Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Chapter 200: Under The Spire [IX / Bonus Chapter]

Silas paused, considering the proposal.

An automated early-warning ward that would allow him to take the weight off his legs without compromising security sounded infinitely preferable to arguing with a stubborn noble all night.

"I prefer that," Silas agreed pragmatically. "Set the barrier."

Harper smiled brightly, happy to finally contribute her magical utility.

She closed her eyes, bringing her pale palms together in front of her chest as she drew upon the slowly regenerating electrical mana within her core.

BZZZZZZZT!

A low humming vibration filled the air as a brilliant, semi-translucent dome of hyper-condensed purple lightning aggressively expanded outward from her sitting position.

The electrical barrier arched and crackled across the damp stone floor, completely enclosing a twelve-foot circular perimeter in the dead center of the blue Safe Zone ring.

The voltage running across the surface of the dome was intense, emitting a steady warm violet illumination that pushed the cold shadows of the cavern completely back.

"There," Harper declared proudly, lowering her hands and wiping a bead of sweat from her forehead. "That is a static displacement ward. It is hardcoded to instantly shock and repel any unauthorized physical or magical body that attempts to cross the threshold. It can easily defend against most strong attacks or roaming beasts..."

She paused with a frown touching her lips as she remembered the apocalyptic events of the previous afternoon.

"...well, as long as monsters like Seraphina or Elora aren’t the ones attacking us," Harper clarified dryly. "If Seraphina drops another solar fireball on our heads, this barrier is going to melt like sugar."

"Let’s hope she’s busy fighting somewhere else," Silas muttered.

With the outer perimeter securely guarded by Harper’s lightning dome, Silas turned his attention to their immediate environmental comfort.

The bare stone floor of the Treasury Dungeon was freezing cold, and covered in a thin grimy layer of ancient moisture and dirt.

"Move back," Silas instructed her.

He raised his calloused hands toward the center of the electrical dome, forcefully drawing upon the residual moisture hanging in the damp air and pulling the standing water from the surrounding stone floor.

"Ice Transformation," Silas chanted softly.

KRKKKKKKKKKK!

The moisture violently condensed and flash-froze in front of them.

Silas rapidly manipulated the crystalline structure of the ice as it formed, utilizing his deep, intrinsic memory of how Mia constructed their shelters.

However, because his water reserves were severely limited in the dry cavern, he couldn’t build a massive multi-room small house like the ancient Grandmaster usually did.

Instead, Silas meticulously crafted a reinforced thick-walled structure that looked more like a large, rigid military tent made entirely of smooth solid blue ice.

The structure stood six feet tall, featuring an angled roof to deflect falling debris, thick insulated walls to completely block out the damp cavern draft, and a flawlessly smooth, raised frozen floor that elevated them six inches above the grimy bedrock.

It was compact, efficient, and could only comfortably fit the two of them laying side-by-side inside.

Harper sat on the stone outside the entrance, watching the structural creation in complete speechless amazement.

"Silas..." Harper breathed out, her purple eyes wide as she ran her pale fingers over the perfectly smooth insulated blue ice frame of the tent entrance. "Your structural control is phenomenal."

"As long as it keeps the damp out, it’s good for me." Silas replied simply, stepping through the low entrance of the ice structure.

Since they had both agreed to stay awake together inside the automated barrier, Silas lay down completely flat on his back on the raised ice floor of the tent.

He rested the back of his head against his folded arms, staring up at the smooth blue ceiling of their shelter.

"I’m not even feeling sleepy anyway," Silas stated calmly with his mind still slowly processing the adrenaline of the General fight. "We can use the time to map out our extraction route for tomorrow."

Harper crawled gracefully through the entrance, joining him inside the insulated ice tent.

The interior space was intimate and warm, illuminated by the soft violet glow of her external lightning barrier filtering through the blue ice walls.

Silas and Harper lay a few feet apart on the frozen floor with their backs to the ice.

For several minutes, the only sound inside the shelter was the hum of the electrical dome outside.

Then, Harper shivered slightly.

Despite the insulated walls blocking the cavern draft, the residual chill of the subterranean dungeon slowly began to seep into her bare legs.

Her naked body offered zero warmth, and even with his heavy trench coat draped over her shoulders, her calf and thigh were aching intensely from the cold.

She turned her head on the ice, looking across the small gap at Silas’s sharp profile.

"Silas..." Harper whispered softly. "Can I... do I have your permission to lay on you? Just a little bit? The ice floor is making my healed leg ache, and it is really cold over here."

Silas turned his head, looking at her shivering form in the dim violet light.

His paranoia instinctively warned him against allowing an elite noblewoman inside his personal guard while resting.

But then he remembered the sight of her impaled by a flaming spear just to buy his retreat, and he remembered the trust she had shown while clinging to his back through the dark tunnels.

Silas let out a long but ultimately defeated sigh.

"Fine," Silas begrudgingly allowed her, shifting his arms down to his sides. "Come here. Just don’t cut off my circulation."

Harper’s face lit up with a brilliant breathtaking smile of joy.

She didn’t hesitate for a second.

Harper immediately shifted her body across the small gap on the ice floor, closing the distance between them.

She lay down directly against his right side, resting the side of her head comfortably on his broad muscled chest, right over the steady powerful beating of his heart.

To secure her balance and warm her freezing leg, she casually lifted her right pale thigh, placing one bare leg entirely over his own hips, locking herself intimately against his frame.

The overwhelming heat radiating from Silas’s body was intoxicating.

It felt like resting against a living furnace. Harper sighed a long contented breath of comfort, burying her face into the clean fabric of his black shirt.

"So warm..." Harper murmured softly, her eyelids already growing heavy.

Within less than two minutes, the emotional exhaustion of her near-death experience and the overwhelming physical security of his arms completely caught up to her.

Harper quickly fell fast asleep with her breathing dropping into a soft purr against his chest with her grip on his waist remaining iron-clad.

Silas lay there on his back, looking down at the sleeping lightning mage draped across his body.

He let out another heavy sigh, shaking his head at the absurdity of his life then, suddenly, without any warning or physical exertion, Silas felt a crushing wave of heavy sleepiness violently slam into his brain.

YAWN!

Silas opened his mouth wide, letting out a massive, involuntary yawn that audibly popped his jaw.

His golden-ringed eyes blinked rapidly, his brow furrowing in deep, profound confusion.

’What the hell?’ Silas thought. ’Why am I crashing like this? My core is stable. I just said I wasn’t even feeling sleepy five minutes ago...’

His eyelids felt like they were being weighed down by lead blocks.

The violet light filtering through the ice walls began to blur and swim before his eyes.

He tried to tense his muscles, tried to force his focus to remain alert and maintain visual security on the tent entrance, but his resistance was completely evaporating into a warm comfortable fog.

Unable to fight the overwhelming tide pulling him down into the dark, Silas’s eyelids fluttered shut.

His tense shoulders slumped against the ice floor with his arm instinctively wrapping around Harper’s waist to hold her secure as he ended his fading, conscious thoughts with a final thought.

’Just... just five minutes...’

Silas fell fast asleep, snoring softly in the dark.

...

As for the actual magical cause of this sudden heavy sleep... it had absolutely nothing to do with Silas’s physical stamina or the atmosphere of the Secret Realm.

Thousands of miles away from the freezing death traps of the Treasury Dungeon, sitting safely in the heart of the Blessed, was Eluned.

Back in the Keep of the Blessed Land territory, the Goddess of Nature was currently standing alone inside Silas’s spacious dimly lit private bedroom.

She was dressed in her flowing emerald night robes, standing right at the edge of his massive comfortable feather bed.

Eluned had her eyes closed, her pale hands hovering gracefully over the glowing root that had sprouted a bit on her hand.

She was deliberately manipulating Silas’s biological functions across the vast spatial distance of the realm drop, utilizing the divine Genesis Rune she had personally kissed and tattooed onto his knuckles prior to the raid as a direct magical conduit!

Through the divine tether, Eluned could accurately sense the extreme physical trauma his body had undergone throughout the day... the muscle tearing from the General fight, the magical depletion of his water spells, and the lingering stress of carrying Harper through the tunnels.

Her divine heart ached with overprotective devotion.

"You push yourself entirely too hard, My Lord," Eluned whispered softly to the empty room, a tender breathtaking smile illuminating her divine face as she gently twisted her fingers, sending a targeted concentrated pulse of pure restorative sleep-inducing nature mana directly through the Genesis tattoo into his nervous system.

With her magical intervention successfully executed, Eluned climbed into Silas’s massive bed.

She pulled his heavy silk bed covers completely up over her shoulders and all the way to her nose, deeply inhaling the lingering familiar scent of him woven into his sheets.

She rolled onto her back, kicking her bare pale feet happily at the air under the blankets like an excited schoolgirl as she thought to herself with divine satisfaction:

’It’s Night-time in that miserable dungeon... my Lord should get all the deep uninterrupted sleep he needs to completely repair his muscle fibers and recover his strength for tomorrow...’ Eluned snuggled deeper into his pillows with her green eyes sparkling in the dark.

’He’ll definitely thank me later.’

...

The next morning, the tranquil peace of their subterranean slumber was violently shattered.

KRA-KRA-CRASH!

Without a single second of warning, a massive two-ton chunk of ancient bedrock violently broke away from the vaulted stone ceiling eighty feet above their Safe Zone and plummeted directly down toward their camp!

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

The falling boulder smashed directly into the top of Harper’s automated lightning barrier but the impact was so immense that the A-Rank electrical dome violently overloaded, flashing with blinding white light before completely shattering with a deafening ear-splitting sound that sounded like a bomb detonating inside the corridor!

KRA-THOOM!

The concussive shockwave of the exploding barrier and the falling stone slammed directly into Silas’s ice tent, completely pulverizing the angled roof of their shelter and showering them both in a freezing suffocating avalanche of shattered ice, falling frost, and pulverized stone dust.

"AGGGH!" Harper screamed in terror with her eyes snapping wide open as the freezing debris rained down over her face.

Silas snapped awake instantly as his reflexes exploded into action.

He didn’t even waste a second orienting himself. He violently threw his right arm upward, utilizing his Gold Core strength to physically catch a falling slab of ice and heave it away before it could crush Harper’s head, while pulling her securely against his chest with his left arm.

They scrambled to their feet amidst the ruined remains of their ice tent, coughing violently as thick grey dust filled the air.

As soon as their boots touched the damp stone floor, they realized the falling ceiling boulder wasn’t an isolated incident.

RUMBLE! GROAN!

The entire subterranean floor beneath their feet was continuously vibrating with intense rolling miniature earthquakes!

The massive bedrock walls of the cavern were groaning in protest as deep jagged fault lines aggressively spider-webbing across the masonry as loose gravel and water rained down from every direction.

Silas stood in the center of the shaking intersection as his hand flew to the hilt of his mythril longsword.

"What the fuck is going on now?!" Silas roared over the deafening tectonic rumble, glaring up at the cracking ceiling.

As if waiting for his curse, the dead god’s laughter boomed from the falling masonry above, echoing with absolute, manic, world-ending glee.

"HAHAHAHAHAHA!" Ititus laughed hysterically over the dungeon broadcast with his voice vibrating through the shaking stones. "Good morning, my surviving little mice! Did you sleep well in your cozy little ice tents?!"

[Author’s Note]

I wasn’t aware I hadn’t delivered the Bonus Chapter for reaching 200 GT, thanks for the support and as for those Bonus Chapters, they’ll be coming within next week!

Give a gift hehe~ A Castle wouldn’t be bad at all.