Rebranding

March 24th, 2034

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

"Ah, Christina. It's good to see you." I laughed as I made my way over to the limousine.

My assistant was leaning against the car, arms crossed, with an impatient scowl on her face. "It's 3 a.m.," she complained. "If you were much longer I was going to go to sleep in the limo."

I rubbed my eyes for a moment. "That means I was in there for over 4 hours, then? It was a lot of walking. And then there were these weird creatures—"

"I don't want to deal with you right now. Let's go." Christina turned away from me and got into the car without another word.

"Come on," I said as I opened the door. "That's not very nice. Aren't you even going to ask where I got this T-shirt? Ask what sort of mythical being I had to slay to leave?" I sat down and poured myself a drink. All the limo had in the fridge was a "just add tequila" margarita mix for some unknowable reason.

Christina yawned and laid down on a stretch of seat. "It's good to see you had fun, but I am very tired. How do you have this much energy?" She sounded like she was about to pass out as she spoke.

"I am a highly-caffeinated individual," I proudly declared. "Thanks for reminding me." I emptied the last of my pill container into my hand. Unfortunately, the heart attack I was about to give myself went unnoticed by my assistant, who seemed to have passed out already.

"Well, whatever." I pounded my drink and selected 'Level-up' on the system menu, allocating my given point into the concentration stat. Due to my divinity factor, that was really allocating 3.3 points into concentration, bringing it up to 92.4 total.

In this world, the arbitrary divinity allocated by the system was truly the most important thing a person could have. It was unfair, exceedingly so. I was incredibly fortunate to benefit from it, but billions were screwed over because of it. That's not even counting the hundreds of millions of casualties from before the system showed up.

It was incredibly unfair. I hated it all. Eldritch gods beyond our comprehension ruined an entire planet for unknowable reasons, and then our alleged savior discriminated against everyone, allowing for the oligarchy that was the Divines.

I poured myself another drink, this time half tequila, half cocktail mix.

If you got assigned a divinity factor of 3 or more, you're Divine. But that's forgetting about the people that have divinities of below 1, making each level-up give them a paltry less than a single point. There were even a few people I knew of with factors of simply zero, making them unable to use the system.

I wanted to repent, apologize for accepting my role as a leader of humanity, apologize for abusing my power and living like a king. At the same time, the system had given me an incomprehensible amount of power, an amount that would corrupt even the purest of hearts. Most importantly, it let me be true to the one side of myself I had promised to never let anyone see or know of.

Trying to avoid the dark, downward spiral I was leading myself into, I looked over to my loyal assistant.

It was considerate of her to wait for me that whole time. She really didn't need to. Be it that she was worried about me personally or that her boss could have been dead, I appreciated the notion.

With happier, more sentimental thoughts lulling me to rest, I finally decided to take a break and close my eyes. I had done quite enough for my first day of preparation, I reckoned.

…

The next day, things were going well enough. I had lost track of Wrath at some point—and thus, so had the world—but he was likely just making preparations as well. I had sat down for a moment while drinking my morning energy drink when I rationalized that what I had done yesterday was a bit stupid.

Simply put, there wasn't much point in recklessly diving into subspaces to get stronger if that involves the acute possibility of my own demise. That would defeat the whole point, as I am trying to live.

Yesterday had been a bit of a panicked, knee-jerk reaction, and not something that I was inclined to repeat with a rational mind. It had worked out for me that time, even warranting a level-up, but it was unlikely that would always be the case.

And so, instead, I had spent the day organizing my business's personnel. To clarify, my organization, Sol LLC, was designed to be more of a hired defense agency than anything else. We would provide defense from wormhole invasions to the cities that could afford us, as well as escort people into wormholes to grow stronger. They dealt with the brokers and we cleared the subspace, keeping a large cut of the proceeds.

However, I had the epiphany that our previous business model wasn't sustainable. It was inherently reactive and complacent. We weren't remotely innovative. It took me a few hours to work out, but I had decided that I wished to branch into research and development primarily.

Of course, we still had the responsibility to protect the larger cities of the East Coast from problematic wormholes. But, instead of working with a multitude of freelance contracts, we would start delving into the wormholes ourselves and try to glean insights about the artifacts therein. Ideally, we acquired some special talents and started having the ability to produce our own magical items.

That was what Christina and I had been working on all morning and afternoon, at least. We spent a couple hundred thousand on an advertising campaign, looking for competent people familiar with artifacts. Artificers, blacksmiths, armorers, engineers, etcetera—we wanted them all.

There was a bit more to it than that. Finding and organizing managers and tracking all of the company's magical assets, as well as getting quotes on how much some of the more complex machinery would set us back. Naturally, the numbers we were getting back were astronomical.

"It's a good investment," I kept telling myself. A part of me was a bit worried that Lucian and a few of the other Divines would get peeved at me for encroaching upon their territories, but what were they compared to Wrath?

Oh, and I officially got a second assistant. I made a few phone calls to some of my contacts and settled upon someone that would be more capable of getting things done in the subspaces than Christina. It would have been nice to just promote one of the hunters working under me, but I needed someone even more capable than anyone I had.

"Hello, Madison." I smiled politely and shook hands with the young woman in front of me. She wore a nice suit with a distinct cyan tie, letting her long blonde hair flow freely behind her shoulders.

"You can just call me Maddy." She reciprocated the smile. "It's nice to meet you, Mr. Eaton."

"And you may call me Tom. It's good of you to be able to fly out on such short notice. As you can see, things are quite busy right now." I gestured towards the dozens of people moving throughout the lobby of my office building.

"Of course. My dad said that you had called in a serious favor to get someone you could trust, and so here I am. It's better than working for him; that's for sure."

I laughed. "I'm glad that we could come to an agreement, then."

Maddy's dad was my good friend, Christopher—the Divine of the West Coast. We had worked together quite a few times over the years, but he was turning 60 come June. Some years back, he retired from being an active hunter and focused on being solely an executive producer in Hollywood.

Since his daughter still had a passion for adventure in her, he felt comfortable loaning her services out to me for a pretty penny. Well, it made sense. She was one of the strongest people under the Divines with a divinity factor of 2.8. That allowed her the ability to solo delving into wormholes up to C-rank comfortably.

I didn't fully trust Maddy herself, but Chris was a good guy. I trusted that he didn't have any ulterior motives in sending her here. At least, I hoped so. Even if he did, I didn't have the flexibility to do anything about it. I needed the manpower.