Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Chapter 182: Lord Silas

The dragon sprung out of Aeliana’s headlock by forcefully manipulating its own biology.

It made its entire body incredibly spiky, jagged crimson thorns violently erecting from its scales like a porcupine.

CRK! CRK! CRK! CRK!

Aeliana was forced to release her grip, teleporting backward a dozen feet to avoid being impaled.

’Fuck... Dragons really are one of the most versatile creatures.’ Aeliana thought.

As the dragon reared backward, shaking the dust from its massive head, it didn’t immediately attack. It looked directly at Aeliana with its chest heaving, and asked the question that had been burning in its mind.

"Why?!" the dragon’s booming dual-harmonic voice echoed across the barren world. "Why are you fighting so hard for a filthy human? You are an Elf! Your kind had been terribly wronged by humans! They enslaved your forests! They burned your glades!"

The dragon’s massive tail lashed angrily behind it.

"This is exactly what my Mother told me before she died! Humans are a plague upon all ancient races! Why do you submit to one?!"

Aeliana stood perfectly still with her green eyes locking onto the massive beast.

Aeliana had to admit, the dragon wasn’t wrong.

Historically speaking, the beast was entirely correct.

There was a very specific bloody reason why the Holy Elf Kingdom was originally formed in the Sovereign Realm.

It was formed as a sanctuary, a militarized fortress designed specifically to protect their kind from the rampant enslavement and exploitation perpetrated by human empires but Aeliana’s expression didn’t waver.

Her posture remained completely resolute.

"You speak of history," Aeliana said with her voice sounding clear and carrying over the howling wind. "And history is written in blood but both my Previous Lord, Lord Kal, and my Love, Lord Silas... are not the kind of humans that elves were afraid of."

Aeliana brought her hand forward, the starlight dimming slightly as she spoke with deep conviction.

"You do not know him," Aeliana explained softly. "Lord Silas is a man who loves developing his territory and the people that are inside it. He doesn’t view us as tools or slaves. He views us as his foundation instead..."

The dragon let out a low rumbling growl of disbelief. "Lies."

"It is the truth," Aeliana countered fiercely. "It didn’t matter if someone was an elf, or a goddess like Lady Eluned, or even a demon... as long as they have something to give, as long as they were willing to contribute to the territory, Lord Silas would take them in and protect them with his life."

Aeliana lowered her gaze slightly with a brief shadow passing over her flawless features.

"Lord Silas is actually my second Lord," she revealed quietly. "I had an original Lord before him, Lord Kal, when I had recently been summoned into this world. But... I failed him. Not only did I lose my Lord to the darkness of the dungeon, but I lost my home, my purpose... I lost everything."

The look of profound crushing loss was still deeply etched on her pale face.

The dragon stopped thrashing as the massive beast stared at the tiny Elf.

For a brief fleeting moment, the feral rage in the dragon’s eyes dimmed, replaced by a flicker of genuine understanding.

The dragon knew exactly what it meant to lose everything but then a completely bright and radiant look of pure joy entered Aeliana’s face, entirely erasing the sorrow.

The sudden shift stunned the dragon.

"But then," Aeliana smiled, her green eyes glowing with absolute warmth. "Lord Silas and Miss Eluned saved me from the darkness that covered me... They didn’t cast me aside because I was a failure. They gave me a place to stay and they gave me a home."

Aeliana stepped forward, completely ignoring the massive claws resting just feet away from her.

"And when I made mistakes," Aeliana continued, "when I fucked up... Lord Silas punished me but it was not harsh. He sat me down, he told me what went wrong, and he helped me realize my mistake so I could grow stronger. He treats me as an equal."

A faint blush touched Aeliana’s pale cheeks. "Plus... he’s incredibly handsome."

The dragon blinked, completely thrown off by the sudden romantic pivot.

"Lord Silas tries to act mostly tough on the outside," Aeliana laughed softly, a beautiful, musical sound. "He acts like a ruthless Lord to the rest of the world but he is very kind at heart and he cares about all of us immensely."

She pointed a finger at the dragon.

"If he didn’t care, he wouldn’t have spent a lot of time to build a massive Library in the territory just to teach the uneducated girls how to read. He wouldn’t actively try to capture and breed comfortable mounts just to reduce the pain that our legs feel when we march across the Basin!"

Aeliana pressed both of her hands over her heart.

"However," Aeliana declared with her voice ringing in unshakable devotion. "If you ask me why I love my Lord so deeply... why, even though we have spent such a relatively short time together, why I want to have his children... I can give you a thousand more reasons."

The dragon fell completely silent.

The massive beast slowly turned its head looking away from the glowing Elf. The dragon looked at the massive, decaying corpse of her mother resting in the dark dirt a few hundred yards away.

The dragon remembered earlier.

She had been the one that made her Mother talk earlier with necromantic magic, just to hear her voice one last time before her vocal cords rotted away completely. She had been gone for a while, lost to the decay.

Her Mother had been deeply betrayed by Humans.

She had assumed a human form, she had fallen in love, and she had married a human man and that same man, the man she trusted with her ancient heart, had drugged her and sold her off to a mercenary band of Dragon Slayers for a pathetic sum of 5 coppers.

Five coppers for the life of a primordial queen?

So many terrible things had happened to their bloodline and the trauma was etched into their very DNA.

But as the dragon looked back at Aeliana... even the dragon felt intrigued.

She felt genuinely intrigued to know what kind of human this ’Lord Silas’ was.

How could a human possess a soul so saintly, so utterly devoted to his people, that an immortal Elf would willingly offer to bear his children?

The dragon felt a strange alien desire to meet this human, just to prove that he was not as perfect as Aeliana made him seem.

But the inherited trauma was too deep but the feeling of isolation since the moment she was born had fundamentally broken her mind.

The dragon violently shook her massive head, forcefully burying the curiosity beneath a mountain of inherited rage.

"I DO NOT CARE!" the dragon roared, her voice cracking with emotional agony.

She reared up on her hind legs, her massive wings spreading wide and casting a terrifying shadow over the battlefield.

"ALL humans are evil!" the dragon screamed, her crimson eyes flaring with psychotic light. "They are parasites! And the moment you learn to make peace with that truth, Elf... that is when you will truly be at ease!"

"Then we have nothing left to say..." Aeliana stated coldly with her starlight flaring.

The dragon charged at Aeliana again.

BOOM! KRA-THOOM!

The dragon lunged with her massive jaws snapping shut with enough force to shatter mythril and Aeliana teleported a fraction of an inch out of the way with the teeth clicking shut right next to her ear.

Aeliana spun, driving a heavy, starlight-infused kick directly into the side of the dragon’s snout.

CRACK!

The impact shattered three of the beast’s massive fangs.

The dragon retaliated instantly, swiping its massive claws in a horizontal arc but Aeliana formed a Starlight Aegis, however the physical mass of the blow shattered the shield into glowing shards with the force raking across Aeliana’s ribs and drawing a thin line of elven blood.

"Arcane Barrage!" Aeliana shouted.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

She fired dozens of condensed starlight spheres directly into the dragon’s chest.

The spheres detonated on impact, blowing massive gaping craters through the crimson scales.

But the dragon’s regeneration was absolute as the wounds closed instantly.

"If I find my way out of this prison," the dragon roared, unleashing a massive, sweeping torrent of crimson lightning that scorched the obsidian floor. "I swear upon my mother’s rotting bones... I will kill any human that I can see! I will burn their cities to ash!"

"You will never leave this room!" Aeliana screamed back.

The dragon violently whipped its heavy spiked tail and Aeliana tried to dodge, but the spatial distortion of the lightning blast threw off her timing.

SMASH!

The massive tail connected cleanly with Aeliana’s torso.

Aeliana was hit violently into the air.

She was launched hundreds of feet into the dark sky with the wind violently knocking the breath from her lungs.

"Ugh!"

She soared upward with her body spinning helplessly as the dragon looked up, preparing a final massive blast of superheated fire to execute her mid-air.

Aeliana stabilized herself at the apex of her flight.

She looked down at the roaring beast with her green eyes turning as cold and unyielding as the void of space.

"If you ever threaten to hurt Lord Sy..." Aeliana whispered, her voice carrying an incredibly terrifying promise.

She spread her arms wide, drawing entirely upon the maximum output of the Genesis Rune as the ambient temperature of the entire pocket dimension violently plummeted.

’No...’ The Dragon shot forward heading toward Aeliana. ’You can’t!’

"No!"

She locked her gaze onto the dragon.

"...then I will murder you right here."

Aeliana clasped her hands together.

"LAND OF FROST!"

The spell detonated and contrary to what the dragon expected, it wasn’t a beam of ice.

It was a complete atmospheric rewrite.

A massive and violently expanding dome of frozen energy erupted from Aeliana’s position in the sky and slammed down onto the obsidian floor.

The entire world flash-froze in a microsecond as massive, towering glaciers of jagged blue ice violently erupted from the ground, entirely encasing the battlefield.

Dragons were fundamentally creatures of heat energy and due to their special biology, they were inherently weak to high-tier ice magic.

The Land of Frost slammed into the crimson dragon.

"AGHHHHHH!"

The beast shrieked in paralyzing agony as the absolute-zero temperature violently extinguished its internal flames, freezing its blood in its veins and locking its massive limbs in an unbreakable, towering prison of solid ice.

[Back Outside in the Deep Abyss.]

Silas stood before the jagged black pedestal.

His entire body was radiating a terrifying blinding aura of pure liquid gold mana.

The sovereign energy converged violently around the blade of his mythril sword, the heavy steel humming with a frequency that threatened to completely shatter the spatial fabric of the dungeon.

"What are you doing?!" the God’s voice shrieked from the ceiling, the sadistic joy completely replaced by genuine panicked terror.

Silas didn’t answer.

He raised the golden sword high above his head with the muscles in his arms bulging as he concentrated every single drop of his Gold Core’s maximum output into the tip of the blade.

"Stop!" Ititus complained frantically, his voice echoing rapidly. "You fool! You don’t understand the structure of that artifact! If you break it, you’ll destabilize the entire lower quadrant! Please, stop!"

Silas was absolutely not having it.

"I want my Hero back..."

He took a firm step back, gathered his full unsuppressed power, and slashed downward with all of his might.

The golden blade struck the dead center of the petrified amber eye.

CHINK!

For a microsecond, time seemed to completely stop then, a microscopic crack appeared on the surface of the amber.

The crack violently expanded, tearing into dozens of deep glowing fault lines across the entire artifact.

The overwhelming force of the Gold Core entirely overloaded the Mythic seal’s containment threshold.

"NOOO!" the god shouted, a long desperate agonizing scream that echoed through the entire Secret Realm.

KA-BOOOOOOM!

The Warden’s Eye violently exploded.

The unrestrained release of spatial energy generated a catastrophic shockwave that threw Silas backward off his feet.

He hit the dirt, shielding his eyes from the blinding light and from the epicenter of the shattered artifact, something massive emerged.

It wasn’t Aeliana.

It was a massive and huge rotting dragon body.

The colossal, decaying corpse of the mother dragon violently shot upward, forcefully expelled from the collapsing pocket dimension.

The mass of the corpse broke completely past the ceiling of the cavern.

The rotting beast shot upward like a morbid missile, violently breaking past the bedrock, breaking past the labyrinth layers, and crashing entirely through the miles of earth above.

Miles above them, on the surface of the Secret Realm, the other Lords were currently facing against another massive Sand General in a desperate raid.

Suddenly, the ground beneath them violently erupted.

The massive, rotting skull of a primordial dragon burst through the sand dunes, completely annihilating the Sand General in a shower of black bone and dust before continuing its ascent into the amber sky.

Back down in the deep Abyss, Silas jumped back, coughing as thick clouds of dust and debris rained down from the shattered ceiling.

He watched in awe as the thick skeleton and the rotting body completely filled the upper area of the massive cavern, blocking out what little light remained.

However, because the corpse was completely removed from the temporal stasis of the artifact, the thousands of years of accelerated decay instantly caught up to it.