Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Morwenna didn’t block the attack... she parried the brute’s elbow at an oblique angle, deflecting the multi-ton energy straight into the dirt as the brute overextended, tumbling forward onto one knee.

"Heh..."

Morwenna pivoted on her heel with her body twisting like a coiled spring.

SLASH-KRA-CHOP!

Her Tidebringer carved through the back of the monster’s neck like a heated cleaver through butter.

The decapitated head rolled across the permafrost, spraying black ichor in a wide arc before the body even realized it was dead.

"I’m sorry Tide, I have to use you against low-tier mobs... They aren’t even worthy of your blade."

Well it was not like she even had a choice in the matter, it was either that or using another weapon and apart from chains, Tidebringer didn’t really like it when she was using another sword especially when she was being wielded.

’It’s just a sword with a fucking attitude issue...’

The third brute roared, lunging at Morwenna’s blind spot—

FZZZZZZT!

"Hold right there, ugly!" Kadi’s sharp voice rang out.

A roaring torrent of dense pressurized golden sand erupted from Kadi’s outstretched palms, wrapping around the charging brute’s face like a suffocating mask, blinding its milky eyes and ripping through its soft tissues with microscopic abrasive fury.

"GAH?!"

The brute stumbled, swinging blindly—

FLASH!

Aeliana appeared out of thin air directly beside the blinded beast.

The high-elf secretary’s silver-gold eyes were wide with razor-sharp focus as she clapped her slender hands together, releasing a spatial shear right at the monster’s ankle.

CRACK-POP!

The space around the joint violently twisted, snapping the thick leg bone in half like a dry twig.

"GRAHHHHHH!"

The brute crashed into the snow with an earth-shattering thud, howling in agony; however Morwenna walked up calmly and stepped onto the struggling monster’s chest.

"Whining on and on... Your kind really makes me sick."

She drove Tidebringer straight down through its throat with a sickening final squelch.

"And... That’s the last of them." Morwenna smirked, giving her blade a crisp downward flick that flung the black blood cleanly into the snowdrifts.

Up in the trees, the final Chitin-Stalker was attempting to scuttle away through the high branches...

THWIP!

A single, silver-fletched arrow whistled through the freezing air, driven by the Princess’s focused draw.

The arrow struck the mantis dead-center through its jointed wing-casing, pinning it to the trunk as Tasmin dropped down from above a fraction of a second later, her void-dagger severing its head with a clean twist.

Within less than three minutes, the entire grove was silent once more.

Thirty Spine-Hounds, four massive Grave-Gorgers, and a dozen Chitin-Stalkers lay dead with their mutilated corpses littering the red-stained snow.

Back at the edge of the grove, sitting tall atop Titan with grease glistening on her fingers, Thor tossed the clean stripped marrow bone over her shoulder with a satisfied cavern-shaking sigh.

THUMP.

"Ah! That was a splendid show!" Thor declared, wiping her mouth with the back of her sleeve with her belly thoroughly full. "Good footwork, pirate! Nice precision, little elf but you took too long on the big ones! A good lightning bolt would have turned them all into fertilizer before the ale lost its chill!"

"Shut your pie-hole, giantess!" Morwenna snapped back, though her chest was heaving with an adrenaline-fueled smirk as she wiped sweat from her brow. "Some of us actually enjoy the physical workout!"

Silas walked into the center of the grove with his eyes scanning the carnage with calm efficiency as he flicked his longsword clean, sheathing it with a sharp clack.

’That was a clean execution... The team is as good as I thought.’

He looked up at the sky and sighed.

"Haah..."

Gnarled charcoal-black boughs knit together above their heads like a petrified ribcage, blotting out whatever pale daylight managed to filter down through the basin’s bruising sky.

High above, fine flakes of dry mountain snow still sifted through the tangled needles, drifting down in lazy spirals to dust the dark wool of his cloak.

Behind him, the low wet gurgle of dying flesh finally ceased as the last Spine-Hound went limp against the permafrost with its black blood freezing into brittle glassy crusts over the shale.

’We dealt with them cleanly enough,’ Silas thought, resting his gloved palm against the pommel of his sheathed longsword. ’But if every mile in this northern corridor throws a dozen ambush predators across our vector, we’re going to burn half our operational window just scraping marrow off our boots...’

His primary concern wasn’t the physical threat.

Between Thor’s raw devastation, Eluned’s power, Morwenna’s blade, and Aurelia’s cleansing silver fire, these low-tier roaming packs were little more than minor terrain friction.

The true enemy was time lost, momentum bled away, and the relentless creep of the sub-zero basin chill grinding down the mounts.

He wanted this expedition wrapped up speedily.

Every extra hour spent navigating these unmapped gorges was an hour the territory ran without him.

Suddenly, an involuntary shudder traveled up the base of Silas’s neck.

It was not cold.

His Gold Core hummed like a furnace within his chest, washing through his pathways with a golden warmth.

The chill was from a thought.

’Leaving Brida in charge of the entire territory...’

Silas rubbed the bridge of his nose with an uneasy grimace tightening the corners of his mouth.

At dawn, before they crossed the perimeter trench, the decision had seemed impeccably rational.

Brida possessed the undisputed respect of everyone in the territory, she had the operational instincts of a veteran, an unshakeable sense of territorial pride, and an iron grip on the defensive rotations.

Behind Tasmin, she was the natural choice to hold the territory so why did the back of his scalp itch with pure dread?

’Was that actually a terrible idea?’ Silas mused, his eyes narrowing as he stared blankly at the snow. ’Brida is disciplined when steel is clashing but give her twenty-four hours of unsupervised administrative command, an open run of the Keep, and the keys to the master quarters...’

A vivid horrifying mental image flashed through his mind...

Silas could picture himself returning through the southern pass to find the whole Barracks repurposed into a brewery, all of the warriors wrestling in grease in the main courtyard, and the Lord’s private chambers thoroughly ransacked with his spare tunics gathered into an unholy nesting pile.

’I doubt she would burn the walls down,’ Silas reasoned, though the thought brought remarkably little comfort. ’She loves the Keep too much for that but she might turn the residency into a den of sin before I make it back to the gates.’

A sudden fierce urgency took root in his chest.

They needed to find this frozen Goddess, crack the ice, and march south before Brida had time to organize a coup over his linen closet.

"Form up on the center line!" Silas called out, his deep voice slicing through the quiet grove with crisp authority. "Check the wolves’ cinches, clear the gore from your stirrups, and tighten the spacing... We’re moving."

"Understood, my Lord," Tasmin answered from the edge of the clearing.

She was already back in her saddle, her twin void-daggers wiped clean and locked into their thigh holsters with a muffled click.

Overhead, perched on the low branch of a weeping cedar, the obsidian bird let out an impatient metallic squawk.

It snapped its scythe-curved beak, shook the frost from its dark crystalline feathers, and launched into the air with three sharp flaps, banking smoothly toward a narrow ascending rocky ravine that cut northward through the cliffs.

"Bird’s got the scent," Morwenna noted from the flank as Valkyrie arrived.

The Pirate Queen reached up, pushing a stray lock of jet-black hair behind her ear, her cool gray eyes tracking the bird’s flight path through the dense canopy.

Her hand rested comfortably on the pommel of Tidebringer as her posture was fluid despite the freezing squall.

"Looks like it’s funneling us along the high shelf, Captain. Flatter footing, at least..."

"Let’s make use of it," Silas said, nudging Valkyrie forward.

The eight Blessed Wolves fell into an offset column with their broad paws pounding rhythmically against the shale.

For the next mile, the terrain grew increasingly severe.

The twisted pine forest thinned out, replaced by towering walls of black basalt that rose vertically on either side, pinching the trail into a deep corridor of stone and ancient ice.

Yet, as they pressed deeper into the corridor, the light began to fail with alarming speed.

It was not the natural twilight of dusk.

From the cracks between the basalt slabs, that same milky-white opaque fog they had skirted earlier was beginning to pool anew.

It crept out of the fissures in thick lazy ribbons, curling around the wolves’ hocks like freezing water.

With every hundred yards they gained, the ribbons thickened, fusing together into a dense soupy bank that clung to the permafrost, rising rapidly toward their waists.

High above, the obsidian bird suddenly halted its forward glide.

It fluttered erratically, diving down from the mist-shrouded rocks to land heavily upon the Princess’s leather pauldron with its talons digging into the reinforcement as it issued a series of sharp distressed clicks.

"KRR-CLIK! Squawk! Krrr-caw!"

Eluned, riding parallel to Silas, tilted her head.

Her long, emerald-green braid swayed over her shoulder as her eyes flared with a faint luminescence, attuning to the creature’s panicked vibrations.

"Silas," Eluned spoke, her voice filled with seriousness. "The monster says we must stop our advance immediately."

Silas pulled on Valkyrie’s reins, bringing the pack to a smooth halt. "What is it? A territorial pack ahead?"

"The fog," Eluned explained, gesturing with her wooden staff toward the white vapor rapidly rising around their thighs. "According to the bird’s instincts, the necrotic fog in this specific sector operates on an ebb and flow. At this hour, it surges to its peak saturation point across the entire low-lying basin... If we remain exposed on this trail when the peak arrives, the fog will completely blind us, and the boundary will become entirely impassable. It insists we locate an enclosed cavern... something deep within the cliffside and seal the threshold completely so none of this vapor can seep inside."

’I really couldn’t have thought that a Bird would be that smart...’

She turned her gaze up toward the jagged rock walls. "Once the peak crests and burns itself out through the valley vents, the air will clear for several hours so we will have an open unobstructed window to ride straight to the trench without harassment."

Silas sighed, a heavy plume of gray mist puffing into the chill. "Just what we needed. Stalled by bad weather..."

"Why bother hiding in a hole like frightened mice?!"

Thor’s booming voice shattered the quiet of the gorge.

The God of Thunder shifted atop Titan’s broad back, crossing her thick sculpted arms over her chest.

Her storm-blue eyes flashed with restless combative irritation as she glared down at the creeping white mist.

"We are warriors, Silas!" Thor scoffed, her golden locks whipping in the draft. "We have the strength of the earth, the fury of the skies, and blades that can sever mountains! If the fog is thick, I will summon a gale and blow it back to whatever pit spawned it! Why waste time shivering in a cold burrow when we could simply cut through the entire valley?!"

From her saddle between Aurelia and Tasmin, the Princess shrank slightly into the deep wool lining of her cloak.

Her small hands, clad in thick sheepskin gloves, were trembling from the unrelenting sub-zero draft that howled down the canyon.

She had spent the entire morning maintaining a proud stoic royal facade, desperate to prove that she wasn’t a fragile liability to the girls but the truth was simple...

Her limbs were stiff as iron, her ears were burning with frost-nip, and the violent clash in the grove had drained the last remnants of her adrenaline.

She looked up at Thor’s towering defiant silhouette.

’If Thor insists on marching, Lord Silas will keep pushing the line,’ the Princess thought, her mind working frantically through courtly negotiation tactics. ’I need to redirect her but you cannot reason with a storm with logic... you have to offer it a feast.’

The Princess cleared her throat softly, pulling her fur mantle tighter around her slender neck as she leaned toward the thunder deity.

"Lady Thor..." the Princess began, her azure eyes widening with deliberate innocent pleading. "I... I agree that you could effortlessly blow this entire mountain away with your divine thunder. Truly, none of these monsters could stand against you for an instant."

Thor puffed her broad chest out, a proud satisfied grin instantly breaking across her face.

"Gwahahaha! You see, Silas? The little royal knows true majesty when she sees it!"

"However," the Princess continued smoothly, her voice sweet as honey, "if we take shelter in a cavern now, as Lady Eluned suggests... we would finally have the time to sit by a warm hearth and eat properly."

Thor’s grin hitched as her ears twitched.

"Eat... properly?" Thor echoed, her voice dropping down a bit as she was suddenly intensely curious.

"Yes," the Princess nodded, leaning into the trap. "Remember the three massive containers Lady Kaelia packed for Lord Silas this morning? The roasted mountain venison sealed in rich tallow? The thick, herb-crusted loin slices? The warm concentrated bone broth? If we push through the storm, we cannot stop to open the containers... The food will freeze into blocks of ice while we ride but inside a warm cavern... we can lay out the platters, stoke a fire, and eat until our bellies are completely full."