Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Chapter 175: The Secret Realm Of Ititius [XIV / Bonus Chapter]

It violently ripped its boots free from the ice, shattering Elora’s bind.

CRUNCH!

"That was good..."

It raised its snow staff high above its head with the ice glowing with a blinding light, and slammed it down directly into the center of the arena.

A blizzard erupted with the freezing wind physically pushing all the Lords back twenty feet.

"It’s time to go Phase tw—" the Guardian rumbled, preparing to initiate its second health bar and regenerate its sand armor.

It never got the chance.

From the high ridge of the dunes directly behind the arena, they all heard a furious tear-soaked scream of rage that completely drowned out the howling wind of the blizzard.

"SILAS GRAVES!"

Seraphina burst over the crest of the dune, sprinting at full terrifying speed.

Silas was running for his life just ten yards ahead of her, his dark trench coat flapping wildly as he inadvertently led the furious flushed red-haired noble directly back into the combat arena.

Seraphina didn’t care about the raid.

She didn’t care about the Guardian and she didn’t even care about the Realm Seed.

The noblewoman was completely consumed by humiliation and a burning desire for murder.

She aggressively channeled every single drop of her remaining fire mana in her core into her weapon as she didn’t hold back a single percentage of her power.

She threw her curved dagger forward with all her might, putting her full strength into the projectile and it burned like a descending meteor.

The dagger tore through the air, radiating so much intense superheated energy that it literally burned the sand floating in the air where it touched, turning the dust into trailing glowing sparks of molten glass.

Silas heard the roaring flames closing in behind him and he didn’t look back to check the distance.

He simply threw his entire body sideways, diving face-first into the dirt and rolling aggressively.

’It’s a fucking curse to limit my physical abilities anytime I’m around these fuckers!’ Silas thought as the meteor-strike dagger flew right past the exact coordinate where his head had been a microsecond prior.

It continued its blazing trajectory, soaring straight past him and directly into the center of the arena.

KA-BOOOOOOM!

The superheated dagger impacted the Guardian directly in the center of its chest, striking exactly where Valerius had just carved a deep trench with his wind magic and Mia had drilled with her pressurized water.

The explosion was catastrophic.

The overwhelming thermal shock of a fully powered fire strike, combined perfectly with the structural damage caused by the help of the other previous attacks, was simply too much for the divine construct to withstand.

The Guardian’s core violently destabilized as the packed sand melted into useless slag.

"A fitting... end..." the monster made a final, grinding remark as its existence collapsed then, it popped.

The entire eight-foot monster violently exploded into a massive harmless shower of dry sand, steam, and melted snow, washing over the exhausted Lords.

Floating perfectly in the air, right where the monster’s chest had been seconds prior, a glowing smooth Gold Seed was revealed.

Valerius was the closest and his eyes went wide with pure greed.

He immediately used a concentrated explosive burst of wind magic directly beneath his boots to reach it, launching himself straight up into the air.

He reached out with his iron gauntlet, zoning in on the priceless prize.

Everything turned into slow motion.

Valerius could see the intricate, pulsing runes carved deep into the surface of the golden seed as his gauntleted fingers were mere inches away from claiming the ultimate territorial upgrade!

’Hah!’ Valerius thought triumphantly, a massive, victorious grin spreading across his handsome face. ’It’s min—’

VWOOP!

A hand appeared out of thin air and snagged the seed right out of the sky.

Valerius blinked with his hand, grasping completely empty space.

His momentum died, and he began to fall back toward the sand as he looked up, his brain desperately trying to process the theft.

Hanging in the air directly above him, bathed in the fading blue-white glow of spatial magic, was Silas.

The Lord had a tight secure grip on the Gold Seed and clinging tightly to his back, her arms wrapped securely around his neck, was Aeliana, who had flawlessly timed her high-tier Spatial Teleportation to intersect precisely with the loot drop.

Valerius stared up at the duo as gravity pulled him down with a smug look washing over his features.

"Fu... fuck me," Valerius whispered, realizing he had just been flawlessly robbed by a coordinated team effort.

Aeliana appeared right behind Silas as his boots touched the glass, hugging him tighter as the starlight flared again.

"Got it." Silas smirked, tossing the seed into his inventory.

With a blinding flash of silver starlight, they vanished entirely from the arena, teleporting away with the loot and leaving Valerius to fall face-first into the sand to face his fate.

THUMP!

Valerius dropped out of the sky like a stone with his heavy mythril boots hitting the scorched melted glass of the arena floor with a ringing sound.

He didn’t stumble as he bent his knees, smoothly absorbing the impact of the fall, and slowly stood up to his full height.

The wind whipped his long blond hair across his face, sticking to the sweat on his forehead.

Sitting perfectly balanced on his armored shoulder, Mia looked up at the completely empty stretch of sky where Silas and Aeliana had been floating just moments prior.

"They’re quite some cheaters..." Mia stated flatly, her small hands resting on her hips. ’That’s my student!’

Valerius reached up, running a gauntleted hand through his blond hair to push it out of his eyes.

He let out a long exhausted sigh with the adrenaline of the massive Guardian raid finally bleeding out of his muscles.

"He got me good," Valerius muttered with a begrudging smirk playing at the corner of his lips.

He didn’t throw a tantrum.

He had been completely outplayed by a perfectly timed and coordinated heist. He could respect the audacity of the execution as Silas had read the battlefield geometry, waited for the perfect second, and stolen the prize right out of his hands.

Valerius turned his gaze away from the empty sky and looked out across the sprawling devastated dunes.

About two hundred yards away, a cataclysmic disaster was currently unfolding.

Massive pillars of roaring, superheated fire were erupting into the amber sky.

Entire sand dunes were being violently blasted apart, the sand instantly melting into pools of molten glass from the output.

Seraphina was currently crashing out in the distance.

She was screaming at the top of her lungs with her voice carrying over the wasteland as she hurled devastating blast after blast of fire magic at completely empty stretches of desert, actively hunting a ghost.

The volume of mana she was expending was staggering.

Valerius watched the explosive display of raw Purple core mana as he let out another heavy sigh with the arrogance fading from his eyes for just a fraction of a second as he observed the destruction.

"Even with all I do to optimize my core..." Valerius murmured quietly to himself, "Seraph is still stronger than me."

It was a simple undeniable truth of the century.

Valerius had known Seraphina since they were children.

They had grown up attending the same insufferable noble galas and high-society guild functions. They knew each other so well that they even had small nicknames for each other... Seraph and Val.

It wasn’t because they were actually close friends.

Far from it.

They found each other highly annoying, locked in a perpetual state of snobby, upper-class competition but they had met when they were toddlers, and their formal names were simply quite long and exhausting to say all the time during formal greetings.

The familiarity bred a strange unspoken sibling rivalry and because Valerius knew her so well, he knew exactly how rare it was to see her completely lose her composure.

There were very few things in the entire world that could get her that mad.

"Valerius Sterling!"

The demanding voice of Harper cut through his internal thoughts.

The other Lords were rapidly converging on his position as they had just survived a brutal Guardian raid that had caused one of them to die, only to watch the massive reward get snatched directly out from under their noses by a man Valerius had been hiding with.

Immediately, the other girls started aggressively pressing him.

"Where the hell did your friend go?!" Harper demanded, electricity violently sparking from her fingertips as she stormed up to him. "You were standing right next to him! Where has he been hiding?!"

’I have to act like I don’t know him for now...’ Harper thought, plus she wanted the location.

Elora stepped forward with her glowing blue eyes narrowed into a cold glare.

"You attempted to monopolize the drop, Valerius. Explain how you were about to steal a Realm Seed right in front of the entire group."

Before Valerius could even attempt to craft a sarcastic dismissive response, the temperature in the arena violently spiked.

The air warped and shimmered with intense heat as the glass beneath their boots began to crackle and hiss.

Seraphina stormed into the clearing.

She wasn’t just angry... Pure fire mana was literally leaking from her body. Actual, visible flames were coming out of her ears, her crimson-scaled armor radiating a thermal aura so intense it felt like standing in front of an open blast furnace.

Her fiery red eyes locked directly onto Valerius.

Valerius immediately flinched, instinctively taking a half-step backward.

’Oh,’ Valerius thought with his Lord intuition screaming at him to run. ’She’s mad mad...’

Seraphina stormed forward, completely ignoring Harper and Elora. She stopped three feet away from Valerius, pointing a trembling smoke-trailing finger directly at his chest plate.

"If you know the exact spatial location of where Silas Graves is right now," Seraphina demanded, her voice shaking with pure fury, "you are going to spill it immediately! Give me his coordinates!"

"Seraph, calm down," Valerius tried to deflect, raising both of his armored arms in a placating gesture.

"I am going to hunt him down, and I am about to go kill that bastard!" Seraphina screamed, her aura flaring so violently that the glass floor beneath her boots shattered into spiderwebs.

Valerius took another step back, genuinely bewildered by the intensity of her murderous intent.

"I don’t know where he went! He teleported! And besides, why are you so incredibly mad about it? We lost the seed, yes, but you look like you want to flay him alive!"

Without thinking, completely overwhelmed by her blinding world-ending humiliation, Seraphina threw her head back and shouted at the top of her lungs with a violently red face.

"IT’S BECAUSE HE SAW ME NAKED!"

The words echoed across the entire, glass-shattered arena as there was a whole lot of silence.

The roaring of the ambient desert wind seemed to completely vanish.

Harper’s jaw dropped so fast she almost bit her own tongue and Elora blinked with her cold brain completely flatlining as it tried to process the implications of that highly specific statement.

’Ah... If he goes around seeing other people’s bodies, how am I supposed to seduce him with mine?’

Julian, hiding behind a rock, let out a tiny, high-pitched gasp as nobody moved and nobody breathed.

Then, one of the Lords broke the silence.

It was Julius, the arrogant gold-armored spear-wielder who had just finished hastily tending to the crushed skull of his rhino summon.

Julius saw the chaos, the confusion, and the sheer vulnerability of the moment, and he immediately tried to capitalize on it to eliminate a major political rival.

He gripped his heavy iron spear, pointing it directly at Valerius.

"You!" Julius shouted, attempting to rally the stunned Lords. "You are the one who broke the first Artifact back in the First Layer! The teleportation sphere that brought us to this Hellscape where all the treasures buried in the sand are fake!"

The lesser nobles slowly began to draw their weapons with their greed shifting toward a new isolated target.

"And you were just about to actively steal the Realm Seed from the entire group!" Julius accused him loudly. "You are colluding with the pervert Silas Graves! Seize him!"

Valerius didn’t hesitate as he took that exact declaration as an opportunity to dash back with the wind.

He instantly channeled high-pressure mana into his boots with his core flaring though they could not see it.

However, Julian chose to come out of hiding at that exact moment.

Seeing Valerius isolated, Elora’s cowardly cousin decided to rush him in order to gain the political favor of Lord Julius and the surrounding mob.

Julian pulled a silver dagger, sprinting clumsily across the glass.

"For Valoria!"

Valerius didn’t even draw his mythril sword.

He simply watched the pathetic approach with exasperation. Julian’s weight was shifted too far forward with his grip on the dagger white-knuckled and completely lacking any fluid technique.

’How did this guy graduate...?’

As Julian stumbled into striking range, Valerius smoothly pivoted on the ball of his foot, letting the silver blade sail past his chest plate by an inch then, Valerius casually lifted his heavy mythril boot and hooked it directly behind Julian’s leading ankle.

He flipped the guy over with his foot, utilizing Julian’s own reckless momentum against him.

CRUNCH!