Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Chapter 475: Mine BVR [Bonus Chapter]

The Keep was dead silent now.

As Silas walked down the dimly lit hallway, his boots made muffled thuds against the plush carpet.

’I’m tired...’

He felt the immense crushing weight of the day’s events finally catching up to him.

The scouting expedition, the tension with Evelyn, the negotiation with Thor, the construction of the Nexus... every single muscle in his body was screaming for rest.

’Now... tomorrow’s mining operation,’ Silas thought, running a tired hand through his dark hair. ’We break ground in KB-22 as well as the rest of the mines at first light... The golems need to be loaded, the Vanguard needs to be sobered up, and we have to extract every single Mana Diamond before the monsters catch our scent.’

He passed by the open door of Eluned’s private quarters as Silas paused, glancing inside.

The World-Tree Goddess was curled up peacefully on her massive, vine-woven bed, completely lost to the world.

Her green-tinted hair spilled across the pillows like living moss, and her breathing was soft.

’She slept quite early, is there something she wants to do tomorrow?’

Eluned was still sound asleep however Silas smiled, quietly continuing down the hall toward his own master bedroom.

He reached his door, turned the brass knob, and pushed it open.

The room was dark, illuminated only by the silvery moonlight bleeding through the frost-rimed windows.

Silas kicked his boots off by the door and stepped inside, his eyes naturally falling onto the massive bed in the center of the room.

There, lying completely sprawled beneath the heavy sheets, was Morwenna.

The Pirate Queen was exactly where he had left her hours ago with her tanned, athletic frame completely naked beneath the covers and her long messy hair fanning across the dark velvet sheets.

Silas blinked, crossing his arms as he looked down at her sleeping form.

’Thor woke up, drank half the mess hall under the table, and passed out again... and Morwenna hasn’t even moved an inch?’ Silas thought with a small smirk tugging at his lips. ’Aeli’s sleeping draught must have hit her with the force of an anchor.’

Silas didn’t bother overthinking it.

He reached down, untying the sash of his dark cultivator robes.

’Let’s get this off...’

He pulled the heavy fabric over his shoulders, tossing it onto the wooden armchair by the window, and stepped out of his trousers, leaving himself in just a comfortable pair of dark linen shorts.

"Getting on..."

Silas walked around to the empty side of the bed, gently lifting the heavy fur duvet and sliding his tired frame beneath the covers.

The mattress dipped under his weight as Silas rolled onto his side, naturally sliding his right arm across the bed until his broad hand rested against Morwenna’s smooth warm waist.

He pulled her gently toward him, cuddling the naked Pirate Queen against his chest.

Her skin was hot, radiating the natural vitality of a powerful warrior.

’I haven’t shown her what I did with the Second Style yet... Well maybe tomorrow.’

Silas buried his face into the crook of her neck, inhaling the intoxicating scent of her that clung to her collarbone.

He pressed a soft warm kiss directly against the soft skin of her neck.

"Goodnight, Morwenna," Silas whispered into her hair and he closed his eyes.

Within seconds, the soothing warmth of his Gold Core slowed, matching the quiet breathing of the woman in his arms, and the Lord of Blessed Land finally drifted off into a deep dreamless sleep.

The room returned to stillness.

Outside, the blizzard howled softly against the glass like a distant harmless whisper.

Slowly... agonizingly slowly... the quiet was broken by the faintest hitch in breathing.

Underneath the heavy duvet, Morwenna’s long dark eyelashes fluttered.

Her eyes cracked open in the darkness, glowing with a vibrant amber hue.

She wasn’t asleep, Morwenna hadn’t been asleep for the last five minutes.

The Pirate Queen lay completely frozen in his embrace, feeling the comforting weight of Silas’s muscular arm wrapped securely around her bare waist, and the steady warmth of his chest pressing firmly against her naked back.

The phantom heat of his kiss was still burning against her neck, sending tiny electric shivers straight down her spine.

A brilliant crimson blush exploded across Morwenna’s tanned cheeks, burning all the way down to her collarbone.

Her heart began to hammer wildly against her ribs, so loud she was terrified it would wake him.

She bit her lower lip, pulling the sheets slightly higher with trembling fingers, her tough ruthless facade completely melting into mush in the quiet dark.

’C-captain...’ Morwenna thought, a soft flustered whimper catching in her throat as she closed her eyes again, leaning back into his warmth.

...

The dawn that broke over Blessed Land did not bring warmth like Silas wanted.

It brought an iron-gray sky and a biting needle-sharp frost that clung to every surface like ground glass.

Down in the courtyard before the Keep, Silas had been standing by the mounting posts, rubbing his gloved hands together and grumbling under his breath at the howling draft funneling off the northern peaks.

Even with the internal furnace of his core humming steadily beneath his ribs, the damp bite of the basin’s sub-zero squalls grated on him.

Everyone could see he hated the snow... not the snow rather but the constant snowing.

For Tasmin, however, the morning was nothing short of perfection.

The cold made the blood circulate faster.

It kept the senses razor-sharp, tightened the sinews, and made the shadows pooling beneath the rocky ridges crisp as well.

"Haah..."

She stood at the head of a ten-woman vanguard column, resting one gloved hand casually on the pommel of her sidearm as she adjusted the heavy fur mantle over her shoulders.

Beneath her, a Blessed Wolf shifted its weight, its paws sinking barely an inch into the crust of frozen snow.

Its fur bristled against the wind, while a tranquil golden hum resonated through the silver-inlaid harness wrapped around its broad chest.

The Tier 3 Pack-Lord’s Sanctuary had done wonders for these beasts as their breath rose in steady calm plumes of vapor, lacking the feral agitation common to wild basin wolves.

Behind Tasmin sat nine other women, their mounts formed up in a clean disciplined double file.

It was an intentional split... Four battle-hardened veterans who had bled alongside Blessed Land before the Lord War had even ignited, and four fresh recruits whose leather was still stiff and whose eyes darted nervously across the jagged horizon.

Then a dwarf.

Tasmin glanced back over her shoulder, letting her gaze sweep the line.

The terrain stretching out toward the eastern crags was notoriously brutal... a broken expanse of shattered shale, black frost, and jagged volcanic outcrops hidden beneath treacherous drifts.

On foot, an expedition out here was an ankle-shattering slog that could bleed a squad’s stamina dry before a single pickaxe struck stone.

Mounted on the Blessed Wolves, however, the jagged terrain was practically a highway.

The beasts moved with a fluid grace, their broad pads distributing weight across the snowdrifts effortlessly.

"Pick up the slack, girls," Tasmin called out, her voice cutting cleanly through the whistling wind. "Look ahead. That jagged spine of black slate right past the second ridge? That’s the boundary marker so we’re almost at the breach."

A chorus of sharp gasps and enthusiastic cheers erupted from the ranks behind her.

Several of the younger recruits pumped their gloved fists into the air, their faces flushed bright red from the frost and sheer adrenaline.

"Finally!" a young archer with cropped chestnut hair grinned, leaning over her wolf’s neck. "My knees were starting to freeze solid in these stirrups!"

"You won’t be complaining about frozen knees once we start swinging," an older shield-bearer beside her retorted with a rough, good-natured bark of laughter. "You’ll be sweating through your undergarments within ten minutes of clearing the entrance."

Tasmin watched them, a slow knowing smirk curving her lips.

The high spirits weren’t purely born of military pride... There was a far more competitive edge humming through the ranks today, and every single woman in the squad knew it.

Before the deployment manifests had been signed at first light, Silas had stood before the gathered squads in the central square, his dark eyes sweeping over the ranks as he laid down the terms of the day.

’Whoever mines the most,’ he had declared, his voice carrying the calm weight of a decree, ’will receive a special reward directly from their Lord.’

That single sentence had set the entire garrison ablaze.

A special reward... From him...

Tasmin’s fingers tightened slightly against the leather of her reins as heat flared unbidden in her chest.

She wanted that reward.

She wanted it more than she cared to admit aloud.

It was impossible not to feel the tension buzzing through the territory... ever since the construction of the multi-room apartments, secrecy was an illusion.

When Vala had slipped through the compound yesterday evening, rushing down the central hallway toward her private quarters with her dark cloak clutched tight and her breath coming in shallow ragged hitches, the entire floor had smelled it.

She carried the unmistakable intoxicating musk of their Lord and it had lingered in the draft of the corridor like heavy incense.

’Vala got to taste him,’ Tasmin thought, her amber eyes darkening with quiet ravenous envy as she stared out at the jagged rocks ahead. ’She got to kneel before him and take that grace into her mouth... I’ve bled for this territory since the first foundations were laid in the dirt so I deserve to have my mouth full of his essence too.’

She exhaled a hot trembling breath that vanished into the freezing air, forcibly shoving the perverted distraction into the dark recesses of her mind.

Discipline first... Desire second... If she wanted to be on her knees in his private quarters, she had to earn it with results.

A heavy thudding vibrated through the earth, cutting through the sound of the wind.

Tasmin pulled her mount slightly to the right and cast a glance backward.

Following roughly twenty paces behind the mounted column, moving on all fours with terrifying weight, was a Phase 2 Golem.

The construct was a titan of dwarven engineering.

Its chassis was forged from heavy slabs of volcanic bedrock bound together by thick bands of Deep-Earth Alloy and tempered iron.

It moved with a steady motion, its four massive stone limbs driving into the snow with enough force to crack the shale beneath.

Bolted across its broad, hunched back was an intricate system of heavy-duty transport bins and reinforced tool-racks, their surfaces etched with pale runic stabilization lines designed to absorb shock and prevent loaded minerals from grinding to dust during transit.

Even after watching Thora hammer the rune-plates into the chassis yesterday, seeing a four-legged siege automaton casually pacing a cavalry column was deeply unsettling.

Yet, beneath the unease, Tasmin felt a swell of satisfaction.

’We’re advancing,’ she thought, watching the golem’s central core pulse with a dull steady blue glow.

Riding alongside Tasmin’s left flank was a stout broad-shouldered dwarf, completely clean-faced, her skin weathered by the fierce subterranean winds of her homeland.

She wore a tailored suit of reinforced leather mining gear over steel-mesh underlays, her thick fingers deftly manipulating a roll of vellum that she had braced against her knee.

"Are we on the marker, Durna?" Tasmin asked, nodding toward the jagged rock wall looming ahead.

The dwarf spat a glob of chewing tobacco into the snow and tapped a blunt finger against a charcoal-drawn grid on the map.

"Aye, right on the nose, Captain," Durna grunted, her rough mountain-bred dialect clipping the words short. "Just past that sheer shelf of basalt where the ice hangs like daggers... The opening sits in the blind spot of the ridge."

Sure enough, as the wolves loped around the bend of the rock face, a wide gaping fissure in the mountain flank carved itself out of the gloom.

The opening was irregular, roughly fourteen feet tall and nearly twenty feet wide at the base, its jagged edges rimmed with thick sheets of black frost.

Stretched across the entrance, shimmering with a translucent violet lattice, was an intricate magical ward.

’Rowenna’s work...’ Tasmin noted, pulling her wolf to a halt.

Because Silas couldn’t personally tour every single cavern entrance in the vast Umbral Basin to maintain seals, Rowenna had mass-produced boundary runes.

These wards were anchored directly into the stone lintels, keeping the feral creatures of the frozen wastes from nesting in the surveyed veins before the mining squads were mobilized.

Tasmin raised her right hand, extending two fingers toward the glowing barrier.

She drew upon the subtle trace of mana letting a whisper of mana bleed into her voice.

"Dispel."

PING!

The violet barrier resonated like a struck crystal bell as the intricate geometric runes flashed once, folding inward like burning paper, before dissolving into harmless motes of purple light that drifted harmlessly down onto the snow.

The dark yawning mouth of the cavern stood wide open.

Durna pulled her mount up beside Tasmin, looking into the darkness with a grim assessing eye.

"Welcome to Mine BVR Star, girls. Mind your step; the frost inside is slicker than grease..."

Tasmin gave the dwarf a strange sideways look.

"BVR Star? Seriously? How the hell does Thora come up with these designations? Did she just pull random consonants out of an empty ale barrel?"

"Clan codes, Captain," Durna snorted, rolling up her paper with a sharp snap. "BVR stands for Black Vein Runic... The ’Star’ part is because the primary yield here isn’t mundane iron... it’s Star-Iron that exists in pure unrefined clusters. Master Thora doesn’t name things for poetry, she names them for the ledger."

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