Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

The navigation became an agonizing crawl.

Tamsin led them through the rigged corridor, carefully stepping over the frozen tripwires and sliding sideways past the pressurized radiation sacs.

The tension in the air was suffocating.

The strike team was forced to move slowly, completely abandoning their mobile, fighting style to avoid triggering a catastrophic cave-in.

They reached a narrow, highly restricted chokepoint where the tunnel bottlenecked between two massive, fossilized femurs.

Suddenly, the dim blue light of Rowena’s floating rune flickered.

It wasn’t a magical failure... The ambient temperature in the tunnel plummeted so violently that the magical energy itself was struggling to ignite.

Click! Click! Click!

The sound was incredibly soft, echoing softly off the high ceiling. It sounded like heavy jagged daggers gently tapping against solid stone.

Silas slowly tilted his head back, looking straight up into the pitch-black vault of the ceiling.

He didn’t need Rowena’s light to see them.

High above their heads, clinging effortlessly to the smooth, frozen rock ceiling, dozens of glowing, midnight-blue eyes simultaneously snapped open.

”Shields up!” Silas roared, the command tearing through the suffocating silence.

The trap hadn’t been set to kill them with falling rocks.

The traps had been meticulously placed to force intruders into this exact, narrow chokepoint, completely restricting their movement.

The cavern ceiling practically exploded as twenty heavily muscled, midnight-blue Shadow-Stalkers detached themselves from the rock.

They plummeted straight down through the darkness, their elongated jagged claws fully extended, dropping directly toward the trapped Vanguard like a meteor shower.

”Phalanx!” Brida screamed.

The Shieldmaidens reacted with flawless drilled precision.

Brida, Hilda, Gunnhild, and the four veterans violently smashed their heavy shields together, overlapping the steel rims to form an unyielding, sloped turtle-shell formation directly over the heads of the ranged fighters.

KRA-BANG!

The impact was utterly devastating.

The first wave of Shadow-Stalkers crashed directly into the locked shield wall.

The crushing momentum of massive, two-hundred-pound panthers dropping from a forty-foot height violently buckled the Vanguard’s knees.

Gunnhild screamed as the pressure nearly dislocated her shoulder, but Hilda slammed her shoulder against the rookie, forcing the line to hold.

The beasts snarled with their jaws snapping wildly as their jagged claws ruthlessly tore across the shields.

The sound of metal screeching against bone filled the cavern but it wasn’t just the physical weight that threatened to break them.

Wherever the Shadow-Stalkers’ claws raked across the iron, a thick, necrotizing layer of dark frost violently bloomed.

The freezing radiation rapidly spread across the surface of the shields, creeping down toward the handles, attempting to flash-freeze the girls’ arms and force them to drop their guard.

”My Lord! The cold!” Brida grunted, her teeth gritted as the dark frost bit into the heavy leather gauntlet of her right hand.

Silas didn’t panic. He stood directly in the center of the crushed formation as his blue eyes burned with fury.

He rolled up the sleeve of his combat robe, exposing his right forearm.

The intricate, geometric emerald rune Eluned had kissed onto his skin was pulsing faintly in the dark.

”Hold the line...” Silas commanded with his voice perfectly calm amidst the deafening screeching of the panthers.

He slammed his left palm violently against the emerald rune, directly injecting a massive surge of his Gold Core mana into the magical tether to forcefully activate it.

The reaction was instantaneous.

A blinding, breathtaking wave of warm, brilliant emerald light erupted from his forearm, completely washing over the ten women of the strike team.

[System Notification: Aura of Genesis (Emulated) Activated.]

[Status Effect: Extreme Frostbite nullified.]

[Status Effect: Stamina Regeneration boosted by 400%.]

The dark necrotizing frost coating the iron shields violently shrieked, instantly melting away into harmless steam the moment the divine nature magic touched it.

Brida gasped as a rush of endless, explosive vitality flooded her exhausted muscles.

The crushing weight of the panthers pressing down on her shield suddenly felt trivial.

”Push!” Brida roared, her eyes wide with adrenaline.

The Shieldmaidens synchronized their breathing, anchoring their boots against the frozen stone floor, and violently shoved their shields upward in a unified, devastating thrust.

The staggering physical force launched the massive panthers backward, throwing them off the top of the phalanx and sending them tumbling aggressively across the cavern floor.

The shield wall opened.

”Fenna, clear the ceiling!” Silas barked, stepping smoothly through the gap in the shield wall, his Umbral-Forged Mythril Blade already drawn and glowing with lethal intent.

Fenna didn’t need to be told twice. She dropped to one knee, pulling three arrows simultaneously from her quiver.

Her fingers blurred as she nocked and fired with the mythril bowstring singing a deadly tune.

THWIP-THWIP-THWIP!

The glowing mana-arrows streaked upward into the dark, embedding themselves into the stomachs of three Shadow-Stalkers that were still clinging to the ceiling, preparing to drop.

The arrows detonated on impact, blowing the beasts into shredded burning chunks of meat that rained down harmlessly onto the stone.

”Rowena, pin them down!” Tamsin shouted, throwing a dagger that buried itself into the eye of a charging panther.

Rowena slammed her staff into the ground. ”Gravity Well!”

A massive, glowing purple circular rune rapidly expanded across the stone floor directly beneath the tumbling pack of panthers.

The moment the magic activated, the gravity within the circle violently multiplied.

Five Shadow-Stalkers were instantly slammed flat against the rock, their bones groaning under the crushing oppressive weight, entirely unable to lift themselves.

Silas stepped into the fray.

He didn’t swing wildly. He moved with the terrifying efficiency of an apex predator.

He sidestepped a desperate lunge from a panther, pivoted flawlessly on his heel, and brought his mythril blade down in a heavy, brutal arc.

SLASH!

The dark-purple metal easily severed the beast’s neck with the decapitated head thudding heavily against the floor.

[Vassal Fenna has slain a Tier 2 Shadow-Stalker. +2 UP]

[Lord Silas has slain a Tier 2 Shadow-Stalker. +2 UP]

[You have leveled up!]

Silas grinned, the golden light in his eyes flaring as the blue tabs began to rapidly cascade across his vision.

The hunting ground had just become a slaughterhouse and soon the cavern floor was slick with thick void-like black blood.

The ambush had lasted exactly three minutes, but the resulting devastation made the subterranean tunnel look like it had been hit by a heavy artillery strike.

The stone floor was violently cratered by Fenna’s explosive arrows, and the walls were deeply gouged by the crushing weight of Rowena’s gravity magic.

Scattered across the frost-covered rock were the mutilated remains of twenty Tier 2 Shadow-Stalkers.

Silas stood in the center of the carnage, taking a slow breath.

He flicked his Umbral-Forged Mythril Blade to the side, throwing a thick streak of black blood off the dark-purple metal, before sliding the weapon smoothly back into its scabbard.

His internal interface was a cascading waterfall of highly satisfying blue light.

[Vassal Brida has slain a Tier 2 Shadow-Stalker. +2 UP]

[Vassal Fenna has slain a Tier 2 Shadow-Stalker. +2 UP]

[You have slain a Tier 2 Shadow-Stalker. +2 UP]

The notifications stacked rapidly, injecting a steady stream of power directly into his Lord Core.

”Perimeter secure!” Brida shouted, lowering her Steel Aegis.

Her iron breastplate was scored with deep jagged claw marks, but the emerald warmth of Silas’s emulated [Aura of Genesis] had already mended the bruised muscle underneath.

”Don’t let them sit!” Silas ordered. ”The dark frost is already trying to reclaim the bodies. Tamsin, extract the marrow. Brida, get the preservation crates open!”

Tamsin immediately dropped to her knees beside the largest of the slain panthers.

The Huntress didn’t bother with delicate incisions. She raised her heavy iron meat cleaver and brought it down in a brutal practiced arc directly onto the beast’s spine.

CRACK!

The mutated bone fractured.

The moment the internal skeletal structure was exposed, a thick violently cold blue mist erupted from the marrow cavity.

The temperature around the corpse plummeted with the moisture in the air instantly crystallizing into dark frost.

”By the gods, it’s freezing...” Tamsin hissed, her breath pluming thickly in the dim light.

She reached in with a pair of heavy iron tongs, forcefully gripping a glowing, gelatinous chunk of deep-blue matter.

It was the exact resource that had been holding his empire back.

[Resource Acquired: Abyssal Marrow (Unrefined) x1]

Tamsin turned and aggressively dropped the glowing marrow into the heavily insulated preservation crate that Hilda was holding open.

The moment the lid slammed shut, the biting cold radiating from the material was completely neutralized by the Vault’s enchantments.

They moved like a well-oiled machine.

While Rowena maintained her dim blue light rune to watch the tunnels, the Shieldmaidens systematically broke the spines of the slain panthers, pulling the freezing marrow from the beasts.

Within ten minutes, Tamsin wiped the black blood from her brow and closed the first crate.

”Six units secured, my Lord,” Tamsin reported, her hands shaking slightly from the residual cold despite the healing aura. ”The smaller beasts didn’t have fully developed skeletal mutations...”

”Then we keep moving,” Silas stated, drawing his mythril sword once again. ”This was just the hunting pack... The fact that they bottlenecked us here means they were guarding something deeper in the cavern.”

He checked his balance.

[Current Balance: 58 UP]

He was rapidly rebuilding his wealth, but the job wasn’t finished.

The strike team reformed their tight, highly disciplined column. They pushed past the shattered remains of the first wave, marching deeper into the massive downward-sloping tunnel.

The deeper they ventured, the wider the cavern became.

The claustrophobic walls opened up, expanding into a colossal, subterranean dome that looked like an ancient cathedral.

Rowena’s light rune barely scratched the edges of the massive chamber. The floor was completely covered in a thick, treacherous layer of black ice.

But it was the center of the dome that made Silas raise his fist, signaling an immediate halt.

Resting in the dead center of the chamber was a towering mountain of ancient, frozen bones.

And lying atop that throne of fossils, currently crunching down on the massive femur of a long-dead titan, was the undisputed ruler of the deep trench.

It was a Shadow-Stalker, but it was easily twice the size of the beasts they had just slaughtered.

It stood as tall as a warhorse but what made it truly terrifying wasn’t its size. Its midnight-blue hide was entirely encased in thick, jagged, naturally formed armor plating made of highly compressed dark ice.

The freezing radiation rolling off the beast’s body was so intense that the stone floor beneath it was constantly groaning and cracking under the thermal pressure.

[Target Analyzed: Void-Stalker Alpha (Tier 3 Boss)]

[Warning: Extreme freezing radiation detected.]

The Alpha stopped eating. It slowly turned its massive head with its glowing bright blue eyes locking directly onto Silas.

It didn’t roar like a mindless animal. It simply stood up, the heavy ice armor plates grinding together like tectonic plates, and let out a low, deeply growl that vibrated right through the Vanguard’s iron boots.

”Scatter!” Silas roared, immediately recognizing the buildup of mana in the beast’s throat.

The strike team violently dove in opposite directions just as the Void-Stalker Alpha unhinged its jaw.

Instead of a physical attack, the Alpha exhaled a massive, hyper-pressurized shockwave of dark frost.

The beam of freezing radiation tore across the cavern floor, instantly flash-freezing the exact spot where the shield phalanx had just been standing.

A towering, jagged glacier of black ice erupted from the stone, completely blocking the tunnel entrance.

’It isn’t relying on stealth...’ Silas analyzed with his mind running a mile a minute as he rolled back to his feet. ’It actively manipulates the Abyssal Marrow in its own bones to weaponize the temperature. If that frost touches the girls’ armor, the metal will supercool and shatter like glass.’

”Keep your distance!” Silas commanded with his voice slicing through the biting wind of the cavern. ”Fenna, chip that armor! Do not let it lock you down!”

Fenna scrambled to a high vantage point behind a fossilized ribcage.

She drew her bowstring back, entirely bypassing standard arrows and manifesting three highly condensed, explosive mana projectiles.

THWIP-THWIP-THWIP!

The arrows streaked across the cavern, slamming directly into the Alpha’s shoulder.

The detonations were deafening, blowing massive chunks of dark ice away from the beast’s hide but the raw concussive force barely made the monster flinch. The frozen armor actively began to reform, drawing moisture directly out of the air to seal the cratered ice.

The Alpha’s glowing eyes snapped toward Fenna. Its massive, heavily muscled legs coiled, preparing to leap across the entire cavern and crush the archer into the stone.

Before its claws could even leave the floor, Silas was there.

He didn’t just run... he moved with the blinding, explosive speed of a Sovereign.

Silas forcefully ignited his Mythic Gold Core. He didn’t hold the energy back as he opened his spiritual pathways completely, letting the roaring furnace of his divine foundation flood his physical body.

A blazing, brilliantly bright golden aura erupted from his skin, completely pushing back the suffocating cold of the cavern.

The dark ice on the floor violently hissed and melted into steam the second his boots touched it.

”Come on... look at me!” Silas snarled, launching himself into the air.

He brought the Umbral-Forged Mythril Blade down in a devastating, two-handed overhead cleave.

The Alpha shifted its attention at the last possible fraction of a second, raising its heavily armored forearm to block the strike.

KRA-KOOM!