Genetic Ascension

1581 Not Worth His Time

Elara sat at a windowsill, looking out into the world with a pout on her face.

"Well, that didn't last for long. How boring."

After a while, the childishness on her face seemed to fade away, replaced by a contemplative, mature look that belied her age by what felt like decades.

Staring out into the new constructions of Castle Main going up, she wondered if she should skip school again. It was all so very boring.

Reaching out a finger, she drew with a well-polished and manicured nail on the window. Runes followed the arc of her motion, lining the glass as though she were cutting a hole right through it.

Life fluttered from it, but just as she was about to complete the circle, she stopped, shaking her head.

She really didn't want to compete with her brother, but sometimes she wondered which of them really was better.

As far as she was concerned, though... Sylas was a little soft. He had a fluffier, smoother part of himself that she didn't have.

[A Legend has sensed you]

[Would you like to establish a connection?]

[Yes] [No]

Elara didn't seem to have noticed the notification at all considering how she reacted, her finger hovering in place without completing the circle.

After a moment, her gaze seemed to regain some focus, and she looked at it before waving it away.

"I need food," she said after a while, her bright smile returning.

Now that she thought about it, maybe she should grow stronger if for no other reason than the fact she could eat more.

There were many sweets to try out in this world.

Sylas sat down with his eyes closed as the ship hurtled through space, moving so fast it probably wouldn't take them much more than a few minutes to return to the Sanctum.

He actually hadn't known what Fowler and that woman wanted to do. He didn't even know who the latter was, for that matter-though he had expected that Fowler would be receiving some help from outsiders.

What he did know, though, was that Fowler had made a critical mistake.

The method he was trying to use to steal Sylas' Title from him was one that took advantage of the system's confusion. By forcing a Cross Tier challenge, the system was in a state where it was placing Sylas and everyone around him on the same plane. So, if Sylas lost, it made the system doubly question things.

The reason Sylas hadn't seen this as a potential method in the past was because he didn't have as much backing as the now-dead, once-future Matriarch of the Kaelthar.

She had known how all such Titles were once connected in the past, and how the current system had no choice but to separate them and weaken their potency.

So she knew how to take advantage of the lingering connections that still remained between them.

It had to be remembered that Fowler hadn't had a great feat of intelligence to gain the Dominus Paragon Title—at least not in the same sense Sylas had. He gained his Title after his feats in the Rune Tower.

Logically, for a feat in Runes, he should have gained Primus Luminaria instead. But while he had displayed great skill, he hadn't fully crafted his own Path of Runes yet.

Because of that, while the system almost gave him Primus Luminaria, it instead decided to give him Dominus Paragon.

It was just as the dead, once-future Matriarch had said: the system didn't have a perfect method of measuring intelligence. It instead used proximal methods to gauge things.

They had hoped to use this weakness, having Fowler defeat Sylas and gain both Titles as a result. Reaching the end of the Quicktime Event wasn't necessary at all so long as Fowler dominated Sylas at least once.

One time was all it would take even if Sylas had been first in the round-would he be able to continue as it grew more complex and difficult?

Unfortunately, what they didn't know was that the moment the system deemed Sylas unworthy, his Title didn't shift over to Fowler like they had expected.

Since Dominus Paragon and Primus Luminaria were so tightly connected to one another, the assumption was that so long as he made the system doubt Sylas, the logical transfer would be toward him.

The woman had almost certainly manipulated things to ensure that this would happen as well, adjusting the environment just perfectly so that Fowler would benefit the most.

Her plan was quite simple, all things considered. She had even placed a backdoor that would essentially make Fowler a slave to her unless he wanted to lose his precious Titles again.

The backing of the strongest Rune Master in the Sector would have been huge for the success of the Kaelthar in this region.

Everything was so perfectly accounted for...

Except for the existence of Elara.

When the system decided that Sylas wasn't worthy, things didn't go as planned at all. How could the dead, once-future Matriarch possibly know that the system had been mulling over whether to hand Primus Luminaria to Elara for months already?

As such, not just Primus Luminaria was transferred over to her, but so too was Dominus Paragon.

The end result was devastating for this ambitious, once-future Matriarch.

Earth's Summoning wasn't complete yet. When she tried to manipulate and put a backdoor into the Titles-as was always her plan the system detected it as an attempt to influence a world in the process of its Summoning.

This was a huge taboo.

In the end, she probably only barely had time to understand that this was all because of Sylas. There was no way that she could deduce exactly how he had done it.

She could only die with her eyes wide open.

If Sylas had had to win the normal way, he would never have been unconfident in doing

such a thing, but it would have taken weeks-maybe months-that he didn't have to waste.

So he did this instead.

They weren't worth his time.

The ship pulsed with light and came to a sudden stop.

'Hm?'

Sylas' head slowly turned toward one of the many floating moons of the Sanctum's

planet-toward the Scorpion Lineage's moon.

Something had changed.