Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Aki crossed her arms, leaning her hip against the side of the floating interface as she looked up at his golden name with a wistful, exasperated pout.

”Of course you’re already glowing,” Aki grumbled playfully. ”They’ll never see a Lord of your caliber in this bracket again... Seriously, who else could get that many points in their initial trial? Ten thousand! It’s a completely broken record... The System probably wants you out of here as fast as possible just so the rest of the mortal realm doesn’t give up in despair.”

Silas chuckled, rubbing the back of his neck.

”I guess I didn’t realize how fast the clock was ticking down. Still, it’s not like Blessed Land is going anywhere.”

”No, but for me, I have a very clear goal,” Aki declared, her posture straightening with sweet unshakeable resolve as she looked back down toward the upper ranks. ”I want to get to Number 2 at the very least before your advancement completes...”

Silas smiled, thoroughly charmed by her earnest ambition. ”Shooting for the runner-up spot, huh?”

”For now, yes!” Aki said proudly, puffing her chest out in a way that made the fabric of her lavender dress pull nicely across her modest curves. ”Because once you move up to the Classic Leaderboards, Number 1 will be completely open and when you leave, I’ll take Number 1 after you, which is only natural since I’m a vassal of Blessed Land! A lead territory shouldn’t have an embarrassing vassal sitting down in the double digits, right?”

”That’s the spirit,” Silas laughed, his dark blue eyes crinkling with approval. ”Though moving from fourteen to two in a few days is a massive jump... Building walls and paving roads only gets you so far, Aki.”

Silas stepped closer, looking down into her wide azure eyes with a confident, encouraging smirk.

”Tell you what,” Silas suggested, his voice warm and decisive. ”How about we go on a raid tomorrow? I’ll bring some of the Blessed Land girls through the runes in the morning, and we can join up our squads... Plus, looking at your setup right now, your territory needs a lot more development before you can hold that Number 1 spot safely.”

Aki’s azure eyes shone with unreserved enthusiasm, her small head bobbing up and down in eager agreement.

”A joint raid sounds wonderful, Silas,” Aki said, clasping her hands together against the front of her lavender dress. ”If we take our squads out together at sunrise, we’ll get it done in half the time. It really is the best way to catch up.”

Before Silas could say anything more, another heavy choking wave of dark gray smoke rolled through the arched corridor leading to the kitchens.

The acrid stench of scorched grease and carbonized flour grew so intense that Aki pinched her nose with a soft cough, waving her sleeve in front of her face.

From the side of the hall, Elowynn let out a horrified shriek.

”The secondary reduction!”

Her long legs scrambled across the floorboards in a frantic blur of tight leather and billowing red hair with her knee-high boots skidding around the doorframe as she sprinted back toward the source of the disaster.

”Curse these terrestrial burners! Cease this infernal combustion at once, you wretched iron kettle!”

CLATTER!

A heavy metal pot lid bounced off the tiles in the kitchen, followed by the frantic clinking of ladles and another puff of dense oily smoke billowing into the vaulted ceiling of the foyer.

Silas watched the kitchen entrance with an amused lopsided smirk, coughing once into the crook of his elbow as the bitter odor drifted over them.

He glanced down at Aki, whose cheeks had turned a sheepish shade of rose as she waved the haze away.

”So,” Silas murmured, crossing his arms over his chest, ”are you going to tell me what that was, or should I summon a water elemental to hose down your ground floor...?”

Aki sighed, letting her shoulders slump in mild defeat as she rubbed the back of her slender neck.

”I haven’t actually summoned a chef yet,” Aki confessed, her voice dropping into a sheepish apologetic murmur. ”None of the girls in the Keep have much cooking experience at all, so we’ve mostly had to feed everyone on standard rations...”

Her delicate nose wrinkled in pure distaste as she remembered the previous meals.

”They’re so horribly bland, Silas,” Aki complained, a small genuine pout pulling at her lips. ”They come in those little waxed paper bricks. Gray compressed oats, dehydrated vegetable flakes, and salted jerky that feels like chewing on vulcanized leather straps... How do people actually eat that stuff every single day? It feels like punishing your tongue for being alive.”

Silas let out a deep sympathetic sigh, rubbing his temple with two fingers.

”Yeah, military field bricks are pretty miserable,” Silas agreed. ”Tell you what, I’ll talk to Kaelia back in Blessed Land when I get home... I’ll have her pack several crates of preserved stews, cured roasts, and fresh bread so you guys have real meals for the next few days. Beyond that, though, you either need to spend a summoning scroll specifically on a dedicated culinary artisan, or you could send a couple of your girls over through the runes to Blessed Land for some proper cooking lessons under Kaelia.”

Before Aki could respond, the kitchen doorway creaked open.

Elowynn stepped out, brushing soot from the sleeves of her charcoal bodice with a pair of blackened tongs held loosely in her right hand.

Her voluminous curls were tied up in a messy knot, and there was a dark smudge of charcoal across her left cheekbone right next to her beauty mark, but her eyes blazed with desperate determination.

”I volunteer!” Elowynn declared instantly, throwing her shoulders back so fast her chest nearly spilled over the neckline of her bodice. ”I shall depart for Blessed Land at the earliest possible light! I will master the sacred arts of roasting, simmering, and plating, and return as a culinary enchantress capable of crafting banquets worthy of your majestic palate, Lord Silas!”

She lowered her chin, trying to give him a sultry heavy-lidded wink through the smoke, but ended up coughing violently into her shoulder instead.

COUGH!

Silas chuckled, shaking his head. ”We’ll work on your griddle control first, Elowynn. One step at a time...”

He turned back toward Aki, his eyebrows arching in mild, genuine surprise.

”Still, it’s pretty wild that nobody in this entire Keep knows how to swing a frying pan. I get it with you, Aki. You’re an actual princess, so having people bring you silver trays makes sense... But what about your legendary guard over there?”

He pointed a thumb over his shoulder toward Ther’Abella, who was still sitting stiffly on the floorboards with her arms crossed over her chest and an ice-cold glare fixed on the front door.

”What’s your excuse, Ther’Abella?” Silas asked, his dark blue eyes gleaming with mischief. ”You’ve been alive for ages... You couldn’t pick up how to roast a potato in all that time?”

Ther’Abella’s head snapped toward him, her sky-blue eyes flashing with pure indignation as her delicate jaw locked tight.

”I am an astral warrior of the sacred boughs, not a scullery maid, usurper!” Ther’Abella hissed, her silver hair bristling as the constellation marks across her cheeks pulsed with cold light. ”After being banished from Yggdrasil... I am an elf! We do not feel the base, animalistic need to cram dead matter into our gullets three times a day like mortal swine... We subsist on ambient solar ether, morning dew, and the clean resonance of the celestial spheres! Culinary indulgence is a distraction of the flesh that clouds the blade!”

Silas took a slow step forward, looking down at her proud upturned nose with an infuriating, relaxed grin.

”Uh-huh,” Silas drawled, tapping his chin in mock contemplation. ”That’s a lot of fancy philosophical words just to admit that at your grand old age, you still don’t know how to boil an egg without burning the water... Who knows, you might have starved for several hundred years before you got summoned.”

Ther’Abella’s silver eyebrows twitched violently... He wasn’t wrong though she would rather die than admit it.

”My age?!” she shrieked, her voice cracking as the insult struck her like a physical blow. ”Insolent mortal dog! I will carve that smug smirk from your face with starlight!”

SWOOSH!

She exploded upward from the polished floorboards like an uncoiled steel spring.

Pure, brilliant astral mana erupted around her slender fists, shaping into two razor-sharp daggers of condensed starlight that hissed through the air as she lunged straight for his collarbones in a blinding acrobatic blur.

Silas didn’t even shift his back foot.

His mana hummed softly in his veins, giving him the effortless instant perception that made her furious charge look like it was moving through warm molasses.

He dipped his shoulder slightly, letting the first starlight blade whistle harmlessly past his ear.

His left hand shot out like an iron clamp, snapping shut around her right wrist with precision, twisting it just enough to pinch the nerve and scatter the mana dagger into harmless silver sparks.

FZZT!

Before Ther’Abella could bring her off-hand blade around, Silas stepped inside her reach, bent his knees, wrapped his thick right arm firmly around her hips, and hoisted her upward in a smooth continuous circle.

HOIST!

In the span of half a second, the elite Viridian Guard elf was once again flipped upside down and slung over his broad right shoulder with her legs kicking uselessly behind his back while her silver hair dangled toward his belt.

”Curse you!” Ther’Abella grunted, pounding her legs against the back of his jacket with frantic furious thuds.

THUMP!

”Unhand me, you wretched human! Put me down! Fight me like an honorable warrior, not a farmhand hauling grain!”

Silas rested his right forearm securely across the back of her thighs, pinning her in place while his left hand went back into his jacket pocket.

”You really need to vary your attack patterns, Ther’Abella,” Silas chuckled, completely unbothered by her fists. ”It’s the exact same dive every single time... Lunge, slash, get turned into a sack of potatoes. You’re quite predictable.”

Ther’Abella buried her face into the fabric of his jacket with a muffled furious groan, her teeth grinding in utter agony.

’Why can’t I beat him...?’ Ther’Abella fumed, her thoughts spiraling into a bitter self-loathing whirlwind as she hung helplessly over his shoulder. ’I have trained for ages in the sacred martial forms of the World Tree... My blade should be swifter than a shooting star... Yet every time I face this crude, heavy-handed brute, my techniques vanish like smoke! He doesn’t even draw a weapon! He treats me like a bag of turnips! Curse this pathetic mortal vessel... Curse my weakness!’

Beside the front stairs, Aki held a hand over her mouth, letting out a soft musical chuckle that she tried and failed to swallow.

”I told you not to charge him, Ther’Abella,” Aki teased gently. ”Silas has killed a lot of monsters... You aren’t going to catch him off guard in our front hall.”

Over by the kitchen doorway, Elowynn leaned her hip against the wooden frame, her amethyst eyes narrowing as she watched the silver-haired elf squirming over Silas’s broad back.

’Look at her,’ Elowynn thought, her mind working with the sharp cynical intuition of a woman who had spent years observing men and women in rowdy pirate ports. ’With the way Ther’Abella acts around him, with all that hissing, clawing, and shouting about usurpers and honor, any fool would think she despises the ground he walks on but I can see right through that frigid high-elven facade... She doesn’t hate him at all, she’s completely obsessed with him.’

Elowynn’s lips pursed into a knowing thoughtful smirk as she traced the line of Silas’s muscular shoulders.

’She attacks him because it’s the only way she knows how to touch him,’ Elowynn reasoned, her gaze drifting down to where Silas’s heavy forearm was casually resting over the elf’s thighs. ’She gets to scream and fight, and in return, he scoops her up and holds her close against his chest without a care in the world... With the way those two dance around each other, I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if Ther’Abella managed to stumble into his bed before any of us.’

The thought sent a sudden frantic jolt of jealousy straight through Elowynn’s ribs.

Her breath hitched, and a deep fiery blush rushed back across her cheeks, burning away her cynical composure.

Her hands flew up to clasp over her mouth with her heart hammering against her ribs like a runaway carriage.

’B-but I want to get to know this handsome man properly...’ Elowynn thought desperately, her eyes wide as she drank in the confident curve of Silas’s jaw. ’I want to sit beside him beneath the stars, share flagons of spiced wine, and whisper tales of the high seas until dawn... He’s strong, he’s generous, he possesses the noble bearing of an untamed king, and he didn’t even mock my burned meat! He’s my soul mate... I know it... The cosmic currents brought him to this realm specifically for me, and I cannot allow a stubborn flat-chested elf to steal his heart with temper tantrums!’