Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Chapter 166: The Secret Realm Of Ititius [V / Bonus Chapter]

"Got it!" Harper cheered, lowering her hands with a smug victorious smirk but the victory was premature.

The monster didn’t fall.

It didn’t even flinch.

It simply looked down at the smoking glass hole in its chest with its burning red eyes. The eight arms flexed simultaneously, and the Guardian forcefully channeled the ambient mana of the cavern.

CRUNCH!

The glass violently shattered from the inside out, turning instantly back into swirling, abrasive sand.

The hole completely closed up, healing the monster flawlessly in less than two seconds.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," Harper cursed loudly, the color draining from her face as she stepped backward.

The monster was a true Guardian.

It was heavily armored by the shifting sand, regenerating with the sand and incredibly lethal in close quarters. It was not weak, and it was going to be a brutally tuff fight.

"Scatter! Flank its legs! Do not let it corner the casters!" Elora commanded with her voice cutting through the deafening roar of the sandstorm.

"I’m drawing its aggro!" Jaxon roared, rushing forward.

The armored tank Lord raised his heavy iron tower shield, aggressively charging the beast to keep its attention away from Harper and Maya.

"GRRROAAAR!"

The centaur swung one of its massive, glass-forged maces downward in a brutal, crushing arc.

CRASH!

The impact drove Jaxon directly to his knees with his heavy boots sliding backward through the dirt, carving two deep trenches into the arena floor.

The iron surface of his shield groaned agonizingly, deep spiderweb cracks forming across the reinforced metal.

"My arm!" Jaxon shouted, gritting his teeth in pure agony as his shoulder threatened to dislocate. "It hits like a freight train! Someone hit its flank!"

Everyone was contributing to the chaos.

Maya’s one-armed archer Hero dropped to one knee, drawing his massive darkwood longbow back with his teeth with his lone arm providing the stability.

"Piercing Volley!" the archer shouted.

THWIP! THWIP! THWIP!

He fired volley after volley of highly explosive mana arrows directly into the monster’s burning red eyes, detonating against its face and blinding it temporarily.

Julian, Elora’s arrogant cousin, was actually proving mildly useful, though it was out of self-preservation.

He stayed in the backline, using his pristine silver armor to deflect stray blasts of abrasive sand while firing bursts at the centaur’s flanks from his ornate, jewel-encrusted wand.

"Keep it away from me, you peasants!" Julian cursed frantically, firing a blast that successfully chipped a massive chunk of sandstone off the monster’s lower leg. "I am not getting my armor scratched in this filthy pit!"

"GRROAAAR!"

The Sand Boss realized the ranged attacks were whittling it down so it didn’t just swing its weapons. It slammed its lower, tornado-like hooves directly into the dirt.

RUMBLE!

The sand around its legs violently coalesced, rising upward and rapidly forming six smaller aggressive mini-versions of itself.

The mini-centaurs, each wielding jagged glass daggers, let out high-pitched screeches and immediately charged the ranged casters.

"Adds! We have adds!" Maya screamed in absolute panic, frantically backing away as a mini-centaur lunged at her with its dagger raised.

"I’ve got them! Stay behind me!" Harper yelled, her purple eyes flashing with raw power.

She unleashed another wide-area web of violent purple lightning, sweeping her hands forcefully across the dirt.

FZZZZZZZZT!

The high-voltage web caught three of the mini-bosses mid-leap, frying them instantly into smoking glass statues that shattered into harmless piles of sand upon hitting the arena floor.

"My turn!" Elora shouted over the din of combat.

The City Lord’s daughter opened her glowing spellbook that was linked with her soul. She didn’t hold back her strength as she was playing for keeps.

"Glacial Barrage!" Elora chanted rapidly.

A massive array of heavy, razor-sharp ice-lances materialized in the freezing air above her head.

She hurled them forward with a sweeping gesture, while her ice-mage summon instantly cast a freezing aura onto the ground directly beneath the centaur’s hooves, desperately trying to lock the massive beast in place.

CRASH! CRASH! CRASH!

The ice-lances slammed violently into the centaur’s torso, burying themselves deep into the sand and freezing the shifting particles into hard brittle chunks of ice-packed mud.

Up on the rock, Silas watched the chaotic raid unfold, his hands resting casually on the hilt of his broadsword.

’They’re wearing it down,’ Silas analyzed, perfectly tracking the monster’s regeneration rate through the swirling dust. ’Every time Harper blasts it with lightning or Elora freezes it with a barrage, it takes slightly longer for the sand to reform and heal the wound so its internal core is running out of mana to pull from the environment.’

Down in the pit, the battle was reaching its bloody climax.

People were wounded.

Jaxon’s left arm was hanging completely limply at his side with his heavy iron shield completely shattered into useless pieces of scrap metal.

Harper was panting heavily, her expensive blazer covered in dirt and soot, her mana reserves nearly entirely depleted.

Julian was screaming terrified curses, his pristine silver armor deeply dented from a glancing near-lethal blow by a glass spear.

It was a true brutal raid fight, and the strike team was running on fumes, well mostly because most of the other Lords weren’t even engaging at full power and nobody except idiots were showing all of their cards

"I can’t hold its aggro much longer!" Jaxon shouted, coughing up a thick mouthful of blood onto the sand.

"Now!" Elora yelled out as he dropped her spellbook into the sand, ignoring the expensive artifact, and threw both of her hands forward.

She unleashed every "single" drop of remaining ice mana she possessed in her Blue Core.

’I’m not an idiot... This isn’t even a quarter of my capabilities and I’m sure it’s the same for that purple haired woman, but I have to make it look like I’m trying.’ Elora thought, she had read a book that said that men loved women who struggled to achieve their goals.

Or something like that...

A blinding howling wave of absolute-zero frost crashed over the monster.

The freezing temperature was so severe it completely halted the centaur’s internal mechanics, freezing its eight massive arms securely to its torso.

"GROOOARR!" The beast let out a final muffled sound as it was encased entirely in a thick immobilizing block of solid crystalline ice.

Lady Seraphina, the striking red-haired daughter of the World Council magistrate, saw her opening.

Seraphina had been stuck on defense for the entire raid, using her curved dagger to parry the mini-bosses and protect the squishy casters, conserving her energy for this exact moment.

She wasn’t on defense anymore.

Seraphina gripped the hilt of her dagger with both hands, her crimson-scaled leather armor shifting as she dropped into a low sprinter’s stance.

She aggressively channeled an immense amount of pure, superheated fire mana directly into the blade.

The steel glowed blindingly white-hot, radiating a wave of heat so intense it instantly evaporated the falling snow and steam lingering in the cavern.

"Burn," Seraphina commanded softly with her red eyes locking onto the frozen beast.

She dashed forward at the frozen monster.

Seraphina moved with explosive velocity, leaving a trailing comet of roaring fire blurring across the sandy arena behind her boots as she ended it in one single, perfectly executed and devastating cut.

SHING!

Seraphina slashed horizontally directly through the frozen sand-packed torso of the massive Guardian.

The concentrated heat of her white-hot blade melted the sand instantly upon contact, completely bypassing its physical density and severing the structural integrity of the beast.

She appeared at its back with her boots skidding to a halt in the dirt as her back was turned to the monster.

A microsecond later, the roaring flames followed her cut.

FWOOSH!

A massive horizontal ring of explosive fire violently erupted from the exact cut line, roaring outward and completely severing the upper half of the centaur from its lower body.

Seraphina calmly stood up, flipping her curved dagger in her hand, and smoothly sheathed the blade at her hip with a sharp sound.

The monster turned entirely to solid brittle glass from the extreme change in temperature then, it violently shattered into a million useless pieces.

CRASH!

It rained harmless glass shards down onto the exhausted panting raid team like a glittering shower.

Jaxon collapsed onto his back in the sand, groaning in pain, while Harper leaned on her knees, wiping sweat and soot from her brow, completely "exhausted."

Floating perfectly in the air, exactly where the center of the monster’s chest had been, was a massive cut golden core.

The treasure...

The golden core floated motionless in the hot air directly over the center of the sunken dirt arena.

It pulsed with a beat of mana illuminating the glass-shattered remains of the centaur Guardian with a warm intoxicating light.

For a single second, the members of the raid team just stared at it with their chests heaving as they caught their breath in the aftermath of Seraphina’s devastating flame-slash.

Then, the greed kicked in.

"I claim the core!" Lady Seraphina announced immediately, her melodious voice ringing out over the quiet pit as she took a firm possessive step forward in her crimson-scaled armor. "My blade severed its structure and dealt the lethal blow. By all standard rules of raid engagement, the primary boss drop belongs to my faction!"

"Like hell it does!" Harper snapped right back, her purple hair messy from the sandstorm as she pushed herself up from her knees.

She pointed a dirt-smeared finger at the World Council magistrate’s daughter. "I blew a glass hole through its chest in the opening three seconds and cleared half the mini-bosses! You spent ten minutes hiding behind a parry stance while my lightning kept it from stepping on our support mages! That core is going to me!"

"Both of you need to calm down and look at the actual distribution metrics!" Elora argued loudly, her City Lord authority flaring up as she aggressively wiped a smudge of soot from her cheek.

She didn’t argue with her words alone as she raised her left wrist and directly activated her Lord tab.

She aimed the scanner lens of her interface straight at the floating golden orb.

A sleek translucent blue holographic window immediately projected outward into the air between the arguing women, displaying the exact system parameters of the boss drop for everyone in the arena to see.

With a special device that Elora had, she could show her tabs to other people.

[Name]: Ititius’s Spatial Key

[Tier]: Tier 2

[Description]: A dimensional transport node forged from the crystallized core of a sand deity. Activating or fracturing this node completely bypasses the standard dungeon progression architecture, forcibly teleporting the user and any physically tethered entities directly to the hidden vault floor where the true unmapped treasures of the Secret Realm are stored.

"Look at the classification!" Elora commanded, gesturing sharply at the floating text. "It isn’t a weapon core or a baseline mana battery! It’s a Tier 2 dimensional teleporter! It’s the direct key to the actual treasure vault! We are not splitting this up based on who got the last hit... we need to coordinate our deployment before we do anything else."

’I’m tired of doing this to impress that ma—’

CRACK!

A deafening violent tremor suddenly shook the entire cavern as the sound of solid bedrock violently shattering echoed from the high ceiling, completely alarming everyone in the dirt pit below.

Before Elora, Harper, or Seraphina could even raise their weapons to defend the floating orb, two distinct high-velocity streaks of pure speed erupted from the elevated rock outcroppings on opposite sides of the arena.

From the dark ledge on the left, Silas and Aeliana shot through the air.

Silas didn’t bother using a ladder or finding a safe path down; he had simply loaded his leg muscles like hydraulic springs and launched himself two hundred feet across the open pit with his dark trench coat whipping wildly behind him like the wings of a predatory bird.

Right beside him, utilizing her passive Elven Swiftness, Aeliana surfed the atmospheric displacement of his jump, blurring through the air with effortless zero-gravity grace.

Simultaneously, from the shadow-shrouded ledge on the right side of the cavern, Valerius and his little cloaked Hero, Mia, launched themselves into the open air with equal greed.

All four airborne figures converged on the exact same coordinate in the center of the arena at the exact same microsecond.

"Mine!" Valerius roared, his golden mythril armor gleaming in the artificial light as he thrust his hand forward.

"Get off it!" Silas barked right back, extending his right arm.

Both of them touched the glowing orb in mid-air simultaneously.

Silas’s large right hand clamped down with crushing vise-like force over the left hemisphere of the golden sphere, while Valerius’s gauntleted fingers locked in an unyielding death-grip over the right hemisphere.

Suspended thirty feet above the glass-littered arena floor, completely defying gravity for a split second by the sheer momentum of their collision, both Lords gritted their teeth at each other.

Their faces were inches apart with their eyes locking in a ferocious battle of dominance.

Veins bulged along Silas’s forearms as he tried to physically rip the artifact out of the gold-armored man’s grasp while Valerius’s jaw set in stubborn refusal-to-lose defiance.

Neither of them let go. Neither of them yielded an inch of kinetic ground.

Under the immense, conflicting pressure of two powerful Lords squeezing it from opposite directions with a lot of power, the fragile Tier 2 artifact couldn’t handle the strain.

The golden sphere began glowing blindingly bright.

CRACK!