Chapter 630: Thor Arrives [Bonus - ]

Chapter 630: Thor Arrives [Bonus Chapter]

Kara’s jaw slacked slightly beneath her dark cowl.

’Why in the name of the nine hells was a one-and-a-half-mile-tall Death God trying to climb through that kind of tear?!’ Silas blurted out in mental disbelief. "His shoulders alone must measure six thousand feet across! His hips would have caught on the spatial rim like a fat pig stuck in a fence! What was the plan here?! To stick his hand through, wave at the mortals, and get stuck in the doorway for three centuries?!’

It made zero practical sense.

The gods of death... even the so-called ’minor’ ones who sat in the lower tiers of the pantheons were ancient and disgustingly territorial according to what he could see from the System now.

They spent eons sitting on thrones of petrified marrow in the deep rifts, slowly digesting the souls of collapsed worlds.

They didn’t simply wake up on a Tuesday morning, smell an engine blow out on a terrestrial rock, and decide to cannonball headfirst through a narrow dimensional aperture into a world that still possessed active nuclear deterrence.

’Unless...’ Silas narrowed his eyes, ’...the destruction of the Khemet Suppression Engine didn’t just break the local ceiling. It sent a soul-frequency ringing across everywhere like a dinner bell...?’

Silas scratched the side of his head, looking down past Talira’s trailing tail toward the massive smoking crater where the severed hand lay.

Down in Sector Four, the colossal limb was already beginning to react to regular physics.

Without the active core of Thanat-Kor pumping primordial necrotic mana through the calcified joints, the eighty-foot bone fingers were slowly crumbling.

Massive, powdery sheets of pale-green bone-dust were peeling away from the knuckles, drifting across the ruined streets like an eerie lightless blizzard.

DING!

[Opportunity Detected... Residual Primordial Essence.]

[Being In Direct Proximity To The Unraveling Limb Of A Deity Of Cessation Permits Absorption Of Corporeal Necrotic Particles.]

[Host Possesses An Unblemished Gold Core... Intake Of Thanat-Kor’s Residual Marrow-Mist Will Amplify Innate Death/Entropy Affinity By 340%, Accelerating Soul-Seat Refinement Toward High-Tier Necrotic Resistance!]

Silas’s eyes lit up like twin lanterns.

’Three hundred and forty percent?!’

"Hold the flight, Talira!" Kara shouted aloud, kicking off the dragon’s spine. "Wait right here! I’m going down to harvest some fertilizer!"

WHOOSH!

Kara dove straight off the dragon’s back, tucking her arms and rocketing toward the smoking bone crater at two hundred miles per hour while Number 5 didn’t even flinch.

She simply adjusted her sleeves with a sigh.

"If she splatters on the pavement, I am not scraping the grease off the stones."

Down fell Kara, closing the distance... four thousand feet... three thousand feet... two thousand feet—

BZZZZT-PING!

A bright crimson error window violently materialized three inches from Kara’s nose in mid-air.

[Soul-Vibration Incompatibility Detected!]

[Warning: Host Personally Severed Thanat-Kor’s Right Hand Utilizing The Sacred Artifact [Dawn Blade].]

[Current Divine Status: Thanat-Kor Has Officially Logged Host’s Spiritual Frequency Under [Blood-Cursed Enemy Of The Seventh Scythe].]

[Residual Marrow Particles Carry Active Retribution Will... If Host Ingests Or Enters Direct Absorption Contact With The Ash, The Residual Will Enter The Pulmonary Meridians And Violently Eviscerate Host’s Internal Organs From Within.]

[Recommended Action... Do Not Touch The Ash and Retreat Immediately.]

Kara’s body seized mid-air.

"WHAT?!" Silas shrieked internally.

’Are you fucking kidding me?!’

KABOOM!

Kara slammed her heels together, unleashing an emergency blast of wind-mana straight toward the ground.

The concussive back-blast violently halted her descent at twelve hundred feet, sending her looping upward in an undignified parabolic arc.

SWOOSH!

She flipped backward, kicked off three invisible air-steps, and rocketed straight back up into the stratosphere, landing back on Talira’s ruby spine with a heavy dust-covered thud.

Talira blinked her massive burning crimson eyes, turning her serpentine snout backward to look at her master.

"Back already, My Lord?" Talira rumbled, her voice filled with innocent genuine confusion. "Did you harvest the tribute?"

Kara slowly pushed herself up from her hands and knees, brushing a stray fleck of ash from her cheek with her face taking an expression of twitching exhaustion.

"False alarm," Kara grunted, her raspy voice completely devoid of life. "The dirt is contaminated."

’Type faster next time, you useless piece of junk!’ Silas roared at the system in the silent fortress of his mind. ’You let me free-fall five thousand feet toward an exploding bone pile before mentioning the god wants to turn my liver into soup?!’

He dismissed the screen with a sharp aggressive flick of his wrist.

Yet, despite the irritation, Silas reached inward, his fingers brushing against the spiritual anchor within his chest where the Dawn Blade slept.

’One slash,’ he thought, marveling at the memory. ’A single, clean stroke from that three-foot blade took out the hand of a Death God... What kind of monster was the Second King to forge something like that?’

It was a terrifying realization.

The items he had retrieved from the World Vault weren’t mere high-tier weapons... They were quite some anomalies and tools designed to defy the basic laws of divinity.

’Is it weird that I want more of them for myself?’

After this whole thing, he would definitely go there again.

’I haven’t even had to touch the other items yet,’ Silas thought with a cold confidence settling deep into his marrow.

If this one was like this... what about when he started using the other items as well?

Silas didn’t draw the blade again.

He let it rest within the warm quiet sanctuary of his soul, where his Gold Core mana slowly washed over the steel, cleansing it of the necrotic residue.

Beside him, Number 5 subtly shifted her weight, a tiny involuntary shiver running down the length of her spine beneath her heavy robes.

She slowly turned her porcelain mask toward Kara.

"Why are you smiling like that?" Number 5 asked with a sharp edge of genuine paranoia creeping into her tone. "You have that exact, repulsive expression people get right before they commit a high-order war crime... What are you planning?"

"Nothing at all, Madam Councilwoman," Kara replied sweetly, giving her a slow, terrifyingly unbothered wink. "Just thinking about how much I love public service."

GROOOOOOOOOOOOOOWL!

Talira’s throat vibrated with a deep sound.

"My Lord," the dragon reported, her gaze locking onto the horizon three miles to the east. "The minor vermin are organizing... Another rift has coalesced up above."

Kara rose to her full height, her traveler’s mantle billowing behind her like a raven’s wing.

She looked.

Across the eastern skyway, where the aqueducts crossed into the industrial sector, the air was black with movement.

It wasn’t a chaotic scatter of beasts like one would expect, rather it was a disciplined churning funnel of over four hundred Abyssal Gore-Vultures and eighty Chitinous Trench-Drakes, circling tightly around a central massive anomaly... a hovering four-winged terror whose bloated thorax was crowned with pulsating blue-and-violet lightning sacs.

A Tier 5 Hive-Alpha.

"Looks like the cleanup crew needs a foreman," Kara sighed, rolling her right shoulder until the joint popped cleanly. "Talira... Straight through the center of the formation and don’t waste breath on the scouts, aim directly for the throat of that bloated bird in the middle."

"BY YOUR WILL, LORD!" Talira roared, her ruby wings snapping back, preparing to dive—

Suddenly... the world went blue as a violent azure flash that turned the entire thermosphere into a photographic negative.

CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-KABOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The sky detonated with the fury of an exploding star as a single colossal bolt of cosmic blue lightning... easily sixty yards in diameter punched straight down through the upper ionosphere like the javelin of an angry titan.

The four hundred Gore-Vultures were vaporized instantly... The eighty Chitinous Trench-Drakes were obliterated as well and as for the Tier 5 Hive-Alpha with the lightning sacs?

Its bloated body was struck with such ungodly voltage that its cells didn’t even have time to burn... its molecular structure simply dissolved into fine, drifting azure ozone before the thunderclap could even reach the ground.

A massive clearing shockwave blew the smoke and clouds away from the eastern sector, leaving three square miles of sky completely clean and empty.

And descending through the center of that smoking ionized vacuum...

"GWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

A booming cheerful laugh echoed through the heavens.

"HELL YEAH!"

Floating weightlessly down through the azure static was a woman who looked like she had just kicked open the doors of a celestial tavern.

She was stunning... tall, athletic, with long, wild golden hair braided with strands of crackling blue plasma that arced lazily across her shoulders.

Her skin was lightly tanned, her muscular arms bare, wearing a tight sleeveless tunic of beaten celestial bronze and leather battle-skirts that bore the unmistakable rough-hewn aesthetic of the northern mythological realms.

Resting casually in her right hand, twirling around her fingers by its leather wrist-strap with dizzying velocity, was a short-handled war hammer forged from dark uru-metal.

...Mjolnir.

BURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRP!

Thor let out a massive belch that rattled the air for thirty yards around her as she blinked, wiping the back of her mouth with her forearm, her bright blue eyes widening in sudden sheepish realization as she looked around.

"Whoops!" Thor laughed, coughing into her fist. "Pardon the thunder! The mead of Blessed Land carries a remarkably sharp fermentation but fear not, fragile mortals! I looked down from the high spires, saw that Midgard was once again choking on its own incompetence, and descended to deliver holy deliverance!"

She floated smoothly across the sky, coming to a hover ten paces from Talira’s snout.

Her bright booming gaze swept over the dragon, then locked onto the single-armed woman standing on its back.

"Greetings, majestic red lizard! Or rather Talira, you’re much stronger since we sparred! Why am I even doing this? We saw each other before you got summoned of course!" Thor beamed, waving her free hand. "And greetings to you, Si—"

Thor abruptly froze.

Her jaw clamped shut mid-syllable with her eyes bulging slightly as she caught the murderous glare Kara was shooting directly into her eyes.

Thor’s eyes darted down toward Number 5 sitting quietly on the scales.

She coughed violently into her fist, clearing her throat with an exaggerated unnatural shift in posture.

"...Ahem! I mean... Greetings, Lord of Blessed Land!" Thor boomed, her voice dropping into a comical and overly formal tone that sounded like a mercenary reading from a royal treaty for the first time. "I, the mighty Champion of the Northern Storms, have officially arrived to provide glorious multilateral assistance to your military operation... Truly, what a completely coincidental and uncoordinated deployment this is!"

Kara stared at her for three long, agonizing seconds then, she slowly stepped forward, walking along the ridge of Talira’s neck until she reached the dragon’s brow, looking down at the floating thunder-goddess with half-lidded amused eyes.

Kara reached out her single right hand, patting the top of Thor’s golden, plasma-streaked head with two firm rhythmic pats.

"Good girl," Kara murmured, her voice dripping with patronizing sweetness. "Such a helpful, obedient little powerhouse."

Silas watched internally with absolute, wicked glee.

’Let’s see how your divine ego handles being treated like a prize hound, you overgrown lightning rod~’

Thor, however, didn’t bristle.

Instead, she simply looked at Kara with an expression of mild unbothered pity, tilting her chin up proudly as she floated three inches higher into the air.

"Obviously I’m a good girl," Thor stated with absolute, unshakeable self-assurance, casually twirling Mjolnir across her knuckles. "I am my father’s favorite daughter, after all! Odin himself remarked many centuries ago that among all his glorious progeny, my hammer strikes with the cleanest trajectory! Praise is merely an acknowledgment of the natural cosmic order!"

Kara’s eyes twitched.

’That wasn’t the point, you arrogant blonde idiot!’ Silas cursed inwardly, dragging his mental hands down his face. ’You’re supposed to get flustered! You’re supposed to huff and cross your arms! You don’t just lean into the dog-patting and quote your dad!’

Beside them, Number 5 slowly rose to her feet upon Talira’s back.

The Fifth Seat brushed a stray speck of soot from her midnight-violet robes, letting out a long remarkably deep sigh of genuine, unvarnished relief that rustled the edges of her porcelain mask.

"This is remarkably good fortune," Number 5 murmured, her dark eyes looking out over the cleared eastern skyway. "With the primary Tier 6 rift-anchor severed, and with high-tier divine artillery of this caliber actively purging the upper airspace, our defensive parameters have stabilized significantly... The casualty projections for the northern sectors just dropped by forty-two percent."

Kara turned her head, looking at the masked woman and a cold knot formed in the pit of Silas’s stomach.

Ever since the blast, hell ever since he had dragged Harper’s unconscious body out of that collapsing shaft... a single terrifying question had been gnawing at the back of his mind.

’Fuck...’

He had gone back down.

Barely twenty minutes after breaking the surface, while the dust was still settling, he had discreetly probed down through the vertical fissure to inspect the place and the Sub-Suppression Engine anchoring the northern sector was gone.

The four-thousand-foot basalt cavern had been violently hollowed out into a smooth glassy sphere of void-melted slag.

There were no gears to replace and there were no runic conduits to repair either.

...The entire machine had simply ceased to exist.

Silas possessed the Absolute Upgrade System as he could take a rusted kitchen knife and turn it into a mythril cleaver, and he could take a cracked stone foundation and reinforce it into titan-slate as well.

’...But how the hell am I supposed to upgrade something that isn’t there anymore?!’

He couldn’t point his fingers at empty air and upgrade a concept... You needed a base for that.

And worse... he couldn’t simply pack his bags, take his girls, and board Evelyn’s supersonic jet back to Europa.

’I hate myself...’

Lord Vespera was the face of the World Council’s modern squad.

If Kara White vanished from the frontlines while the northern half of Khemet was still bleeding through hundreds of dimensional tears, the international media would tear her reputation to shreds within forty-eight hours.

The Council would freeze his accounts, the Directorate would launch an inquiry, and the leverage he had carefully cultivated over the past month would evaporate like spit on a hot skillet.

He had to see this through.

He had to keep the World Council firmly on the hook for every single credit, every single drop of blood, and every single resource expended on this damn desert.

Kara gritted her teeth, her jaw setting into a tight miserable line as she looked at Number 5.

"Number 5," Kara spoke, her voice dropping into a low reluctant rasp that practically bled resentment. "The primary engine below the White Citadel... it is thoroughly obliterated. What is the World Council’s actual timeline for manufacturing and installing a replacement anchor?"

Silas held his breath.