Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Through the speaker, something creaked.

It was the long rusty squeak of a metal gate swinging open, followed by the clink of a latch dropping back into place.

”Hold on a second,” Silas murmured with his voice slightly muffled. ”This smaller gate sticks every time... Okay. There we go.”

Harper swallowed. She couldn’t say anything... Her knuckles were trembling against her sand gauntlets, and her mouth had gone completely dry.

His footsteps came through the line next, the steady scuff of shoes on pavement, and behind them the soft sounds of a quiet afternoon street, a bird chirping somewhere, a car rolling past and the faraway laughter of kids.

”Sorry,” Silas said, his voice clear again. ”I’m heading to the shop down the road. I need to grab a shaving stick...”

Harper blinked as the panic in her chest stalled for a second, distracted.

”A shaving stick?” she repeated slowly.

”Yeah. I’ve got a bit of stubble coming in on my chin...”

”Silas-kun,” Harper said, her voice dropping into something low and wicked, ”are you telling me you’re growing a beard?”

”It’s not a beard, it’s a stub—”

”...Don’t you dare shave it before I see it!”

”Harper, it’s like four hairs.”

”Then I want to see all four of them! You’re not allowed to shave until I get there and inspect them personally. I’ll decide if they stay or go... I’m very qualified. I want to see if my boyfriend looks rugged!”

The word fell out of her mouth before she could stop it again, and she clapped her free hand over her own lips so hard it stung.

SMACK!

’Boyfriend?! WHY DO YOU KEEP DOING THIS?!’

”Your boyfriend?” Silas repeated, and she could hear the grin spreading across his face.

”I-I meant... my... my friend who is a boy,” Harper stammered. ”My boy... friend... Separate words... There’s like a big space in between them.”

”...Is there?”

”A huge space, Silas... It’s so huge that you could park a car in it.”

”Mm-hm.”

”Stop saying ’mm-hm’ like that!”

On the other end of the line, Silas laughed. It was warm and lazy, and she could hear him smiling around every bit of it.

”Harper.”

”Mm-hm...?” she squeaked through her fingers.

”To answer your earlier question,” Silas said, slow and teasing, the words practically sliding into her ear, ”I just don’t want my billionaire girlfriend spending too much money and losing all her billions... What would I do with you if you went broke?”

Harper’s whole body went numb as the breath stopped in her lungs.

Her knees almost gave out, and they had nothing to do with the gravity.

Every single nerve along her spine, from the top of her skull all the way down to her tailbone, lit up at once in a dazzling, blinding wave of pure, uncut euphoria.

...He hadn’t denied it... He hadn’t laughed it off. He hadn’t corrected her, and he hadn’t pulled back.

He’d said it... He’d said it with his own mouth, in his own voice, completely on purpose.

’Billionaire girlfriend.’

The words echoed through her head in huge, golden flashing letters, louder than the hum of the gravity engines and louder than her own pounding heart.

’GIRLFRIEND! HE CALLED ME HIS GIRLFRIEND! ON PURPOSE! AFTER I ALREADY SAID IT, SO THAT MEANS HE AGREES, WHICH MEANS IT’S OFFICIAL, WHICH MEANS...!’

Something inside her chest snapped as the lightning coiled neatly around her arms tore loose all at once.

KRAKATHOOOOM!

It erupted out of her in every direction at once.

Huge, jagged arcs of violet lightning exploded off her shoulders and hips and out of her hair, ricocheting off the walls and the ceiling and the floor until the whole training room turned into a roaring lightning cage.

...The panels in the ceiling overloaded and burst one after another.

POP! POP! POP! POP!

Sparks rained down around her like falling stars.

One wild arc of lightning lashed across the room toward the executioner and he swung his axe up and caught it on the flat of the blade.

KRAAANG!

The impact shoved him back across the floor, his heels gouging two long trenches through the tiles, and the black energy on his axe hissed and spat where the lightning had touched it.

SKRRRRRT!

He came to a stop at the far wall, lowered his head, and the red light in his eyes flared brighter.

Across the room, the executioner moved.

He’d watched her stand there in the middle of her own lightning storm with a phone pressed to her ear and a dopey smile on her face, and now he saw his opening.

He raised his giant axe high over his head, and all that thick crawling energy surged up the blade until it doubled in size.

He charged across the room with the floor shattering beneath every step, swinging the axe down at her with enough force to split the room in two.

FWOOOOOM!

Harper didn’t use a technique... She didn’t call her sand or raise her guard either.

She was too happy to bother with any of that.

She just stepped forward, hair crackling and eyes shining, wearing the biggest silliest smile of her entire life, pulled her right fist back, and threw the happiest punch of her entire life.

...Her knuckles met the axe head-on.

KRRRRAAAAAANG!

The black blade shattered like glass.

Her fist kept going, straight through the falling shards, straight up the haft, and straight into the executioner’s face.

KABOOOOOOM!

The executioner exploded.

A blinding blast of violet light and raw joyful voltage ripped through the construct and kept going, rolling outward in a ring that shook the walls and blew every last scrap of blue dust in the room into a swirling storm of glitter as silence fell.

PSSSSSHHH!

The gravity in the room switched off with a long hiss, and the weight on her shoulders vanished all at once.

Harper stood alone in the middle of the scorched smoking room with her chest heaving.

She wiped the sweat and soot off her forehead with the back of her wrist.

Her ponytail had come loose, and her violet hair tumbled down around her flushed cheeks in messy waves.

Her heart was racing and her face hurt from smiling.

She looked around at the damage.

Half the ceiling panels were hanging by their wires... The floor was a mess of scorch marks and craters.

The fancy observation window had a long crack running from one corner to the other, and somewhere behind the walls, an alarm was beeping politely.

’That’s going to be expensive,’ she thought then she thought about the word girlfriend again, and decided she didn’t care even a little bit.

She clutched the phone tighter.

”I-I’ll be there in like twenty minutes,” she blurted out, already half turning toward the exit.

On the other end of the line, his footsteps stopped as the quiet afternoon sounds seemed to go oddly still behind him.

”Yeah...” Silas said, his voice suddenly low and distant. ”Come quick.”

CLICK!

The call ended.

Harper stood there blinking at the phone in her hand.

She lowered it slowly as she looked around at the blackened tiles, at the smoking ceiling panels, at her own trembling sand-dusted hands then she jumped four feet straight up into the air.

”YES!”

She landed and threw both fists up toward the ceiling.

”TAKE THAT, RED-HAIRED BITCH...!” she roared at the empty room.

She practically skipped across the cracked floor toward the bench, swinging her hips and humming to herself.

Seraphina was currently off on some trip to the pirates, playing captain on the high seas with her nose in the air, completely unaware of what had just happened.

Harper could picture her perfectly.

Standing at the front of some ship with her red hair blowing in the wind, looking smug and gorgeous and insufferable, probably telling some poor sailor that she was going to marry Silas Graves someday.

The thought would have made Harper grind her teeth an hour ago but right now, it made her want to laugh until she cried.

’By the time Sera gets back,’ Harper thought with a deeply wicked grin, ’I’ll have helped him pick out a house, moved half my wardrobe into his closet, and pushed this relationship way further than she could ever dream of. The war is over, darling. You lost...’

She grabbed her duffel bag and swung it over her shoulder, then paused and looked down at herself.

Her tank top was soaked through... Her arms were streaked with sweat and black sand, and she smelled like a thunderstorm had crawled into a gym bag and died there.

’I need to take a quick shower...’

A stray thought drifted into her head, and her eyebrows twitched.

’...or would Silas like me sweaty?’

She thought about the way his eyes always lingered a little too long whenever she was out of breath after a spar, the way his gaze would drift down her neck and then snap back up to her face like he’d been caught doing something, and her face went hot all over again.

...Maybe he would like it... Maybe he’d pull her close and tell her she looked good like this, all flushed and messy and glowing.

’Oh no,’ Harper thought, pressing her palms against her burning cheeks. ’Oh no, I’m doing it again...’

She lifted her arm and sniffed delicately and Harper immediately wrinkled her nose.

’Nope... Absolutely not... I smell like a burnt engine.’

She shook her head hard.

’I’d better just bathe...’

She sprinted out of the training room and down the corridor toward the showers with her bag bouncing against her hip but as she reached the frosted glass doors, her feet slowed.

She stopped on the threshold and frowned down at the dark screen of her phone.

The giddy warmth in her chest flickered, and something uneasy crept in underneath it.

The way his footsteps had stopped... The way the street had gone quiet... The way his voice had suddenly dropped like he was looking at something.

She knew that voice.

Was he in trouble? Had something happened? Had someone come after him in the middle of Silverleaf, in broad daylight?

Harper’s grip tightened around the phone.

Then she shook her head firmly... This was Silas... If something had come after Silas, then the thing was the one in trouble.

Still...

’Why did Silas end the call like that, though...?’

...

Silas had hung up because there was a cat sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, and the cat had just talked to him.

It was sitting on the pavement just past the corner of the next building, a few doors down from his apartment, perfectly still in the bright afternoon sunlight, right in the middle of his path.

Its front paws were tucked neatly together, its tail curled around its feet, and it was staring straight up at him.

...It was a black cat.

That alone wasn’t strange.

Silverleaf had plenty of strays, and half of them were black.

They lounged on garden walls and slept under parked cars and wandered into people’s kitchens when the doors were left open, and nobody ever paid them much attention.

This one was thin, with dust caked into the fur along its belly and a small notch torn out of one ear, like it had been living rough for a while but it sat with its spine perfectly straight and its chin lifted high, the way a queen sat on a throne, as if the sidewalk had been laid down specifically for it.

What was strange was the eyes.

They were gold... Deep liquid gold, the color of the sun sinking into a desert, and they were looking at him with the cold stare of something that had seen a very great deal and been impressed by very little of it.

He’d noticed it while Harper was still giggling in his ear.

He’d been about to step around it, the way anyone would, when those golden eyes narrowed, the little black mouth opened, and a voice came out of it.

A clear and very real voice.

Silas had gone still and he’d said the first thing that came into his head to get Harper over here as fast as possible, and hung up.

Now he stood on the sunny sidewalk with his hand still halfway to his pocket, a plastic bag blowing lazily across the street behind him, and wondered if he’d finally lost his mind.

Silas slid his phone into his pocket and stared down at it as the cat stared back.

Neither of them blinked.

A leaf skittered across the pavement between them, and somewhere down the street, someone’s wind chimes tinkled in the breeze.

It was the most ordinary peaceful afternoon in the world, and Silas had the strangest feeling that something was about to ruin it.

The cat tilted its small black head to one side as its whiskers twitched once then it opened its mouth and spoke again, in a smooth, haughty, unmistakably feminine voice that rang across the quiet street like a temple bell.

”You... I’ve seen your face before... Nyaa~”