With Athena's patronage secured, Nicholas Aldridge entered a new and accelerated phase of his ascent.
Her "guidance" manifested as strategic dreams, vivid, detailed visions of political maneuvers in Congress, warnings about rival military factions, and startlingly precise insights into foreign intelligence networks that even his own division had missed.
But to Nicholas her only true use was making sure he didnt get smited by a God wanting to push their child to power.
He accepted these nocturnal briefings with the performative gratitude of a dutiful son, while privately running every piece of information through the Book of Probability where he confirmed that her help was genuine, if entirely self-serving.
His position within the Military Intelligence Division became an fortress of his own making. Using the divine insights Athena provided as a starting point, and the guidance of the Book, he orchestrated a series of stunning, public counter-intelligence victories.
He didn't merely uncover spies; he constructed elaborate traps, allowing entire foreign networks to believe they were secure, only to orchestrate their very public collapse at the most geopolitically damaging moment for America's rivals.
Each success was a carefully crafted spectacle, earning him headlines, presidential commendations, and, most crucially, rapid promotions.
Within 4 years at a mere 24 years old, Nicholas was pinning the stars of a Brigadier General to his uniform, becoming the youngest of his rank in a generation, a man hailed in Washington as the undisputed spymaster.
But his true war, the one that mattered, was fought on a different, invisible front. Under the shroud of the Kapre's concealment authority, the Order of Eternity ceased to be a discreet club for the very few but grew and metastasized into a hydra, its heads reaching into every facet of American life.
Through his growing network of fanatical disciples, he established a web of legitimate fronts: charitable foundations that dispensed miraculously effective healing in impoverished urban and rural areas, investment firms that seemed to possess an uncanny, never-failing intuition, and a small but influential chain of newspapers and radio stations that subtly, persistently shaped public perception toward strength, order, and a reverence for timeless wisdom.
The worship of Aeon, the God of Magic, Fate, and War, became a quiet, powerful undercurrent in the psyche of the American Elite.
Faith now flowed to him not just from desperate villagers overseas, but from cynical captains of industry, influential media barons, and powerful politicians who saw tangible, worldly results from their whispered devotion.
Through this faith he got a surprising discovery, that if the person who believed in him and prayed to him was renown they would contribute a portion the faith flowing towards them to Nicholas, like a river flowing into an ocean.
He guessed that it was one of the reasons that the Greek Gods used to battle over the faith and worship of mortal rulers in the past, as they also stumbled on this phenomenon.
The mighty river of belief from the Philippines was now joined by a roaring torrent of hundreds of thousands from the very heart of the American Empire itself, all of it channeled safely into the reservoir of the Book of Probability, completely invisible to the complacent gods on Olympus hidden by the Cloak of Concealment.
Yet, for all this power, Nicholas felt a distinct lack. The Kapre cloak was a masterpiece of defense and subtlety, but he required a true instrument of attack.
The Book and the goddesses within, ever-reliable, guided him to the sacred Black Hills, where the Great Plains met the sky in a endless expanse.
There, in the heart of the gathering storms, dwelled the Thunderbird, a majestic, primordial spirit of storm and sky, whose 6 wings created wind and whose eyes flashed with lightning.
It was a being of immense power, its authority woven from the very fabric of the ancient Native American faith flowing through it though it was weakened by years of neglect.
However, given that it was a mere 200 years ago that it enjoyed active worship it was still the most formidable enemy he had faced yet. Luckily the bird was an irrational creature of instinct and Nicholas was no longer just a simple mortal.
Confronting the Thunderbird became a coordinated assault across multiple domains of power. As the colossal creature descended from the storm-wracked sky, Nicholas channeled his authority over air to create a pocket of unnatural calm around himself.
Meanwhile, the fate goddesses bound within the Book of Probability worked in concert, their ancient consciousnesses subtly plucking the threads of destiny.
They ensured a vital thermal updraft collapsed at the crucial moment for the Thunderbird's dive, that a claw-swipe missed by an impossible margin, and that the beast's own lightning strikes were guided by fate to hit the most electrically grounded rocks nearby.
Simultaneously, the Kapre's mischievous essence woven into his cloak twisted perception and reality around the battle, making the Thunderbird misjudge distances and causing its terrifying roars to echo back on themselves in a disorienting cacophony.
Meanwhile Nicholas used every elemental spell in his arsenal to bombard the creature. The battle of their domains twisted the very world and caused the mountains around them to shake and crack, the sky being overcast with dark twisting clouds as far as the eye could see.
This multi-front war of attrition, waged through elemental control, manipulated fate, and spatial trickery, systematically down broke the 6 winged bird.
The Thunderbird, a being of pure instinct, could not fight an enemy that controlled the very circumstances of the battle. Its rage turned to confusion, its powerful strikes rendered futile by a universe that seemed to conspire against it.
Nicholas stood as the focal point of this convergence, his will the central command for this symphony of domination.
When the great beast's spirit finally faltered, exhausted and outmaneuvered on every level, Nicholas froze it before compressing its essence into a swirling orb of storm and sky, the ultimate trophy of a victory achieved not by overpowering his foe, but by making the world itself his weapon.
He bound this essence to a staff of lightning-struck ponderosa pine, a wood chosen for its deep roots in the American West and its resilience to storms.
The resulting artifact, which he named the Anemos Staff, was a conduit for absolute atmospheric control.
With it, he could summon gales, still hurricanes, call down lightning with pinpoint accuracy, or shatter eardrums with a thunderclap.
It was the scepter of a weather god, the tool that would allow him to wield the sky itself as a weapon.
It was a fitting focus for him, causing his authority in the Air Element to surpass even the levels of the Minor Gods given that the staff was powered by the faith of hundreds of thousands of mortals.
It was at this zenith of his power, both mortal and divine, that he made his most important move to move up the mortal ranks.
The Book of Probability showed a clear path: his greatest influence would not be found in the military, but in the halls of Congress.
With the full support of his mother Athena and the immense political machine of the Order of Eternity working in the shadows, he arranged for an honorable discharge.
The narrative for his election was perfect: the brilliant young general, his service to the nation in intelligence and combat deemed complete, heeded the call to serve his country in a new capacity.
He returned to New York and, in a landslide, victory fueled by his war-hero status, his father's political machine, and the influence of the Order, Nicholas Aldridge was easily elected to the United States House of Representatives.
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