SPLAT!

They hit the mud with a depressing sound.

The entire field went dead silent for the second time.

Morwenna froze exactly where she stood.

Her arms were still raised triumphantly in the air.

She was currently standing completely exposed from the waist down in front of the entire army and her attractive Sovereign.

The only thing she was wearing was a pair of dark soaked-through cotton panties that left absolutely nothing to the imagination.

The freezing rain pattered against her exposed pale thighs.

Silas stood on the sidelines with his hands frozen mid-clap.

His golden-ringed eyes went completely wide.

He stared directly at the completely unexpected visual currently burning itself into his retinas.

’I am definitely doing the anime protagonist trope now... why are all these girls getting naked for no reason?’ Silas thought with a shake of his head

Morwenna didn’t scream.

She slowly lowered her arms as she looked down at her ankles.

She looked back up at Silas with her face currently matching the exact shade of Tasmin’s flaming daggers.

"Hehe..." Morwenna let out a high-pitched squeaky nervous laugh.

...

Silas stood directly outside the reinforced iron doors of the Warlord Barracks.

He stared at the thick oak handle as his golden-ringed eyes narrowed in dread.

He really did not want to be anywhere near this specific building...

He knew exactly what was waiting for him on the other side of that door.

Thora.

The loud unapologetically half-naked Dwarven blacksmith who treated sexual harassment like a competitive sport.

’Do I actually have a choice?’ Silas thought, letting out a long exhausted sigh. ’No. I am the Sovereign... I have to manage the logistics... Even the highly degenerate ones.’

Quite a while had passed since Morwenna had casually beaten Blessed Land’s elite strike force into the mud.

Several hours, in fact.

And true to his orders, the Dread Queen hadn’t wasted a single minute of that time.

She had immediately started educating them.

Silas’s mind flashed back to the brutal efficient training session that had taken place just two hours ago.

[Flashback]

The Ground Floor of the massive Warlord Barracks had been completely retrofitted into a sprawling indoor training arena.

Lined up across the polished stone floorboards were dozens of training dummies.

They were forged from thick ashwood and wrapped in enchanted leather.

Whenever they were struck, a restoration feature triggered, automatically healing the splintered wood and torn fabric in a matter of seconds.

It was the perfect environment for high-volume combat repetition...

Morwenna paced back and forth in front of the assembled women.

She was still wearing Silas’s oversized tactical shirt and his heavy winter coat.

Morwenna held a simple iron training sword resting on her shoulder.

"Your raw physical stats are impressive," Morwenna projected her commanding voice across the hall. "But your mechanics are absolute garbage...You swing your weapons like you’re trying to chop firewood... You rely entirely on your Levels to brute-force your way through armor."

She stopped pacing and pointed the iron sword directly at Brida.

"When you fight a monster that matches your Vitality," Morwenna lectured coldly, "your brute force means nothing... You need fluid momentum and you need to turn their weight against them."

Morwenna casually turned toward one of the pristine, auto-healing training dummies.

She didn’t wind up for a massive swing. She simply engaged her Tidal-Blade Arts.

With a slight pivot of her hip, she unleashed a blinding, hyper-condensed flurry of six consecutive slashes.

The iron blade blurred.

She struck the exact same micro-fracture on the dummy’s leather joint six times in under a second, utilizing phantom heavy-water pressure to exponentially stack the damage.

CRACK!

The heavy ashwood training dummy didn’t just splinter.

It violently exploded into sawdust.

The restoration short-circuited, unable to keep up with the destruction as the dummy was permanently deleted.

The girls stared in absolute awe.

’Hey! You can do that?!’ Silas almost yelled out however without a doubt, the dummy returned to normal.

"Everyone holds a blade today," Morwenna ordered, tossing a pile of wooden training swords onto the floor. "And I mean everyone."

"Excuse me?" Aeliana spoke up from the back row.

The Royal Elf was dressed in her robes, clutching her clipboard defensively against her chest.

She looked at the wooden swords with deep aristocratic disdain.

"I am an Arcanist..." Aeliana protested. "My tactical designation is exclusively long-range spells and runes. I do not engage in crude close-quarters physical brawling... I have delicate hands."

Morwenna’s feral gray eyes locked onto the Elf.

She walked slowly toward Aeliana with her boots clicking against the stone.

She stopped inches from the Arcanist’s face.

"Nobody is above the sword," Morwenna whispered in a voice that carried the crushing weight of the ocean floor.

Aeliana swallowed hard, her pointed ears drooping slightly.

"When the front line collapses," Morwenna explained. "And a Tier 4 monster closes the distance to your backline while your mana is on cooldown, your spells or runes won’t save your throat from getting ripped out. You will learn to parry so pick up the sword."

Aeliana didn’t argue.

She carefully set her clipboard down and picked up a wooden blade.

Beside her, Rowena was already struggling.

The elegant human mage was holding a wooden rapier like it was a venomous snake with her stance completely awkward and rigid.

"Bend your knees, Mage!" Morwenna barked, kicking the back of Rowena’s knee to force her stance lower. "You’re standing like a marble statue! Fluidity! You must move like water!"

Silas had watched the entire grueling session with a deep sense of pride.

His backline casters were learning basic survival parries and his frontline brawlers were finally learning edge-alignment and momentum redirection.

[End of Flashback]

Silas snapped back to the present, standing in the dimly lit stone corridor outside the Foundry.

He wasn’t standing alone.

He was currently caught in the middle of a dangerous territorial SSS-Rank tug-of-war.

Morwenna was currently clinging tightly to his right hand.

The Dread Queen had laced her pale cold fingers entirely through his.

She stood close to his side with her stormy gray eyes practically glowing in the dim light.

Eluned was violently clinging to his left hand.

The Goddess of Nature had both of her arms wrapped securely around his bicep with her silver-green hair brushing against his shoulder.

She was glaring daggers across Silas’s chest directly at the pirate.

"Your internal biology is fascinating, Captain..." Morwenna commented casually, leaning her head slightly against his shoulder.

She ran her thumb over the knuckles of his right hand.

"Your body is akin to a literal generator," Morwenna praised smoothly. "You run so incredibly hot. Why do you hoard all this ambient heat to yourself? You should share it with your crew. I’ll gladly take it."

Silas shrugged his broad shoulders. "I don’t really mind."

He had a massive baseline Vitality and a constantly burning Mythic Gold Core.

He practically radiated an invisible layer of thermal energy.

If the water-logged pirate needed to siphon some body heat to stay warm in the freezing corridor, it didn’t cost him a single drop of mana.

Eluned, however, minded immensely.

"The heat is mine!" Eluned snapped fiercely with her glowing green eyes narrowing into jealous slits.

She aggressively dragged Silas by his left arm, physically trying to pull his entire Gold Core frame closer to her side of the hallway.

"I am his primary tether!" Eluned declared. "I claimed his body heatt first!"

Morwenna’s feral grin faded into a cold smirk.

The Dread Queen looked directly past Silas’s chest with her gray eyes locking onto the Goddess.

The atmospheric pressure in the corridor violently dropped.

"You should be incredibly, profusely happy that I am currently tolerating your suffocating divine presence, tree-hugger..." Morwenna whispered. "Under any other standard circumstance, I would be beheading you on the spot for simply standing too close to me."

Eluned didn’t flinch.

The Goddess of Nature let out a mocking laugh.

Pure nature mana sparked violently across her fingertips.

"You can try, trench-rat," Eluned threatened cheerfully. "But the exact microsecond you draw that rusty piece of scrap metal you call a sword, I will physically punch you so hard you’ll end up in the upper stratosphere."

"Is that a promise?" Morwenna challenged, her grip tightening on Silas’s right hand.

"It’s a divine guarantee..." Eluned sneered.

Silas aggressively pinched the bridge of his nose.

’My blood pressure is going to physically burst a blood vessel in my brain,’ Silas’s internal monologue complained. ’They are literally five seconds away from leveling the entire Warlord territory in a catfight.’

"Relax," Silas ordered flatly with his deep voice cutting through their rising killing intent. "Both of you. Stand down."

He didn’t wait for them to argue.

He reached out with his free hand, firmly grasped the heavy iron handle of the Warlord Foundry, and pushed the door open.

FWOOSH!

A massive, overwhelming wave of blistering thermal heat violently hit their faces.

The interior of the Foundry was a roaring inferno.

The massive mythril smelting furnaces were burning at maximum capacity, casting brilliant flickering orange and blue light across the dark stone walls.

In the dead center of the room, standing over a massive, heavily enchanted mythril anvil, was Thora.

She was covered in dark soot with her thick blonde hair tied back in a messy bun underneath her heavy iron helmet.

Thora was wearing her stained leather bra, her dark panties, and a pair of thick leather welding gloves.

She held a massive glowing forging hammer in her right hand.

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

She was aggressively hammering a glowing, violently hot ingot of Tier 3 deep-earth alloy.

Sparks showered across the stone floor with every massive strike.

Silas stepped into the blistering heat of the room, dragging his two glaring, SSS-Rank escorts behind him.

"Thora," Silas called out over the ringing metal.

Thora didn’t miss a beat.

She delivered one final crushing blow to the anvil, smoothly grabbed a pair of iron tongs, and plunged the glowing alloy directly into a barrel of highly refined cooling oil.

HSSSSS!

A thick cloud of white steam erupted toward the ceiling.

Thora turned around, wiping a streak of black soot off her forehead with the back of her leather glove.

Her eyes immediately locked onto Silas.

A massive, highly perverted grin stretched completely across the Dwarf’s face.

"Well, well, well," Thora purred loudly, completely abandoning any sense of professional decorum. "If it isn’t the Boss. Come to finally inspect my premium pillows? My forge is running incredibly hot today, but I can always make room for you to—"

"I need your help," Silas cut her off instantly, completely stonewalling the degenerate banter.

He gestured to Morwenna standing on his right.

"This is Morwenna... She is the new instructor," Silas explained. "I need you to forge her a capable personal weapon. She’s been actively complaining that her current cutlass is rusted scrap and I need you to properly repair and refit her personal combat gear."

Thora blinked, finally shifting her gaze away from Silas’s chest.

She looked Morwenna up and down.

The Dread Queen was still wearing Silas’s oversized tactical coat and shirt.

"Let’s see what we’re working with," Thora said, stepping away from the anvil and walking toward them.

She reached out and roughly grabbed the fabric of Morwenna’s original water-logged leather armor that Silas was carrying over his arm.

Thora’s perverted smile vanished instantly.

The sharp genius of a Master Smith took over.

She rubbed the dark faded material between her calloused fingers.

Thora flipped the oxidized dark-blue mythril plating over, inspecting the foreign runes etched into the metal.

"By the Ancestors," Thora breathed out with her eyes going wide from shock alone. "What in the hell is this material?"

She looked up at Morwenna.

"This isn’t standard Sovereign Realm dungeon leather," Thora analyzed frantically. "The tensile strength is impossible and the mythril... it’s oxidized, but it holds an ambient mana capacity that defies standard metallurgical physics. The fabric is literally woven with microscopic threads of raw cosmic metal. I have absolutely never seen anything like this in my entire life."

Morwenna smirked, a hint of dark pride touching her feral eyes.

"It’s Void-Kraken hide," Morwenna explained smoothly. "Harvested directly from the deep currents of the Astral Seas... The plating is star-forged abyssal iron, salvaged from the wreckage of a Righteous Pantheon dreadnought."