17 The tower has eyes...

Shoutout to my new patron:

louiscinq5

You are a legend.

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(General POV)

(Babel Tower, Top Floor)

The silver haired, exotically clad goddess swirled wine around in her hand as she stared out of her window, her piercing gaze penetrating the walls of the Twilight Manor.

Those who sit on an outside perspective would most certainly be irritated that any main character of any story always managed to catch her eye. But there was little that could ever escape it, and little that could be concealed from her.

She possessed the ability to peer into the fleshy vessels of any living being and gaze upon their immortal souls, looking at it and admiring it like a work of art. And whichever was artistic enough to tickle her collector's habit, she'd pounce on them at any given opportunity.

It was why she had an S rank Familia after all, and the most powerful in current times. With the banishment of the Zeus and Hera Familia from the dungeon city, the top seat was fresh for the taking, which afforded her more opportunity to sate her never-ending thirst for interesting souls.

Of course, like any person who did things over and over again, she had an end goal in mind when ensnaring different talented mortals. For her personally, it was to find her Odr.

The powerful, noble husband prophesized to come to her someday in the lower realms. The one she could sit beside in a lover's embrace for all eternity. And the man she would crown as her Einherjar.

Anybody who managed to enter her Familia was an Einherjar after all, but she was waiting to crown THE Einherjar, the one above the rest of them. And who better to fill that place than her Odr?

Currently, that seat was being warmed by Ottar, her ever-faithful Boaz child she'd made captain over her group of adventurers. The man knew very well that the seat was not truly meant for him, that he was merely its safe guarder until his mistress's beloved arrived one day to fill it.

But if it pleased his goddess, then he was all too ready and eager to protect it with his life. They both were aware how much of a big head any other member of their Familia would get if they were chosen as Captain, and were made the steward of such an honourable position.

Freya had spent centuries ever since being goaded by Hera down to the mortal realm on the look out for potential candidates for that seat, and the one who would fulfil the prophecy as well as the hole in her heart. Countless people had come and gone from her Familia, either being expelled, killed in the dungeon or simply dying of old age.

But none had been eligible enough to be her Odr, no matter how interesting or eye catching or how much their soul resonated with Freya. But the goddess was patient. She had an eternity to find him, and she would sit and wait, while searching for him among the vast ocean of souls that lay before her.

The most promising yet was a soul she'd caught bouncing around the rooftops of Daedalus yesterday, in the form of a little boy that could not have been more than 10 years of age.

Physically in appearance, he did not look all much as most adventurers did before they started adventuring. Adventurers (for the majority) tended to become more handsome and healthy after they levelled up due to the effects of the divine blood running through their Falna.

What she could say though was that for what she could see of his face, he would definitely grow up to be very handsome in the future once he'd lost all the baby fat and become strong and tall. It was just unfortunate that the eyes were not visible for her to see thanks to that blindfold he wore.

Freya was no fool. She'd come across many blind people before and they could not move as confidently as that boy could, especially when dangerous running across rotten and broken down rooftops like the ones in the Daedalus slums.

She did pity those poor souls living there but it was a well established fact that anybody who lived there ended up in such a dreadful place by their own volitions, so as powerful and influential as she was, she cared not for helping them.

Not to say her interest was not peaked though if such a place could produce a soul like the one she was seeing now. Most of the time, souls were really just balls of different colours. The colours were generated by a person's traits or certain aspects of their character.

Or perhaps by any certain abilities or potential they had. It could even be influenced by what race they came from. In Freya's experience, humans were the easiest to read as they did not have any particular racial traits or abilities that cast colourful stains upon their souls. Their colours were made solely by their emotions.

Any odd colours indicated something else present inside that human, something worth taking and keeping.

But then...there were times when a mortal's soul would form into something else, a portrait or an image which was a representation of that individual's personality or their desires.

In the blind boy, she saw a flame. A transparent flame, that burned brighter and brighter with the desire for power, for control, for recognition, for fulfilment. But as said before, Freya was not so easily deceived.

The flame was naught but a façade, a veil that covered the true treasure hidden within. While the flame was certainly a representation of the boy's character, there was something he seemed to suppressing, trying to keep hidden from those around him.

Deeper prodding on her part revealed something...blasphemous yet equally mysterious and exhilarating. And orb of swirling darkness and light, flowing together in harmony. Two extremely contradicting and opposing things, other gods would have been left puzzled and scratching their heads at how something so unspeakable could exist.

But more than that was the nature of these two things.

The darkness was so putrid, vile and evil, she could almost gag at how much it seemed to want to destroy and swallow everything around it. That darkness alone seemed to contain hundreds, if not thousands times more power than she currently held herself in her true form.

As for the light, it shone with so much purity and good will, as well as a desire to create and preserve life, it put every god she had ever known together to shame with how much kindness and holy radiance it emitted.

Two things so confusingly contradictory, things that were an obvious source of magical power that flowed so harmoniously, Freya was almost convinced that it was something on its own, separate from the boy. As if it were an entity of its own...

One thing was most definite however in her mind. If ever there was a mortal with the potential to become a god, then it was that boy right there, with so much power in his soul that he just could not fully harness. But when he finally would, she had no doubt he would be the most powerful god of all. And if he were to join her, she would stop at nothing to make sure that such an event came into fruition.

But there was more. Something almost as glamorous. And it had to do with the peculiar weapon the boy carried around. Because as impossible as it seemed, Freya knew it to be the case as seeing was indeed believing.

There were countless transparent human souls, noble, pure and powerful. Hundreds of them, perhaps over thousand, living inside that metal blade that each individually shone with power that dwarfed some of the best adventurer's she'd seen in her lifetime.

Somehow, these mortals had been able able to preserve their souls inside that sword, and they were quite obviously in conjunction with the boy, burning as bright as his own flaming transparent soul did whenever he fought. That sword alone would have been enough to capture her collector's desire, even if it were wielded by an ordinary soul.

Surely, there was more to such a weapon than merely being a crutch/means of defence for an impeded child?

Judging by how the boy was dressed, she correctly assumed that he was an aspiring adventurer. It was not that uncommon for such young children to try and enter a Familia, and begin the lifelong flirting-with-death lifestyle that was that of an adventurer's.

She'd hoped that he would do it the usual way by going to the guild and being given a list of Familia to choose from, whereby he would visit each individual residences of said Familia and ask to join.

The moment he'd have gone to Folkvangr would have been the point she'd station Ottar to pick him up and bring him to her to mark as her own after putting him through her own necessary trials.

It was customary for her to use her charm on any new recruit to see how they would react. If they were charmed, and filled with immediate lust and want for her, they would be immediately ticked off of the candidacy for the position as her Odr and merely put on her metaphorical shelf of precious toys.

Majority of people ended up this way in her Familia, but there were some whom it did not have that effect on, like Ottar who was standing behind her. There would have of course been the hurdle of seeing whether or not the boy did have functioning eyes as she needed a person to see her eyes in order for the charm to work. She was confident that he did have working eyes, but if he didn't, then she had other means of testing him.

But to her dismay, and no small amount of jealousy, the boy had immediately headed for the Loki Familia, no doubt having been headed there from the start. She could only grit her teeth in anger as she saw her biggest rival in pure adventurer power mark the boy as her own.

But the anger slowly cooled as Freya calmly realized that it was not the end. Just because he was in that Familia, it did not mean he would stay there forever. Whether she engineered his abandonment/resignation/expulsion or not, all she'd have to do would be to steer him in her direction, right into her open arms. It was just a matter of time and patience. And as a goddess of hundreds of millions years behind her, she had plenty of both.

Like the visual stalker she was known to be, she used her mirror to follow the child down into the dungeon with her strongest child watching the events unfold right by her side. They were both equally shocked and amazed as the boy tore through several powerful monsters easier than some higher level adventurers.

And with abilities so versatile, numerous and powerful in nature, it only drove her into more despair as she realized how badly she missed out on recruiting this extraordinary boy into her Familia.

She'd believed that she'd found the child's limit when he struggled against the minotaur. It was a powerful level two monster after all and he was merely a beginner, if an exceptional one at that. But he eventually overcame that obstacle as well with terrifying speed of improvement and progress.

Ottar himself could hardly believe it as he watched the child rip through dozens more of the creatures with a blade of fire, ice and lightning in spectacular demonstrations of magic. Not only that, but the child's physical strength as well as he somehow managed to rip off the head of one minotaur with both hands.

It took the Boaz back to his own days of fighting those things. It had been a long time till he'd become capable of that but he'd eventually been able to do it once he'd reached a level high enough. However, by then he'd actually become a second class adventurer and he'd used the naturally gifted super strength of his species.

THIS boy was human, and he'd managed to accomplish something Ottar had only managed in his later life, during his days as a young man. This boy was still just that, a boy.

But what had taken the cake was the battle with the Goliath. No words could have described what the two people were feeling as they reacted to the boy's incredible and innovative as well as equally dangerous ways of taking the beast down. Freya despaired more and more as she realized the treasure that had slipped past her fingers.

One thing she'd taken note of however was when the boy had taken that dark form of his, the swirling darkness hiding in his soul suddenly overtook the light, almost snuffing it out as the boy seemed to draw upon it specifically. She could almost feel his malice through the her mirror. But as quick as it appeared, it disappeared and the darkness receded and allowed the light to take over its original space as the two found equilibrium once again.

The red lightning had also been a thing of interest for her. That someone so small could unleash something so devastatingly powerful when he should have been low on Mind, gave her the impression that it could not have possible been magic, not exactly. And she also could not shake off the feeling that there was something unsettlingly evil about that lightning either.

But these 'imperfections' as some would see them only gave the depraved goddess more reason to wat the child in her own circle. She smiled as she watched him carried off by Nine Hell back to the Twilight Manor. She couldn't have the boy now for certain.

He may be a part of another Familia, but that did not mean she could not help him grow from behind the scenes. She couldn't wait to see how brightly that flame inside his soul would burn in the pursuit of more strength.

"Tell me Ottar dear, what do you think of our little friend?" She asked in a motherly tone.

Ottar bowed as he spoke to his mother-figure.

"I believe he is the most promising adventurer yet to step foot in Orario. To be able to defeat so many middle floor monsters, as well as slay a monster rex on his first dungeon run, not to mention being able to draw blood out of Braver in a simple spar. Such achievements are nothing short of a promise of a glorious career as most definitely a first class adventurer, more powerful than can be imagined."

"More powerful than you?" Freya questioned as she looked back at her child with a side eye.

"Far more powerful than me, my Lady. If he is already able to accomplish so much while being a simple level one, it is terrifying to think what he would be capable of if he reached level six the same as I." Ottar said, with no hint of exaggeration in his tone. Just pure truth, or rather honesty of opinion.

"Well you are nearing level seven yourself Ottar. You just need that little something to nudge you along. I am most certainly waiting with great anticipation." Freya smiled.

"I will endeavour to reach that level as quickly as possible if that is what you wish."

"Hmm, no. Take your time. Slowly and organically brings forth quality and efficiency when it comes to matters such as this."

"As you command." Ottar bowed.

Freya turned back to her mirror and placed her hand on the image of the sleeping child.

"Ottar."

"Yes my Lady."

"I want that child. I want him oh so badly. But I'm afraid I missed the opportunity to snatch him up first. That does not mean however that I can not help his growth along." She looked back at the giant man. "At some point, I would like you to test his power yourself, and feel out his potential."

"Of course. But would others not find it odd that someone such as I would challenge someone so lowly in level?"

"No. Not with the reputation he's bound to garner. With an achievement like killing Goliath, I doubt he will stay a level one for long. We will be just one Familia among others that will try and test him to see if he is truly what the rumours will make him out to be."

"I understand."

"Good. It does not have to be now. Perhaps when he next enters the dungeon. Time will tell. And as he grows more powerful, the closer he will come to me. Eventually, he may take the seat of the Einherjar. Who knows? But for now, I am perfectly content in waiting."

She stood up from her chair and placed the wine glass down on her table.

"Now then." she said. "Knowing that ridiculous harpy, Loki, she will no doubt want to celebrate a mighty event such as this with alcohol and hot food. And there is only one place she will go for both." She looked at Ottar. "I will be spending the rest of the night swapped with Horn. Have Allen do the usual for me."

Ottar bowed and walked out of the room to relay the protocol orders. Freya looked back at the mirror as she watched the boy engage in a pillow fight with his childish goddess.

"I look forward to meeting you in person, young one. Let us see, if you truly are the one for me."

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