Introduction

What happens when an atheist retiree is part of a mass summoning.

But what happens when he does not accept the rules of the nobles that summoned him and believes that his goal is to improve the lives of others.

This is the story of that man

1.0 Prolog.

The ritual was decades in the planning. The expense of the endeavor was staggering. First, the temple that was being used needed to be cleansed and dedicated to the god of fate. This was not a simple task, Guul was a fickle deity. Catching and holding his attention was always problematic, Fate itself was a difficult form of magic to invoke. While reading the threads of fate was acceptable and within the higher magics the costs were significant in that once a reading had occurred fate becomes fixed, and when the reading was unfavorable, the difficulties in moving the finger of fate to a different outcome was always hard.

Nearly a millennium earlier, a seer had a prophecy that had many branches and had promised great things for a small city that was situated at the mouth of one of the great rivers. The leaders decided that for all the risks they would follow the prophecy. The result 923 years later was that the city had grown from its humble beginnings to an empire that spanned much of the continent. Each span of years the leading families gather to empower the prophets and hear the predictions, warnings, and promises. These minor prophecies illuminated the original prophecy to the point that now all of the original projections and branches had been trimmed or exceeded. For the last 11 gatherings, this had been the case. 3 gatherings ago a new and powerful branch had appeared. It promised much but the costs were high. The Empire would conquer the continent. Develop from the minor power that it was now, to be a true world power. To achieve this various sacrifices would be required.

With each generation, the leaders had become more and more removed from the people that made up the empire. Now looking at the costs of the branch that they want to take, they found it was unacceptable to their families. There would need to be a culling of the privileges that they had obtained, only for some 100 years, but more importantly, the leaders of the various key families would need to toil and work, without access to the privileges that they had come to expect as a matter of right. They would have been happy to kill off various members of their families even without the new path since most family members were immune to the ravages of aging. Gaining rank was very much a blood sport where death and dismemberment were the norms. This aspect of the ruling families had extended downwards and even families, cults, and most clans in the major cities, even when the skill of 'Deathless' was not available to the leaders of the various entities.

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What was required was an approach that enabled the path to be followed, while removing the impact of the negative aspects. To this end, the ritual was developed, and the costs were heavy. The impacts on the ordinary citizens and most particularly the non-humans were massive. Yet for the slaves, the horrors that the ritual inflicted were at least painless on the surface, after all being sacrificed to power the ritual did not in this case require that the sacrifices were in pain, thus to the clerics that were killing the slaves it was just simpler to induce a willingness to move forward and present their necks to the killing strikes.

Precious metals and rare gems were obtained and used to capture the life force of the slaves.

At last, the ritual could start. Powered spirit jars were placed at the various junctions. Priest and Casters poured faith and power into the array. The faint lines that joined the circles started to glow. At certain points, the caches of materials and artifacts that had been stacked carefully in each of the major nodes started to glow. Once this occurred the various casters stopped powering the ritual itself and pushed all their available power into the outer circles which enclosed the complex web of nodes and lines. Quickly a dome enclosed the working, Flickers of void escaped before the dome was completed and consumed some of the workers. Only one of these gaps in the fabric of reality managed to reach the observers and consumed 3 imperial family members before being crushed. By this time each of the caches had reached a point where only the most powerful could view the rapidly diminishing stacks.

At this point suddenly each of the piles of treasures flared to the point that even the most powerful were blinded and almost simultaneously the shielding became opaque and the ritual space became unobservable.

The grand summoning occurred.

The Summoning Circles [https://imgur.com/wHBGSp3]

Each of the summoning circles pulled people from different worlds across the multiverse. The effects of this spell were well understood by the families It had often been used to summon particular types of heroes. Two titles would accrue to each of those summoned. “Offwolder”; which results in the summoned having an ability to develop much faster than the normal inhabitants of the local world. The other title was “Hero”; which meant that any skill that was learned tended to of a higher grade, It also meant that skills tended to consolidate more easily which in turn made the skills more powerful.

The drawback of both titles meant that the holders attracted attention. Once they left the safety of the locale where they were summoned the life expectancy was much worse than the average adventurer.

The needs of the imperial family were such that this was not a simple summoning. A normal summoning might draw offworlders from 1 or occasional 2 worlds. But this summoning was not complete until It drew from 7 worlds. This in theory would protect the ruling powers as heroes were considered to be members of the imperium, thus they could be sacrificed to address the prophecy. All that was required was to allocate each hero to the various factions within the circle. And thus their problem would be solved.

Thus a total of 53 heroes were pulled from their homes. As each of the worlds came from different universes, each universe had different ways that Life had come about and how it succeeded. Two of these worlds were aware of the concept of summoning so those that were summoned were unsurprised.