Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Silas’s eyes widened slightly in genuine surprise.

He took a slow step backward as right now, The Lord wasn’t fighting a mindless beast.

He was fighting a veteran commander who had literally helped execute a divine entity ten thousand years ago.

”You have stepped beyond your bounds, mortal,” Xerxes stated calmly.

The sand on the floor began to violently vibrate.

SHHHH-SWISH!

Instantly, the sand completely separated.

In a fraction of a microsecond, the single Lesser General split into four perfectly identical, eight-foot-tall copies of himself. All four towering sand figures raised their obsidian blades in perfect unison.

”There will be no running,” all four copies of Xerxes spoke simultaneously with their voices overlapping in a terrifying unified chord.

Silas stopped stepping backward.

He firmly planted his heavy boots into the stone floor, gripping his mythril longsword with both hands.

His fear completely evaporated, replaced by a cold thrill of high-tier combat.

A dark, incredibly dangerous smile slowly spread across Silas’s face.

”I’m not running,” Silas told them, however he could sense that Harper was watching or he would have already summoned his gold aura. ”Come at me.”

BOOOOOOM!

All four copies of Xerxes charged Silas simultaneously, their heavy glass boots shattering the stone floor.

They didn’t attack wildly as they moved with flawless military synchronization.

The first clone swung a massive overhead chop aimed to cleave Silas in half.

SWISH!

Silas deflected the blow, angling his mythril sword to slide the obsidian blade off his guard with a shower of sparks.

The second clone lunged, thrusting for his ribs.

Silas violently twisted his torso, entirely evading the thrust.

He dropped his left hand, forcefully drawing a massive volume of moisture from the air.

”Tidal Impact!” Silas roared.

He blasted a condensed sphere of heavy water directly into the chest of the second clone at point-blank range.

The hydraulic shockwave was massive, blowing a gaping, wet hole straight through the sand figure’s torso.

However, the third and fourth clones instantly capitalized on the opening, their swords swinging in a deadly intersecting pincer attack.

Silas parried the right sword, but the physical weight of the strike forced him to his knees.

The left sword descended toward his neck.

Silas didn’t try to block it.

He utilized the environment to his advantage.

The massive volume of water he had just blasted into the second clone had aggressively soaked the surrounding stone floor, completely saturating the bodies of all four sand figures.

Silas slammed his palm flat against the wet stone.

”Ice Transformation!” Silas commanded.

KRKKKKKKKKKK!

The temperature in the lower cavern violently plummeted to absolute zero.

The heavy water thoroughly soaking the sand figures instantly flash-froze and all four copies of Xerxes were abruptly halted mid-swing, their massive eight-foot-tall bodies completely solidified into jagged unbreakable statues of freezing, hardened brown ice.

Silas didn’t waste a second as he exploded off his knees, his mythril sword glowing with mana.

KRA-CRUNCH!

He swung his heavy blade horizontally with devastating kinetic force, cleanly decapitating the first frozen clone.

The frozen sand head flew through the air, violently shattering against the cavern wall into thousands of harmless, icy fragments.

”One down,” Silas smirked, preparing to completely shatter the rest.

But as he raised his sword to execute the second clone, the ice violently shuddered.

CRACK! SNAP!

A massive surge of pressurized earth mana erupted from within the frozen statues.

The three remaining figures completely shattered their icy prisons from the inside out, blowing the frozen fragments across the cavern like a frag grenade.

”Do not mistake me for a baseline elemental,” the three copies of Xerxes spoke in unison.

The sand constituting their bodies immediately violently shifted.

”We are all Xerxes,” the clones declared.

They began moving and Silas’s perception tracked the shifting silhouettes perfectly through the freezing mist and he noticed they didn’t bother reforming their obsidian broadswords.

The Lord watched in real-time as the ancient general completely altered its body.

The right arm of the clone on his left rapidly expanded, the black sand aggressively compressing layer upon layer until it formed a massive boulder-sized war hammer.

Simultaneously, the clone on his right extended its arm outward, the sand hyper-heating itself through intense friction to flash-melt into a twenty-foot-long razor-sharp whip of flexible black glass.

CRACK!

The glass whip brought forth a shockwave with the boom echoing like a cannon shot in the confined corridor.

It snapped violently toward Silas’s throat, moving with imperceptible speed but Silas didn’t duck.

A smirk crossed his face instead.

He channeled his dense mana into his left hand, instantly coating his forearm in a thick unbreakable gauntlet of absolute-zero blue ice. He threw his arm up.

CLANG-SHATTER!

Silas completely intercepted the glass whip.

The razor-sharp tip violently shattered against his ice gauntlet. Before the sand clone could retract the weapon, Silas closed his fist, gripping the remaining length of the glass whip with monstrous physical strength.

”Get over here,” Silas commanded.

He violently yanked the glass whip backward.

The force of his pull completely uprooted the eight-foot-tall sand clone from the floor, ripping the massive beast through the air directly toward him.

Silas rotated his hips, gripping his mythril longsword tightly with his right hand.

As the flying clone entered his striking range, he swung his blade in a devastating horizontal arc.

KRA-SLASH!

The mythril steel cleaved cleanly through the clone’s neck and torso, violently bisecting the sand entity in mid-air.

The top half of the monster crashed into the stone wall, dissolving into useless dirt.

”Two,” Silas counted with his eyes flashing.

WHOOSH!

The third clone launched itself into the air, bringing the massive compressed sand hammer down with all of its multi-ton physical might, aiming to crush Silas into the bedrock.

Silas didn’t even look up.

He pointed his left palm directly down at the wet stone floor beneath the descending beast as he utilized the precise spell Mia had drilled into his head just hours ago.

”Currents deep, pressure rise...” Silas chanted rapidly, cutting the chant in half too. ”Abyssal Geyser!”

KRA-THOOM!

A hyper-pressurized geyser of pure, freezing water violently erupted from the damp stone floor directly beneath the hammer-wielding clone.

The hydraulic force was astronomical.

The geyser slammed into the clone’s chest with the impact of a breaching whale, completely reversing its downward momentum and launching the massive sand monster fifty feet straight up into the air!

The clone smashed brutally into the vaulted stone ceiling, completely disintegrating into a shower of wet, harmless mud that rained down across the corridor.

”Three...” Silas smirked, stepping forward through the falling mud.

The fourth and final clone, wielding a jagged obsidian blade, charged forward. Silas met it head-on.

Silas deflected the heavy obsidian thrust with a casual flick of his wrist, stepped cleanly inside the clone’s guard, and unleashed a blistering flurry of sword strikes.

SHWK! SHWK! SHWK!

In three seconds, Silas severed the clone’s sword arm, chopped off its left leg, and drove his mythril blade straight through its featureless face.

He ripped the blade free, kicking the crumbling sand construct backward onto the floor.

Silas stood perfectly still while lowering his sword. He wasn’t even breathing heavily.

”Is that really all a ’God-Slayer’ has?” Silas mocked the crumbling dirt. ”I fought tougher rats in the slums.”

But the Lesser General was ten thousand years old, and infinitely more adaptable.

Xerxes realized instantly that engaging this human in close-quarters martial combat was absolute suicide.

The severed sand limbs and the wet mud didn’t stay dead.

The second the debris touched the bedrock, it immediately dissolved into the damp stone floor like acid melting through wax.

SQUELCH!

The solid stone directly beneath Silas’s heavy boots instantly liquefied as the bedrock actively turned into a suffocating spinning maelstrom of black quicksand, attempting to drag him down into the earth.

Silas just rolled his eyes.

”Ice Transformation,” Silas stated boredly.

KRKKKKK!

He violently stripped the heat from the quicksand.

The trap solidified instantly into jagged brown ice.

Before his boots could even be caught, Silas effortlessly stepped out of the freezing perimeter, shattering the edges of the trap with a casual stomp.

”You’re going to have to try harder than that...” Silas taunted.

The dungeon responded.

The sand on the floor began to violently vibrate, emitting a terrifying, low-frequency hum.

The three destroyed clones rapidly pulled themselves back together, their forms bubbling up from the stone but they didn’t take humanoid shapes this time.

The three clones completely dissolved into a massive, swirling cloud of fine, abrasive black grit.

FWOOSH!

The cloud violently expanded, completely filling the narrow corridor and generating a massive, high-velocity sandstorm.

Silas narrowed his eyes, raising his arm to shield his face.

The abrasive dust completely blinded his vision, plunging the battlefield into suffocating darkness.

The fine, razor-sharp particles of glass and sand aggressively whipped against his skin, tearing at his shirt and slicing dozens of microscopic cuts across his cheeks.

Xerxes had changed the rules of the engagement. It was no longer a sword fight as it was an environmental execution.

From within the blinding storm, the attacks began coming from every conceivable angle.

SHWK!

A massive spike of hardened sand erupted horizontally from the left wall. Silas violently twisted his torso, the spike grazing his ribs.

CRACK!

A glass whip materialized from the ceiling, snapping down toward his skull. Silas parried it blind with his sword ringing out in the dark.

THUD!

A heavy sand fist formed directly from the floor, slamming into his thigh and forcing him to stumble.

’I can’t even hate on this...’ Silas thought as he gritted his teeth with his smirk vanishing.

The sand was utilizing its physical form with creativity.

The attacks were relentless, overlapping, and perfectly synchronized.

He slashed and parried, weaving through the storm with monstrous physical agility, but he couldn’t hit a target that was literally the air he was breathing.

SHING! SHING!

Obsidian blades manifested from the storm, slashing at his back and Silas forcefully drew moisture from the bone-dry air.

”That will be enough!” Silas roared.

A pressurized invisible ring of spinning water violently erupted around him, expanding outward like a buzzsaw and completely obliterating the incoming sand constructs.

But the constant magical expenditure was rapidly depleting his water reserves.

The Lord couldn’t generate an ocean in a dry cavern.

’Plus if I had a sea of mana like this, that might confirm things... Sigh...’ Silas thought, he wasn’t in danger though.

The sand storm intensified, sensing his stamina draining.

The three clones began to rapidly materialize and dematerialize within the swirling grit.

A clone would form, swing a massive hammer, and instantly dissolve back into dust before Silas’s sword could even make contact.

”Weight of the ocean!” Silas chanted, aiming his palm at a forming clone. ”Hydraulic Press!”

BOOOOOOM!

A crushing weight of atmospheric pressure slammed the sand clone into the floor, completely flattening it into a pancake of dirt.

But a microsecond later, the dirt just swirled back into the storm, entirely unharmed.

Silas parried a thrust from the dark, but the force was staggering. The mass of the sand entity was finally gaining the upper tactical advantage.

CRASH! BOOM! SHWK!

A synchronized triple-layered attack converged on him. A glass whip wrapped around his left ankle, pulling his balance off.

A sand hammer slammed into his mythril sword, forcing his guard completely wide open and a massive, solid wall of jagged sand spikes violently materialized in front of him, pushing forward like a bulldozer.

Silas dug his boots into the stone with his muscles bulging as he tried to hold his ground, but the weight of the pushing wall forced him backward.

His boots dragged across the stone.

THUD!

Silas’s back slammed heavily against the cold damp bedrock of a dead-end alcove as he was completely cornered.

The sandstorm parted slightly, revealing the massive shifting wall of spikes preparing to violently crush him into paste.

...

Up at the top of the stairs, standing safely within the glowing perimeter of the blue Safe Zone ring, Harper watched the battle unfold.