Genetic Ascension

Chapter 2353 Not a Single

Sylas swept his gaze across the storm of pink, blue, and violet Will surrounding him with almost careless disregard. He had never seen so many Mesmeryx gathered in one place before, and until now he had disdained to use Vipermancy against any of them because there had simply been no need.

Why use a sledgehammer to crush an ant when the weight of a finger was enough?

Even so, there were parts of Vipermancy he couldn't simply turn off because he felt like it, and the intuition that came from comprehending Serpentes was one of them.

That understanding unfolded the attack before him almost instantly, exposing the span, scope, and intricacies of the Mesmeryx formation despite how many individual Wills were involved. The more Sylas looked, the more elegant the construction became.

The Mesmeryx were pouring out enormous amounts of their reality-altering Aether, but they weren't trying to coordinate every movement through their own Wills. Attempting that with this many members would have been a nightmare, each slight disagreement in interpretation creating fractures that would spread through the whole.

Instead, they allowed the Living Wills around them to guide the direction of the phenomenon while providing only a single, unified directive.

Create the reality that harmed Sylas Grimblade the most.

It was a shortcut that somehow made the technique more sophisticated rather than less, because they weren't attempting to dictate the exact road reality needed to take. They only chose the destination and allowed the world itself to fill in the route, which made the resulting transformation forceful without losing its natural flow.

Ripping it apart from the outside would be difficult precisely because there was so little artificial structure holding it together.

It reminded Sylas of the Fate Dragon.

The scale was smaller and the purpose far more targeted, but the underlying sentiment carried a familiar weight. Instead of forging an artificial ceiling that would eventually supersede the concept of Dragons across Spacetime, these Mesmeryx were constructing a reality where Sylas died because the world itself had been convinced that this was the outcome it should produce.

Sylas found the irony almost amusing.

The Beast Heaven represented Constitution, and yet these Beasts were using Will with more elegance than any expert of the Skai Heaven he had encountered thus far.

Their method was careful, meticulous, and almost beautiful in its efficiency, enough that Sylas could appreciate what he was seeing even while the pressure of their chosen reality continued gathering around him. Unfortunately for them, appreciation had never stopped him from destroying something.

It seemed they needed to be reminded of their place.

The fist Sylas still held raised above him trembled once, and the mangled ball of flesh that had once been Selythra Mesmeryx burst apart into a fine crimson mist. Blood spread outward through the surrounding clouds of colored Will, but instead of falling, every droplet stopped in place beneath Sylas' control. His eyes shifted as he reached into what remained of her body and began separating one layer of existence from another.

Blood Essence came first.

Sylas pulled it free and condensed it into the foundation of what he intended to build, using the energy as the fuel that would allow everything else to persist without drawing heavily upon himself. Then his Will sank deeper, peeling apart the Genes threaded through Selythra's flesh and exposing the Runes buried within the structure of her bloodline.

There was no hesitation in his movements.

Genes fractured into strands, Runes separated into characters, and every piece was reconstructed into a cascading catalytic framework that hovered within the sea of blood. Sylas didn't need to recreate the Mesmeryx ability in full, nor did he care to, because all he needed was the part that recognized and resonated with their own bloodline.

Selythra had stood near the peak of their C-tier generation.

Her blood carried a stronger expression of the Mesmeryx lineage than almost every Serpentes currently surrounding Sylas, and the moment his formation awakened, that superiority became an anchor. The fused Wills of the Mesmeryx reacted instinctively to the familiar bloodline authority, their combined reality-warping Aether bending toward it before any of them understood what was happening.

Sylas swiped out a hand.

The crimson mist expanded.

Cascading Runes spread through it like sparks traveling along invisible threads, each one latching onto another until an enormous bloody formation unfolded across the skies. What had looked like little more than rain moments earlier became a layered network of blood, Genes, and Runes, every section using Selythra's superior lineage as a catalyst to drag the surrounding Mesmeryx resonance into alignment.

The flowing clouds froze.

Pink stopped drifting into blue, violet stopped coiling around silver, and the vast reality the Mesmeryx had been shaping locked in place as though someone had seized its throat. Their Wills struggled to pull away, but the stronger they resisted, the more deeply Selythra's bloodline resonance dragged them back into the formation.

Then Sylas took control.

The reality that had been gathering to kill him shifted beneath the catalytic Runes, its direction turning with terrifying smoothness because the Mesmeryx themselves had already built the foundation for him.

He didn't need to overpower their combined Will from nothing, because they had generously gathered the Aether, coordinated the resonance, and opened reality wide enough for someone to guide it.

All Sylas had to do was choose a different destination.

His emerald eyes glowed through the frozen sea of color as the bloody formation tightened around the battlefield. The Mesmeryx shrieked, their translucent wings beating furiously as they finally understood that their own fused Wills were no longer answering them.

Sylas breathed out a single word.

"Die."

The reality they had created obeyed.

Scythes erupted across the skies, countless blades of emerald and crimson appearing from every fold of distorted space at once. They swept through the frozen formation in intersecting arcs, cutting through silver scales, translucent wings, flesh, and Will until the beautiful clouds of pink, blue, and violet became a storm of blood.

Not a single Mesmeryx remained in the air.