Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

The silence that fell over the parlor was instantaneous and heavy with wounded pride.

Harper stared at him.

Her violet eyes narrowed behind her spectacles, and her chin lifted in deep personal insult, as though he had just suggested she couldn’t multiply single-digit numbers.

Seraphina’s red eyes flared with equal indignation, and she planted her hands on her hips.

"I am the recognized heiress of House Bloom," she declared coldly. "I have memorized seventeenth-century alchemical compounding matrices and synthesized complex elemental reagents... A simple culinary process of combining proteins and heat is basic physics. It is child’s play! I’m insulted that you think otherwise."

"House Whitmore maintains the trade lines in organic agricultural commodities," Harper stated, with icy composure.

She not only handled the LAB now but was doing other things that truly made her a noble.

"To imply that I cannot prepare a morning spread is a severe misjudgment of my administrative capabilities."

Silas stared at the two of them for three long seconds.

He raised both hands and took two cautious steps backward toward the living room.

"Fine," he muttered. "Go. The pantry is through the archway... Cook whatever you want."

The two girls immediately turned their backs on him and marched shoulder-to-shoulder through the kitchen’s swinging door like two rival generals deploying to the front line.

"Wait!" Silas called after them, a cold spike of panic suddenly piercing his sleep-deprived brain. "Just, do not destroy the kitchen! If you burn the counter or crack the induction stove, I swear to the gods I am billing both your houses ten times the replacement cost!"

The swinging door paused.

Harper’s head poked out of the gap, and she looked at him over the rim of her glasses with a feline amused smirk.

"Ten times the cost, Silas?" she teased, in a voice sweet as honeyed poison. "A kitchen renovation is light work for my treasury... If things get out of hand, I’ll simply purchase the entire residential block, demolish it, and build you a three-story culinary wing of polished marble. Try to relax!"

Fwip!

She disappeared behind the door, leaving Silas standing in the hall with his fist raised and his whole body fighting the urge to throw a piece of furniture at the woodwork.

"Infuriating," he growled under his breath, turning around and trudging back toward the parlor. "Rich people are completely unhinged."

He collapsed into the empty armchair beside Valerius, leaned back until his head rested against the leather, and stared up at the ceiling molding while the faint sounds of clattering metal began to echo from the kitchen.

Now it was just the two of them.

The morning sun climbed higher and cast broad golden rectangles across the Persian rug.

The silence between the two young men was comfortable, born of having stood back-to-back beneath collapsing ice while horrors clawed at their shields.

Silas reached down, picked up a half-empty glass of cold water from the side table, and took a slow sip.

"So," he said, his voice returning to its normal, steady pitch. "How’s the family? How’s Lohan holding up? What about Mia too?"

Valerius let out a long groan and threw his head back against the cushions until his golden hair spilled over the top.

"Don’t get me started, man," he sighed, dragging both hands down his face. "My old man has been riding my ass non-stop since the Secret Realm collapsed... Every single morning it’s ledgers, contracts, quarterly yield projections... The man treats my existence like an underperforming branch office."

"Still pushing trade agreements?"

"Worse," Valerius muttered, rolling his neck until the joints popped. "You remember the Grand Assembly? Well you weren’t there but I was, The Sterling Conglomerate just closed the Tsardom of Borealis deal so now ten automated heavy-munitions foundries along the northern railway corridor, standardized artillery, mana-core casings, and void-iron penetrators, are all underwritten by us, with replenishment times cut by sixty percent... In exchange, we get an exclusive fifteen-year concession on the raw titanium and unrefined void-iron out of the newly stabilized northern trench sectors."

Silas raised an eyebrow. "How did the Tsar take it?"

"Volkov slammed his fist on the table and said yes before my father finished the sentence," Valerius said, with a grin he couldn’t quite suppress. "He’s sick to death of Columbian shells jamming in his cannon breeches because some pinstripe bureaucrat shaved an eighth of an inch off the brass to save a few credits... We walked out with the monopoly and a military alliance with Borealis in under five minutes and President Vanderbilt looked like he was going to burst a vein."

"I would have paid good money to see that."

"It was beautiful," Valerius sighed. "And now my father has the whole corporate structure on twenty-four-hour rotations to get the foundry sites and the transport convoys ready... I haven’t slept more than four hours a night all week and it isn’t just us but the whole Council sector is buzzing."

Silas raised an eyebrow. "House Bloom too?"

"Yeah," Valerius nodded, glancing toward the closed kitchen door. "Matriarch Bloom won the three coastal mining sectors in the southern gulf... Albion’s Prime Minister threw a huge scene, because those sectors sit right on his trade route, but she pointed out that his navy can’t keep sea-krakens and pirates off his own freighters, and Australis voted with her. Now she’s hammering out patrol terms with Albion, and Sera’s getting dragged into the negotiations next week to represent the younger lineage. Her mother’s grooming her for a council seat, so she’s been swamped with legal briefs and diplomatic protocol."

He let out a quiet chuckle and his golden eyes softened.

"It’s been completely hectic for both of us. But... well, after the desert, after everything that happened down in the dark, we both wanted to come see you. Make sure you were actually breathing and not buried under some mountain of paperwork or something, Oh and Mia’s doing alright... She wants us to meet up sometime and see Aeliana again."

Silas paused and looked at the blond giant beside him.

A quiet warmth settled into his chest.

In the cutthroat world of high-tier Awakened nobility, where every conversation was an exchange of leverage and every alliance had an expiration date, having people who simply showed up at your door because they wanted to verify you were alive was a rare precious commodity.

’Friends in the real world, huh? Feels nice.’

Valerius turned his head to look straight at him.

The easygoing smirk on the blond scion’s face faded, replaced by a sudden awkward hesitation.

"Hey, Silas," he said, his voice dropping into a lower, more serious tone. "We’re... friends, right?"

Silas blinked, caught off guard.

"Yeah?" He nodded with an easy shrug. "Of course we’re friends. We split that Guardian together in the Ititius Realm and you covered my back down in the dark. That makes you solid in my book."

Valerius’s eyes widened, and then his expression shifted into one of aggrieved dramatic betrayal.

"Then why the hell don’t we have each other’s personal comm codes?!" he bellowed, leaning forward and throwing his hands into the air. "We fought through an ancient god’s tomb together! We survived a tectonic collapse and I had to track your damn residential address through my father’s corporate surveillance registry just to find out where you sleep at night! Do you know how pathetic that feels?!"

Silas froze.

His eyes darted to the side, and a nervous sheepish laugh escaped his throat. "Ah... ha ha... right. That."

He reached into the pocket of his violet silk pajamas and pulled out his utilitarian smartphone.

"My bad," he admitted, tapping the screen to unlock the contacts menu. "I’m not exactly great with social stuff, Half the time I forget the device is even charged."

"Unbelievable," Valerius grumbled, pulling a sleek state-of-the-art golden communicator from his vest pocket.

The two devices clicked softly as their proximity sensors engaged, exchanging secure frequencies and personal comm numbers in a flash of pale blue light.

Valerius pocketed his communicator and leaned back into the cushions with a triumphant satisfied nod.

A mischievous boyish grin spread across his handsome face.

"Alright," he said. "Since we have a few minutes before the kitchen inevitably detonates into high-grade shrapnel... you play Lord of the Outer Rings?"

Silas looked up and raised an eyebrow. "The mobile territorial strategy game? The one with the micro-transactions and the base-building timers?"

"The very same," Valerius smirked, tapping his screen with rapid, practiced thumb strikes. "I’ve got a Tier 4 fortress in Sector Seven... My automated ballistas are tearing through the barbarian encampments. Let’s run a co-op siege while the ladies burn your cookware."

Silas looked at the kitchen door, listened to the sound of something heavy and metallic falling onto the linoleum, and shrugged.

"Why not?" he said, booting up the application on his phone. "Let’s see your setup."

...

Behind the closed swinging door of the kitchen, the atmosphere was thick enough to choke an ox.

Seraphina Bloom stood in front of the expansive marble kitchen island with her hands hanging awkwardly at her sides and her red eyes darting across the stainless steel countertop in mounting panic.

’What... what are all these things?!’

Before her sat an array of culinary implements that looked less like cooking tools and more like torture devices from an ancient dungeon.

There was a heavy cast-iron skillet with a ribbed bottom, a ceramic mandoline with a terrifyingly exposed razor blade, a double-balloon wire whisk, four wooden spoons of varying curvature, a digital food scale, and a stainless steel bowl filled with raw brown eggs.

In the Bloom estate, food simply appeared.

A bell would chime, three uniformed footmen would glide into the private dining pavilion bearing silver cloches, and a five-course spread of pan-seared sea bass, truffle-infused consommé, and glazed root vegetables would be set before her without a speck of grease touching her fingers.

...She had never touched raw poultry in her life, Sera didn’t even know where the shells of eggs went after they were cracked.

Seraphina shifted her weight and cast a cautious defensive glance toward the other side of the counter.

Harper Whitmore stood there, inspecting a clear glass bottle of cold-pressed olive oil.

The Head of House Whitmore appeared to be the picture of effortless competence.

Her long violet hair was tied back with a clean silver clip, her wire-rimmed spectacles sat perfectly on the bridge of her nose, and she held the oil bottle up to the light and tapped the glass with a slender fingernail, whistling a cheerful unhurried melody through her teeth as she arranged a loaf of sourdough, a block of yellow butter, and a carton of milk on the cutting board.

’Damn her,’ Seraphina thought, her teeth grinding in a quiet surge of bitter envy. ’Look at her... So calm... So domestic... She actually knows how to do this... She’s going to whip up a three-star gourmet spread, Silas is going to look at her like she’s a household goddess, and I’m going to be standing here holding an empty frying pan like a complete idiot.’

Her knuckles tightened around the edge of her oversized shirt then Harper’s cheerful whistling abruptly stopped.

She glanced toward the swinging door to verify that Silas and Valerius were out of line of sight, then slid a hand into the pocket of her violet silk pajamas.

With rapid movements she pulled out a sleek, purple-cased smartphone, unlocked the screen with her thumb, opened the global video streaming application LordTube, and clicked on the search bar.

Seraphina’s sharp red eyes narrowed.

She leaned forward by half an inch, tracking the movement of Harper’s thumbs against the glass keyboard.

Harper typed with blistering speed.

[How to make Omlet]

’Omlet?’ Seraphina thought, her brow furrowing. ’She misspelled omelet.’

On the screen, the search engine automatically corrected the query and pulled up hundreds of cooking tutorials.

Harper’s eyes scanned the thumbnails frantically with her cool polished composure cracking into tiny desperate fractures of panic.

She tapped a video titled... [Easy 3-Minute Fluffy Omelet for Beginners (No Skills Required!)]

The video loaded and Harper leaned her hip against the marble counter, turned the volume down to a barely audible whisper, and held the screen close to her spectacles.

A soft feminine voice emanated from the tiny speaker:

"Hello, everyone! Welcome back to Auntie Mae’s Home Kitchen! Today, we are going to make the simplest, most delicious classic rolled egg omelet that anyone can master in five minutes!"

Seraphina stood motionless on the other side of the island.

She looked at Harper’s rigid laser-focused posture as she looked at the tiny screen displaying a cheerful middle-aged woman holding a yellow plastic bowl.

The tension in her shoulders slowly drained away and a tiny breathless snort escaped her nose.

Harper froze.

Her head slowly rotated ninety degrees to the left, her violet eyes wide behind her glasses, and caught Seraphina’s gaze.

For three seconds, neither woman moved.

Harper was holding an instructional video for toddlers while Seraphina was holding an empty wire whisk like a club.

Both of them were completely out of their depth.

Seraphina walked slowly around the edge of the marble island, her footsteps quiet against the linoleum, and came to a halt beside Harper’s shoulder.

She looked down at the illuminated screen, where Auntie Mae was demonstrating how to crack an egg against a flat surface without getting shells in the bowl and Harper didn’t turn the phone off.

She simply tilted the display toward Seraphina so the crimson-haired heiress had a clear view of the instructions.

The two noble prodigies leaned against the counter side by side, their shoulders brushing in the quiet kitchen with their eyes glued to the three-minute beginner tutorial.

"Now, remember," Auntie Mae chimed through the speaker, "the secret is low heat, gentle stirring, and plenty of butter!"

Harper pushed her glasses up her nose with one finger.

Seraphina nodded slowly, her expression grave, as though she were memorizing the coordinates of an enemy fortress.

A silent unspoken truce descended over the marble island.

’Just this once,’ Harper thought, her jaw tightening with grim determination.

’Just this once,’ Seraphina agreed silently, her red eyes burning with fierce resolve.

’...We conquer the eggs.’