Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Chapter 162: The Secret Realm Of Ititius [I / Bonus Chapter]

Maya smiled politely, but her internal thoughts were spinning with petty frustration.

’He completely ignored my calls not only that,’ Maya thought, glaring at the back of Silas’s dark hair. ’Silas didn’t even give me his real number last time. Is it that he doesn’t take me seriously....?’

She crossed her arms over her chest.

’Well, I’m going to prove him wrong today. Once he sees my activities in the field, he’ll realize exactly what he’s missing.’

She was confident that she could impress him, especially now that she had Government support... she managed to break into Top 100 in the Newbie Leaderboard and not only that but she had even gotten personal people to train her Summons.

Though she lost 90% of her full control as her and the City were sharing it, but compared to the others, she was quite a low ranking Lord... They wouldn’t want to use her people at all.

Elora didn’t waste time on pleasantries.

She engaged the thrusters, and the supercar launched forward, pinning them all back in their seats as she merged aggressively onto the Valoria City highway.

"Alright, listen up," Elora commanded, her voice cutting through the hum of the engine as she navigated the dense morning traffic. "We should be completely focused on the Secret Realm. Do any of you actually know about Secret Realms, aside from the general knowledge they feed you in the Academy? Or what I told you initially?"

Silas remained silent, staring out the window. Jaxon grunted, scratching his jaw while Maya looked away.

When she got absolutely no reply from her strike team, Elora let out a long exasperated sigh.

"Fine. I will brief you," Elora explained. "Secret Realms are not simple single open battlefields. Similar to dungeons, they are separated into distinct, descending layers of spatial reality. Each layer is heavily guarded by high-tier Guardian monsters that have absorbed ambient mana for a long time. You cannot advance to the next layer until the Guardian of the current floor is butchered."

She took a sharp turn, bypassing the commercial district entirely and heading toward the desolate abandoned industrial sector on the edge of the city.

"Furthermore," Elora continued with her eyes locked on the road. "These anomalies are highly volatile. After a certain amount of time after being activated... which, based on the spatial decay rate in this specific case, is an estimated five to six days, the Secret Realm will violently collapse its entry matrix. The realm will forcibly eject any surviving biological matter back into the terrestrial world."

"Wait," Jaxon frowned, leaning forward. "Eject us? Like, teleport us out?"

"Yes," Elora nodded grimly. "If we don’t clear the final vault and claim the core before the five-day timer expires, the realm spits us out. If we are in the middle of fighting the boss when the timer hits zero, we lose the loot."

"What happens if we die inside?" Maya asked nervously.

"Then the realm digests your mana core and uses your blood to keep the lights on for another century," Silas answered bluntly, not even looking back at her.

Elora offered a grim nod of confirmation. "Be silent. We are approaching the breach point."

She pulled the supercar off the main highway, navigating down a series of cracked overgrown asphalt roads until she pulled up directly outside a massive towering rusted industrial warehouse.

The building looked entirely abandoned but as the supercar approached, hidden runic scanners flashed blue from the rusted eaves.

The big corrugated metal doors of the warehouse suddenly groaned, opening automatically like a massive hangar hatch.

Elora drove the car smoothly into the cavernous, pitch-black interior of the building.

The heavy doors slammed shut behind them, cutting off the sunlight and plunging them into darkness.

But it wasn’t completely dark.

Suspended directly in the center of the empty warehouse, hovering three feet off the concrete floor, was a terrifying violent anomaly.

It was a massive crack in the very reality of space.

The edges of the tear bled with shifting chaotic colors... blinding gold, deep violet, and aggressive crimson.

It looked like a bleeding wound in the fabric of the universe, humming with a deafening vibration that rattled the teeth in their skulls.

"That," Elora said softly, the glow of the spatial tear reflecting in her eyes. "That will lead us to the Sovereign Realm."

Jaxon and Maya immediately began to reach for their seat belts, fully intending to remove them and step out of the vehicle to approach the anomaly on foot.

Silas reached for his buckle as well.

"Hold on," Elora commanded abruptly.

She didn’t hit the brakes.

Elora’s eyes widened with pure adrenaline-fueled madness as she slammed her foot directly down on the accelerator.

The supercar’s anti-grav thrusters roared with explosive force.

"Wait! What are you doing?!" Maya shrieked in absolute terror from the back seat.

Elora didn’t answer.

She drove the heavily armored car straight forward, accelerating to eighty miles an hour, and launched the vehicle right into the center of the bleeding spatial crack.

As soon as the front bumper touched the anomaly, the sound of the engine vanished.

The world shattered and the fundamental laws of physics violently ceased to exist.

Passing through the dimensional anomaly didn’t feel like driving through a tunnel... It felt like being forcefully shoved through a meat grinder constructed entirely out of static electricity and gravity wells.

Silas gripped the leather armrest of the passenger door, his jaw clenching as a wave of intense nauseating vertigo slammed into his brain.

He felt quite weird. His internal organs felt like they were briefly floating outside of his physical body, while his eardrums popped under a sudden crushing shift in atmospheric pressure though that was all in his head.

His Gold Core immediately flared to life, flooding his veins with dense stabilizing mana to combat the spatial sickness, forcefully grounding his body.

He glanced into the rearview mirror.

Jaxon and Maya were not handling the transition nearly as well.

They were both registered Lords... individuals who possessed their own territories, their own mana cores, and their own baseline authority within the Sovereign Realm but their cores were clearly several tiers below Silas’s.

Jaxon was gripping the edges of his seat with white knuckles, his face a sickly shade of pale green as he fought the urge to vomit all over the expensive upholstery.

Maya had her eyes squeezed tightly shut, letting out a high-pitched, pathetic whine of discomfort as the dimensional friction rattled her bones.

Elora, gripping the steering wheel with ice-cold focus, didn’t even flinch.

The suffocating, reality-bending transition only lasted for a few agonizing seconds.

Then, with a loud concussive pop that echoed like a breaking vacuum seal, the supercar violently burst out the other side.

The heavy tires slammed down onto solid ground, kicking up a massive, trailing cloud of dry abrasive dust.

Silas blinked against the sudden blinding shift in light.

The dark rusted interior of the abandoned Valoria City warehouse was completely gone.

In its place was a sprawling and blindingly bright sandy dune.

It looked as though they had just driven straight out of an industrial sector and directly into the heart of a sun-baked desert.

The sky above them wasn’t the neon-lit, cloudy gray of Earth.

It was a deep burning amber color, completely lacking a sun, yet radiating an oppressive suffocating heat that instantly began baking the armored chassis of the supercar.

Elora hit the brakes, bringing the vehicle to a smooth, hovering halt atop a high ridge of packed sand.

Silas looked out through the windshield.

Down in the shallow basin of the dunes up ahead, they weren’t alone.

Not only were there several other high-end modified luxury off-road vehicles parked erratically across the vicinity, but dominating the center of the desert depression was the primary objective.

It was a massive, glowing white portal.

Unlike the chaotic spatial tear they had just driven through on Earth, this portal was perfectly circular, contained within a ring of ancient weathered obsidian.

The ring itself was elevated by some massive intricately carved stone stand stuff... heavy pillars buried deep into the sand, completely covered in glowing runes that pulsed like a heartbeat.

Elora killed the engine. The silence of the desert instantly pressed in on them.

"We’ve arrived," Elora announced smoothly, unbuckling her harness.

She looked through the glass at the glowing white gateway. "This is the staging ground. That construct ahead is the entrance to the Secret Realm of Ititius... He was an ancient forgotten deity of the sand."

Silas didn’t bother asking for a history lesson on Ititius. He unbuckled his seatbelt, kicked his door open, and stepped out into the baking heat.

All four of them left the comfortable interior of the supercar.

Silas’s heavy combat boots sank an inch into the loose burning sand.

He stood at his full height, adjusting the collar of his dark trench coat, and took a slow look around the basin.

They were the last people to arrive, probably.

Silas did a quick headcount.

He could see that there were exactly twenty people scattered around the vicinity of the glowing portal.

They were divided into small heavily armed cliques, standing near their respective vehicles.

They didn’t look like scrawny Academy students or desperate lower-ward scavengers.

These people were wearing custom-forged armor, carrying high-tier elemental staves, and projecting dense auras of authority.

"Silas-kun!"

A loud enthusiastic voice echoed across the dunes.

Silas didn’t even turn his head.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Harper standing near the front bumper of a massive, six-wheeled transport rover.

The purple-haired woman was waving at him frantically with a smug expectant smile plastered across her face.

Silas deliberately chose to ignore her.

He turned his back to her completely, focusing his golden-ringed eyes on the massive white portal.

Elora stepped up beside him, her boots crunching in the sand. Jaxon and Maya flanked them, the two lesser Lords finally shaking off their spatial nausea and drawing their respective weapons.

Elora leaned in closer to Silas with her voice dropping into a tight secure whisper that only the four of them could hear over the dry wind.

"Do not underestimate the people standing in this basin," Elora warned them, her eyes sweeping over the crowd of twenty elites. "This is not a public raid. The coordinates to this specific spatial fracture were auctioned off exclusively through the High Council’s black market channels... Most of the people standing here right now are either Blue Core Lords or Purple Core Lords. There is no baseline trash."

Silas crossed his arms.

’Purple Cores, huh?’ He thought. ’Rich kids who bought enough high-tier beast cores to artificially inflate their cultivation before they even turned eighteen.’

Speaking of that, he needed to get some high tier Beast cores for Lia... He had the money, it was time to start acting like a true young rich man.

"Be especially wary," Elora continued softly, her gaze locking onto a specific group standing near the base of the portal. "There are three Unique Lords here today... Two are men, one is a woman."

She discreetly tilted her head toward a tall arrogantly postured man wearing gleaming, gold-trimmed mythril armor.

"That is Valerius. And the one to his left is Kalind... Like me, they are directly related to the City Lords in their own respective terrestrial cities. They have diplomatic immunity, and their combat training is strictly elite."

Elora then moved her gaze toward a striking woman with fiery red hair, dressed in sleek crimson-scaled leather armor, casually inspecting a curved dagger.

"And the woman," Elora murmured with caution bleeding into her voice, Silas hadn’t even known she was capable of saying stuff with so much emotion.

"That is Lady Seraphina. She is the direct daughter of one of the chief magistrates sitting on the World Council... Do not engage her unless she strikes first. If you kill her, her father will glass your residential district from orbit."

"Noted," Silas replied deadpan. "Don’t murder the World Council’s kid, good to know."

Before Elora could finish her breakdown of the rival factions, the sound of expensive boots crunching aggressively through the sand approached them from behind.

"Well, well, well. If it isn’t my dear, overly ambitious cousin..." a loud, obnoxiously arrogant voice sneered.

Silas slowly turned around.

Among the different Lords here, Elora’s cousin had decided to make his presence known.

The man walking toward them looked exactly like the kind of aristocratic nepotism-fueled parasite Silas despised.

He was in his early twenties, possessing the same sharp good-looking features as Elora, but his face was twisted into a perpetual punchable smirk of superiority.

He was wearing highly impractical, ridiculously ornate silver armor that looked like it had never seen a single drop of actual blood.

As soon as he saw them, he immediately came over and stopped three feet away, his nose practically in the air.

He looked at them and then the cousin let out a loud mocking laugh, roasting his cousin without hesitation.

"Elora, darling," the cousin sneered, gesturing dismissively at Silas and the others. "What is this? Is the Verinda estate running a charity outreach program now? I knew your faction was struggling to maintain its quotas, but dragging Commoners into a Tier-4 Secret Realm? You’re going to get these poor, unwashed peasants slaughtered."