SSS-Ranked Summoner: Only I Summon All Heroes And Heroines Of Legend-Chapter 22: A Secondary Gate

The first thing Altair registered was the dizziness.

It wasnt the kind you got from spinning too fast or standing up too quickly. This was spatial. Like his brain was trying to figure out which direction was up and down repeatedly.

Then gravity reasserted itself, his feet hit solid ground as the light faded.

They were standing on hard rock ground.

Altair blinked hard, clearing the afterimage of the summoning seal from his vision. The world came into focus piece by piece. Grey stone stretched in every direction, uneven and jagged. The ground was a mix of flat plateaus and steep inclines, broken up by deep cracks and holes in the earth.

Above them was just more rock, a cavern ceiling that arched high. Dim light filtered through paths that led forward, maybe they were enchanted stones embedded in the walls, that gave everything a pale, washed-out quality.

"This is it," Altair muttered.

Beside him, Ryka let go of his hand and took a cautious step forward, scanning their surroundings. Her posture was alert.

On his left, Svenja released his hand without a word, letting her hands hang like dead weight.

Altair pulled out his phone.

The screen lit up. It was clearly still functional, that was good. He opened the map app and watched as it loaded, a progress bar crawling across the screen.

Then it appeared onscreen.

A detailed map of the summoning plane. There wasn’t much detail of activity, but their position showed as a single blue dot near the southern edge of the mapped area.

"Phone still works," Altair announced, turning the screen so Ryka could see. "And we’ve got a map. Instructor Scathach said it was a controlled zone, looks like she wasn’t lying."

Ryka moved closer, studying the display. "That’s... actually helpful. I thought we’d be going in blind."

"Gran-Lusia doesn’t half-ass things, I guess" Altair said. He zoomed out slightly, checking the scale. The plane was about two square kilometers total. Plenty of space to get lost in, but not infinite.

Svenja hadn’t moved. She stood a few feet away, staring at the nearest tunnel entrance.

"Schwarzes Loch, Weißes Loch"

Her orbs materialized without a sound, rotating slowly around her in their usual orbit, she wasn’t leaving anything to chance, and from how her aura pressure was largely felt, it was easy to guess she had very high mana reserves.

Altair pocketed his phone. "Alright. Game plan, we move carefully, Svenja, you have the farthest reach with your summon, so you provide, I’ll handle close combat situations. And Ryka, watch out for surprises anywhere in-between."

Ryka nodded. "Agreed."

Svenja said nothing, but she started walking toward the tunnel.

Altair exchanged a glance with Ryka, then followed.

The tunnels were narrower at first and the walls were rough. Their footsteps echoed softly, bouncing off stone and fading into the distance.

Altair kept his phone out, checking the map every few minutes. They were moving nort, deeper into the plateau region.

Svenja walked ahead, her white orb providing an extra glow that helped make the path brighter . The tunnel opened into a wider chamber.

Altair stopped at the threshold, scanning the space. The ceiling was higher here, maybe twenty feet up. The floor was scattered with loose rocks and debris. Three other tunnels branched off from the chamber, leading deeper into the plane.

He checked his phone again, confirming their position.

Then something moved in the shadows.

Altair looked up. "Contact!."

A low chittering sound echoed through the chamber, layered and distorted like it was coming from multiple sources. Then he saw them.

Three creatures emerged from one of the side tunnels, low to the ground and moving fast. They were covered in segmented rocky plating that blended almost perfectly with the stone floor. Eyeless heads, wide mouths lined with rows of serrated teeth designed for grinding through rock.

"Stoneback Moles," Ryka said, her voice audible enough for both to hear. "Low level burrowers. They hunt in packs."

"Great." Altair stepped back, giving himself space.

One of moles charged.

Svenja didn’t flinch.

"Schwarzes Loch."

Her black orb shot forward, blasting the mole backwards, the orb carved a smooth hole within the moles’ midsection.

The other two moles hesitated, and then charged at Altair.

Tzzztzzzt, BAM-BAM

The orb blitzed in a zigzag patterned, scattering both moles into chunks of earth.

Altairs hands lowered , the summoning seal he was preparing dissipated before it fully formed.

"Thanks for the cover." Altair said.

"...." Svenja only looked at him for a moment, and she proceeded forward.

They encountered two more packs over the next twenty minutes.

The pattern was the same. Stoneback Moles, always in groups of three to five, always ambushing from side tunnels or burrows in the floor. Svenja handled most of them, Altair had been in several near-summoming situations, but Svenja’s orb was faster than his summoning took to activate.

Ryka remained on standby, her wyrven was a last option, especially since it was prone to go rogue. She served more in information gathering.

But now it was almost routine. Altair checked the time on his phone, twenty-five minutes in. They were doing fine, better than fine actually.

"This feels too easy," Ryka said. Even though her not summoning yet was precautionary, she still wanted the chance to show her strength.

"Hope you haven’t just jinxed," Altair replied.

They emerged into another chamber, this one larger than the previous ones. The ceiling stretched higher. The walls were lined with faintly glowing crystals that pulsed with a soft, rhythmic light.

Altair stopped in the center of the chamber and pulled out his phone to check their position.

Then...

The screen glitched. He knocked the phone slightly, that was new.

Another glitch, the blue dot representing their position splitting into two, then four, then scattering across the screen in a chaotic pattern before snapping back to normal.

"Uh," Altair said.

"Do you feel that?" Ryka asked.

Altair looked up from the screen only to find the ground beneath them glowing.

The light glowed red and black, a malicious pattern forming in reverse of what they’d seen before. Lines of energy traced themselves across the stone, spiraling outward from directly beneath their feet.

"That’s..." Altair started but froze. His eyeballs were the only thing that moved left and right, catching glimpses of Svenja and Ryka also frozen in place.

The seal expanded, then it pulled.

The sensation was forceful, like invisible hands had grabbed them and yanked downward. Altair’s stomach lurched and his vision blurred.

He heard Ryka shout something, but the sound was a muffled, distorted noise.

And they were gone.

----------

Back at the academy.

The monitoring room erupted.

Screens flashed red across the entire wall. Alarms blared sharply leaving the Magi-technicians scrambling between terminals, their voices overlapping in a discord of panic.

"Secondary gate detected..."

"Inside the primary plane?, that’s not possible!"

"The security is still intact, how did it happen?!"

"Signal lost on Group 47!"

Instructor Scathach stood in the center of it all.

In shock!.

Her hand gripped the edge of the main console so hard her knuckles had gone white. Her face was a mask of controlled fury, but her eyes betrayed her. They were wide, sharp, scanning the data feeds anxiously.

"Instructor!" One of the technicians turned toward her, his face pale. "We’ve lost tracking on one of the groups."

"Which group?!." She yelled back.

"Group 47." The technician’s hands moved across his terminal, pulling up the roster."Altair Elfender, Ryka Drakenheart, Svenja Hohenzollern."

"How.?!"

The lead Magi-technician, an older man with silver streaks in his hair, pulled up a secondary display. Lines of data scrolled past, incomprehensible to anyone without expertise.

"A secondary summoning gate opened inside the primary plane," he said slowly, like he couldn’t believe the words coming out of his mouth. "It bypassed our security fields entirely. Without warning, it just... appeared."

"That’s impossible," another technician said from across the room. "The fields are designed to prevent exactly that. External interference should trigger a cascade alarm before even getting through"

"This plane has been used for twelve years without incident." She moved to the main terminal. "Show me the signature."

The lead technician stepped aside, letting her take the console. The screen displayed a chaotic mess of data. Wavelengths that spiked and dropped in patterns that didn’t match anything in the Academy’s database.

Scathach stared at it for five seconds.

Then she shifted back.

"It’s not Academy magic," the lead technician said quietly.

Scathach’s expression began to change, fear growing evident in her. She pulled out her phone and typed a message to the senior council.

Emergency, the training plane has been compromised. Three students are missing.

She hit send.

Then she turned back to the room, her voice cutting through the noise like a whip crack.

"Find them.!"

__

Principal Baldwin’s office was quiet when Master Oz’s phone buzzed.

A routine meeting with Principal Baldwin, and Vice Principal Vivienne seated to his right, the conversation had been winding down.

Then his phone vibrated.

Oz glanced at it. He read the notification, his expression didn’t change, but Baldwin caught the shift anyway.

"What is it?" He asked.

Oz looked up slowly, concern and composure written all over his face.

"We have a huge problem."