Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

He tapped a finger against the glowing glass slate set into his desk... The quarterly profit margins flickered to life in cyan digits.

...The numbers were staggering.

Mining consortiums from four separate territories had signed exclusive bulk contracts.

The Directorate’s own excavation corps had put in an advance order for two hundred units... Royalties and executive bonuses had cleared that morning, and the Brassbound Guild had rocketed from a third-rate engineering shop to the wealthiest independent manufacturer in Central City.

His own share?... Over two hundred million Spirit Credits sitting in his personal vault, with another half-billion projected before the winter solstice.

The fox had never even filed her complaint since she couldn’t afford the fee.

Nobody could, which was exactly why the fee existed... He’d sat in the Trade Expo audience and watched her shrink in the third row, and it had been the best afternoon of his life.

’Heh, I like this... Maybe I’ll go give her some scraps and get another idea.’

DING!

A sharp crystalline chime rang out from the gilded communications terminal on the corner of his desk.

The guildmaster arched an eyebrow and set his goblet down with a soft click.

A glowing crimson seal flared to life above the terminal screen but it wasn’t the bronze stamp of the city’s commercial registry... it wasn’t the blue badge of the local magistrate either.

It was a platinum compass-rose, the official emergency dispatch seal of the World Council.

The guildmaster sat up straight, his chest swelling with sudden breathless pride as his grin stretched until his cheeks ached.

’An official commendation!’ His heart thumped with eager arrogant delight. ’It has to be! The Council has noticed the Centurion’s efficiency! They’re probably awarding the guild an imperial defense charter... Or an honorary seat on the Industrial Advisory Board!’

He reached out with a confident ring-laden hand and tapped the glass to open the transmission.

The document unfurled in cold black text.

[World Council Executive Judicial Enforcement Notice]

[Case File: 884-Delta... High Commercial Piracy & Systemic Intellectual Theft]

[Defendant: The Brassbound Guild / Executive Leadership]

[Complainant: Blessed Land]

[Victim of Record: Kitsuna Solenne, Chief Artificer of Blessed Land]

His smile faltered and his brow furrowed as his eyes darted across the characters.

”What...?” he muttered, leaning closer.

He scanned down to the mandate.

[Formal Notice: All commercial assets, vault holdings, and patent rights regarding the ’Centurion Mining Automaton’ are hereby frozen under Fifth Seat emergency jurisdiction... An executive audit has confirmed that the underlying architecture was unlawfully taken from the territory of Blessed Land.]

[Action: A presiding Council Head has been dispatched to execute personal on-site seizure and charge the leadership with high commercial piracy.]

The color drained completely from the guildmaster’s face.

The crystal goblet slipped from his hand and tumbled across the oak desk, splashing dark red wine over his velvet doublet, and he didn’t even notice.

His breath stalled and his eyes bulged as the words Fifth Seat and Blessed Land crawled across the glass.

”What... what is this?” he choked out, in a dry terrified wheeze. ”Blessed Land?! That ragged little fox was an alley mechanic! She doesn’t have a Lord! She’s a nobody! This is a mistake! A clerical error!”

For three whole seconds, there was no sound in the entire office but the crackle of the enchanted fireplace.

KNOCK! KNOCK! KNOCK!

The heavy mahogany doors rattled under a frantic pounding and before he could answer, they burst open.

His chief secretary, a young man who usually took immense pride in his pristine silk waistcoats and perfectly combed hair, stumbled into the room with his face as white as fresh paper and his spectacles dangling off one ear, gasping like he’d just run out of a burning building.

”S-Sir!” the secretary cried, his voice trembling so violently he could barely form the syllables. ”Sir, you need to come out to the foyer immediately!”

The guildmaster gripped the edge of his desk with his knuckles turning white. ”Calm down, you idiot! What’s happening out there?!”

The secretary swallowed hard and pointed a shaking finger back toward the open hallway.

”Blessed Land’s Lord is here to see you,” he whispered, eyes wide with horror. ”And she’s with Number Five of the World Council.”

The mahogany doors of the executive suite clicked open with a sound like a velvet-wrapped hammer hitting stone.

Inside, the guildmaster stood frozen behind his desk of petrified oak and his breath had stuck halfway up his chest.

His hands, soft and pale from three months of signing procurement vouchers instead of holding field calipers, were pressed flat against the lacquered wood, and even with all ten fingers spread he couldn’t stop the tremor crawling up his forearms.

The spilled wine hadn’t stopped either.

It gathered at the beveled corner of the desk, swelled into a heavy glistening teardrop, and fell onto his hand-woven steppe rug.

Plop!

In that silence it sounded like a funeral drum as a figure stepped through the doors first.

Two silver fox ears twitched against a halo of untamed silver hair, swiveling to catch the hum of the small breeze.

Behind her, nine thick silver tails swayed in a slow fan with their tips curled upward in undeniable pride and the guildmaster’s vision swam as the air seemed to thin out just to spite him.

...Solenne.

Ninety days... That was all it had been since he’d stood in that freezing cellar below the canal line, smelling rot in the ceiling timbers and listening to rats scratch inside the walls.

’N-no... It can’t be real.’

He remembered every second.

He remembered her fingers shaking as she untied the hemp twine around her drafting rolls, and her golden eyes going wide and wet when he handed her a half-stale loaf of spiced honey-bread and called her a visionary of the modern age.

She’d given him everything... Fourteen months of stress calculations, pressure formulas and alignment matrices, her whole heart on paper, for a handful of hollow promises and five copper bits.

Three weeks later she’d come to the front desk of this very tower, weeping and begging for an explanation after the Centurion Mining Automaton was unveiled in the Grand Arc, and he’d stood on the second-floor mezzanine and told the armed guards to throw her in the drainage canal if she ever showed her furry snout on the property again but now she was standing on his rug.

She stopped three paces inside, and her boots left two prints on the wool.

She looked at his trembling hands.

”Hehehe...”

She took in the dark stain spreading across his golden velvet doublet, the crooked ermine collar, and a fat manicured face gone the color of unbaked dough.

Solenne tilted her head then, with the pure pettiness of an alley cat watching a yard dog get chained to a post, she wrinkled her nose, stuck out her pink tongue and blew him a raspberry.

”Blehh!”

His stomach dropped through the floorboards as cold sweat slid into the crease of his manicured mustache.

”S-Sorry, my Lord,” Solenne whispered, hiding half her face behind her satchel strap. ”It slipped out.”

”Don’t apologize,” Kara murmured. ”I’d have paid to see it.”

Before he could find his voice, the air in the office stopped moving.

The temperature fell twenty degrees in one beat.

The fireplace of carved green serpentine, roaring on enchanted coals imported from the southern rifts, flattened and turned a sickly violet, clinging to the grate like something heavy had sat on the chimney.

The crystal chandeliers gave one resonant chime and shivered in place as two more figures walked in.

On the left came someone so small she barely reached the chest of an average woman, though the space around her bent like heat off summer asphalt.

A voluminous mantle of midnight-violet silk hung from her, so dense it swallowed the lantern light, with platinum compass-roses stitched along the sleeves and shoulders that flashed in the dying fire.

Her hood was pulled low over a full-face mask of black and silver porcelain.

It had no painted lips and no nose, only a seamless enameled surface with two narrow slits and through the slits, two dark pupils stared out with the unblinking boredom of something that had watched continents sink.

”H-h...ha...”

It was truly a terrifying feeling... Seeing the Fifth Seat of the World Council.

Beside her walked a tall woman who filled the room like a storm front.

Ink-black hair spilled over the shoulders of a midnight-blue three-piece suit tailored so sharply that no wrinkle dared show.

Her left sleeve was pinned flat and empty across her chest and her right hand rested in her trouser pocket.

Her violet eyes swept the office, bright and sharp and dripping with easy amusement, and the silver-leaf crest on her lapel caught the firelight with a cold glow.

”L-L...”

His tongue was a dry strip of salted beef glued to the roof of his mouth.

He staggered back half a step until the crimson cushion of his chair caught the backs of his knees, and his right hand swung blindly for the desk with his ringed fingers knocking the petrified oak.

Clatter!

”L-Lord Vespera,” he wheezed at last, his voice cracking into a pitiful reed. ”Fifth Seat... Excellency...”

Kara White ignored the velvet guest chairs.

She didn’t nod, didn’t greet him, didn’t spare so much as a flicker of courtesy.

Kara’s violet eyes drifted up over the thirty-foot ceiling beams, the gold-plated cogwheels in their velvet-lined glass cases, the framed certificates signed by municipal trade clerks.

”Nice place,” Kara said, her voice becoming a smooth melodic drawl that carried across the room without trying. ”Good flues... Lots of natural light... It’s fascinating what a man can afford when he doesn’t waste capital on silly things like research and development.”

”Th-Thank you, my Lord,” the guildmaster said, because his mouth had decided to be polite without him. ”I had the flues redone in spring.”

”I can tell,” Kara said. ”Somebody paid for them...”

”My Lord, there’s been an administrative misunderstanding!” The guildmaster clutched his wine-stained doublet with both hands as if holding his ribs together. ”We got the dispatch five minutes ago... Legal was already drafting a response! The Centurion Mining Automaton is a registered proprietary design, cleared by the Patent Bureau under seal 44-B, and we have the original filings...”

”Be quiet,” Number Five said.

Her voice was a flat dry drone with no warmth and no theater in it, like two slabs of slate grinding together in the dark and the guildmaster’s teeth snapped shut so hard his jaw ached.

’I’m fucked...’

The little Council Head didn’t look at him.

She slid a silver-cuffed glove into her mantle and drew out an iron-bound ledger that hummed with sapphire seals.

Clack!

She popped the latch with her thumb.

”Case File 884-Delta,” Number Five droned.

Her dark eyes sat dead center on his forehead. ”Commercial espionage... Expropriation of schematics belonging to a recognized territorial domain... Fraudulent registration of industrial patents under forged individual authorship... Systematic coercion and financial intimidation of an artisan bound to Blessed Land... Collusion with, and subornation of, third-tier arbiters.”

She turned a page. ”Shall I proceed to the second page, or would you prefer a summary of the penal protocols for public executions in the High Plaza?”

His knees turned to water as his bladder gave a sharp terrifying spasm.

”P-Public executions?!”

”Standard procedure for high treason involving territorial expropriation... The Council prefers a spatial collapse around the carotid artery.”

Clack!

Number 5 went to the next page.

”It is efficient... It also produces thirty-four percent less fluid waste.”

”L-Less waste,” the guildmaster squeaked... It was the only part of the sentence his brain would hold. What were these monsters talking about?

”You may take notes.” Number Five added.

”You read that beautifully...” Kara murmured. ”I’m surprised that you can read so well.”

Number 5’s right eye twitched.

”Fuck you...” said Number Five.

The guildmaster’s face went slack as he gripped the desk until his manicured fingernails bent against the oak, breathing in short ragged wheezes.

”Now now, Council Head,” Kara cut in, taking two slow steps toward the desk.

Her pinned sleeve didn’t move and her right hand stayed in her pocket.

”Let’s not be barbarians... Execution is so permanent, It stains the carpets, it ruins the upholstery, and frankly I doubt this man’s velvet coat would fetch enough at auction to cover the cleaning salt. We’re reasonable people so we prefer civil litigation.”

”C-Civil?” The word fell out of him like a prayer.

He leaned over the desk, eyes ping-ponging between Kara’s mocking violet gaze and the blank porcelain mask. ”Yes! Civil litigation! The Intellectual Arbitration Board has a framework for patent disputes! We can convene a tribunal! We can negotiate a licensing royalty! Five percent! No, eight percent of net quarterly yields! We can settle this through proper commercial channels—”

”The Board?” Kara laughed, a low silvery sound like coins dropping on a frozen lake. ”The board where your second cousin presides over the third-tier review panel? The board that charges a ten-thousand-credit audit fee just to book a preliminary hearing, then misplaces the docket behind a filing cabinet until the complainant starves in the gutter? That board?”

”It’s a respected board,” he tried weakly. ”Very respected... By the people I pay.”

”Yes,” Kara said. ”That’s the problem.”

Kara pulled a long scroll of heavy vellum, bound in braided crimson cord, from inside her coat with her one hand.

Tap!

She tossed it on the desk.

It unrolled with an aggressive snap, skidded straight through the puddle of wine without soaking up a single drop, and stopped against his quivering knuckles.

”Let’s look at the damages,” Kara said, her voice dropping into a brisk businesslike rhythm. ”Item one... The base intellectual valuation of the Titan-01 quad-arm kinetic chassis, Solenne spent fourteen months on the balance vectors and the dual-stage pressure seals so I’ll be generous and set the property value at a very conservative six hundred million Spirit Credits.”

The guildmaster’s eyes bulged.

”Six hundred MILLION?! For a scrap-iron frame?!”

”Conservative,” Number Five agreed flatly. ”I would have said a billion.”

”You’re right, I’m too soft~ It’s a weakness of mine...” Kara sighed. ”Item two... A lot of Centurion units have been built and delivered to the mining syndicates in the last eight weeks. You had no territorial manufacturing license, so every credit from those sales is illicit contraband. We’re claiming one hundred percent of the gross, plus an eighty percent surcharge for what your shoddy simplified valves have done to our Chief Artificer’s reputation, That brings item two to eighty-five million.”

Over by the wall, Solenne was counting on her fingers. She ran out of fingers, started again on her tail tips, and gave up with a tiny gasp.

”Eighty-five...” The guildmaster’s vision dimmed at the edges. ”Six hundred, and eighty-five...”

”Don’t try to add it in your head, you’ll hurt yourself,” Kara said, tapping the scroll with a manicured nail. ”I can write it down for you.”

”I have already written it down,” Number Five said.