Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

”AGGGGGGGGH!” Julian shrieked in soul-tearing agony, dropping his sword and staggering violently backward as blood sprayed from the ruined socket.

But the punishment wasn’t over.

Silas channeled mana directly through his fingertips into the wound.

The hot blood violently gushing from Julian’s ruined eye instantly froze over, expanding into ice crystals that tore through his optical nerve and locked his agonizing scream into a frozen gasp.

Silas stood before the staggering noble with his ice sword resting casually at his side.

He sneered and it looked like a demonic expression that promised violence.

”Fight for your life,” Silas commanded.

Julian, blinded in one eye with his face half-covered in bloody ice shrieked in feral desperation.

”YOU FUCKERRRRRR!”

He blindly scooped his sword off the floor. His Lord core ignited, bursting into a roaring aura of red fire magic.

”I will burn you to ash!” Julian screamed, launching himself forward.

Julian executed the Verinda Sword Art... the elite high-tier combat style of the City Lord’s inner circle.

He unleashed a flurry of rapid incredibly complex thrusts and slashes, his steel blade completely wreathed in roaring fire and aiming to dismember Silas with a hundred burning cuts.

However...

CLANG! CLANG! SHWK!

Silas didn’t even step back.

He stood his ground, moving with terrifying perfection as he parried every single fiery thrust with his ice sword, the cold temperature of his blade instantly extinguishing Julian’s flames upon contact.

”FUCKER!”

Julian swung a burning horizontal arc aimed for Silas’s neck.

Silas ducked smoothly under the blade.

He stepped entirely inside Julian’s guard, entirely bypassing the technique as Silas swung his ice sword in a short brutal upward arc.

SHWK!

”AAAGH!” Julian screamed again.

Silas cleanly chopped off the three middle fingers of Julian’s right hand.

The severed digits flew through the air, completely frozen solid before they hit the ground.

Julian dropped his sword, clutching his bleeding, frozen stump in sheer terror.

”Is that the Verinda art?” Silas mocked coldly, kicking the dropped sword away. ”It’s quite pathetic.”

Julian scrambled backward, his fire aura wildly sputtering. He threw his left hand forward, desperately trying to cast a point-blank fireball to create distance but Silas didn’t dodge the spell.

He stepped forward and swung his ice sword horizontally with devastating force.

KRA-SLASH!

The razor-sharp ice blade cleanly severed Julian’s left hand entirely at the wrist.

”AGGGHHH!”

The noble collapsed to his knees, his mind completely breaking as he stared at his two ruined, bleeding stumps.

The agony was unimaginable with his noble reality completely shattered by the brutal violence of the slums.

”Please!” Julian begged, sobbing hysterically as tears and blood streamed down his face. ”Please! Graves! I have money! I have influence! My family will give you anything!”

Silas walked slowly around the kneeling man. He didn’t speak as he raised his ice sword and brought it down in two rapid fast downward chops.

SHWK! SHWK!

”NOOOOOOOOO!” Julian wailed, his voice tearing his vocal cords.

Silas completely cut off both of Julian’s legs at the kneecaps.

The noble collapsed onto his back in the growing pool of his own freezing blood, completely dismembered, writhing like a dying insect on the damp stone.

Silas stepped over him. He placed his heavy combat boot directly onto Julian’s chest, pinning the thrashing Lord to the floor.

With terrifying precision, Silas rested the tip of his absolute-zero ice sword against the center of Julian’s ornate breastplate.

He pushed down, channeling dense pressure as the ice blade pierced the armor, slicing cleanly through the sternum, cutting Julian’s chest cavity wide open.

SHHHHHKKKKKK!

The cut was so deep and brutal, that the bleeding palpitating human heart was visibly exposed, furiously beating amidst the ruined flesh and shattered bone.

Julian stared up at Silas with his one remaining eye.

The terror and the realization of his impending death, was fully cemented in his gaze.

He couldn’t fight back... He couldn’t run... He was nothing.

”Graves... please...” Julian gurgled, blood bubbling violently from his lips. ”Mercy...”

Silas leaned down with his face inches from the dying aristocrat as the light of the cavern reflected in his cold golden eyes.

”I might have spared you,” Silas whispered, his voice a dark, lethal promise that echoed with years of buried hatred. ”But you insulted my sister.”

Silas raised his ice sword high above his head with both hands.

”Die.”

SHWK-KRA-THOOM!

Silas brought the blade down with the maximal force that he could manage.

He slashed Julian completely in half, vertically bisecting the aristocrat from his collarbone straight down to his pelvis.

The force of the strike shattered the stone floor beneath the body as the two halves of Julian’s ruined corpse violently fell apart, spilling a massive steaming wave of blood and frozen viscera across the corridor.

The cavern fell completely silent, save for the rhythmic dripping of water.

Drip! Drip! Drip!

Silas stood up slowly.

”Haaah...”

He let out a long sigh with the deep burning tension in his chest finally releasing after years of holding it in.

He flicked his wrist, dispelling the ice sword back into harmless ambient water vapor.

He turned around slowly, looking back at Harper.

She was still leaning against the stone wall, clutching his trench coat tightly around her shoulders.

She had watched the entire brutal execution from start to finish.

Harper had watched him torture, dismember, and bisect a Valoria Lord without a single ounce of mercy but she didn’t look any bit disgusted by what she had seen.

In fact, her purple eyes were wide, her breathing was shallow, and a dark flush had spread across her pale cheeks.

Silas wiped a speck of frozen blood from his cheek as he looked at the massive stone staircase leading upward into the dark.

”So,” Silas asked her calmly, his voice completely level. ”Want to go up?”

”Y-yeah...”

...

...

...

The eerie light filtering down from the high, vaulted stone ceiling of the subterranean labyrinth had completely changed.

The golden hue of safety had bled away, entirely replaced by a cold and deeply ominous shade of luminescent blue.

Inside the flawlessly constructed, thick-walled ice house that Mia had erected in their isolated section of the dungeon, the atmosphere was thick.

Aeliana sat cross-legged on the smooth, frozen floor with her pristine white spider-silk robes pooling around her.

She was currently holding the ancient Grandmaster water mage in a tight protective embrace.

Mia was resting comfortably in her lap, looking entirely unbothered by the mortal peril surrounding them.

They were currently chewing on the dry rations that Valerius Sterling had begrudgingly shared from his spatial inventory.

To Aeliana, the preserved meat tasted like ash compared to what Kaelia could cook.

She stopped chewing, her glowing green eyes staring blankly at the solid blue ice wall of the shelter.

”Aunt Mia...” Aeliana whispered softly, her voice trembling with a rare uncharacteristic vulnerability.

She squeezed her Grand Aunt a fraction tighter. ”Will he be alright? I haven’t seen Lord Sy for almost an entire day now. The labyrinth shifted violently when the Spire collapsed and he is alone out there in the dark.”

Mia swallowed her bite of dried jerky, reaching up with a tiny hand to lazily pat Aeliana’s pale cheek.

”Calm your heart, little bird,” Mia assured her, her voice raspy but carrying absolute, ancient confidence. ”That boy is a Lord if I have ever seen one... He has a lot of mana, a ridiculously durable physical body, and the survival instincts of a starving wolf. A little collapsing architecture and a few monsters are not going to put him in the ground. He will be alright.”

Sitting across the small, freezing enclosure, Valerius leaned his back against his mythril shield, chewing loudly on a piece of hardtack.

”Mia is right, Elf,” Valerius chimed in, wiping crumbs from his golden armor. ”Silas Graves is a tough nut to crack. If anyone is going to survive the separation, it’s him. You should be worrying about us.”

Aeliana let out a long, shuddering sigh, burying her face into Mia’s soft white hair.

”I know that,” Aeliana murmured with her pointed ears drooping slightly. ”I know he is strong. But... he is out there.”

She paused, her silver eyes narrowing slightly as a dark paranoid and jealous thought suddenly invaded her elven mind.

She remembered the purple-haired lightning mage who had forcefully kissed Silas’s cheek right in front of her.

”Lord Sterling,” Aeliana asked, her voice dropping into a cold, deadly serious register. ”What is the possibility that he is currently trapped in the dark with that scheming lightning-attuned harlot from the group? The one who kissed him.”

Valerius choked on his hardtack. He pounded his armored chest, coughing violently before looking at Aeliana with a smirk.

”Harper?” Valerius coughed, shaking his head. ”Given how aggressively she was stalking him, and the fact that she was literally standing not too far from the Spire entrance when the sand avalanche hit... I would say the possibility of her clinging to his leg right now is extremely high.”

Aeliana’s flawless face instantly darkened.

She gritted her teeth so hard they audibly ground together as her silver starlight aura violently flared in the confined space, causing the temperature of the ice house to drop another ten degrees.

”That treacherous shameless harlot,” Aeliana cursed under her breath with her fingers digging into the fabric of her robes. ’If she tries to lay a single finger on my Man...’

In her innermost thoughts, Aeliana viciously cursed the dead god Ititus for separating them, praying to Eluned that Silas was keeping his discipline intact.

...

In an entirely different sector of the sprawling Treasury Dungeon, Silas Graves let out a long exhausted sigh.

He stood near the center of a wide, cavernous intersection.

He looked around with his eyes analyzing the architecture.

The difference between the cavern corridors located below the grand staircase and the cavern corridors located above the staircase was that there was absolutely no difference.

It was exactly the same damp, moss-covered and oppressive black stone stretching infinitely into the gloom.

Right now, the luminescent light radiating from the cracks in the high ceiling was a vibrant eerie blue.

Directly beneath their boots, radiating from an unseen magical source in the stone floor, a perfectly geometric glowing blue ring had spread wide around them.

The circle was roughly thirty feet in diameter.

That was the Safe Zone and they were currently standing dead in the center of it.

When the dead god had cheerfully mandated ”not moving” during the night cycle, he meant not stepping a single millimeter beyond the glowing perimeter of the blue Safe Zone ring.

As long as Silas and Harper remained within this specific magical boundary, they wouldn’t get targeted and instantly attacked by the roaming Lesser General.

AGGGGGGGH!

Just then, a horrifying blood-curdling scream echoed through the damp caverns, violently bouncing off the stone walls from a long distance away.

The scream was abruptly followed by a deafening sound of tearing flesh and crushing bone, before the labyrinth fell completely silent once more.

Silas sighed some more, slowly shaking his head.

”Fools,” Silas muttered coldly.

Those were the actual sounds of rival Lords being brutally slaughtered in the dark for stepping outside their Safe Zones.

Silas couldn’t fathom the stupidity of these people.

The god had explicitly given them the rules of survival. He couldn’t understand why people didn’t just stay exactly where they needed to be and preserve their stamina for the daylight hours?

Silas turned his head, looking down at Harper.

The purple-haired Lord was sitting cross-legged on the damp stone floor near the center of the blue ring.

She had his black trench coat draped over her shoulders, covering her bare skin and she was currently deep in meditation with her eyes closed, desperately trying to manually gather electrical mana from the stagnant air to fill her core and properly activate her magical pathways.

Suddenly, the absolute silence of their Safe Zone was broken by a loud rumble.

Gurgle...

Harper’s eyes snapped open.

She immediately stopped meditating with an embarrassed flush of crimson spreading across her pale cheeks as she reached down, rubbing her bare stomach hungrily.

She looked up at Silas, biting her lower lip.

”Are you hungry?”

Before Silas could even attempt to deny it or brush off the necessity for sustenance, his own stomach betrayed him.

RUMBLE!

A deep hollow growl echoed from Silas’s muscled abdomen.