Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Chapter 173: The Secret Realm Of Ititius [XII / Bonus Chapter]

"Aeli, I can explain," Silas whispered with his voice hushed as he tried to carefully untangle his numb right arm from beneath the sleeping girl’s head. "It was a training session. We sparred with water magic. I dropped my guard, and she literally chopped me in the neck and knocked me out... I didn’t invite her to use me as a mattress."

Aeliana didn’t say a single word. She simply turned her face the completely other way, refusing to meet his eyes.

Her delicate pointed elven ears twitched with silent indignation.

Before Silas could attempt to salvage his dignity any further, the weight on his arm shifted.

Mia stirred.

The little white-haired Grandmaster let out a soft, highly exaggerated yawn, stretching her small arms high above her head.

"Haaahhh~"

She blinked her large green eyes open, looking completely innocent as she effortlessly rolled off of him, hopped to her feet, and casually dusted the frost off her gray cloak.

Silas let out an exhausted sigh as he pushed himself up off the freezing ice floor, sitting up and rubbing the sore muscles at the base of his neck where she had struck him.

From the other side of the dividing ice wall, the loud clank of boots echoed through the cavern.

Valerius stepped out from his private quarters, fully armored and eager to start the day.

He adjusted the thick leather straps on his iron gauntlets with a confident smirk plastered across his handsome face as he looked toward the cavern exit.

"Alright," Valerius announced loudly, clapping his metal hands together with a sharp sound. "Let’s get treasure hunting. I want at least three artifacts before noon—"

He paused mid-sentence.

The gold-armored Lord looked between Silas’s exhausted stiff posture on the floor, Aeliana’s icy glare facing the wall, and Mia’s innocent smile.

Valerius raised a skeptical eyebrow with his combat intuition instantly sensing the incredibly awkward tension filling the frozen room.

"Did something happen?" Valerius asked, his eyes darting between the three of them.

Before Silas could even open his mouth to address the bizarre dispute, a voice shattered the absolute silence of the desert layer.

It didn’t come from outside the ice cavern nor did it come from a hidden mechanical speaker.

The sound resonated directly inside their skulls, echoing through the very fabric of the spatial layer itself, causing the solid ice walls of their shelter to boom with a strange high-frequency magical sound.

"Hello, my lovely, greedy little intruders!"

It was a goofy obnoxiously cheerful voice that sounded out of place in a dungeon built by a dead deity.

Valerius didn’t hesitate for a microsecond.

His Lord instincts flared instantly as he drew his mythril longsword with a sharp, ringing sound and his eyes darting wildly around the corners of the ice shelter as he stepped aggressively toward the entrance.

"Show yourself!" Valerius demanded to the empty air, his mana core flaring.

Valerius was already lowering his center of gravity, charging outside to confront the speaker and swing his blade at whoever had breached their perimeter, but Silas lunged forward from his seated position.

He firmly grabbed the gold-armored Lord by the back of his shoulder plate, holding him back with raw physical strength.

"Hold on, Sterling," Silas warned, his golden-ringed eyes narrowing as he analyzed the ambient mana flowing through the air. "That’s not a person standing outside. It’s a broadcast from what I can see..."

The goofy voice continued, ignoring Valerius’s aggressive outburst completely.

"First of all, I want to formally thank everybody for entering my little domain!" the voice chimed happily, like it was that of a stage host. "It has been dreadfully boring down here for the last ten thousand years! Now, if you are currently drawing your weapons and wanting to shout at the sky to challenge me, please lower your blades. It is completely useless! This is just a spatial recording left behind by me... the great Ititus before I gracefully passed on from the mortal coil!"

Valerius slowly lowered his sword with his jaw tightening as he stared up through the translucent ice ceiling at the featureless amber sky.

"If this specific recording was triggered," the dead god continued cheerfully, "then surely this is your second day in here which means you successfully bypassed my beautiful upper labyrinth. Clever! But be warned, the structural integrity of this Secret Realm will only last for about six days before it violently collapses and throws you all out! So you really don’t have much time~!"

The incredibly cheerful and almost musical tone of the dead God’s voice discussing like this made Silas aggressively grit his teeth.

"Now," Ititus’s recording shifted, taking on a deeply patronizing, highly mocking tone. "As for the people down here who possess the rare magical ability to sense treasures, or who brought expensive little mechanical gadgets from the surface to track my loot..."

The god paused for dramatic effect.

"How were the mirages?" Ititus taunted them directly, his voice practically dripping with smug satisfaction. "Did you enjoy digging up ordinary rocks?"

"You son of a bitch!" Valerius roared at the ceiling with his composure completely shattering.

"I am going to find your tomb and turn your skeleton into a coffee table!" Silas complained furiously right alongside him with his calloused hands balling into tight fists as the exhaustion of digging fifty useless holes in the baking sun burned in his memory.

The recording actually laughed... a booming laugh that echoed across the endless dunes.

"I knew you would hate that!" Ititus chuckled warmly. "Now... enough games. For your first goal of today, if you wish to find real treasure, all of you will be facing a mandatory battle against one of my very personal guardians."

All of them paused.

Beneath their heavy boots, the solid ice of the shelter vibrated as the entire layer violently rumbled with a deep tectonic groan that shook the massive sand dunes outside and caused loose granules of dirt to cascade down the slopes like miniature avalanches.

"Don’t worry," the God’s voice reassured them breezily. "The guardian’s baseline stats will be tuned down quite a lot from its original divine peak! However, embedded deep inside this very monster is a peculiar treasure that I know will be immensely beneficial to any Lord and their terrestrial territories."

Silas perked up, his tactical Lord logic immediately engaging, pushing past his annoyance.

"It is a Realm Seed," Ititus announced proudly. "Consuming this seed and planting it within the borders of your territory will permanently expand your territory by five miles in every direction... progressively though! It will fortify your existing defensive structures with unbreakable bedrock, drastically increase your mana density, and expand your maximum population cap! But not only that... whoever assimilates the core of this seed into their own body will be granted a permanent, high-tier affinity for Sand Magic!"

The transmission clicked sharply, and the voice vanished leaving only the hollow howling of the desert wind.

All of them perked up instantly.

’A Realm Seed?’ Silas thought rapidly, his mind spinning with the immense tactical possibilities. ’I already have a Sand Affinity from being a Gold core, but who’s to say I couldn’t give it to someone like Rowenna back at the territory?’

The image of his Head Maid flashed in his mind.

Rowenna already possessed a devastating Gravity affinity that allowed her to crush enemies into the dirt.

If she could manipulate the mass of gravity while simultaneously commanding an ocean of abrasive slicing sand... she would become an unstoppable walking natural disaster.

She would have gravity and different kinds of magic as well as Sand, which would be a terrifying upgrade to their defensive line.

"We are getting that seed," Silas declared flatly, turning to Valerius.

"Try and stop me," Valerius challenged right back, slamming his sword into its scabbard with a sharp click.

They departed for the coordinates immediately.

The distant continuous rumble of the Guardian forming provided a clear undeniable tectonic beacon across the wasteland.

Stepping out of the freezing ice shelter into the blinding, baking heat of the desert, Mia clapped her small hands together.

"Currents freeze, carve the dunes!" Mia chanted smoothly, her voice commanding and precise, completely lacking the playful tone of a child.

She didn’t create a defensive shield.

She utilized the moisture from the air to rapidly construct a massive and perfectly smooth sled made of solid dark blue ice. It hovered exactly an inch above the baking sand, actively chilling the air around it.

"Get on!" Mia cheered.

She jumped up, gracefully landing and clinging to her Lord, planting her boots firmly on Valerius’s broad armored shoulders like a surfer preparing to ride a wave.

Mia looked back over her shoulder. "Aeliana, cling to your own!"

Aeliana, still acting cold and distant toward Silas, hesitated for a fraction of a second but the ice sled was already beginning to hum with mana.

She stepped onto the back of the construct, reached out, and wrapped her slender arms tightly around Silas’s stomach, pressing her chest flush against his back.

"Sorry for acting like that with you Lord Sy but you’ve never held me to sleep before."

Silas’s eyes widened.

"So—"

Then, Mia made them move.

She aggressively channeled a continuous high-pressure stream of water magic directly from the rear of the sled.

The propulsion was instantaneous and violent.

WHOOSH!

The ice sled launched forward across the desert dunes with terrifying breakneck velocity, completely ignoring the friction of the sand.

Valerius was actively surfing the front of the construct with Mia on his shoulders, laughing loudly as the hot wind whipped his hair, while Silas stood planted in the center, bracing his heavy boots against the brutal G-force.

Behind him, Aeliana completely lost her stoic composure.

"Ahhhhh!" Aeliana screamed, burying her face directly into the back of Silas’s dark trench coat and clinging to his stomach for dear life as the sled launched fifty feet into the air over the crest of a massive sand dune.

Minutes later, they violently skidded to a halt.

The massive ice sled shattered into a cloud of harmless snow as they arrived at the edge of the designated arena.

Silas and Valerius immediately dropped low, dragging their respective Heroes down with them.

They slid securely behind a massive, towering sandstone boulder overlooking a sprawling perfectly flat expanse of baked desert glass.

Down in the massive clearing, the monster was currently forming.

The other Lords from the drop were already gathering, forming a loose perimeter around the epicenter.

Silas peered around the jagged edge of the rock, scanning the battlefield geometry.

He saw Harper, her purple hair whipping in the wind as she stood aggressively at the front line, electricity already sparking erratically from her fingertips.

Twenty yards to her left was Elora Verinda, her glowing soul-bound spellbook open as her disciplined Ice-Mage Hero prepared a defensive ward.

Julian was there too, hiding cowardly behind a jagged rock, occasionally poking his wand out to check if the coast was clear.

There was also that other Lord Elora had explicitly warned them to be careful of... the arrogant gold-armored spear-wielder who commanded a massive, heavily plated rhino summon.

He was currently barking loud, useless orders at the lesser nobles, trying to force them to form a crude shield wall in front of him.

The only one notably missing from the clearing was Seraphina.

"Let them take the whole thing..." Valerius whispered, crouching next to Silas with a wicked smile on his face.

Down in the exact center of the glass arena, the sand monster fully formed.

It was utterly bizarre, yet undeniably terrifying.

The monster was an eight-foot-tall humanoid constructed entirely of densely packed, shifting yellow sand.

The grains of its body constantly rotated like a sandstorm but it wasn’t wielding desert glass or sandstone.

It possessed two massive clawed hands, and it was holding a massive swirling staff made entirely of snow and ice.

The elemental contradiction was glaring, a testament to the dead god’s twisted sense of humor.

"Come," the Sand Guardian rumbled, its voice sounding like grinding tectonic plates dragging across each other.

It didn’t wait to be surrounded as it immediately seized the initiative, starting the engagement by rushing forward with explosive unnatural speed directly at one of the Lords in the front line.

The young Lord in heavy iron armor raised his kite shield, bracing his boots against the smooth glass.

The Guardian swung the massive staff made of snow in a brutal overhead arc.

CRACK!

The sheer force behind the blow was astronomical.

The impact completely shattered the Lord’s steel shield into useless, flying shrapnel.

"Ahhhhh!"

The Lord screamed as the physical blow bypassed his broken guard and connected directly with his chest plate, physically lifting him off his feet and making him fly backward through the air like a discarded ragdoll.

He crashed into a dune fifty feet away, completely incapacitated in a single strike.