Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

’Fuu...?!’

It was a Mist-Phantom Chimera which was a Tier 4 predator like he expected.

”Haah!”

The beast was fifteen feet long, its muscular panther-like body covered in interlocking plates of translucent milky-white crystal that completely refracted the ambient light, rendering it nearly invisible in the fog.

Its head was a nightmarish fusion of a feline skull and a serrated snapping turtle, and its long, whip-like tail ended in a massive heavy mace of petrified basalt.

The Tier 4 beast had utilized the dense necrotic mist as a natural cloaking medium, executing a flawless ambush at the exact microsecond Silas completed his sword swing.

WHOOSH!

The stone mace-tail whipped through the air with high speed, aimed directly at Silas’s ribs!

’Fast!’ Silas’s mind registered instantly since he didn’t have the leverage to bring the longsword back across his body.

...So he didn’t try.

Silas simply shifted his center of gravity, tightening his abdominal muscles and letting the furnace of his Gold Core flood his vascular system with protective mana.

KRA-BOOOOOOM!

The stone mace slammed squarely into Silas’s left flank and the force was immense as the concussive shockwave blew the surrounding mist away in a twenty-foot ring, and Silas was hurled laterally through the air with his boots skimming across the permafrost before he dug his heels into the shale, carving two deep smoking trenches into the stone as he came to a halt twenty paces away.

Up on the ceiling stalactite, the obsidian bird let out an ear-splitting screech of pure despair.

”SQUAWWWWWWWK! KRR-CLACK!”

The animal covered its eyes with its wings, fully convinced the mortal had just been crushed into a paste of broken ribs and ruptured organs however down on the floor, Silas slowly lowered his left arm.

He rolled his left shoulder.

CRACK-POP!

The joint popped smoothly.

The silver-threaded wool of his coat was scuffed with gray stone dust, and there was a dull ache along his lower ribs... a light muscular bruise that faded the instant his Gold Core circulated a single wave of restorative golden heat through his marrow.

His bones were completely intact and his stance was rock-solid too.

Silas brushed a fleck of basalt dust from his lapel, his blue eyes locking onto the translucent Tier 4 chimera with a cold unimpressed stare.

”Not a bad swing,” Silas noted, his voice sounding calm and level. ”Good acceleration. Solid mass behind the pivot but your follow-through is lacking.”

The chimera let out a low bass-heavy growl that rattled the stones beneath their boots.

Its translucent crystal plates flared with sickly, pale mana as it realized its fatal strike hadn’t even broken the prey’s skin.

FZZZT!

The beast blurred, melting backward into the thick white mist and attempting to reposition for another cloaked ambush.

”You don’t get to hide twice,” Silas said softly.

He didn’t chase it with his feet as he closed his eyes for a fraction of a heartbeat, focusing on the moisture contained within the freezing fog.

’There.’

The chimera’s muscular body displaced forty gallons of atmospheric moisture as it sprinted along the eastern perimeter.

To the naked eye, the fog was an opaque white wall but to Silas’s [Rip-Current Perception], the beast’s trajectory was a glowing electric-blue highway carving through the dark.

SHSHSHK!

The chimera struck again.

It lunged from the ceiling shadows directly above Silas’s head, its massive razor-sharp crystal talons extended to decapitate him in a downward pounce!

Silas didn’t look up and he waited.

...One pace.

...Half a pace.

At the exact second the monster’s claws entered his perimeter—

BOOM!

Silas didn’t parry as he sidestepped with terrifying microscopic precision, letting the massive multi-ton beast crash into the stone floor right beside him.

KRA-CRUNCH!

The impact cratered the granite and before the chimera could recoil or whip its stone tail, Silas stepped forward, driving his heavy leather boot squarely onto the beast’s snout, pinning its massive head into the cracked rock with the concussive weight of an anvil.

SPLAT!

The chimera thrashed violently with its claws tearing deep furrows into the shale, but Silas’s leg was an iron pillar.

”Ice...” Silas commanded with cold authority. ”Transformation.”

FROOOOO-SH!

Dense high-pressure water mana erupted from the sole of his boot, flooding over the chimera’s skull and forelimbs.

In the span of a single second, the liquid flash-froze into massive, unbreakable blocks of solid glacial ice, permanently locking the Tier 4 monster’s front half into the bedrock.

The beast let out a muffled frantic roar with its hind legs kicking wildly as it tried to shatter the freeze...

Silas raised his golden longsword with both hands, reversing his grip so the tip pointed straight down at the monster’s exposed nape.

”Good effort,” Silas said quietly.

SHING-CRACK!

He drove the blade down with the full weight of his Gold Core and the golden mythril steel punched clean through the chimera’s crystal neck plates, severing the thick spinal column, burying three feet deep into the solid granite beneath.

SQUELCH!

A thick geyser of dark viscous monster blood sprayed across the white ice, sizzling softly before the life-force faded.

The chimera’s massive hindquarters twitched violently twice with the translucent crystal plates dulling into brittle milky chalk, before collapsing into stillness.

THUD!

Silas pulled the longsword free with a smooth effortless jerk of his wrists.

The amphitheater fell into ringing silence.

The forty low-tier beasts had been completely eradicated... shredded, burned, and crushed into silent heaps of smoking visceral debris while the Tier 4 apex predator lay dead at his boots, its neck pinned in an eternal block of ice.

Up on the ceiling stalactite, the obsidian bird sat completely frozen.

Its wings were half-unfolded, its beady eyes bulging as it stared down at the lone mortal standing amidst the slaughterhouse.

It had watched the Tier 4 monster sneak the man twice with bone-shattering strikes, fully expecting the human to be ripped into ribbons.

Instead... the man had barely grunted.

He had brushed off a powerful strike like it was a dusting of dry flour, pinned the apex predator with a single boot, and executed it with the casual bored precision of a farmer culling a sick goat.

The bird slowly fluttered down from the ceiling, landing cautiously on the edge of the chimera’s frozen tail.

It looked at the dead titan, then looked up at Silas, letting out a faint bewildered click.

”Krrr... caw...?”

”See?” Silas said, flicking the blood from his blade and sliding it back into its scabbard with a crisp clack. ”Told you. There’s nothing to lose your feathers over so now get back on my arm and stop trembling. You’re vibrating like an unbalanced turbine.”

The bird didn’t squawk.

It simply hopped onto his leather vambrace, tucking its head low against his wrist in complete humbled submission.

Whatever arrogance the ancient familiar had carried was dead, buried beneath the corpses of forty basin horrors.

Silas stepped over the chimera’s frozen flank, continuing his march toward the deep northern corridor.

’No more mana signatures within five hundred paces,’ Silas noted, his senses expanding through the quiet dark. ’The horde was the perimeter guard. Whatever sits ahead... is alone.’

He walked for another twenty minutes through a rising, narrow basalt flue.

The ground underfoot grew increasingly smooth, worn down by centuries of an unnatural drag as if some colossal monolithic weight had been pulled back and forth across the stone until the shale was polished like black marble.

And then, with terrifying suddenness... the white fog simply died.

It simply terminated along a clean line, as if an invisible spatial wall severed the humid vapor from the chamber ahead.

Silas stepped across that boundary.

The air on this side was dead and completely lacking of heat, moisture, or the coppery stench of blood.

It carried a suffocating stillness as the ceiling opened up into an unfathomable vaulted dome that stretched hundreds of paces into the dark.

And right in the center of the chamber, thirty paces ahead of Silas’s boots...

SZZZZZT!

A sudden howling atmospheric draft detonated outward from the center of the cavern.

The violent rush of air whipped Silas’s dark traveling coat back against his shoulders with his black hair blowing wildly across his forehead, stinging his eyes with dry mineral dust.

From the high, shadowed wall of petrified black ice that filled the far side of the dome...

Two colossal eyelid-like folds of gray leathery skin slowly parted with the sickening wet sound of tearing paper.

SQUELCH.

An enormous circular eye ignited in the dark and it was big... easily twenty feet across, swollen, bulging, and veined with thick black vessels that wept clear viscous slime onto the stone below.

And right in the center of that massive unblinking sphere... sat a flat, horizontal pupil of dull stone-gray.

The pupil didn’t flicker.

It slowly rotated within the socket with an audible wet shluck, locking its dead gaze directly onto Silas’s tiny solitary figure.

Silas stood motionless in the freezing draft with his boots planted firmly on the polished marble shale, staring back at the towering hideous monstrosity.

His face remained completely deadpan but he didn’t draw his sword and he didn’t drop into a combat crouch.

He just stared at the massive slimy orb for five long agonizing seconds with his brow slowly furrowing into an expression of pure disgust.

’What the fuck...’ Silas thought, his lips twitching with distaste as his hair whipped in the howling wind. ’It looks so damn ugly.’

Silas took a deep breath.

He genuinely had no idea what he was supposed to do next.

Across the thirty paces of dead air separating them, the colossal, twenty-foot orb remained embedded in the petrified black ice, perfectly still.

Silas kept his spiritual perception poured into his Gold Core, muscles primed to detonate into an evasive slide or channel an immediate blast of [Hurricane Repulsion].

He waited for the inevitable mental probe, the intrusive phantom hum of a psychological assault, or the telltale heat of an ocular beam charging behind that glassy surface.

...Nothing came.

’Doesn’t she have anything?’

There was no insidious pressure scraping against his consciousness, no surge of hostile mana gathering along the optic nerves, and zero feral malice leaking from its flesh.

The gargantuan organ was simply sitting in its socket, staring directly at him with that flat horizontal pupil.

’What the hell...?’ Silas thought, his brow furrowing deeper into baffled annoyance.

He had mentally mapped out an entire multi-phase boss fight the second the ceiling vault opened up.

He had planned the approach angle... Use [Rip-Current Perception] to track the tectonic shifts, drop a blinding burst of [Incineration Ray] straight into the pupil to scorch the optic stem, and follow through with [Tidal-Blade Arts: First Style — Severing Horizon] to shear the surrounding ice wall clean off its foundation.

Yet the giant veiny monstrosity just... sat there and staring.

It was looking less like an apex subterranean predator and more like an overgrown discarded fish head trapped in a frozen gutter.

”You going to throw a beam, or are we having an unblinking contest?” Silas muttered under his breath with his fingers tightening around the golden grip of his sheathed longsword.

He shifted his weight onto the ball of his right foot, preparing to draw steel and initiate the clash himself but before his blade could clear the scabbard, the creature moved.

SCHLUCK.

A sickening wet tremor rippled across the leathery gray skin framing the socket as the entire sphere violently hitched upward by half an inch.

Silas stiffened instantly, locking his center of gravity to the stone, while the obsidian bird on his vambrace clamped its talons down until the leather groaned, letting out a strangled hiss of panic.

Then, the eye did something utterly incomprehensible.

The thick blackened veins webbing the sclera began to pulse rapidly, flushing with a sudden surging heat as the wide gray horizontal pupil dilated, trembling with a slow agonizing spasm.

From beneath the heavy, leathery upper lid, a massive bead of translucent fluid welled up.

It clung to the rim for a fraction of a second before breaking free, cascading down the curve of the eyeball like a falling sheet of glass.

DRIP!

A droplet the size of a carriage wheel broke away from the bottom fold of skin, plummeting through the dead air before slamming heavily against the shale three paces ahead of Silas.

SPLASH!

The fluid struck the stone with a soft hollow shhhk, instantly evaporating into clean odorless vapor that dissolved into the freezing air without leaving a single trace of acid or poison behind.

Silas blinked, his jaw going slack as he lowered his hand half an inch from his pommel.

The leathery folds shuddered again, and a second massive sphere of clear moisture welled up, spilling over the dark rim in an unbroken stream that washed across the blackened permafrost.

The eye wasn’t charging an attack... It was weeping?