Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Chapter 198: Under The Spire [VII / Bonus Chapter]

Her purple eyes darted frantically, tracking Silas’s retreating silhouette through the dust.

Her heart hammered violently against her ribs.

Harper saw Silas get pushed back, his back hitting the stone wall. She saw the massive wall of sand spikes actively rearing back to impale him.

"Fuck!" Harper screamed.

She didn’t think about her depleted core and she didn’t think about the explicit orders to stay put and cover the retreat.

Harper ran completely out of the Safe Zone, her bare feet slapping against the cold stone as she sprinted toward the top of the stairs and the heavy trench coat billowing behind her.

The very instant her body crossed the glowing blue threshold into the unprotected corridor, the labyrinth reacted.

FWOOSH!

The damp stone floor directly in front of her violently exploded.

A massive towering wave of black sand erupted from the ground, aggressively morphing into a jagged wall of spikes designed to impale her instantly for breaking the curfew.

Harper didn’t flinch. Her purple eyes flashed with electrical power.

"Get out of my way!" Harper roared.

She thrust both of her pale hands forward, unleashing a catastrophic torrent of superheated purple lightning directly into the incoming wave of sand.

The raw heat of the lightning was absolute.

The massive wall of black sand didn’t just stop... the intense electrical voltage instantly superheated the silicon dioxide to over three thousand degrees!

The towering sand spikes completely melted, instantly turning into a beautiful and harmless sculpture of smooth, branching violet glass!

Harper slid to a halt on the stone, breathing heavily as she lowered her sparking hands.

She stared through the translucent glass sculpture with her eyes narrowing as she looked down at the swirling storm cornering Silas.

Her education regarding elemental constructs and summoned entities rapidly clicked into place.

"Wait," Harper whispered to herself, wiping sweat from her brow as she analyzed the way the clones shared a single, perfectly distributed mana signature. "If they are all identical copies... where the hell is the main body?"

...

The howling abrasive tornado of black grit and razor-sharp glass shards violently whipped against the damp bedrock walls of the alcove, completely trapping Silas in a meat grinder.

SHWK! SHWK!

Two jagged spears of condensed sand materialized from the spinning vortex, shooting forward with enough velocity to pierce solid iron but once again, Silas didn’t flinch.

He planted his right combat boot into the stone floor, pivoting his torso with devastating precision as his mythril longsword blurred in a protective arc.

CLANG! SHATTER!

The steel blade intercepted both spears simultaneously, shattering the hardened sand into a useless shower of harmless brown dirt.

But before Silas could even reset his posture, the stone floor directly beneath his boots violently liquefied into a spinning gravitational sinkhole of black quicksand.

"You’re getting quite repetitive," Silas spat coldly.

He didn’t bother stepping back.

He forcefully slammed his left palm flat against the damp cavern wall, violently stripping the heat from the immediate atmosphere.

"Ice Transformation!" Silas commanded.

KRKKKKKKKKKK!

A catastrophic wave of absolute-zero frost aggressively raced across the floor, flash-freezing the spinning quicksand into a solid unbreakable platform of jagged brown ice before his boots could sink an inch.

Without wasting a second, Silas channeled an explosive surge of his mana directly into his calves and launched himself forward, completely abandoning defense to execute a brutal blitz directly into the heart of the sandstorm.

He knew exactly how to overwhelm an elemental hive-mind... You don’t fight the individual limbs; you violently overload their shared processing capacity.

FWOOSH!

Silas swept his left hand through the air, drawing upon every single remaining drop of condensation hanging in the surroundings down here.

’I should be able to do this...’ Silas thought.

He didn’t form blades or shields this time as instead he unleashed a high-pressure deluge of pure aqua mana, aggressively blanketing the entire thirty-foot intersection in a torrential downpour of dense water.

The heavy water slammed into the swirling sandstorm like a collapsing dam.

The microscopic grains of silicon dioxide, suddenly saturated by hundreds of gallons of pressurized aqua mana, instantly lost their aerodynamic lift and structural cohesion.

The roaring tornado of abrasive grit violently choked, sputtered, and collapsed into the floor, completely unable to sustain its high-velocity rotation while weighed down by the water.

"Let’s see you fly now," Silas sneered.

Forced out of its sandstorm state by the weight of the water, the ancient Lesser General had no choice but to reassemble its physical form.

The saturated muddy sand violently coalesced in the center of the corridor, rapidly compressing layer upon layer until it assumed the towering, eight-foot humanoid silhouette of Xerxes, wielding a massive jagged broadsword forged from wet obsidian.

The General raised its blade to strike, but Silas was already there.

BOOOOOOM!

Silas closed the distance with a concussive boom, his combat boot driving directly into the center of Xerxes’s chest with monstrous uncompromising physical strength.

The impact caved the wet sand inward, sending the eight-foot giant skidding violently backward across the slick stone floor.

Before the General could recover its footing, Silas unleashed a relentless combination of brutality.

CLANG! KRA-SLASH! SHWK!

He swung his mythril blade in a devastating sequence of overhead chops, horizontal cleaves, and thrusting lunges.

He moved so fast that the steel blade left a trailing, luminous afterimage in the dim blue light.

Xerxes desperately tried to fight back, swinging its heavy obsidian broadsword in wide, sweeping arcs designed to decapitate the mortal, but Silas merely tilted his head or shifted his shoulders, effortlessly dodging every single counterattack by mere millimeters.

Yet, as Silas drove his blade deep into the sand giant’s shoulder, ripping a massive chunk of wet mud away, his instincts spiked.

’Something is very wrong...’ Silas thought with his golden-ringed eyes narrowing as he ducked under a desperate obsidian swipe. ’I feel like this fucker isn’t the real thing and not only that but he’s trying to trap me too.’

As if confirming his suspicion, the damp bedrock on either side of the corridor violently bulged outward.

SQUELCH! SQUELCH!

Two additional fully formed clones of Xerxes aggressively erupted from the walls, raising their arms to manifest twenty-foot-long whips of compressed glass designed to catch Silas in a lethal pincer movement.

Silas didn’t even turn his head to look at the flanking reinforcements.

He simply dropped his left hand toward the puddles of heavy water he had just flooded the arena with.

"Ice Transformation!" Silas roared.

KRKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!

The entire thirty-foot intersection flash-froze in a fraction of a microsecond.

The standing water on the stone floor violently erupted upward, transforming into a dense inescapable forest of razor-sharp five-foot-tall spikes of solid blue ice!

KRA-CRUNCH!

The erupting ice spikes cleanly skewered the two emerging sand clones from below, tearing through their midsections and instantly freezing their saturated mud bodies into fragile, immobilized statues.

Silas spun on his heel, bringing his mythril sword around in a sweeping horizontal execution that shattered both frozen clones into thousands of harmless, glittering ice fragments across the corridor.

...

Up at the top of the sweeping stone staircase, Harper was leaning heavily against the masonry, her breath catching in her throat as she watched the violence below.

She had just watched Silas effortlessly dismantle a sandstorm, freeze the entire arena, and shatter these clones in less than five seconds but as she tracked the glittering ice shrapnel falling across the cavern, her perception noticed an anomaly.

The ambient magical density in the room hadn’t dropped at all.

Harper’s purple eyes darted away from the slaughtered clones, rapidly scanning the dark, vaulted stone architecture of the cavern.

She checked the walls, the stairs, and finally... she looked directly up at the high, eighty-foot ceiling.

Her heart violently seized in her chest.

Clinging silently to the damp, moss-covered masonry directly above the center of the intersection, camouflaged within the deep shadows of the ceiling, was a massive mass of swirling black grit.

It was the real Sand General.

The towering, eight-foot figure Silas was currently engaging on the floor was nothing more than a dense intricate puppet designed to hold his attention.

The real Xerxes had completely condensed its primary core and physical mass onto the ceiling, holding a massive, four-foot-long execution spear forged from hyper-compressed, obsidian-tipped desert glass.

The ancient entity’s glowing, malevolent red eyes were locked entirely on the back of Silas’s neck, waiting for the exact microsecond his swing finished to execute a top-down assassination.

"Silas!" Harper screamed at the absolute top of her lungs, her voice tearing through the cavern’s acoustics to alert him. "Above you! The ceiling!"

However, before the final syllable of her warning even left her lips, the monster jumped off.

WHOOSH!

Xerxes detached from the high stone ceiling, plummeting directly down toward Silas’s exposed back like a falling meteor, its razor-sharp obsidian spear pointed dead center for the Warlord’s spine.

For Harper, standing forty yards away at the top of the stairs, it felt as though time had suddenly slowed to an agonizing suffocating crawl.

CRACK! KRA-THOOM!

Harper’s purple eyes flared with electrical power as she thrust both of her pale hands forward, instantly letting off three consecutive condensed bolts of white-hot purple lightning directed straight at the descending sand giant’s trajectory.

The lightning bolts screamed across the cavern, illuminating the damp stone in blinding violet flashes but Xerxes was a veteran commander who had survived the Ascension War.

Mid-air, without any physical leverage to push off from, the Lesser General fluidly shifted the internal density of its sand body.

The entity actively dissolved the center of its torso into an empty, hollow ring of loose grit a fraction of a microsecond before the lightning arrived.

ZZZZZT!

All three bolts of Harper’s lightning passed harmlessly through the gaping hole in Xerxes’s torso, scorching the stone floor below without dealing a single drop of damage.

The General instantly re-condensed its chest, continuing its terrifying high-velocity descent directly toward Silas without losing an ounce of momentum.

"No you don’t!" Harper shrieked.

She violently bitten her lower lip, tasting iron, and instantly activated her signature blood technique.

FWOOSH!

The residual iron in her boiling blood violently converted into a liquid electrical medium.

Her pale skin literally began to emit static sparks, her purple eyes glowing like twin supernovas as she violently launched herself off the top of the staircase.

She blasted forward through the air like a human lightning bolt, desperately trying to physically intercept the falling spear before it impaled Silas.

Sensing the incoming electrical projectile from its flank, Xerxes didn’t even turn its head.

While still plummeting toward the floor, the General casually extended its left hand toward the lunging woman.

SHHHH-BOOM!

A twister of abrasive black sand violently erupted from Xerxes’s palm, blasting directly across the cavern and slamming point-blank into Harper’s face!

"AGGGH!" Harper cried out as the spinning vortex of grit completely engulfed her head, violently stripping her momentum in mid-air and plunging her vision into suffocating darkness.

The razor-sharp grains of sand aggressively scored her skin, attempting to shred her corneas and blind her completely but Harper refused to be taken out of the fight.

While suspended mid-air inside the blinding twister, she violently dumped a massive surge of raw voltage directly from her palms into the swirling grit around her face.

BZZZZZZZZZT!

The electrical resistance instantly superheated the spinning black sand to over three thousand degrees.

In less than a heartbeat, the blinding twister of grit flash-melted into a solid, hollow cylinder of fragile violet glass wrapped around her head!

KRA-SHATTER!

Harper violently headbutted the glass, completely shattering the cylinder into thousands of glittering fragments.

She cleared her vision instantly, thrusting her hands forward to unleash a devastating, close-range electrical blast directly at the General’s torso.

However, at that exact point in time, it was already too late.

Xerxes had already crossed the remaining vertical distance.

The eight-foot sand monster was hovering directly above Silas’s shoulders, its massive obsidian spear thrusting downward with multi-ton force, mere inches away from impaling the Lord straight through the heart.

Harper’s purple eyes widened in horror as her scream caught in her throat.