Chapter 490: The Bust... Goddess?

The squad packed up their tools, laughing and teasing Brenda as they filed out of the sunken grove, making their way back through the winding limestone passage.

When they emerged into the wide dome of the former goblin hollow, Thor was already standing proudly atop the back of the Phase 1 Titan Golem.

She had dumped the massive haul of red crystals and white diamonds into the other transport bin, effortlessly tossing the heavy stone crate to the side.

Silas snapped his fingers, and before the crate could shatter against the ground, his earth magic dissolved the structure back into harmless gravel dust.

Thor leaped down from the golem, landing with a light triumphant thud.

She strode up to Silas, wiping a speck of chalk from her cheek with a wide toothy grin.

"The payload is secured, Lord Silas! Hehe~" Thor announced proudly.

Silas looked up at the towering demigoddess, offering her a genuine appreciative smile.

"Incredible work, Thor. Truly. When we get back to Blessed Land, I am personally ordering Kaelia to prepare an entire roasted ox just for you. As much meat and stout as your stomach can hold..."

Thor’s face lit up with radiant joy.

"GWAHAHAHA! You are a king among men, Silas!"

She reached out with an affectionate hand and gave him two heavy, affectionate pats on the head, ruffling his dark hair as if he were a favored younger brother.

Standing barely two paces away, the Princess instantly puffed out her cheeks, crossing her arms over her chest with a quiet indignant huff as she glared up at the blonde giantess.

Thor noticed the pout immediately.

"And a pat for our brave royal princess as well!" Thor laughed, reaching down and giving the Princess a gentle affectionate ruffle on her azure hair, which instantly broke the girl’s pout into a flustered embarrassed giggle.

"Hehehe~ You didn’t have to~"

Silas chuckled, turning toward the mouth of the cavern. "Alright, everyone. The titan is fully loaded so let’s head to the surface."

Thora stepped up to the resting Phase 1 Titan Golem, pulling a small brass control rod from her belt and tapping the chassis’s primary rune matrix.

"Phase One Titan, engage transport mobility!" Thora commanded. "Compact terrain mode! Slither protocol!"

WHIRRRR-CLANG-HISS!

The colossal construct stirred, venting a thick plume of steam from its lower conduits.

Instead of rising onto its four massive, knee-jointed legs, the golem’s chassis folded inward.

The heavy basalt plates shifted on ball-and-socket hydraulic tracks, tucking its limbs flat against its undercarriage as the central alloy spine lengthened and loosened, transforming the rigid four-legged siege engine into a dense serpent-like stone train.

Without legs to catch on the narrow limestone walls, the golem began to smoothly slither across the cavern floor, navigating the tight, twisting curves of the upward trail with shocking frictionless agility.

Within twenty minutes, the expedition group emerged from the jagged limestone maw of Cavern KB-22, stepping back out into the open air of the Umbral Basin.

The sub-zero blizzard from earlier had completely died down, leaving behind a crisp bitterly cold stillness.

The iron-gray sky hung heavy over the jagged shale ridges, and the surrounding terrain was a rugged expanse of black frost and broken volcanic rock.

Silas pulled his fur mantle tighter around his shoulders, his blue eyes scanning the jagged horizon to the north.

"The payload from KB-22 is massive," Silas noted, checking his mental map. "How about we hit that Spider’s Lair on the northern ridge before sunset? We still have a few hours of operational light..."

Thora immediately raised both hands, shaking her head vigorously.

"Out of the question, my Lord!" Thora declared firmly, pointing up at the golem.

The construct had expanded back into its standard four-legged posture, standing tall among the jagged rocks.

Thora scrambled up the side mounting rungs with practiced dwarven agility, grabbing the heavy reinforced leather tie-down straps bolted along the rim of the central transport bins.

With sharp muscular pulls, she hauled the heavy webbing across the glittering mounds of Mana Diamonds and red crystal vines, ratcheting the iron buckles down with a series of thunderous metallic clacks.

"Look at this chassis!" Thora shouted down from the golem’s back, patting the bulging leather straps. "These bins are filled to the brim! If you try to stack another five hundred pounds of raw ore on this construct, the suspension will grind against the axles! Not to mention, if we get ambushed by a pack of high-tier basin beasts on the march, we won’t be able to maneuver without risking half the haul spilling across the snow!"

She hopped down to the ground, landing with a solid thud.

"We head back to the Sovereign Distribution Nexus right now," Thora urged, wiping soot from her forehead. "We offload the payload, let the automated sorting conduits catalog the diamonds, and give the girls a hot meal... Greed on the return march is how miners end up dead, Lord Silas."

Silas looked at the bulging bins, then down at the exhausted women before nodding in agreement.

"You’re right," Silas conceded smoothly. "Logistics comes first. We head back to Blessed—"

RUSTLE!

The words died in Silas’s throat.

Barely thirty yards to their right, nestled near the edge of a snow-choked volcanic ridge, a dense thicket of deadwood pine suddenly rustled violently.

’Hostile?!’

Silas’s hand blurred with his fingers instantly locking around the hilt of his golden sword.

Beside him, Aurelia’s eyes sharpened as a faint halo of Argent Flame flickering to life at her fingertips.

Vala slipped half into the shadows, her void-iron sword drawn in a reverse grip, while Thor casually rested a hand on her belt, her storm-blue eyes narrowing into predatory slits.

FLAP-FLAP-FLAP.

From the swaying deadwood branches, a solitary, desperate shape broke through the freezing mist.

...It was a bird?

The creature was roughly the size of a mountain hawk, but its feathers were completely devoid of natural color, resembling dull shards of chipped obsidian.

It possessed an unnervingly long scythe-curved beak that looked wicked enough to shear through leather, and its beady black eyes were wide with pure terror.

The bird looked like it had been dragged through seven layers of hell.

Its plumage was ragged, crooked, and caked in frozen slush as several of its primary wing feathers were bent at agonizing angles, and its tailfeathers looked as though they had been singed by a high-altitude atmospheric explosion.

And clutched desperately within its iron-black talons was a large, perfectly flat, rectangular tablet of smooth gray slate.

FLAP... FLAP... FLUTTER!

The obsidian avian flew toward them with agonizing pathetic slowness.

Its hollow chest heaved, whistling with desperate breaths as it fought the freezing mountain drafts, its wings barely generating enough lift to keep it airborne.

As it closed the distance, the bird’s beady eyes locked onto Silas.

The Lord stood tall, draped in black furs and leather with his hand resting on a blade of pure radiant gold and his Gold Core humming with terrifying pressure.

Beside him stood the Saintess, a woman who was really strong, and an immortal God of Thunder who looked capable of swatting dragons out of the sky with a wooden spoon.

The bird’s hollow bones vibrated in paralyzing dread.

’He is going to cleave me in half,’ the bird thought in pure shrieking panic, its scythe-beak clicking erratically. ’He is going to draw that golden sword and turn me into a cloud of black feathers before my claws even touch the dirt!’

Yet, remembering the terrifying image of its frozen mistress spitting saliva craters into bedrock, the terrified avian forced its crooked wings to beat one last time.

FLUTTER-THUD!

The bird dropped out of the sky, tumbling clumsily onto the snow barely three paces in front of Silas’s boots.

It skidded across the frozen shale, ruffling its battered feathers, and immediately dropped onto its belly.

With a trembling desperate motion, the bird shoved the flat stone tablet forward across the snow, tapping the rock twice with its scythe-curved beak before bowing its crested head flat against the permafrost in an unmistakable gesture of terrified desperate supplication.

"Squawk..." the bird wheezed weakly, trembling in the cold. "Krrr-caw..."

Silas didn’t draw his sword.

He stood frozen with his hand still resting on the golden crossguard, blinking down at the shivering battered avian in complete and utter bewilderment.

Behind him, Thor tilted her head, squinting at the creature. "Is that dinner? It looks a bit stringy, but with enough mustard—"

"Quiet, Thor," Silas muttered, slowly lowering his hand from his blade.

"Lord Silas, be careful," Aurelia warned softly, stepping up beside him, her golden eyes analyzing the stone. "It carries no corrupt mana, but its origin is strange..."

"It’s just a bird," Silas said quietly.

He took two slow cautious steps forward, crunching through the snow as he knelt down on one knee before the prostrated creature.

The bird flinched, pulling its scythe-beak tight against its chest, but it didn’t flee.

Silas reached down, his leather-gloved fingers wrapping around the edges of the flat slate tablet.

He lifted the heavy stone from the snow, turning it over in his hands.

"Oh?" Silas muttered, his dark eyebrows creeping upward in surprise.

The surface of the stone wasn’t blank.

Crude and jaggedly carved into the smooth slate... clearly etched using the tip of a razor-sharp rock were distinct legible letters written in English.

Silas squinted, tilting the slate toward the dim daylight, his lips moving as he read the opening line carved into the stone.

"Dear Lord of Blessed Land... from the B... Bust Goddess...?"

Silas stopped and he blinked.

He stared at the tablet, his mind grinding to a violent screeching halt.

’...The what?’ Silas thought, his eye twitching as he looked from the stone tablet down to the shivering prostrate obsidian bird waiting desperately in the snow.

"Wait, what?" Brenda blurted from six paces back, her ash-wood spear drooping toward her boots as her freckled nose scrunched up. "A bust goddess? Like... a broken statue? Or... a woman who’s remarkably—"

"Quiet, Brenda," Helen hissed, nudging the younger recruit’s ribcage with an iron-banded elbow, though Helen’s own eyes were darting toward the slate with shameless curiosity.

The bird frantically hopped upright, flapping its ragged, singed wings in a frantic frenzy.

"Squawk! Caw-caw-caw! Krrr-clack!"

It launched into an erratic frantic routine, hopping from talon to talon in the snow before violently jabbing its wicked, hooked beak down toward the edge of the slate tablet.

It pecked the rock three times with sharp metallic dinks, then threw its head back, pointed its wing toward the vast jagged expanse of the northern peaks, and made an exaggerated panting sound while dragging its beak sideways through the slush.

Silas blinked.

He ran a calloused thumb over the jagged indentations, tracing the groove that looked less like a scripted alphabet and more like a series of violent gouges carved by desperate madness.

"Wait," Silas said slowly, leaning closer. "This doesn’t say ’Bust.’ The horizontal stroke cuts clean through the middle loop, and the bottom tail dragged outward across the grain. It says... Beast."

"Squawk!" The bird’s beady black eyes widened with tearful validation.

It nodded its crested head so violently its skull blurred, letting out an affirmative rattle that sounded like dry river stones bouncing down a copper chute.

"The Goddess of Beasts," Silas read, piecing the mangled letters together.

He tilted the stone toward the light once more, but the rest of the text was a disaster.

The lettering degraded rapidly after the greeting, turning into erratic jagged zig-zags that slashed violently across the slate, overlapping each other until the lines looked like the seismograph of an earthquake.

"How was this even written?" Silas asked, genuinely baffled, glancing from the tablet down to the ragged avian. "It looks like someone took a railroad spike, held it in a mechanical vice, and violently dragged it across the surface with an unstable drill... There’s no structural syntax here at all as half these vowels are just straight gouges."

He scanned the middle section, his vision filtering through the messy grooves.

Most of it was an unreadable smear of pulverized slate dust, but two words near the lower third had been gouged into the stone with such terrifying force that the bedrock had fractured around their margins.

TRAPPED.

And right beneath it, carved four times larger than any other word on the tablet, encircled by three frantic crooked rings.

FOOD.

The word was so brutally defined that it looked as though it had been etched with tears and concentrated hunger.

"Trapped... and food," Silas murmured with his brow arching. "Those are the only two words that were carved with any deliberate legibility."