Chapter 519: Rikavariashaluna-El-Theris-Kalyndra [Bonus - ]
He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, expanding his spiritual perception outward.
The Gold Core within his chest pulsed gently, sending an invisible high-frequency ripple of pure golden mana washing across the cavern floor, brushing against the perimeter walls, the ceiling stalactites, and everywhere around.
’Eluned and the girls should be coming here by now,’ He calculated.
"Eeeek! Ah! What is that?!" The Goddess suddenly squealed, her pale shoulders violently twitching within the ice collar as a vivid dark crimson blush exploded across her chapped cheeks. "Stop! Stop that! What is that golden thing you’re rubbing against my soul?! It tickles! It feels like hundreds of tiny warm brass needles brushing against the back of my neck and down my spine! Ah! It’s horribly ticklish!"
Silas opened his eyes, letting out a dry exasperated sigh as he pulled his mana back.
"You’re absurdly mana-sensitive for an entity that claims to be running on empty."
"I am an ancient celestial authority, you uncultured barbarian, not a brick wall!" she protested loudly, though she couldn’t stop a wide toothy grin from splitting her cracked lips. "So... does that mean the interrogation is concluded? Did I answer correctly? Am I hired, or am I going to freeze into a permanent coat rack?!"
Silas let his hands drop to his sides with the golden crossguard of his blade glinting in the pale light.
"You’re hired," Silas said. "Under my condition... You swear your soul, your divinity, and your physical existence to Blessed Land. You take the oath of a Hero and you answer directly to my command. There will be no rogue expeditions, no divine temper tantrums, and no insubordination."
"Do you have meat?" she asked immediately, her eyes wide and dead serious.
"I have an entire cold storage of wolf meat, smoked boar, hot bone broth and a lot more," Silas answered smoothly.
"DEAL! DONE! SIGNED IN BLOOD AND CARVED IN BONE!" the goddess screamed with hysterical glee, rattling the icicles hanging from the roof. "Hurry up and smash this miserable ice cube before my jaw shatters from shivering!"
"Hold your horses," Silas said, resting his palm on the pommel of his longsword. "If you’re going to become my Hero, I need a name. What do I write down?"
The goddess immediately pulled her chin up, puffing out her chest with as much grandeur as a woman frozen to her collarbone could muster.
Her emerald eyes flashed with a dramatic glow.
"Hear my true primordial name and tremble, mortal Lord! I am Rikavariashaluna-El-Theris-Kalyndra, High Warden of the Primeval Brood and Goddess of the Fanged Courts, Lady of—"
"Rika," Silas cut in flatly.
The goddess instantly choked on her own breath, her regal expression collapsing into a slack-jawed horrified stare. "R-Rika...?"
"Rika," Silas repeated, giving a single decisive nod. "It’s clean and I don’t have to spend five minutes reciting a poem every time I need you to summon a wolf. By the way, I’m Silas."
She stared at him, her mouth opening and closing like a landed trout.
Slowly, the indignant shock faded from her eyes, replaced by a strange warm softness.
A small genuine smile curled the corners of her cracked lips.
"Rika..." she murmured, testing the sound against her tongue. "Hmph. It’s short. Terribly mortal... but it has a nice ring to it. Very well, Lord Silas! Rika is ready! Break the shell!"
"Bird," Silas barked over his shoulder. "Clear the blast radius."
The obsidian familiar didn’t hesitate.
With a sharp terrified "Krrr-caw!" it launched from the basalt spire, beating its dark wings frantically to flutter behind a massive granite boulder thirty paces back, poking only its crested head and scythe-curved beak out from behind the stone.
Silas took a wide balanced stance before the glacier.
SHING!
He drew his mythril longsword.
The golden blade cleared the scabbard with a sharp ringing chime that vibrated through the dead air of the vault.
The polished metal caught the blue luminescence, but beneath the surface of the steel, a sun-bright radiance began to coil.
Rika watched the blade, her emerald irises darting nervously across the glowing steel.
’He has a Gold Core, that much is obvious from the heat,’ she thought, a knot of anxiety tightening in her throat. ’But this is ice forged by a high-order deity... It doesn’t melt under mere fire magic, and strikes just bounce off the stasis weave. How does a mortal longsword even begin to bite into—’
Silas didn’t strike blindly.
He lowered his chin, exhaling a thin stream of gray mist through his nostrils as he focused his intent, channeling a dense thread of refined mana directly into his optic nerves.
[Rip-Current Perception] was activated!
Instantly, the visual spectrum of the chamber dissolved.
The solid permafrost and the towering glacier lost their opaque density, transforming into a complex show of elemental currents and tectonic stress lines.
Silas saw the crystalline weave of the conceptual cold... billions of petrified mana threads anchored deep into the cavern floor, looping through the glacier, and converging directly into a swirling nexus locked around Rika’s collarbones.
’There,’ Silas spotted the structural flaw.
Right at the base of her left clavicle, three inches beneath the surface of the frost, lay an infinitesimal fracture.
It was a hairline stress fault born from Rika’s awakening aura when her divine eyes had first snapped open moments ago.
’Or maybe she has been doing it a lot but that part is weaker.’
The weave was slightly stretched with the threads pulling taut against the anchor.
’Eluned estimated that breaking through this thing through continuous flaming strikes would take at least thirty minutes of concentrated channeling,’ Silas thought, his Gold Core beginning to spin with violent escalating torque. ’Thirty minutes is an eternity is too long... I’m not waiting around for a slow thaw.’
VUUUUUUUUUM!
Silas opened the floodgates of his core.
𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎
Blinding golden flames erupted from his pores, wreathing his forearms and spiraling along the length of his longsword in a roaring pressurized vortex.
The sudden release of high-tier energy caused the permafrost beneath his boots to violently sublimate, throwing up a dense screen of hissing, superheated steam.
Rika gasped, the intense furnace-like heat washing over her frozen cheeks, stinging her frostbitten skin with sudden, glorious, and almost agonizing warmth.
Silas coiled his hips, shifting his weight onto the ball of his back foot.
BOOM!
Silas exploded forward.
He didn’t execute a wide sweeping slash, instead he channeled the entire kinetic weight of his charge, the rotational torque of his core, and the concentrated solar heat of his flames into a single, pinpoint thrust, driving the tip of his golden blade straight into the microscopic stress fracture,
CLANG-KRA-BOOOOOOOOM!
The collision sounded like a siege engine striking a mountain of solid iron.
A concussive shockwave of pulverized white rime detonated outward in a thirty-foot ring, blasting through the cavern and rattling the stalactites overhead like wind chimes.
For a terrifying heartbeat, nothing happened.
The golden blade remained wedged three inches into the face of the glacier as the incandescent flames hissed furiously against the unyielding ice, but the ice itself held firm, swallowing the heat without melting a single millimeter.
"D-Did it work?!" Rika shrieked, her voice pitching up in frantic panic. "Hit it again! Channel lightning! Hit it with a rock! Don’t tell me your sword bounced—"
TICK!
A sound no louder than a snapping hair echoed through the vault.
CRACK-CRACK-KRA-BOOM!
From the tip of Silas’s blade, thousands of radiant golden fractures violently spiderwebbed across the surface of the glacier.
The deep, ethereal cyan light within the ice died instantly, snuffed out by brilliant veins of golden fire that tore through the threads like acid eating through cotton.
"IT’S SPLITTING!" Rika screamed in hysterical delight.
Silas didn’t waste a second.
He wrenched the blade free, stepped into a tight half-spin, and brought the reinforced flat of his sword crashing horizontally against the fractured perimeter surrounding her shoulders.
KRA-SHATTER!
A colossal slab of ancient petrified ice broke away in a deafening cascade!
The conceptual collar pinning Rika’s throat snapped with a hollow crack.
Her body, completely released from centuries of immobility, pitched forward into the empty air, tumbling downward amidst a shower of heavy, tumbling ice boulders.
THUD!
Rika hit the permafrost in an uncoordinated heap, gasping and hacking as the cold air rushed into her uncompressed lungs.
Silas planted his boots, breathing heavily as he lowered his sword. He turned his eyes to the wall behind her.
The entire glacier had not shattered.
Despite pouring every ounce of force and core output into the strike, only the front face holding the goddess had broken free.
The massive, thirty-foot-thick foundation of black ice plugging the Great Northern Borehole remained largely intact, scarred with glowing cracks but holding firm against the void behind it.
’Damn,’ Silas thought, wiping a bead of sweat from his chin before it could freeze. ’Even with a Gold Core, conceptual magic left behind by an ancient deity is absurdly resilient... Cleaving through this entire formation would have taken hours.’
He looked down at the dark narrow fissure exposed at the base of the plug.
He wasn’t taking any chances with whatever was sleeping in the dark.
Silas thrust his left palm forward, channeling water mana.
"Ice Transformation!"
FZZZZZZT-SNAP!
The thousands of shattered ice chunks littering the floor liquefied instantly under his command, surging into the fissure like a torrent of molten glass before re-freezing into a smooth seamless twenty-foot-thick barricade of reinforced permafrost!
Silas let out a satisfied grunt. ’Good. The door stays locked.’
"I’M FREE! I’M ALIVE! I HAVE ANKLES! I HAVE KNEES!"
Before Silas could even turn his torso, a pale, shivering blur threw itself straight at his chest.
"Oof!"
Rika slammed into him with the uncoordinated momentum of a falling sack of grain, her freezing bare arms locking in an iron vice around his neck.
Silas’s boots lost their purchase on the slick, freshly formed permafrost, and the two of them tumbled to the ground, rolling across the stone in an undignified heap of flailing limbs and blood-crusted wool!
"THANK YOU! THANK YOU, YOU GLORIOUS SUN-FLAVORED HUMAN!" Rika wailed at the top of her lungs, burying her face straight into the crook of his neck, completely unbothered by the foul stench of the weeping eye’s black ichor. "I CAN BREATHE! I CAN SHIVER! I PROMISE I WILL NEVER COMPLAIN ABOUT BLIZZARDS AGAIN! PRAISE THE SOIL! PRAISE THE BEDROCK!"
"Hey! Get off me, you oversized stray!" Silas grunted, planting both hands against her shoulders and shoving her back with a scowl. "Hold still! You feel like a slab of frozen beef, and you’re getting snot on my tunic!"
"I don’t care! I love you! You are my savior, my master, my Lord! I’ll carve your face into a mountain!" she sobbed with tears flowing freely down her pale cheeks and freezing into tiny glittering pearls on his leather lapel.
"Hold still!"
Silas grabbed her chin with his left hand, forcefully tilting her head upright.
His golden ringed blue eyes locked onto her watering emerald irises, his fingertips flaring with a bright corona of Mythic Gold mana.
He slammed his index and middle fingers directly against the center of her forehead!
VUUUUUUUUUUUM!
A blinding aura of golden light erupted beneath his touch.
Dense rivers of gold mana surged from Silas’s core, pouring through her cranial meridians and diving deep into her vacant frozen spiritual reservoir.
The energy swept through her meridians like wildfire, burning away the lingering conceptual frost and anchoring her divine soul directly to Blessed Land.
[Hero Contract Has Been Established.]
[Name: Rikavariashaluna (Rika).]
[Tap To See Her Full Status Below]
Rika gasped, her entire body arching as the golden mana settled into her core, establishing an unbreakable warm link between her existence and the man kneeling above her.
"There," Silas exhaled, pulling his hand away as the golden crest faded beneath her pale skin. "You’re on the books so welcome to Blessed Land."
Rika touched her forehead with trembling fingers, her eyes wide with reverence.
Slowly, she leaned forward and pressed her forehead against his breastplate in a gesture of unreserved submission.
"My soul is yours, Lord Silas," she whispered, her voice surprisingly soft and solemn. "My fangs will strike only where you point. I swear it upon my very existence."
Silas let out a quiet chuckle, tapping her head with a gloved knuckle.
"Good. Now get your feet under you. You’re heavier than you look."
GURRRRRRRRRRRRRR-GL!
A sound like an erupting mud geyser tore through Rika’s midsection, vibrating violently against Silas’s ribs.
Rika froze.
A brilliant dark crimson blush burned through the pale frost on her cheeks, turning her entire face bright red.
She slowly lifted her head, looking up at him with watering shameless puppy-dog eyes.
"Lord Silas...?" she whimpered pathetically. "The... the contract mentioned roasted meat. You promised on your sovereign honor."
"I know, I know," Silas sighed, shaking his head with an amused grin.
He stood up, brushing the crushed ice from his knees, and offered her a hand.
Rika’s legs were like wet noodles as she wobbled violently, clinging to his arm for balance before she could even stand upright.
With a flick of his wrist, Silas opened his spatial inventory.
VUUUM!
A thick double-layered wool blanket materialized in the air. Silas caught it and wrapped it snugly around her shivering shoulders, bundling her up like a dark-haired mummy.
Next, he pulled out an insulated, fleece-lined leather mat, spreading it smoothly across the permafrost.