Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

The City Lord’s daughter looked terrifying.

Her usually immaculate blond hair was blowing wildly in the freezing wind, and her hands were encased in floating gauntlets of jagged ice.

”You dodged, huh?” Elora stated as she pointed an icy finger at Harper. ”You... I have so many things to say to you, not only did you steal the map but you attacked my scout with lightning after I gave an explicit warning... You deserve to die for what you pulled last night, Harper.”

Before Harper could summon another burst of lightning to defend herself, the sand to her left exploded.

FWOOSH!

A violent roaring column of white-hot fire erupted from the earth, melting the surrounding ice crystals into instant steam.

Stepping out of the flames, her crimson hair flowing like liquid fire and her curved dagger gripped tightly in her hand, Seraphina arrived.

The fiery noblewoman looked entirely different from her usual frantic screaming self.

Her face was calm and her posture was completely relaxed as her red eyes burned with a cold look.

She looked directly at Harper, completely ignoring Elora.

”Harper,” Seraphina asked calmly, her voice entirely devoid of her normal furious, screaming pitch. ”Where is Graves? Tell me where he went, quietly, and I will make your death painless.”

The three girls stood in a tense three-way triangle in the center of the desert battlefield.

They looked at each other in complete silence.

The ambient atmosphere violently distorted around them as their respective elements sounded in reality.

There was the sharp crackling ZZZZZT of Harper’s purple lightning, the freezing crystalline KRKKKKK of Elora’s expanding ice, and the deep, volcanic FWOOOSH of Seraphina’s roaring flames.

Harper shifted her weight with her heart sinking as she analyzed the positioning.

She was wounded, her core was depleting, and she was trapped between a Noble that prided herself on Ice Magic and one for Fire.

’I’m dead,’ Harper thought desperately, bracing her bleeding arms. ’I am about to get jumped by both of them simultaneously.’

Elora stepped forward first with her ice aura flaring to freeze Harper’s boots to the sand.

”Seraphina. Help me execute this woma—”

BOOOOM!

Before Elora could even finish the sentence, Seraphina pivoted on her heel with terrifying explosive speed.

She didn’t attack Harper though.

She drove a superheated fire-wrapped right hook directly into the side of Elora Verinda’s face!

The impact was so violent that it generated a visible circular shockwave of fire and air that shattered the surrounding ice lances.

Elora’s head violently snapped to the side, her body lifting completely off the ground as she was sent flying thirty feet across the sand, crashing heavily into a sand dune with a muffled thud.

”That’s payback!” Seraphina roared, her calm demeanor instantly evaporating into unbridled rage as she shook her smoking fist at the crater. ”That’s payback for making me pay that exorbitant Hero Summoning Card back then and using me yesterday, you scheming blond-haired bitch!”

Without pausing for a single heartbeat, Seraphina spun back around and violently attacked Harper too!

”And you get to die for touching my prey!” Seraphina screamed, lunging forward with her curved dagger slashing in a devastating X-shaped arc of white-hot fire.

Harper’s survival reflexes saved her life.

She violently pushed her electrical blood, blurring backward with a desperate spark of static.

The flaming dagger sliced through the front of her leather armor, scorching her skin as she narrowly dodged the lethal blows, backflipping across the melted sand to gain distance.

Over in the sand dune, the debris violently exploded outward.

Elora rose from the sand, her lip bleeding, her face contorted in pure fury. She had never been so angered and annoyed before.

”You insane uneducated arsonist!” she shrieked.

Elora rapidly made a complex, two-handed runic hand sign.

At the exact same instant, standing half a mile away on a high dune, Elora’s summoned Hero also helped as well!

The Hero slammed her staff into the earth, channeling her mana pool directly into Elora to amplify the spell.

”Glacial Sepulcher!” Elora commanded.

KRKKKKKKKKKKKK!

A massive sixty-foot-tall dome of ultra-dense magical blue ice violently erupted from the desert floor, instantly enclosing all three girls... Elora, Seraphina, and Harper within a sealed, inescapable arena.

The temperature inside the dome cratered to absolute zero instantly.

The walls of the ice dome were actively freezing from the inside out, emitting a terrifying high-frequency dampening field.

The white-hot frost aggressively crept up their leather boots, rapidly scaling their legs and torsos, forcibly freezing their mana pathways and completely stopping their respective elements from taking control of the atmospheric ambient energy!

Harper gasped as the frost encased her knees with her purple lightning violently sputtering and dying out. ”My mana... it’s locked!”

Elora spat a wad of blood onto the ice, glaring at Seraphina with cold triumph.

”The internal dampening field suppresses all elemental ignition beneath the Sovereign realm. You can’t cast your fire here, Seraphina. You are just a powerless mortal in a cage...”

However, all Seraphina did was laugh.

She stood in the dead center of the freezing dome with the ice rapidly scaling up to her waist, and let out a loud peal of laughter that echoed off the frozen walls.

”You think I need atmospheric fire, you arrogant fool?” Seraphina mocked, her red eyes flashing with terrifying power. ”I am a favored daughter of the World Council! Did you really think I came into this Secret Realm without a trump card?!”

Seraphina raised her hand to her face and called upon her own Hero!

Unlike baseline Lords who summoned physical warriors or mages to walk beside them, Seraphina had utilized a Mythic-tier binding contract.

Her Hero was an ancient formless Primordial Fire Spirit!

FWOOSH!

The space around Seraphina’s head violently distorted.

Instead of a person materializing, the Primordial Fire Spirit instantly appeared directly upon her flesh, manifesting as an intricate glowing white-hot runic mark that violently burned itself across the left side of her face and down her neck!

The thermal density of the Primordial Spirit completely bypassed Elora’s ice dampening field.

The ice encasing Seraphina’s waist violently flash-melted into boiling water, then instantly vaporized into superheated steam.

Seraphina tilted her head back, the glowing mark on her face illuminating the freezing dome like a localized sun.

She looked down at Elora and Harper, who were both staring at her in paralyzed horror.

Seraphina pointed her finger directly at the ceiling of the ice dome, throwing her head back as she laughed at Elora and the two of them with supremacy.

”Boom!” Seraphina said simply.

KA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

What followed was a cataclysmic explosion of primordial flames so pure, so astronomically concentrated, that it completely defied the laws of thermal dynamics.

A blinding white-hot pillar of pure solar energy erupted from Seraphina’s body, violently expanding outward in a fraction of a microsecond.

The sixty-foot dome of ultra-dense blue ice didn’t just melt... it was completely eviscerated into atomized hydrogen and oxygen, annihilated from physical existence!

The concussive shockwave was so immense that the desert ground violently trembled for miles in every direction.

The tectonic vibration shook the entire landscape, physically rattling even Silas, Valerius, and Aeliana who were currently several miles away, climbing the high stone steps of the Spire entrance.

Silas stumbled on the black glass steps, grabbing the doorframe to steady himself as he looked back over his shoulder toward the distant mushroom cloud of white fire rising into the amber sky.

Across the smoking vitrified desert wasteland, the glass rain had been completely vaporized.

Where the ice dome had once stood was now a massive, fifty-foot-deep crater of bubbling white-hot magma and echoing out from the dead center of that apocalyptic inferno, cutting cleanly through the roaring flames and the falling ash, only the sound of Seraphina laughing hysterically could be heard.

Standing on the Spire steps beside Silas, Valerius Sterling watched the distant column of solar fire ascend into the heavens.

He felt his wind core shudder in his chest, a drop of cold sweat rolling down his cheek as he remembered the girl he had grown up with in the city.

Valerius slowly shook his head, gripping his sword hilt tightly as he thought to himself:

’She’s still a monster... through and through.’

FWOOSH!

Out of the apocalyptic column of solar fire that had completely eviscerated the sixty-foot ice dome, a dark silhouette violently broke through the wall of white-hot flames.

It was Harper.

The purple-haired Lord jumped out of the blinding inferno, her ruined leather armor smoking and actively catching fire at the edges.

She didn’t fall to the desert floor as she was floating in the air, utilizing a hyper-dense electromagnetic field beneath her boots to physically repel herself from the superheated ground.

Her chest heaved, her pale skin covered in soot but her purple eyes burned with unyielding defiance.

”Is that the best you have, you pampered arsonist?!” Harper screamed over the roaring flames.

She violently thrust both of her hands forward with her Lord core igniting.

She fired dozens of concentrated, jagged strikes of purple lightning directly into the center of the roaring white flames, the electrical arcs completely tearing through the thermal currents in a desperate attempt to locate her target.

A split second later, out of the opposite side of the fire pillar, a massive, jagged crystal of ultra-dense blue ice violently burst out.

The ice crystal shattered, and Elora Verinda tumbled out onto the baking sand, coughing violently as thick suffocating smoke filled her lungs.

Elora’s usually immaculate blond hair was singed, and the pristine fabric of her City Lord robes was scorched black.

She scrambled to her knees, her eyes wide with terror at the impossible magnitude of the output she had just witnessed.

Still, her survival instincts flared. She raised her hands, wildly blasting erratic desperate torrents of absolute-zero ice back into the flames, trying to suppress the heat that was actively melting her magic.

However, it was all for absolutely naught.

The massive, towering column of white flames violently dispersed, parting like a curtain.

Standing in the dead center of the glassed, molten crater, completely untouched by the lightning and the ice, was Seraphina but she didn’t look like herself.

The fiery red hair that usually tumbled down her back had completely changed color.

It was now a radiant silver, glowing with the pure energy of the Primordial Fire Spirit currently fused to her soul.

The intricate, white-hot runic mark burned brightly across the left side of her face and down her pale neck, illuminating the desert like a newborn star.

Seraphina stood there, laughing.

It wasn’t her usual angry scream. It was a cold and utterly terrifying laugh that resonated with the power she currently wielded.

”How do you like it?!” Seraphina taunted them, her silver hair whipping wildly in the heated updrafts.

She lazily swatted a jagged bolt of Harper’s purple lightning out of the air with the back of her bare hand, completely disintegrating the electrical current before it could even touch her skin.

”Did you honestly think a City Lord’s daughter and a corporate rat could match the raw bloodline of the Bloom Clan?” Seraphina asked, her voice echoing with absolute supremacy. ”My first Hero was not a simple swordsman or a baseline elementalist... It was a Primordial Fire Spirit who possessed the unique inherent ability to multiply the baseline fire output of its bonded Mage by a factor of ten!”

She slowly raised her hands, white-hot solar flames aggressively coiling around her slender fingers like obedient serpents.

”And in her hands... I am simply unstoppable,” Seraphina declared.

She turned her glowing eyes away from the two kneeling Lords for a brief, fleeting microsecond.

She glanced miles into the distance, looking toward the towering black sand Spire where Silas Graves and the rest of his group had retreated.

As she looked in the direction of the dark-haired Lord who had carried her out of the Abyss by her rear end, a small uncharacteristic blush briefly touched her glowing cheeks.

”And with this power...” Seraphina whispered to herself, the flames flickering around her lips. ”...I will kill Silas Graves.”

But... the threat lacked her usual vicious bite.

Where was the furious ear-piercing shout?

Where was the unbridled outrage?

Was she actually not mad at him for seeing her naked? For touching her? For humiliating her?

In truth, the overwhelming terror of falling into the Abyss, followed immediately by the suffocating, muscular warmth of his arms wrapping around her to pull her to safety, had completely short-circuited her pampered worldview.

She was incredibly confused, embarrassed, and very terrified of the fluttering sensation in her chest.

Seraphina aggressively shook her head, forcing her silver hair out of her eyes to banish the Lord’s face from her mind as her glowing eyes snapped back to Harper, floating in the air a hundred yards away.