Genetic Ascension

Chapter 2431 · Collector

Caelum's Order shattered, but Sylas didn't immediately press forward. The golden formations collapsed in layers around them as their relationships came apart, yet Caelum remained standing with blood at the corner of his mouth and both mechanical eyes slipping in and out of rhythm.

What interested Sylas was that none of the exhilaration had left him. If anything, Caelum seemed even more invested now than he had been before his breakthrough. He had spent years searching for a weakness in his Path, and Sylas had not only exposed one, but had then broken apart the answer Caelum formed almost immediately afterward.

For someone who valued his own evolution above most things, humiliation and opportunity could easily become the same thing. Caelum had finally found something capable of forcing him forward, and from the way his gaze remained fixed on Sylas, it was obvious he hadn't reached the point where fear outweighed ambition.

His hand moved toward his waist.

Sylas' attention shifted with it as Caelum removed a narrow black cylinder no longer than his forearm, several metallic rings fitted around its surface. There were Runes carved into it, but the moment Sylas' Runeweaver Eyes traced beneath the outer shell, his expression became more serious.

The treasure wasn't built from Runes and Aether alone.

Thin metallic pathways ran through the interior in patterns that reminded Sylas far more of circuitry than Rune Foundations, while several internal mechanisms moved without any visible Aether interaction at all. Current passed through some of those channels in a form that behaved like electricity, yet other sections linked directly into Rune structures as though the two systems had been designed together from the beginning.

Technology, but not technology imitating the system, nor some crude attempt to strap machinery onto a treasure. Whoever had built this understood both.

Sylas had seen enough of Legacy to know that its relationship with technology ran deeper than most organizations. Germaine had practically turned portions of her body into machinery, while even the Silvers behind Caelum carried replacements and augmentations that looked less like prosthetics and more like pieces of whatever evolutionary Paths they had chosen.

Caelum twisted one of the outer rings, and the cylinder unfolded as space compressed around its frame. Black panels separated from one another while the interior expanded far beyond what its physical size should have allowed, and Sylas prepared several layers of Spacetime Runes before the first body dropped out, but then another followed. Then another.

Five Fallen Madness Disciples struck the obsidian ground in total, each twisted by Hell in a different way and carrying the same fractured look Sylas had already seen countless times since arriving. The similarity ended there, though, because their Wills were so dense that his Greed Seed stirred before any of them had even managed to stand.

Sylas' gaze sharpened. These weren't ordinary failures.

Every one of them was close to forming something that felt disturbingly similar to a Virtue of Greed, which made almost no sense when the entire reason they had been dragged into Hell was that they had already failed their Madness Paths. If anything, their Wills should have been further from balance now than when they first arrived.

Caelum didn't give Sylas time to study them for long.

Golden mechanisms flooded back into the battlefield as he stepped into the center of the group, temporal formations expanding outward to cover all five Fallen Disciples. His newly reached B-tier Rune Mastery still gave him an enormous advantage in raw quality even after Sylas shattered his Order, forcing Sylas to answer each golden construction with several emerald layers of his own.

Sylas drew a single Stroke and split its meaning across six formations.

Caelum shifted two of the Fallen Disciples several seconds forward while leaving the others where they were, forcing Sylas to fold the relationship between their moments rather than attack them directly. The instant that fold formed, Caelum inserted another temporal mechanism into the gap and redirected the collapse away from the group.

Emerald Runes continued spreading as Sylas moved forward, their Strokes bending through Space and Time before taking whatever shape the exchange demanded. When several formations struck toward the nearest Fallen Disciple, Caelum rewound the moment before impact and replaced the empty space with a golden wall, only for Sylas to change the destination of the attack while Caelum changed when it would arrive.

Their earlier chess match resumed, but its purpose had changed.

Caelum now spent almost every exchange protecting the five Fallen Disciples, which told Sylas more about the black cylinder than anything Caelum could have said. These weren't reinforcements prepared specifically for him. They were samples Caelum had already collected during whatever mission originally brought the Legacy group into Hell.

The Fallen Disciples gradually recovered from their confusion and began releasing their Wills.

One dragged Aether toward itself without restraint, taking more even after its body had begun swelling from excess. Another seemed to steal fragments of pressure from everything stronger nearby, while a third fixed its gaze on Sylas with a Greed so direct that it barely cared about anything else on the battlefield.

It wanted his Seed.

The other two expressed Greed differently again, but Sylas stopped separating them in his mind after only a few breaths because something stranger had begun happening between them. Their Wills were somehow combining, forging themselves together within the air in odd pockets that melded with Caelum's formation in peculiar ways that didn't quite seem intentional.

At first, the overlap was so faint that even Sylas nearly dismissed it as the natural consequence of placing several similar Madness Paths beside one another. But then the Aether-devouring Will strengthened the one stealing pressure, that pressure fed the Disciple focused on Sylas' Seed, and a fourth fractured Will began growing more coherent as all three passed through it.

The pieces weren't competing with one another. Almost like they shared the same source, or more like they were recognizing that they came from the same source, they were slowly starting to combine and fuse into one.

Caelum's mechanical eyes shifted a moment later as he finally noticed the same thing, but by then the resonance had already deepened enough that even Hell began responding. Greed rolled outward in waves while the five Disciples became increasingly difficult to distinguish as separate experiments.

Sylas looked back toward the cylinder and understanding followed almost immediately. The treasure hadn't only been trapping them, it had also been keeping their Wills apart.

Whoever designed it had gone to extraordinary lengths to transport these Fallen Disciples without allowing their Greed to interact, which meant the current reaction wasn't an accident no one had considered. It was something they had specifically built safeguards to prevent.

Unfortunately for Caelum, he clearly hadn't known this before he summoned them in hopes of getting them to fight on his behalf. On the one hand, he succeeded in doing so. But on the other...

Those safeguards were gone now.

The five Wills layered again and a deep vibration rolled through Hell.

Far beyond the battlefield, the enormous doors holding Scurrying Madness groaned as something on the other side reacted to the resonance.

Caelum turned toward them. Sylas' attention, however, remained on the black cylinder, on the circuitry beneath its Runes, and on the fact someone had found a way to combine technology with Hell cleanly enough that even his Runeweaver Eyes had needed a moment to separate the two.

Then the doors began to move, slowly creaking open as the resonance of the five Wills grew and began to combine with the Will leaking out from it as well.