Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Chapter 150: Tales Of Asgard [II]

The leather cover was worn and cracked along the spine, looking dry as if it had spent decades if not centuries sitting untouched in the Library.

’What the hell man... I just created this shit, why is it looking old?’ Silas thought, but then he looked at the other books in the Mythical section and they were all the same. ’Well fuck it then.’

The title was stamped into the grain in peeling gold leaf: Tales of Asgard.

Silas stood in the quiet warmth of the Keep’s newly constructed Tier 3 Grand Archive.

The soft light from the overhead starlight crystals caught the floating dust motes drifting between the towering bookshelves.

Around him, the low respectful murmurs of dozens of his warriors echoed through the vaulted room as they explored the aisles in their socks and bare feet, marveling at the sheer volume of printed knowledge he had just dropped into their laps.

He ignored the chatter, resting the heavy spine of the book against the edge of a polished mahogany reading stand and flipped past the table of contents.

’Hey at least the pages don’t seem that old...’

He traced his calloused thumb down the margin and read the opening lines, deciphering the flowing script of the book since it was written in English.

[Long before the Sovereign Realm was subjected into endless separations and the territorial borders were drawn in blood and miasma, there existed a radiant, unyielding nation of gods, ruled by the All-Father, Odin. The All-Father was not born to the divine ether... he was well known in the ancient records as a mortal Human from medieval Earth who broke the mortal tether by becoming a Lord. Odin always wanted to reach for the stars, to ascend beyond the terrestrial mud and the suffocating gravity of his birth world. Through slaughter and cultivation, he established a sovereign territory within a higher plane of stars, forging the golden eternal halls of Asgard above the clouds.

Yet, the planar walls were never absolute... There were several hidden warded entrances to Asgard scattered across the lower terrestrial realms... spatial bridges linking the mud to the stars in case Odin needed to descend and in Asgard, where high-tier gods lived and cultivated, there were endless violent wars for supremacy.

The fallout and elemental debris of these catastrophic celestial wars frequently tore through the planar fabric, falling through the spatial tears in the realm and crashing down to the lands below.

Sometimes the tear would bleed a heavy freezing snow storm that buried empires in frost.

Sometimes it was a roaring atmospheric inferno that scorched the earth to glass and sometimes it was a torrential deluge of freezing rain accompanied by booming thunder... an environmental disaster which was always courtesy of Odin’s very own daughter, Thor.]

Silas stopped reading. His eyes locked onto the final four words at the bottom of the paper.

He blinked once then he blinked twice.

’Daughter?’ Silas thought, his brain completely stalling out as he stared at the dry page. ’Odin’s very own daughter, Thor?’

He stood there in the quiet library, trying to reconcile the text with the mythology he had grown up watching back on Earth.

’Thor was a woman?’ Silas mused, rubbing the bridge of his nose as a dull headache thrummed behind his temples. ’Odin was a medieval human from Earth who just farmed his core until he broke the atmosphere and built an orbital fortress in space?... I knew of that but what the hell kind of translated cultivation nonsense is this? Did the Sovereign Realm algorithm just grab Earth mythology, throw it into a blender, and flip half the genders just to keep things interesting?’

It sounded ridiculous on the surface but as he looked at the gold ink, the Lord in him couldn’t ignore the terrifying implications of the text.

In the Sovereign Realm, myths weren’t just bedtime stories for children... they were historical records of high-tier awakeners who had survived long enough to become legends.

’If Odin was a real human who ascended from Earth like they said,’ Silas thought with a sigh. ’... That means he was a core-holder just like me. He started in the mud, built a faction, and climbed the grids until he hit the top but more importantly... look at the environmental descriptions.’

He looked back down at the paragraph detailing the spatial fallout.

[Sometimes the tear would bleed a heavy, freezing snow storm... sometimes an inferno... sometimes torrential rain and booming thunder.]

’Ever since I dropped my anchor point in the Umbral Basin, the weather here has been completely bipolar...’ Silas realized with the pieces of a very dangerous puzzle beginning to slide into place. ’There’s just been rain after rain for no reason at all, what next... Some snow? ’

He stared at the page with his jaw tightening.

’Regardless of whether Thor is a woman wielding a hammer or some ancient elemental mage,’ Silas pondered, ’Is it possible that the Blessed Land was sitting directly underneath one of these unstable spatial tears leading to Asgard?’

If Asgard was an active high-tier orbital territory hovering somewhere above the spatial ceiling of the Unknown Zone, and Odin was a medieval Earth human who had achieved godhood, the possibilities were too much.

’I wouldn’t mind meeting another guy from Earth who actually figured out how to become a god,’ Silas thought. ’We’re both Gold Cores... or at least, he started as one. If Odin is still running his territory up there, maybe he knows how to handle all of this development easily and we could trade weap— The hell am I thinking... do I look like some sort of Protagonist with plot armor? Why would a God want to trade anything or even give me the time of day?’

If he wanted to attract Odin’s attention then he needed to become as big as the All-father himself, perhaps even bigger.’

Then, he caught himself and shook his head, pushing off the mahogany reading stand.

"Not at all," Silas muttered aloud to himself, taking the heavy volume and preparing to slide it back onto the ironwood shelf marked MYTHICAL. "I’m overthinking it... There’s no way the Blessed Land is sitting directly under—"

"Lord Graves!"

A sharp frantic shout from across the library completely cut off his muttered words.

Silas spun around on his heel, his right hand instinctively dropping toward his hip where his forty-pound hand-and-a-half sword usually hung, before remembering he had stowed his weapons in his Lord Inventory.

Elara was standing at the far eastern end of the Grand Archive. She had her hands pressed flat against one of the massive arched starlight glass windows that overlooked the inner courtyard and the training yards.

She turned her head over her shoulder with her voice echoing clearly over the quiet murmurs of the Vanguard.

"All of you! Come look! There’s white stuff falling from the sky!"

Silas didn’t hesitate.

He crossed the polished ironwood floor in three long, rapid strides, easily pushing past a knot of curious shieldmaidens, and stepped up right next to Elara.

He looked out the tall, arched window.

She wasn’t lying...

It was snowing for some reason.

The temperature outside the protected mana-warmed walls of the Grand Archive had plummeted off a cliff in a matter of minutes.

Just an hour ago, when he and the girls had walked across the courtyard after Silas reprimanded them, the air had been clear and cool with typical Umbral Basin night fog.

Now, the pitch-black sky above the Keep was swirling with thick blindingly white flakes of pure ice.

It wasn’t a light flutter, either.

It was coming down in a dense sheet, rapidly burying the dark slate tiles of the courtyard under an inch of accumulating frost.

Over by the Beast Pavilion, the massive golden Alpha wolf had stepped out of its covered stall, shaking a thick layer of white powder off its heavy fur while sniffing the freezing air with deep confusion.

Silas stared through the glass at the drifting snow.

’Rain and snow, huh? I could have sworn I saw this shit just no—’

He slowly turned his head, looking back toward the row of ironwood shelves where the dry leather cover of Tales of Asgard rested.

’Sometimes the tear would bleed a heavy freezing snow storm...’

Silas leaned his forehead against the cool, enchanted glass of the window, letting out a long exhausted exhale that fogged up the pane.

He muttered

"Fuck..."

He watched the thick white flakes bury his courtyard, completely abandoning any lingering skepticism as the tactical reality locked into an undeniable picture.

"No wonder we’ve been having all these weather issues," Silas said quietly to himself, crossing his arms over his broad chest. "We aren’t just sitting in a monster-infested swamp... The Blessed Land seems to be right under the tear leading to Asgard or not too far from it"

Before he could begin calculating the defensive logistics of protecting his Keep from orbital divine fallout, the heavy double doors at the entrance of the library banged open.

"What in the nine hells is that?!" Brida’s booming voice echoed across the reading room.

The heavy shieldmaiden hadn’t bothered to put her boots back on.

She marched straight out of the library in her thick wool socks with her shoulders stretching the fabric of her casual linen tunic as she stepped directly out onto the covered portico, blinking out into the swirling white courtyard.

Silas turned from the window and walked toward the entrance to keep an eye on his soldiers.

By the time he reached the open double doors, half the girls had already crowded onto the portico and the top steps, peering out into the freezing night.

Brida stepped off the covered stone ledge and planted her bare sock-covered feet directly into the two-inch accumulation of fresh snow on the slate tiles.

She instantly flinched, looking down at her feet with wide shocked eyes.

’I’ve never seen anything like this before...’

She was a warrior summoned from a rugged mud-drenched southern town that was attacked by monsters regularly... she had spent her entire life fighting in humid bogs and dry badlands as well as forests.

She had never seen frozen snow in her entire life.

"It’s... it’s freezing dirt!" Brida yelled out, reaching down with a hand and scooping up a handful of the white powder.

She squeezed it between her thick fingers, watching it compress into a dense icy ball. "It turns into water! Why is the sky dropping freezing white mud on the territory?!"

"It’s called snow, you uncultured brick..." Tasmin’s dry, mocking voice sounded from the shadows near the corner of the portico.

The agile Huntress stepped out from behind a stone pillar.

Unlike Brida, Tasmin was wearing a dress.

She moved with the silent effortless stealth of a born predator, completely unaffected by the freezing air.

While Brida was staring bewildered at her wet wool socks, Tasmin casually bent down, scooped up a generous handful of the wet heavy snow, and packed it between her palms.

In less than two seconds, she had fashioned a sphere of ice the size of a baseball, compressed tight enough to dent armor.

’Though I don’t think it’ll hurt her that much... This should be enough punishment for this bitch leaving her panties all sweaty!

Tasmin didn’t give a warning as she simply flicked her wrist.

THWACK!

The snowball flew across the twelve-foot gap with the velocity of a bullett, exploding directly against the back of Brida’s thick muscular skull.

A shower of freezing wet snow and shaved ice erupted into Brida’s dark hair and slid straight down the back of her linen tunic.

Brida froze completely rigid. Her shoulders hitched upward as the freezing water hit her warm skin.

Slowly and terrifyingly, the heavy shieldmaiden turned around. Her face was flushed bright red.

"You..." Brida growled, her voice dropping a bit as she glared at the smirking Huntress. "You just threw frozen sky-dirt at my head."

"Good reflexes, shieldmaiden," Tasmin smirked, tossing another perfectly packed snowball up and down in her palm. "Maybe if you raised your shield as fast as you complain, you wouldn’t have ice down your crack."

Brida let out a deafening roar that shook the snow off the eaves of the library roof.

"I’M GOING TO BURY YOU!" Brida bellowed.

She didn’t draw her axe at all... not like she had it on her.

She simply plunged both of her hands into the snowdrift accumulating on the steps, scooped up a boulder-sized mass of white powder, and lunged across the courtyard like a charging Umbral Boar.

That was all it took.

...The spark hit the powder keg.

Within thirty seconds, the quiet atmosphere of the courtyard completely evaporated, turning into a war zone.

[Author’s Note]

I’ll be adding the Bonus Chapters of Last week’s goal today, the Bonus Chapters for the castle will come tomorrow...

Thank you!