Chapter 219: Returning Home
Her Father might be one of the most important and politically powerful people in the entire world, but here... in this guarded household... he had merely married into the ancient Bloom bloodline.
He was a political asset, not a ruler.
And as her Mother loved to constantly brutally remind him: "Once a loser, always a loser."
Which was exactly what he was in her eyes.
"Seraphina! My beautiful spark!" her Mother greeted her with a warm brilliant smile, entirely ignoring the man she was sitting on. "You have returned! Please, tell me immediately, what exactly happened in the Secret Realm?"
"Welcome home, pumpkin!" her Father chimed in cheerfully from the floor, trying to look up at her.
THWACK!
Her Mother aggressively, violently kicked him directly in the ribs with her sharp heel. "Shut up! I am speaking to my daughter!"
Her Father instantly went silent while whimpering softly.
Seraphina sighed, walking over to the massive mahogany desk in the center of the room.
"The Secret Realm of Ititus was a complete waste of time and resources, Mother," Seraphina recounted. "The Sand God was a narcissistic relic. He barely had any actual treasures to offer the us, and he trapped us in a tectonic collapse."
She raised her right hand. Her palm glowed with a bright, spatial blue light as she accessed her Lord Inventory.
"But," Seraphina continued, "I still managed to secure some high-tier assets during the subterranean descent before the collapse."
She swiped her hand across the desk.
CLATTER!
Several highly valuable items materialized and dropped heavily onto the polished wood.
A massive, violently glowing, obsidian-horned monster skull.
A perfectly forged Tier 3 mythril dagger that pulsed with latent shadow magic and several other glowing, highly condensed mana crystals and ancient treasures that would massively bolster the territory’s raw power.
Her Mother’s eyes widened, highly impressed by the haul.
"I must also officially report," Seraphina continued, her voice tightening slightly as she recounted the sheer terror of the event. "I was almost killed by the deity as he atomized my armor. But before he could execute the coalition, we met another far more powerful deity."
Seraphina looked at her parents with her red eyes turning serious.
"Thor. The Daughter of Odin. She descended from the sky and completely atomized the Sand God with a single swing of her hammer. It was... terrifying."
Her Mother’s smile vanished, instantly replaced by deep maternal worry. She slid off her husband’s back, rushing forward to check her daughter for injuries.
"Oh, my sweet girl!" her Mother gasped, cupping Seraphina’s face. "You survived a divine execution zone! You are so incredibly strong! I am so proud of you!"
Seraphina took a deep breath, her heart hammering against her ribs. It was time for the hardest part of the report.
"There is... one other thing, Mother," Seraphina murmured, her face instantly flushing a violent, blinding shade of crimson. "There was a man in the dungeon. A Lord and he... he saved my life against the deity."
Her Mother’s delicate eyebrows raised in sharp, aristocratic curiosity. "Oh? A man? A hero?"
"He also..." Seraphina stammered, completely unable to meet her mother’s eyes. "...he also saw me completely naked during when I was... I was... peeing."
The entire temperature in the massive study instantly plummeted.
VROOOOOOOOOM!
A terrifying aura of pure murderous intent violently exploded from the floor!
Her Father had instantly snapped.
The submissive dog was gone as the Magistrate of the World Council completely lost his mind at the disrespect to his daughter’s honor.
The gravity in the room increased tenfold, physically cracking the mahogany desk.
"WHAT IS HIS NAME?!" her Father roared, his voice distorted with demonic rage as he stood up, ready to completely glass whatever territory this man belonged to.
Before he could even take a step, the emotional shock of his daughter’s ruined modesty caught up to him.
His eyes rolled back into his head, and the terrifying Magistrate completely collapsed back down to the ground, passed out cold from a rage-induced aneurysm.
Seraphina panicked, waving her hands frantically at her stunned Mother.
"No! Please, do not punish him!" Seraphina shouted desperately, completely interrupting her Mother before she could summon the family assassins. "Silas is actually an incredibly strong and terrifyingly capable Lord! He fought the god hand-to-hand for a bit!"
Seraphina squeezed her eyes tightly shut, her face burning hotter than a solar flare.
She threw her hands down to her sides, bracing herself for the chaos she was about to unleash.
"Since he saw me naked," Seraphina shouted at the absolute top of her lungs. "I want to get married to him!"
Her Mother stood perfectly frozen in the center of the shattered study.
The Matriarch of the Bloom Clan looked down at her blushing, screaming daughter, and for the very first time in her entire noble life... she was completely speechless.
...
The torrential rain of Valoria City battered violently against the massive, floor-to-ceiling panoramic windows of the ultra-luxury penthouse apartment.
Inside the sprawling decorated living room, the atmosphere was a stark contrast to the violent thunderstorm raging outside.
The apartment was a masterclass in corporate wealth as the floors were laid with imported, polished obsidian.
The furniture was crafted from rare, magically preserved mahogany and draped in the finest temperature-regulating frost-silk.
Sitting right in the absolute center of a massive, U-shaped white leather couch was Harper.
The Lightning Lord wasn’t wearing her expensive and perfectly tailored corporate-sponsored combat armor, nor was she wearing her sleek suit.
She was dressed down in a simple oversized gray sweatshirt and a pair of loose black sleep shorts, her vibrant purple hair tied up in a messy chaotic bun that completely defied her usual perfection.
Despite constantly calling her father ’Papa’ in public and possessing a seemingly unbreakable psychological attachment to the man who funded her very existence, Harper did not live with him in the main family estate.
Since her mother had passed away years ago, the man had remarried.
He had taken his new significantly younger wife and shoved Harper and her little sister into this isolated golden-cage penthouse to live completely out of sight.
He had effectively buried his first family in a high-rise tower so he could focus entirely on his new political acquisitions without the messy baggage of his past even though he used them for missions.
’What was I thinking...?’
Sitting on the thick plush rug on the floor of the living room, surrounded by a small mountain of academy textbooks and glowing holographic datapads, was Harper’s little sister, Penelope.
Penelope looked up from her foundational mana-theory homework, adjusting her sleek wire-rimmed glasses.
She looked incredibly similar to Harper, sharing the exact same vibrant purple hair and sharp features, but she completely lacked the violent static energy that constantly crackled around her older sister.
"The infiltration plan with Lia is progressing perfectly, Big Sis," Penelope reported with her voice sounding very serious, it was far too mature for an eleven-year-old girl. "I officially solidified my position as Lia’s second best friend today during the lunch period. Kaede from the Shogunate Isles is currently her first, but I am rapidly closing the social gap."
Penelope paused, her violet eyes dropping to the floor.
She nervously gripped the edges of her textbook.
She genuinely liked Lia Graves.
The girl from Sector 4 was funny, fiercely loyal, and completely lacked the toxic manipulative venom that infected the rest of the Valoria Academy student body.
Penelope wanted to just be normal friends with her.
"I... I honestly really like her," Penelope admitted quietly with her voice softening into something resembling actual childhood innocence. "She isn’t like the other nobles. She’s genuine."
Harper didn’t even blink. Her purple eyes were cold and focused on the objective.
"That is completely irrelevant to the mission, Penelope," Harper stated. "Your personal feelings do not dictate the strategy as we need to maintain an unbreakable proximity to Silas Graves’s bloodline. Lia is the absolute center of his psychological anchor. If we completely control his sister’s social circle, we maintain a direct unfiltered line of influence to the Lord. Do not lose sight of the objective just because the girl shared her lunch with you."
Is what she would have loved to say but she didn’t say anything at all... she only looked down.
"Okay sis."
Harper let out a long and deeply exhausted sigh.
She looked down at her lap.
Resting across her thighs, completely dominating the pristine white leather of the couch, was a massive and heavy scuffed black trench coat.
It was Silas’s coat.
During the chaos of the Secret Realm extraction, he didn’t ask for it back.
It was stained with dried monster blood, ash, and his own scent.
Harper gently, almost reverently, ran her pale fingers over the torn fabric.
Her violet eyes began to glow with a dark intensity as she traced the stitching where his broad shoulders usually rested.
"Penelope," Harper asked quietly with her voice echoing softly in the massive rain-battered living room. "How much do you actually think Dad cares about us?"
Penelope physically flinched.
She completely stopped writing in her notebook as she stared up at her older sister in genuine shock.
Harper never, under any circumstances, referred to their father as ’Dad’ unless she was experiencing a violent spike of emotional instability.
It was always ’Papa’ when she was playing the role of the perfect obedient corporate daughter.
Hearing the word ’Dad’ meant the carefully constructed dam was actively breaking.
Penelope swallowed hard, carefully considering her words. She looked away, staring at the polished obsidian floor.
"He... he stuffed us in this apartment to stay with his new wife," Penelope recounted softly, quoting the exact harsh reality they had lived with for years. "Which he had been cheating on our Mother with for months before she even passed away. And well... it’s pretty low. He pays for the penthouse and the tutors, but he doesn’t actually look at us. We’re just liabilities to him."
Harper didn’t respond immediately.
She slowly stood up from the white leather couch.
She picked up the black trench coat and effortlessly swung it over her narrow shoulders.
Because it belonged to a towering Lord like Silas, it was comically large on her.
The dark hem dragged slightly against the obsidian floor, and the broad shoulders completely swallowed her slender frame but the second she put it on, something fundamentally shifted in her psyche.
She didn’t know exactly why, but when she was completely enveloped in the scent of Silas Graves...
She felt an astronomical surge of pure confidence.
’I feel like... I can do anything.’ Harper thought.
Harper turned around, looking down at her little sister.
The static electricity in the luxury penthouse violently spiked as the heavy crystal chandelier hanging above the dining table began to flicker and hum with dangerous voltage.
"Penelope," Harper purred with a dark unhinged smile stretching across her flawless face. "How exactly do you think it’ll feel if I just walk over to the main estate right now... and blast him directly in the face with some high-voltage lightning?"
Penelope stared at her older sister.
She didn’t scream, hell she didn’t try to talk her out of it.
She simply adjusted her wire-rimmed glasses with her own deep-seated quiet resentment toward their father bleeding through her noble conditioning.
"I think," Penelope replied calmly, her violet eyes totally deadpan. "that it will hurt him. A lot."
Harper’s smile widened into a brilliant psychotic grin.
The violet lightning violently crackled to life, actively glowing inside her purple eyes, illuminating the dark living room with harsh flashes of electricity that perfectly matched the thunderstorm raging outside.
"Sure~" Harper sang cheerfully, her voice dripping with sweetness as she adjusted the heavy collar of Silas’s trench coat around her neck. "Let me go do that quickly~"
...
A world away, completely separated from the toxic neon-lit politics and torrential rain of Valoria City, the world shifted.
The absolute pitch-black void of the dimensional tether evaporated.
Silas materialized directly in the center of his sprawling, dimly lit master bedroom inside the Blessed Land Keep.
The transition from the high-tech bureaucratic reality of Earth to the primal, mana-dense atmosphere of the Sovereign Realm was completely instantaneous, leaving him standing barefoot on the thick rugs of his sanctuary.
He was home.
He didn’t even have a single second to fully exhale the stale air of the human world from his lungs before the wooden door to his bedroom was violently thrown open.
"MY LORD!"
Eluned didn’t just walk into the room... she practically teleported across the floorboards.
The stunning SSS-Rank Goddess sprinted directly forward and threw her entire body against him.
She wrapped her arms tightly around his neck, burying her flawless face directly into his bare, muscular chest.
"Thank you... Thank you... for coming back to me, my Lord..." Eluned breathed out, her voice trembling with genuine relief.