Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Chapter 165: The Secret Realm Of Ititius [IV / Bonus Chapter]

She walked over to the dead Lord’s body.

With a precise flick of her wrist, she used the edge of the stolen spear to slash the ruined black mask off his face, pulling the blood-soaked fabric away to reveal the guy’s features.

Silas walked up behind her with boots crunching loudly in the dry sand as he looked down at the corpse.

Even if he was a son of an influential person in the upper wards of Valoria City, his face was so incredibly ugly that it made both Aeliana and Silas physically recoil in disgust.

His features were severely asymmetrical, his jaw was completely misshapen, his teeth were jagged as though he was a monster, and his skin possessed a mottled sickly texture that had nothing to do with the spear wound.

"Jesus," Silas muttered, taking a half-step back. "Not even a mother could love this face."

This was very surprising given that everyone paid to be attractive these days, how ugly did one have to be?

Aeliana wrinkled her pristine nose, completely appalled by the visual offense, and dropped the bloody spear into the sand as if it were contaminated.

"I can see why the fucker hated attractive people," Silas sighed, shaking his head. "He probably spent his entire life getting rejected at corporate galas and decided to take his severe genetic insecurities out on anyone with a decent jawline..."

"Shall I search him, my Lord?" Aeliana asked, kneeling beside the corpse despite her obvious distaste for the man.

"Loot him," Silas instructed, stepping back to keep watch over the dark tunnels.

Aeliana swiftly and efficiently searched the dead Lord’s velvet pockets.

She patted down his heavy coat, checked his belt pouches, and even felt along the lining of his boots for hidden spots.

She stood up empty-handed.

"He has nothing, Lord Sy," Aeliana reported, her tone laced with deep aristocratic disdain. "No spatial storage rings, no high-tier artifacts, no beast cores, and not even the currency known as Spirit Credits you showed us... He is destitute."

Silas sighed heavily, pinching the bridge of his nose. They looted his body and found that this guy literally had nothing on him.

"What a complete waste of time," Silas lamented bitterly. "If this was an Official Lord Territory war, I would have at least gotten some more women troops out of his barracks, or forcefully absorbed his raw material stockpiles into my own territory. So far, there is nothing... I just killed a broke, ugly guy in a velvet coat."

He walked over to where the heavy longbow had dropped from the ledge before the Hero dissolved.

It was lying half-buried in the sand. He picked it up, dusting off the grip, and tested the draw weight by pulling the string back.

It was surprisingly sturdy, carved from enchanted darkwood, and hummed with a decent amount of tension.

"Well, it’s not a complete loss," Silas said, slinging the bow over his broad shoulder.

He took the bow of the Hero.

"Fenna could probably use this, or some other archer back at the Keep. It’s significantly better than the standard bows."

He turned his attention back to the Starlight Arcanist, pushing the disappointing encounter out of his mind.

They had a realm to clear.

"Did you bring the contraption?" Silas asked Aeli, holding his hand out.

"I did, my Lord," Aeliana nodded sharply.

She reached into a hidden expanded pocket of her white robes and brought out the scanner.

It was a small and incredibly complex brass radar device.

Thora had made it over the past few days in the sweltering heat of the Warlord Foundry, completely obsessing over the new technology Silas had brought from Valoria.

It worked by passively absorbing the ambient mana in the air of the Secret Realm, using that stolen energy to bounce a highly sensitive sonar-like ping off the spatial layer to reveal exactly where dense concentrations of magical treasures were buried.

Aeliana handed it over to him with the brass casing warm to the touch.

Silas held the heavy device in his palm.

Since this was the First Layer of the anomaly, there was surely not any treasures here.

Eluned had explicitly told him during their briefing that the ancient architects usually started placing the real high-yield loot from the Second Layer downward, leaving the first floor as a barren monster-infested trap specifically designed to bleed out weak strike teams before they even reached the real center.

Silas pressed his thumb against the primary activation rune carved into the side of the brass casing.

HUMMM....

He used it and a low vibration came out as he activated it, buzzing deep into the bones of his forearm.

The pulse emitted from the device was completely invisible, traveling through the dark cavern like a ripple itself.

This was expected, since this particular stealth function had been crafted with Eluned and Morwenna’s help to ensure the radar didn’t trigger any ancient alarm runes left behind by the dead god.

’I am officially naming this thing the Treasure Radar.’ Silas thought, watching the intricate brass dials spin wildly behind the glass screen.

Just when he fully expected that nothing was going to come up on the blank screen and that they would have to find the staircase leading to the Second Layer manually.

PING!

A sharp high-pitched sound echoed from the device as a glowing gold light flared on the surface of the radar.

Silas and Aeli both jolted backward, letting out a synchronized undignified yelp of surprise.

"What?" Silas muttered, staring down at the glowing gold dot illuminating the glass screen.

"A positive signature?" Aeliana gasped, abandoning her composure and leaning over his arm to get a closer look.

"The mana density reading is astronomical, Lord Sy..." Aeliana confirmed, tapping her slender finger against the glass screen. "That is not a malfunction from what I can see... that is a genuine high-tier artifact."

"There is actually treasure on the First Layer?" Silas asked. "Well that completely defies the architectural design of Secret Realms Eluned laid out."

"Perhaps this deity was eccentric, my Lord," Aeliana suggested.

There was a solid glowing golden line projecting from the center of the radar’s screen, going from exactly where they were standing over to where the treasure was located, plotting a direct path deeper into the winding cavern.

"Let’s move," Silas ordered, gripping the brass device tightly.

They went ahead, following the golden line.

The duo moved rapidly through the dark winding sandstone tunnels with their boots kicking up dry dust however the First Layer wasn’t entirely empty.

As they pushed deeper into the suffocating heat, the sand beneath their feet began to violently shift and vibrate.

"SKREEEEEE!"

Some monsters attacked them.

Three massive armored sand-scorpions, each the size of a small transport carriage, erupted from the dunes.

Their thick carapaces were the color of dried bone, and they possessed massiv glowing red stingers dripping with highly corrosive venom.

They charged at the intruders, their massive pincers snapping with enough force to cleanly decapitate a man but Silas didn’t even have to draw his broadsword.

Aeliana cleared them quickly.

The Elf stepped smoothly in front of him with her hands flaring with a brilliant, freezing sapphire light that completely contrasted her usual starlight magic.

"Land Of Frost!" Aeliana chanted, her voice ringing out like chilled bells.

She slammed her palms toward the ground, projecting a sea of absolute-zero ice forward.

The freezing wave crashed over the charging scorpions, instantly halting their momentum.

The absolute zero temperature bypassed their thick armor plating, penetrating deep into their cores, making them freeze up inside out.

CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!

The three massive scorpions violently shattered into a thousand pieces of frozen meat and bloody ice, completely dead before they could even cross the tunnel.

"Clear, my Lord," Aeliana smiled warmly, turning back to him, clearly happy to be of use to her Lord.

"Good work. Keep moving," Silas praised her, stepping effortlessly over the shattered frozen scorpion claws.

Ten minutes later, the narrow tunnel finally opened up. The air grew significantly hotter, and the sound of combat preparations reached their ears.

They reached where they needed to be.

Silas immediately raised his hand, halting Aeliana’s advance.

They crouched down low, utilizing the natural terrain, and hid securely behind a massive wide sandstone rock that overlooked a sprawling, sunken dirt arena.

In the massive clearing ahead, the Guardian of the First Layer was currently being unsealed.

Silas peered carefully over the edge of the rock.

Down in the sunken arena, Elora and the rest of her strike team, including Jaxon and Maya, and the other high-tier Lords that were still alive from the initial drop, had all rounded around the center of the pit.

They had their weapons drawn with their summons positioned defensively in a wide perimeter, all staring intensely at the massive pile of shifting vibrating sand in the middle of the floor.

Silas looked down at the Treasure Radar in his hand.

The bright glowing gold dot on the screen was positioned exactly, perfectly in the dead center of the shifting sand pile.

Silas surmised the situation instantly.

"The radar shows that the treasure is the Boss... The loot is buried inside its chest cavity from what I can see."

"A brilliant defensive mechanism," Aeliana whispered beside him. "Force the invaders to exhaust their resources on the Guardian just to claim the prize."

Silas glanced across the massive arena, scanning the perimeter.

On the exact same kind of elevated rock outcropping on the complete opposite side of the cavern and hidden in the shadows, he saw movement.

Valerius, the arrogant gold-armored Unique Lord Elora had explicitly warned him about earlier at the staging ground, was currently creeping to the edge of his own ledge.

Right beside him was his own Hero, who was surprisingly a little, unassuming girl wearing an oversized gray cloak.

Both Silas and Valerius locked eyes across the massive, two-hundred-foot gap of the arena.

They stared at each other for exactly one second.

Then, completely utilizing mutual common sense, they immediately ignored each other.

Neither of them raised an alarm.

Neither of them shouted a warning to Elora’s team below. They both turned off the sides of their respective rocks, crouching back down into the shadows to observe the battle below in total silence.

Across the cavern, Valerius crouched low against the sandstone with a smug smirk spreading across his handsome face.

’Mia over here has the unique passive ability to sense high-tier treasure,’ Valerius thought, reaching out and affectionately patting the little girl’s hooded head. ’And she can sense a powerful treasure buried right inside that Boss. Once Elora and those other try-hard idiots kill it and exhaust their mana reserves, we’ll just drop down, snatch the loot right out from under them, and go! This is the life, man! Let the others do the heavy lifting!’

Valerius briefly glanced back across the cavern toward Silas’s rock with his smirk faltering slightly as a seed of doubt took root.

’Wait,’ Valerius frowned, his eyes narrowing in the dark. ’That can’t be what he’s here for, right? Is that guy actually trying to steal my strategy? Does he have a treasure-sensing artifact too?’

Down in the arena, the shifting pile of sand violently erupted as the Guardian fully formed.

It was a staggering, utterly terrifying monstrosity.

The monster was a giant, towering sand monster, built like a grotesque mutated centaur.

The lower half of its body was a massive, swirling vortex of hardened, abrasive sandstone that moved like a tornado, while its upper torso possessed eight massive, heavily muscled arms.

Each of the eight hands was holding a different crudely forged weapon made of compacted razor-sharp desert glass... there were jagged swords, heavy maces, and long spears.

Its featureless face possessed no mouth, but its eyes burned with hollow red fire that illuminated the dark arena.

"GRRROOOOAAAARRRRR!"

The Guardian groaned, letting out a deafening sandstorm that blasted across the arena.

The wind pressure threatened to blow the lighter Lords and their summons completely off their feet.

Harper didn’t hesitate. The purple-haired woman wasn’t going to cower as she wanted to establish immediate dominance over the entire raid group.

"Cover your eyes!" Harper screamed to Penelope and the other Lords, bracing her boots in the dirt.

Harper aggressively slammed her hands together, her purple hair whipping wildly in the wind as she rapidly made a complex incantation chant.

"Fulgur Annihilation!" Harper roared.

The air around her violently crackled with raw high-voltage electricity as she thrust her hands forward, firing off a massive powerful blast of violet lightning directly at the centaur’s chest.

CRACK-BOOM!

The lightning struck the monster dead center and the intense superheated energy of the blast was enough to instantly melt a massive gaping hole entirely through the monster’s chest, literally turning a huge part of the sand monster into solid, smoking glass.

’Ah... That woman is quite strong.’ Silas thought.