Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

’Framed?’ Silas thought, his mind rapidly latching onto the word. ’Eluned was framed?...’

He wanted to pry.

The Lord within him demanded to know the names of the gods who held that grudge, to catalog the potential threats that might one day look toward Blessed Land seeking to finish what they started.

"Thor, what exactl—"

"Bah! No matter! Ancient rot is best left buried under the snow!"

Before Silas could finish his sentence, Thor violently snapped out of her melancholy.

The suffocating aura vanished, replaced instantly by her usual reckless vigor.

She shook out the dark spirit-wood robes, whipped them through the air with a loud crack, and shoved her massive arms straight through the sleeves.

She pulled the garment shut, tying the thick sash around her waist with a triumphant grunt.

"There!" Thor declared proudly, striking a heroic pose with her hands planted firmly on her hips, puffing out her chest. "Fits like a dwarven breastplate! Perfection!"

Silas blinked then, he looked down and then, he looked back up.

A slow incredulous smile crept across his face, followed by an unavoidable breathless chuckle.

"Thor," Silas said, stepping forward. "You put it on backward."

"What?" Thor barked, looking down at herself.

The high embroidered mandarin collar that was supposed to rest against the nape of her neck was currently choking her throat, while the deep overlapping front panels were flapping uselessly against her spine, exposing the entirety of her massive muscular back and the twin ridges of her shoulder blades to the cold air.

"Nonsense!" Thor scoffed, pulling at the suffocating collar. "The cloth covers the meat, doesn’t it? It functions!"

"You’re going to strangle yourself the moment you bend over," Silas laughed, walking up behind her. "Stand still... Let me fix it before you rip the seams that Eluned spent time weaving."

Thor grunted, but she obediently dropped her arms, allowing Silas to step into her personal space.

Silas untied the rough haphazard knot she had made with the sash, sliding his hands along the thick textured fabric of the robes.

To adjust the shoulders, he had to reach around her sides, stepping exceptionally close to the towering demigoddess.

The heat radiating off her skin was staggering like standing before an open blast furnace in Thora’s foundry.

As he pulled the fabric forward, rotating the robes so the collar fell naturally, his arms brushed lightly against the sides of her heavy unconstrained chest.

Even beneath the thick weave of the spirit-wood fibers, the staggering mass of her bust was impossible to ignore.

"You know," Silas muttered under his breath, his hands working the delicate clasps at her front, "for a warrior who spends her life swinging a divine warhammer, your chest really is large."

Thor threw her head back, letting out a short amused snort that rustled the stray hairs on his forehead.

"Gwahaha! And what of it?" she replied, looking down her nose at him with an unapologetic smirk. "A weak, flat chest carries no breath for battle! These lungs have swallowed the winds of cosmic tempests, mortal! They need room to expand! I like them just fine as they are."

She tilted her head, her storm-blue eyes narrowing into a sharp playful slits as she watched his hands work the front of her robes.

"Tell me, Lord of Blessed Land," Thor purred, her voice dropping into a deep vibrating rumble that Silas felt in the soles of his boots. "Do you like them as well?"

Silas paused.

His fingers rested lightly against the dark sash. He looked up, his dark eyes meeting the ancient electric blue gaze of Odin’s daughter.

He didn’t flinch, nor did he offer a simpering cowardly denial.

"They are magnificent," Silas answered honestly, pulling the sash tight and securing it with a clean efficient knot. "A man would have to be blind or dead not to appreciate them."

"GWAHAHAHAHA!"

Thor erupted in a roar of triumphant, boisterous laughter that shook the dust from the ceiling rafters... She was thoroughly delighted by his blunt honesty.

"Good lad! A man who speaks his mind without choking on his own tongue!" Thor shouted, grinning wildly as she raised a massive iron-gauntleted hand to give him an affectionate encouraging pat on the shoulder. "I knew you had—"

KRA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The iron gauntlet, Járngreipr, carried the full unmitigated weight of a divine warrior who had forgotten that she was wearing a belt that doubled her strength.

The moment her hand made contact with Silas’s right shoulder, the physics of the room completely detonated.

A shockwave the color of violent violet lightning exploded outward as the air violently compressed, shrieking like a dying jet engine, and Silas ceased to exist on the living room floor.

SHATTER-CRASH!

Silas became a human artillery shell.

He shot backward in a horizontal blur of speed, bypassing the hallway and smashing violently through the reinforced iron-banded oak front doors of the Keep!

The four-inch-thick timber splintered into a million jagged shards, the heavy iron hinges ripping clean out of the stone masonry with an ear-splitting screech.

Silas sailed through the blizzard air for forty yards, hurtling across the frozen courtyard before crashing into the deep knee-high snowbank near the central plaza with a muffled explosive thud.

Snow flew thirty feet into the howling winter air, raining down in a massive glittering plume.

Silence descended over the courtyard, save for the howling wind and slowly, the snow shifted.

A broad dark-robed hand emerged from the white drift, planting itself firmly against the frozen cobblestones beneath.

Silas pushed himself upright, violently shaking his head to dislodge the half-ton of freezing powder that had buried him.

His dark robes were caked in white, his hair was plastered to his forehead, and his right shoulder was throbbing with a dull ache that only a Mythic Gold Core could have absorbed without his entire skeleton turning to fine porcelain dust.

"Gods above..." Silas wheezed, coughing out a mouthful of fresh snow.

He rolled his right shoulder, the joint popping with a terrifying sound as his internal gold core pulsed, flooding his flesh with divine vitality and instantly knitting the bruised muscle fibers back together.

’If I weren’t Gold core, my entire upper torso would be a red paste on the courtyard stones.’

Heavy crunching footsteps echoed through the storm.

Thor stepped out through the gaping jagged hole where the Keep’s front doors used to be.

She was wading through the knee-deep snow completely unfazed by the sub-zero wind biting at her bare ankles as her wild blonde hair whipped furiously behind her.

Her face was twisted into a look of genuine, almost childlike panic.

"Silas!" Thor bellowed, jogging toward him with her iron gauntlets raised in surrender. "Lad! By the blood of Ymir, I am sorry! I forgot to suppress the gauntlets! Megingjörð was still feeding feedback into my strike! Are your bones whole?!"

Silas hauled himself entirely out of the snowbank, brushing the thick white flakes from his robes with exaggerated stoic patience.

Behind Thor, a soft, ethereal light began to bleed from the shattered doorframe of the Keep.

The splintered fragments of wood, infused with territory’s living mana, began to tremble.

Like living vines, the jagged pieces pulled themselves back together, the iron hinges snapping smoothly back into the stone mortar with a series of clean organic clicks.

Within three seconds, the front doors had completely regenerated, sealing the Keep’s interior once more from the freezing elements.

Silas exhaled a long cloud of white steam, looking at the towering demigoddess who stood a full head taller than him.

"I am fine, Thor," Silas muttered, his voice flat, though his eye twitched slightly. "My core is dense enough to take a beating but next time you feel the urge to show affection, a simple verbal compliment will suffice."

He glanced past her, looking toward the sealed front doors.

"Where is Mjölnir?" Silas asked, noticing the empty loop on her belt. "Did you leave a divine artifact resting on the living room floorboards?"

Thor waved a dismissive iron-clad hand through the howling wind, completely unconcerned.

"Bah! It sits upon the velvet rug where I dropped it," Thor snorted. "Mjölnir is not a stray dog... it doesn’t wander off into the snow. Besides, who in this realm could possibly lift it to steal it? Even if that giant ox-demon from the northern peaks wandered into your hall, he’d sooner snap his spine than budge the handle an inch. It will come to my hand when I call it so I do not need to clutch it like a nervous child clutching a wooden doll."

She paused, crossing her massive arms over her chest, the dark spirit-robes stretching tight across her brawn.

Her storm-blue eyes scanned the darkened, snowy paths of the settlement.

"Where is everyone?" Thor demanded, her stomach letting out a low rumbling growl that sounded eerily like distant thunder. "The Keep is a tomb... Did that elven girl put the entire army to sleep?"

Silas shook the remaining snow from his sleeves, pointing a finger toward the sprawling illuminated complex situated on the eastern side of the inner wall.

"Everyone completed their work hours ago," Silas explained. "Right now, most of them are packed into the Mess Hall inside the Barracks. They’ve tapped three barrels of dwarven stout, roasted a lot of boars and we’re doing a feast to celebrate the promotion of the scouts."

The moment the words stout and feast left his mouth, Thor went unnervingly still.

Silas watched her closely.

The boisterous, loud-mouthed warrior’s expression visibly locked up as a subtle involuntary twitch pulled at the left corner of her eye, her nostrils flaring as if she could already smell the roasted pork through three miles of driving blizzard.

Her pupils dilated into pure lightning.

"Alcohol..." Thor whispered, the word carrying more reverence than any prayer she had ever uttered. "Roasted boar..."

Silas barely had time to point toward the Barracks entrance.

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

The snow beneath Thor’s bare feet vaporized.

A concussive pressure wave tore across the central plaza, blasting a clean sixty-foot trench straight through the three-foot snowdrifts as the God of Thunder launched herself forward like an intercontinental ballistic missile.

"GWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

Her booming thunderous laughter echoed across the entire territory, drowning out the howling blizzard as her massive dark-robed frame blurred through the storm.

"STAND ASIDE, MORTALS! TIME TO GO DRINK!"

BANG!

The reinforced timber doors of the Barracks were violently thrown wide, slamming against the stone walls with enough force to rattle the windowpanes, and Thor vanished into the warm torch-lit interior, swallowed instantly by the roaring cheers, clinking tankards, and chaotic singing of the Blessed Land women.

Silas stood alone in the frozen trench, the snow gently falling onto his dark hair.

He let out a slow exhausted breath, the white vapor trailing into the sky.

’These gods...’ Silas thought, shaking his head with a tired wry smirk. ’Are complicated creatures... Capable of shattering a continent in the morning, and reduced to feral beasts by the promise of free alcohol by nightfall.’

Before the trench could fill with fresh snow, the heavy doors of the Barracks clicked open a fraction.

Slipping out into the freezing wind, clutching a thick fur-lined cloak tightly around her stout muscled frame, was Thora.

The dwarven forge master had clearly just extracted herself from the center of the revelry.

Her braided head was flecked with white foam from dwarven stout, and her cheeks were flushed a deep healthy crimson from the roaring hearths inside.

She spotted Silas standing in the cleared path and began marching toward him, her heavy iron-toed boots crunching rhythmically through the snow.

Silas watched her approach, feeling a pang of genuine guilt.

’Ah yes... She did say it was important.’

He knew how sacred post-battle drinking was to the dwarven clans, as Thora explained, considering she was a Princess too.

To pull Thora away from an active keg of ale was an offense that usually resulted in a broken nose.

’But the warehouse is important too.’

Thora stopped three feet in front of him, planting her thick calloused hands onto her hips and folding her arms across her leather apron.

Her breath puffed out in heavy irritated clouds of steam.

"Lord Silas," Thora grunted. "I understand that logistics wait for no man. I understand that the expansion of Blessed Land requires steady infrastructure, and that a proper storage depot is the backbone of any serious mining campaign but I want it on the formal record... pulling a dwarf away from freshly tapped stout while the meat is still dripping on the spit is a crime against the ancestors!"

Silas didn’t argue.

Instead, Silas took a single step forward, reached out with his right hand, gently caught the rough soot-stained chin of the dwarven forge master, and leaned down.

He pressed his lips firmly against hers and Thora’s eyes blew wide open.

’Thora is a really easy woman though...’

Her thick eyelids fluttered, her entire body freezing mid-rant.

The fiery stubborn dwarf went completely rigid, her brain stalling out in a haze of sudden unexpected sensory overload.

Silas lingered for two slow heartbeats, tasting the bitter tang of dwarven stout and the trace of forge-ash on her lips, before smoothly pulling back with a calm handsome smirk.

He didn’t say a word.

Silas simply turned on his heel, his dark robes swirling in the wind, and began walking toward the western perimeter of the inner territory.

"Follow me, Thora," Silas called over his shoulder. "We have work to do."

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!