Chapter 520: You Were Weak, So What? [Bonus - ]
Rika collapsed onto the mat with a grateful sigh, pulling the blanket tight around her throat.
Silas reached back into his inventory and brought out several more containers that Kaelia had carefully packed before the expedition marched north.
He pressed the release latches with a crisp clack.
The heavenly aroma of piping hot venison stew, roasted garlic bulbs, and heavily spiced braised mutton exploded into the freezing cavern air.
Rika’s emerald eyes nearly popped out of their sockets.
Her nostrils flared, drawing in the savory steam with an expression of pure ecstasy.
She threw the blanket back slightly, pressed both of her trembling frost-bitten hands together in front of her nose, and bowed her head toward Silas with reverent intensity.
"ITADAKIMASU!" she yelled at the top of her lungs.
Silas blinked, his eyebrows shooting up toward his hairline.
’...Itadakimasu? Did this ancient northern deity just bust out standard Japanese meal etiquette?’
Before he could even begin to dissect the bizarre linguistic anomaly, Rika abandoned every shred of divine dignity.
She lunged forward, grabbed the largest brass container with both hands, ignored the boiling steam and tipped the rim straight into her mouth.
Massive chunks of tender, slow-braised venison, rich bone marrow broth and spiced root vegetables disappeared down her throat in ravenous, terrifying gulps.
GLUG-GLUG-CHOMP-GULP!
"OH GODS! OH MOTHER OF EARTH! IT’S SO GOOD!" she screamed between mouthfuls, gravy and brown sauce splattering across her pale cheeks, chin, and fingers. "THE SALT! THE ANIMAL FAT! I CAN FEEL MY TONGUE AGAIN! LORD SILAS, I WILL DIE FOR YOU! I WILL SLAUGHTER ENTIRE PANTHEONS FOR THIS STEW! I LOVE YOU SO MUCH!"
Silas dropped cross-legged onto the mat beside her, resting his elbow on his knee as he watched her inhale the food with morbid amusement.
"Slow down, Rika. You’re going to choke to death ten minutes after I carved you out of a glacier."
"Can’t... stop... the void... demands tribute...!" she mumbled around a mouthful of mutton, already reaching for the second container.
Meanwhile, hundreds of feet above in the howling whiteout, the vanguard had arrived at the lip of the vertical drop.
The wind roared across the basalt crags, tearing at the heavy fur mantles of the girls.
The Blessed Wolves stood in a tight disciplined defensive ring around the horses, their golden eyes scanning the swirling snow for any lingering predators.
At the very edge of the abyss, Eluned stood motionless.
Her silver-emerald hair whipped violently in the gale and the tips were glowing with a soft pulsing green radiance as she closed her eyes, extending her spiritual roots through the deep tectonic strata of the mountain.
"He’s down there," Eluned announced, a brilliant breathtaking smile breaking across her ethereal face. "His core is burning strong and steady. I think he slayed the beast."
Behind her, Morwenna let out a long relieved breath, her hand easing off the grip of Tidebringer.
"Took the captain long enough," Morwenna chuckled, though her sharp gray eyes were burning with restless energy. "We slaughtered three Tier 5 abominations on the ridgeline just to clear a path through the mist... If he thought he was going to have all the action to himself in the basement, he’s dead wrong."
"Those beasts were sloppy," Tasmin said coolly, twirling one of her void-daggers with a quiet hum. ’Eluned’s roots pinned their flanks before Morwenna’s blade even cleared the scabbard so they barely qualified as warm-ups to people of their level.’
"Still, Tier 5 kills belong to the strongest," Kadi remarked, checking her staff. "We need to advance our personal strength since the Lord is moving at a pace that will leave us regular girls behind if we don’t bleed for our breakthroughs."
Aurelia and Aeliana nodded in quiet agreement, while the Princess clung nervously to the heavy fur-trimmed cloak of the towering warrior standing beside her.
Standing at the front of the precipice, towering over the other women like a walking mountain of muscle and mythril armor, was Thor.
The God of Thunder held the Princess securely in the crook of her left arm, looking down into the plunging azure shaft with a wide toothy grin.
"A glorious descent!" Thor bellowed, her booming voice easily drowning out the roaring blizzard. "No coward’s ladders! No creeping down ropes like frightened spiders! A true warrior plunges into the dark like a thunderbolt! Who goes first?!"
"I’m going," Morwenna said, already stepping up to the rim. "The captain is down there, and knowing him, he’s probably sitting in something repulsive..."
Without waiting for a countdown, the girls began their descent.
Morwenna leaped into the void first, her form vanishing into the azure mist.
Eluned followed in an effortless, gliding descent, her body dissolving into a swirl of luminescent green leaves that rode the thermal updrafts downward.
Tasmin, Kadi, Aurelia, and Aeliana dropped in rapid succession, utilizing wind arts, spatial blinks, and shadow steps to arrest their momentum along the smooth granite walls.
Thor let out a booming laugh that shook the snow from the cliffs, adjusting her grip on the shivering Princess.
"Clench your jaw, royal!" Thor roared cheerfully. "Do not bite your tongue on the landing!"
"WAIT—NO! LADY THOOOOOOR—!"
WHOOOOOOOOSH!
Thor stepped off the ledge with the crushing weight of a falling anvil, the boom of her falling divine mass echoing through the underground flue like a crack of thunder.
Down in the vault, Silas was in the middle of wiping a splash of gravy from his traveling coat when the ceiling vents began to whistle with violent displaced air.
THUD! THUD! SWOOSH!
Morwenna, Eluned, and Tasmin landed on the glassy permafrost in rapid succession with their weapons drawn and their senses flared to detect any lingering anomalies or hidden threats.
A split second later, a deafening thunderclap rattled the cavern walls as Thor touched down with bone-crushing momentum, fracturing the ice beneath her armored greaves and setting the dazed trembling Princess gently onto her feet.
"Perimeter clear!" Morwenna called out instinctively then, the girls froze.
Sitting comfortably on an insulated leather mat in the center of the ancient tomb was Silas Graves.
He was thoroughly drenched from his hair down to his boots in foul half-frozen black monster blood.
And curled within his lap, wrapped snugly in a thick wool blanket, was an extraordinarily gorgeous woman with wild cascading midnight-black hair, porcelain-pale skin, and vivid emerald-green eyes.
Her cheeks and lips were completely smeared with brown gravy and grease, and she was currently gnawing on the roasted bone of a monster leg while resting her cheek directly against Silas’s sternum.
The moment the newcomers landed, Rika’s emerald eyes snapped wide.
KRA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
A terrifying divine pressure erupted from her petite frame!
The atmospheric pressure within the vault spiked so violently that the surrounding ice stalactites hummed with strain.
An ethereal towering phantom silhouette of a nine-horned apex beast manifested behind her shoulders, letting out a silent soul-crushing roar that caused the Princess to shriek and scramble behind Thor’s thighs!
"Halt, insolent mortals!" Rika bellowed with imperious divine thunder, her grease-covered chin held high with regal majesty. "Who dares intrude upon the private dining pavilion of the Goddess of the Fanged Bro—"
THWACK!
Silas casually reached down and delivered a sharp open-palmed chop to the crown of her head.
"Ow!" Rika yelped, the divine phantom instantly shattering into dust as she clamped both hands over her skull, looking up at Silas with watering betrayed eyes. "What was that for, Lord?! I was asserting our dominance! I was establishing the pecking order!"
"Tone down the cheap theatrics, you fraud," Silas said flatly, tossing a clean linen cloth directly onto her face. "Wipe your snout."
He looked up at his stunned vanguard, shaking his head with an exhausted dry sigh.
"Put the weapons away, girls," Silas told them. "She’s harmless... She can flare an impressive divine aura because her soul still holds the old celestial frequencies, but physically? She’s running on fumes. She’s so depleted right now that even Thora could probably tackle her into a snowbank and sit on her chest."
"Hey! That is deeply slanderous to a celestial authority!" Rika protested loudly, though she made zero attempt to climb out of his lap.
Instead, she burrowed deeper into his woolen coat, shamelessly pressing her freezing nose against his warm neck. "Haaah... so warm... Lord Silas, you are basically a walking furnace. Don’t push me away, my ribs are still half-frozen!"
She reached out with a sauce-stained hand, popping the latch on the third container and pulling out a fistful of braised venison.
Morwenna stood frozen, her left eyebrow twitching uncontrollably as she stared at the scene.
"Captain... did you go down an ancient monster trench and accidentally adopt an overgrown stray dog?"
"It’s like watching someone feed a miniature version of Thor," Tasmin muttered, slowly sliding her void-daggers back into their sheaths with a look of deadpan bewilderment.
At the mention of her name, Thor stepped forward from the shadow of the ice pillars.
The God of Thunder’s shoulders began to tremble. Her chest hitched once, twice, and then—
"BAHAHAHAHAHAHA! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!"
A deafening earth-shaking roar of pure laughter erupted from Thor’s throat.
She slapped her armored thigh with a sound like a cannon shot, tears of hilarious disbelief streaming from her blue eyes as she pointed a gauntleted finger straight at the woman curled in Silas’s lap.
The women stared at Thor in complete shock as Rika froze mid-chew. The piece of venison slipped from her fingers, dropping back into the brass container with a wet plop.
Her emerald eyes widened with pure horror and slowly, desperately, she tried to pull the wool blanket completely over her head, attempting to vanish into the fabric like an embarrassed turtle.
"Is that who I think it is?!" Thor bellowed between booming gasps of laughter. "By the high heavens, it is! Rikavariashaluna! So this is the miserable hole you crawled into after the northern wars!"
A muffled agonized groan rose from beneath the blanket: "Oh gods... why her? Why did it have to be the muscle-headed thunder ape...?"
Silas looked between the two, his brow arching high. "You two know each other?"
Thor wiped a tear of mirth from her eye, grinning from ear to ear with boisterous amusement.
"Know each other? We crossed hammers during the early divine campaigns, centuries before the continents fractured!" Thor roared, shaking her head. "I shattered three of her armored war-panthers with a single swing! Captain, you are looking at one of the weakest most pathetic deities that ever managed to scrape together an altar!"
Rika whipped the blanket off her head, her face blazing scarlet with furious indignation.
"I was an ecosystem guardian and a beast-tamer, you violent brute! My strength was in territory cultivation and pack synergy, not mindless brawling!"
"Even with your entire royal pack surrounding me, you couldn’t leave a single dent in my breastplate!" Thor laughed cheerfully, completely oblivious to how thoroughly devastating her words were. "To this day, none of the high courts have any idea how you attained a celestial seat! We all assumed the divine registry made an administrative error..."
Thor spoke without genuine malice as she was merely recounting the brutal reality of the ancient divine hierarchy but every word hit Rika like a physical hammer to the sternum.
The fallen goddess slumped against Silas’s chest, letting out a long, trembling sigh of complete crushing defeat.
’She’s right...’ Rika thought miserably, staring down at her sauce-stained knuckles. ’I was always the runt... The war gods stole my territories, the sky gods laughed at my beasts, and the moment a real ice deity showed up, I got shoved into a glacier for five hundred years like an unwanted turnip. I’m a joke...’
A heavy awkward silence descended over the leather mat then, Silas’s calm voice cut through the quiet.
"It doesn’t matter what you were before."
Rika blinked, slowly lifting her chin.
Silas stood up from the mat, gently setting her onto her own feet.
He looked down at her... looking past the sauce on her chin, past the tangled matted hair, and straight into her wounded emerald eyes.
He held out his right hand with his palm upward.
"I didn’t recruit you for what you did centuries ago," Silas said. "I recruited you for what you will become under my command. Blessed Land doesn’t look backward so swear your fangs to me once again, and I will give you the resources, the beasts, and the territory to become ten times stronger than you ever were as an isolated goddess."
Rika stared at the open, calloused hand extended before her.
The lingering shame, the humiliation, and centuries of bitter defeat melted away like morning frost before a rising sun.
Beneath her ribs, her dormant spiritual core gave a violent, rhythmic thump, fluttering with a sensation she hadn’t felt in an eternity.
...Ambition.
Her lips parted, and a radiant tearful smile broke across her face.
"Yes, Lord Silas," She whispered, her voice trembling with unbreakable reverence as she placed her small pale hand firmly into his grip.
"I’m with you to the end."