Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Valerius frowned, slowly lowering his sword. ”Explain.”

Silas laid out the logic perfectly.

”Ititus said he throws the people he defeated down there... His enemies. If you are powerful enough to be considered a personal enemy of a literal god, you are not a baseline peasant and are a high-tier entity. Powerful entities carry their own artifacts.”

Silas stepped closer, his voice dropping into a greedy one.

”The enemies of gods would probably hold their own legendary treasures on their corpses so the god wouldn’t bother looting them all. He just buried them and the next best place to find unfiltered loot in this entire Secret Realm is a dungeon full of dead rivals, instead of a rigged treasury full of fake mirages.”

Valerius stared at him. The logic was completely and undeniably solid. It was suicidal, yes, but it made perfect sense.

Valerius slowly grinned.

”You are a madman... I like that about you.”

They all agreed. Even Mia nodded her small head, actively agreeing that the ancient enemies of gods would be loaded with pristine artifacts.

So, they waited.

They stood on the glass plateau, doing nothing as the timer clicked down.

[05:00]

[02:00]

[00:10]

They were honestly getting bored. For a deadly divine trial that started so fast and sounded so incredibly urgent, it sure was going remarkably slow.

[00:00]

Then, it happened.

The solid desert glass beneath their boots completely liquefied as the sand instantly latched violently around their ankles, drawing them downward with terrifying inescapable gravitational force.

”Hold your breath!” Silas yelled.

They were violently sucked into the earth.

All of them sunk downward, plummeting through suffocating darkness for ten agonizing seconds before they were violently spat out into a completely different world.

THUD!

Silas hit the ground hard, rolling to a stop as he pushed himself up, coughing.

This layer was entirely different. It was a world of only pitch-black sand.

Towering around them were different kinds of massive, heavy iron cells that looked like they were made of solid reinforced dark sand.

”Welcome to my dungeon~” the god’s voice laughed sadistically through the dark corridors.

However, Silas completely ignored the taunt and the looming armor as he was staring directly at the heavy brass Treasure Radar gripped tightly in his left hand.

PING! PING! PING! PING! PING!

The radar was going crazy.

The screen was completely lit up with massive, high-density magical blips. There were twenty... no, thirty different signatures buried in the area around them!

There were no mirages down here or were they?

”We just hit the jackpot,” Silas whispered with a greedy grin spreading across his face.

Valerius laughed out loud and thrilled laugh as he raised his gauntleted hand for a high-five.

Silas was in such an incredibly good mood that he didn’t even hesitate.

He stepped forward and high-fived the aristocratic guy right back as the leather slapped against the iron with a loud sound.

However, all that joyous camaraderie drained completely out of the room the very next moment.

The air distorted heavily to their left.

Seraphina appeared completely out of nowhere, teleporting into the dungeon right beside them.

As soon as her fiery red eyes locked directly onto Silas’s face, she practically vibrated with pure rage as she took a furious step forward, immediately opening her mouth to yell at the top of her lungs and cast a devastating spell.

However, she couldn’t.

She opened her mouth, but no sound came out and no fire emerged from her lips.

Silas blinked with his perception, catching the detail instantly.

Clamped tightly around Seraphina’s pale throat, its metallic legs digging securely into her skin, was a specific advanced spider-shaped jewelry.

It was a silencing artifact, completely suppressing her vocal cords and severing her casting chants, which made her unable to speak.

Nothing happened.

Not a single decibel of sound left her lips and not a single spark of fire ignited in her palms as the air remained cold, silent, and lacking of the heat that they knew.

Valerius raised an eyebrow, stepping cautiously forward. He slowly waved his armored gauntlet directly in front of her flushed face.

”Seraph?” Valerius called out, his voice dripping with genuine confusion. ”Are you casting a silent incantation, or did you finally lose your mind?”

Seraphina slapped at his iron hand with a vicious, silent snarl.

She stepped back, frantically clawing at her own throat, desperately trying to force her mana pathways to ignite as she pushed her Lord core to its limit, attempting to blast her flames outward in an explosive omni-directional wave.

Still, nothing worked. Her mana violently sputtered and died the second it reached her chest.

Silas didn’t ask useless questions. He immediately focused on the strange, metallic gleam catching the dim light on the side of her neck.

He narrowed his golden-ringed eyes, activating his Lord inspection tab to scan the foreign object.

A glowing blue interface immediately manifested in his vision, organizing the data into a standard tab.

[Name]: Arachne’s Mute Parasite

[Type]: Tier 2 (Cursed Suppression Artifact)

[Duration]: 24:00:00 (Counting Down)

[Effect]: A clamp engineered for high-tier prisoner subjugation. Upon latching to the host’s nervous system, it forcibly compresses the mana core, bringing down the maximum mana output of the user by 50%. Simultaneously severs the vocal cords from the magical circulation, rendering verbal incantations and speech completely impossible.

[Warning]: The artifact is physically tethered to the host’s carotid artery. Applying external brute force or attempting to prematurely destroy the clamp will destabilize the core, immediately exploding the host’s neck. It safely unlatches and disappears automatically after 24 hours.

Silas read the red warning text twice. He slowly deactivated his interface, letting out a long exhausted sigh as he looked at the trembling girl.

”Well, the good news is you’re not going to blow up if we leave it alone,” Silas remarked flatly, crossing his arms over his dark coat. ”And honestly? At least you’re calm right now and not actively trying to kill me.”

Seraphina’s eyes widened in outrage.

’Calm?!’ She wanted to do nothing more than slaughter Silas Graves right where he stood.

She wanted to summon a sun and melt his bones into glass. This miserable commoner had humiliated her beyond mortal comprehension.

He had seen her in the most compromising undignified position imaginable, and now he was casually mocking her inability to speak!

She stepped forward to throw a physical right hook, but the moment her muscles tensed for an erratic combat movement, the metallic spider clamped tighter.

ZZZTS!

A sharp agonizing jolt of suppression magic spiked directly through her brainstem.

Seraphina gasped silently with her knees buckling as her depleted mana core violently shuddered.

She quickly realized she didn’t have an option at all. If she performed erratic movements or aggressive attacks, the artifact actively punished her.

She could only stand there, breathing heavily and shooting daggers at Silas with her eyes without physically touching him.

Before Valerius could question the artifact’s origins, the air around them vibrated.

”Ahem!”

The dead God’s voice boomed through the dark dungeon, echoing off the towering iron cells with a deafening hearty laugh.

”Welcome, my unfortunate little souls, to the deep Abyss!” Ititus cheered happily. ”If you are hearing this broadcast, it means you either failed the timer, or you actually chose to jump down here voluntarily! That makes you either the unluckiest, or the greediest bastards ever born to the Sovereign Realm!”

Valerius crossed his arms, glaring up at the dark ceiling.

”Now,” Ititus continued, his tone shifting into a sadistic sneer. ”Even if you were clever enough to realize that I buried my legendary treasures down here, you aren’t getting them for free! You will have to survive the reanimated bodies of this zone! You see, all of the elite enemies and rival Lords I defeated during my ascension were thrown down here. The treasures you seek are deeply embedded inside their very flesh and armor! You have to slaughter them to get the loot!”

Valerius instantly lost his aristocratic temper. He raised his fist at the ceiling.

”You are a twisted, honorless bastard!” Valerius called the god out loudly.

The audio broadcast flickered, a burst of static buzzing through the air before Ititus’s voice surprisingly responded.

”I’m not a bastard~” Ititus mocked in a sing-song tone. ”Oops! Did I forget to mention? Some of these recordings have interactive trigger algorithms! Enjoy the bloodbath!”

The voice completely vanished, leaving a heavy, suffocating silence in its wake.

All of them blinked, staring at the empty air. Was this not a standard recording, or had the god left a fragment of his actual consciousness behind to troll them?

Regardless of the answer, the dungeon didn’t give them time to debate.

GRIND! GRIND! GRIND!

The heavy reinforced iron gates of the surrounding cells began to lift. From the suffocating darkness of the corridors, the first enemies of the god or rather, his ancient prisoners made their way into the clearing.

They weren’t fleshy undead as they were massive, eight-foot-tall piles of shifting, condensed black sand, shaped into humanoid gladiators with hollow glowing red eyes and agonizing faces screaming from their torsos.

Valerius immediately cursed under his breath.

”More sand?! I am sick of this element!”

He didn’t wait for them to surround the group as Valerius dropped his center of gravity, his mythril boots sliding across the stone floor as he rushed forward.

He drew his blade, his green mana flaring brilliantly.

”Vacuum Domain: Cross-Sever!” Valerius roared.

He didn’t use a basic wind slice as he utilized another aggressive style of his Vacuum Domain attack.

Valerius slashed his sword horizontally, then vertically, creating a massive X-shaped vacuum rift that violently sucked the air out of the corridor before imploding.

BOOOOM!

The explosive decompression violently ripped through the group of the sand prisoners, cleanly cutting through them and scattering their black sand bodies across the stone walls.

Valerius stepped into the wreckage, his eyes scanning the debris. He kicked a shattered sand torso.

”Nothing,” Valerius spat, turning back to Silas. ”Inside them were no treasures. These front-line trash are just decoys.”

”Then we keep moving until we hit the high-density signatures,” Silas said.

He checked his brass radar, which was pointing deeper into the labyrinth.

Silas and Valerius chose to move forward immediately.

They walked side-by-side with their summoned heroes with Aeliana and Mia guarding their flanks as they advanced down the dark corridor, completely leaving Seraphina trembling behind in the clearing.

Seraphina stood alone in the dark, her chest heaving as she hyper-ventilated.

’Why?!’ she wondered desperately, hot frustrated tears finally spilling out of her eyes and cutting clean lines through the soot on her cheeks. ’Why is this Secret Realm so utterly hellish?!’

Her entire world had collapsed in less than an hour.

Not only had she been seen peeing like some uncivilized barbarian in the dirt, but a man who was not her future husband had seen her completely naked!

And not only that, she was now wearing a cursed collar that reduced her A-Rank power to a pathetic fraction, she couldn’t speak a single syllable, and she couldn’t even try to convince Val to help her because she had literally attacked him with lethal fireballs in a fit of her own uncontrollable rage!

And as for Silas Graves...

’That filthy rat!’ Seraphina thought, her jaw trembling with fury. ’I wouldn’t be caught dead asking him for—’

The angry thoughts violently stopped as she looked up.

The glowing lights of Silas, Valerius, and their heroes had vanished.

They had turned a corner, leaving her line of sight and going completely into the dark labyrinth, leaving her entirely alone in a dungeon filled with reanimated god-killing monstrosities.

From the shadows behind her, the grinding sound of shifting sand echoed as two more black sand gladiators were reforming from the floor, their hollow red eyes locking onto her solitary figure.

Seraphina’s legs were actually trembling. Without her vocal cords to chant and with her fire mana suppressed by fifty percent, she couldn’t output enough heat to turn them to glass.

She took a terrified wobbly step backward, breathing harder and harder as the monsters raised their heavy stone swords.

Suddenly, a hand reached out from the darkness and grabbed her shoulder.

Seraphina flinched violently, raising her fists, but someone popped up right beside her.

It was Silas.

The dark-haired Lord had doubled back. He stood there with his trench coat covered in desert dust, looking down at her with a calm resigned expression.

He let out a heavy sigh, gesturing with his thumb toward the lighted corridor ahead.

”Do you want to come along with us?” Silas asked simply. ”If you stay here, you’re going to get turned into fertilizer so come.”