Genetic Ascension

Chapter 2456: Sylas’ Answer. (3)

Xarvenya had gone pale enough that the color seemed to have drained from even her lips, one hand resting over her stomach despite the fact there was still nothing there for anyone else to see.

Her fingers moved once against the fabric before becoming still, and she stared toward the heavens as though looking away for even an instant might make the sight before her real in a way she could no longer deny.

There was almost nothing left of Sylas. Half of his skull remained beneath patches of fractured emerald, while pieces of black ribs, spine, and splintered limbs floated beneath it without enough structure between them to resemble a body; even the crystalline Phoenix wings that had dragged him back from destruction again and again had been reduced to a few dim fragments of light.

Xarvenya’s breathing had grown shallow, but Cassarae and Nosphaleen stood differently. Neither woman relaxed, and neither looked anything close to calm, yet their eyes remained fixed ahead with an intensity that made it seem as though they weren’t watching Sylas die at all, but waiting for the moment he inevitably did something that made everyone else feel foolish for believing he would.

They had seen that moment too many times.

The humanoid raised its fist again.

**

Within the emptiness where Sylas’ consciousness had been compressed almost to nothing, the distant Dragon concept remained beneath his grasp, too immense and complete for what little of him remained to hold.

Voidborn Wisdom changed that problem without making his mind feel faster or louder, allowing him to pull on the thought until its edges began separating, then fracture it further until what had once been an impossible whole became pieces small enough for him to understand.

Age. Patience. Memory. Authority earned through the weight of time rather than demanded through force.

Sylas took hold of those fragments, and something inside the void answered.

A sliver of his Will returned first, followed by another so faint that Judgment should have crushed them the moment they surfaced, yet the ceiling did nothing. The strands continued weaving together beneath the influence of that foreign Dragon Will, and Sylas understood the reason almost as soon as he felt his existence begin to expand again.

Judgment didn’t understand it.

The ceiling above Earth knew Dragon Will, but it knew the Dragon that had developed beneath this universe and the beliefs that had accumulated beneath its Heaven. What Sylas had reached through the void had never existed here, which meant the Judgment Will had no foundation from which to define it, let alone suppress it.

Sylas pulled harder.

His senses burst back into existence so suddenly that lightning, Aether, Will, and space all crashed into his perception at once. Voidborn Wisdom sorted the flood before it could overwhelm him, and only then did Sylas notice the white-gold fist already descending toward the surviving half of his skull.

Black bone grew from the remnants of his shoulder and formed an arm before the strike landed. His fist met the humanoid’s, shattered from the knuckles to the shoulder, rebuilt itself before the enemy could finish pressing through, then shattered again as Sylas forced more Dragon Will into the reconstruction.

The third arm lasted longer.

The fourth stopped the fist.

Sylas hovered there with barely half a skull and enough bones to suggest the beginning of a torso, his newly formed fist pressed against the humanoid’s while Judgment descended from above in a fresh wave. The pressure searched through the foreign Will, probing it for meaning and attempting to force it into a shape the ceiling could recognize, but the moment Sylas felt the first signs of understanding begin to form, he abandoned that version of Dragon entirely.

Voidborn Wisdom reached elsewhere.

A different Dragon surfaced in his perception, one curled atop wealth so vast that possession itself had become inseparable from its existence. Sylas didn’t attempt to comprehend the entire concept. He pulled free only the portion he needed, and the Dragon Will flowing through his reconstructed arm changed before Judgment could finish adapting.

Greed.

The humanoid’s next blow cracked his forearm without destroying it, and Sylas used the opening to drive his other fist through the creature’s chest. Lightning scattered from its back, only for the ceiling to begin correcting the weakness almost immediately, but Sylas had already reached through the void again.

Another Dragon existed through nothing but strength, revered because opposition to it had ceased to have meaning. Sylas drew a sliver of that concept into himself, and his spine began rebuilding beneath him one vertebra at a time while the emerald coating across his bones thickened.

Might.

The humanoid struck his ribs and broke three, but seven others remained intact. Sylas caught the wrist of the following strike, shifted his weight around the force, and tore the arm away at the elbow before Judgment could properly adjust.

He continued pulling.

One Dragon existed as rainfall and abundance, another as the authority of rivers and seas, while another had become synonymous with calamity to civilizations that had survived beneath its shadow.

Sylas moved between them before the ceiling could settle on any one interpretation, taking fragments rather than wholes and forcing Judgment to solve a different problem every time it believed it was close to understanding the last.

His skeleton rebuilt itself throughout the exchange. Ribs spread outward from his spine, his pelvis formed beneath them, and two black femurs extended downward as emerald scales crawled across their surfaces, while his second arm finally stabilized enough that he no longer needed to recreate it after every collision.

Phoenix remained beyond his reach, but Sylas didn’t waste thought on it.

He didn’t have the bandwidth to chase both concepts across countless worlds, and he didn’t need to. Dragon alone had already changed the nature of the battle. Every version he drew upon gave him another structure Judgment had never encountered and another moment in which the humanoid could no longer perfectly answer him.

Its fist drove toward his forehead.

Sylas caught it. This time nothing broke.

His fingers tightened around the humanoid’s wrist as he twisted, and white-gold lightning burst from the joint when the forearm snapped away from the elbow. The creature recoiled for the first time since Judgment had begun stripping Sylas apart, but Sylas’ attention had already shifted inward toward the ruby light pulsing near where his ear had once been.

The Ouroboros.

The Contract had survived even when Sylas could barely reach it, its existence buried beneath the same pressure that had cut him off from Bloodburn, Infinite Hunger, Eternal Cycle, and Undying Proliferation.

Now foreign Dragon Will flowed through Sylas again, and as his connection to the creature reopened, a thought entered his mind. Given life by his subconscious, he acted the moment it surface.

He drove Dragon Will through the Contract.

The Ouroboros recoiled so violently that the connection between them trembled, but Sylas didn’t stop. Wisdom entered first, followed by Greed, Might, calamity, water, abundance, sovereignty, and fragments of concepts he couldn’t yet name, each one carrying an interpretation of Dragon that had developed beneath a sky the Judgment Will above Earth had never touched.

Infinite Hunger reacted.

The Ouroboros devoured the first strand, then the second, and by the third its resistance had changed into something far more familiar. The creature swallowed everything Sylas sent through their Contract, its ruby coils convulsing as the boundary between what it consumed and what it was began to blur.

Cracks spread across its scales and something darker appeared beneath them.

Sylas felt Vipermancy tremble with the change, the Profession reacting with a violence it hadn’t shown in so long that he had almost stopped considering its advancement entirely. Silver light flooded through the connection, surged upward toward Gold, then continued without slowing.

The light shattered through the boundary.

—

[Profession Evolution Triggered]

[Vipermancy: Silver → Legendary]