Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Chapter 209: Out Of The Secret Realm

The other Lords in the group were okay but this dark-haired man was giving off the distinct feeling of a very fierce warrior who had clawed his way up from the bottom of the food chain.

But that wasn’t what caught her attention.

Thor focused her divine perception, looking completely past his physical flesh.

Hidden deep within his chest, suppressed and meticulously concealed beneath layers of mana, Thor sensed it.

It was a flawless Gold Lord Core.

Thor’s eyes widened a microscopic fraction.

Her Father, the All-Father Odin, had long ago awakened a Gold Lord core during his ancient travels through Midgard.

It was the unquestionable hallmark of a true predator.

It was the mark of a King. She knew exactly what kind of terrifying presence a Gold Core emitted, and she felt that exact same resonance radiating from this silent dark-haired man.

A slow knowing smirk stretched across Thor’s flawless face.

She stepped completely past Valerius and Seraphina, completely ignoring the elite nobles, and walked directly right up to Silas Graves.

She stopped mere inches away from his chest, forcing the Lord to look slightly up to meet her electrical blue eyes.

The passive pressure radiating from her body made Silas’s heart violently hammer against his ribs.

"Well, well, well," Thor purred softly.

She leaned in close, her blue eyes sparkling with amusement. "And what might your name be, little warrior?"

Silas Graves, The Lord of the Blessed Land who was quite a powerful Lord capable of beating hordes of monsters by himself... actually hesitated.

His brain short-circuited in the presence of an incredibly beautiful deity standing two inches from his face.

"S-Silas," Silas actually stuttered. "Silas Graves."

Thor’s smirk widened into a brilliant grin.

She didn’t say another word.

Thor casually reached out her right hand.

With the heavy runed iron gauntlet of Járngreipr aggressively sparking with static electricity, the Daughter of Odin gently patted Silas Graves directly on the top of his head, exactly like one would pet a very good dangerous hunting dog.

Pat. Pat.

Silas stood completely frozen in place with his golden-ringed eyes twitching violently, but his survival instincts screaming at him not to swat the hand of the god who had just deleted a mountain.

Behind his back, Aeliana’s eyes widened in absolute shock with her elven jaw dropping. Harper covered her mouth to hide a hysterical gasp.

Thor completely maintained the Lord’s secret.

She didn’t say a single word out loud about the Gold Core hidden in his chest. Even her Father had explicitly warned her centuries ago that being exposed as a Gold Core in Midgard meant inviting all of the political and military trouble in the entire world directly to your doorstep.

She respected the hustle and she wasn’t going to blow his cover to these pampered nobles.

"Keep surviving, Silas Graves." Thor whispered softly, pulling her hand back.

Before Silas could even formulate a response, the dry monotone voice of the Druid echoed from behind them.

"Executioner Thor," the Druid interrupted, tapping her wooden staff against the bedrock. "The spatial integrity of this Secret Realm is critically failing. The core is fractured and I respectfully request that we leave this dimension immediately before it completely collapses onto the void."

Thor sighed, her cheerful demeanor returning as she turned away from the Warlord.

"Duty calls!" Thor announced loudly to the group of utterly stunned Lords. "I wish you all the best of luck! May your mead be strong and your enemies be slow!"

She offered the Midgardians a final polite wave goodbye.

Thor casually turned around, facing the massive fractured golden Realm Core hovering near the edge of the crater.

She didn’t use a spell as she simply drew Mjölnir from her hip, casually tossed the heavy iron war hammer into the air, caught it by the handle, and threw it directly at the core.

KRA-SHATTER!

Mjölnir smashed completely through the massive golden sphere, permanently shattering the Realm Core into a million microscopic fragments of dead light!

The exact microsecond the core broke, the Secret Realm violently collapsed.

The gravity failed as the pitch-black, fractured sky instantly dissolved into a swirling vortex of spatial energy.

FWOOSH!

The surviving Lords were violently caught in the spatial backwash.

Their bodies instantly dissolved into streaks of white light, completely teleported out of the collapsing dimension and forcefully sent back directly to the surface of their own mortal world.

As the Midgardians vanished, Thor casually caught Mjölnir as it flew back into her hand.

The barren bedrock around them was actively crumbling into the cosmic void.

Thor let out a long exhausted sigh, aggressively stretching her arms above her head.

"You know, tree-hugger," Thor complained casually to the Druid, completely ignoring the apocalyptic dimension collapsing around them. "I really want to take a break. My shoulders are killing me... I think I’m going to use some of my PTO this weekend and hit the taverns in Alfheim."

The stoic Druid stared at the collapsing sky for a moment then uncharacteristically, she slowly nodded her head.

"Surprisingly," the Druid admitted, her voice dripping with exhaustion, "I completely agree with you as a break sounds optimal."

Thor gasped, her blue eyes lighting up with genuine joy.

"Did we just agree on something?!" Thor cheered.

She aggressively lunged forward, throwing her armored arms around the tiny Druid and pulling the stoic woman into a crushing bear hug.

The Druid let out a strangled wheeze of protest with her wooden staff clattering to the floor.

"Thor... release me—" the Druid gasped.

"See you on Monday!" Thor laughed.

KRA-THOOM!

Thor completely ignored the protest.

She violently launched herself directly into the sky, rocketing upward through the collapsing spatial tears and flying off into the cosmic void, leaving a massive trail of blue lightning in her wake.

The Druid was left completely alone standing on a rapidly shrinking piece of barren bedrock as the Secret Realm actively dissolved into the abyss around her.

The Druid slowly bent down, picking up her wooden staff.

She dusted off her vine-woven robes, adjusting her collar with an deep sense of fatigue.

As the ground beneath her boots finally gave way, the Druid let out one final sigh, her glowing white eyes staring blankly into the void.

’I really,’ the Druid thought to herself as she initiated her own emergency teleportation sequence, ’do not get paid enough for this.’

...

The transition between dimensions was never a smooth or forgiving process.

Silas Graves felt an incredibly nauseating sensation violently rip through his entire physical body.

It was the exact same kind of fundamentally "weird" stomach-churning spatial displacement that he had felt upon first entering the Secret Realm days ago.

The sudden shift in atmospheric density, the complete evaporation of the ambient mana, and the aggressive readjustment of gravity completely scrambled his brain a bit.

His vision swam with blinding streaks of white and blue cosmic light.

The roaring thunder of the collapsing Secret Realm was instantly muted, replaced by a sudden silence that rang loudly in his ears.

Right next to him, still holding tightly onto his arm, Aeliana’s flawless elven body suddenly violently shuddered.

"Lord Sy—" Aeliana began to speak, her green eyes widening in sudden realization.

Before she could even finish her sentence, the spatial laws of the mortal world forcefully reasserted themselves.

Aeliana’s physical form aggressively dissolved into a million brilliant, shimmering white sparks of starlight.

The sparks swirled rapidly in the air for a fraction of a microsecond before completely dissipating into the ether, leaving Silas grasping at empty air.

DING!

A mechanical chime echoed directly inside his skull as a translucent blue system screen immediately materialized in front of his eyes projecting crisp white text.

[The dimensional tether has been severed.]

[Hero: Aeliana (Starlight Arcanist) has been successfully unsummoned and returned safely to the Blessed Land Territory barracks.]

Silas blinked away the disorientation. It wasn’t just Aeliana.

All across the chaotic cluster of teleporting Lords, everyone’s summoned Heroes were vanishing in identical bursts of elemental light.

Elora’s Frost Mage dissolved into a flurry of blue snowflakes.

The mechanical-armed Archer serving Maya vanished in a blur of metallic polygons.

Mia, the ancient Grandmaster who had been securely perched on Valerius’s shoulder just moments ago, quietly faded into a splash of harmless evaporating water drops, forcefully pulled back to her master’s domain.

Without the supportive weight of his Hero, Silas felt the sudden aggressive pull of Earth’s gravity.

THUD!

The spatial vortex aggressively spat them out.

They fell from the glowing white portal, tumbling roughly through the air for several feet before hitting the ground heavily.

Silas hit the dirt in an automatic shoulder roll, mitigating the blunt force trauma.

He slid to a halt with his hands instantly pressing flat against the earth to anchor himself.

"Fuck..."

He coughed, his lungs aggressively rejecting the sudden influx of stale air of the place after spending days breathing the hyper-oxygenated atmosphere of a divine realm.

He slowly sat up, wiping a thick layer of grit from his face, and looked around to assess his immediate surroundings.

The sand that stretched across this barren world... the sand that had previously been a normal, mundane beige had completely lost all of its life.

The earth itself had become pitch black. It looked and felt like scorched, dead ash scattered across a massive graveyard.

The massive intricately carved stone pillars that held the portal aloft were dark.

The swirling volatile energy that usually drifted around the array was completely gone.

The glowing portal hovering between the pillars sputtered, sparked with a few dying arcs of residual static, and then permanently deactivated, plunging the place into the dim flickering light that came from above.

Silas let out a long exhausted breath.

All around him, the other Lords that had somehow miraculously survived the meat grinder of the expedition were picking themselves up off the black sand.

There were barely more than half a dozen of them left out of the twenty that had originally marched through those doors.

They were all covered in soot, dried blood, and severe lacerations. They looked like refugees fleeing a war zone.

Silas watched as they all began slowly standing up, brushing the dead black sand off their ruined armor.

The trauma of the experience was evident on every single one of their faces but human nature was incredibly resilient, and almost immediately, the shocked silence was broken by frantic chatter.

Some of the surviving elites were already frantically talking about Thor.

"Did you see the size of that hammer?!" one of the blue-core Lords gasped, his hands trembling violently as he leaned against the warehouse wall. "She completely deleted the sky! A single swing! I didn’t even see her cast a spell!"

"The Daughter of Odin..." the Spear Lord babbled hysterically, sitting on his knees in the black sand, completely ignoring the fact that he was missing a chunk of his armor.

The usually arrogant man was unashamedly glazing the Norse deity to anyone who would listen. "Her physical power was impossible! The gravity! She blocked a mountain of liquid glass with her bare hand! If she hadn’t arrived, we would all be dead! All hail Asgard!"

Silas listened to the frantic awe-struck worship echoing around the warehouse.

He didn’t join in. Instead, Silas slowly climbed to his feet, his jaw clenching so tight his teeth audibly ground together.

He aggressively brushed the dead black sand off his shirt with his golden-ringed eyes burning with a dark frustrated fire.

’I need to stop treating this shit like a game,’ Silas thought fiercely, his ego taking a massive beating. ’I need to stop taking it easy. I need to stop thinking I’m at the top of the food chain just because I can bully a few pampered aristocrats.’

In the apocalyptic world-shaking battle between Thor and Ititus, Silas had felt incredibly useless.

It was a bitter pill to swallow.

Which was only natural, of course, since he was fundamentally just a Human standing in the crossfire of two cosmic entities.

But he had a Mythic Gold Core.

He possessed the highest tier of magical potential recognized by the Sovereign realm.

Silas didn’t want to be a spectator.

He wanted to be the one swinging the hammer.

He wanted to be strong and completely undefeated like Thor. He wanted to possess the kind of terrifying baseline physical power that could make other Lords physically choke on the air just by standing in his general vicinity.

Silas looked down at his calloused right hand, slowly curling his fingers into a tight, bruising fist.