Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Chapter 201: Under The Spire [X / Bonus Chapter]

The audio crackled as a massive section of the corridor fifty yards away completely caved in, burying the staircase in tons of rubble.

"I have an exciting morning announcement for all remaining Lords!" the dead god declared cheerfully. "Given that we are approaching the final phase of our game, I have decided to increase the pacing! Right now, as you can feel beneath your feet, the entire Treasury Dungeon is actively undergoing a complete chain-reaction tectonic collapse onto itself!"

Harper grabbed Silas’s arm, her purple eyes wide with horror as another boulder smashed into the floor ten feet away.

"He’s destroying the entire labyrinth?!"

"Listen closely to the rules of morning cardio!" Ititus shouted happily over the global broadcast. "There is currently only one specific structural sector in this entire subterranean dungeon that is not collapsing... and that is the central caldera below where the real Apex Vault and the primary Dungeon Core are located! You have exactly ten or twenty minutes!"

The god’s voice dropped into a dark sneer that promised inescapable death.

"If you do not run at maximum speed and cross the threshold into the stable place within the next ten to twenty minutes..." Ititus whispered, "...millions of tons of collapsing bedrock will completely crush you into atomized paste, and you will all die alone in the dark! Run, little Lords! RUN!"

The broadcast clicked off, leaving the cavern drowning in the deafening roar of collapsing earth and splitting stone.

Silas and Harper stood frozen in the center of the violently shaking intersection, the floor actively fracturing into jagged spiderwebs beneath their boots as falling gravel pelted their shoulders.

They looked at each other through the thick swirling dust of the collapsing dungeon, their faces identical masks of exhausted bewilderment.

’Seriously?’ Silas and Harper both thought in unison, blinking their eyes in disbelief as a massive stone pillar collapsed behind them.

Did this broken sadistic dead god genuinely want them to play his twisted game that bad?!

KRA-KRA-CRASH!

The apocalyptic roar of the falling ceiling violently drowned out any remaining semblance of peace within the damp subterranean corridor.

Millions of tons of ancient bedrock, pulverized stone, and freezing moisture completely collapsed, plummeting downward with the terminal velocity of a meteor strike.

Silas didn’t even have a second to hesitate.

He violently grabbed Harper by the forearm with his Core igniting as he yanked the exhausted lightning mage completely out of the rapidly crumbling ice haven.

They burst into the open intersection just as the vaulted stone ceiling directly above their Safe Zone gave way entirely.

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

The massive boulders completely crushed the thick-walled ice tent they had been sleeping in just seconds prior, obliterating the intricate absolute-zero structure into a million glittering shards of useless blue frost.

The impact was so astronomically immense that a thick, suffocating cloud of grey dust aggressively blasted down the tunnel, choking the stagnant air and plunging the corridor into near-total darkness.

Silas coughed with his golden-ringed eyes watering as the entire floor beneath his heavy combat boots began to violently heave, roll, and aggressively buck.

"Move!" Silas roared over the deafening tectonic rumble, pulling Harper forward.

They sprinted down the corridor, but the destruction of the dead god’s twisted game was inescapable.

Deep fault lines violently tore through the damp stone floor directly in front of them, splitting the ancient bedrock wide open like the maw of a dying beast to reveal bottomless lightless chasms that reeked of sulfur and void.

Silas skidded to a violent halt with his boots carving deep grooves into the stone.

He aggressively grabbed Harper’s shoulder, physically jerking her backward to stop her from plummeting into a newly formed fissure that had just ripped open inches from her bare toes.

’What the fuck man...’

Silas whipped his head to his right, his eyes desperately scanning the architecture for an escape route.

The massive sweeping stone staircase they had ascended yesterday was completely gone too.

The entire architectural support structure of the stairs had violently buckled under the tectonic stress.

Before their very eyes, the massive stone steps aggressively collapsed, shearing away from the cavern wall and plummeting downward into a vertical drop into the Abyss, swallowed by the suffocating darkness below.

"The stairs are gone!" Harper screamed over the apocalyptic noise with her purple eyes wide with terror as she gripped the lapels of Silas’s oversized trench coat tightly around her shoulders. "How are we supposed to navigate to the Vault sector?! The whole place is shifting!"

Silas let out a deeply exhausted, frustrated sigh with his jaw clenching tight.

"We don’t need to navigate!" Silas shouted back, his voice cutting through the roar of the collapsing earth. "The entire labyrinth is actively collapsing right behind us! The only way left to go is straight forward! We just run completely past the destruction until we find stable ground!"

Silas turned to her with his sharp jawline going tight with adrenaline and focus.

He looked at her bare legs, her bruised skin, and the fact that she was wearing nothing but a coat.

"Can you keep up?!" Silas demanded.

"I can keep up!" Harper assured him frantically, aggressively nodding her head. "My core is mostly recovered! I can run!"

"Good," Silas said.

But as he looked at her trembling legs and the heavy trench coat dragging against the stone, he didn’t think so.

He didn’t trust her physical stamina one single bit. Nobles always overestimated their baseline endurance.

They both sprinted forward, leaping across a two-foot-wide crack in the floor, plunging deeper into the dark vibrating corridor.

Within exactly ten seconds, Silas’s suspicion was proven utterly correct.

Even while Silas was actively suppressing his Gold Core, merely maintaining a perfectly regular jogging pace to conserve his breath, Harper was already lagging terribly far behind.

Her bare feet were completely unsuited for the jagged bedrock.

The sharp stones sliced into her soles and her physique while magically potent enough to level a a lot of things completely lacked the raw cardiovascular endurance necessary to outrun a earthquake.

A massive chunk of the ceiling broke away, falling directly toward her trailing silhouette.

"Harper..." Silas barked.

He didn’t wait for her to dodge and he didn’t waste breath encouraging her.

Silas violently spun on his heel, aggressively reversing his forward momentum.

He closed the ten-yard gap in a terrifying blur of motion, sweeping his strong calloused arms directly underneath her bare knees and behind her back.

WHOOSH!

Silas effortlessly picked her up off the crumbling floor, pulling her into a secure, tight Princess carry just as the massive boulder smashed into the stone exactly where she had been standing a microsecond prior.

"Hang on!" Silas commanded.

Harper gasped with her hands instinctively flying up to wrap securely around his neck.

BOOOOOOM!

Silas compressed an explosive surge of Gold Core energy directly into his calves and violently shot forward down the collapsing corridor like a human cannonball!

The sudden acceleration was absolute.

The sheer G-force of a Gold Core sprint physically made Harper’s flawless face tremble with her cheeks vibrating from the wind resistance as Silas made the air tremble around him.

She gasped, burying her face deeply into his broad chest as the damp stone walls violently blurred past them in streaks of grey and black.

He was clearing massive amounts of distance in a single sustained blitz with his heavy combat boots effortlessly finding traction on the shifting earth.

But the dead god’s timer was ticking, and the ground behind them was beginning to crack even harder.

The deafening roar of the earth eating itself was following right on their heels and a tidal wave of destruction that refused to be outpaced.

Through the thick swirling dust, his golden-ringed eyes locked onto a massive, branching intersection up ahead.

"Another staircase!" Silas muttered.

Looming in the gloom was a secondary reinforced stone staircase leading sharply upward toward a higher cavern but it wasn’t safe.

The tectonic vibrations had already reached the architecture.

The ancient stone steps were violently cracking with jagged fissures tearing through the dead center of the ascent as the pillars holding it aloft began to buckle.

Silas didn’t slow down. He accelerated with his muscles bulging as he hit the base of the stairs at absolute full speed.

’If Ititius has no haters then I’m no longer alive!’

He bounded upward with his heavy boots flawlessly targeting the few remaining solid patches of stone.

He hopped cleanly over the points that were completely shattering beneath his weight, using the falling debris as temporary stepping stones to propel himself higher.

CRUMBLE! KRA-THOOM!

As he reached the midway point, the entire front half of the remaining staircase violently collapsed.

The stone steps simply fell away into the dark chasm below, leaving a massive twenty-foot horizontal gap between him and the upper landing.

Silas gritted his teeth.

He planted his boot on the very edge of the collapsing step, tightened his grip on Harper’s thighs, and leaped completely over the chasm.

WHOOSH!

Silas soared through the empty air, defying gravity for two agonizing seconds, before landing heavily but securely on the upper stone platform.

He hit the ground in a flawless roll, instantly bouncing back to his feet without losing an ounce of momentum, and continued sprinting down the upper corridor.

The escape only intensified from there.

The upper corridors were a nightmare as the labyrinth was aggressively collapsing right behind them with the darkness literally swallowing the stone a few yards behind his boots.

But it wasn’t just the architecture trying to kill them.

The violently shifting earth had disturbed the deepest darkest nests of the subterranean ecosystem.

SKREEEEEEE!

A horrific high-pitched ear-piercing screech echoed from a side tunnel up ahead.

Bursting out of the collapsing darkness, completely blocking their path forward, was a swarm of massive grotesque monsters.

They were towering, heavily armored tunnel-centipedes, their segmented bodies dripping with highly corrosive green acid that hissed and bubbled against the damp stone floor.

"Monsters!" Harper warned, her purple eyes wide as she desperately tried to summon a spark of lightning in her palm.

"I’ve got them!" Silas roared, his voice completely lacking any sort of fear.

He didn’t put her down.

While securely holding the entire weight of Harper in his strong left arm, Silas seamlessly reached over his shoulder and drew his mythril longsword with his right hand in a blinding flash of gold steel.

As he closed the distance, the first massive centipede reared up, its mandibles snapping violently as it lunged for his legs.

KRA-SLASH!

Silas swung his blade in a brutal blindingly fast upward arc, completely disregarding traditional swordsmanship in favor of brutality.

The mythril steel cleanly bisected the massive insect straight down the middle, splitting its armored head in two as thick, foul-smelling yellow ichor sprayed across the corridor.

The second centipede reared up, preparing to spit a highly pressurized stream of corrosive green acid directly at Harper’s exposed back.

Silas violently pivoted his torso, shielding her completely with his own body as he forcefully channeled his water mana into the steel of his blade.

"First Style!" Silas chanted rapidly.

He swung the sword horizontally, unleashing a hyper-pressurized crescent-shaped blade of cutting water that completely intercepted the acid stream, neutralizing it mid-air before cleanly decapitating the second monster.

Silas aggressively trampled directly over its ruined twitching carcass as he kept running, kicking the severed head into the Abyss.

The corridor opened up into a massive, wide-spanning underground bridge that overlooked a bottomless fiery pit and they were not the only ones running for their lives.

Sprinting desperately across the buckling stone bridge, his gold armor heavily dented and his face pale with unadulterated terror, was a familiar figure.

It was the Spear Lord!

The arrogant aristocratic man who had hunted them across the surface desert was currently screaming at the absolute top of his lungs.

He was desperately clutching his heavy iron spear with tears actively streaming down his soot-covered face as the bridge collapsed right on his heels, threatening to swallow him whole.

Silas didn’t engage as he simply accelerated, easily outpacing the exhausted terrified Lord and running right past him on the collapsing bridge like he was standing still.

As Silas blurred past, the Spear Lord’s desperate bloodshot eyes locked onto the Silas’s cargo.

He instantly recognized the purple-haired lightning mage being carried securely in Silas’s arms, wearing nothing but his black trench coat.

"You!" the Spear Lord roared, his intense fear momentarily overridden by a screaming wave of fury. "You lightning bitch! You killed my Siege Rhino! It cost me a Hero Summoning Card to summon that beast, you whore!"