Genetic Ascension

Chapter 2426 Rewind

Caelum didn't say anything when the two groups finally came within striking distance of one another, only lifting two fingers and making a small motion toward Sylas. The Silver woman in dark plate armor reacted immediately, while Fanelei took half a step forward before Sylas shook his head.

"Stay."

Fanelei raised an eyebrow, though she didn't argue. She was still slowly growing into what it meant to be a Demi-God, while the woman approaching them was clearly a God, but there was another detail that made Sylas' caution seem strange.

She was only a C-tier.

In fact, all four of them were.

Fanelei had enough experience to understand that Tier alone didn't mean very much once the quality of the person standing in front of you grew high enough, but Sylas wasn't usually the type to care about such a thing either. If he didn't think she or Cheri could handle this woman, there was probably something else he had noticed.

The Silver crossed the remaining distance in an instant.

The blue lines beneath her armor brightened as she thrust a thin sword toward Sylas' heart, and the space around her seemed to skip. It wasn't quite teleportation, since Sylas could still feel every part of her movement, but the time between one step and the next had been compressed until the distance might as well not have existed.

Sylas flicked a finger.

The woman's sword was suddenly back at her side.

Her feet stood exactly where they had before she attacked, the blue light beneath her armor still flowing through the same channels as though nothing had happened. Only the slight widening of her eyes suggested that she remembered crossing the distance at all.

She moved again.

This time, the mechanisms beneath her armor activated before her first step, thin plates shifting over her shoulders and waist while the blue lines pulsed in a sequence that Sylas could clearly read. Her personal time accelerated, the outside world slowed around her, and her sword approached Sylas from an angle meant to take his heart before he could react.

Sylas raised a hand.

The attack disappeared.

The Silver found herself standing several hundred meters away again, except this time she was already halfway through her follow-up motion, forcing her to stop herself before she lost balance. She frowned, finally looking at Sylas properly.

He hadn't rewound time.

At least, not in the way she understood it.

She attacked a third time, then a fourth, and each attempt became more aggressive as the result remained the same. Time folded around her body, stretched beneath her feet, and compressed around her sword, yet no matter how she changed the application, Sylas continued returning her to an earlier position with movements so small they barely looked related to what was happening.

Cheri watched in silence, her previous panic slowly being replaced by confusion.

The woman was a God.

Even a Silver Acolyte of Legacy was someone Cheri wouldn't have dared provoke casually, and this one was now attacking with enough power that the pressure leaking from her movements alone should have flattened large regions of the Demi-God Plane. Yet Sylas hadn't taken a single proper step since the battle began.

The Silver's expression hardened.

The blue beneath her armor changed to gold.

A heavy aura descended around her, and the failed Madness Candidates nearby were crushed into the ground before they could even react. Her sword hummed in her hand as she finally stopped testing Sylas and pulled directly on the power of the God Plane.

Then something went wrong.

Sylas saw it before she did.

Hell didn't sit cleanly within any one Plane. Mortal Aura, Demi-God Aura, and God Aura all existed here with almost equal naturalness, layered through one another by a world that had been built beneath ordinary reality rather than inside it.

The Silver was accustomed to reaching for God Aura as naturally as breathing.

Here, that instinct betrayed her.

Her Will spread outward, found what felt like the same familiar foundation, and latched onto it without hesitation, but what answered her wasn't entirely the God Aura she had expected. It was mixed with the layers beneath it, close enough that someone less sensitive would never notice, yet different enough that every temporal technique she formed carried a small flaw.

What she hadn't yet realized was that this wasn't entirely natural. This was because of Sylas. But she was too late to piece it together.

The Silver blurred forward again, this time so quickly that Cheri lost sight of her altogether. The air warped around Sylas as dozens of possible sword paths appeared at once, each one representing a slightly different moment before converging toward the same result.

Sylas' eyes flashed.

Emerald Runes formed in the space around him, not in a broad formation, but in small linked sections that rotated against the current of the woman's technique. He wasn't fighting the force of her time manipulation directly, only touching the places where her connection to God Aura was wrong and allowing those errors to accumulate.

The first sword path vanished.

Then another.

The Silver's expression changed as the future she had prepared began collapsing one possibility at a time, and she poured more power into the technique in an attempt to stabilize it, but that only made the flaws larger.

Sylas stepped forward for the first time.

The distance between them folded.

The Silver tried to retreat, but the time around her body suddenly moved in conflicting directions, one portion accelerating while another returned toward the moment she had just left. Her armor screamed under the strain, metal plates twisting against one another as blood appeared along the seams.

Her eyes widened.

Caelum finally moved.

The mechanisms in his left eye spun, and the entire battlefield lurched backward.

Blood rose from the ground and returned to bodies, broken armor repaired itself, and the Silver was pulled away from Sylas as every moment of their battle began rapidly undoing itself. Within seconds, they were returning to the instant before she had first moved.

Then two emerald lights spun within Sylas' eyes.

The reversal stopped.

Caelum's mechanical eye twitched.

Sylas stepped through the frozen current of time as though it wasn't there, appearing in front of the Silver before she understood that Caelum's technique had failed. His hand pierced through her armor and chest, claws closing around something dense before he pulled back.

The woman's body collapsed.

Sylas looked down at the heart resting in his palm, his eyes narrowing slightly as he weighed it.

It was far heavier than a heart had any reason to be.

Across the battlefield, the remaining two Silvers stood completely frozen.