Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

’Mia said it herself,’ Silas recalled with his mind rapidly sorting through the intense magical lectures the ancient Grandmaster had drilled into his skull. ’To forcefully push my Gold Core into the second stage of Core Advancement, I cannot just rely on raw physical stats and a single element. I need to achieve Adept Mastery in at least eight different elemental affinities.’

He needed versatility.

He needed to be able to seamlessly chain fire, wind, earth, lightning, and water together without relying on his summoned Heroes to cover his blind spots.

Since Mia had been forcefully unsummoned back to Valerius’s territory and was no longer here to physically teach him the spells, he was going to have to do it the hard expensive way.

Silas was going to have to physically buy high-tier skill scrolls from the Lord Association (LA) Building’s premium marketplace and brute-force the knowledge directly into his brain.

While Silas was actively plotting his massive power-leveling trajectory, Elora Verinda walked over to him.

The City Lord’s daughter looked significantly worse for wear.

Her usually immaculate, icy blond hair was singed and tangled, and her expensive frost-silk robes were torn and stained with dried blood and black sand.

Maya, her loyal subordinate, was walking right beside her, supporting a deeply traumatized Jaxon.

Elora looked at Silas, her cold blue eyes completely lacking any of their usual superiority.

’If he isn’t the Lord of Blessed Land then I am a fool.’ Elora thought, he possessed more higher combat ability and mana than a standard Blue Core, not only that but he had been recognized by a god too?

”Silas,” Elora addressed him.

She looked at Maya and Jaxon, then back to the dark-haired Lord.

”I am glad that we all managed to survive that nightmare. This expedition was a failure of intelligence and I’m sorry for wasting your time. Would you like to leave now?” She said and Silas nodded.

”Agreed. The less questions we have to answer about dead gods, the better.”

They turned and began walking across the massive sand place, navigating around the scattered debris and parked luxury vehicles toward Elora’s sleek armored supercar parked near the exit ramp.

However, before they could even reach the vehicle, an armored hand clamped firmly onto Silas’s shoulder.

Silas turned. It was Valerius Sterling.

The blonde noble looked completely exhausted. His golden armor was severely dented, covered in soot, and missing a pauldron.

But despite the absolute beating he had taken over the last few days, a genuine un-arrogant smirk touched his bruised lips.

Valerius stepped past Silas, gently but firmly intercepting a deeply dazed silent Seraphina, who was currently staring blankly at the floor, still trying to process the fact that she had just been choked by a deity.

”I will handle it from here, Graves,” Valerius told him quietly, subtly gesturing toward Seraphina. ”I will make sure she gets back to her estate without causing a scene or setting the warehouse on fire.”

Valerius extended his heavy iron-gauntleted right hand toward the Lord.

”Goodbye, Silas,” Valerius said, his tone ringing with respect. ”You fight like a demon and if the anyone tries to pin the casualties of this raid on your faction... you let me know. The Sterling house will block the motions.”

Silas looked at the offered hand with a smile appearing on his face as he reached out, firmly gripping Valerius’s iron gauntlet.

Silas smiled. ”Try not to get blown away by the wind next time, Sterling.”

”Very funny,” Valerius snorted, shaking his head.

They released their firm handshake.

Valerius gently guided the unresponsive Seraphina toward his own transport vehicle parked across the warehouse.

Silas turned back and gracefully slid into the passenger seat of Elora’s sleek, low-profile supercar.

The reinforced doors hissed shut with a pressurized seal, immediately locking out the sand and enveloping him in the quiet luxury of the vehicle’s interior.

As he settled into the plush leather seat, Silas let out another long sigh, resting his head back against the headrest.

’Fuck...’ Silas thought, a sudden wave of regret completely washing over his mind. ’I was so completely distracted by Thor’s arrival and the collapsing sky that I completely forgot to try and secure the last hit on that guy.’

It was a potential loss of Upgrade Points.

He had actively pumped gallons of pressurized Aqua mana directly into Ititus’s core during their skirmish, hoping to detonate the god from the inside out.

Sitting in the passenger seat, Silas casually raised his right hand.

He snapped his fingers, sending a microscopic calibrated pulse of mana through the ether, attempting to manually trigger the remote detonation of the Aqua mana he had injected into the Sand God.

Snap!

He waited for a second with his golden-ringed eyes closing as he focused his senses.

Nothing...

He felt absolutely nothing as the connection was completely dead and the mana signature had vanished.

Silas sighed once more, deeply disappointed.

’Damn her...’

The Daughter of Odin had been too thorough.

Mjölnir must have completely vaporized every single microscopic trace of the god, including the water mana Silas had planted inside him and now the loot was gone.

Outside the tinted windows of the supercar, the remaining Lords were scrambling to evacuate the premises.

Harper, still wearing Silas’s oversized black trench coat, practically sprinted toward her own armored corporate vehicle, desperate to escape the lingering glares of the other nobles.

One by one, the rumbling engines of the luxury transports roared to life.

The different portals that they had used to secretly enter the underground warehouse days ago were already open and each of the surviving Lords rapidly exited the facility, their tires screeching against the concrete as they fled back into the portals and to their cities.

And as the final vehicle cleared into the portal, the massive carved stone pillars in the center of the warehouse completely crumbled into useless mundane grey dust as the portal vanished forever.

However, what the Council of Deities, the Daughter of Odin, and the paranoid Lord did not realize... was that the universe was stubbornly resilient.

Deep inside the pitch-black scorched sand completely covered the floor, A single microscopic grain of brilliantly glowing gold sand silently, painstakingly crept out from the absolute center of the pulverized portal remnant.

It slowly, agonizingly rolled across the sand, landing softly onto more of the dead black sand.

It was Ititus.

The God of the Eternal Sands had miraculously managed to survive the apocalyptic deletion of his entire physical form.

Through a desperate million-to-one cosmic anomaly, a single infinitesimal fraction of his divine core had been violently ejected from the Secret Realm just a microsecond before Mjölnir struck, riding the spatial backwash of the teleporting Midgardians through the portal.

He was reduced to a literal singular grain of dirt. He possessed no physical strength, no magical reserves, and no voice.

But his divine consciousness remained completely intact.

’CURSE YOU!’ Ititus screamed in his internal soundless thoughts, the microscopic grain of gold sand vibrating with wrath as it laid there in the dark. ’CURSE THAT BLONDE, HAMMER-WIELDING WHORE! CURSE THAT TREE-HUGGING DRUID! AND CURSE EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE MISERABLE PARASITIC LORDS!’

The fragmented god seethed with vengeance.

He was currently completely powerless, but he was immortal. He would bury himself deep into the bedrock of this disgusting place.

He would slowly gather ambient earth mana over the next thousand years.

He would rebuild his core, and then he would rise up and completely annihilate this entire—

Suddenly, the microscopic grain of gold sand violently twitched.

Something was wrong.

Deep within the microscopic atomic structure of his fragmented core, Ititus suddenly felt it.

It was an dense microscopic drop of Aqua mana.

It was the exact same water mana that Silas had forcefully pumped directly into the god’s chest during their battle on the surface.

When Ititus’s body had been atomized by Thor, this singular stubborn drop of mana had remained flawlessly attached to the surviving core fragment, lying completely dormant.

And then, back in a speeding car, Silas snapped his fingers.

’Won’t hurt to active it... meh!’

The remote detonation signal, traveling through the ether of the Sovereign system, instantly reached the drop of water.

The latent Aqua mana violently activated.

The microscopic grain of gold sand felt the freezing expanding pressure of the water violently ripping its atomic structure apart from the inside out.

’NO!’ Ititus panicked with despair flooding his final thought. ’CURSE THAT FUCKE—!’

POP!

With a completely silent microscopic explosion that wouldn’t have even startled a passing rat, the final grain of golden sand violently exploded apart.

The atomic structure of the core was completely annihilated by the expanding water.

The God of the Eternal Sands died completely and unconditionally in the middle of his own curse, reduced to nothing but another grain of sand among the black sand.

....

Meanwhile, smoothly cruising down the brightly illuminated neon-lit elevated highways of Valoria City, Elora’s sleek supercar revived a bit.

Silas was leaning his elbow against the passenger side window, watching the towering skyscrapers and holographic advertisements blur past.

He was lost in thought, calculating exactly how many Spirit Credits he would need to successfully purchase a lot of elemental spell scrolls.

Suddenly, Silas violently blinked.

DING!

A crisp chime echoed loudly in his skull as a bright unexpected translucent blue system tab aggressively materialized directly in front of his face, completely obscuring his view of the city.

[Target Eliminated: Tier 6 Ititius’s Fragment. +1000 UP]

[Current Balance: 4400 UP]

Silas’s golden-ringed eyes went completely wide.

He physically jerked backward in the plush leather seat, almost spitting out his own saliva in shock.

’One thousand?!’ Silas screamed in his thoughts with his heart hammering violently against his ribs. ’One thousand Upgrade Points?!’

He stared at the glowing blue numbers as his brain completely short-circuited.

He had absolutely not defeated Ititus in standard combat... He hadn’t even been in the same zip code when the god died.

Silas immediately made a rapid query, asking the System directly in his thoughts to explain the error.

[Entity ’Ititus’ miraculously survived the Executioner’s strike by jettisoning a microscopic fraction of his core into the mortal realm. However, the latent Aqua mana you previously injected into the target remained attached. Upon your manual detonation signal, the Aqua mana successfully expanded, permanently executing the surviving core fragment. As the sole initiator of the fatal strike, you have been awarded the full bounty for the Fragment.]

Silas gulped with a cold bead of sweat rolling down his sharp jawline.

He stared blankly at the dashboard of the supercar.

Not only was the completely powerless, microscopic, near-dead fragment of Ititus classified by the system as a massive Tier 6 entity... but it had casually dropped a thousand Upgrade Points just for dying.

Silas felt a shiver of thrill wash down his spine.

’If a microscopic piece of dirt was classified as a Tier 6...’ Silas thought with his hands trembling slightly in his lap. ’...then how astronomically high would the bounty have been if I had somehow managed to kill the true fully formed Ititus?’

He was miles... rather oceans... in fact different dimensions away from the true apex of power in this universe.

The realization only fueled the burning, relentless furnace of his Gold Core ambition.

He needed more power and he needed that power right now.

The supercar smoothly decelerated, pulling over to the curb on a quiet upscale residential street lined with towering apartment complexes.

Elora shifted the vehicle into park.

The heavy reinforced gull-wing doors hissed upward, allowing the crisp afternoon air of the city to enter the cabin.

Maya, looking completely exhausted, gently helped the deeply traumatized Jaxon out of the cramped backseat.

”Thank you for the extraction, Lady Elora,” Maya said politely, bowing her head slightly.

She looked over at the passenger seat. ”Silas. Despite our... differences in the desert, I acknowledge your strength.”

Mia wanted to ask for a date but honestly she was too stressed out.

”Thank you.” Silas replied calmly, offering a brief nod of respect. ’Even if you didn’t do anything.’