Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Chapter 178: The Secret Realm Of Ititius [XVII]

He reached out, offering his open hand to her.

Silas was not doing this because she was cute, or because he felt some romantic chivalrous obligation toward a crying noble.

It was quite far from it.

In this specific political situation, he was actually at a massive disadvantage.

Apart from accidentally seeing her naked behind that dune, he had also offended her earlier during the drop for some unknown reason.

And most importantly, Seraphina was not a regular girl... she was the direct favored daughter of a World Council Magistrate. He was a commoner from the slums of Sector 4 who had clawed his way up.

If she survived this Secret Realm and reported to her father that Silas Graves had humiliated her, left her to die, and watched her suffer... the political backlash would be catastrophic.

Hell, if she died down here and the Magistrate’s soul-trackers traced her last moments to Silas’s proximity, he would be the very first one off that assassination list!

In the overarching Sovereign Realm, he was a terrifying Gold Core Lord with the potential of a god.

But right here, in the legal reality of the mortal world, he was just a Blue Core upstart from the slums.

He needed her alive, and he needed her mildly indebted to him so, he decided to help.

Seraphina didn’t contemplate her pride for a single second.

The moment she saw his hand, she ran over and aggressively clutched his hand with both of hers with her fingers locking around his palm like a drowning sailor grabbing a lifeline.

She didn’t let go.

Silas didn’t say anything more about her sudden change in attitude.

He just looked at her desperate grip and nodded.

"Oh? Let’s walk back to the others then."

They walked back together, turning the corner into the wider corridor where Valerius, Mia, and Aeliana were waiting.

As they approached, the group turned to look at them. Their eyes immediately dropped to their locked hands.

Aeli’s silver eyes narrowed instantly. Her pointed ears stood straight up, and her flawless face tightened into a deeply unimpressed jealous glare.

She stepped forward, her white spider-silk robes swirling as she looked Silas dead in the eye, silently demanding an explanation for why he was holding hands with a screaming fire-mage.

Silas raised his free hand in defense. "What? I have to pacify her in some way so we can move. She can’t fight properly with that collar."

Valerius leaned against his longsword, waving his gauntleted hand with a wicked, mocking smirk. "Good luck with that, Graves. You saw her naked... she’s never letting that go for the rest of her natural life."

The blunt reminder made Seraphina’s face completely melt into a fresh wave of violently hot crimson humiliation. She hid her face behind Silas’s shoulder, wishing the floor would open up and swallow her.

However, Silas frowned, shaking his head with genuine confusion.

"I didn’t even see her fully naked," Silas corrected him, trying to be accurate to the facts. "It was just the lower half."

Valerius froze. His smirk vanished, replaced by an expression of shock as he slowly looked at the man like he was completely crazy.

’Just the lower half?!’

In noble society, seeing a lady’s lower half without her express permission was ten times worse than seeing her standing normally without clothes in a changing room! It was the ultimate breach of honor!

Seraphina’s immediate reaction to Silas’s casual clarification was violent. Her eyes went wide with horror as she aggressively pulled her hand away from his palm, stepping back as if his skin had caught fire.

Before Silas could ask what he said wrong,

Aeliana stepped firmly into the gap.

"Hmph!"

She aggressively took his hand, locking her slender fingers through his without a sound as she pulled him slightly closer to her side as they continued walking down the dark corridor.

As they advanced deeper into the prison, they also noticed that the iron cells in question did not actually hold the creatures anymore. The bars were shattered outward with the doors hanging limply on rusted hinges.

Silas stopped, lifting his brass radar. The glowing green screen beeped rapidly.

"The signatures aren’t in the cells," Silas noted, his eyes narrowing as he tapped the glass. "All of the treasures have shifted. They’re moving together up ahead."

They accelerated their pace, climbing a steep rocky ridge that overlooked a massive amphitheater.

They reached the edge, dropping low and looking downward.

The sight below made them all stiffen.

Milling around in the massive torch-lit basin were easily a hundred creatures made of black sand but these weren’t simple foot soldiers. They were massive, four-armed centurions, beasts riding sand-sculpted hounds, and towering brutes wielding heavy weapons forged from compressed desert bedrock.

The mana radiating from the horde was suffocating.

Before they could formulate a plan, the God’s voice boomed from the cavern ceiling once more.

"Beautiful, isn’t it?" Ititus laughed proudly. "Before you will be able to proceed to the final zone, you have to slaughter the monsters... all of them! Every single one! But here is the fun part... only some out of all of them actually possess an artifact embedded in their cores! You aren’t getting my loot that easy! Happy hunting!"

Silas, Valerius, and the others let out a collective groan of sheer exhaustion.

Down in the basin, the hundred sand monsters heard the echo of their voices.

Simultaneously, a hundred glowing red eyes snapped upward, locking directly onto the ridge.

"RAHHHHH!"

The horde let out a deafening unified roar that shook the stone walls with their heavy weapons raising as they began to charge up the slope.

Valerius didn’t retreat. A massive arrogant grin spread across his face as his core ignited, flaring with intense wind mana.

"The one that slaughters more monsters gets all the Artifacts!" Valerius declared loudly.

Without waiting for agreement, he immediately shot downward off the ridge with anexplosive burst of wind from his boots.

WHOOSH! CRASH!

Valerius dived directly into the center of the charging horde like a falling meteor. He landed with a deafening sound with a shockwave of green wind exploding outward from his impact point, instantly blowing three sand centurions into flying dust.

"Let’s dance!" Valerius roared, spinning his mythril blade into a devastating whirlwind.

Silas sighed, shaking his head at the aristocrat’s recklessness. He turned his head slightly, calling out to his Starlight Arcanist.

"Aeliana," Silas commanded, his voice dropping an octave into pure, cold authority. "Go wild."

Aeliana’s silver eyes flashed with starlight as a breathtaking smile crossed her face as she offered a crisp flawless bow.

"Yes, My Lord," Aeliana finished smoothly.

She stepped off the ledge with her body dissolving into a beam of pure starlight. She materialized fifty feet below, directly above the densest cluster of monsters.

She raised both of her slender arms, her palms pointing downward.

SHING! SHING! SHING! SHING! SHING!

Dozens of powerful Arcane Piercers materialized in the air around her... beams of condensed white starlight that looked like spears of solid diamonds.

She brought her hands down, and the orbital bombardment began.

The starlight spears rained down with terrifying accuracy, punching clean glowing holes through the skulls and chests of the sand beasts below, turning the dark room into a light show.

Silas didn’t stay on the sidelines.

He jumped from the ledge too with his heavy trench coat billowing behind him as he descended into the chaos.

He didn’t use any verbal chants as his Gold Core, perfectly attuned to the runic pathways Mia had drilled into him, mapped the spells instantly.

While falling through the air, Silas slashed his right hand horizontally three times.

SWISH! SWISH! SWISH!

Three razor-thin pressurized crescent blades of water of Abyssal Severs erupted from his empty knuckles.

They were completely flawless, vibrating with such intense frequency that they hissed through the air.

The water blades struck the charging vanguard right at neck height, cleanly slicing five massive sand centurions apart in a single fluid motion before Silas’s boots even touched the ground.

THUD!

Silas landed in the center of the pack with his physical body absorbing the impact as a four-armed brute swung two heavy sandstone clubs down at his head.

Silas didn’t dodge.

He planted his left foot, compressed ambient moisture directly into his right palm, and thrust his hand upward without uttering a word.

TIDAL IMPACT!

A massive cannonball of heavy water detonated directly against the brute’s chest.

The hydraulic shockwave exploded outward with the force of a breaching dam.

BOOOOM!

The brute was instantly vaporized into wet mud, and the massive volume of heavy water violently washed over twenty surrounding monsters, soaking their sand bodies and turning the dry basin floor into a flooded swampy mess.

Silas smirked with his eyes glowing gold as he immediately pivoted to his third spell.

He reached out with his mana, gripping the saturated, flooded battlefield, and executed Ice Transformation.

KRKKKKKK!

The temperature in the basin violently cratered to absolute zero in a microsecond.

All that heavy water he had just dumped across the battlefield instantly froze solid.

The wet sand monsters were trapped with their legs and torsos encased in jagged blue ice.

The sudden violent expansion of the ice field spread so fast it almost tripped Valerius too.

"Hey! Watch your target zone, Graves!" Valerius grumbled loudly, jumping over a waist-high glacier that suddenly sprouted from the floor while he was mid-swing.

"Sure sure..."

He dashed forward across the frozen floor, utilizing his physical strength as he broke off massive ice shards from the frozen ground, wielding them like improvised greatswords, and began stabbing directly into the frozen monsters’ cores, ending them with efficiency.

CRUNCH! SHWK! CRUNCH!

As he shattered the torso of a particularly large sand hound, something clattered against the ice.

Silas reached down and snatched it up. It was a heavy glowing bronze bracer... he had found an artifact!

Meanwhile, on the far side of the clearing, Valerius was having his own peak combat moment.

The gold-armored Lord was a blur of green wind with his longsword parrying heavy stone weapons with terrifying speed.

"Mia! Water pulse on my six!" Valerius shouted while dodging a swinging axe.

Sitting securely on his shoulder, Mia yawned, looking completely lazy.

She didn’t even stand up as she lazily pointed a single tiny index finger over Valerius’s shoulder without looking.

Pew!

A microscopic compressed needle of water shot from her fingertip, silently drilling a hole straight through the forehead of a beast about to ambush Valerius from behind.

The monster collapsed into dust before Valerius even turned around.

"You could at least act like you’re trying," Valerius complained, spinning and severing two more monsters with a Zephyr Slash.

"You’re doing fine, My Lord." Mia mumbled sleepily, resting her chin on his iron shoulder plate as he slaughtered the horde.

High above the chaotic warzone, Seraphina stood alone on the ridge, watching the devastation below.

Her lips slowly parted in genuine awe, though no words came out of her silenced throat.

Her fiery red eyes tracked Silas as he seamlessly blended devastating physical brawling with high-tier water and ice magic, tearing through the horde.

’He’s... not bad...’ Seraphina thought reluctantly with her heart beating slightly faster.

At first, back in the upper layers, she had genuinely thought Silas Graves was just some useless arrogant Lord who had tried to make trouble for everybody but watching him now, the truth was undeniable.

Not only did he command an incredibly competent powerful Hero like Aeliana, but he was also quite competent himself.

His combat IQ was flawless, his elemental transitions were instant, and his physical strength was monstrous.

Seraphina slowly nodded her head, a strange grudging respect settling over her prideful heart.

’As expected of the man who has seen me naked, at least,’ she thought, rationalizing his strength in her own twisted noble logic.

If a commoner was going to humiliate her, he at least had the decency to be a monster on the battlefield!

As for how she knew that he was a commoner... that was simple, she could smell it.

Refusing to be completely left out of the raid, Seraphina drew her curved dagger and jumped down from the ledge to join the fray.

THUD!

She hit the ground, but she immediately stumbled with her legs feeling dangerously wobbly.

’Ugh!’ she winced internally as she remembered... the parasite artifact didn’t just mute her; it actively lowered her physical strength by 50% as well as her mana!

Her limbs felt heavy, like she was moving through deep mud. Every step hurt, and swinging her dagger required double the effort.

Still, she gritted her teeth, pushing her wobbly legs forward to slash at the remaining stragglers, refusing to show weakness in front of Silas.

Ten minutes later, the place was completely silent.

Over a hundred sand monsters had been reduced to piles of harmless dirt and melting ice shards.