Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Chapter 745: First Tier-4 Upgrade [Bonus Chapter]

Beside them Solenne’s silver ears twitched sideways, and her golden eyes blinked in complete confusion.

’Brida...?’ she thought, her brow furrowing as she tried to place the name. ’Another captain? Is she a dwarf like Miss Thora...? Or another fox? There are so many people in this territory... I’ll have to bring her a cup of tea so she doesn’t throw my wrenches off the wall.’

Silas turned his attention back to Thora and looked around at the scarred cramped walls of the testing room.

”Thora,” He said with his voice dropping into a level tone. ”Be honest with me... Do you need more space? Do you need this whole place to be bigger?”

Thora snorted loudly and threw her hands in the air with a huge exasperated roll of her eyes.

”Does a bear need the woods, Lord Silas?!” she barked, stomping her boot against the stone. ”Look around! We’ve got two dozen smiths sitting in each other’s laps and three furnaces that barely keep up with tool repairs, and now you want us to rebuild a twelve-foot golem and cast cannons on top of it? We’re choking in here! I do! I need more space!”

Silas smiled, and a spark of decision flashed in his dark blue eyes.

”Fair enough... then let’s fix it right now.”

He turned toward the bulkhead and jerked his head at it. ”Everyone outside. Thora, grab every girl in the building... Nobody stays inside.”

”Wait, right now?!” Thora blinked.

”Right now,” Silas said. ”Move.”

Within three minutes the clanging hammers and roaring bellows of the Warlord Foundry had fallen silent.

The heavy iron-banded doors swung open, and a steady stream of soot-streaked leather-clad dwarves filed out onto the wide cobbled yard in front of the building.

There were easily over two dozen of them now, the dwarves who had come over from the Lord War with Evelyn, and Borna, Dagna and the wide-eyed apprentices of the Greyrock Clan.

They gathered in a curious murmuring half circle near the outer fence, wiping their hands on their aprons and trading puzzled looks.

Solenne stood near the edge of the crowd with her nine silver tails wrapped tightly around her legs to keep them away from the sooty boots, and Cogsworth rolled quietly beside her with his wheel crunching softly over the loose gravel.

The cool evening wind came down off the misty ridges and carried away the sulfur fumes still clinging to their clothes.

Overhead the fog had thickened, and the first stars were trying and failing to push through it.

Silas walked ten paces out in front of the crowd and stopped facing the towering soot-blackened basalt face of the Foundry.

He looked up at it for a long moment, at the single iron chimney and the crates of ore stacked under tarps along its walls and the cracked mortar where the old stone had been patched again and again.

Then he turned his head back toward the gathered workers and raised his voice so it carried over the mountain draft.

”Listen up, girls! We’ve got a mountain of work ahead of us. Weapons, cannons and golems. This place isn’t big enough to hold what we’re about to build. So, as of right now...”

He let it hang for a single breath, and two dozen dwarves leaned forward at once.

”I’m going to raise the Warlord Foundry to Tier 4.”

For half a second the yard went dead quiet then Thora broke the silence with a deafening dwarven war cry.

”YEEEEEE-HAW!”

She leaped nearly three feet straight into the air and threw both thick fists at the gray sky with her amber eyes burning in pure joy.

”Tier 4! We’re getting Tier 4 hearths! Blow the bellows, you magnificent bastard! Give me an anvil big enough to crack a mountain!”

Behind her the rest of the dwarves erupted into a wave of wide-eyed gasps and frantic excited whispers.

Borna dropped her rag, her hazel eyes wide with disbelief. ”Tier 4...? He’s raising a forge to Tier 4? Just like that?!”

”I’ve never even seen a Tier 4 building,” Dagna stammered, her hands trembling as she pushed up her spectacles. ”Not once in my whole life. Not even in Central City...”

The apprentices grabbed each other’s sleeves and bounced on their toes, and somewhere at the back a dwarf who had come over from the Lord War with Evelyn burst into noisy tears and had to be patted on the back by the girl next to her.

Solenne looked from the cheering dwarves to the massive stone building, her golden eyes shimmering with breathless anticipation.

’Tier 4...’ she thought, her heart racing against her ribs. ’I’ve only ever read about buildings like that. To rebuild Titan-01 inside one... it’s like stepping into an artisan’s dream!’

Standing in front of the old stone walls, Silas looked up at the blackened iron chimney and the heavy basalt blocks, and a quiet thoughtful breath slipped out through his teeth.

’First Tier 4, huh?’ he thought, sliding one hand into his trouser pocket.

He tilted his head and watched the gray smoke drift up into the gathering dusk.

’It’s a weird milestone... I probably already have Tier 4 items sitting in my Inventory but a building? A whole place raised to Tier 4? This’ll be the very first one in Blessed Land I’ve pushed that far... Up until now Tier 3 felt like a safe ceiling while we were securing the borders and stockpiling.’

A faint nostalgic smirk touched his lips as he remembered the early desperate days of carving this territory out of the wild.

’Back then every single point had to be squeezed until it bled but now... Now things are different.’

He focused his thoughts and called up the territory’s upgrade interface.

’Upgrade System.’

SHING!

A crisp translucent blue window flared into being right in front of his eyes, glowing against the dark basalt wall.

[Warlord Foundry]

[Tier: 3 Construct]

[Status: Operational.]

[Upgrade System: Would you like to upgrade Tier 3 Warlord Foundry to Tier 4 Titan’s Anvil Forgeworks?]

[Cost: 1,000 UP]

[Y / N]

Silas stared at the glowing prompt, and his eyebrows climbed as a low dry chuckle escaped him.

’A thousand points...’ he thought, shaking his head with mock irritation. ’A whole thousand UP for one building... There was a time when a thousand points would’ve taken us a lot of grinding and clearing monster dens to scrape together... The System never misses a chance to gouge you once you hit the high tiers.’

He glanced at the corner of his vision, where his total sat in clean glowing numbers.

It was sitting just a hair under 100,000 UP, a mountain of points the girls had piled up for him slaughtering monsters across North Khemet.

’Complaining about a thousand when I’m sitting on nearly a hundred thousand,’ he thought with a quiet grin. ’I’ve got more than enough to burn so let’s see what a Tier 4 building actually looks like.’

He lifted his right hand and tapped the glowing prompt with one firm finger.

[Y]

The instant his fingertip touched the glyph, the window shattered into thousands of golden sparks.

THUUUUM!

The bedrock under the cobbled yard heaved with a low bone-rattling shudder that came up through their boots and rattled their teeth... It felt like an ancient mountain waking up and shaking off centuries of sleep.

The dwarves stumbled, and Solenne grabbed Cogsworth’s lid to keep her balance.

High above the roofline the dark basalt groaned.

CREEEAK!

The iron tie-plates and heavy brass rivets binding the corners of the old Warlord Foundry began to glow a deep molten red.

The three-story building didn’t crack or crumble, instead the basalt blocks unlocked themselves from the mortar one after another with loud rhythmic metallic thuds and slid outward across the yard as if invisible pistons were shoving them.

The walls stretched in every direction... They pushed the outer fence back, swallowed the empty dirt lot behind the coal bunkers and rose toward the gray mountain clouds.

RUMBLE!

”Look at the foundation stones!” Borna shouted over the roar, pointing a thick finger at the base of the main hall. ”The ground’s moving! It’s laying its own footings!”

”The walls are doubling!” Dagna cried, her spectacles sliding all the way to the tip of her nose as she clapped her hands over her ears. ”The runes are braiding themselves together! By the deep forge, look at the arches!”

A wave of golden light rolled up the face of the building from the ground to the roof.

Everywhere it passed, the old soot-blackened basalt changed... The cracks sealed... The patched mortar vanished... The stone darkened into a deep polished black veined with thin lines of glowing orange, like cooling lava trapped under glass.

CLANG! CLANG! BOOOOM!

High in the air the single blackened chimney split apart and widened into three huge smokestacks of dark heat-treated alloy.

Heavy iron girders shot across the upper framework like black lightning and locked together with deafening hammer-blow concussions that showered harmless blue sparks down over the watching crowd.

”Eeeek!” Solenne squeaked, and every one of her nine tails shot straight up into the air as a spark landed on the tip of one of them and fizzled out.

The roof folded upward into a soaring reinforced hall of iron and glass, complete with overhead crane tracks, heavy chain hoists and wide skylights of thick tempered glass.

Along the western side a whole new wing pushed out of the ground, tall enough for a giant to stand up in, with a pair of iron doors twice the height of the old building.

Along the eastern side a second wing rose with a long row of hearth-mouths already glowing red inside it.

The heat rolling off the growing building washed over the yard in a dry wave that smelled of fresh stone and clean iron.

Where a crowded soot-stained fortress had stood a few seconds ago, an enormous manufacturing complex now rose against the ridge, three times wider than the old footprint and anchored by thick buttresses and iron-banded archways that looked like they could take a direct artillery bombardment.

The shifting stone finally settled with one last earth-shaking thud as the dust cleared and drifted off into the misty pines on the evening draft, and the yard fell into breathless stunned silence.

PING!

Right in front of Silas’s eyes the golden sparks gathered again into a crisp detailed window.

[Titan’s Anvil Forgeworks]

[Tier: 4 Construct]

[Passive Effects:]

[Expanded Halls]: Several times the floor space of the old Foundry, with separate wings for golem assembly and weapon forging.

[Heavy Ordnance Line]: A dedicated production line for cannons and heavy armaments.

[Titan Assembly Bay]: A full-height bay with cranes and cradles for building golems the size of Titan-01 and larger.

Silas read down the glowing panel and searched every line and margin for hidden restrictions, upkeep costs or drains but there was nothing.

His worry about a sudden drawback went completely unanswered and sat quietly at the back of his mind as the window faded into thin air.

Beside him Thora was practically vibrating.

Her thick boots left the ground in frantic bouncing hops and her amber eyes were as wide as dinner plates as she took in the towering front of the Titan’s Anvil Forgeworks.

”Holy blazing magma!” she shrieked, hopping higher and higher and pumping her fists in the air. ”Look at the height on those bays! Look at those cranes! Come on, girls! Get your butts moving! Welcome to the new forge! Welcome to the big house!”

Before anyone could take a step toward the huge double gates, Thora spun on her heel, threw her arms around Silas’s neck and leaped straight up.

SMOOCH!

She planted her mouth right on his lips in a hard enthusiastic kiss that tasted faintly of mountain apples and forge soot.

Silas blinked in surprise as his balance rocked back onto his heels and he caught her compact muscular weight with both arms.

After a second of frantic enthusiastic lip-locking he pulled his head back, set her down on the cobbles and laid one broad palm on top of her head for a firm affectionate pat.

”Alright, alright,” he chuckled, his lips twitching. ”Calm down before you blow a gasket...”

Thora grinned from ear to ear and wiped her mouth with her forearm, completely unapologetic. ”That’s how you thank a man who buys you three smokestacks!”

Silas shook his head and looked from Thora to Solenne, who was watching them with wide shining golden eyes.

The possibilities of the new building were already buzzing in his head as he could practically see rows of golem frames rolling out of the assembly bay.

”Look,” he said, stepping forward with an easy confident stance. ”You’ve got the space now, and you’ve got the materials in the Nexus. If you two produce the golems and cannons... I’ll give you—”

Thora’s boots hit the ground with an abrupt aggressive stomp.

Her ecstatic grin vanished in an instant. In its place came a sharp accusing glare that cut his sentence off at the knees.

She planted her fists on her hips, puffed out her cheeks and stared up at him in open disdain.

”Oh, listen to him!” she scoffed, her raspy voice dripping with theatrical mockery. ”Here he goes again with the big promises! You’re a real promise-and-failure, you know that, Lord Silas?”