Novel Full Chapter 134: Back On Earth
Chapter 134: Back On Earth
Eluned’s posture immediately softened.
Her administrative side took over. She nodded in agreement, recognizing the necessity.
"The mortal girls have been working incredibly hard on the perimeter walls," Eluned noted softly, tapping her finger against her chin. "A library will provide them with much-needed mental stimulation and passive morale recovery... It is a wise decision, my Lord."
Silas stood up from the table, adjusting the collar of his dark canvas shirt.
"I’ll be gone for a few hours, depending on how fast i can get to and fro so you all don’t need to worry..." Silas told them.
Kaelia, hearing that the coast was clear, stepped tentatively out of the kitchen.
She clutched her apron, looking at Silas with wide hopeful eyes.
"Uhm... Lord Graves?" Kaelia asked softly, her voice barely above a whisper.
Silas paused, turning to his S-Rank Chef. "What is it, Kaelia?"
"If you... if you are things for the library," Kaelia stuttered nervously, wringing her hands, "do you think... you could possibly find a high-tier Earth cookbook? There are so many spices you described to me that I’ve never seen before. I want to learn how to prepare them for everyone."
Silas smiled, a warm expression breaking through his face. He respected competence, and Kaelia was nothing if not dedicated to her craft.
"Consider it done," Silas promised. "I’ll get you a masterclass book on everything you want to know."
Morwenna immediately slammed her hand on the table.
"I want a book too! Something about naval warfare or siege tactics. I’m bored out of my mind teaching all of the girls how to use the sword!"
Eluned crossed her arms, refusing to be outdone.
"And I require a detailed botanical encyclopedia of Earth’s flora. If I am to eventually reshape your native world into a proper garden, I must study its weak root systems from what I guess."
"Naval tactics and a gardening book," Silas repeated, shaking his head. "Fine. I’ll get the books. Until I get back, the territory is under your joint control. Keep the gates locked. If any monster approaches, you will deal with it."
"Understood, my Lord," Eluned bowed her head gracefully.
"Aye, Captain," Morwenna saluted lazily, resting her boots on the table. "We’ll keep the fort clean."
Silas mentally accessed his system.
He didn’t need a physical portal to return to his anchor point on Earth. The connection between a Lord and their native dimension was hardcoded into their core...
He selected the [Ascend] on his interface.
"System," Silas commanded. "Ascend."
A blinding vertical pillar of pure white light violently descended through the ceiling of the Citadel, completely engulfing his body.
The transition was always jarring.
For a split second, the gravity of the Sovereign Realm ceased to exist. His stomach dropped as his physical matter was violently ripped out of the Umbral Basin, dragged through the cosmic void bridging the dimensions, and forcefully reassembled on the other side.
The roaring noise of the forge, the smell of roasted meat and the dense mana of the Blessed Land instantly vanished.
FWUMP!
Silas’s boots hit solid hardwood flooring.
The blinding light faded, replaced by the dim flickering orange glow of the streetlights filtering through drawn blinds.
He was standing in the dead center of his apartment in the lower wards of Valoria City.
Silas stood perfectly still for three seconds, letting the feeling settle into his chest.
’Once again... I’m back on Earth and it feels shitty.’
It felt like breathing through a straw after spending weeks inhaling the rich oxygen of a forest.
He looked down at himself. He
was still wearing the same clothes he had worn during his last visit to the Sovereign Realm... the durable long sleeve shirt, the reinforced trousers.
He let out a long, exhausted sigh, running a hand through his dark hair.
"Every time I come back here," Silas muttered to himself with his voice sounding flat in the room. "It feels smaller."
This apartment was the anchor of his old life.
There was nothing to do over here... apart from being annoyed by annoying people like Maya or being called for meetings with people he didn’t give a single shit about.
’But it’s my anchor,’ Silas thought, shaking his head. ’For now, it keeps me off the radar. Let them think I’m still a nobody while I build an empire capable of leveling their skyscrapers...’
He walked over to his desk to pull up his terminal and order the stuff he needed at the very least. Silas really didn’t feel like going outside today.
Before he could even touch the keyboard, his Gold Core pulsed violently in his chest.
It wasn’t a warning of imminent death, but it was a sharp alarm.
His newly evolved senses instantly picked up on environmental inconsistencies.
Silas froze.
He didn’t turn his head as he simply let his heightened senses expand outward, filling the apartment like an invisible radar net.
There were several inconsistencies... The first one was that the temperature in the apartment was four degrees warmer than it should be for a deactivated heating unit.
The second was that there was a sound coming from the floorboards below... Footsteps, they sounded light and unarmored but deliberate.
Inconsistency Three: The smell.
Silas inhaled slowly through his nose.
Beneath the scent of luxury, there was a rich aroma drifting up the staircase.
It smelled of garlic, crushed tomatoes and sizzling ground meat.
Someone was downstairs in his kitchen... and they were cooking spaghetti!
’What the fuck?’ Silas thought, his eyes narrowing into cold slits.
His mind instantly raced through the possibilities.
Did somebody find out that he was the Lord of Blessed Land and they were trying to spawn camp him?
Was this an Association hit-squad?
’If they wanted to kill me, they wouldn’t be cooking pasta...’ Silas thought with a shake of his head. ’But they are in my home and nobody breaches my perimeter without a consequence.’
He didn’t reach for a kitchen knife or a baseball bat... He didn’t have either.
Silas mentally accessed his Lord Inventory.
A dark-blue metallic shimmer materialized in his right hand.
He pulled a Tier 2 Broadsword directly out of the spatial void... he had made this one though he didn’t plan to use it.
The heavy three-foot blade settled into his grip, the dense mythril-laced spine humming faintly with lethal intent.
Silas simply flowed to the door.
His agility and Gold Core control allowed him to move with terrifying silence.
Despite weighing over two hundred pounds of dense muscle and carrying a sword that weighed fifty pounds, his boots didn’t make a single sound against the floorboards.
He slipped out of the bedroom and approached the top of the staircase leading down to the ground floor.
The smell of the food was overwhelmingly strong now.
He could hear the bubbling of a pot of water boiling on his cheap electric stove and he could hear the soft humming of a voice.
Silas crept down the stairs, pressing his weight against the wall to avoid the creaking center boards.
His golden-ringed blue eyes pierced through the light of the lower floor. The only light was coming from the small stove lamp in the kitchenette...
He reached the bottom step. He tightened his grip on the broadsword, dropping his center of gravity into a lethal striking stance.
He peered around the corner of the wall.
Standing in front of the stove, with her back turned to him, was a person.
They weren’t wearing corporate mythril armor and they certainly weren’t a massive scarred mercenary holding a silenced rifle.
It was a girl.
She looked no older than ten years old. She was short, wearing a slightly oversized faded yellow hoodie and a pair of worn denim jeans.
She had long messy brown hair tied up in a loose ponytail that bobbed slightly as she stirred a large pot of boiling noodles with a wooden spoon.
She was humming a cheerful off-key tune, completely oblivious to the fact that a predator from the Sovereign Realm was standing ten feet behind her with a weapon capable of cleaving a car in half.
Silas stared at the back of her head with his mind completely stalling.
’A kid?’ Silas thought in absolute bewilderment. ’A ten-year-old girl broke into my apartment to cook dinner... Oh is it her?’
For a fraction of a second, Silas lowered the tip of his sword while being thoroughly confused.
But a Lord didn’t survive by making assumptions. The world was full of anomalies that looked harmless.
Assassins used illusion tech and mimics took the form of children so until she was verified, she was an unknown threat inside his perimeter.
He needed to secure the target without killing her.
The girl turned her head slightly, reaching for a jar of salt on the counter and that was the trigger.
Silas exploded forward.
He channeled a fraction of his Gold Core energy into his legs. He crossed the ten-foot distance across the linoleum kitchen floor in less than a microsecond.
The acceleration was so violent that it physically displaced the air in the wide room.
BOOM.
A concussive shockwave of compressed wind blew through the kitchen.
Cabinet doors rattled violently on their hinges, loose papers pinned to the fridge were ripped off and sent fluttering into the air.
The little girl hadn’t even finished turning her head before the wind hit her, blowing her messy brown hair wildly all around her face.
She froze.
Silas was standing directly behind her.
He hadn’t touched her but the freezing flat edge of his Tier 2 broadsword was resting a millimeter away from the side of her neck.
The weight of the blade radiated a suffocating pressure that made the hair on her arms stand up.
Silas’s eyes were glowing with intense golden-ringed hostility and the kitchen was dead silent, save for the bubbling of the pasta water.
The little girl didn’t scream.
She didn’t drop her wooden spoon.
She simply blinked, looking down at the massive terrifying slab of dark metal resting against her collarbone, and then slowly craned her neck to look up into the glowing intimidating eyes of the warlord looming over her.
A small exasperated sigh escaped her lips.
"Ah, Big Brother Silas..." she said with her voice perfectly calm, carrying the exhausted sound of someone dealing with a very dramatic idiot.
She turned fully around, totally unbothered by the lethal weapon and put her hands on her hips.
"Isn’t this a bit too much?" she asked flatly, raising an eyebrow at him. "Lifting a blade at your little sister’s neck like this... Are you trying to kill me?"
Silas stood completely frozen on the immaculate hardwood floor of his Silverleaf apartment.
The heavy mythril-laced broadsword in his hand was perfectly steady with the freezing flat edge of the blade resting less than a millimeter from the intruder’s neck.
For a few seconds, he just blinked.
"The hell?" Silas finally groaned with his voice flat and completely stripped of the commanding tone he usually carried as a Lord. "Why the hell are you here?"
The little girl laughed. It was a bright mischievous sound that echoed off the expensive marble countertops of the kitchen.
"I’ll tell you," she promised, gesturing casually toward the massive slab of sharpened metal still resting against her collarbone. "But can you remove the giant sword from my neck first? It’s really cold."
Silas didn’t lower the blade immediately.
There were shape-shifters, illusionists, and assassins who would gladly wear a kid’s face just to get close enough to slip a poisoned dagger between a Lord’s ribs.
But as he looked down at her, the absurdity of the situation finally cracked his guard.
Silas sighed heavily, shaking his head as he lowered the broadsword, pulling the edge away from her neck.
Then, without any warning, his empty left hand shot forward.
He didn’t grab her shoulder though, instead he grabbed a thick fistful of her messy brown hair right at the crown of her head and lifted her straight up.
"Hey! Ow! What are you doing?!" the girl shrieked, her feet leaving the floor. She instantly dropped the wooden spoon with her hands flying up to grab his thick wrist as she squirmed wildly in his grip. "Let me go! That hurts, you jerk!"