Genetic Ascension

Chapter 2429 Perfect

Sylas didn't move immediately.

Caelum remained on one knee with blood running from the corner of his mouth, but the reaction Sylas expected never came. Instead, a grin spread across the man's face, bloody teeth showing before his head snapped up and laughter rolled across Hell.

The two Silvers behind him looked more disturbed by that than they had when their companion died.

They had watched Caelum fight often enough to understand what his Rune Mastery represented, and Sylas could see from their expressions that seeing him lose so thoroughly had shaken something fundamental in them. Even now, their gazes kept shifting between Caelum and Sylas as though they were trying to fit what had just happened into an understanding that no longer worked.

Sylas could guess why.

A numbered Legacy evaluation wasn't simply another step beyond Gold. From what Alex had explained long ago, only five people in Legacy's recorded history had ever received one, placing such an assessment beyond Legendary. Even when it came to Sacreds, a rank that most of Legacy didnt' even know existed amongst their number, a rank with so few members that even Legendaries couldn't say with 100% certainty if they had ever met one, were beneath Sylas' evaluation.

Even so, the two Silvers hadn't objected when Caelum decided to kill him.

That made sense.

Rankings like these measured potential more than present strength. Saying Sylas had received a Priority Five evaluation was effectively saying that, given the correct environment and enough time, his ceiling exceeded theirs.

But Sylas hadn't been given either of those things.

He had been born on the Mortal Plane and evaluated there by someone of the same limited world. Even if Legacy trusted its evaluators, the Silvers had probably dismissed the result as something that couldn't possibly account for the difference between someone raised beneath Mortal restrictions and a God who had spent his life surrounded by resources Sylas hadn't known existed.

Their mistake hadn't been unreasonable, but it had still been a mistake.

Caelum pushed himself upright while his laughter continued, then spread both arms as golden Runes began flooding out from his body. They didn't form in the controlled layers he had used before, and Sylas could immediately see the chaos still running through them as his earlier contradiction continued attacking Caelum's Path.

"You are perfect."

Sylas' gaze remained fixed on the changing Runes.

"I've been looking for a way to fix this weakness for years." Caelum wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of one hand, though the grin remained. "I refused to enter the B-tier until I found it, and then you walked straight to me."

The chaos inside his Will was getting worse.

It warped against his Charisma and disrupted the stability of his Spark Seed, introducing small inconsistencies into almost every Rune he produced. Under ordinary circumstances, Sylas would have expected Caelum to suppress those flaws immediately, but he didn't.

That made Sylas' attention sharpen.

Caelum stopped resisting.

The chaos spread through his golden formations, and for several moments their structures became even worse than before. Foundations shifted out of place, temporal sequences contradicted one another, and several Runes collapsed before they could even fully form.

Then Caelum chose one of the failures and used it.

A temporal distortion that should have ruined the Rune instead became the center of another formation, with three additional structures built around its instability. Caelum didn't repair the flaw or force it into Order. He simply accepted that the flaw existed and found something useful it could do.

Sylas understood immediately. To find a use for Chaos was still a form of Order.

Caelum had defined his Path too narrowly before, treating Order as something that required contradiction to be corrected. But Order didn't require every piece to be identical or stable, only that every piece had a purpose within the whole.

The distinction was simple, and it was also worth more than enough.

Golden Runes surged forward.

Sylas raised a hand as his own emerald Strokes spread across the air, and for the first time since he had exposed the flaw in Caelum's Path, he was forced to respond rather than simply observe. Caelum layered one chaotic temporal pocket over another, then used the instability between them to hide an attack that appeared in three different moments at once.

Sylas unraveled one, redirected another, then rewrote the third before it completed.

But then Caelum adjusted again.

Fast.

Sylas could feel the difference with every exchange.

The man wasn't simply recovering from the weakness Sylas had exposed. He was learning from it in real time. Every new chaotic pocket became another example, another piece of information that refined what Order could mean to him.

That was more interesting.

The dome of control surrounding them began shifting violently between emerald and gold.

One moment Sylas' Runes dominated several thousand kilometers, only for Caelum to seize half of that space with a new layered structure. Sylas answered by collapsing several formations into one another, and emerald spread back across the battlefield before gold surged again.

The failed Madness Disciples suffered most. Some were trapped between contradictory moments and torn apart when their bodies couldn't decide which state to occupy. Others were caught inside Caelum's growing formations and forced into precise positions that turned them into unwilling pieces of larger temporal attacks.

Yet they barely spared them attention.

Caelum's Rune Mastery was changing too quickly.

The man's laughter returned as another wave of gold erupted from his body, and Sylas felt something in the surrounding Hell shift with it. The Runes no longer drew on the same principles they had only moments ago.

Caelum had crossed a threshold.

B-tier Heaven Rune Creation.

His laughter grew louder as he lifted one finger and tapped the air.

The chaos across the battlefield twitched.

Then every contradiction, every unstable Rune, every broken temporal sequence suddenly divided into clean panels. They rotated, shifted, and locked together like pieces of an impossibly large puzzle until the entire sea of chaos became perfect Order.

Sylas' eyes narrowed.