Chapter 498: No Cages [Bonus - ]
She extended her right arm, turning her pale slender palm upward toward the Princess.
"Come, little messenger."
On the Princess’s shoulder, the obsidian bird stiffened.
Its beady black eyes darted between Eluned’s glowing palm and the formerly shattered window frame where a root had just obliterated solid wood.
Its hollow chest hitched, its scythe-curved beak clicking nervously as it dug its talons into the Princess’s leather pauldron, trembling with clear hesitation.
"Go on, little bird," the Princess urged gently, raising a gloved hand to stroke its dark plumage with reassuring warmth. "Lady Eluned will not harm you... She is a benevolent woman. You flew all this way to save your mistress, didn’t you? Show her where she is."
The bird looked into the Princess’s soft azure eyes, finding a shred of comfort in her voice.
Steeling its nerve, the avian puffed out its chest, spread its dark wings, and pushed off the pauldron with a muted flutter.
FLAP-FLAP-FLAP.
It soared across the short gap, landing neatly upon Eluned’s outstretched palm.
SNAP!
The instant its iron-black talons touched her porcelain skin, Eluned’s emerald eyes flared with blinding radiant light.
CRRR-WHIP.
Microscopic, hair-thin emerald roots erupted from her fingertips, wrapping themselves tightly around the bird’s legs and winding upward across its chest and skull like a living jade cage.
The bird let out a sharp strangled squeak, its wings locking rigid as its pupils dilated into pure pinprick voids.
HUMMMMM.
The memory transfer was instantaneous.
For a single, fleeting fraction of a second, the bird felt entirely exposed as if its soul were being stripped bare under the piercing, all-seeing gaze of an ancient forest deity.
POP!
The glowing roots detached, dissolving into shimmering emerald motes that drifted harmlessly to the desk.
The bird violently jerked backward, fluttering frantically through the air before crashing into the Princess’s lap, shivering uncontrollably as it buried its head beneath her sleeve.
It had lasted only an instant, but looking up into Eluned’s green eyes now, the bird felt ten times more terror than it had ever felt before.
Just staring into those deep jade irises made it feel completely naked, as if every secret of its hollow bones had been permanently laid bare.
The emerald glow in Eluned’s eyes slowly died down.
Before Eluned could begin her report, a crisp sound across the surface of Silas’s desk.
A thick, leather-bound folder... embossed with the sigil of Blessed Land materialized atop the table with a soft spatial snap.
Silas looked down.
’Aeli...’
"The final mining ledgers," Silas murmured, pulling the folder toward him and flipping it open.
His eyes swept over the columns of dense figures, tracking the tonnage harvested across the territory.
’Ah...’ Silas thought, leaning back in his leather chair.
Tasmin and Brida had logged an undisputed draw.
Brida’s brawlers had extracted slightly more raw Deep-Earth Alloy from the lower fault lines, but Tasmin’s scouts had countered with high-carat Star-Iron and pristine void-ores.
When Thora’s automated scales factored in mineral density, rarity, and zero-defect extraction bonuses, the two squads were separated by a microscopic margin of less than three ounces.
And if one wanted to say who mined the absolute most across the entire territory?
It was Eluned’s group, dead-first by a colossal margin thanks to her World-Tree roots ripping out Mine XVIT...
And second place?
Second place belonged to Gunnhild’s group.
’Apparently Gunnhild was deployed near several interconnected surface mines,’ Silas noted, his finger tracing her squad’s entry. ’She quietly marched her unit from cavern to cavern, clearing and harvesting all of them with disciplined efficiency.’
Silas tapped his knuckles against the petrified wood, a quiet contemplative sigh escaping his lips.
’What girls actually deserve the reward then...?’
He had specifically stoked the rivalry between Tasmin and Brida so that if one of them claimed victory, he could use that reward to motivate the other to push past her limits.
But they had tied... And beyond the two commanders, what about the rest of the women?
Gunnhild’s squad had broken their backs hauling iron, while Eluned had literally brought home a mountain.
If he rewarded only one, the others would feel slighted. If he rewarded everyone, the decree lost its competitive bite.
Silas closed the ledger with a heavy thud, setting it aside.
He looked up at Eluned.
The Goddess smiled, stepping forward and resting her hands on the edge of the desk.
"I have sifted through the creature’s thoughts," Eluned reported, her tone turning smooth and informative.
She raised a pale arm, pointing through the shattered window frame toward the dark jagged peaks of the northern horizon. "In the deepest northern sectors of the Umbral Basin, within a lightless canyon, rests the woman who calls herself the Goddess of Beasts."
Eluned’s eyes narrowed slightly.
"She is completely entombed within a colossal block of Forever Ice."
Silas’s brow arched. "Forever Ice?"
"An ancient freeze," Eluned explained, crossing her arms over her chest. "It is not mundane frozen moisture... from my experience... it is a stasis boundary forged to seal divine entities. It is remarkably difficult to break, even for me. The bird’s memories show that she has been trapped in that exact position for several centuries, desperately waiting for someone with the authority to shatter the ice and set her free."
Silas paused, his tactical mind processing the timeline.
’Several centuries...?’
He had only claimed the territory recently.
That meant this trapped Goddess of Beasts had been buried beneath the permafrost long before Aeliana’s original lord had ever set foot in the Umbral Basin.
She was a relic of an ancient age, frozen in the deep dark while empires rose and fell above her head.
"Can the ice be shattered?" Silas asked.
"With your current power, Silas... yes," Eluned confirmed. "If you unleash the full concentrated authority of your Gold Core and drive your fire magic into the structural fault points, you could crack it."
"How long would it take?"
"Perhaps thirty minutes to an hour of continuous high-output bombardment," Eluned estimated. "However, Morwenna’s Tidebringer carries an armor-cleaving sea enchantment that could slice through the grain in an instant and Thor? Thor could burst it with a single, high-tier lightning strike."
Silas rubbed his chin. "I see."
"We will have to travel there in person, of course," Eluned added, an amused smirk tugging at her lips. "The Goddess has already formally agreed to submit to your banner and join Blessed Land as a registered Hero, provided she is given warm shelter and abundant food..."
Silas let out a soft, thoughtful sigh, looking out at the snowy peaks.
"When do you think we can depart?" Silas asked.
Eluned’s smile faded slightly, replaced by a stern cautionary gaze.
"That is the complication," Eluned warned, her voice dropping into a serious tone. "To reach her, we must enter the deepest sectors of the Umbral Basin. According to the bird’s flight memories, there are numerous Tier 4 monsters roaming those lightless valleys."
She paused, letting the silence hang in the warm office.
"And buried within the deepest crevasses... there are slumbering presences that radiate the suffocating pressure of Tier 5 calamities."
Silas rubbed his stubbled chin, his piercing blue eyes narrowing into a dark squint.
Tier 4 and Tier 5 monsters were extreme hazards.
A Tier 4 beast was a disaster... capable of shrugging off modern high-caliber artillery, tearing through fortified city walls, and requiring coordinated strike teams of elite combatants to suppress.
And Tier 5? That was a whole different monster.
’Those are a bit much...’ Silas thought, his pulse quickening with cold ruthless ambition rather than fear. ’Facing a Tier 5 head-on would be an nightmare but... the corpses. The high-tier cores, the hide, the blood... they would be worth an astronomical fortune.’
He nodded slowly.
"We should go," Silas agreed firmly. "It’s going to be dangerous, but we have you, Morwenna, and Thor. You’ll be able to protect the perimeter, and the bird will guide us along the safest path to bypass the sleeping titans. Right?"
Silas, Eluned, and the Princess all turned their gaze toward the small obsidian creature peeking out from beneath the Princess’s sleeve.
The bird stiffened under the collective weight of their stares. It puffed out its chest, slowly nodding its crested head in rapid affirmative clicks.
"Good," Silas said, standing up from behind the ironwood desk. "I’ll assemble a specialized strike team for this... We can’t bring a large army into a calamity zone so we’ll leave the bulk of the garrison behind to secure the territory under Gunnhild’s command."
He adjusted his leather belt, looking at Eluned.
"I also want Aeli to come along with us."
Eluned arched a delicate green brow. "Aeli? Our sweet secretary?"
"She needs the field time," Silas explained calmly. "She’s been buried in administrative work for a while. Her spatial teleportation is our ultimate escape hatch if a strong monster wakes up, and she needs to stretch her legs outside the walls."
Eluned nodded gracefully. "I will speak with the girls and prepare our kits."
"Wait!"
A small desperate voice cut through the room.
Silas and Eluned paused, looking toward the velvet chairs.
The Princess had shot up to her feet.
Her hands were balled into tight, trembling fists at her sides, her porcelain cheeks burning with a desperate flush as she looked straight into Silas’s eyes.
"Lord Silas..." the Princess pleaded softly. "Please. Let me come along with you."
Silas stared at her for a flat second as he blinked, letting out a dry incredulous breath.
"Princess," Silas said, his voice dropping into a flat unimpressed monotone. "Did you even hear a single word we just said? Tier 4 monsters... Tier 5 monsters too... That is astronomically far beyond what you need for basic combat training. You learned how to stab a monster three days ago but this is an expedition into a death-zone."
The Princess’s lower lip quivered slightly, but she refused to yield.
She puffed out her cheeks, reaching frantically into her embroidered belt pouch and pulling out a sleek, gold-embossed royal promissory slate.
"I... I will pay you more!" the Princess blurted out, holding the gold slate forward like a shield! "A hundred million credits! Two hundred million! The moment Thor takes me and I return to Earth, I will execute an immediate wire transfer directly into your account! Please, Lord Silas!"
Silas didn’t even look at the slate. He simply crossed his arms over his broad chest with his expression hardening into stone.
"Put your money away, Princess," Silas said coldly. "Our vaults are overflowing with Mana Diamonds... I don’t trade my women’s lives for paper currency so you are staying behind the walls where it’s safe."
The Princess’s chest heaved.
The sharp rejection stung, but beneath the sting was a burning desperate fire that she had never felt in her entire sheltered existence.
She took two bold, determined steps forward, stopping barely two feet from his desk.
"It is not about the money, Lord Silas," she whispered, her voice dropping its frantic edge, replaced by an earnest heart-wrenching voice that resonated through the quiet office.
’Again...’
She looked up into his piercing blue eyes, her own azure pupils wide and shimmering with raw emotion.
"All my life... I have been kept in a gilded cage," she spoke. "My father, the court ministers, the noble houses... they treated me like an ornamental doll. They told me the world was too dangerous, that I belonged behind marble pillars, waiting for someone else to decide my fate. I was never allowed to see the horizon. I was never allowed to bleed. I was never allowed to live..."
She reached up, pressing a hand firmly against her heart.
"Today... in Cavern KB-22... and since I joined Blessed Land, when I swung that pickaxe, when I stood beside your warriors, when I saw the light refracting through those raw diamonds... I felt alive for the very first time... I don’t want to hide in the Keep while you fight for the future of this territory... I want to see this world with my own eyes... I want to see the frozen goddess... I want to learn... Even if I only watch from behind your shield... please..."
She gulped.
"Do not lock me in a cage again."
𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞
The office fell into pin-drop silence as the crackling of the hearth seemed to soften.
Silas looked down at her trembling frame and he saw the genuine desperate plea in her eyes.
’Why doesn’t she just want to sit still?’
He could see the hunger of a caged bird that had finally tasted the open sky and would rather die in the wind than return to its golden bars.
He felt the rigid paranoia in his chest slowly yield, giving way to a grudging reluctant respect.
Beside him, Eluned stepped forward, a soft smile gracing her lips as she reached out and gently rested a warm hand on the Princess’s shoulder.
"Take her, Silas," Eluned murmured gently, her voice like warm honey. "I will personally weave a barrier of bark around her mount so nothing short of an apocalyptic strike will touch her skin and Thor will be riding with us... you know the blonde giant treats the little royal like her favorite sister."