Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Silas ignored her kicking.

He held her suspended at eye level with his blue eyes narrowing as he ruthlessly inspected her face.

He brushed her messy bangs aside with his thumb, exposing the top right corner of her forehead.

Right there, resting just below her hairline, was a small crescent-shaped scar.

It was pale and old which was the kind of scar that only came from a very specific and poorly treated wound healing badly over a long period of time.

Silas ran his thumb over it.

It was real tissue... It wasn’t some synthetic skin graft or a mana-based illusion.

’I’d know if it was.’

It was really her.

Silas loosened his grip, letting her fall.

She landed squarely on her feet with a soft thud, immediately reaching up to furiously massage her scalp, glaring daggers at him.

”Ah, for fuck’s sake,” Silas sighed, rubbing the back of his neck as the tension finally drained out of his shoulders. ”I thought you were an intruder or some hitman but it’s just you.”

Lia huffed, fixing her ruined ponytail.

She turned back to the stove, grabbed a ceramic plate from the open cabinet, and quickly scooped a massive serving of steaming spaghetti and meat sauce out of the pot.

She turned back to him, holding the heavy plate out with a small, hopeful smile.

”Here, Big brother,” she said softly.

Silas stared at the plate, his expression hardening. ”Don’t call me that. We aren’t even related.”

He wasn’t wrong.

There wasn’t a single drop of shared blood between them...

As he looked at her standing in his high-end kitchen, the memories he spent years trying to bury came clawing their way back to the surface.

Before the System, before he had an empire in the Sovereign Realm, before he lived in Silverleaf... he had been nothing.

Just another rat scraping by in the Valoria City slums even though he was a reincarnator.

He had been ten years old.

The lower wards were a miserable rotting place that always smelled of garbage.

It had been pouring rain, the kind of freezing relentless downpour that soaked right into your bones and he had been walking home from sweeping floors at a scrap yard, clutching a meager daily ration of paste, when he heard a faint whimpering sound coming from a rusted-out commercial dumpster.

He had dug through the soaking wet cardboard and rotting food.

Buried at the bottom and shivering uncontrollably and clutching a filthy, torn blanket, was a three-year-old girl.

She had no parents. No ID card. No name... Just another piece of trash thrown away by a city that didn’t care about anything unless it made them money.

Silas, a ten-year-old kid who barely had enough food to keep himself from starving, had looked down at her.

He didn’t like seeing her like that. He had cursed his own rotten luck, reached down, and pulled her out of the trash.

He named her Lia...

For seven years, he took care of her.

He starved so she could eat. He took beatings from older kids to protect their tiny drafty apartment.

He worked every grueling odd-job he could find just to keep the heat on during the winter but the slums didn’t breed innocence.

No matter how hard Silas tried to stop it, no matter how many times he yelled at her, Lia became a product of her environment.

She became a pickpocket and she was too good at it.

She started stealing money from the rich arrogant academy idiots who wandered into the lower wards looking for cheap thrills, and she brought the stolen cred-sticks home for the both of them.

Silas had been furious. He knew exactly what happened to slum kids caught stealing from the elites.

They disappeared so he had confronted her, terrified for her life, demanding that she stop.

Lia had cried, she had apologized and she had agreed to stop.

The next morning, Silas had woken up to an empty apartment.

She had taken his money.

The money he bled for doing odd-jobs... A huge chunk of his savings that he had hidden away under the floorboards. She took it, and she ran off.

The one person he had sacrificed everything for had robbed him and vanished into the city.

’Sigh... Just when everywhere was looking bright. I don’t mind though.’

And now... she was here, standing in his expensive apartment, trying to act like they still knew each other. Like nothing had ever happened.

Silas’s broadsword vanished, dissolving into thin air as he stored it back in his Lord Inventory.

He walked past her, stepping fully into the kitchen.

”What do you want, Lia?” Silas asked, his voice entirely devoid of warmth. ”Tell me what you’re doing here, and after that, I’m kicking you out. I don’t have time for this.”

Lia flinched slightly with her small hands tightening around the edges of the warm plate.

”How did you even get in here?” Silas demanded, looking around the kitchen for signs of forced entry. ”I engaged the Spirit Lock on the front door before I left. It requires a scan and how long have you been in here?”

Lia looked down at her worn sneakers. ”A few hours.”

Silas raised an eyebrow. ”A few hours? How?”

”It... it wasn’t that hard,” Lia mumbled, shifting her weight nervously. ”In the city registry, I’m still listed as your official sibling. You never took my name off your file so I just went to the front desk, confirmed my identity as Lia Graves, and requested a Lock override from the company. They opened the door for me... after I paid them a bit.”

Silas stared at her in utter disbelief.

He lived in Silverleaf now.

He paid a premium for security and his top-tier, corporate-grade spatial lock had just been bypassed by a ten-year-old girl exploiting a bureaucratic loophole at the receptionist’s desk?

”I should really change that,” Silas muttered to himself, pinching the bridge of his nose again. ”I see... Why are the rules even that stiff? A registered family member can just ask the company to override a lock? That is incredibly stupid.”

He let out an annoyed breath. He reached out and snatched the plate of spaghetti out of her hands.

He scooped a massive forkful of noodles directly from the pot, added it to the plate, and walked past her without another word, heading straight for the living room.

Silas dropped heavily onto his expensive, dark leather couch, resting the plate on his knees.

He didn’t wait for her... He just started eating instead.

It was really good. It tasted exactly like the rare, expensive meals they used to share back in the slums on his birthdays. It made him even more annoyed.

Lia slowly followed him out of the kitchen.

She stood a few feet away from the couch with her small hands nervously wringing the hem of her oversized yellow hoodie.

The bravado she had shown earlier was completely gone as the cold impenetrable wall Silas had put up was suffocating her.

Her lower lip began to tremble.

”Big Brother...” Lia started, her voice cracking slightly. She refused to look him in the eye, staring intently at the expensive rug. ”I’m... I’m sorry. For taking your money and running off that time. I know you probably hate me.”

Silas paused. He chewed his food slowly, swallowing before he spoke. He kept his eyes fixed on the blank television screen across the room.

”I’m not mad,” Silas said flatly.

Lia blinked, looking up in surprise.

”I’m not,” Silas repeated, his tone entirely clinical. ”You were an eight-year-old kid living in a rotting box and you wanted to see the world past the slums. Of course you did. I get it.”

He took another bite of pasta, his jaw clenching slightly.

”But still,” Silas continued with his voice hardening just a fraction. ”You could have just said so. You didn’t need to steal from me... You didn’t need to empty my savings and run into the dark. All you had to do was trust me. I would have given you the money.”

Lia’s breath hitched. The words hit her harder than any punch. The certainty in his voice... the fact that he would have willingly handed over everything he had just because she asked shattered whatever defenses she had left.

Her lips thinned into a tight trembling line.

”Big Brother, I...” Lia choked out, taking a sudden desperate step forward toward the couch.

She didn’t finish the sentence.

As soon as she put her weight on her right leg, she winced violently.

A sharp involuntary gasp ripped from her throat as her knee completely buckled.

She fell heavily onto one knee on the rug with her small hands flying up to clutch her side as she curled in on herself, panting through clenched teeth.

Lia slowly looked up, trying to force a reassuring smile, but Silas was already moving.

The plate of spaghetti vanished from his lap. Before she could even process what was happening, Silas was off the couch and kneeling directly in front of her.

The cold look in his eyes was gone.

”What happened?” Silas demanded as his hands hovered over her shaking shoulders.

”It’s... it’s nothing,” Lia gasped out, lying through her teeth as she tried to pull away from him. ”It’s a pretty simple wound. I just scraped it...”

”Don’t lie to me,” Silas snapped.

He reached out, grabbed the hem of the oversized shirt she was wearing which he now recognized as one of his old shirts she must have kept and firmly pulled it upward.

It wasn’t a scrape...

Silas’s eyes went completely wide.

Running directly up from her right leg, tearing deeply across her ribs, and ending just below her chest was a massive wicked wound.

The flesh was torn and jagged, the edges of the laceration angry and discolored.

It looked like she had been dragged across broken glass or slashed by something incredibly sharp. It wasn’t bleeding heavily anymore, but it looked terrible.

’She’s been walking around on this?’ Silas thought, a surge of raw anger hitting his chest. ’She dragged herself into my apartment and cooked with a wound like this?’

Silas dropped the hem of the shirt. He looked directly into her pale sweating face.

”Go lie down on the couch,” Silas ordered. ”Immediately.”

Lia saw the terrifying look on his face. She gave a weak, trembling nod and slowly dragged herself up onto the soft leather cushions, lying flat on her back with a pained whimper.

Silas didn’t waste a single second. He stood up and sprinted up the staircase to his bedroom.

’Fucking hell... why does she have to get herself hurt? How did it even happen?’

He dug into his secure stash and brought down a medical kit.

It was fully stocked with the healing potions he had received for buying this place. He descended the stairs quickly, dropping the kit onto the coffee table next to the couch.

Lia was lying completely still with her eyes squeezed shut in pain.

Silas unscrewed the cap of an emerald-green healing potion. The sharp sterile scent of crushed herbs filled the room.

”I need to apply this directly,” Silas told her bluntly.

He reached out and grabbed the collar of her oversized shirt. ”Take this off.”

Lia’s eyes snapped open. Even through the pain, her stubborn pride flared up.

She grabbed the collar of the shirt, pulling it tight against her neck.

”Take it off?” Lia croaked with her cheeks flushing a brilliant shade of crimson. ”Are you crazy?! I can’t take this off! You’re... you’re going to see my breasts!”

Silas paused, the vial of healing potion hovering in his hand. He looked down at the ten-year-old girl with a completely deadpan expression.

”What breasts?” Silas countered flatly, raising an eyebrow. ”These things are really small, Lia. There is literally no difference between you and a guy right now. Take the shirt off...”

”I am not a guy!” Lia shrieked, instantly kicking her legs furiously against the couch cushions, completely abandoning her pain to defend her honor. ”I’m growing! You’re a jerk, Big Brother! You’ve always been a jerk!”

”Yeah, yeah, keep kicking, see how much that helps,” Silas muttered, completely unfazed.

Before she could complain again, Silas reached down, grabbed the hem of the shirt, and swiftly pulled it directly up over her head, tossing it onto the floor.

Lia crossed her arms over her chest defensively with her face burning red, grumbling under her breath.

Silas ignored her.

He poured a generous amount of the glowing green healing potion onto a thick wad of sterilized cotton.

”This is going to sting,” Silas warned her.

He pressed the soaked cotton directly into the deepest part of the wound.

Lia’s back violently arched off the leather couch.

”Ah!”

A muffled agonizing scream tore from her throat as she bit down hard on her own lip.

The alchemical reaction was immediate, the potion aggressively attacking the damaged tissue, bubbling as it began knitting the torn flesh back together.

”I know,” Silas said quietly, keeping his hand firmly pressed against the wound. ”Hold still...”

As the searing pain slowly faded into a dull numbness, Lia collapsed back against the cushions, panting heavily.

Sweat plastered her messy brown hair to her forehead.

She looked up at the ceiling with her chest heaving. The adrenaline crash hit her hard, stripping away the last of her emotional barriers.

”I’m sorry,” Lia whispered, the tears she had been fighting back finally spilling over her eyelashes and tracking down her pale cheeks. ”I’m so sorry, Big Brother.”