Chapter 652: Reuniting With Eluned [Bonus - ]

Chapter 652: Reuniting With Eluned [Bonus Chapter]

The transition was instantaneous.

Unlike the first time there was no falling feeling as space simply folded, and Ther’Abella felt cool smooth marble beneath her boots.

The weight in her limbs was gone and the golden glare washed out of her vision, replaced by the sweet clean scent of mountain air however beneath it... so faint she thought she had imagined it was something else.

...There was sap and moss, it was an area thriving in nature, but there was something very familiar about this place, specifically a smell.

"...Lady Eluned’s scent..." she breathed.

She stood between two soaring pillars of rose-veined white marble, inlaid with spiraling threads of beaten gold with a pair of carved sea-drakes curling around a star-silver sun above her head.

Beyond the arch lay a grassy knoll under an afternoon sky and standing three paces in front of her with her hands clasped nervously over the hem of her loose white traveler’s tunic, was a young woman with long crystalline lapis-lazuli hair and wide sapphire eyes, staring up at her with innocent breathless awe.

"Huh...?"

Beyond the arch, she saw a modest wall of neat white stone, a half-built hall of timber and pale granite, and a surprisingly cheerful vegetable plot.

At the far edge of the meadow, a pack of iron-spined stalkers crouched at the treeline beyond the barrier, frozen in place and staring at the archway as though it had grown teeth.

Princess Aki’s breath hitched in her throat.

’She’s so tall,’ She thought frantically, her mind spinning as she struggled to form words.

’What do I say? "Welcome to my territory, I am your Lord"? No, that sounds too arrogant! "Hello, please protect me"? That sounds pathetic! What do I—’

On the Lord’s tab in front of her face, a line of golden letters blinked.

[Your Hero has been summoned!]

Aki had spent years memorizing every variable of the summoning protocol, and not one of them had said anything about the Hero looking as though she had walked out of a siege... well it depended on how you summoned them though.

WHOOSH!

Aki didn’t even get to finish the thought as Ther’Abella ignored her.

Her senses, stripped down to a Level 1 registered a thunderous vibration from the grass beyond the archway... it was a loud booming belch, and the thick unmistakable reek of fermented dwarf ale and roasted boar meat.

Her head snapped to the right.

Floating three feet above the emerald grass, idly spinning a heavy warhammer by its strap while wiping froth from her lips with the back of a bronze-clad forearm, was a towering seven-foot woman with golden hair and a celestial bronze cuirass.

...Thor.

’Eh... Eh... She’s here...?’

Ther’Abella’s vision turned a violent purple.

The blood in her veins roared, and four hundred years of buried agony and hatred erupted through her skull in a single second.

’THOR!’

She was Thor the Thunderer...

A friend of Lady Eluned’s from before the sky had cracked, the one who had feasted at the sanctum table and sworn, with a tankard raised, that anyone who touched the Tree Spirit would answer for it.

Ther’Abella remembered the night Thor had arrived at the sanctum gates with a barrel of mead on each shoulder, laughing so loudly that three lanterns burst, and Lady Eluned, who never laughed, had pressed a hand to her mouth and giggled like a girl while the whole Guard stood frozen in shock.

Ther’Abella remembered the laugh that had rattled the library shelves.

When the roots split, when Ellvi marched her traitors into the heartwood and Lady Eluned bled out on the stone, where was the friend who had promised?

Where were the great war-horns of the north? They had sat in their golden halls, drinking their casks, while Eluned choked on her own blood.

"YOU TRAITOROUS WHORE!" Ther’Abella shrieked, her voice tearing raw fury.

SWOOSH!

She blurred forward, launching herself off the marble base like an uncoiled viper.

She had no silver weapon since the system reset had stripped her gear, and it didn’t matter.

She reached into her soul, and her piercing blue eyes ignited into deep radiant lilac starlight.

SHING!

A five-foot lance of white concentrated starlight condensed between her palms, its edge humming with freezing plasma.

WHOOSH!

Ther’Abella drove it straight at Thor’s throat in a blinding thrust aimed to pierce the jugular.

Some part of her, perhaps the part that had been a squire of the Viridian Guard before she was anything else, was reading the woman in front of her the way Captain Kaelith had taught her to read a field...

’I can’t hope to match...’

This was a woman on Lady Eluned’s level at least, standing in the open with her guard down with a drink in her left hand and a hammer in her right, and she was still the most dangerous thing within a hundred miles.

Thor’s bright blue eyes narrowed slightly.

"Huh...?"

The lazy drunken smile vanished from her lips, replaced by the razor-sharp reflexes of a warrior who had fought in more than ten thousand wars.

"Who are you again?"

WHAM!

Thor’s heavy bronze-plated war-boot snapped up in a short brutal front-kick and caught Ther’Abella squarely in the center of her sternum before the starlight lance could cross the final foot.

CRACK!

The concussive force was like hitting an iron rampart.

Even with Thor holding back ninety-nine percent of her output, the mass behind the kick blew Ther’Abella backward through the air and into the grass.

She tumbled across the lawn, tearing up patches of emerald clover, sliding violently across the stone flagstones until her back slammed against the carved border of the Anchor Gate.

"Ugh—!"

She coughed, spitting a mouthful of blood onto the carved runes beneath her hands.

Her freshly reset Level 1 frame screamed in protest, with three ribs fractured by the single strike.

"Oi!" Thor barked, planting her boots on the grass and glaring down at the silver-haired elf with deep annoyance. "What in Odin’s name is wrong with you, girl?! You step out of the portal and immediately aim a spear at my throat?!"

"SILENCE!" Ther’Abella roared, pushing herself up with trembling arms with her lilac starlight flaring around her fists.

Her face was twisted in grief and rage as tears began to cut tracks through the dust on her cheeks.

"You were her friend!" she screamed at Thor, her voice breaking. "You sat at her table! You drank her wine! You promised, and when Lady Eluned screamed for help beneath the roots, not one of you came! You left her to die! She is DEAD because of cowards like you!"

The grin had gone out of Thor’s face and her hand tightened on the strap of her hammer.

"Dead?" she said slowly. "Girl, who in hell told you Eluned is—"

HUMMMMMM!

Starlight coalesced around her hands again, forming two curved, jagged daggers of freezing white plasma.

Her stats were gutter-tier right now and her mana reserves were practically nonexistent but she didn’t care.

WHOOSH!

The daggers went in low and fast as Thor tilted a hip and let the first pass her ribs.

She caught the second wrist in one broad hand without spilling a drop of ale, and held it there as easily as she might have held a fussing cat.

’Fuck you!’

Ther’Abella drove her forehead into Thor’s nose.

BANG!

The goddess blinked, touched her own lip with her thumb, and found a thread of blood as a slow delighted grin spread across her face.

"Ha! That was good," Thor said with real appreciation. "I could kick you again, but it would be rude..."

"Wait! STOP!" Princess Aki yelled, waving her arms in panic as she sprinted between them. "Both of you, calm down! Thor, put the hammer away! Ther’Abella, stand down! That’s an ally—"

She planted herself between them with her arms spread wide looking small and quite visibly terrified then she lifted her right hand, and a ripple of royal-purple mana rolled out across the clover.

A clump of grass at her feet shivered and began to come apart, blade by blade, into fine violet dust.

"I am Aki," she said, in the clearest voice she could manage. "I am the Lord of this territory, and you are my Hero... I do not know what Thor has done to you, but I promise that nothing in this meadow is your enemy..."

’That sounded much better in my head,’ Aki thought, her heart hammering in her ears. ’Please do not let her kill me... I have only just gotten my wall finished...’

Behind her, Thor lowered the hammer a few inches and muttered out of the corner of her mouth.

"Aki, I swear on Odin’s beard I have never seen this woman in my life."

Ther’Abella stared at the slight girl in the white tunic, at the purple light and the trembling chin.

’A child...?’

She was a child with the courage of a woman twice her size... It was a bit different from what she was used to.

VUUUUUUUUUUUM.

Behind Ther’Abella’s back, the massive twenty-foot runic circle carved into the bedrock as the Territorial Anchor Gate leading to Blessed Land, suddenly flared to life.

A gentle pulse of verdant green mana rippled across the grass as a cheerful melodious voice called out from the portal threshold.

"Aki, dear! I baked a fresh tray of honeyed lotus pastries for your new summon! I wanted to make sure she felt welcome, you see—"

The voice paused, and a soft scolding chuckle drifted through the air.

"—because you know how Lord Silas is! On his very first day in the territory, he was so terribly excited about summoning the girls that he actually forgot to feed the girls until the following morning..."

Ther’Abella froze as every muscle in her body locked into solid stone and the starlight daggers in her hands sputtered and died.

That voice... That rhythm... That gentle unhurried tone that sounded like a spring breeze rustling through dry willow leaves...

Slowly, Ther’Abella turned her neck.

Standing on the edge of the runic circle, barely three paces behind her, was a woman dressed in simple flowing robes of translucent jade silk that brushed against the clover.

Her hair, a magnificent cascade of luminous pale emerald, fell past her waist, adorned with half-bloomed white star-lotuses.

In her hands she carefully balanced a steaming ceramic baking dish filled with golden, honey-glazed pastries, and the dish tilted a worrying degree as her fingers loosened in surprise.

Eluned stopped.

She had flour on her cheek, and her sleeves were rolled to the elbow like a woman who had been in a kitchen all afternoon.

"Ah... An Elf...?"

Ther’Abella swallowed.

’...Alive.’

She was not entombed in the lightless dark... not reduced to petrified ash beneath a stolen tree?

Lady Eluned was alive and standing in the sun in front of her, smelling of honey and warm bread, with a pastry dish in her hands and a faintly worried line between her brows.

Ther’Abella’s throat closed.

Four hundred years of loneliness could do things to a mind, and for one terrifying second she was certain it was a hallucination, maybe the last kind trick of a dying brain... after all, she was about to die.

"Umph..."

Her knees gave out as her fingers closed around the polearm she no longer had.

"Lady," she tried to say, and the word came out as a broken wet sound she hadn’t made in so long.

Thor, who had been dabbing at her split lip, froze with the back of her hand halfway to her mouth.

She looked from the elf to Eluned and back again, slowly assembling a picture she did not like at all.

Her large brilliant jade eyes blinked as she tilted her head, looking down at the tall silver-haired elf kneeling in the dirt at her feet.

In the hush, even the iron-spined stalkers at the treeline had gone silent, as though the whole meadow were holding its breath.

A single honeyed pastry slid off the tray and landed in the clover without anyone noticing.

"O-Oh," Eluned murmured, her porcelain brow creasing into a tiny bewildered furrow.

A strand of emerald hair slid over her shoulder, and she brushed it back with the flour-dusted heel of her hand.

’It’s really her...’

This was the same absent gesture Ther’Abella had watched on ten thousand mornings, and every cell in her body recognized it before her mind could argue with it too.

At the edge of the circle, Aki pressed both hands over her mouth.

Eluned stared at the elf’s face as she looked at the silver constellations on her cheekbones.

’Where have I seen her before...?’

She tapped her chin with one finger, clearly struggling with immense effort to dredge a specific memory out of the thousand years of clutter in her head.

’I’m not that old so why is it hard to remember— Oh right! It’s Ther’Abella!’

She was the youngest... The one who always saluted too fast, whose ears turned red when she was embarrassed, who had carried her polearm into the library every morning for three hundred years as though it were a spoon she had been told not to drop.

Eluned had never once told her how much she looked forward to the sound of those hurried boots on the flagstones.

A sudden bright spark of recognition lit up the Goddess’s eyes as Eluned beamed... it was a radiant breathtaking smile that made the grass around her boots instantly sprout tiny yellow buttercups.

"Ther’Abella!" Eluned chimed happily, her voice ringing clear across the meadow. "Goodness, look at you! Welcome to Blessed Land!"