Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Chapter 164: The Secret Realm Of Ititius [III / Bonus Chapter]

Silas’s combat boots hit solid ground.

He didn’t stumble as he instantly bent his knees, dropping his center of gravity with his right hand immediately resting on the hilt of the mythril broadsword strapped to his hip.

He opened his eyes.

He wasn’t in a desert anymore.

He appeared in a massive subterranean cavern of a cave.

The ceiling was lost in impenetrable darkness, and the walls were constructed from unworked sandstone.

The ground beneath his boots was solid bedrock, but it still had thick drifts of loose dry sand blown into the corners and the air was suffocatingly hot.

He looked to his right.

Aeli, who was standing perfectly poised next to him, had safely survived the transition. Her white robes glowed faintly in the pitch-black cavern, providing the only source of illumination.

Silas didn’t waste a single microsecond on sightseeing.

He immediately reached over to his left wrist. He grabbed the sleek glowing black metal location band Elora had given him.

’Fuck it...’

Silas didn’t unclip it. He squeezed his fist, channeling raw power into his fingers.

CRACK!

Silas completely shattered the metal band, breaking the tracking runes into useless pieces, and let the fragments drop into the sand.

He looked at Aeli as he told her his first command.

"Crush the band," Silas ordered her flatly.

Aeliana didn’t question him and she didn’t hesitate either.

She raised her left wrist, summoned a pulse of crushing starlight, and instantly obliterated her own tracker.

"We don’t need to meet up with the others," Silas explained his logic as he sighed. "So now we’re free..."

They crushed their bands because Silas wasn’t interested in doing any sort of group project.

He had no intention of babysitting a one-armed archer, or pulling Jaxon out of traps, or dealing with Elora’s politics while her idiot cousin wandered the halls.

In fact he was planning to kill that fucker too.

’That’s just a little side quest.’ Silas thought.

All he was trying to get were Secret Items. If he stayed with the group, he would have to split the high-tier loot, and worse, he would expose the terrifying combat superiority of Aeliana to the City Lord’s daughter.

He operated better in the dark.

"We just need to move fast and get everything we can..." Silas declared, drawing his broadsword.

The heavy mythril blade scraped against the scabbard with the sound echoing loudly in the quiet cave.

Suddenly, a sharp high-pitched TWANG echoed from the darkness directly above them.

There were the unmistakable sounds of an arrow cutting through the stagnant air and it was not just one but a dozen.

Silas didn’t even have time to swing his sword.

Aeli immediately appeared directly at his side.

The Starlight Arcanist didn’t even need to chant. She simply raised her left hand, aggressively expanding her Royal Arcane Aegis shield forward.

A massive multi-layered dome of blinding, compressed blue-white starlight snapped into existence, covering them both like a fortress of glass.

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

Six glowing green mana arrows slammed violently into the surface of the Aegis shield, shattering into useless sparks upon impact and completely failing to pierce the A-Rank barrier.

Aeliana didn’t flinch as the magical shrapnel rained down over her shield.

She kept her hand raised with her green eyes glowing as they pierced through the pitch-black darkness of the cavern ceiling, locking onto the hidden hostile signatures.

She turned her head slightly, offering her Lord a calm composed smile.

"Lord Sy," Aeliana reported smoothly, perfectly blocking the barrage. "I believe we have an intruder."

The glowing green mana arrows shattered violently against the convex surface of Aeliana’s Aegis shield, dropping harmlessly into the hot dry sand of the subterranean cavern like pieces of broken glass.

Silas stood perfectly still behind the multi-layered dome of blue-white starlight.

His golden-ringed eyes tracked the trajectory of the shattered magical shrapnel upward, tracing the ballistic arc through the copper-scented air until his gaze locked onto a jagged sandstone outcropping shrouded in the impenetrable darkness near the cavern ceiling.

’If an archer was the one that attacked us with those kind of high-density, armor-piercing mana arrows, that means it was probably a Hero...’ Silas analyzed. ’I mean Baseline monsters don’t use enchanted longbows with elemental resonance and if it was a Hero up on that ledge, taking a sniper’s vantage point, then the Lord who summoned them has to be standing nearby.’

Silas didn’t draw his weapon into an attacking stance yet.

He didn’t want to alert whoever was hiding in the shadows to the terrifying weight of the forty-pound mythril blade strapped to his hip.

He simply looked into the dark shadows beneath the ledge with his deep voice carrying easily over the vast cavern without a single trace of intimidation or fear.

"Tell your Hero to stand down," Silas commanded, his tone completely flat and pragmatic. "We don’t want to attack you and as long as you stand down, we could probably walk away from each other right now without spilling any blood on the sand."

There was a tense silence in the dark and the oppressive heat of the Secret Realm seemed to magnify the quiet, pressing down on their shoulders.

Then, the soft grinding sound of expensive leather boots slipping on loose sandstone echoed from the shadows directly ahead of them.

The hostile Lord finally stepped out of the shadows.

It was some short, obnoxiously dressed guy wearing an impractical dark velvet coat adorned with cheap gaudy silver trim that completely clashed with the desert environment.

He had a black, featureless cloth mask strapped tightly over his face, completely obscuring his features from the nose down. He was twirling a long ornate iron spear in his right hand, the heavy iron tip sparking with red mana that smelled of burning sulfur.

The short guy stopped ten feet away from the outer edge of Aeliana’s glowing starlight barrier.

He looked at the massive constructed Aegis shield, then slowly tilted his head backward, looking up at Silas’s sharp handsome face and his broad towering shoulders.

The masked guy let out a bitter and incredibly resentful scoff.

"I really do hate attractive guys like you," the masked Lord spat.

He didn’t bother trying to negotiate.

He didn’t even attempt to utilize a basic ocular scanning spell to evaluate the disparity in their ambient mana densities.

If he had, he would have realized he was pointing a stick at someone that was much more powerful than him.

The masked Lord aggressively spun his spear, planting his boots in the sand and pointing the sparking iron tip directly at Silas’s chest.

"Kill them both!" the masked Lord ordered, sending his own Hero after Silas and Aeli.

From the shadows of the elevated ledge above, the cloaked archer Hero obeyed instantly.

He started by shooting more arrows. A rapid hissing volley of three glowing green projectiles ripped through the darkness, aimed directly at Silas’s unprotected face.

THWIP! THWIP! THWIP!

Aeli didn’t even blink.

The Starlight Arcanist casually flicked her left wrist, her green eyes completely lacking any sort of concern.

The Royal Arcane Aegis instantly expanded outward by three inches, catching all three arrows in mid-air and violently deflecting them.

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

The arrows ricocheted off the barrier and slammed harmlessly into the cavern ceiling, raining a small shower of dust down upon the masked Lord’s velvet coat.

Silas let out a tired sigh.

He gripped the hilt of his broadsword, fully intending to draw the heavy blade, step through the starlight barrier, and end the pathetic ambush with a single brutal cleave.

But before his fingers could tighten around the grip, Aeli stepped slightly in front of him with her pristine white spider-silk robes brushing against his trousers.

"Lord Sy," Aeliana asked smoothly, her melodious voice chillingly calm as her green eyes glowed with a cold bloodlust. "May I have permission to kill the both of them."

Silas paused, looking down at the elegant Elf.

’Aeli wants to kill someone? It really doesn’t fit her but sure...’

Silas really didn’t want to kill a Lord in the first five minutes of the raid.

It was messy, it usually involved a lot of fallout if they were connected to a Valoria guild, and he was strictly here to secure the vault loot.

But there was obvious killing intent in the air.

The guy had already launched two lethal volleys and explicitly ordered their execution.

Silas couldn’t just let it slide, turn his back, and walk away. If he left the rat alive, the guy could easily get in contact with a larger posse of mercenary Lords and jump him later along the line when he was busy fighting a boss monster or dealing with a trap.

In the Sovereign Realm, mercy was just a delayed death sentence.

"Permission granted," Silas told her flatly with his golden-ringed eyes hardening. "Make it quick."

Aeliana didn’t hesitate at all. Once he gave her permission, she ran forward.

The Elf dropped her Aegis shield entirely with the blue-white starlight shattering into ambient pixels as she completely abandoned her defensive posture.

Utilizing her passive Elven Swiftness, she caught the stagnant thermal currents of the cavern and blurred across the hot sand.

Aeli closed the ten-foot gap between herself and the masked Lord in a fraction of a microsecond.

The short Lord panicked with his eyes going wide beneath his black mask.

He thrust his iron spear forward with both hands, desperately trying to impale the beautiful white-robed woman rushing him.

"Die, you bitch!" the masked Lord screamed, pouring all of his low-tier red mana into the thrust.

Aeliana didn’t even break her stride.

She gracefully side-stepped the clumsy telegraphed thrust.

Her pristine white robes fluttered softly as the heated iron spear tip passed harmlessly by her waist, missing her flesh by a solid foot.

Without missing a beat, she reached out with her delicate left hand and grabbed the wooden shaft of the spear just behind the iron head.

Her A-Rank physical density effortlessly overpowered the short Lord’s baseline grip.

Aeliana violently wrenched the weapon out of his hands, ripping the wood through his leather gloves.

She simultaneously spun her body on her lead foot, generating flawless dancer-like momentum.

’Miss Morwenna truly is amazing... she taught me how to move like this.’ Aeliana thought.

As she spun, the archer on the ledge realized his Master had just been disarmed and the Hero frantically nocked another arrow.

THWIP!

Aeliana didn’t even look up.

She casually tilted her head a fraction of an inch to the right, letting the glowing green arrow graze past her silver hair and bury itself into the sand behind her.

She finished her spin, now gripping the stolen iron spear with both hands however at this point, Aeliana didn’t use her starlight magic.

She relied entirely on brutal physical force.

Aeliana drove the spear directly forward, aiming straight for the center of the masked Lord’s face.

CRUNCH!

The heavy iron spearhead punched effortlessly through the black cloth mask, completely shattering the Lord’s nasal cavity, and stabbed directly into the middle of his head.

The force of the thrust drove the iron tip through his brain, erupting out the back of his skull in a violent explosion of dark blood, gray matter, and bone fragments.

The Lord’s body went completely rigid with his hands twitching erratically at his sides as his nervous system instantly shut down.

SHWK!

Aeliana ripped the spear out of his ruined face with a sickening wet sound.

As the dead Lord slumped backward onto the sand with his red mana dissipating into the air, Aeliana fluidly pivoted on her heel.

She looked up at the sandstone ledge where the archer Hero was currently fumbling with his bowstring in a blind panic.

Because his Lord was dead and he was in a Secret Realm, the Hero’s physical form was already beginning to destabilize with the edges of his cloak dissolving into glowing pixels but Aeliana wasn’t going to let him fade away peacefully.

She channeled a concentrated burst of blue-white starlight directly into her right palm.

"Arcane Piercer," Aeliana whispered.

She fired a compressed high-velocity beam of destructive starlight mana.

BOOM!

The laser punched directly through the archer’s chest, instantly vaporizing his heart and blowing a smoking molten hole straight through his torso and the sandstone wall behind him.

The Hero’s terrified scream died in his throat as his body violently dissolved into ambient mana particles, instantly unsummoned.

The entire ambush was over in less than four seconds.

Aeliana stood in the center of the bloody sand with her white robes completely immaculate, without getting hurt or spilling a single drop of blood on herself.

She calmly lowered her hand, the starlight fading from her fingertips.

’I will not only protect my Lord from people like you but those whores outside.’ Aeliana thought.