Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Chapter 167: The Secret Realm Of Ititius [VI / Bonus Chapter]

A sharp agonizing web of deep glowing white fractures instantly raced across the smooth surface of the orb, spreading outward from beneath their fingers like shattering ice.

Silas’s eyes widened in sudden realization and Valerius’s arrogant smirk instantly evaporated into pure panic.

"Fuck," Silas and Valerius said simultaneously with their voices overlapping in universal dread.

The exact second the syllable left their mouths, the cracked orb violently detonated.

It didn’t explode with shrapnel or fire.

An intense wave of pure golden light erupted outward from the exact point of impact between their palms.

The light expanded at the speed of a supernova, instantly swallowing Silas, Valerius, Aeliana, and Mia, before washing down over the sunken dirt arena below.

The golden wave slammed over Elora, Harper, Seraphina, Julian, Jaxon, Maya, and all of their summoned Heroes... everyone else really.

The light completely ignored their physical shields and magical barriers, saturating their biology with overwhelming spatial relocation mana.

The entire cavern violently folded in on itself.

Everyone in the arena was forcibly teleported out of the First Layer, dragged kicking and screaming through the dimensional floorboards toward the next layer down.

THUD!

Silas awoke with an involuntary gasp, his back slamming hard against solid, scorching ground.

The wind was briefly knocked out of his lungs, leaving him blinking up at a blinding deep amber sky that radiated an oppressive dry heat.

He slowly raised his right hand.

His fingers were still tightly clamped around his half of the shattered golden orb with the broken edge of the crystallized sand pulsing in a dying magical resonance.

Right next to him, lying flat on his back in the coarse sand, Valerius was laid out as well.

The gold-armored Lord let out a low, painful groan with his gauntleted fingers identically gripping the right hemisphere of the broken sphere.

The two Lords blinked up at the strange sky at the exact same time.

Then, operating on synchronized survival instincts, they both violently rolled to the side away from each other.

They pushed themselves up onto one knee in the sand, raising their respective halves of the broken orb between them like makeshift shields while aggressively analyzing the item.

The familiar glowing blue system tab immediately popped up in front of Silas’s vision, except the structural identity of the artifact had completely changed following the fracture:

[Name]: Ititius’s Fractured Key (Exhausted)

[Tier]: Tier 2 (Broken Remnant)

[Description]: A successfully activated dimensional transport node. By forcefully cracking the crystallized core before the standard, slow-burn portal to the second floor could naturally open, the users have successfully bypassed the labyrinthine intermediate layers and arrived directly on the True Vault Floor, where the genuine unlooted treasures of this Secret Realm are preserved.

[Note]: "Ah, ambitious little mortals! I see you possessed the greedy impatience required to shatter my core rather than walking down the stairs like civilized scholars! I congratulate you on not wasting your time in the dirt above. I sincerely hope you survive long enough for me to see your adorable terrified reactions to the special gifts I have left buried in the sand for you down here. Do try to die entertainingly! — Ititius."

Silas read the floating text with his jaw tightening as a massive migraine-inducing throb pulsed behind his temples.

’An ancient sand god left a patronizing sticky note in the system interface?’ Silas thought as he dismissed the blue screen with a flick of his wrist. ’Of course he did... Every single one of these ancient dead deities is an irredeemable troll. They build complex, multi-layered dungeons just to mock anyone who actually figures out how to speed-run their traps...’

Both of them sat up fully in the sand, lowering the useless broken halves of the orb and casting a wary glance at each other.

They had both planned on keeping the treasure entirely for themselves.

If both of them hadn’t lunged at it across the arena at the exact same microsecond, and if they hadn’t applied enough conflicting physical pressure to violently crack the core in mid-air, then they might have been stuck fighting a pointless drawn-out territorial skirmish against Seraphina and Harper back in the First Layer while the real loot sat down here untouched.

Their mutual greed had paradoxically saved them hours of dungeon crawling.

Silas slowly stood up, brushing the hot coarse sand off his dark trousers, and looked forward to survey their new surroundings.

They were in a desert.

An endless rolling sea of massive, towering sand dunes that stretched out toward a distant heat-shimmering horizon under the burning amber sky.

The air was very dry and sitting a few yards away on a low, wind-carved sandstone rock was Aeliana.

The Starlight Arcanist looked completely unbothered by the brutal heat or the violent spatial transition, her white spider-silk robes remaining immaculately clean but what made Silas pause was the little girl currently sitting comfortably on her lap.

It was Mia, Valerius’s summoned Hero.

The little girl was leaning her head against Aeliana’s shoulder, looking completely relaxed and content as the Elf gently smoothed down the hood of her gray cloak.

Valerius pushed himself up from the sand, his mythril armor clanking loudly, and stared at the sight in genuine shock.

Mia had never been comfortable with anyone else apart from him since the day he had summoned her to his territory; she usually hid behind his cape and hissed at stranger Lords like a feral cat.

Seeing her sitting happily on another Lord’s summon made his jaw drop slightly.

Both of them turned back as Silas walked closer to the rock.

As Silas approached, he got a clear look at the little girl’s face beneath her oversized hood.

She had messy, snow-white hair that framed her round cheeks, large, brilliant green eyes that glowed with an intuitive light, and... most noticeably long, delicately pointed ears that peeked out from her locks.

She had long ears just like Aeli.

Both Lords blinked, looking back and forth between the tall, pristine silver-haired Elf and the small, white-haired girl sitting on her lap.

The resemblance was unmistakable... they both possessed the distinct, high-fantasy elven bone structure and the same ethereal aura.

Aeliana looked up from the little girl, meeting Silas’s questioning gaze with a soft warm smile of her own.

"Lord Sy," Aeliana explained smoothly. "This little girl... is actually a direct relative of mine from the high astral branches. An elven girl of my lineage who I hadn’t seen in a very long time before I was summoned to this place."

Aeli was not going to mention that this Little girl was her Grand-Aunt of course, that felt quite strange to say out loud.

She turned her glowing silver eyes toward Valerius, offering the gold-armored Lord a formal respectful inclination of her head.

Because she had never bothered to ask for his identity, she didn’t use his name.

"I must extend my sincere thanks to you, Sir Lord," Aeliana said gracefully to Valerius. "By summoning her to your territory and bringing her into this Secret Realm today, you have given us the opportunity to see each other again across the void. I am deeply in your debt for keeping her safe."

Mia looked up from Aeliana’s lap with her big green eyes locking onto Silas’s towering frame.

She offered him a bright incredibly adorable smile that completely lacked any standard deception or scheming.

"Thank you too, Mister Lord!" Mia chirped happily, thanking Silas as well despite not knowing his name either. "If you hadn’t jumped and grabbed the shiny ball with my Master, we wouldn’t have broken it and ended up here together!"

She suddenly clapped her small hands together, her pointed ears twitching excitedly as a brilliant idea popped into her head.

"Hey!" Mia suggested enthusiastically, looking between Silas and Valerius with wide hopeful eyes. "Why don’t we all stick together and be friends while we’re down here? If we don’t fight each other, and we all work together as a big team, I can use my special tracking magic to help us find lots and lots of hidden treasures buried in the sand! There’s enough for everyone!"

’I don’t know why she’s roleplaying like a little girl though...’ Aeliana thought.

The entire desert fell dead silent for two seconds.

Valerius’s eyes bugged out of his skull.

The gold-armored Lord slapped his gauntleted hand directly over his face, letting out a loud painful groan of pure frustration.

"Mia!" Valerius scolded her frantically, waving his hands in the air. "You shouldn’t have told them that! Why are you broadcasting our primary strategic advantage to a rival Lord?! You’re supposed to keep the tracking passive a secret so we can monopolize the drops!"

Mia simply blinked her big green eyes, tilting her head to the side with an expression of complete innocence.

"Master, were we hiding it?" Mia asked genuinely. "You never told me it was a secret! You just told me to point at the shiny things!"

Valerius groaned again with his shoulders slumping in defeat.

One annoying, highly consistent thing about this little elven girl was that she had a terrible non-existent memory for complex military orders or covert operational parameters; if an instruction wasn’t explicitly repeated three times, she just followed her own wholesome instincts.

But looking at her happy face, and realizing she had just been reunited with an elder of her lineage, Valerius couldn’t bring himself to stay mad.

He let out a long sigh, completely forgiving her blunder, and turned to face Silas properly.

He straightened his gold-trimmed mythril armor, brushing a layer of desert dust off his chest plate, and extended his right hand toward the Warlord with a crisp, formal aristocratic posture.

"I am Lord Valerius of the House of Sterling," Valerius introduced himself formally, stating his prominent surname with clear pride.

He looked Silas dead in the eye.

"Despite what my armor might suggest, I don’t care about City politics. I don’t discriminate whether a man was summoned from the lowest mud-drenched slums of the outer wards or born into the highest silk-sheeted echelon of society. In the Sovereign Realm, all that matters is whether you have the physical power and the core strength to fight when the monsters surround you."

Silas looked at the extended hand.

He didn’t see the slimy backstabbing arrogance of a corporate parasite. He saw a warrior who valued strength above bloodlines and he liked it.

Silas reached out and took his hand, gripping the iron gauntlet firmly.

"Silas Graves," Silas introduced himself smoothly, matching the grip. "It’s an honor to meet a Lord whose brain isn’t entirely made of mush."

He paused, his golden-ringed eyes narrowing slightly as he added his fundamental condition for their newfound alliance.

"This temporary truce will go nicely between our factions... just as long as you don’t get in the way of my treasure hunting. If we spot a high-tier core, we split it cleanly or we fight for it honestly. No backstabbing."

Valerius smiled, a fierce expression that bared his teeth. He aggressively tightened his grip around Silas’s hand, pouring his physical strength into the handshake.

Silas didn’t flinch. He squeezed right back with his muscle density.

The two towering Lords stood there in the baking desert sun, actively squeezing each other’s hands with terrifying bone-crushing force.

The leather of Silas’s glove creaked against the iron of Valerius’s gauntlet, and thick, vascular veins popped out along the sides of their forearms and temples as they silently tested each other’s physical limits in a mutual show of dominance.

After five agonizing seconds of neither man yielding a single millimeter of grip strength, Valerius let out a low chuckle through clenched teeth.

"Likewise, Graves..." Valerius ground out with his jaw muscles flexing. "Likewise. No backstabbing."

They released their hands simultaneously, stepping back and shaking out their fingers with mutual respect.

Valerius turned toward the sandstone rock where Mia was still sitting with Aeliana.

"Alright, Mia!" Valerius commanded, clapping his gauntleted hands together to shift their focus to the mission. "Rev up the engines! Scan the horizon and find us a high-tier treasure! We didn’t crack an ancient god’s teleportation sphere just to stand around burning our skin in this desert for nothing!"

"Yay!" Mia cheered loudly, hopping down off Aeliana’s lap onto the hot sand.

The little white-haired girl closed her eyes, planting her small boots firmly in the dirt, and started her magical tracking process.

Silas watched her closely, expecting her to pull out a mechanical brass contraption like Thora’s radar or cast an glowing eye-spell into the sky.

Instead, Silas’s underlying suspicion regarding her unique utility was instantly confirmed.

She didn’t need an artifact. She could detect hidden treasures naturally, but not at all in the conventional line-of-sight way he had expected.

An invisible pressurized wave of ambient mana violently erupted outward from the little girl’s small frame.

The pulse didn’t travel through the air... it traveled directly through the ground, causing the trillions of sand grains across the desert floor to physically vibrate and hum in unison.

The wave spread outward in a massive, three-hundred-degree radius around the woman, moving across the dunes as if she was the living radar herself, mapping the subterranean density of the entire Secret Realm floor in real time.

Two seconds later, Mia’s green eyes snapped open, glowing with a brilliant light.

She lifted her small hand and pointed directly toward a massive, shifting sand dune located about four hundred yards forward across the desert basin.

"I can sense treasure right over there, up ahead!" Mia announced excitedly, her pointed ears quivering with positivity. "It’s buried just beneath the surface of that big hill!"