Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

With her Elven Swiftness enhancing her reaction time, Aeliana simply slipped her head a fraction of an inch to the left.

The glowing accelerated fist grazed her pristine white collar, ripping the silk fabric but completely missing her flesh.

Rowenna’s momentum carried her awkwardly forward with her balance completely overextended.

Seeing the miss, Aeliana’s green eyes flashed.

The Elf fluidly brought her right hand up, bending her elbow in a wide sloppy arc, as if she was attempting to deliver a clumsy sweeping backhand to Rowenna’s exposed neck.

Rowenna, operating on pure adrenaline, saw the sweeping right hand coming.

She immediately shifted her weight, bringing her left arm up in a rigid desperate block to catch the incoming blow and protect her neck but the blow never landed.

Aeliana’s sweeping right hand completely stopped mid-air.

It was a fake! A flawless high-speed feint...

Rowenna’s eyes widened as she realized her left arm was now raised high in the air, completely exposing the entire left side of her torso.

Before the Runic Arcanist could even attempt to pull her arm back down, Aeliana stepped deeply into the pocket, completely closing the distance.

The Elf dropped her center of gravity, loaded her hips like a coiled spring, and unleashed her real attack... a devastating, perfectly executed left hook that buried itself wrist-deep into Rowenna’s exposed floating ribs.

CRUNCH!

The sickening sound of cartilage fracturing echoed over the howling wind.

All the air violently exploded out of Rowenna’s lungs in a choked breathless gasp.

Her eyes bulged with her knees instantly buckling as the agonizing pain of the liver-shot shut down her nervous system.

The girls on the sidelines winced collectively.

Brida sucked in a sharp breath through her teeth, instinctively rubbing her own ribs.

”That’s a powerful strike,” Vala muttered in shock, staring at the elegant Elf. ”She fights exactly like Lord Graves.”

Rowenna folded forward, gagging for breath with her hands dropping uselessly toward the snow.

As her vision grayed out, a deep suppressed memory violently surfaced in the back of her mind.

’F-fuck...’

It was a memory from the Sovereign Realm but before she met her Lord and before the Blessed Land was even established.

It was a memory of a stuffy, brightly lit combat-theory classroom back at the Academy that she attended before being summoned here.

’You are a mage, Rowenna...’ the gruff scarred voice of her old combat instructor echoed clearly in her head.

The memory immediately made her wince harder than when she was hit. Out of everybody she remembered, why was it him?

’Mages die in the field because they think their spells make them gods but you are not a god... You are a squishy bag of blood holding a loaded gun. If a swordsman gets inside your guard, you bleed exactly like anyone else so what do you do when the enemy breaches the pocket?’

Rowenna sighed, the answer was quite simple... It was to—

’I create space.’

’Exactly,’ the instructor’s voice barked. ’Do not look at their hands as their hands lie. Look at their shoulders, control your breathing and create space like I taught you... The goal is to survive.’

Rowenna gritted her bloody teeth.

She forced her eyes open, fighting through the blinding pain of her bruised ribs but she didn’t look at Aeliana’s hands.

She locked her blurry blue eyes directly onto the Elf’s pristine, white-silk shoulders.

She saw Aeliana’s right shoulder twitch, dropping slightly.

’An uppercut...’ Rowenna read the telegraph perfectly. She was grateful that she had taken Combat classes.

Using every ounce of willpower she possessed, Rowenna threw her head violently backward, completely abandoning her stance just as Aeliana launched a brutal right uppercut aimed at her chin.

The Elf’s knuckles grazed the tip of Rowenna’s nose, missing the knockout blow by a fraction of an inch.

Rowenna desperately tried to scramble backward, her bare feet kicking up slush as she tried to put distance between herself and the melee monster.

’Create space... Create space...’

But the theory nor practice at the Academy didn’t account for the terrifying reality of an Epic-Rank combatant in the Sovereign Realm.

Aeliana didn’t let her retreat.

The Elf simply flowed forward like water, sticking to Rowenna like a shadow, completely dictating the pacing of the engagement.

Rowenna tried to throw a desperate sloppy jab to keep her away, but Aeliana casually parried the strike away with her left hand, completely opening up the Runic Arcanist’s center line again.

What followed was a brutal and perfectly executed disassembly.

Aeliana stepped in.

THWACK!

A lightning-fast straight right caught Rowenna flush on the cheekbone, snapping her head to the left and sending a spray of blood into the falling snow.

THUD!

Aeliana immediately followed up with a crushing left hook to the exact same bruised ribs she had hit seconds ago.

Rowenna screamed with her body folding in half.

CRACK.

Before Rowenna could collapse, Aeliana grabbed the back of her blue hair with her left hand, hauled her head downward, and drove her right knee violently upward.

The knee collided directly with Rowenna’s sternum with the force of a battering ram.

’I don’t hate you but I want to be the woman that my Lord brings around...’ Aeliana thought,

Rowenna’s eyes rolled back in her head.

Her arms fell completely limp at her sides. She was practically unconscious on her feet, held up entirely by the Elf’s grip on her hair.

”Holy shit,” Tasmin whispered on the sidelines with her eyes wide. ”She’s butchering her.”

Silas watched without blinking.

He didn’t intervene just yet.

’Rowenna needs to learn more... she has a lot of potential after all.’ Silas thought.

In the Sovereign Realm, you learned by bleeding. If Rowenna wanted to survive the Secret Realm, she had to figure out how to survive an opponent who completely out-statted her in close quarters.

Aeliana released her grip on Rowenna’s hair, letting the battered, bloody girl begin to drop toward the slush however the Elf didn’t stop there.

Aeliana pivoted on her left foot, spinning her entire body with flawless dancer-like grace.

She dropped her center of gravity, planting both of her hands flat against the freezing, snow-covered slate tiles, and launched her right leg upward in a devastating capoeira-style spinning hook kick.

The heel of Aeliana’s pristine white boot caught Rowenna perfectly, squarely in the center of her chest.

BOOM!

The force of the kick lifted the Runic Arcanist completely off her feet.

Rowenna was launched backward like a discarded ragdoll.

She flew through the air, crossing fifteen feet of open space before slamming violently into the ground.

Rowenna tumbled head-over-heels through the freezing slush, her limp body skipping across the slate tiles like a skipped stone until she finally rolled to a complete, devastating halt near the edge of the circle.

She lay there in the snow, completely motionless.

The courtyard was dead silent as the only sound was the howling of the blizzard.

”Match over!” Brida yelled out, taking a step forward to go check on the B-Rank mage. ”The runic girl is out cold! Lady Eluned, please heal her!”

Reina, the referee, raised her hand, taking a deep breath to officially call the fight and declare the Starlight Arcanist the victor.

Aeliana slowly stood up from her crouch. The Elf brushed a speck of snow off her white silk robes with her chest heaving slightly.

She looked across the courtyard at the crumpled form of her rival with a look of genuine pity crossing her elegant features.

”She fought bravely...” Aeliana murmured, turning her head to look back at Silas for his approval.

Silas didn’t look at Aeliana.

His golden-ringed eyes were locked with focus on Rowenna’s crumpled body.

’Look at her feet,’ Silas thought.

While Rowenna had been getting her face boxed in, while she was getting brutally dismantled by the combo, and while she was tumbling helplessly through the freezing slush... Silas had seen something completely unnatural.

Her bare toes had been dragging through the snow.

As she rolled across the slate tiles, her toes had carved deep and perfectly straight, geometric lines into the mud beneath the frost.

At the edge of the ring, Rowenna lay face down in the snow.

Slowly, agonizingly, her right hand twitched.

She didn’t push herself up.

She simply slapped her bloody, bruised palm flat against the wet slate tiles, pressing her hand directly into the center of the geometric lines she had carved with her feet.

Rowenna coughed, a thick mouthful of blood spilling onto the ice.

She weakly turned her head, looking through the blizzard directly at Aeliana.

Her left eye was completely swollen shut, her lip was split, and her ribs were screaming but the unyielding grin that broke across her bloody face was quite terrifying.

”Checkmate... you pointy-eared bitch,” Rowenna croaked.

The moment her hand touched the snow, the ambient mana in the courtyard violently inverted.

FZZZZZZZZT!

A blinding dense flash of deep violet light erupted from the ground directly beneath Aeliana’s boots.

The lines Rowenna had carved during her beating connected perfectly.

The entire section of the courtyard beneath the Elf flared with the unmistakable geometry of a crafted magical array.

Runic Gravity Well (10x).

Aeliana’s silver eyes widened in horror.

Before the Elf could even attempt to cast her Aegis shield, the spell activated.

The gravity within a twenty-foot radius of the violet circle instantly, violently multiplied by a factor of ten.

CRACK!

The thick slate tiles beneath Aeliana’s feet immediately buckled and shattered under the sheer atmospheric pressure.

Aeliana didn’t just fall; she was physically slammed down into the ground by an invisible crushing skyscraper of gravity.

She hit the floorboards on her hands and knees with a sickening thud with the breath exploding from her lungs.

The snow around her was instantly compressed into solid, flat sheets of black ice from the downforce.

”Augh!”

The Elf let out a choked scream of agony, her pristine white robes pressing flat against her skin as her bones groaned under the weight of her own body mass being multiplied tenfold.

The girls erupted into chaos.

”YES!” Morwenna roared at the top of her lungs, throwing her hands in the air. ”DIRTY PIRATE TACTICS! SHE SET A TRAP WHILE SHE WAS GETTING HER TEETH KICKED IN! THAT’S MY KIND OF MAGE!”

Eluned narrowed her glowing green eyes, genuinely impressed by the masochistic dedication it took to maintain a complex runic casting sequence while actively suffering a concussion.

”She weaponized her own defeat,” Eluned murmured, looking at the bloody B-Rank mage with newfound respect. ”She deliberately baited Aeliana into a false sense of security... That’s quite outstanding, and Aeliana isn’t doing so bad either.”

Silas crossed his arms with a grin breaking across his face.

’That’s my girl,’ Silas thought proudly. ’Both of them... now Aeli, I want to see how you break past this.’

In the center of the violet circle, Aeliana was completely pinned to the shattering slate.

She couldn’t lift her arms and she couldn’t stand up.

The gravity was so intense it felt like her internal organs were being slowly dragged out of her back.

The physical superiority she possessed as an A-Rank Elf was neutralized; muscles meant absolutely nothing when the planet itself was trying to swallow you whole.

Rowenna slowly, painfully pushed herself up onto her knees outside the perimeter of the gravity well.

She wiped the blood from her chin with her blue eyes full of triumph.

She raised her right hand, channeling her remaining mana reserves, preparing to drop a massive Ignis Rune directly onto the pinned Elf and end the match with a pillar of superheated fire.

’I have her,’ Rowenna thought with her heart pounding. ’I did it.’

Inside the crushing violet well, Aeliana forced her head up, her eyes locking onto the glowing crimson rune forming in Rowenna’s hand.

Aeliana bared her teeth in a furious snarl.

”I am not... done!” Aeliana ground out through clenched teeth.

She couldn’t move her body, so she abandoned physical movement entirely.

Aeliana closed her eyes, entirely bypassing the crushing physical gravity, and aggressively tapped directly into her A-Rank mana core.

The air around her pinned body began to hum with a high-pitched vibrating sound as brilliant blinding particles of blue-white starlight began to bleed directly out of her skin, swirling wildly in the heavy air.

Silas’s eyes widened. ”She’s bending the space?”

Rowenna saw the starlight gathering.

She panicked, accelerating her casting speed.

The crimson Ignis Rune finalized in her palm and she thrust her hand forward, unleashing a massive roaring torrent of superheated fire directly at the pinned Elf.

The fire crossed the courtyard, melting the snow instantly into a cloud of thick, blinding steam but a microsecond before the flames engulfed her, Aeliana screamed.

’Spatial Teleportation!’

BOOM!

The space inside the gravity well violently warped as the air displaced with the sound of a thunderclap.

The fire washed over the slate tiles, completely incinerating the spot where Aeliana had just been kneeling but the Elf wasn’t there.

Rowenna’s head snapped upward, her eyes frantically searching the blizzard.

Thirty feet straight up in the freezing air, hovering completely unaffected by the 10x gravity field anchored to the ground below, Aeliana materialized out of a flash of blue-white starlight.

The Elf was floating in the sky with her white robes fluttering wildly in the howling blizzard.

She was panting heavily, her mana core screaming from the sheer cost of forcing a spatial teleportation while under the crushing influence of a gravity well but she was free.

’And now... I have the high ground.’