Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Evelyn paused with her grip tightening on his vest.

She suddenly remembered a brief cryptic conversation she had with Jax months ago.

The paranoid hacker had bragged that he gave everybody he worked with different names and encrypted aliases.

’Jax’ was not his real name. To the syndicates, he was known as something else.

”Jax, Fortune, it doesn’t matter,” Evelyn dismissed the naming convention sharply. ”Tell me where they took him. Or do you have one of those suicide seals painted on your tongue too?”

The guy immediately winced with his face draining of whatever color was left.

”N-No!” the sniper stammered frantically, shaking his head as he complained about the brutal methods of his employers. ”I don’t have a seal! I hate those things! The syndicates use them to blow up their inner circle to protect secrets, but I’m just cheap hired help! I swear, I’m just a contractor!”

”Then talk,” Evelyn interrupted him, drawing a sleek blackened combat knife from the sheath strapped to her thigh.

She pressed the cold steel directly against his throat. ”Tell me what happened in that apartment, or I will kill you immediately and find someone else to ask.”

Looking deep into the unreadable shadowed slits of her painted Kitsune mask, the sniper truly felt the icy grip of death.

He knew she wasn’t bluffing. The girl smelled like fresh gore, and the monster standing on his leg was a literal demon.

”We... we are just the leftover crew,” the sniper explained, the words tumbling out of his mouth in a desperate rush to survive. ”We were hired to watch the perimeter and execute anyone who came looking for his hard drives. Fortune... he was taken alive.”

”By who?” Evelyn pressed, the knife digging a fraction of an inch deeper.

”The Black-Ash Syndicate,” the man coughed. ”They raided his rig and they took him for an outstanding loan.”

Evelyn’s brow furrowed in genuine confusion.

’A loan?’ Evelyn thought, her mind hitting a massive logical roadblock.

The amount of capital that she consistently paid Jax for helping her launder her stream revenue was astronomical.

It was more than enough to cover any standard undercity gambling debts or hardware loans a dozen times over.

He was practically a millionaire just from her commissions. So what kind of massive life-ruining loan was this about?

Regardless of the financial specifics, she kept the pressure on the blade, letting him continue his panicked confession.

”For some strange reason, the Black-Ash boss didn’t want to just execute him in the street and take his gear,” the sniper gasped, clutching his ruined knee. ”Instead, they kept him breathing. They have been actively advertising his hacking abilities on the dark web all week...”

Both Silas and Evelyn blinked in surprise beneath their masks.

Wasn’t his unparalleled hacking ability the exact reason Silas was here in the first place?

To make use of his skills to forge a fake identity?

So the Syndicate themselves were currently advertising the most sought-after asset in Shogitown to the highest bidder.

That specific revelation made both of their faces darken considerably... It meant a massive bidding war.

”Why are they advertising him?” Silas demanded.

”A Slave Rune,” the sniper confessed, his cybernetic eye whirring nervously. ”The boss had a high-tier enchanter engrave a permanent Slave Rune directly onto Fortune’s spine. Whoever controls the master trigger controls him for life and everybody... everybody from the different syndicates in Shogitown, and even heavy hitters from outside the district, are coming to bid for him.”

”An auction?” Evelyn asked, already mentally calculating how much of her millions of credits it would take to simply buy his freedom.

”No, not an auction,” the sniper corrected her, coughing up another speck of blood. ”A tournament... They have to compete in the Black-Ash underground Boxing tournament.”

Silas narrowed his eyes with his instincts instantly sparking to life.

A tournament?

”What are the rules?” Silas asked.

”It requires a two-person team,” the sniper explained weakly. ”One designated Manager, and one designated Fighter. But the catch is... the arena is warded with null-stone. Fighters cannot use any external mana outside their own physical bodies. No spells, no elemental strikes, no magical weapons. You can only rely on your internal body enhancements and pure Martial Arts in a brutal hand-to-hand combat cage.”

The sniper let his head fall back against the grating, his voice filled with bitter exhausted envy.

”The winner of the Finals gets the trigger to the Slave Rune,” the man muttered. ”They win Fortune. I don’t get it... why does a greasy hacker get a chance to leave this hellhole and be owned by a rich guild, and we don’t? We just bleed in the gutters.”

Evelyn ignored his pathetic existential complaints.

”Give me the exact location,” Evelyn demanded.

The sniper quickly rattled off the coordinates to an abandoned place located deep in the heart of the Black-Ash territory.

It was the registry location for the blood-sport tournament.

”I told you everything!” the sniper pleaded desperately, looking between the two masked figures. ”I swear on my life! Please, let me go!”

Evelyn listened to his begging. She processed the tactical intel, committing the coordinates to her flawless memory.

”Thank you for the detailed information,” Evelyn told him with her voice terrifyingly calm.

She stood up from her crouch.

She slowly raised her right hand as dense crackling mana instantly began to gather around her leather glove, glowing with a pale blue light.

”You can’t be allowed to live, though,” Evelyn stated coldly. ”You can report to your people, and you know we are coming for Jax.”

She brought her glowing hand down, fully intending to drive a strike straight through the sniper’s chest and end his miserable life.

But the exact moment she initiated the lethal strike, her brain violently betrayed her.

A sudden flashing montage of the recent Lord War assaulted her mind.

She saw the mud... She saw her soldiers being ripped apart by enemy artillery... She saw the crushing weight of death that she had been surrounded by for the past forty-eight hours...

And worst of all, she saw ”them”

Evelyn flinched.

Her hand stopped mere inches from the man’s chest.

The glowing blue mana violently sputtered and died, dissipating into the damp night air.

Her shoulders slumped with a sudden wave of bone-deep exhaustion washing over her soul.

She just couldn’t bring herself to execute another helpless bleeding human being tonight... She was too tired.

The sniper didn’t waste his miraculous second chance.

Seeing her falter, the man desperately rolled to the side, dragging his crushed leg across the rusted grating and clutching his stomach.

Evelyn turned away, unable to look at him.

”Just go,” Evelyn muttered tiredly, staring out at the neon skyline. ”Get out of here.”

”Thank you! Thank you so much!” the man sobbed profusely, dragging himself toward the edge of the fire escape.

As he dragged his broken body toward safety, his cybernetic eye caught the dull gleam of his discarded anti-awakened sniper rifle lying near the railing.

His hand twitched, instinctively reaching out to grab the weapon. If he could just get his hands on the grip, he could shoot them both in the back and claim the bounty.

Before his fingers could even brush the cold metal of the barrel, a massive shadow fell over him.

Silas stood directly between the man and the rifle.

The man didn’t say a single word.

He just stared down at the sniper from behind the terrifying jagged fangs of his Oni mask.

The suffocating weight of his dormant aura leaked out just a fraction... a cold paralyzing pressure that promised immediate slaughter.

One single gaze from Silas proved that attempting to collect the gun was foolishly fatal.

The man swallowed hard with terrified tears streaming down his dirty face as he abandoned the rifle immediately.

’No! No! He’s a demon!’

He scrambled frantically for the rusted metal ladder leading downward into the dark alley.

As he grabbed the rusty rungs, a greedy treacherous thought crossed his mind.

’I need to report them to the Boss of my crew,’ the sniper planned frantically, the pain in his leg fueling his spite. ’They are obviously in league with Fortune... The Boss explicitly wanted us to report any high-tier customers that came looking for the hacker. I can make a fortune from this intel.’

He tried to shift his weight onto the ladder, blinded by his own greed and the searing agony in his knee.

His boot slipped on the wet iron.

”Wait—”

The man tripped wildly.

His hands failed to catch the slick rungs as he tumbled backward over the precarious railing of the fire escape, plummeting silently down into the pitch-black alley below.

SPLAT!

A sickening wet pop of rupturing flesh and shattering bone echoed loudly up from the pavement.

Evelyn flinched violently at the terrible sound with her shoulders jumping up to her ears.

Silas didn’t even blink.

He reached down, tapping his spatial ring against the heavy sniper rifle, smoothly sucking the expensive weapon directly into his Lord Inventory to sell or dismantle later.

He stepped over to Evelyn, placing a warm hand firmly on her trembling shoulder.

”We need to leave this area,” Silas told her quietly, his deep voice anchoring her to reality. ”The noise will attract local patrols.”

Evelyn nodded mutely.

They vaulted over the rusted railing, using their enhanced physical stats to slow their descent, and dropped cleanly into the dark alleyway below, stepping carefully around the broken corpse of the sniper.

Silas looked down at her gray hoodie in the dim light of the alley.

”You reek of blood,” Silas noted bluntly. ”You look like you just crawled out of an abattoir.”

Evelyn looked down at her hands and the front of her clothes.

The explosive gore from the suicide bomber in the apartment was still caked onto her gear.

She quickly raised her hand, weaving a complex runic pattern in the air.

She cast a Cleanse spell as a wave of purifying white magic washed over her body, instantly vaporizing the dried blood, the grime, and the terrible scent, leaving her clothes looking pristine once again.

She reached into the deep pocket of her cargo pants.

”Ugh...”

She pulled out a cigar, placed it between her lips, and sparked her lighter.

She took a desperate heavy drag with the rich calming taste of mana-infused tobacco flooding her lungs.

”This whole night is fucking with my brain,” Evelyn complained bitterly, leaning her head back against the brick wall and exhaling a thick cloud of smoke.

Silas crossed his arms, watching the smoke drift up toward the neon sky.

”So, what are we going to do?” Silas asked, getting them back on track.

Evelyn puffed the cigar again, pushing off the brick wall and starting to walk down the narrow street toward the coordinates the sniper had given them.

”Isn’t that incredibly obvious?” Evelyn said. ”Let’s go enter the blood-sport tournament... I will register as the Manager, and you will be the designated Fighter.”

Silas gave her a long skeptical look through his Oni mask.

”What?” Evelyn snapped defensively, catching his stare. ”Did you seriously want a woman to be the one doing the cage fighting tonight?”

”I don’t care about your gender,” Silas countered smoothly. ”But you are a Lord so I figured you liked breaking things.”

Evelyn let out a harsh laugh.

”We won’t be allowed to use any mana in that arena,” Evelyn reminded him bluntly. ”I am a mana user. I rely on mana, massive area-of-effect spells, and spatial awareness. I am not a brawler... Without my mana reinforcing my strikes, I would get brutally curb-stomped by some seven-foot cybernetic freak in three seconds flat and considering this is the criminal Underworld, it won’t be a fair fight with referees. It’s a death match.”

She was right on that account. It was basic logic.

”Fine,” Silas agreed easily, rolling his broad shoulders under his heavy trench coat. ”I’ll do the fighting. I actually have something I want to test out in a controlled combat scenario anyway.”

His Mythic Gold Core granted him physical stats that defied all logical comprehension.

He wanted to see exactly how much damage he could output using purely raw unenhanced physical strength against top-tier Syndicate thugs.

They walked in silence for a few blocks with the distant sounds of the festival fading behind them.

Silas glanced sideways at Evelyn.

She was smoking the cigar in rapid stressed puffs with her posture still incredibly rigid.

”About your brother,” Silas started, his voice dropping slightly.