The sorceress stood above her latest acquisition, a tanned humanoid with brown hair.

It was a perfectly average being. Roughly six feet tall, not big enough to pose a threat to her personnel unarmed, not small enough to have to worry about him hiding in some small nook or crawl through the vents. On the flip side, lightweight enough to easily climb something, a tree or cliff face for example while not being so light that he could be easily lifted or shoved around by anything that didn't have magically enhanced bodies.

Very average, and if her readings from the many tests were correct he had no innate magical abilities to speak of.

No blessings from any gods that granted special abilities.

No innate ability to understand the arcane.

She sensed no chi, soul manipulation abilities, or the ability to speak to the natural world.

No enhanced physique that would allow him to tear them into pieces with his hands.

Unable to resist even the weakest curses and malefactions.

He didn't even specifically have no magical ability, it was simply so low that he could never cast a spell should he practice for a million years while still existing in enough capacity that he registered in magical detection abilities.

What he did have was obvious: brightly colored clothing that registered as mass produced and a smartphone. This meant his species had some level of technological ability, and given that his smartphone only had sixty four gigabytes of memory, his species wasn't even particularly advanced.

The sorceress smelled bullshit. He had a soul and that registered on her many intensive and invasive scans of her new prisoner. The fact that he had a soul meant that he was created by a god just like everyone else. Not some soulless evolutionary monstrosity.

Well, if he had been created by a god, what was his purpose? Some species had been made as builders or architects, while some races were made to enjoy the bountiful worlds that their creators had gifted them.

Some had even been born as slaves, though that was generally seen as a fairly stupid move, given that making a species who hated you and wanted to rebel never ended up with you in charge for eternity.

But then, even the cruelest of tyrants and the most evil of gods agreed that leaving your species defenseless wasn't a good idea. Whether they granted the ability to survive with little to no food or water, to work without rest or to not fear disease, or stronger bodies to defend themselves and their god's belongings, to name a few, every race had something to give them an edge over others.

She had never heard of nothing. What god would go through all of the effort of creating an entire species just to give them no edge at all over common wildlife? If his entire species had no blessings or powers at all then it would have no method of defending itself should any species attack it; their god would need to show up personally to deal with anything that threatened them with extinction.

She was fairly sure that if they were a technological genius they would have anti-teleportation measures like all of the others with learning based blessings.

Which meant that his blessing was hidden. She tried asking him what it was and was told he had no clue what she was talking about. Maybe a stealth type? Someone with stealth and the ability to see others of their species would never notice until they met foreigners. She turned to the humanoid wolf to her right.

"Mark him, tell me if you know his location."

The wolf nodded, she saw their eyes focus and begin glowing slightly.

"No changes, I can sense him perfectly."

She would have rather kidnapped an entire swarm of Biters than a person who's blessing she couldn't identify. In this specific case a metaphorical concealed knife would be infinitely worse than a metaphorical rifle, say he had the ability to temporarily negate blessings. If she put him in the cages next to the other slaves he might be able to negate all the servant crests she had laboriously implanted onto each one. She was dangerous but not at the league where she could fight off dozens of people with their own abilities simultaneously.

The ability to sometimes temporarily negate blessings wouldn't show up currently if he didn't activate it.

Currently he was under the effects of a mind numb and therefore would mindlessly do whatever she asked of him as long as it didn't cause him enough pain to wake him up. But then again if his blessing included mind control immunities then he could just be faking it.

Was he faking it? Reveling in her confusion and waiting for an opportunity to strike?

He was a pain in the ass, while also being an unregistered species who was undoubtedly worth much more. Yet the only reason she didn't kill him was because she didn't know if he had a suicide based ability. Using your death to explode violently or curse the person who killed you, while rare, wasn't unheard of.

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A voice from one of her underlings, "Maybe something luck based? Those are hard to detect."

Luck was a pain to deal with, if he had supernatural luck they would have to send him back immediately.

She pointed towards a gambler, "You, toss something at him and everyone else get ready in case it negates the current effects."

Two dice made of bone flew out of the crowd, hitting him and landing on the ground for a total roll of eight.

"He is slowed, and will only be able to run at half speed."

Well, if he was luck based he should have easily negated a gambler.

They couldn't risk doing something to him until after they knew what he did. It was a miracle in the first place that they didn't have resistances to a randomized summoning circle, or any of a myriad of abilities that would have countered one of the steps to having him sit here nicely while they discovered how to disarm him completely so that he could be sold.

"Have a scryer take position, have four counter detections sitting around and get one of the slaves to take position behind the er... Human before we try this, if something activates have the slave kill him immediately."

A dragonoid took position two steps behind him, a glowing crest seared into their neck. Three drops of blood were painlessly taken from the human in the center of the room, and then given to the old woman who dribbled them onto a crystal ball.

Four shades took position around her, hiding her presence from the universe itself.

They knew the drill, they had done this countless times before, but the old hag explained herself anyway. This group had been around much longer than any of their peers and it was because they took no chances. You always explained your plan of action beforehand to everyone taking part. That was how militant actions worked.

The overall point of this operation was to find a being, find its abilities, counter said abilities, make them subservient, sell them to buyers.

"I will attempt to scry one of the lowest ranks of angels." The word unfamiliar on her tongue. "Gods always have servants created with no free will, designed for self protection or to perform specific tasks that are required to keep a world functioning."

Everyone knew that, it was something people taught in elementary school if their parents didn’t teach them before even that.

"Something else, is that if a god maintains control of a world, only something with a portion of that specific god's power can directly manipulate or maintain it. Thus, even the weakest angel should look like and have similar abilities as their god."

The 'average' angel was hardly more dangerous than a normal person, though generally the fact that they tended to spawn even without a god directly willing it meant they had great numbers.

"One angel will be no issue even if it manages to reach us, however an equal number would leave everyone dead or worse. Should the spell be picked up by more than three I will immediately break connection and we will all retreat from this location as quickly as possible, leaving everything but what you have on your person behind."

They nodded, some veterans had done that before. Those that stuck around long enough to try and grab their belongings when an evacuation was called did not become veterans.

Your own life wasn’t worth any amount of money.

"I will start now." The lady wiped the partially dried blood into a runic symbol, and the orb began to glow.

Everyone watched, the orb got brighter and brighter until it lit the entire room. So bright that you needed to look away or else you would become blinded.

"I see light! There is light! Do their abilities center around the sun? Is his not active because we are beneath the ground? What time zone are we in?"

Someone cursed and deployed a dark cloud which seemed to consume the light in the room. The haze which wanted to leave them all blind in darkness fought with the light that sought to sear their corneas before settling on the level of a well lit room.

"But we are not done yet. Who has the power to allow us to see through this light?"

Another voice called out in a magical tongue and the light began to recede, or rather their eyes adapted, pupils shrinking to allow them to see past even unending light.

They started to see as the light grew dimmer and dimmer, until they could make out the rough size of the angel mainly through what was still blocked from sight.

They heard a voice, not through their ears but within their minds. Some type of telepathic ability? It was speaking in something old that even a god-given blessing had difficulty translating.

"Insolent wretches. I give you no such permission to gaze upon my form. Begone lest you incur my ire."

It was a reflection of a god, so some pride was to be expected. Still, dominion over light and mental abilities wasn't a matchup she had ever heard of.

Now an outline was starting to appear, somewhat circular. A giant eye maybe?

"I see you, you ignorant whelps. You have taken a child of Tera from his rightful home? Turn back your ways now or suffer for it."

The angel was staring right back through the orb. It should not have been possible, four different people overlapping their blessings to keep their sight hidden and it was staring right through them.

No, it was staring at her with its giant eye- no eyes, wait- one big eye made of smaller eyes. Eyes everywhere spinning in a circle around a wheel that-

The light dimmed, and the hag gazed upon the being's true form and started screaming, falling out of her chair and attempting to tear out her own eyes.

It didn’t work, her hands fused with the melting ball of glass she held. Her flesh started to boil, the light- no the image of this creature was tearing holes in the hag’s face. She writhed, trying to take her hands away from the scrying instrument. The rest of the room moved away from the obvious hazard.

After all, if a scrying expert was failing at stopping counter scrying what odds did they have?

Eventually the hag transitioned from a flailing person to a corpse and in that moment the four people in charge of keeping the scrying attempt discrete, veterans who had been doing this work for decades, ran shrieking until someone shot ice across the room and destroyed the orb.

With no source of light the cloud of darkness blanketed the room, before that too was pulled back leaving barely enough light to see.

A voice from the side. "What the fuck was that?"

The sorceress would like to know too. The hag laid dead on the ground and the four in charge of keeping them hidden were nowhere to be seen. She had caught only the barest glimpses of the orb since she was across the room and it had left her unsettled.

Still, as the leader, if she showed fear everyone would lose hope and descend into panic. Even if she had no clue what just happened, she needed to maintain an aura of superiority.

"Obviously she accidentally looked at something she shouldn't have. It seems like she must have made a mistake and scryed a higher ranking angel." She paused for a second searching for words.

"The good news is that it appears that thing's power is sight based, something about blinding people and making them see horrifying imagery and whatnot. Kill him and we can just make due with the cargo we have."

Another voice from the side. "Boss." She followed where he was pointing his finger and saw it.

A hole.

A hole a foot and a half off the ground, which something was clawing through. Something much bigger, the sight of a part of its claw was enough to try her mental fortitude. The mental fortitude of someone who had been enslaving and tormenting innocents for centuries.

Everything clicked at once, they did scry one of the lowest level angels and the human did have a blessing.

The blessing of not being designed in this thing's image. The blessing to be able to truthfully tell her that he didn't even know if god was real or not because no one in living memory had ever seen their true creator's face or directly heard their voice.

A blessing she did not share.