Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Seventy-three outfitted warriors poured out of the library, completely abandoning their reading studies to join the fray.

Shieldmaidens formed defensive phalanxes using wooden training shields to block incoming barrages, while agile scouts scrambled up onto the sloped ironwood roofs of the smithy and the stables to establish high-ground sniping positions.

Silas stood on the top step of the library portico with his arms crossed over his chest, watching his military faction revert to a mob of ten-year-olds with extreme amusement.

”Form a line!” Vala shouted, ducking behind a stone planter as a volley of snowballs shattered against the masonry above her head. ”Left flank is buckling! Someone suppress that roof!”

Before Silas could step back inside the warm library to leave them to their frozen trench warfare, two hands grabbed him by the back of his heavy trench coat and violently jerked him backward out into the falling snow.

”No hiding in the barracks, Captain!” Morwenna’s raspy voice barked in his ear.

The Dread Queen of the Astral Seas dragged him unceremoniously down the steps and into the thick of the courtyard chaos.

Morwenna had thrown on her heavy, weather-treated canvas coat over her linen wrap with her wild dark hair already dusting in white snowflakes.

Right beside her, stepping gracefully through the slush without getting a single speck of mud on her hem, was Eluned.

The Goddess of Nature had wrapped a thick warm wool shawl over her green silk dress.

’I’m guessing she made that just now but do they have to drag me out here... I just want to read man.’

”The Lord must participate in the territorial defense!” Eluned declared haughtily, pointing a delicate finger toward the northern training yards where a squad of spear-fighters had constructed a makeshift snow-barricade. ”The infantry recruits have established a fortified redoubt! We must crush their rebellion before they gain confidence!”

”I am not fighting a snowball war against my own recruits,” Silas said flatly, attempting to brush the snow off his sleeves. ”I’m your Lord, not a target practice dummy.”

”Too late, Boss!” Morwenna grinned ferociously.

The pirate didn’t bother packing normal snowballs.

Using her absurd SSS-rank physical strength, she reached down, scooped up an entire thirty-pound snowdrift off a nearby wooden weapon rack, compressed it into a dense melon-sized ice-boulder between her forearms, and hurled it across the courtyard with the trajectory of a siege cannon.

BOOM!

’Won’t that kill someone?’

The massive ice-boulder impacted directly against the center of the spear-fighters’ snow-barricade, completely shattering the defensive wall into a cloud of white powder and sending three screaming infantry girls flying backward into a snowdrift.

”Direct hit!” Morwenna roared, pumping her fist. ”Reload! Houseplant, give me suppressing fire!”

Eluned let out an elegant superior sniff. She didn’t stoop to scooping snow with her bare hands.

She simply raised her right palm, channeling a pulse of glowing green nature mana.

Instead of growing vines, she manipulated the moisture and organic particles trapped within the falling snow.

In front of her palm, six perfectly spherical flawless snowballs materialized out of thin air, spinning rapidly like floating runic projectiles.

With a subtle flick of her wrist, Eluned launched all six projectiles simultaneously.

They curved through the freezing air with guided, supernatural precision, sniping six different scouts attempting to flank them from the stables, hitting every single one of them dead center in the forehead with popping impacts.

’Now they’re just being bullies...’

”I have my divine eyes and trajectory,” Eluned smirked smugly at Morwenna. ”Quality over brute naval quantity, pirate.”

While the two SSS-rank monsters were turning the courtyard into a slaughterhouse, a single high-velocity streak of white hissed through the falling snow from the far dark corner of the Beast Pavilion eaves.

SPLAT!

The snowball bypassed Morwenna’s broad shoulders, missed Eluned’s floating runic shield by a millimeter, and struck Aeliana directly in the center of her chest.

The Arcanist had just stepped out onto the library portico, quietly holding her stack of clipboards and minding her own business as she tried to calculate some stuff for the upcoming week.

”Hmmm!”

The impact slammed her backward against the doorframe.

Her pristine white spider-silk robes were instantly plastered with wet, freezing slush, and a wet chunk of snow slid off her collarbone and dropped directly onto her top clipboard, completely ruining her handwritten ink ledger.

The entire courtyard went dead silent for two seconds.

Even Brida and Tasmin stopped wrestling in the slush. Everyone turned to look at the portico.

Aeliana stood frozen against the doorframe. She slowly looked down at her ruined ledger, then looked up, her glowing silver eyes narrowing into cold terrifyingly luminous slits.

High up on the roof of the Beast Pavilion, Fenna... the archer was crouching behind a stone chimney, desperately trying to duck back into the shadows.

”Oh fuck me sideways and cum in me....”

Fenna had been using her inhuman ranger eyesight to snipe targets across the courtyard, but the wind had caught her last throw and drifted it directly into the Arcanist’s path.

”A-apologies, Aeliana!” Fenna squeaked from the roof, raising her hands in surrender. ”It’s the fault of the wind!”

Aeliana didn’t say a word. She didn’t yell, and she didn’t complain about her robes.

She simply dropped her ruined clipboards onto the stone floor. She raised her right hand with her white sleeves fluttering as ambient starlight mana violently erupted around her fingers.

”You can’t do that and expect me not to retaliate...” Aeliana spoke with her voice ringing out like chilled silver bells.

She didn’t throw a snowball. Aeliana instead channeled a small gravitational pulse directly into the snow-covered roof of the Beast Pavilion by using her Starlight though it was quite hard to do

A brilliant beam of blue-white light illuminated the dark sky. Instantly, the entire four-inch layer of accumulated snow resting on the sixty-foot ironwood roof violently detached from the shingles, hovered in the air for a split second, and then condensed into a massive twenty-foot-wide avalanche of crushing white slush that dropped directly downward onto Fenna’s hiding spot.

CRASH!

Fenna let out a muffled yelp as she was completely buried under a lot of falling snow, vanishing from sight entirely.

”Don’t mess with the bookkeeper...” Silas muttered, side-stepping a stray snowball that whizzed past his ear.

Before the girls could recover from Aeliana’s snow-strike, the iron doors of the Library opened.

Thora stepped out into the freezing courtyard.

She was carrying a heavy iron pair of tongs in one hand and a mug of alcohol in the other, wearing only her thick leather forge-apron over a stained sleeveless tunic.

She stopped at the top of the library stairs, taking a long swig of her alcohol that she had gotten from God knows where... she looked out over the chaotic snow-covered courtyard.

Thora saw a lot of women... Half of them including Brida, Vala, and the infantry girls were wearing lightweight linen casual tunics or combat under-layers that were now completely soaked through with melting snow.

The wet fabric was clinging tightly to their skin, their teeth were chattering, and they were shivering violently in the biting Umbral Basin wind.

Thora let out a loud dwarven belly laugh that echoed across the territory.

”By the Ancestors’ beards!” Thora roared, leaning against the stone railing of the Library stairs and pointing her tongs at the shivering shieldmaidens. ”Look at the lot of you! Freezing your arses off in the dark like wet mud-crabs!”

She took another gulp of her drink, her eyes gleaming with shameless crude blacksmith humor as she looked at Brida’s soaked tunic clinging tightly to her massive chest.

”If you lasses wanted your assets to stand at attention that badly, you didn’t need to jump into a snowbank!” Thora bellowed gleefully, winking with total lack of decorum. ”Just come down to the forge! I’ve got a pair of bellows and a roaring hearth that’ll warm your under-layers right up! Or better yet, go ask the Lord! I’m sure his Prime Body runs hot enough to defrost half the barracks if you squeeze in tight enough!”

The entire courtyard froze.

The snowball throwing stopped completely.

Morwenna lowered her ice-boulder and Eluned dismissed her floating runic projectiles. Brida stopped wiping slush from her eyes, hell even Aeliana lowered her glowing hand.

Seventy-three women slowly turned their heads, locking their cold collective gazes directly onto the grinning dwarven blacksmith.

Thora blinked, lowering her mug as the murderous silence of soaking wet women washed over her.

”Uh...” Thora grunted, taking a slow step backward toward the foundry door. ”Now, girls... it was just a bit of humor...”

”DESTROY HER!” Brida roared at the top of her lungs.

It was an instantaneous and unified military consensus.

Every single rivalry, every squad division, and every disagreement vanished in a heartbeat.

All of the women simultaneously reached down into the snow.

Morwenna packed a boulder made of snow.

Eluned summoned twelve snow spheres. Tasmin prepped a dual-wield volley and Brida scooped up an entire planter’s worth of slush.

Even Kaelia, standing safely on the library portico, aggressively packed a small snowball with surprising malice.

”Fire at will!” Vala commanded.

WHOOSH! WHOOSH! WHOOSH! WHOOSH!

The sky darkened. It looked like a meteor shower of pure white slush launching across the courtyard from three different directions, all converging on a single isolated target standing on the Library steps.

”BALLS OF THE ANCESTORS!” Thora shrieked.

She didn’t even have time to turn around and grab the heavy iron door handle.

SPLAT! BOOM! THWACK! CRASH! SPLAT!

Over a hundred pounds of high-velocity snow, shaved ice, and wet slush impacted against the dwarven blacksmith simultaneously.

The weight of the barrage physically lifted Thora off her feet, slammed her backward against the iron door, and completely buried her from head to toe in a massive six-foot-tall mound of freezing white powder.

Her ale mug clattered across the slate tiles, completely empty.

A single soot-stained dwarven hand poked weakly out of the top of the snowdrift, waving a white rag in unconditional surrender.

”That will teach you...” Tasmin announced coldly, wiping her wet palms on her leather pants.

The girls cheered loudly, their collective honor restored by the brutal execution of the pervy blacksmith.

Silas shook his head with a genuine grin breaking across his face as he watched the dwarf’s hand twitching in the snowdrift.

”She brought that entirely on herself.”

He left them to their victory celebration, turning his back on the freezing courtyard, and stepped back up onto the covered portico.

He pushed through the double doors and re-entered the quiet, starlight-illuminated warmth of the Grand Archive.

The contrast was immediate.

Silas walked straight back to the isolated ironwood shelf in the corner, ignoring the muddy boot prints near the entrance as he needed to finish what he had started before the chaos erupted.

He pulled Tales of Asgard off the shelf again where he had kept it before he left, carried it over to the mahogany reading stand, and opened it back up to the middle Chapters.

If the Blessed Land really was sitting directly underneath a spatial tear leading to Odin’s orbital territory, he needed to know what those tears actually looked like in the physical world.

He couldn’t defend his Keep against an anomaly if his scouts didn’t even know what to scan for in the sky.

He flipped past the Chapters detailing Thor’s atmospheric storms and located a section titled:

The Bridges of the All-Father and the Illusions of Loki.

Silas leaned over the parchment with his eyes scanning the dense letters:

[The entrances to Asgard are not physical gates of stone and iron, nor are they runic teleportation circles bound to the earth. Because Odin forged his territory within the higher astral fabric, the bridges linking Asgard to the lower mortal grids manifest as severe fractures in reality itself.

To the mortal eye looking upward from the terrestrial dirt, an active entrance to Asgard appears as a bleeding Gold Tear in the sky... a luminous vertical wound in the atmosphere that burns with pure light. These golden tears are highly volatile and they act as two-way funnels.

While they leak Asgardian weather, celestial debris, and dense ambient mana down onto the territories below, they also serve as the primary invasion corridors utilized by Odin’s elite.

Yet, finding a true Gold Tear is a task fraught with peril, for the borders of Asgard are guarded by Odin’s second daughter, Loki.]

Silas paused, his finger resting on the name.

’Loki is a woman too?’ Silas thought, staring at the text with deep, cynical resignation. ’Odin’s second daughter? Let me guess, the God of Mischief is some overpowered illusionist mage who runs around scamming Lords?’

He read the next paragraph to confirm his suspicion:

[Loki, the Mistress of Spatial Deception and High Arcanist of Asgard, wove thousands of false golden tears across the lower skies.

She draped the clouds in phantom light and spatial mirrors, ensuring that any rival Lord or invading armada attempting to ascend to Asgard would fly into an illusion, only to be crushed by gravity wells or dropped into the freezing trenches.]