening inside him, something none of them expected.

"This boy, his existence just keeps getting more and more complicated. This should not be possible," Hermes continued, still unable to believe what he was sensing.

"No wonder my other half Hathor likes this boy so much," Sekhmet muttered, her fierce yet beautiful face lit with intrigue.

Unlike her gentle, radiant counterpart Hathor, a goddess of love, joy, and motherhood, Sekhmet was the goddess of war, destruction, and fierce protection.

"I am starting to like him myself," Sekhmet added with a concerning grin forming on her lips.

"Sekhmet, this is not something to be happy about," Nike, the Goddess of Victory, said sternly.

"I can feel it, my Law, the concept of victory itself. He is starting to understand it. He is using my blessing to comprehend the very essence of my domain. He has just taken the first step. Do you understand how ridiculous that is? If word gets out, it is the same as putting a cosmic bounty on his head."

"This is truly unexpected," Brahma, the God of Creation, muttered while rubbing his temples.

"This boy's growth is absurd, even by divine standards. If this continues, forget everything he came here for; he will become a god himself in the very near future."

"No wonder the System protects him," Freya, the Vanir goddess, added with a worried expression.

"There is no way he is just another awakened human from a random mortal world with ridiculous talent. No mortal should have the capacity to do what he is doing."

Her concern was not born from jealousy of his talents or fear of his power but from what it meant for the rest of the gods.

What would the divine pantheons think of an existence like Damian?

Would they see him as a threat?

This boy was not just powerful.

He was growing at an unprecedented rate.

Gods and goddesses were not only making contracts with him, they were competing to do so.

And now, he had begun to comprehend the Laws themselves.

The Laws, for the Universe's sake.

The first step towards comprehending the concepts themselves.

"If the troublesome gods were to find out about his existence, they would surely feel threatened by him, and they would do everything in their power to eliminate a growing threat," Freya said.

As a compassionate goddess, she wouldn't let anything happen to her disciple.

Even though she had just met him, she felt like Damian had a much greater role to play in the universe, and she instinctively felt the need to protect him.

In fact, she was the first one to notice Damian's existence within the Tower Realm.

Almost every god and goddess focused only on the higher levels of the Tower Realm, believing that only those realms held powerful Awakeners, ones capable of entertaining or even challenging the gods.

They rarely paid any attention to the lower levels.

Freya, however, had always been different.

As usual, she was diligently working to increase her comprehension of her divine concept, striving to grow stronger.

It was during one of these moments that she had a premonition of a unique being, one that would stand above all else.

The figure in her vision seemed human, though she couldn't make out a face or any specific features.

Still, she had an unshakable feeling that the meaning behind the premonition would one day reveal itself in the mortal world.

That vision came to her hundreds of years ago.

Ever since then, she had been quietly observing the lower Tower Realms and the mortal worlds, searching.

Then, on an unassuming day, she sensed a disturbance in the First Tower Realm of a certain sector of the universe.

There, she discovered a human who was dominating the power ranking battles, one who went on to destroy entire factions and even declared war on one of the most prominent races in the universe: the vampires.

Even then, Freya did not immediately think this human was the one from her vision, at least not until the war between his faction and the vampire faction.

She watched with her own godly eyes, from her abode in Asgard, as this human appeared, not as a normal human, but as a High Human.

A pure-blooded one, no less.

A being that hadn't appeared in thousands upon thousands of years, as the High Human race was believed to have gone extinct long ago.

Yet somehow, this low-level human had evolved into a High Human on his own.

But he didn't stop there.

Somehow, he became one of the 72 rulers of Biblical Hell and then gave Freya the most incredible shock of her divine life.

He possessed the ability to transform into a High Demon.

Not merely a disguise or partial transformation, but a true, complete rebirth into the High Demon race.

Such a thing had never been seen before.

Not even the gods had ever imagined something like this was possible.

But there she was, witnessing it with her own eyes.

That was when she decided there was no one in the universe who better fit the description of the figure in her premonition.

And that was when she knew it was time to begin the work.

That was when she realized that this human might be the key to saving everything that was on the path to extinction.

"He needs to be protected," Sekhmet, the Egyptian goddess and the other half of the goddess Hathor, said with a burning passion in her eyes.

Her divine concept of Fierce Protection surged within her, and her presence as a goddess began to grow stronger.

"There isn't even anyone here threatening him, so stop acting up, Sekhmet," the goddess Nike said.

Sekhmet snorted, then sighed as her aura slowly receded.

"And besides, this is the Tower Realm. The gods have no authority here. Not even the god-kings can pose a threat to his existence. We've already made him our disciple, and that protects him from the gods' scope of discipleship. So I guess we have nothing to worry about?" Hermes, the Greek god, muttered.

"That's right," a strong yet feminine voice echoed in their ears.

Suddenly, all the gods standing in front of Damian felt their very existence tremble.

A presence had arrived, one that didn't bother to hide its overwhelming power.

Even the gods hadn't sensed its approach, but now that it was here, they couldn't help but feel small and submissive in its wake.

A figure appeared beside Damian, looking at him with a gentle, loving expression.

Then she turned her gaze toward the gods, her face shifting to an expression of annoyance, clearly bothered that she had to deal with them.

"Y-Your Eminence…" fear flickered across the faces of all the gods.

Before them stood a seven-foot-tall woman with long, dark black hair accented in red, dressed in a royal gothic gown.

Her aura was beyond comprehension.

"Yup, it's me," the woman said with a slight smile.

That's when the gods realized something terrifying.

Unlike them, who had only frozen the beings around Damian to prevent them from seeing or hearing the divine encounter, this woman had frozen the entire Tower Realm.

Time itself had stopped.

Even Damian, who had seemed to be in the middle of some kind of awakening, was frozen in place.

As soon as they realized who was standing in front of them, the gods dropped to one knee, even Brahma rising from his cloud to pay his respects.

"We greet the Great Administrator of the System," they said in unison, lowering their voices respectfully.

"Yeah, yeah," Eden, the System Administrator, sighed. "Anyway, I see you've found him," she said, pointing at Damian.

"W-What do you mean, Your Eminence?" one of the gods asked nervously.

They had known Damian had to have some kind of incredible background, but to have her, the being who controlled the very system itself, appear in person…

There was no telling what kind of existence he truly was, beyond even their highest speculations.

"Let's talk, shall we? We have so much to discuss."

The woman grinned.