Genetic Ascension

Chapter 2427 Time

Sylas looked from the heart in his hand toward the remaining two Silvers, then took a step in their direction. He had no particular interest in them, but leaving enemies alive beside him when killing them would cost almost nothing didn't make much sense either.

Caelum moved before he could take a second step.

A thin golden Rune appeared beneath Sylas' foot, so simple that anyone else might have dismissed it as incomplete. But Sylas stopped, his Will brushing across the surface before sinking deeper, and what he found beneath made his attention sharpen.

Dozens of smaller structures had been buried inside it.

Some accelerated time by fractions of a second, others slowed it, while several existed only to change how those first layers would be interpreted. One Rune concealed another, that one concealed three more, and beneath all of them sat a formation whose only purpose seemed to be altering the timing of Caelum's next movement by a small fraction.

Sylas understood the reason almost immediately.

Time was too obvious when used directly.

Speed something up, slow it down, stop it, rewind it. Every action exposed its intention too cleanly, which meant a competent Rune Master would always know where to begin dismantling it.

So Caelum hid simple actions beneath other simple actions until the whole became complicated.

Emerald light flickered through Sylas' eyes as his own Runes formed, peeling apart one of Caelum's outer layers while deliberately allowing another to complete. Caelum responded before Sylas finished, adjusting three formations at once, and Sylas was forced to change the meaning of his counter midway through its construction.

Neither of them seemed truly intent on attacking, and yet every exchange was steeped in countless unforetold dangers.

Every Rune was a question meant to force a particular answer, and every answer concealed another intention beneath it. Sylas would allow an apparent weakness to remain, Caelum would press it, and three steps later it would become clear that both of them had been aiming at something else entirely.

It reminded Sylas of chess, though even that comparison was somewhat lacking. At least a chessboard stayed still.

Here, the pieces changed function while moving, the board expanded beneath them, and even a discarded move could return several exchanges later if enough time had been folded around it.

A golden formation slowed the space around Sylas, so he folded another Rune through it and redirected the effect toward a group of failed Madness Candidates charging from the side. They nearly froze in place, only for Caelum to accelerate the same region a moment later and send them crashing together hard enough that several bodies tore apart.

Neither of them cared. The dead were only more variables.

One Madness Disciple crossed another golden Rune and aged several thousand years before its second foot touched the ground, flesh shrinking against bone until the body collapsed into dust. Another became trapped in one of Sylas' loops and repeated the same movement so many times that its own Aether circulation tore itself apart.

Behind Sylas, Fanelei and Cheri had long since stopped trying to follow.

He had sealed them inside a stable pocket almost absentmindedly, while Caelum had done the same for the two remaining Silvers. Neither group dared to move beyond the boundaries, which was sensible enough considering even Sylas had to keep adjusting his understanding of what Caelum was doing.

The battlefield spread outward.

Kilometers became hundreds, then thousands, and every increase forced them to account for more bodies, more loose Aether, more existing Runes, more changing terrain and more overlapping sections of time.

That was when Sylas began to lose interest.

Caelum was good. At their Tier, he was probably the best Rune Master Sylas had ever fought.

His Runes wasted almost nothing, his timing was excellent, and even his mistakes tended to be deliberate. Twice Sylas saw openings that would have ended almost anyone else, only to realize Caelum had left them there intentionally and was already waiting for the response.

But after enough exchanges, the same strength started irritating Sylas.

Caelum was too clean. Too ordered.

Every sequence began broad, layered itself through misdirection, then narrowed toward the most efficient resolution. He changed details constantly, but the structure underneath never changed.

Once Sylas saw that, the rest became tedious.

He didn't like solving the same problem twice. So he stopped playing at Caelum's pace.

The number of emerald Runes multiplied almost instantly.

Instead of allowing one exchange to finish before beginning the next, Sylas changed parts of the battlefield while Caelum was still resolving earlier ones. He folded space into temporal distortions, altered Runes halfway through activation, then introduced new flows of Will into regions Caelum had already stabilized.

Caelum kept pace, but Sylas increased it again.

If Caelum's method depended on controlling complexity through structure, Sylas wanted to know how much complexity it could survive before the structure broke.

A slowed region became accelerated before it finished forming, then Sylas folded it across another section of space and changed the meaning of the original Rune before Caelum's counter arrived. Three formations Caelum had already accounted for suddenly became pieces of an entirely different sequence.

For the first time, Sylas saw strain in the response.

Sylas pressed harder, his earlier indifference turning into a colder sort of focus. If Caelum wanted to insist on following the same pattern, Sylas would simply increase the number of variables until that pattern stopped being useful.

The battlefield expanded again.

Hundreds of thousands of Runes became hundreds of millions, and the people of Hell caught between them began dying in increasingly strange ways. Some aged into dust, others reversed through injuries only to be torn apart by new ones, while entire groups disappeared into overlapping stretches of time that no longer agreed on what moment they occupied.

Sylas barely noticed. His attention remained on Caelum.

The left mechanical eye was spinning fast enough now that its individual gears had become difficult to distinguish, yet the responses were becoming more constrained with every exchange.

Predictable. That was the one word to describe it.

Sylas felt the last of his interest draining away.

Then Caelum's Will changed and every golden Rune on the battlefield stabilized at once.

Sylas paused.

Not because the pressure had suddenly become dangerous, but because the flaw he had been exploiting had disappeared so completely that it couldn't have come from Time alone.

The scattered formations snapped into position, each one finding a place within something larger. Chaos didn't vanish, but it was forced into a structure that accounted for it before it could spread.

Sylas' attention sharpened again, a single word roaring in his mind...

Order.

Caelum opened his second eye.

Another set of watch-like mechanisms appeared within it, but these gears moved differently from the first. They weren't measuring passing moments. Instead, they were arranging them.

Time in one eye.

Order in the other.

Caelum's Will expanded across the battlefield, and the unstable network Sylas had spent the last several minutes tearing apart became stronger than it had been at the beginning.

It was suddenly like all of the effort he had put into destabilizing Caelum's formation had just been one elaborate trap to forge a distortion and control of time so impossibly large there didn't seem to be room to escape.

Time and Order... what a fascinating path combination.

Sylas' interest suddenly reignited like a blazing torch in the night.