Genetic Ascension

Chapter 2424 Gnat

Cheri recognized the uniforms before she could make out the faces, and the realization immediately pulled most of her attention away from the failed Madness Disciples between them.

The three figures surrounding the leader wore silver-trimmed Legacy emblems, while the man at their center wore gold.

"Legacy," Cheri said, her voice low. "Three Silvers and a Gold."

Sylas glanced in their direction once before continuing forward, another series of Rune formations unfolding ahead of him and tearing through a cluster of Madness Disciples without slowing his steps. Cheri stared at his back for a moment, more shaken by that lack of reaction than she would have been if he had stopped and prepared for a battle.

Her own uniform identified her as a Bronze, even if that designation had been something she deliberately manipulated downward from what she believed should have been Gold. Silvers were already extraordinarily rare within Legacy, and Golds were existences she had gone out of her way to avoid attracting the attention of, yet Sylas had heard that there were three of the former and one of the latter ahead and directly ignored it.

**

"What is a Bronze doing here?"

The woman who spoke wore a fitted suit of dark armor that looked medieval at first glance, except thin metal lines ran beneath the plates and pulsed with a soft blue light whenever she moved.

Beside her stood another woman whose robes were threaded through with articulated metal ribs, while the remaining man had replaced most of his left arm with a mechanism of gears and polished black steel.

None of them looked entirely technological or entirely traditional, which was common among Legacy members who had spent enough time mixing inheritances from different eras and worlds, and even more common amongst those on the verge of becoming Professors, but weren't quite yet.

Even so, the three Silvers looked almost ordinary beside the man walking slightly ahead of them.

As for the Gold, he looked human in every way except for his left eye.

There was no iris or pupil within it, only a collection of tiny interlocking gears, springs, and wheels arranged in layers too deep for the space of an eyeball to reasonably contain. Some turned continuously while others moved in tiny increments, and every few seconds a thin golden hand swept across the mechanisms before snapping back to its original position.

"Something isn't adding up," the second woman replied as she cut through a Madness Disciple. "We only managed to enter this place through Lord Caelum. A Bronze shouldn't even have the qualifications to find the entrance."

The other two glanced toward their leader almost instinctively.

Caelum had been a Gold for longer than any of them had been members of Legacy, and even among that designation he was considered strange. His affinity wasn't simply with Time, something rare enough on its own, but with the measurement and ownership of it, an ability that had made several Professors take a personal interest in his development.

"Maybe she followed someone stronger," the man with the mechanical arm offered. "The man beside her doesn't have a Legacy uniform at all, and the woman—"

His voice reversed.

The other two froze as the words he had just spoken came back out of his mouth in the wrong order, each sound undoing itself while his body stepped backward. The women followed a moment later, their attacks reversing, wounds closing on the Madness Disciples they had just killed while blood returned to severed bodies and weapons returned to the exact positions they had occupied several seconds earlier.

Then everything snapped back.

Vertigo slammed into the three Silvers at once, forcing one woman to catch herself before she fell. None of them spoke as their gazes shifted toward Caelum's mechanical eye, where several of the smallest gears had just completed another rotation.

Their hands began to wrinkle.

Skin thinned, veins rose, and age flashed across their fingers before fading away again, leaving their youthful appearances untouched.

Caelum had reclaimed his time.

This wasn't the first time they had experienced something like this, and realization of what happened almost shut down their own thoughts completely. They had interrupted Caelum's thoughts for several seconds, so he had taken those seconds back and paid for them with their lifespans instead.

The three Silvers pressed their lips shut and continued fighting.

For almost half an hour, the only sounds between them came from weapons striking flesh and the occasional mechanisms hidden beneath their armor. The endless humanoids continued pressing forward, and while none of the four were in serious danger, the sheer number made progress irritatingly slow.

More importantly, the other group was getting closer.

The Bronze woman remained beside the unfamiliar man, while the older-looking woman with them seemed to be handling most of the work required to keep pace. Even at this distance, it was obvious that the man was the center of their formation, and the strange thing was that the armies ahead of him seemed to collapse faster the longer they watched.

The first Silver woman wanted to ask if they should change direction, but the memory of wrinkles spreading across her hands kept her silent.

"Pull up a file."

They jolted the moment Caelum's voice began to speak, sounding far more ancient than his youthful appearance would suggest. The first Silver woman acted before Caelum finished speaking, a translucent screen forming above her palm while she waited for the name.

"Sylas Grimblade."

The three Silvers exchanged confused looks.

None of them recognized it.

A search ran through Legacy's archives, and a moment later the woman's expression changed. The file that appeared wasn't especially long, but the designation at the top was unlike anything she had ever seen.

"Priority Five?"

The words slipped out before she could stop them, and she immediately glanced toward Caelum's eye. He didn't react.

She exhaled carefully.

"This assessment was performed on a child," the second woman said, forgetting caution for a moment. "The earliest entries are from when he was seven."

Her gaze shifted toward the man in the distance.

"That was only a little over twenty years ago. He's not even thirty?"

"Read," Caelum said.

The woman hurried to obey.

"Age nine, normal testing methods were deemed ineffective. Age eleven, he identified a planned school shooting before the first stage could begin and alerted an instructor without exposing himself. By fourteen, Legacy had already concluded that direct testing risked revealing the observer."

She swallowed and continued scrolling.

"At fifteen, he learned an intentionally complex programming language in three days during a disguised evaluation, then lost interest in the field entirely. At sixteen, active testing was abandoned, and the evaluator recommended observation only."

The mechanical eye turned by a fraction.

"Continue."

"Age seventeen, first recorded display of serious violence following a personal incident. The evaluator noted that the level of ruthlessness was abnormal for someone with no battlefield experience."

Her expression had been growing more neutral the more she read. Even though she knew that this was an evaluation that took place on a Summoned World, she found it hard to take it seriously. These feats were too... mortal.

Until, that is... she reached the last line.

The evaluators of Legacy were highly specialized. Anyone chosen to evaluate a Summoned World would be exceptional. Despite the size of their organization, the number of credited evaluators was counted in the mere hundreds.

For one of them to write this...

"Final Evaluation: steer clear of Sylas Brown. Subject intelligence cannot be properly measured, behavioral control is unreliable, and continued interference carries an unacceptable probability of exposure."

The Silvers fell silent.

Priority Five wasn't part of the ordinary Fragmented through Legendary scale at all. In the entire recorded history of Legacy, only five people had ever received such an evaluation.

Just five.

Caelum watched Sylas for several more seconds while the gears inside his eye continued turning.

"I see. So it is him."

Legacy had had far too many problems to deal with to waste meaningful resources on Sylas Grimblade. He had been troublesome in several places, but on the scale their organization operated, he had remained too small to justify the distraction.

Caelum's gaze settled on the approaching group.

Still, there was no reason to ignore convenience. Since the annoying, buzzing gnat had delivered himself directly to them, they might as well kill him.