Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Silas’s eyes widened to the size of saucers.

Tier 4?

Everyone had been bleeding themselves dry for the past day or so fighting over Tier 1 and Tier 2 trinkets so a Tier 4 artifact wasn’t just a weapon... it was even more than a trump card.

’I didn’t even think Ititius would have something of great value like this... but what if something is inside?’ Silas thought, that was a risk but he was sure as long as one didn’t apply mana into the thing... it was alright.

After all, that was an item that could actively seal gods?

Silas of course wanted it.

”That eye is coming home with us,” Silas declared however, the dungeon was not going to hand over a Tier 4 item for free.

HSSSSS.

The ocean of black sand surrounding them began to violently churn and bubble.

Massive mounds of the dark sediment began rising from the floor nut these weren’t the classic, humanoid sand mobs from the arena above.

They were twisted nightmarish amalgamations. Spiked carapaces made of compressed black glass formed over shifting limbs. Scythe-like appendages erupted from their sides, and hollow glowing purple eyes snapped open in the dark.

Silas drew his mythril longsword with the steel ringing sharply in the dark cavern.

”I’ll handle the mob,” Silas told her, stepping forward to draw the frontline aggro. ”And then take the eye too, you just need to support me Aeliana.””

Aeliana stepped up beside him, gently placing her hand on his forearm.

”There is no need for you to dive in recklessly, My Lord,” Aeliana said as she looked out at the forming horde with her green eyes calculating the spatial distance to the pedestal. ”Allow me to retrieve it... I can bypass the entire frontline with a single spatial step.”

Silas looked at the shifting sea of black sand, then back at his Starlight Arcanist.

The logic was quite sound.

”Alright,” Silas agreed, tightening his grip on his sword. ”You get the eye and I’ll buy you the time but do not touch anything else on that pedestal and don’t put mana into it..”

”No worries,” Aeliana assured him with a confident devoted smile. ”I shall return in ten seconds.”

She didn’t run. Aeliana’s body instantly dissolved into a blinding flash of blue-white starlight, teleporting right past the forming monsters.

The sudden flash of light immediately drew the aggro of the horde.

One of the massive, scythe-wielding sand monsters rotated its upper torso, its purple eyes locking onto Aeliana as she rematerialized near the pedestal.

The beast let out a shriek, raising its arms and violently expanding a massive, razor-sharp net of black sand directly in her direction.

”Don’t look away from me!” Silas roared.

Silas didn’t just step in to intercept as he completely let go of his restraints.

For quite a while, he had been meticulously hiding his true power, suppressing his core to blend in with the baseline Blue and Purple core Lords of the group.

But down here, in the dark, with no witnesses except his most loyal Hero, there was no reason to hide.

Silas fully ignited his Gold Core.

A terrifying aura exploded outward from his chest as blinding, liquid gold mana surged through his veins, traveling down his arm and aggressively coating the entire length of his mythril sword in a brilliant aura of golden light.

SHWK!

Silas swung his sword in a horizontal arc and the golden energy completely disintegrated the net with the holy mana burning the black sediment into harmless white ash.

The monsters immediately turned their attention back to the massive, glowing threat in their midst.

Silas laughed loudly, the sound echoing off the cavern walls. It felt incredibly good to stop hiding. He was tired of holding back.

”Come on!” Silas taunted them.

Ten monsters lunged at him simultaneously with their glass scythes swinging for his neck.

Silas didn’t retreat a single inch.

He ducked under the first swing, driving his golden-coated blade straight up through the jaw of the closest beast.

CRUNCH!

He ripped the blade free and didn’t bother using the chants once more.

Silas threw his left hand forward, pouring his dense, golden mana directly into a water spell.

TIDAL IMPACT!

A massive sphere of heavy golden-tinted water formed in his palm and violently detonated against the chest of a charging brute.

BOOOOM!

The hydraulic shockwave was devastating as usual as the brute was blown into atomic dust, and the heavy water splashed aggressively over a dozen surrounding monsters, soaking their shifting black sand bodies and slowing their movements to a crawl.

Silas didn’t give them a microsecond to recover as he slammed his boot into the ground.

ICE TRANSFORMATION!

He violently stripped the heat from the soaked battlefield as the golden-tinted water instantly flash-froze, completely encasing the twelve monsters in jagged unbreakable blocks of solid ice.

Silas blurred forward as his physical strength combined with his momentum.

He swung his golden sword like a baseball bat, shattering the frozen monsters into thousands of pieces of flying ice and black sand.

KRA-SHATTER!

While Silas was completely dismantling the horde at the frontline, Aeliana reached the objective.

She stood before the jagged black pedestal. Sitting in the center of the stone was the Tier 4 artifact... the petrified, golden-irised eye.

Aeliana was meticulous as she didn’t just grab it blindly.

She closed her eyes, channeling her starlight mana outward to scan the immediate vicinity for hidden pressure plates, runic tripwires, or spatial curses before retracting her mana.

The scan returned completely clean. So far, she couldn’t sense any traps whatsoever.

”Securing the asset, My Lord,” Aeliana called out over her shoulder.

She reached out her slender pale hand however the moment her fingertips physically brushed against the cold, petrified amber of the eye, everything went wrong.

The artifact didn’t move.

Instead, the golden iris violently dilated. It snapped awake, the pupil locking directly onto Aeliana’s face, and it began to glow with an intense purple light.

”Hah...”

Aeliana gasped, her eyes going wide as the ambient gravity around her completely inverted.

Her physical body immediately began swirling with her form actively stretching and distorting as she was violently pulled into a spatial vortex that erupted directly from the pupil of the eye.

Silas spun around, hearing the violent tear in the spatial fabric. He saw the purple light consuming her.

”AELI!” Silas yelled at the top of his lungs, abandoning the fight and sprinting toward the pedestal with explosive speed but he was too late.

VWOOP!

The spatial vortex collapsed inward with a sharp snapping sound.

Aeliana completely disappeared from the cavern, leaving only the dark pedestal and the dormant eye behind.

[Inside the Artifact.]

Aeliana blinked.

The transition was violently ripping the breath from her lungs.

One moment she was standing in a freezing cavern, and the next, she was standing in a completely different world.

The sky above her was a suffocating, endless expanse of pitch-black nothingness and the ground beneath her boots was cracked obsidian.

But what hit her first wasn’t the visual desolation.

It was the smell.

Aeliana gagged, throwing her hand over her mouth and nose. The smell of festering rot filled the air everywhere, a stench so intensely putrid it physically burned the back of her throat.

It smelled like a millennia of undisturbed decay.

She slowly lowered her hand with her eyes adjusting to the gloom, and located the source of the rot.

Laying sprawled across the cracked obsidian ground, taking up an area the size of a small mountain, was a very huge dragon.

Its scales were a dull, muted crimson, cracked and peeling away from its massive frame. The beast was actively rotting.

Massive sections of flesh were sloughing off its ribs, exposing blackened bone. Disgusting, pale worms the size of anacondas were actively coming out of her open wounds, writhing blindly in the dark dirt.

Aeliana was terrified.

The overwhelming aura of the creature, even in its decaying state, was suffocating but as she looked closer, she noticed something else.

Standing perfectly still at the edge of the dragon’s massive, resting head, gently stroking the decaying scales, was a woman.

She was completely naked.

Her skin was flawlessly pale, glowing softly in the dark. Her hair was a vibrant, cascading waterfall of fiery crimson that matched the dragon’s scales and her figure was quite impossible...

It was curvaceous and toned while exuding a magnetism that completely defied the grotesque rot surrounding her.

Aeliana, despite the terror of the situation, felt a sudden pang of intense, petty elven jealousy.

She instinctively crossed her arms over her own chest, glaring at the woman’s flawless proportions.

The naked woman stopped stroking the dragon. She didn’t turn around, but she tilted her head back, taking a slow, deep sniff of the stagnant air.

”You...” the woman spoke with her voice echoing with a strange dual harmonic resonance. ”You smell like humans.”

The woman slowly turned around, her glowing crimson eyes locking onto Aeliana.

”And not only that,” the woman continued, her eyes narrowing. ”But you smell like gods, too. Are you perhaps allied with them? Has Ititius finally come to execute me?”

Aeliana straightened her posture, her pride as an Arcanist of the stars refusing to let her cower before a naked stranger, regardless of the aura she emitted.

”I am allied with no god,” Aeliana started, preparing to verbally defend her presence.

Before Aeliana tried to even speak another word, the massive rotting dragon behind the woman suddenly moved.

SQUELCH.

The dragon’s massive decaying jaw parted, exposing rows of yellowed broken teeth. When it spoke, the voice was identical to the naked woman’s, only magnified to a deafening earth-shaking volume.

”Answer the question!” the dragon interrupted her, its voice booming with hostility. ”You smell of filthy humans, and the stink of the divine gods clings to your soul! Why is that?!”

Aeliana didn’t flinch. She raised her chin with her green eyes glowing with unwavering loyalty.

”Because I am tethered to a Lord,” Aeliana replied firmly. ”And he possesses the heart of a Saint.”

The word hung in the rotting air.

There was a deafening, sickening cracking sound from the dragon. The beast’s massive spine arched, snapping ancient bones back into place as she roared out, a sound of pure, unadulterated historical agony.

”Lord!” the dragon roared, the soundwave physically pushing Aeliana backward a few inches. ”It’s always Humans! It’s always gods! You always try to oppress us! You bind us, you steal our skies, and you lock us in the dark!”

The naked woman turned fully over to Aeliana.

The woman’s flawless face contorted into a mask of pure, feral rage. Her eyes were glowing in brilliant crimson light.

Her pale body began to violently tremble.

CRACK! SNAP!

A sickening sound of breaking bones filled the silent void. The woman’s spine violently elongated, tearing through her pale skin.

Her jaw unhinged, extending outward into a massive snout as thick burning crimson scales began aggressively bursting out from beneath her flesh, covering her entirely.

The transformation was horrific, nothing like what the books said of a Dragon transformation as Aeliana watched the ground.

The delicate humanoid shadow cast on the black ground was violently twisting and expanding, shifting from the silhouette of a curvaceous woman into the massive, winged, horned profile of an apex predator.

Within seconds, the woman was completely gone.

Standing before Aeliana, entirely separate from the rotting carcass on the ground, was a newly formed flawless crimson dragon.

Aeliana immediately got on the defensive. She shifted her stance, dropping her center of gravity and raising her hands.

She was an educated Elf.

She knew exactly what dragons were, their destructive capabilities, and exactly what to do once their territorial rage was ignited.

[You do not run from a dragon. You fight, or you die.]

She didn’t want to resort to this ultimate trump card so early in the Secret Realm raid, but the pressure radiating from the crimson beast left her no alternative.

Aeliana reached over with her left hand and forcefully ripped the right sleeve of her pristine white robes all the way up to her shoulder.

Burning brightly on her pale elven skin, near her bicep, was a glowing intricate green rune.

Lady Eluned, the Goddess of Nature, had personally kissed a Genesis Rune onto her arm back at the territory before the raid commenced.

Aeliana closed her eyes for a microsecond and poured her raw mana directly into the mark, forcefully activating it.

’Thank you my Goddes...’

The green rune flared with blinding natural light.

The effect was instantaneous. As long as the rune existed and remained active on her flesh, her magical stamina was going to be near limitless.

Her core expanded, drawing mana from the rune.

The Crimson Dragon didn’t care about the glowing light.

”Die!” the dragon roared with the sound shaking the black sky.