Chapter 756: Deciding The Winners

The cool air swept across the wide stone landing outside the Keep as Silas pulled the heavy front doors shut behind him with a dull ringing thud that echoed out into the dusk.

"Aaaand, I think I’m done a bit for tonight..."

He rolled his shoulders back and rolled his neck until a satisfying crack loosened the tension along his spine.

The twilight had deepened while he was upstairs with Rika and Reina.

Long bruised streaks of violet and indigo stretched across the sky, and the first cold stars were peeking through over the eastern ridges.

Down in the valley the lanterns of the settlement were flickering on one by one, little golden dots shining through the rising mist like fallen stars.

’So isn’t snow going to come again...?’

One day Silas wanted to go up to the cause of this erratic weather and blast it with a flame of misfortune, the weather in the Umbral Basin had more mood swings than a pregnant woman for fuck’s sake.

’Also speaking about pregnancy...’

He and Eluned had been going at it for quite a while, he was well aware that she wanted to have his child and that was pretty much what most of the girls wanted but still...

’Well, I do want to have a child as well.’

So what if it was this early in his Lord’s career though...? Silas would take full responsibility.

’Now if Morwenna gets pregnant too... it would be a bit of an issue.’

He hadn’t gotten a woman pregnant but from the way his coworkers back on Earth got tired when their wives were pregnant dealing with cravings and whatnot, Silas knew it wouldn’t be easy.

"Well, I’ll take it... It can’t be that hard."

Unknown to Silas, he would come to regret those words very badly in the near future...

He walked down the wide stone steps with his boots clicking in a slow steady rhythm, then turned off the main path and cut across the clover lawn toward the eastern side of the Keep.

There, set into a flat raised terrace of pale stone right beside the Keep’s foundation, lay the travel runes.

The carved glyphs were dormant for now with their rings etched deep into the pale stone and catching the dim evening light with a faint shimmer.

They hummed with a quiet held-back pull that made the grass along their border lean away... the pull that led straight to Aki’s territory.

Silas stopped at the edge of the platform with his hands resting on his hips while the wind tugged at his dark hair and the collar of his jacket.

Before he stepped onto the stone, his mind drifted back to the mining expedition.

’So who should I decide...?’ he thought, rubbing the faintest stubble on his jaw.

He had promised a special reward directly from their Lord to whoever mined the most then, the night before he left to free Rika from the ice, he’d stood in the barracks and sweetened the pot in front of all of them.

The winner wouldn’t just get an audience and a private favor from his own hand... The winner would get the permanent right to move their quarters directly into the Keep.

The barracks had exploded.

He remembered it now, the screaming and the mugs slamming on the tables and Brida nearly launching herself over a bench to make sure he was serious.

The Keep had private baths... It had a lot of strong people living in it to learn from and it was where he slept so to the girls, it was an upgrade beyond measure and they had worked for it like it was the last thing they’d ever do.

A lot of groups had done well.

The Mana Diamonds and star-flecked ore they’d hauled back had filled the Distribution Nexus so full that its compression shelving was the only thing keeping it from bursting at the seams... Every single girl had swung her pick until her hands blistered and her tunic was caked in rock dust.

’Honestly, Tasmin and Brida were equally matched.’

Silas let out a slow breath through his nose and shook his head with a rueful grin.

Tasmin had tracked a whole hidden nest through the seams and pinned its alpha down so Brida could land the killing blow then Brida had told her she could have the win, that’s what sisters did... and burst out laughing in her face the second Tasmin believed her.

’According to what Brida told me later of course.’

After that the two of them had gone at the rock like they were trying to dig straight through to the other side of the world, and by the end, every time one of them dumped a loaded cart, the other one showed up three minutes later with a bigger one.

’Probably to stay in the Keep...’ Silas mused, watching the pines sway in the dark. ’They both want that one so badly they can taste it. If I give it to one of them over a handful of gravel, the other one’s going to sulk for a month... Maybe I’ll make them spar each other or something.’

He could already picture it.

Tasmin’s sharp quick footwork against Brida’s stubborn wall of a guard, the two of them tearing up the courtyard dirt while half the territory placed bets from the walls.

It would be entertaining but right now, looking at the numbers, he really couldn’t decide between them.

And then there were the rest of the girls who had broken their backs under the ground.

For them he needed someone who had truly earned it, and someone whose win would make every other girl in Blessed Land want to throw herself into the next one.

...If the reward only ever went to the heavy hitters, the rest would stop trying.

’Gunnhild it is,’ Silas decided with a firm nod.

Gunnhild had been one of his very first vassals, one of the girls huddled by the dead bonfire on that early morning, killing Umbral Hounds for UP.

Out of all the other girls she had packed the most ore, and her whole group had done well too.

Only Tasmin and Brida had beaten them.

She had run her crew without losing a single cart, kept the relays moving and swung her pick until her forearms cramped... She had earned it fair and square, and if Gunnhild could win, then every girl in the territory would know that hard work never went unnoticed.

Silas smiled, and the matter settled in his mind.

"I’ll announce it when I get back." he said out loud to the empty lawn then he stepped forward, and his boot crossed onto the pale stone.

The moment his sole touched the center of the platform, the dormant glyphs blazed to life.

VUUUUUUM!

A column of pale shimmering spatial mana shot straight up from the circle and swallowed Silas in a blinding vortex of white light.

The ground under his feet dissolved into a weightless rushing current, and the shape of his Keep warped like wax before it snapped away into pure empty brilliance.

FLASH!

With a sharp pop, the light collapsed into a single needle-thin spark, and Silas was gone.

...

WHOOSH!

The rushing wind died in an instant... In its place came a soft cool evening breeze that smelled of blooming flowers and clean spring water.

Silas blinked against the sudden change in light as his boots settled onto a circle of polished rose-tinted marble.

He had arrived on the runes in Aki’s Wonderland.

It was evening here too.

The same violet sky stretched overhead and the same first stars were coming out, but down here everything looked softer.

The trees around the clearing were silver-barked birches, and the path leading away from the circle was laid with smooth pale gravel instead of rough stone.

Silas let his shoulders drop into a relaxed stance and took a careful breath.

...Honestly, he had half expected Ther’Abella to attack him immediately.

That silver-haired elf usually treated the arrival runes like a battlefield whenever she felt them flare.

’Well, it’s only been once but once is enough. What a cute feisty woman...’

Silas really did like himself some elves and feisty women were still one of the types that he liked.

He’d fully braced himself for a hail of starlight blades the moment his boots touched marble, or at least an outraged battle cry from the bushes.

Instead, there was nobody here.

The arrival circle was completely deserted.

The tall silver birches swayed gently in the evening wind, and their pale leaves rustled with a soft peaceful whisper that felt almost eerie in the quiet.

Silas raised an eyebrow and scratched the back of his neck.

"It’s quiet today," he murmured, stepping off the marble onto the gravel path that wound toward the settlement. "Either she’s out on patrol, or she finally figured out that throwing things at visitors is bad manners."

He started walking with long easy strides and spread out his senses.

His mana flowed outward from his Mythic Gold Core in a silent pulsing wave and swept through the woods around him.

The mana in the air here was light and sweet and calm, nothing like the dense heat of his own.

A few minutes later the gravel path opened onto a wide circular plaza paved in pink and white cobblestones.

In the middle of it stood the summoning altar. It was a beautiful delicate thing carved from shimmering pearl-white stone, crowned with slender arches that curled upward like lotus petals and caught the last of the evening light.

Silas walked past it and admired the clean careful stonework... Aki obviously kept this place spotless as there wasn’t a single weed between the pavers.

He slowed for a moment beside it anyway.

This was where Aki had stood with her hands shaking and her eyes squeezed shut, pouring everything she had into her first summons.

Thirty troops had answered her, and Ther’Abella with them... He could easily picture the look that must have been on her face when the light faded and she realized it had actually worked, the First Princess who had been called a useless failure for twenty-five years standing in her own territory with an army at her back.

’She’s come a long way,’ he thought, and a warm feeling settled in his chest. ’And she’s only getting started...’

He lifted his eyes past the plaza, and there it was.

...Aki’s Keep.

Silas stopped in the middle of the avenue and folded his arms over his chest as he took it in.

It stood five stories tall, just like his, but it looked nothing like his. His Keep was solid and dark and built to sit through a siege but Aki’s looked like it had stepped straight out of a fairy tale.

The walls were smooth pale pastel stone, a soft blend of warm cream and blush pink, with slender balconies carved in delicate flowered lattices.

The roofs were capped with steep pointed spires tiled in glazed sea-green ceramic that shimmered like fish scales in the dusk.

Stained-glass bay windows jutted out from the third and fourth floors and glowed with warm candlelight from inside.

Silas focused his dark blue eyes on the building and called up the System.

PING!

A translucent blue window hovered in his vision:

[Structure: Modern Lord’s Keep]

[Tier: 2]

[Durability: 100%]

’It’s Tier 2, huh,’ he thought, dismissing the screen with a flick of his wrist.

He’d noticed right away that it was a completely different kind of Keep from his own.

’I guess this is the luxury version?’

His was a command post first and a home second... Aki’s had been built around comfort and light and pretty things, and it showed her sweet earnest heart in every curving arch and pastel tower.

It was gorgeous but it wasn’t built for the kind of fights that were coming, mostly.

’I’ll definitely help her increase its Tier,’ he thought, a warm determined smile tugging at his lips. ’Aki deserves a home that can take a siege without chipping those pretty tiles but first, I need to find her.’

He lowered his arms, crossed the wide courtyard and climbed the low flight of cream marble steps to the Keep’s entrance.

The front doors were double panels of polished birch inlaid with brass vines and clear crystal handles.

Little carved birds perched along the top of the frame, each one painted a different soft color, and a wreath of dried flowers hung from a brass hook in the middle.

The left door stood open a fraction of an inch, and a warm sliver of light spilled out onto the porch along with the faint unmistakable smell of burnt cooking oil.

Silas pushed the birch door open with a gentle casual shove.

CREEEAK!

He took half a step over the threshold into the front hall.

SWOOSH!

A sharp violent rush of air whistled straight at his face from the shadows above the doorway.

Before his boot could even settle on the rug, a slender leather-booted leg came whipping out of nowhere in a blinding horizontal arc, aimed with bone-snapping speed straight at his left temple.

Silas didn’t panic.

’I was wondering when this woman would assault me...’

With the lazy reflexes of a man taking none of this serious, he leaned his upper body back three inches.

WHIP!

The kick sailed harmlessly past his nose, so close that the wind off the sole fluttered his dark bangs.

The attacker spun through the air with smooth graceful momentum and landed lightly on the polished floorboards six feet away in a low crouch.

Silver hair whipped around her shoulders like spun silk, framing a fierce shockingly pretty face with high cheekbones and vivid blue eyes that glared at him with pure hostility.

Fine silver constellation marks glowed faintly across her cheeks, pulsing with sharp starry light.

...Ther’Abella.

The Viridian Guard elf sprang upright, and brilliant crackling starlight was already flaring between her slender fingers.

In a single heartbeat it hardened in her grip into a gleaming razor-edged short sword of pure starlight, and she leveled it straight at Silas’s throat!

"Usurper!" She hissed. "How dare you cross this threshold! Who gave you permission to walk into the Lady’s home without announcing yourself?!"