Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Chapter 181: Warden’s Seal

"Die!" the dragon screamed with her mind completely shattered by solitary confinement alongside the decaying corpse of her mother.

The beast rushed forward with terrifying speed with her massive claws violently tearing up deep chunks of the obsidian floor after every thunderous step.

"Do you know what your kind did to us?!" the dragon shrieked. "You filthy humans took our skies! You took our Lands!"

She snapped her massive jaws with acidic saliva sizzling against the black stone.

"You stripped away our pride, you stole our magic, and you locked my mother in this suffocating hell to rot in the dark for ten thousand years!"

As the dragon shot forward, rapidly closing the distance, she aggressively spread her massive leathery crimson wings to halt her physical momentum.

Deep within the back of her massive throat, a terrifying superheated ball of white-hot flames began to violently gather, illuminating the dark world like a newborn sun.

"Every single one of you deserves to agonizingly die!" the dragon roared, her throat expanding with pressure. "Burn with us!"

Aeliana didn’t step back as she planted her boots firmly on the black stone.

She raised both of her hands forward, overlapping her palms.

She didn’t hold back a single percentage of her output...

"I see..."

Aeliana violently charging up an Arcane Piercer with her absolute full, unsuppressed mana.

The starlight gathered between her hands, condensing into a blinding spear of pure white-hot arcane energy.

The power was so intense it hummed, actively regenerating her reserves the exact millisecond she spent them.

"Listen to me, Dragon!" Aeliana shouted over the roaring flames. "Even if all the men in this corrupted world deserved to die for what they did to your kind..."

She locked her silver eyes onto the dragon’s throat.

"...my Lord Sy does not! And he never will!"

FWOOSH!

The dragon violently snapped its jaws forward, blasting that apocalyptic sea of fire forward like a localized volcanic eruption.

Aeliana thrust her hands out and fired the Arcane Piercer as the two massive attacks collided perfectly in the dead center of the dark expanse.

KRA-THOOM!

The collision generated enough force to send a visible shockwave violently expanding outward, completely shattering the obsidian ground and throwing shards of black stone miles into the air.

For a fraction of a second, it was a stalemate of pure elemental pressure.

However, the Dragon’s scattered flames lacked the density of the starlight. The fire broke, parting like a sea around a stone.

The dragon’s glowing crimson eyes widened in shock.

SHWK!

The Arcane Piercer didn’t just push the fire back as the blinding white spear of starlight punched a perfectly straight, clean hole directly through the thick scales, bone, and brain matter of the dragon’s massive head.

The beam shot out the back of the beast’s skull, soaring off into the dark sky.

The dragon’s momentum died instantly.

The flames in its mouth sputtered out as it fell to the obsidian ground with a massive thud, completely motionless as its crimson eyes went wide and totally unfocused.

Aeliana lowered her hands, breathing hard despite the near limitless stamina with the mental strain of the attack wearing on her mind.

’I don’t think it’s that easy to kill a dragon...’

She looked at the massive corpse, feeling a brief pang of pity for the imprisoned monster.

Suddenly, the air warped.

The massive, gaping hole in the center of the dragon’s skull began to violently writhe.

Flesh, bone, and scales aggressively knit back together in a fraction of a second as the fatal wound physically sews itself shut.

The dragon’s eyes snapped wide open, burning brighter than before. It regenerated instantly!

The monster didn’t even bother standing up.

"I don’t care about your Lord or anything!" the dragon shrieked, its voice echoing with pure hatred. "They all deserve to die!"

The beast violently twisted its massive hips on the ground and whipped its spiked tail forward with the speed of a snapping whip.

Aeliana didn’t even have time to raise a defensive shield.

The massive tail slammed directly into Aeliana’s side with the force of a speeding freight train.

BOOM!

...

SHWK!

The massive razor-sharp edge of Silas’s mythril longsword tore effortlessly through the compacted sand.

Silas, standing completely alone on the pitch-black exterior of the deep Abyss, twisted his torso with devastating force as he channeled a dense surge of ambient moisture into the blade, converting it into a pressurized Abyssal Sever right at the point of impact.

The giant, fifty-foot sand snake that had ambushed him from the underground dunes let out a hissing screech of agony.

"PSSSSS!"

Its massive body was cleanly cleaved in twain, the two halves violently falling away and dissolving into useless inert piles of black dirt before they even hit the stone floor.

Silas didn’t even pause to watch the monster die.

His boots slammed against the dark ground, kicking up clouds of ash as he sprinted directly toward the jagged black pedestal at the center of the cavern.

He arrived in front of the stone pillar with his eyes locked onto the Tier 4 artifact.

The Warden’s Eye sat there, perfectly still but the brilliant, swirling gold iris that had been glowing just moments ago was completely gone.

The petrified amber vessel was dull and lifeless..

Silas reached out with his calloused fingers brushing against the cold, dead surface of the artifact.

He tried to touch it, tried to channel his mana into it to establish a tether, but there was nothing inside.

’Fuck...’

The signature was completely hollowed out and Silas’s golden-ringed eyes widened in horror.

"Aeli..." Silas muttered, his voice cracking as he squeezed the cold artifact in his palm.

His heart hammered violently against his ribs.

He should have never let her do this by herself. He should have taken it, or at the very least, he should have tied a physical mana-tether to her waist.

She had leaped directly into a Tier 4 Mythic sealing item completely blind. Who knew what ancient god-killing horror she was stuck in there with?

"Hahahahaha!"

The dead God’s voice suddenly erupted from the cavern ceiling, booming with sadistic joy.

"Oh, the look on your face is absolutely priceless!" Ititus laughed heartily, the sound vibrating the very air. "It is quite over for your little elven pet! She has been completely consumed by the item! And that, my greedy little boy, is exactly what you get for being greedy! You wanted a Mythic artifact? Now you have a very expensive paperweight!"

Silas’s grip on his sword tightened until his knuckles turned completely white but he remained calm, this was the god’s secret realm and if he refused to answer then Silas would simply have to make a query.

"How do I release the seal?" Silas demanded with his voice dropping quickly, however if the God was intimidated by drops in voice, Ititius would have never become a god in the first place..

"Oh, you want a hint?" Ititus teased,. "Very well! I am a generous god! Here is your riddle... I am the lock that has no key, the prison built of eternity. To open the door that has no hinge, you must first find the—"

"Shut the fuck up," Silas interrupted viciously.

Silas immediately discarded the riddle.

There was no way he was trusting a single syllable out of this pathological liar’s mouth ever again.

The god had lied about a lot of things today... he had lied about the safe tunnels, and he was definitely lying right now.

Silas closed his eyes, completely tuning out the god’s annoying laughter.

He turned his focus inward as he decided to ask a direct System Query to the one thing he absolutely trusted... his Upgrade System of course.

’System,’ Silas asked in his internal thoughts. ’How can I release Aeliana from this jewel?’

[Ding!]

The familiar, crisp chime of his personal interface echoed in his mind.

The translucent blue screen manifested behind his closed eyelids, calculating the spatial properties of the Tier 4 artifact he was currently holding.

[Query Acknowledged.]

[Analyzing Target: The Warden’s Eye (Tier 4)]

[Analysis Complete: The reverse-summoning protocol does not work on this specific item. The artifact’s internal pocket dimension has already sealed a living, hostile entity inside it prior to your companion’s entry. To extract any newly sealed matter, the primary containment must be forcibly shattered.]

Silas frowned deeply.

’Shattered? You mean I have to break a Tier 4 Mythic item?’

[Affirmative. You must release what was already inside by breaking the physical vessel.]

Silas asked another question in his thoughts with his mind racing.

’How do I break it? The casing feels like compressed diamond.’

[Calculating Structural Density...]

[Solution Found: A standard physical strike will not pierce the amber. However, a full-power strike utilizing the maximum force of your Gold Core mana will overload the item’s threshold and shatter the seal.]

Silas opened his eyes. He slowly exhaled a long breath, letting the system interface fade away.

The god was still talking, still kept clowning him from the shadows of the ceiling.

"—and so you see, little Lord, you will simply have to wait a hundred years for the internal digestion cycle to finish..."

Silas completely ignored him. He laid the dead petrified eye flat on the surface of the jagged black table as he took a firm hold of his mythril sword with both hands. He planted his boots securely against the stone floor, adjusting his center of gravity.

"Well then..." Silas muttered softly to himself, his golden-ringed eyes locking onto the artifact. "I just have to use the maximum force of my mana, right?"

...

[Back inside The Artifact]

KRA-THOOM!

Aeliana skidded violently across the cracked barren obsidian ground.

The impact of the dragon’s massive tail whip had launched her backward like a cannonball.

Her leather boots carved twin smoking trenches into the black dirt as she desperately dug her heels in to arrest her momentum.

She didn’t even have time to catch her breath.

"Die!" the newly transformed crimson dragon roared with her massive jaws unhinging.

The dragon didn’t blast fire this time.

The mana in the air warped aggressively, and the dragon blasted her with a massive torrent of crimson lightning.

The red electricity tore through the dark world, completely shattering the sound barrier with a deafening sound.

CRACK!

"Starlight Aegis!" Aeliana commanded.

She threw her hands forward as an interlocking shield of pure white-hot starlight instantly formed in front of her.

BOOOOOM!

The crimson lightning slammed into the shield as the impact generated a shockwave that pulverized the ground in a fifty-foot radius.

Aeliana gritted her teeth with her eyes glowing fiercely as the mana from the Genesis Rune pumped directly into her defensive ward, holding the barrier steady against the overwhelming voltage.

’This is getting quite repetitive.’

Aeliana didn’t stay on the defensive.

The moment the lightning sputtered, she dissolved into a flash of blue-white light, teleporting directly into the dragon’s personal space.

She reappeared directly above the dragon’s massive right shoulder.

"Arcane Sever!" Aeliana shouted.

She condensed her starlight mana into a massive fifty-foot blade of pure radiant energy and she swung her arms downward with all her might.

The blade sheared cleanly through the air, bypassing the dragon’s thick crimson scales entirely.

SHWK!

The blade cut completely through bone, muscle, and sinew and the dragon’s massive right wing was cleanly severed from its back as a massive geyser of boiling superheated dragon blood erupted from the stump, raining down on the obsidian floor like molten lava.

"GAAARGH!"

The beast let out an agonizing earth-shaking shriek with its massive body completely losing its balance and crashing against the ground but Aeliana knew the biology of the Dragon.

She knew it wouldn’t last.

Before the severed wing even hit the dirt, the bloody stump on the dragon’s back began to violently writhe.

Muscle fibers aggressively knit themselves back together in a fraction of a second as a brand-new fully formed crimson wing violently sprouted from the wound with the monster tanking the lethal blow and regenerating instantly.

The dragon roared, twisting its long serpentine neck around to bite Aeliana out of the sky but Aeliana was faster.

WHOOSH!

She dropped completely out of the air like a stone, landing on the back of the dragon’s neck as she grounded the massive beast by channeling pure concentrated starlight into her boots.

"Hup!"

CRASH!

The overwhelming weight forced the dragon’s head down into the dirt with a massive crater and Aeliana lunged forward.

She reached out with her slender, pale hands and grabbed the dragon’s massive black horns.

"Yield!" Aeliana commanded.

She planted her boots against the scales and violently yanked the dragon’s massive head backward, exposing the beast’s vulnerable throat.

The dragon thrashed wildly with its massive claws tearing up the obsidian ground but despite the feral rage consuming its mind, the dragon was deeply confused.

’Why?’ the dragon wondered frantically, its glowing crimson eyes darting up to look at the Elf currently wrestling it into submission. ’Why does she fight for a human?’