Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Silas let out a soft defeated laugh, shaking his head. ”Alright, alright. I’ll clear the plates. I promise.”

Martha beamed, pressing her hands to her cheeks, looking down at him with adoration.

”And no more disappearing for ten days without a single message,” she added, wagging a finger that trembled just slightly. ”The girls pretended they weren’t counting... I counted for all of us.”

The apology rose in his throat before he could stop it.

”I’m sorry, Martha. It won’t happen again.”

”It will,” she said, with the weary, loving certainty of a woman who had raised more than one stubborn child. ”But thank you for saying it...”

”Master Silas really is the sweetest young man,” she murmured softly to herself, turning on her heel with a cheerful hum. ”I will go fetch the chilled pear juice and the tea service!”

She bustled back into the kitchen with the swinging door clicking shut behind her as the dining room fell into a heavy silence.

Silas picked up his chopsticks, reaching toward a dumpling but he paused as he slowly looked across the table.

Sitting on the opposite side, arranged in a neat symmetrical firing squad, were the three girls.

They hadn’t touched their chopsticks and they hadn’t picked up their water glasses either.

Lia sat directly across from him with her arms tightly crossed over her chest and her chin tilted downward, glaring at him with open hostility.

To her left, Penelope sat with her spine rigid as a ruler, her violet eyes narrowed into sharp judging slits.

To her right, Kaede was leaning forward over the table, her hands clenched on the placemat, looking at him with an expression that was roughly seventy percent awe and thirty percent deep betrayal.

’Huh...?’

Silas slowly lowered his chopsticks back onto the ceramic rest. He cleared his throat.

”Is there an issue?” Silas asked, glancing between the three of them. ”Did someone fail their history exam?”

Lia didn’t blink as her dark eyes bored directly into his skull.

”So,” Lia spoke, her voice dropping into a calm tone that sounded shockingly identical to Silas’s own negotiating tone. ”When, exactly, were you planning on telling us that you are the Lord of Blessed Land, huh? Big brother?”

Silas choked on his own saliva.

A sharp cough tore from his throat as he caught himself on the edge of the table.

’Well, fuck,’ Silas thought, his brain rapidly assessing the damage.

He knew he had sent Eluned to protect them.

He knew Eluned, in all her divine innocence, had probably mentioned his name while chatting with them but he had assumed, or rather foolishly hoped, that the connection between ’Silas Graves, local Europa orphan’ and ’Lord Vespera, Lord of Blessed Land’ would remain slightly blurred in an eleven-year-old’s mind.

’I should have remembered,’ Silas sighed inwardly, dragging a mental hand down his face. ’Lia isn’t stupid... She connects dots faster than Tasmin.’

Silas straightened his posture, schooling his features into a calm dignified expression.

”Lia,” Silas began with his voice sounding very calm. ”You have to understand the sensitivity of the situation... The World Council operates under very strict regulatory frameworks regarding Lords so I was planning on explaining the entire administrative background once the—”

”I don’t care about any of that boring stuff,” Lia interrupted flatly.

Silas stopped.

”What?”

Lia reached beneath her chair with both hands as she hoisted the massive, gold-ribboned master-carton onto the table, shoving the ceramic platters aside without an ounce of remorse.

Her small fingers violently tore the packaging open, bypassing the Styrofoam, reaching deep into the velvet insert, and dragging out the pristine hand-painted collector’s miniature of Eluned.

Lia slammed the figurine down onto the polished oak right beside Silas’s rice bowl.

The tiny tree-spirit stood gracefully on her faux-moss base with her translucent jade robes catching the chandelier light, smiling serenely at Silas’s teacup.

Lia leaned across the table with her face inches from his, her dark eyes sparkling with a bright look.

”Eluned is the coolest person in the entire universe!” Lia squealed, completely dropping her stern interrogator act. ”She held up a literal thirty-story skyscraper with giant tree roots! She grew pretty flowers in the middle of a war zone! She called me her Little Sister, and she gave me sweet nectar to drink, and she’s a million times cooler than you could ever be!”

Silas sat frozen as his mouth slightly parted.

”I want to meet her again!” Lia demanded, slamming both of her small palms onto the table. ”Summon her! Right now! Summon her into the living room so we can have dinner together!”

Silas stared at his little sister then he looked down at the tiny, smiling plastic figurine of the Former Spirit of the World Tree standing beside his dumplings.

A visible drop of cold sweat rolled down the back of Silas’s neck.

’She does know that’s not how summoning works, right?’ Silas thought, his eye twitching in silent defeat. ’She thinks I’m running a magical daycare or something?’

The small plastic face of the World Tree’s former guardian smiled placidly up from the tablecloth with her tiny jade robes frozen in a breeze that didn’t exist.

Silas looked down at it and he looked back up at his sister as his left eyebrow climbed steadily toward his hairline.

”Lia,” he said, speaking slowly, with the agonizing caution of a man trying not to startle an unpinned grenade, ”is that honestly how you think summoning works? Like a takeaway menu?”

The triumphant shine in her eyes flickered.

Her lower jaw set, stubbornness hardening the line of her mouth for a second before the reality of the question caught up with her. Her shoulders sagged by an inch.

”N-no,” she muttered, her voice dropping into a sullen murmur.

She poked the edge of the figurine’s stand with the tip of her forefinger, spinning it half an inch against the wood. ”I know. It’s only when the rifts in the sky tear open and the energy spills out across the district... That’s what the news anchors kept saying every time the red lines crossed the map. ’The anchors only open when the veil bleeds.’ The Lords can’t pull anyone into the Earth unless the pressure between the worlds balances out.”

Silas let out a soft breath through his nose, resting his elbow on the edge of the dining table and leaning his cheek into the palm of his hand.

The linen sleeve of the oversized terrycloth bathrobe bunched around his forearm, white and absurdly soft against the hard grain of the dining suite.

”Right,” he said quietly. ”Which means no, Lia. I can’t just snap my fingers and summon Eluned into the middle of the carpet so she can eat dumplings with us.”

Her forehead puckered into a deep miserable crease as her chin dipped toward her chest and her dark ponytail sliding forward over her shoulder.

She looked every bit eleven years old, not the terrifyingly observant girl who read people like toys, but just a kid who had been promised something shiny and then told the store was closed.

Silas’s chest tightened with a familiar ache settling between his ribs.

”Hey,” he said, his tone softening until the rasp of the desert battles had washed out of it completely. ”Listen to me.”

She didn’t look up, but her finger stopped spinning the toy.

”You can write to her,” he said. ”Get a sheet of that heavy paper Martha bought for your calligraphy drills... Write down whatever nonsense you want to tell her and when I head back into the Sovereign Realm to check the territory, I’ll hand it to her myself. I swear it.”

Lia’s lashes lifted.

She peered at him from beneath her bangs, her dark brown eyes searching his face for any trace of older-brother mockery.

”You won’t read it?” she demanded, sharp as a rusted knife.

”Not a word,” Silas said, raising his right palm flat. ”I’ll be the best mailman in the world...”

She chewed the inside of her lower lip for three seconds, calculating the terms, before nodding once with firm solemnity.

”Fine but I’m using the lavender ink!”

”Use whatever ink you want.”

She was already drafting it behind her eyes, he could tell.

Her lips moved faintly around half-formed sentences and he caught the words ’skyscraper’ and ’flowers’ and, bizarrely, ’please say hi to the dragon’ slipping past her teeth.

’Haah... She’s so cute.’

He decided that whatever Eluned made of that letter, she would treasure it, and that he would deliver it with a perfectly straight face.

Silas picked his chopsticks back up with his eyes lingering on the three of them across the table.

Penelope was calmly arranging her pickled radishes into a neat square on her ceramic plate, while Kaede was staring down at her own unopened carton with her fingers drumming an anxious silent rhythm against the edge of the table.

A thought struck him as he was slightly baffled.

’Wait,’ Silas thought, his brow knitting slightly as he rested his chopsticks on the porcelain bridge. ’Is that it? Are they seriously not going to grill me about being Lord Vespera?’

He had spent the last two weeks under an assumed name, wearing Kara White’s face, parading around on the back of an eighty-yard dragon while the entire international press corps turned the name ”Blessed Land” into the most scrutinized military brand on the globe.

The territory had stopped being merely influential and become a bit of a world power that had helped evacuate people from an incursion single-handedly before the World Council Marshals arrived on Day 3.

...And his little sister had just skipped over the entire revelation because she wanted a green-haired spirit to come over for dinner?

”Lia,” Silas said, his voice flat with lingering suspicion. ”Aren’t you going to ask me anything else? You just dropped the fact that you figured out Blessed Land belongs to me. You don’t have... I don’t know, twenty other questions? No lectures about lying?”

Lia picked up her tea glass, took a small measured sip, and waved her free hand through the air with airy dismissal.

”Why would I?” she said. ”I’m already a fan of Blessed Land. I’ve been watching the live-stream relays from the Khemet towers for two weeks... If you own it, that just means my favorite team has a home field.”

Silas stared at her. ”That’s your entire takeaway?”

”Well, duh,” she said, rolling her eyes with a terrifying look that only an eleven-year-old girl could muster. ”I’m not stupid, Big Bro. I know why you didn’t tell me. If the neighborhood knew you were a high-ranking lord with an unregistered territory, the apartment would be swarmed with news vans and recruiters every single morning... I wouldn’t be able to walk to the tram stop without three bodyguards with machine guns stepping on my heels. You were hiding it because you wanted me to have a normal life. Right?”

Silas paused.

The half-eaten dumpling in his bowl cooled slowly in its puddle of chili oil.

He looked at the girl across from him, her clean clothes, the books stacked neatly on the side table, the bright healthy color in her cheeks and then he nodded once.

”Yeah,” he said, the word rough in his throat. ”That was the idea.”

Lia set her glass down with a soft hollow clink as the sharp teasing edge melted out of her face, leaving behind something small and painfully soft.

”Thank you, Big Brother,” she murmured.

Her eyes were warm and bright with an unshakeable trust that made Silas feel like a giant who had spent his whole life kneeling in the dirt. ”I really am glad. That’s why I love you so much.”

Silas blinked, a sudden ridiculous tightness seizing the back of his throat as he looked away, clearing his throat into his fist.

”Right... Well... Don’t go getting sentimental over cold pork.”

”Which is why,” Lia continued, her voice instantly pivoting into a terrifying business-like chirp, ”you’re going to do this for me!”

She dropped out of her chair before he could react, scurrying around the edge of the dining table with the cardboard lid of her collector’s carton clutched in both hands.

She thrust the heavy, gold-foiled cardstock directly into his face, nearly knocking his water glass off the table.

”Look!” she beamed, pointing her finger at the glossy white banner spanning the lower half of the box art. ”It’s the limited-run packaging! The official ones signed by the Apex Syndicate sold out during the pre-order launch, but the blanks are the ones the collectors actually bid on! Sign it!”

Silas leaned back, batting the cardboard an inch away from his nose.

”Sign it? What are you talking about?”

”Sign your name!” she ordered, thrusting an indelible marker into his fingers. ”I’m taking it to school tomorrow! Tommy from the fourth-grade track team said his uncle works for House Sterling and has a signed badge from Sir Gareth, but if I bring a box personally inked by Lord Vespera, his entire table is going to die of jealousy!”

Silas let out a wounded gasp, pressing his palm flat against his terrycloth lapel.

”You parasite,” he groaned, narrowing his eyes at her with comic betrayal. ”You don’t love me at all! You’re just using my battlefield trauma for playground clout! I survived a whole raid, and you want to use my signature to bully a ten-year-old named Tommy?!”