Chapter 492: It Was Never A Competition

Thor didn’t wait for the protest as she simply detonated forward.

With an apocalyptic roar of atmospheric displacement that violently shattered the sound barrier, a blinding pillar of sapphire lightning blasted downward from the gray heavens.

The concussive sonic boom blasted the snow away in a three-hundred-foot circular shockwave, knocking several women to their knees and sending loose boulders tumbling down the cliff face.

ZOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

Like a celestial artillery shell fired from the gods, a brilliant blinding streak of golden-blue light tore across the sky, shrieking southward toward the distant horizons of Blessed Land at hypersonic velocity, leaving behind a glowing scar that sizzled in the freezing clouds.

"THAT WAS NOT EVEN A COMPETITION!" Thora screamed at the top of her lungs, shaking her fist at the empty sky, her soot-stained cheeks trembling with pure dwarven outrage. "THAT’S CHEATING! SHE USED CELESTIAL VELOCITY AGAINST QUADRUPED MOUNTS! SOMEONE SHOOT HER OUT OF THE SKY!"

Silas shook his head, dusting the fresh layer of churned snow from his shoulders as he vaulted smoothly into Valkyrie’s saddle.

"Mount up!" Silas ordered, leaning forward as the dire wolf’s muscles coiled beneath him. "We have an entire titan golem to escort so move out!"

The women scrambled into their saddles.

The Princess held the pommel of her mount with one hand while keeping her other gloved hand cupped protectively over the top of her head, ensuring the trembling obsidian bird didn’t get blown away by the gale.

Thora scrambled onto the back of her own wolf, pulling the portable control tablet... a heavy slab of slate etched with intricate pulsing blue runes from her side satchel.

She aggressively tapped the central rune with her thumb.

"Phase One Titan, engage column escort!" Thora barked into the slate. "Match cavalry stride! Forward march!"

WHIRRRR-CLANG-HISS!

Behind them, the colossal four-legged stone titan rose to its full, staggering height.

Its massive bedrock limbs drove into the frozen earth with deep thuds that shook the valley, its reinforced alloy bins bulging with thousands of pounds of pristine Mana Diamonds and blood-red crystal vines.

As the construct took its first massive step forward, its central amber optic pulsed.

The glowing optical sensor slowly tilted downward, its mechanical lens locking dead-center onto the tiny obsidian bird perched atop the Princess’s head.

The bird froze.

Its scythe-beak clicked shut and its beady black eyes widened in paralyzing horror as it took in the twelve-foot-wide stone face of an ancient siege engine staring down at it like a god of judgment.

’It’s looking at me,’ the bird’s internal thoughts shrieked in gibbering panic. ’The mountain has eyes! The mountain is going to eat me!’

With a desperate flutter, the bird abandoned the Princess’s hair, diving downward and violently burrowing its entire head into the folds of the Princess’s wool-lined lap, pulling her heavy cloak over its wings and shivering like an autumn leaf.

The Princess blinked, gently patting the trembling lump beneath her mantle.

"Oh, my... that’s new. Don’t worry, little one. It doesn’t bite! It’s just stone!"

Back on her mount, Thora was violently tapping the runes on her slate, her face split into a dark cackle.

’Take that, you scruffy feathered little squawker...’ Thora cursed internally, adjusting the golem’s optical tracking to keep its glaring gaze locked directly on the shivering bird. ’Steal the Lord’s attention from my mining reports, will you? Stare at the rock, you overgrown crow!’

With a unified roar of paws hitting permafrost, the cavalry detachment surged forward, tearing through the jagged shale canyons of the Umbral Basin, racing south toward the safety of the territory.

...

The late afternoon had descended into an iron-gray, suffocating gloom.

The sub-zero blizzard that had battered the central crags earlier had not vanished, instead it had settled into a persistent squall.

Heavy, wet sheets of pale snow drifted laterally across the frozen flats, burying the jagged basalt ridges beneath a thick suffocating blanket of white.

Yet, on the wrists of every single officer and squad leader deployed across the basin, a metallic chime suddenly shattered the silence of the storm.

CHIME! CHIME! CHIME!

The brass-rimmed mechanical timers... mass-produced by Thora’s foundry and bound with precise runes vibrated violently against their gauntlets.

It was the final bell.

The midday mining window was officially closed.

All territorial units were under strict orders to cease extraction immediately and initiate full-scale withdrawal toward the primary gates of Blessed Land.

Barely a mile from the towering southern palisades, emerging from the jagged snow-choked mouth of a narrow canyon, was the joint detachment of Brida and Tasmin.

Riding abreast at the head of the column with their Blessed Wolves cutting parallel trenches through the three-foot snowdrifts, were the two commanders.

Behind them marched twenty battle-hardened maidens, their leather harnesses caked in chalky stone dust and their boots stained with black frost.

Trailing behind the cavalry, their mechanical limbs moving with steady discipline, were two Phase 2 Golems.

The four-legged stone constructs carried heavy alloy bins loaded to the brim with midnight-blue Star-Iron, dense Deep-Earth Alloy, and glittering veins of raw mythril.

A recruit riding on the left flank leaned over her mount’s neck, raising her left forearm to inspect the brass face of her watch.

"Captain Brida! Captain Tasmin!" the girl called out, her voice cutting through the whistling wind. "The operational window has expired! That’s the final bell!"

Brida grunted, pulling her wolf to a momentary halt at the crest of the snowy ridge.

She adjusted the massive thick-bladed Titan’s Cleaver strapped across her back, wiping a crust of frozen sweat from her jaw.

Her amber eyes swept backward, assessing the cargo bins.

After Silas had intercepted their petty domestic dispute in the geode and laid down the law, the two women had linked their squads and systematically assaulted the three assigned sectors... Sector Seven, Sector Eight, and the lower ridge of Nine.

They had mined at a furious punishing pace.

Brida’s side had muscled their picks through the dense Deep-Earth seams with raw terrifying physical power, logging a slightly higher tonnage from the lower caverns.

But Tasmin’s squad had countered with technique, carefully extracting the high-tier, constellation-flecked Star-Iron from Mine BVR Star without shattering a single crystal lattice.

When factoring in the original spoils from the shapeshifting wolf nest, the two ledgers were practically dead-even.

There was no clear victor as the prize was hanging precariously in the balance.

Tasmin pulled her wolf up alongside Brida, her breath rising in steady controlled plumes of white mist.

Her dark leather harness was pristine compared to Brida’s battered, ichor-stained plate, but her amber eyes burned with the exact same sharp intensity.

"Well, Brida," Tasmin drawled coolly, her gloved fingers lightly tapping the pommel of her sidearm. "The ledger is balanced so the dwarven clerks will spend half the night weighing the carats before they determine a difference of ounces."

Brida slowly turned her head. A wide wolfish smirk split across her rugged soot-stained face.

"Ounces are for merchants, Tas," Brida grinned, her crimson battle-aura beginning to hum and crackle beneath the surface of her breastplate like a waking volcano. "Frontline warriors settle the score with their boots."

She pointed a heavy gauntlet straight through the falling snow.

A mile down the long sloping valley of frozen shale, the palisades of Blessed Land rose against the winter sky like an unassailable fortress.

The massive primary gates stood wide open, illuminated by the warm flickering orange glow of torches.

"First one through the timber threshold," Brida challenged, her voice booming with competitive fire. "Takes the reward... The winner gets his private quarters tonight and the loser sits in the mess hall and washes the grease off the soup kettles."

Tasmin didn’t even blink.

"You’re on, you overgrown battering ram."

BOOM!

The snow beneath their mounts exploded as both Blessed Wolves surged forward simultaneously, their muscular hindquarters driving into the permafrost with enough power to blast two twenty-foot roostertails of pulverized slush into the freezing air.

"FOLLOW THE CAPTAINS!" A woman roared from the ranks behind.

The entire twenty-woman column exploded into a dead sprint, their wolf mounts bounding through the drifts in a thundering charge.

Behind them, the two Phase 2 Golems locked their hydraulic joints, their stone pads pounding against the bedrock in rolling mechanical movements as they chased the racing cavalry.

Down the long, descending slope of the valley, Brida and Tasmin transformed the race into a fight.

"GET OUT OF MY WAY!" Brida roared.

She didn’t reach for her cleaver, Brida unhooked the heavy rune-forged buckler from her left arm and slammed it horizontally through the air.

FWOOM!

A concussive shockwave of dense red mana detonated from the rim of the shield, blasting across the five-yard gap between their mounts like a solid wall of force, meant to knock Tasmin’s wolf off balance.

SHSHSHK!

Tasmin didn’t even try to brace it.

"Predictable!" Tasmin hissed!

With a single, effortless thought, Tasmin engaged her Shadow-Submersion Drift.

Her physical body, her armor, and her massive dire wolf mount instantly dissolved, flattening into a wide two-dimensional sheet of liquid blackness that slipped beneath the snow.

The crimson shockwave screamed harmlessly over her head, obliterating a snowdrift twenty yards to the right!

A fraction of a second later, the shadow shot forward across the frictionless permafrost, snapping back into three-dimensional reality five yards ahead of Brida.

"Eat my snow, ox!" Tasmin yelled, glancing over her shoulder with a mocking smirk!

"NOT ON YOUR LIFE!"

Brida roared, channeling her mana directly into her mount’s silver-inlaid harness. Her wolf surged with sudden explosive speed, its heavy jaws snapping at the air as it closed the gap!

As she pulled level, Brida dropped her shoulder, leaning out of the stirrups to drive her heavy steel-plated elbow straight toward Tasmin’s ribs in a brutal bone-jarring check.

CLINK-CLANK-WHIP!

Tasmin’s left hand blurred... Her weighted void-chains shot out from beneath her cloak, wrapping like striking vipers around Brida’s forearm.

Tasmin violently pulled back, using Brida’s own forward momentum to pivot as she planted her boot against the rim of Brida’s saddle, leaping into the air in a breathtaking acrobatic spin.

Her twin void-daggers flashed in reverse grips, the flat spines of the blades slapping against Brida’s heavy pauldrons with a sequence of deafening metallic clangs.

"Your balance is sloppy, Brida!" Tasmin mocked, vaulting cleanly back onto her own saddle without losing a single yard of ground.

"My balance is fine, you slippery flea!" Brida hollered, wrenching her arm free with a savage tug that snapped the dark chains back into Tasmin’s sleeve.

Across the wide valley floor, other mining detachments were converging on the gates as well.

Small squads of ten-woman harvesting teams, and supply carts were funneling down the mountain tracks, watching the two commanders tear down the center of the valley like a hurricane of red energy and black shadow.

The massive gates of Blessed Land were barely three hundred yards away.

Brida lowered her center of gravity, her eyes blazing with competitive madness as the runes on her boots ignited.

Tasmin leaned over her wolf’s neck with the liquid shadows pooling beneath its paws to eliminate all friction, preparing for the final sprint—

RUMBLE... KRA-CRUNCH!

The earth beneath the center of the valley suddenly groaned with an unfathomable seismic shudder.

"What the—" Brida’s jaw tightened.

FWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!

From the deep bedrock directly between their mounts, the frozen earth violently ruptured outward in an explosion of pulverized shale, ice, and rich soil.

Shooting out of the ground like a colossal, breaching leviathan was a massive glowing emerald root.

The root was as thick as a watchtower, covered in smooth, moss-green bark that pulsed with green mana.

It surged forward through the air, arching over the snowdrifts like a living organic bridge, moving with the frictionless velocity of a high-speed mag-train.

And riding comfortably atop the highest curve of the massive emerald root, leaning gracefully against her wooden staff with her emerald robes billowing in the wind, was Goddess Eluned.

Surrounding the serene goddess were the women, all lounging comfortably atop the living wood and their boots dangling over the edge as if they were riding a pleasure barge down a summer river.

’Fucking hell...’

Lashed securely to the rear section of the root, resting safely within a cradle of woven branches, was an entire Phase 1 Titan Golem, its bins overflowing with gleaming slabs of virgin alloy.

Beside Eluned, Morwenna was holding onto a thick vine with one hand with her hair swaying wildly in the gale as she looked down at Brida and Tasmin with a wide shit-eating grin.

Eluned turned her head, offering the two sprinting commanders a gentle wave of her slender fingers.

"Good afternoon, little sisters!" Eluned’s voice chimed with effortless magical amplification, ringing out like sweet bells over the howling blizzard. "My squad and I have had a most productive afternoon! Do mind the drifts... the snow is quite slippery on foot!"