Genetic Ascension

Chapter 2454: Sylas’ Answer. (1)

Sylas continued upward until the sky stopped allowing him to rise, not with anything his hands could touch, but through an invisible curvature of Will that turned the last stretch above his head into an impossible distance.

His emerald crystal wings drove against it once, then again, and each attempt only made the pressure more obvious until Sylas could finally feel the shape of the thing holding him beneath it: a vast dome stretched from horizon to horizon, sealed over the world as though the tribulation had decided there would be no escaping upward.

The lightning humanoid reached him before he could study it any further, its pale-gold fist already wrapped in enough condensed power to light the underside of the dome. Sylas’ Runeweaver Eyes caught the construction before impact, emerald flames tracing through three outer Foundations as his scythe came around, and the moment metal-like lightning met the black edge of the Grim Blade, fissures of gold ripped across the sky in every direction.

Some of those cracks raced along the ceiling for hundreds of kilometers before fading, while others stabbed downward through the cloud layer and struck the world far below.

Sylas barely had time to register the delayed blooms of light before the force of the collision bent his arm backward hard enough to fracture black bone beneath its thin emerald coating, yet Bloodburn caught the future healing he refused and converted it into enough strength for him to twist his wrists and throw the humanoid away.

He followed at once, driving himself upward through the storm of residual lightning as his Phoenix wings broke apart under the acceleration. Hundreds of emerald crystal feathers scattered behind him, but the replacement structure that grew from his back wasn’t quite the same as the one that had failed, its joints narrowing while the roots thickened around his shoulder blades and the internal lattice tightened into something better suited to surviving the force he was demanding of it.

The humanoid recovered without touching anything, stopped against empty sky, and rushed back in.

Sylas met it beneath the dome as both palms came forward and Judgment Will descended alongside the attack, carrying a pressure that pressed on more than flesh.

His Runeweaver Eyes peeled through the lightning first, Astral Stutter catching the way the Runes changed even while the strike formed, and the Death Seal spread along the edge of his scythe until the outer construction separated into two violent streams that tore past either side of him.

The lightning broke apart, but the Will didn’t.

It entered him without needing a physical carrier, forcing his chin downward while the strange sensation of accusation settled into his bones, as though the sky itself had examined him and found something unworthy.

Sylas straightened through it and watched the humanoid gather power again, but this time his attention shifted past the attack and toward the dome overhead.

Pale-gold threads descended from the ceiling and entered the humanoid’s shoulders.

The hairline fractures Sylas had carved into its smooth body filled in first, followed by the damaged Runes beneath its surface, but the change didn’t stop when the wounds disappeared. New supporting structures formed where Sylas had already proven the old ones weak, turning the response into something more than regeneration.

It was compensating for him.

Sylas intercepted the next fist at the wrist, cut through the first layer of Runes, then shifted his grip and let the humanoid’s momentum carry the strike past his ribs. His scythe followed through the opening and opened a line across its neck, deep enough that compressed lightning spilled into the atmosphere, spilling across the dome above them like flames across marble and glass.

The dome pulsed and even more power descended again.

By the time Sylas reversed the Grim Blade for another cut, the wound had vanished and the same angle no longer worked. A newly formed Foundation reinforced the humanoid’s neck, caught the Death Seal before it could bite deeply, and held long enough for a knee to slam beneath Sylas’ ribs and fold the remains of his torso around the impact.

Pain drove through his spine as the little flesh he had left tore against shattered bone, and the humanoid clasped both hands above its head before hammering him toward the earth. Sylas stopped the fall with one crystalline wing, though the structure exploded under the strain while the other twisted hard enough to crack along half its length.

As that wing rebuilt itself, the Phoenix became clearer to him.

He had once reduced rebirth to returning from destruction, but that was far too simple. The new wing didn’t recreate what had been lost. Its crystalline branches grew around the memory of the strike that destroyed the last one, changing their angles and weight distribution so that the same failure wouldn’t happen twice.

That was closer.

Not rebirth for the sake of returning. Change that used destruction as the root of evolution.

Sylas drove himself upward again and met the humanoid in the middle of its descent, their weapons and limbs colliding so quickly that the upper atmosphere became a field of branching light.

His scythe tore through one attack at its foundation, his shoulder caught another that still carried enough residual power to crack several ribs, and a third forced him into a spin that he converted into a sweeping cut across the humanoid’s waist.

Every success cost the humanoid something, but every success also taught the ceiling how to answer.

When Sylas learned to find a weakness faster, the weakness became smaller. When the Death Seal learned how to sever the connection between two Foundations, a third appeared between them. Even the cadence of the humanoid’s attacks began changing around Temporal Delay, refusing to form in the same sequence twice and forcing Sylas to continuously adjust.

Yet Sylas changed with it.

The problem was that the humanoid changed faster.

His gaze flicked upward between exchanges as another pulse travelled through the dome, and something about the response dragged the Fate Dragon back into focus.

A Dragon’s ceiling had never remained fixed. If a Serpentes grew strong enough to swallow a world, the myth simply became something that swallowed stars, and if a poison appeared capable of killing Gods, then a true Dragon’s poison had to reach higher still.

The ceiling moved because the myth demanded that it move.

The humanoid punched, and Sylas caught the strike along the haft of his scythe while lightning exploded around both of them. He slid backward across the underside of the dome, his crystal wings cutting green scars through the upper atmosphere, and images surfaced from somewhere deeper than conscious thought.

A Dragon coiled around a mountain until the mountain looked small, then around a world until even that stopped being worthy of attention. Claws closed around stars not as a miracle, not as a feat demanding praise, but as something natural enough that the stars themselves seemed reduced by being caught within them.

Then the image shifted toward countless beings looking upward.

Not worshipping, but acknowledging.

That difference settled into Sylas before he had time to name it.

Dominance wasn’t the act of proving superiority every time someone challenged you. A Dragon existed from the assumption that challenge itself came from below. The myth didn’t ask whether the Dragon could stand above everything else, only how much higher it had already climbed.

The emerald coating across Sylas’ bones thickened.

He met the humanoid’s next charge directly, Pride Seed resonating as Dragon Will rolled outward and his scythe cut through the first lightning sheath. His free hand closed around the humanoid’s forearm, black fingers wrapped in emerald scale stopping the limb for a single instant while the upper atmosphere shuddered from the collision.

Then the ceiling answered.

Judgment crashed downward hard enough that Sylas felt his Will itself deform beneath the weight.

His grip loosened.

The humanoid tore free and struck him across the face, breaking part of his jaw and sending fragments of emerald-coated bone spinning through the sky. Sylas corrected his flight before the impact could carry him far, but when Temporal Delay opened again, the world didn’t stretch as much as it had before.

The pressure had begun to reach deeper.

His Progenitor Flame still burned, yet every action of Will now had to force itself through the Judgment pressing against him first. Astral Stutter blurred around the edges whenever he tried to follow too many changes at once, and even the emerald flames filling his Runeweaver Eyes lost definition for brief moments before sharpening again.

The humanoid became stronger with the next descent from the dome.

Sylas improved as well.

His new Phoenix wing formed with denser branching supports than the last one, while the Dragon coating around his surviving arm smoothed into something harder and more complete. Every injury still taught him something, every failed defense still fed his understanding, and every change in the humanoid gave him another glimpse of what the ceiling itself represented.

It still wasn’t enough.

The gap continued opening.

A palm struck Sylas in the chest and pulverized what remained of his sternum, driving him against the invisible dome instead of away from it. Judgment Will pinned him there while lightning poured through his body, burning through his ribs and forcing the Bloodburn circulating inside him to reach once again for the path of healing he had sacrificed.

This time, it slipped.

Sylas felt the ability catch, fail to complete, and leave the promised strength absent.

Another wave of Judgment descended before he could examine why, compressing his Will until even the connection to the Ruby Ouroboros became difficult to feel. The emerald flames in his eyes dimmed as Temporal Delay contracted toward ordinary perception, while the Death Seal running through his scythe lost enough definition that the blade no longer cut the surrounding lightning as cleanly as before.

The humanoid raised one hand above him.

Sylas moved to answer and felt the dome press down with even greater force, not crushing his body so much as forcing every expression of his Will inward until each ability began suffocating alongside it. For the first time since the tribulation began, the danger no longer came from what the lightning could do to his flesh.

It came from the fact that the sky was beginning to make Sylas less capable of being Sylas. Weeding away what he was until nothing of it remained.

Ripping him out of the skies and forcing him to crawl across the ground on his belly.