Chapter 517: Foul Mouthed Deity [Bonus - ]

Chapter 517: Foul Mouthed Deity [Bonus Chapter]

With a wet leathery snap of its wings, the bird launched into the freezing air.

Despite the coating of necrotic slime weighing down its primary feathers, the avian familiar cut through the sub-zero squall with startling grace.

It hugged the contours of the scree, staying low beneath the prevailing gale to avoid getting battered against the cliffs, weaving an erratic yet deliberate path between towering monoliths of black basalt that jutted from the permafrost like the shattered ribs of a forgotten leviathan.

WHOOSH!

Silas broke into a steady lope, falling in behind the bird’s dark silhouette.

With every stride, his heavy combat boots crushed the surface crust with a crunching sound with his feet finding instant traction on the uneven frost-heaved rock.

Within his chest, the Gold Core maintained a calm rotation, circulating rivers of radiant mana through his pathways and meridians.

The sub-zero wind lashed his face and whipped the gore-matted black bangs across his eyes, but the cold could not take root as the internal furnace of his core repelled the frost before it could numb his extremities.

"Huuu... I just want to get this done and over with..."

He kept his spiritual perception dialed wide, sweeping the jagged ridgelines flanking the path as the greasy suffocating atmospheric density of the weeping eye’s domain was gone.

’At least we won’t have to worry about mist when I station girls here...’

Out here, the mana was thin as there were no feral beasts stalking the perimeter.

The local fauna knew better than to approach this sector as they were entering the dead zone of the northern basin.

’Or what I assume to be a Dead zone...’

After nearly a quarter of an hour of navigating through a winding maze of frost-shattered canyons and plunging stone gullies, the obsidian bird banked sharply around the face of a mirror-smooth cliff of dark granite.

It flared its wings, hovering against a vicious updraft, and let out a piercing triumphant shriek.

"SQUAWWWWWK!"

Silas rounded the stone shoulder and came to an immediate halt with his boots grinding loose shale to a dead stop.

Directly ahead, dominating the center of an isolated, bowl-shaped depression, lay a colossal vertical puncture in the crust of the world.

It was not a jagged crevasse born of tectonic strain, nor was it the ragged collapsed rim of a volcanic sinkhole.

The opening was terrifyingly neat.

It formed a nearly flawless circle forty yards in diameter with its interior walls bored perfectly plumb through hundreds of feet of solid ancient bedrock, as if a spear of large proportions had been driven straight down through the continent’s spine and violently wrenched back out.

"Fuuu..."

The cold venting upward from the depths was so incomprehensibly severe that the moisture in the falling blizzard crystallized several yards before reaching the lip, disintegrating into microscopic diamond sparks that were hurled back into the atmosphere by the updrafts.

From the lightless throat of the shaft, a slow luminescence pulsed.

It was a deep ethereal azure like the color of an oceanic trench submerged beneath miles of pack ice.

The temperature radiating from the pit hovered at a point that defied basic thermodynamics, it felt like a dead immovable cold that felt as though it were actively working to freeze the flow of time, the vibration of molecules, and the very spark of consciousness itself.

’Weird...’

The obsidian bird hovered over the mouth of the yawning abyss.

It looked back at Silas over its wing, clicked its beak in an urgent unmistakable summons, folded its wings tightly against its flanks, and plummeted headfirst into the darkness.

Silas walked straight to the lip of the pit with the soles of his boots hung slightly over the sheer drop.

He leaned forward, squinting into the plunging shaft.

The ethereal blue light seemed to flicker thousands of feet below, swallowed by endless leagues of lightless granite.

"Looks deep enough," Silas remarked dryly to the empty wind.

He didn’t search the rock face for handholds and he didn’t bother uncoiling a tether, nor did he channel earth magic to construct a descending staircase along the perimeter.

He simply bent his knees, kicked off the permafrost, and stepped out into empty air.

The rush of the subterranean void was a lot.

WHOOSH!

Gravity seized Silas like an iron fist, accelerating his mass downward through the darkness with terrifying bone-rattling momentum.

The walls of the vertical flue blurred past in streaks of lightless slate, illuminated only by the rhythmic flashes of the blue glow far below.

The freezing air screamed in his ears, a deafening roar that ripped at his clothes and threatened to strip the breath clean from his lungs.

Several hundred feet ahead of him in the dark, the obsidian bird was gliding smoothly along the center of the thermal column.

Its dark crystalline wings were locked in an immaculate V-shape, effortlessly riding the freezing updrafts that rushed through its flight feathers.

Its little chest puffed with pride.

It had endured the horrors of the basin... It had slipped past the weeping eye... It had navigated the broken crags and brought the living breathing Lord of Blessed Land straight to the secret threshold.

’I’ve finally reached it...’ the bird thought, clicking its scythe-curved beak in self-satisfied vindication. ’I survived the fog! I brought the human! Mistress is right below, and soon—’

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!

A concussive detonation ripped through the shaft directly past the bird’s left wingtip.

The force of the falling human hit the tiny avian like a physical wall of iron, flipping it violently onto its back and sending it spinning beak-over-tail feathers through the freezing void like a dropped unraveled ball of twine.

"SQUAWWWWWWWK?!" the familiar shrieked in dizzying outrage, flailing its wings wildly in the vacuum pocket left in Silas’s wake.

Down below, the floor of the subterranean chamber rushed up to meet Silas at terminal velocity.

The ethereal blue luminescence expanded into a vast cathedral-sized cavern with the icy bedrock racing toward his boots at well over a hundred miles per hour.

Thirty feet above the stone floor, Silas’s eyes snapped wide.

He rotated his hips mid-air, snapping both palms downward toward the approaching floor.

"Hurricane Repulsion!"

BOOM!

A high-pressure atmospheric shockwave detonated from his gloves, colliding violently against the ancient permafrost and violently checking his terminal descent.

The sudden crushing deceleration dragged at his joints, but before the recoil could snap his ankles, Silas flared a secondary cushion of Cyclone Slipstream beneath his boots, scrubbing the remaining energy into a swirling ring of harmless pulverized rime.

THUD!

Silas touched down on the platform in a low three-point crouch.

One gloved hand grazed the glassy floor to steady his balance with the leather hissing softly against the slick surface.

He held the position for a fraction of a second, letting his center of gravity settle, before rising smoothly to his full height.

"Haah..."

He rolled his shoulders, the dry joints popping softly within the cavern’s dead silence, and cast his gaze across the expanse.

The scale of the chamber was staggering.

It was a vaulted dome large enough to house an entire fortress.

The ceiling was lost in high shadows, but the entire cavern was illuminated by towering monolithic pillars of translucent unmelting ice that spiraled upward like petrified frozen waterfalls.

The light they cast was unnatural like a cold oceanic cyan that seemed to drink in sound and movement.

And there, dead-center in the chamber, sat the monument.

A glacier, easily eighty feet wide and rising like a fortress wall of solid ice dominated the floor.

And suspended dead-center within that impenetrable block of primordial ice... was a woman.

She was entombed from her toes straight to the base of her throat with her body locked rigidly beneath feet of flawless crystal-clear stasis.

Only her pale head and the slender curve of her bare shoulders emerged from the flat vertical face of the glacier.

A thick matted mane of midnight-black hair, caked in centuries of untouched unmelting frost, cascaded over her face like a dark shroud, completely obscuring her features from view.

Only the sharp line of her jaw and a pair of parched severely cracked lips were visible through the tangled strands.

She looked dead like a forgotten tragic relic carved from marble and abandoned at the bottom of the world.

KRA-RUMBLE!

The moment Silas took a single step forward, the dry permafrost creaking beneath his boot and the frozen midnight-black hair shifted.

The woman slowly tilted her chin upward.

CRACK-CRACK-SNAP!

The centuries of thick white frost binding her dark eyelashes fractured with a brittle delicate sound that echoed off the distant ice pillars like snapping needles.

Beneath the matted bangs, her eyelids slowly peeled apart and her irises ignited.

It was not a soft glow.

It was a divine emerald-green blaze that lit up the entire chamber in a shocking wave of radiant jade light.

KRA-BOOOOOOOM!

The instantaneous release of her awakening aura sent a physical shockwave rolling through the bedrock.

The frozen platform groaned in agonizing submission, and spiderwebs of hairline fractures raced across the surrounding stalagmites.

The pressure within the vault spiked so violently that Silas’s silver-threaded coat snapped back against his thighs.

Yet... the glacier entombing her body did not yield.

Not a single fissure appeared across the ice binding her collarbones and not a drop of moisture melted from the surface.

The woman drew in a slow ragged breath.

The freezing air scraped through her dry, cracked throat with a harsh whistling rasp that sounded like iron dragged across stone.

"Gah...!"

She coughed violently, a wet rattling spasm that shook her shoulders within the icy collar, before she finally managed to force her chin down and focus her vision.

She blinked once.

...Twice.

Her divine emerald-green gaze locked squarely onto the mortal standing three paces before her.

She took in every detail with microscopic clarity like the broad shoulders, the relaxed unbothered posture, the hand resting with casual arrogance on the pommel of a golden longsword, the dark wool coat drenched in the foul unmistakable black blood of a very strong monster... and above all else, the roaring furnace of a Mythic Gold Core humming within his chest.

The woman’s divine green eyes dilated until the emerald light swallowed the whites entirely.

Her cracked trembling lips parted.

DRIP!

From beneath her long lashes, genuine tears of hysterical relief welled up, spilling over her pale cheeks and cutting steaming clean tracks through the centuries of dust and grime caked upon her face.

"Hu... Hu... Human...!" she stammered, her voice a cracked high-pitched croak that rattled off the cavern walls. "Ah... AH! A REAL FUCKING HUMAN LORD!"

FLAP-FLAP-FLAP-FLAP!

THUD!

From the ceiling flue above, the obsidian bird finally dropped out of the sky, tumbling violently onto the frictionless ice.

It skidded comically across the permafrost on its stomach with its tail feathers spinning, before colliding head-first into a jagged ice stalagmite with a pathetic hollow thump.

The bird shook its bruised head dizzily, blinked its dark eyes, and scrambled upright.

It ruffled its gore-stained feathers with immense, chest-puffing pride and waddled frantically over to the base of the glacier, letting out a series of self-congratulatory squawks.

"Krrr-caw! Caw! Clack!"

The frozen woman tilted her eyes downward toward the little familiar, her tears flowing freely as her voice cracked with overwhelming gratitude.

"You actually did it, you brilliant, beautiful, magnificent little feathered bastard!" she cried out, completely devoid of any divine composure, sniffling loudly as snot and tears ran down her frozen chin. "I take back every single insult! I take it all back! I won’t pluck your wings! I won’t roast you over a pit! I won’t feed your gizzard to the wolves! You actually brought one! A real Lord with a Gold Core!"

She whipped her head back toward Silas, her green eyes burning with a shameless longing.

The heat radiating off his body was undeniable.

"Lord! Sovereign! Noble master!" the Goddess of Beasts pleaded, her voice rising into a desperate wail that echoed throughout the frozen cathedral. "Please! Break this fucking ice! Shatter this miserable freezing rock and get me out of here!"

She strained against the frozen collar, leaning her chin forward as far as the unyielding ice allowed with her warm tears splashing against the slick permafrost and hissing into vapor.

"If you free me, I will submit to your rule completely!" she blurted out, abandoning every shred of divine dignity and ancient pride without a single second of hesitation. "I don’t care about titles! I will sign anything! I will join your territory! I will bend the knee, swear eternal fealty to Blessed Land, and become your Hero! Whatever enemy, whatever lord, whatever wretched kingdom offends your sight... point your finger, and I will tear their throats out and feed them to the soil!"

GURRRRRRRR-GL!

An undignified sound tore through the quiet cavern.

It originated deep within her frozen midsection... a ravenous earth-shaking rumble that reverberated off the ice pillars like rolling thunder.

The goddess froze.

A furious bright crimson blush burned through the pale frost on her cheeks, cutting straight through her divine aura.

She swallowed hard, licking her parched lips as she looked down at Silas with wide desperate eyes.

"Just... please..." she whimpered, her tone dropping into a pathetic breathless plea. "Please bring a warm blanket... a soft bed... and meat. Real, roasted, seasoned meat, not frozen fish and not cave lichen either! Meat with salt and fat! I will give you my entire existence, Lord! Just break the damn ice!"

Silas stood three paces from the base of the glacier.

He did not flare his Gold Core to channel a burst of shattering force into the frost.

He simply stood on the ground with his golden ringed blue eyes regarding the weeping foul-mouthed deity with an expression of amusement.

Slowly, he folded his arms across his blood-stained chest.

"That’s a very generous offer," Silas said. "And I might just take you up on it."

He took one deliberate step closer with the cold blue light of the chamber reflecting in his eyes as he held her desperate emerald gaze.

"But before I swing this blade... I’ll need you to answer some questions for me first."