Genetic Ascension

Chapter 2313: A Single Word to Erase them All.

The moment Sylas' word descended, the world came alive.

At first it was only a small patch of Runes responding beneath his outstretched palm, a thin bloom of light suspended above the atmosphere like a fracturing pane of glass. And then it rapidly spread.

It crawled outward in all directions, not with the ugliness of decay, but with a cancerous sort of beauty. It was like if ruin learned elegance, or plague blossomed instead of rot. Just maybe... it might have looked something like this.

Runes unfolded across the sky in layered strokes, each line birthing another before the last had even finished settling into place.

Sylas was no longer forcing every structure into existence by completing it in his mind and then stamping it onto reality with a Spark. That had been his old method, powerful enough that it had carried him farther than it should have, but still wasteful in ways he had only just begun to understand.

Now he only needed to light the flint. He sketched the idea of a Rune, not always the entire thing, sometimes only a segment or a directional intent. The rest formed a bridge to itself like pieces of a puzzle marrying themselves to one another.

The universe responded in kind. It was less like constructing a perfect machine and more like jotting notes in a shorthand only reality and Sylas himself could read. Every loose implication, every unfinished curve, every suggestive pressure inside his Will spilling outward until the world completed the thought with him.

In the past, when he used Spark Mastery to spontaneously form Runes, he still thought of the completed Rune. Because his thoughts already moved in Runes, the process had been faster than it ought to be.

The result had always been clean, potent, terrifying to anyone forced to stand in front of it. Yet all of that looked clumsy now.

If that old style of casting had once cost him ten units of effort, this cost him less than a gasp by comparison, not even a fraction of one unit. What he received in return was not a weaker imitation born of cutting corners, but something somehow cleaner. In fact, it even felt... more obedient.

The network grew so fast even Sylas' eye struggled to follow it. But that hardly mattered when his heart and his mind could.

Small clusters of light fused into larger meshes. Those meshes connected into chains. The chains overlapped, folded, doubled back, and then expanded again until the entire planet below him looked as though a living, breathing organism was forming over it and climbing toward infinity.

A bloom no larger than his palm became a shell wrapped around the world in less than three seconds. Space bowed beneath it and time itself gave a faint, keening resistance in the undercurrents of the void. Not enough to stop him, only enough to let him know the scale he was working on was starting to make the universe buck back against him... a scale that it had begun to notice.

Sylas watched the completed formation with a steady gaze, then raised his fingers and snapped.

The world vanished.

It was simply there one instant and absent the next. Or, rather, the life it had once had, that is.

Every structure, every defender, even the struggling Serpentes that were under Sylas' own command, and the every lingering trace of their battle scrubbed away so completely it looked as though the world had always been bare.

A barren rock spun silently in the void. Sylas looked down at it without the slightest hint of surprise. He had just expanded his battle power by an absurd margin, the kind of leap that would have left most others reeling in disbelief, but all he felt was a cold, sharpening certainty.

Every time he stumbled over some relatively minor truth and it suddenly let to such a shocking improvement in power, it didn't make him feel relieved. If anything, it pissed him off a little bit.

He was still ignorant even after all the reading he had done, all the worlds he had been through, even all the battles he had fought. Brutally, embarrassingly ignorant.

He grew so much faster than anyone else, but his starting position was far too low. If one small correction could widen the gap by this much, then what would happen if he understood more? How strong would he be then? How strong would he be if he had a true fundamental understanding of everything?

Was he asking for too much?

Sylas lifted a hand again, but this time he didn't turn his focus toward the worlds below. His eyes tracked the blood-written words laced through the gaps of reality, all those refined Vosskarr concepts still working to twist his Beacon against him, still iterating.

Their method was elegant and he respected it. But it also made them convenient.

He reached a finger into the fabric of space itself, dipping it through one of the floating crimson characters as though testing his ink, and when he pulled back, blood gathered along the tip. Some of it belonged to the Vosskarr script, some of it was his own.

Sylas could feel the difference without looking, it hummed through his Will. Then, with one smooth motion, he dragged his finger through reality and edited the word. He replaced what was there with something else, a single word written with his own Will and his own blood. His own interpretation laid over the pathways spreading through the entire galaxy.

Grimblade.

The word settled in, weaving through every line and crevice.

At that same instant, across every world ruled by the Vosskarr, an emerald spark lit in the eyes of their people. It came without warning.

A guard on the walls stiffened mid-step, a child in a learning hall went silent, an elder standing over a brush froze with wet blood still clinging to the crimson hairs, and behind each of them, as though it had been waiting in the dark space at their backs all along, a ghostly figure took shape.

Black robes trailed from it in torn, foggy, thin strips. Its outline shifted like smoke vaguely outlining a human body but forgetting the legs. No face showed beneath the hood, only depthless shadow. In its hands rested the curved length of a scythe, its shaft formed of white bone that reflected the Will and embodiement of the person it hovered above.

Sylas saw them all at once through the word he had written. The figure eased close enough for the blade to kiss the exposed line of every Vosskarr throat.

And then he watched the scythe pull across.