Genetic Ascension

Chapter 2093: Evolution (1)

Sylas stood in silence over a headless puppet, its head having been ground into nothingness. And yet, despite the power he had used behind the attack, it was like there was no aftershock or blowback at all. The rest of the puppet's body was completely unharmed.

Sylas picked it up with his telekinesis and threw it into his Madness Key without a second thought. Then, he looked up into the skies toward the tortoise.

"You have two choices." Sylas said.

Sylas didn't explain what those choices were, the tortoise already knew what they were. But right now, it was completely frozen.

The world had become something entirely foreign to it. It didn't make sense that Sylas was this powerful, it didn't make sense for the Zeus Puppets to be so weak.

The tortoise didn't know what to believe or which was which. Had the puppets grown faulty because of the mutations to the Dungeon? That was simply impossible. It had left this part of the Dungeon entirely untouched and focused the mutations on the end product and the challenges that came earlier.

It had specifically chosen those earlier challenges so that it could select a group of contenders that could think on their feet and break the most difficult of puzzles.

The only way to make it through those was by either somehow managing to clear every puzzle even with an active saboteur, or finding a way to outsmart everyone else in your group to make it here.

There was also the added layer that if you had been a saboteur before and failed, you would then know that there was likely another saboteur amongst you, which would add another layer of difficulty to the challenge.

But Sylas hadn't needed any of that. He realized there was one without even having ever been one himself. Sylas had undoubtedly performed the best, and he was the only one who fought only to destroy the saboteurs rather than in any attempt to circumvent the actual mental challenge of it all.

But he… should not have been this powerful.

Maybe the tortoise should have already expected that this would happen. If Sylas could clear saboteurs without knowledge of the fact they should exist in the first place, why would he not be prepared to deal with the saboteur who was most obviously going to become one?

It wasn't even a secret what the motives of the tortoise were. Everyone knew them. And everyone complied because the chance to clear a far higher rated Dungeon than they would ever find on the Mortal Plane was far too good to pass up.

But now there were suddenly only two choices that lay before this tortoise.

The first was to burn it all down to the ground, release the hold it had on the world and allow it to collapse. But at that point, after the dust settled down, everything would fall into the hands of the powerhouses waiting outside right this moment.

The second was to let Sylas take what he wanted.

There wasn't a single good option remaining, and Sylas was not only reminding it of that, he didn't even press about which one he wanted it to take.

It was like Sylas didn't care one way or another. He would get his way just the same. One way was just more complex than the other.

Regardless, he was going to have to step outside, and that was going to require its own chaos to get out of here as well.

He just stood there, looking at the tortoise without a care for the fact that Deuvuo, Juxi, and Alpine were stunlocked themselves. Not a single one of them was moving, and when they stared at Sylas' back, all they could feel was all the fear they had once had for Zeus Puppets transfer right to him.

No… it was worse.

Sylas was a complete anomaly.

He had not only won, he had won with what felt like almost too much ease.

Sure, he had been injured to the point of being left as nothing more than a skeleton, but this last battle… he had suffered what amounted to nicks and scratches compared to what they had actually expected.

The tortoise was building up the same fear, but it was unwilling.

How many millennia had it spent building this realm. How could it just give it to someone else?

No. It wasn't fair.

This was its chance, its hope to raise its station and maybe one day catch up to its ancestors.

The tortoise roared and it felt like the entire galaxy trembled.

If it couldn't have it all, it certainly wasn't going to just hand Sylas all of it. It would fight for what scraps it could in the chaos.

The Dungeon exploded.

Or, rather, it should have.

But it didn't.

Sylas reached out, his hands curling through the air almost as though he was scooping something. Chaos rotated around his fingers and palms until a kernel of exactly what he was looking for manifested before him.

Sylas had lost his true connection to the system for a while now. Because of that, he had been stuck at the E-tier without much hope of moving forward.

There was no Quest available to upgrade his Classes, and though he had a free ticket for one of them, the other still needed to be properly cleared.

Then there was the leveling aspect itself. Non-Overlords could technically level, but the process was long and arduous, and it usually required special materials and lucky circumstances.

But Sylas wasn't just a "non-Overlord". He didn't have the same connection to the system everybody else had in the first place.

So, he really had to thank the Zeus Clan—or, rather, the Heaven Clan.

It took some time, but he finally grasped what he needed. How could he not after fighting the embodiment of evolution for so long?

If he wanted to progress to the next tier, it was a simple matter, really…

Just advance his Rune Mastery to that next tier first.

Sylas' body roared with life as he stepped into Fathomless Rune Creation of the D-tier.