Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Chapter 855: A Winter Festival? [Bonus Chapter]

”Achoo!”

Seraphina Bloom straightened instantly and dabbed at her nose with the back of her gloved hand with perfect elegance.

There was a glistening smear of snot on the red leather... Her crimson eyes twitched, and she flung it over the rail into the sea with a sharp flick of her wrist.

’Who’s thinking about me...?’ she thought with her jaw tightening as the sea breeze whipped across her cheeks.

Her mind ran through the suspects.

If it was Val...

A shudder rolled down her spine. If Valerius Sterling was thinking about her, he was probably plotting revenge for the last bet he’d lost to her.

’Why would he be thinking about me...? He should be wondering on how to train and get stronger, that idiot.’ Sera shook her head.

If it was Silas... A traitorous rush of scarlet bloomed up her neck.

’He can think about me all he wants...’ she thought, and a soft, helpless smile tugged at her lips. ’Every morning and every night. And if he isn’t thinking about me right this second, I’ll have to punish him when I get home.’

And if it was Harper Whitmore... Her smile vanished as a dark venomous scowl took its place.

’...Harper can go fuck herself.’

Sera rested both gloved hands on the polished railing at the bow of the warship and breathed in the sharp salty air.

The ship beneath her boots was the Ember Matriarch, a heavy warship of House Bloom’s private fleet, cutting through the blue swells of the southern gulf five hundred miles from the mainland.

At the last World Council meeting, her mother, Matriarch Etilga Bloom, had won control of three coastal mining sectors here, over Albion’s objections and with Australis backing her.

...The sectors were rich in spirit ore and crawling with pirates, and ever since Sera left Silas’s place from the last visit where Harper and her had made Omeletes... she had been burning their hideouts along the shoals but as she stared out at the empty ocean, her thoughts were far from the war.

’I’d rather be spending time with Silas...’ she sighed.

She missed his easy laugh, and out here, there was no network so she couldn’t call him, and worst of all, she couldn’t send him pictures.

She looked down at her outfit with a frustrated pout.

She’d had her uniform tailored for this campaign, inspired by the very pirates she was hunting, and she looked magnificent.

She wore a long crimson leather coat over a fitted black corset vest that dipped low enough to show a tantalizing amount of pale cleavage, with black leather breeches, tall red boots, and a black tricorn hat pinned with a golden flame brooch.

’He’d love this...’ she thought, her cheeks warming as she imagined his eyes widening and that gold ring flaring to life. ’If I could just send him one mirror picture, his brain would melt...’

Boots crunched on the salt-stained deck behind her.

”Admiring the view, Commander?” a familiar voice called, warm with amusement. ”Or are you still glaring at the ocean like it owes you money...?”

Sera didn’t turn, she knew the footsteps too well.

Captain Cassia Bloom, a distant cousin from one of the clan’s border branches, stepped up to the rail beside her.

She was a sun-browned woman of twenty-four with short, spiky red hair, amber eyes and a grin with a chipped canine, and she let out a long whistle as she looked Sera up and down.

”Ancestors, Sera,” she laughed. ”You look less like a fleet commander and more like a pirate queen who just robbed a palace... If the pirates don’t drown when we ram them, they’ll die of blood loss from looking at that corset.”

”A Bloom must project dominance in every aspect of war, Cassia,” Sera replied loftily, adjusting her hat with one gloved finger. ”If the enemy is busy staring at my neckline, they react half a second slower. That’s more than enough time to finish them...”

”Right, right... Strictly tactical.” Cassia nudged her. ”So come on. Spill it. Does our untouchable prodigy finally have a man she’s interested in?”

Sera’s posture stiffened by two millimeters.

After a week or so of salt beef and cannon smoke, the temptation to say his name out loud was overwhelming... Instead she pulled out her phone and casually tilted the screen toward her cousin.

”I don’t merely have an interest, Cassia,” she said with haughty pride, though a brilliant blush instantly set her cheeks on fire. ”I’ve chosen the future master of my household.”

Cassia leaned in and squinted at the screen.

The wallpaper was a candid photo taken in the little garden behind Silas’s apartment a few while earlier.

He was sitting on a low stone bench under a flowering vine, wearing a dark shirt open at the collar... Resting against his skin and catching the sunlight with a deep midnight-blue shimmer was the void-chrysolite necklace Sera had given him.

He was looking straight into the camera with a lazy teasing half-smirk, his dark hair falling over his eyes on purpose and just enough to veil the gold ring glowing in his dark blue eyes.

Cassia stared at it for three long seconds as her amber eyes went huge.

”H-hot...!” she breathed, practically pressing her nose to the glass. ”Ancestors, Sera, he’s a mountain! Look at those shoulders! Where did you find him? Who is he?”

”His name is Silas Graves,” Sera purred, turning the phone back to gaze at him for a moment before tucking it away. ”He’s a Lord and he’s the only man alive who’s ever beaten me.”

Cassia’s jaw dropped.

”He beat you? In a real fight, Sera, not some training bout where you went easy on him because he was pretty?”

”He did,” Sera said softly, and her voice carried a rare, breathless reverence. ”My fire couldn’t touch him... His water swallowed it whole... He’s faster, stronger and more terrifying than anyone I’ve ever faced and he belongs to me.”

’Now to get her to share...’ she thought, a sly thirsty grin spreading across her face.

When a Bloom woman married, the man married into the clan to provide perfect genes for the next generation, and Cassia had a very lively appetite for men.

...One who’d beaten Seraphina Bloom, with shoulders like that, was a once-in-a-century treasure.

Cassia leaned her hip on the rail and nudged Sera’s arm with a wheedling grin.

”You know, cousin,” she began sweetly, ”our family always says harmony is everything. A man with genes that good... it’d be a tragedy to keep all that to just one bedroom... You’re going to be so busy running the clan, Sera. You can’t possibly keep him satisfied all by yourself! Why not lend him to me on weekends? I’ll keep him in peak condition for you, and I’ll even let you have first pick of the daughters—”

The sentence died in her throat as the sea breeze stopped.

Sera turned her head very slowly.

Her crimson eyes had gone flat and bottomless... The air around the bow spiked with heat, and the deck beneath their boots began to smoke as a terrifying corona of white-gold fire curled lazily around the brim of her hat.

With all of that done, Sera didn’t raise her voice at all.

”Say that again, Cassia,” she said softly. ”I’d love to hear it twice.”

Cassia slammed back against the rail with both hands thrown up in surrender, cold sweat drenching her collar.

”J-joking! I was joking, Sera!” she squeaked. ”He’s yours! Only yours! Forever! Please don’t set me on fire!”

The flames around Sera’s hat faded, and the heat drained away though the planks under their boots stayed scorched black.

”Good,” Sera said, smoothing her lapels as if nothing had happened. ”Remember your place, cousin, and we’ll never speak of it again...”

Desperate to climb back into her cousin’s good graces, Cassia racked her brain, and her eyes landed on the pocket where Sera kept her phone.

She leaned in and lowered her voice into a hushed, confidential murmur.

”You know, Sera... since you’re so frustrated about not being able to send him pictures, I could teach you something very useful for when we get back to port.”

Sera arched a skeptical brow.

”And what could you possibly know about men that I don’t? You’ve spent half this campaign losing at cards to the deckhands...”

”How to get spicy pictures out of your man,” Cassia purred, wiggling her eyebrows as she leaned even closer.

Sera froze. Her fingers, which had been toying with a brass button, stopped completely.

”Explain yourself,” she said in a flat, bored drawl, even as the tips of her ears flared bright pink. ”I have no interest in vulgarity... I’m merely curious.”

”It’s not vulgar, it’s strategy!” Cassia said eagerly. ”If you just ask a man for a revealing picture, he gets awkward but if you send one first...”

She tapped her own collarbone with a wink.

”Something classy, not trashy. You stepping out of the steam with a towel barely hanging on or your corset with two laces undone, showing just enough shadow to drive him crazy... With an innocent little caption like, ’It’s so warm in the south today... do you think this suits me, Silas?’”

Sera’s pupils dilated.

”And then...?” she whispered, abandoning all pretense and leaning in so close her hat ribbons brushed Cassia’s cheek. ”What happens then?”

”Then biology takes over!” Cassia declared triumphantly. ”His brain short-circuits, and he feels this overwhelming need to prove he’s worthy of what he just saw. Before his honor can stop him, he’s taking a picture of his chest, or his arms, or... whatever he’s proudest of. It works every single time!”

Sera’s mind detonated.

She imagined loosening her corset laces in her cabin, sending the picture, and then, ten seconds later, a notification from Silas Graves.

...Not that there was network.

’If I did that...’ she thought, her breath coming shallow with her gloves gripping the railing so hard the wood groaned. ’Would Silas really send one of his too...?’

She pressed the back of her cool leather glove against her burning cheek and bit her lip hard to keep from squealing out loud.

”H-hmph!” she managed, turning her back on her cousin and tossing her hair. ”A thoroughly shameless tactic and completely beneath the dignity of our bloodline...”

”Right, right,” Cassia grinned, nodding down at Sera’s hand on the railing. ”That’s exactly why your glove is smoking right now, I’m sure.”

”CONTACT! STARBOARD BOW!” a lookout screamed from the rigging.

The warning bells clanged as marines ran for their stations.

Two miles out, a pirate ship was cutting toward them from behind a jagged sea stack.

”Battle stations!” Cassia shouted, drawing her broadsword as it burst into orange flame. ”Charge the forward batteries!”

”Stand down, Cassia,” Sera said calmly, without taking her eyes off the distant sails. ”I’ll handle this one myself...”

Sera stepped up onto the raised platform at the bow, and her crimson coat whipped around her boots.

All her frustration finally found a target.

”You interrupted my thoughts,” she said softly as she lifted her right hand and pointed one slender finger at the distant ship.

Deep in her core, the Primordial Fire Spirit she’d bonded with at five years old roared awake, and white-gold flame coiled around her fingertip, compressing into a bead no bigger than a cherry.

FWIP!

A beam of white fire no thicker than a needle shot from her finger, crossed two miles of open water in an instant and punched straight through the pirate ship’s hull into its fuel stores.

KABOOOOM!

A pillar of crimson-and-gold fire erupted four hundred feet into the sky. The shockwave flattened the swells into glass, and the pirate ship was simply gone, scattered across the sea in a rain of burning embers.

”Well,” Cassia said, extinguishing her sword. ”That certainly saves us on gunpowder, doesn’t it...?”

Sera blew a tiny curl of smoke off her fingertip.

A scorched scrap of something fluttered down out of the sky on the wind from the blast and landed with a soft slap at her feet.

It was a glossy waterproof travel poster.

She picked it up and smoothed out the singed edges.

It showed a palace of ice and silver stone beneath snowy mountains, with auroras overhead and steaming hot springs nestled among frosted pines.

Across the top, in elegant silver letters.

[THE TSARDOM OF BOREALIS INVITES THE WORLD TO THE FIRST SNOW FESTIVAL!]

”Cassia,” Sera called, without looking up. ”...What’s this?”

Cassia peered over her shoulder.

”Oh! The First Snow Festival! It’s huge up north... Grand Tsar Volkov opens the winter reserves for three weeks every year. There’s amazing food, sled races, ice sculptures, the best hot springs in the world... but mostly, it’s famous for couples... Lovers go up there to soak in the springs under the northern lights.”

Sera looked at the steaming pools surrounded by falling snow as a slow grin spread across her face.

House Bloom had plenty of pull with the Tsardom... One word to her mother, and she could have a private estate with its own hot springs.

’I can invite Silas...’ She thought with her heart racing. ’...and the rest of the girls.’

If she invited everyone, nobody could call her selfish, and once they were up there, she could steal hours alone with Silas, far away from Harper Whitmore...

Just Silas and her, in a steaming hot spring under the northern lights.

Sera folded the poster neatly and tucked it into her coat beside her phone.

She turned her face to the open sea, and the wind whipped her crimson hair around her black hat like a crown of fire.

’I will...’ she thought with a confident dangerous smile curving her lips.

’We need a vacation after all.’

[Author’s Note]

Thank you all for the supergifts and support hehe~ I’ll write more Chapters, also J, Happy birthday heh.