Chapter 646: Lady Eluned’s Smell [Bonus - ]

Chapter 646: Lady Eluned’s Smell [Bonus Chapter]

"GWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

A booming roar of laughter shattered the tranquil mountain air, followed immediately by a belch that shook the leaves of the nearby birch trees.

BURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRP!

"Hell of a view!" Thor declared, floating casually down from the sky above the knoll.

The Norse champion drifted weightlessly through the air with her muscular sun-tanned arms bare and her celestial bronze armor gleaming under the golden sunlight.

In her left hand, balanced effortlessly on her palm, was a massive two-gallon wooden cask of frothing dwarven ale, while her right hand idly spun Mjolnir by its leather strap.

She landed on the grass beside Aki with a soft thud, took a massive foaming gulp from the cask, and wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist.

"Looks like a proper kingdom!" Thor boomed, gesturing with the cask toward the tidy newly erected white-stone perimeter wall encircling the three-acre territory. "Clean grass! Fresh air! None of that miserable sulfurous dust Silas keeps making us dig through down in the south! Truly, a domain fit for a proper royal maiden!"

Aki let out a long sigh, rolling her large sapphire eyes as she turned to look at the floating goddess.

"Do you really have to belch like an artillery piece every time you cross my airspace, Thor?" Aki groaned, resting her hands on her hips. "Are you trying to intimidate my first summoned Hero before she even steps through the archway?"

The wall itself had gone up in the first twenty minutes, a ring of neat white stone twelve feet high with a single iron-banded gate, built from the material caches Silas had made her keep.

Inside it sat her boundary stone, a small unfinished hall of timber and pale granite, and a surprisingly cheerful vegetable plot that Mira would have wept to see.

It was not much but it was hers, down to the last carefully measured foundation stone.

’And I’m satisfied... I can always borrow from the main territory.’

Aki glanced to her right.

Carved into the flat bedrock near the eastern gate of her territory was a massive twenty-foot circular array of glowing gold and violet runes.

It was the Territorial Anchor Gate, the direct spatial bridge linking her vassal domain to Blessed Land.

Because Silas had used his own Gold Core to awaken her and she was his vassal, the Sovereign Realm had bound them together permanently.

The champions of Blessed Land were free to step across the threshold into her borders whenever they pleased, and Aki could stroll into Silas’s orchards as easily as walking into an adjacent room.

Thor took another massive swig of ale and let out a satisfied smack of her lips.

"Intimidate them?" Thor scoffed, her bright blue eyes twinkling with boisterous amusement. "If a warrior is intimidated by a woman enjoying a tankard of cold brew, then they are either a fragile mortal or some pathetic limp-wristed weakling who hates women! And we don’t need those kinds of cowards in this place anyway!"

Aki offered a wry, knowing smile. "Well, you won’t have to worry about fragile men, Thor."

She pointed a delicate finger toward the glowing boundary stone at the center of the camp.

"Because my domain is registered as a Vassal Territory under Blessed Land," Aki explained, her voice carrying a note of quiet pride, "my place automatically inherited Silas’s passive territory trait... Divine Sanctum."

Thor froze mid-gulp and lowered the wooden cask from her lips. "Divine Sanctum?"

"Yes," Aki nodded, a cheerful giggle escaping her. "I can only summon female troops and female champions... The territorial field outright rejects male summoning frequencies."

Thor stared at her for a single stunned second then she threw her head back and let out a laugh so loud and concussive that two birds in the distant trees plummeted three feet before catching their wings.

"GWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" Thor roared, slapping her armored thigh with a metallic clang. "GLORIOUS! MAGNIFICENT! Silas truly is a genius! An entire army composed purely of fierce, battle-hungry maidens! I’m going to challenge every single one of them to an arm-wrestling match before sunset!"

"Besides," Aki added, ticking points off on her fingers, "a hall full of undisciplined knights would eat three times the rations and argue with every order... The Sanctum solves two problems at once."

"And a third!" Thor boomed. "No one to ruin my arm-wrestling record!"

Aki smiled, crossing her arms beneath her chest.

She was a bit happy about the restriction.

In the high courts of Rhyx City, she had spent years reading private complaints from female lords.

The summoning pools were filled with arrogant undisciplined male knights who constantly questioned female commanders, undermined orders, and spent half their watches inappropriately ogling their mistresses.

Aki had zero interest in managing that kind of rot.

’And besides,’ a secret, warm thought brushed against her mind, ’if someone is going to be ogling my body, I would much rather it be Silas than some random greasy mercenary lord from the central plains.’

The thought hit her with sudden clarity, and her cheeks erupted into a blinding crimson.

’WAIT! WHAT AM I THINKING?!’

SLAP! SLAP!

Aki brought both hands up and smacked her own cheeks with two loud, sharp cracks.

’Stop it! Stop it, you shameless royal degenerate!’ Aki scolded herself frantically, shaking her blue head until her hair thrashed wildly. ’Silas has Lady Eluned! He has Lady Aeliana! He’s surrounded by breathtaking goddesses with legs that reach their chins and figures like sculpted marble! My body isn’t even developed like that! I’m petite! I look like a scholar who hasn’t seen the sun in three years!... Why would he ever look at me like that?!’

Thor lowered her ale cask, tilting her head as she watched the young princess slap herself like an wild marionette.

"What in Odin’s name are you doing, girl?" Thor asked, her brow furrowing in bewildered concern. "Did a wasp sting your nose? You’ve slapped yourself three times in forty seconds. If your brain is malfunctioning, drink some ale... it resets the humors."

Aki stopped, panting slightly with her cheeks stinging with bright red handprints.

She looked at Thor’s towering seven-foot frame, at the celestial bronze cuirass straining against a chest the size of two heavy war-shields, framed by thick sculpted pectorals and steel-hard deltoids.

A sudden wave of petty feminine frustration boiled over in her chest.

"You," Aki muttered, narrowing her sapphire eyes.

"Me?" Thor blinked.

THWACK!

Aki stepped forward and slapped her open palm straight against Thor’s right breast.

CLANK!

A sound like a blacksmith’s hammer striking an anvil echoed across the grass and Aki froze with her eyes snapping wide.

"OWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!" Aki shrieked, clutching her right hand to her chest and hopping on one foot across the lawn in blinding agony. "WHAT IN THE HEAVENS IS THAT?! YOUR BREASTS ARE SOLID MUSCLE! IT FEELS LIKE HITTING A REINFORCED GRANITE SLAB!"

Thor didn’t even flinch.

She looked down at her chest, looked back at the hopping princess, and let out a boisterous delighted chuckle.

She took a deep breath and flexed her upper torso, her pectorals contracting with such concussive force beneath her armor that the bronze plates groaned.

"Of course they’re muscle!" Thor declared proudly, pounding her own chest with a heavy fist that would have cracked Silas’s ribs. "I swing Mjolnir eight thousand times a day! Do you think thunder generates itself from fat deposits?! These are forged from pure celestial iron and roasted boar meat!"

Aki blew on her throbbing knuckles, pouting with enough intensity to crack porcelain. "Unfair... Absolutely unfair... The gods play favorites."

"Gwahaha! Drink more milk, little princess!" Thor laughed, reaching into a leather pouch at her belt and tearing off a massive, greasy leg of roasted wild boar with her teeth.

"Stop laughing," Aki muttered, though the corner of her mouth twitched. "Shouldn’t you be doing something useful? Like explaining why Tier 2 Peak is so common out here?"

"Because the Sovereign Realm likes watching new lords panic," Thor said cheerfully through a mouthful of boar. "Give them a pretty view and a thousand hungry teeth... Don’t worry, I’ll clear the Thorn-Stalkers myself if they get bold but a lord ought to see her first Hero fight, so I’ll hold off until the lady’s had her turn."

Aki shook her stinging hand, took a deep steadying breath to clear her head, and turned her back on the noisy thunder-goddess.

She walked with firm determined steps toward the center of her camp.

Rising from the grassy clearing was her Summoning Portal.

It wasn’t the plain white stone arch of an ordinary novice lord.

It was a single soaring archway of pale rose-veined white marble, its twin pillars inlaid with spiraling threads of beaten gold and wrapped in dormant crystalline vines, its crown carved into a pair of sea-drakes curling around a sun of star-silver.

Between the pillars hung a shimmering, empty space, and at the base of the right pillar stood a slender pedestal topped with a circular holder of polished star-silver.

It looked like the gate to a queen’s palace, which Aki thought was only appropriate.

"Thor," Aki called over her shoulder, pausing with one hand on the cool marble of the pillar.

"Thor," she repeated, softer, "thank you for coming. I know you have a hundred better things to do than watch a novice lord pick her first card."

Thor blinked, the ale cask halfway to her mouth, and for once she had no boast ready.

"Silas asked me to look after you," she said, with surprising gentleness. "But I would have come anyway... You are the first lord in an age who read the manual before the monsters."

Aki flushed, then squared her shoulders.

For a moment, though, her fingers tightened on the cold marble, and the bravado slipped enough for Thor to see it.

"I’m frightened," Aki admitted quietly. "Not of the monsters... I read about them all my life. I’m frightened that I’ll summon someone and she’ll look at me and see a princess who could never lift a sword... All those years in the archives, people told me I was clever for someone with no core so I’ve never had to be anything but clever."

Thor was silent for a heartbeat, which for Thor was a very long time then she dropped to the ground beside Aki with her armor clanging and set her ale cask down on the grass.

"Well, Silas looked at a pile of cards and a girl who had never held a sword," Thor said, "and he gave her this power without blinking. Does that sound like a man who is worried about your usefulness?"

Aki let out a tiny wet laugh. "I’m glad..."

"Of course you should be glad." Thor grinned and ruffled her hair with a hand the size of a dinner plate. "Now go and summon your first friend, little princess. I’ll stand behind you."

Aki turned back to the pedestal.

Her voice regained its crisp authority.

"Now pay attention. Under standard deployment protocols, a newly initialized lord must summon their primary Hero before initiating troop formations..."

Thor drifted over, chewing on her boar meat, hovering four feet above the grass with her tankard cradled in the crook of her arm.

"Aye, aye, commander. I’m watching. Summon someone who likes a good brawl!" She jabbed her ale cask toward the Thorn-Stalkers at the treeline. "And if she’s any good, I want first pick of their carapaces... Chitin that thick makes excellent mugs..."

"Their carapaces belong to the treasury," Aki said primly. "But I will consider a commission."

Aki reached into her newly acquired Lord’s tab.

SHING!

With a delicate flick of her wrist, a single glowing card materialized between her slender fingers.

It was a pristine gold-bordered Hero Summoning Ticket, its surface pulsing with a soft luminescence that caught the golden afternoon sun.

Aki held the ticket close to her chest and closed her sapphire eyes, her eyelashes fluttering against her pale skin and Aki brought the card to her lips.

CHOO!

She planted a soft, reverent kiss against the golden parchment.

"Please," Aki whispered into the mountain breeze, her voice trembling with earnest hope. "Summon me someone as cool as Lady Eluned... someone who can protect this land with gentle strength."

She stepped up to the pedestal, leaned forward, and slid the glowing card into the star-silver holder.

CLICK!

The card seated perfectly.

For a single heartbeat, the world held its breath as the wind over the meadow died completely and the chirping of the distant birds cut off as if severed by a blade.

The Iron-Spined Thorn-Stalkers at the forest edge froze, their tails dropping flat against the soil in sudden instinctive terror.

Then a deep tone rose from the marble... a sound that was felt in the bones more than heard, reverberating straight through the bedrock of the Sovereign Realm.

HUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!

The dormant runes carved into the soaring archway flared from dull stone to an incandescent, blinding gold.

It began as a soft, pulsing ring around the pedestal then....

CRACK-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

A colossal vertical pillar of celestial gold radiance erupted from the archway and tore straight through the clouds like an lance.

The light was so pure that Thor instinctively threw her arm over her eyes, her boisterous laugh dying in her throat as the atmospheric pressure over the territory spiked.

The golden beam punched through the shimmering barrier covering Aki’s territory, shattering the dome into millions of sparkling motes, and then, a single heartbeat later, the motes drew back together and the barrier knit itself whole again looking seamless and unharmed.

The light churned, weaving itself into a tight, dense cyclone of starlight.

Silver motes rained down through the golden glare like falling snow, carrying a fragrance of cold night ai.

Aki stood at the edge of the platform with her hands raised against the gale, her sapphire hair whipping wildly as her breath caught in her throat.

’Who?’ she thought, her heart hammering against her ribs like a war drum. ’Who could carry mana this heavy?!’

She was not as strong as Eluned and the others but strong regardless...

The pillar of light slowly began to contract, pulling inward toward the center of the archway and condensing into the tall powerful silhouette of a woman standing between the pillars.

The glare faded into a soft shimmer of golden motes.

She was an elf, and she was nothing like the delicate elves of the storybooks.

She stood six feet and one inch tall, almost level with Silas himself, and her frame was a warrior’s, broad through the shoulders and corded with lean hard muscle beneath the fitted gunmetal-and-white battle leathers that bared her forearms.

Her silver hair fell down her back in a heavy gleaming sheet that glowed with the pale cool color of a night moon, and small stellar marks... tiny pinpricks of faint silver light, were scattered across her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose like a constellation.

She slowly opened her eyes.

They were a piercing blue, sharp as glacial ice, and as the last of the starlight flared across her skin the blue deepened and bled into a luminous lilac purple like the way twilight bled into night.

She lifted her head and took a slow deep breath of the mountain breeze.

Her eyes drifted toward the eastern gate, locking onto the glowing anchor that led straight into the heart of Blessed Land.

Her lips parted.

"...Lady Eluned’s scent..."