Genetic Ascension

Chapter 2088: Cracks

Sylas looked up at the creature, the sockets that were left of his eyes radiating with a light that went beyond what seemed possible at their depth.

This was certainly an interesting choice by the tortoise. The creature had no small amount of control over the Dungeon, but it had no ability to actually clear it itself.

It wasn't just using them because it was more convenient, it was using them because it had no other choice.

Logically, what the tortoise should do was wait for everything to be cleared, and then take action. Or, just use its manipulation abilities to command a large portion of the rewards for itself.

This latter choice was what Sylas had been expecting. This was an A-tier Dungeon with a Demi-God cap. The amount of rewards the tortoise would be able to claim for itself even against the system's insistence was enormous.

While the system would force some equal distribution, it technically wasn't supposed to be possible for a creature of flesh and blood to mutate and form Dungeons like this in the first place. So, obviously, many rules were being thrown out of the window.

Still, at best, Sylas would have ended up with 10% of the reward, more than likely 5%.

That said, 5% of an A-tier Demi-God Dungeon, even if it was the weakest in all of existence, was likely to be something that gave the current Sylas an enormous boost.

But it seemed that this tortoise was particularly greedy. It didn't just want to claim the vast majority, it wanted the entire reward.

It probably had its reasons. It had been trying to form this Dungeon for a very long time for its own specific purposes, and it had finally succeeded in the end.

This was probably its chance to reach beyond the A-tier, maybe its chance to at least become a Demi-God and rise past all the bottlenecks and ceilings it had been trapped beneath for so long.

And it would capitalize on it. Every bit of reward it had less was another bit of a chance it wouldn't be able to achieve its goals, and that was unacceptable.

That was all well and good… but how exactly was it planning to claim that reward after they died and there was no one left to clear the Dungeon? The crux of that answer was the most important.

If the tortoise wanted to do this, it should be trying to find a balance between killing them and clearing the dungeon. Not this.

This was just much too far.

Juxi felt so. Deuvuo felt so. Even Alpine felt so.

The only one who didn't seem to be reacting with the sheer blight of unmanageable panic was Sylas himself.

He stood beneath the shadow of the giant Zeus Puppet, his gaze sharp and focused. Or at the very least, the light within them was.

A confident Pride radiated from Sylas, his Champion Will trumpeting. The world bent and whined around him.

BOOM.

The world began to crack.

Sylas stood as a skeleton of black bone, his body wrapped in an illusory body of emerald green as his hair billowed in streams of black and white energy.

His hand tightened around his scythe, and though he looked up, he somehow didn't seem smaller than the puppet across from himself at all.

In fact, he almost faintly seemed to be even taller.

'I see.' Sylas said.

He understood what the plan of the tortoise was now. Unfortunately, it had made a fatal error.

BOOM.

The palm of the puppet smashed down toward Sylas, the air sizzling and roaring.

The puppet should have been an A-tier Demi-God, but it wasn't. If it was an A-tier Demi-God, it would be too resistant to the system's presence in the Mortal Realm which wouldn't be conducive to the tortoise's purposes.

So, instead, it was limited to the C-tier.

However, C-tier or not, it was a Demi-God, and it was a Zeus Puppet capable of fighting well beyond its tier.

The rest of the energy that should have gone to the puppet was instead transferred into the stairs themselves.

This was done deliberately to compensate for the cracking of the dungeon.

Right about now, the system was pretty pissed off that a powerful Demi-God had appeared in its realm, and the world the tortoise had crafted of Dungeons wasn't powerful enough to keep this aura hidden.

This was the second reason the tortoise had limited the puppet to just the C-tier. If it was any stronger, the reaction of the Heaven System would be even fiercer than it was now.

However, there were cracks nonetheless. Only by filtering the rest of the power into the stairs themselves would the Dungeon stabilize enough to last until the puppet killed everyone and the tortoise could complete its planned ritual.

As things currently stood, the Dungeon would easily last several more days even though things looked quite precarious. This would be plenty of time for the tortoise to get exactly what it wanted and finish things off.

This, however, caused another odd twist…

**

In the outside world, the planet of barbarians and savages was long gone, formed into bits of floating land that orbited aimlessly around the enormous tortoise.

The barrier formed by Alpine and the other Cryst Emperors was holding up strong even now, severing the path of teleportation the other powers had continuously tried but failed to establish.

But when cracks started to appear in the Dungeon…

Space warped and twisted, the controlled gate of the Dungeon suddenly spiralling out of control. As though transcribing its pain onto the outside world, the barrier formed around the Dungeon likewise began to crack.

Fine lines fissured the protective coating and the world spiralled.

BANG.

BANG.

BANG.

As though a waiting line had suddenly boiled over, one teleportation channel after another opened up in the depths of space, surrounding the tortoise.

They bucked up against one another, some collapsing beneath the pressure of so many forming at once, leaving only the most powerful of them standing.

And out from within them, the feet of true monsters stepped forward.