With This Treasure, I Summon Primordial Weapons
Chapter 30: Twenty-Four Hours

Chapter 30: Twenty-Four Hours

Godric stared at the notification for a long, fleeting second before the translucent window dissolved into thin air. The realisation of what he had just done hit him like ice water in his veins.

He hadn’t just extinguished what, as far as he knew, was the last remaining ember of the eternal flame. He had copied it. Which meant he now had a clock running on his back.

Twenty-four hours.

If his earlier intuition was correct, then the condition to escape this dungeon gate was to burn the entire city around him using the eternal flame. And just now he had gotten access to this eerie purple flame.

He didn’t waste time agonising over it. Godric called upon the copied ability, and in an instant, Blackpearl caught alight, bathed in a cold, silent purple fire that cast long shadows across the white bricks, without radiating a single degree of heat.

’Just as I thought.’

There was no way an ability copied by his weapon, as strong as it might have been, could burn the entire city that stretched for miles around him within 24 hours.

He had no think of another way, and he had to do it fast.

The seconds ticking away on the ability’s timer sat at the back of his mind like a countdown he couldn’t ignore.

He was still turning the problem over, trying to work out how to burn down an entire city with one flaming sword, when a soft, barely noticeable sound came from behind him.

Godric turned around partially unguarded, half expecting it to be nothing and half expecting it to be just another one of the hollows.

To his surprise, however, the person standing behind him had a familiar, almost warm look in her eyes.

"Godric?" Raven asked hesitantly, taking a slow step toward him.

Godric didn’t answer right away. His gaze swept over her, dissecting every detail, first her eyes, which held genuine warmth, then her posture, her stride, and the faint aura of her presence. Everything matched the Raven he knew.

"Raven?" He said in a tone that could be both a statement and a question.

A faint, relieved smile touched her lips.

She took two hurried strides forward and wrapped her arms around his neck, burying her face into his shoulder.

"I thought you were dead," she breathed, her voice trembling slightly. "I saw... something that looked just like you."

Godric raised an eyebrow, his mind already trying to piece the mechanic together.

He had assumed the hollows took a person’s shape by capturing them first, but if Raven had seen a double of him while he was elsewhere, it meant the sanctuary copied anyone who crossed its threshold.

"Yeah," he murmured, gently unlinking her arms from his neck. "How about we go home?"

Raven took a small step back and looked him in the eye. "What?"

"I found the way to get out of this dungeon gate," Godric said plainly as if it wasn’t the biggest revelation people of the settlement had in years.

She looked at him as though he had said something impossible. A small frown settled on her face. "Are you serious?"

Godric nodded. "I am. But before we do anything... you’re already a Master summoner, aren’t you?"

Raven hesitated, thrown off by the sudden shift in topic, before giving a slow nod.

Summoners were ranked by their proficiency with their beast: Novice, Elite, Master, Grandmaster.

The levels tracked more than the bond between summoner and beast. They marked how much of the beast’s power a summoner could wield on their own.

A Novice could summon and command their beast. An Elite could access and use the beast’s abilities directly. Master was the rank required to teach at the academy, a lifetime achievement for most summoners, something to boast about at Elyune City’s yearly banquet, something people spent their whole lives working toward.

Raven, however, wasn’t most summoners. Born into one of the great houses, reaching Master was little more than a formality to her, a rite of passage and proof that she belonged to House Stormbourne.

But it wasn’t the prestige of the rank that Godric cared about. And it wasn’t the rite of passage either. It was what came with it, the ability to use every one of a beast’s powers and traits all at once.

"How long would it take you to get me to Master rank?" he finally asked.

...

"Are you sure this is the right way?"

"That’s what Loris said," Godric replied. "After the exit disappears from the eighth corridor, it appears again in the sixth. As long as nobody else had reached it, then it should be there."

Godric had just finished telling Raven what happened with Torr when the girl grew uneasy with the idea of tracing back their steps.

Well, tracing back his steps, according to her mental plan of the place, when she stepped into the doorway, she appeared on the opposite side of the sanctuary.

This meant that the eighth corridor was more or less the middle of the sanctuary, which, judging by the room he found and the location of the first exit, made sense.

They just took the final corner leading back to the sixth corridor, which now was as twisted and winding as the eighth corridor, when they saw a figure walk hesitantly in the near distance.

"Valentina," Raven whispered, and Godric nodded.

The hollows weren’t usually moving, and they definitely wouldn’t move with such cautiousness, so it was clear that the girl was real.

Which raised an immediate, cold question: what was he going to do about her?

Godric’s plan already had far too many dangerous variables. In less than twenty-four hours, he had to force a breakthrough to Master level proficiency, burn the city down to its foundations, and deal with the fallout of Loris seeing him cut down Torr.

No matter how he looked at it, Valentina was a loose end.

A quick, silent strike to her back right now would erase a dozen potential disasters before they could bloom.

His hand tightened around Blackpearl’s hilt.

But before he could commit to the strike, Raven stepped out from the shadow of the corridor, purposefully scuffing her boot against the stone to announce their presence.