Genetic Ascension

Chapter 2467 Too Late

The Crimson Eye began to form before Tomoe's sword had finished its descent, and Xarvenya felt its attention settle onto her before the first trace of red appeared in the sky.

The Sword Will pouring from Tomoe's blade had already ripped through the layers surrounding Earth, opening a path through protections that had obscured far more than simple attacks from outside, and Xarvenya had chosen the worst possible instant to move again.

The moment she reached for her Aether to protect Cassarae, the Heaven System finally saw her.

Every restraint meant for Demons descended at once, locking down Xarvenya's Will while her Aether reversed through pathways that had always been under her perfect control. How long had she trained? How long had her Aether been under her every command? And yet that all seemed to matter so very little now.

She coughed up a mouthful of blood and caught herself against the table, her fingers digging into the stone as another current twisted back through her chest and threatened to tear apart everything it passed.

There was no warning or measure to the punishment. Earth being Sylas' world had never changed that rule, nor had their marriage somehow granted Xarvenya permission to exist beneath these skies.

Her husband's authority over Earth and the Milky Way simply made this one of the few places where the System could fail to notice her, with the world itself obscuring enough of her existence that she could move without constantly drawing the Heavens down upon herself.

When she shattered Tomoe's first strike, she had acted only to defend someone standing beside her, and the protections surrounding Earth had been intact enough to keep the System from properly sensing what she had done.

Tomoe's next attack had cut through those protections before Xarvenya could rely on them again, and her attempt to interfere exposed her at the exact moment the opening appeared.

Crimson light seeped through the clouds above the courtyard while Xarvenya forced her Aether back under control, but every correction only caused another current to rebel as the System continued suppressing the Demon it had finally detected.

Then something shifted beneath within Xarvenya.

The Will inside her belly was still weak enough that she usually had to pay attention to notice it, but there was nothing faint about the reaction this time. A pulse spread from the life growing within her and moved through Xarvenya's body without fighting the restraints around its mother, slipping between them before sinking into Earth itself. High above the planet, the rivers surrounding the world changed course.

Those waters were older than Sylas' control over them, and the formation they composed was older than Humanity itself. The First Race had built its foundations into Earth's oceans because the seas had endured outside corruption better than the land, hiding some of their most important legacies and defenses inside currents that looked natural to every civilization that rose afterward.

Sylas had eventually solved enough of their work to manipulate those currents himself, using Nosphaleen as a proxy to realign them before descending into the depths where the Great Ape Lineage waited.

His relationship with those waters had gone far beyond understanding someone else's formation. Earth's oceans had also become part of his own path.

It was there that Sylas first crossed the threshold into Fathomless Rune Creation, sitting within currents shaped by the First Race while reaching a level of Rune Mastery he didn't yet possess the knowledge to properly name or use.

Much later, while creating the Whale King Armor, he finally understood what that breakthrough had been and learned how to wield Fathomless Rune Creation in earnest, but its beginning had still been here.

That history alone made the waters closer to Sylas than almost any material on Earth, but he had never been the sort of person to leave his world protected by something that might still answer to another hand.

When he raised the oceans and turned their hidden currents into the great rings surrounding Earth, he folded the old formation into his authority as Progenitor and rewrote its place within the world until it answered to him and him alone.

The First Race could return and recognize every piece of their work, but recognition would no longer give them control over what Sylas had claimed.

The formation listened to only Sylas, and now something carrying his blood had reached into it.

White gold and black gold surged through the rings as the child's Will passed into the formation, causing rivers large enough to be seen from space to brighten over the planet.

They had once been ordinary blue ocean water before Earth's rise transformed them into churning currents of opposing colors that wrapped around the world, but their growth hadn't ended with that change. The waters had continued experiencing everything that happened beneath the ceiling they formed.

They had been there when Sylas faced his tribulation, surrounding Earth while Judgment descended and the ceiling of the universe attempted to impose itself over him.

Sylas broke free of that ceiling instead, and the formation remained after the boundary above it failed, carrying the experience of what had happened into the meaning already woven through its Runes.

Its purpose had always been protection, but after Sylas surpassed what should have been the highest limit above his world, the waters became the next thing left standing over Earth.

The old formation had become the ceiling beyond the ceiling.

The Crimson Eye pushed farther into existence while Xarvenya remained locked beneath its attention, but the water formation responded before the pupil could finish taking shape.

Rings that normally flowed around Earth in vast intersecting paths tilted away from their established courses, white-gold currents passing above black-gold ones as the entire structure shifted by fractions that looked insignificant from the surface and changed everything within the formation itself.

Nothing struck the Eye because the waters had no need to fight the Heaven System directly.

They simply refused to make room for it.

Crimson light gathered beyond Earth's atmosphere and searched for a path inward, only for another layer of currents to close over the route before the Eye could establish itself.

Its outline flickered elsewhere as the System attempted to look through from another angle, but the rings moved with it, carrying Sylas' authority and the memory of a ceiling he had already broken. Every direction the Eye attempted to take ended beneath another current until there was nowhere left around Earth for it to properly appear.

The crimson light vanished, and the pressure crushing Xarvenya disappeared with it as her Aether rushed back toward its natural pathways. She stared upward for only an instant, blood still warm against her lips, while the faint Will inside her belly settled once more after touching something far beyond what it should have been capable of commanding.

Their child hadn't controlled the formation or fought the Heaven System. It had reached for protection, and Weaving Madness' gift had allowed it to display the grace granted to a Progenitor's child.

Then Xarvenya remembered why she had moved in the first place.

Her gaze snapped back toward the courtyard as she forced her Aether into order, only to find that the interruption had already lasted too long. Tomoe had never stopped moving while the Eye formed and disappeared above them, and with her sword already descending, even the fraction of a moment Xarvenya had lost was enough.

Unfortunately, the sort of protection Cassarae needed now wasn't something the formation could provide. There was a reason the formation hadn't managed to stop Tomoe in the first place.

She hadn't needed to kill Xarvenya. She only needed to delay her just enough.

Cassarae raised the Executioner's Blade as grey-black Sword Will screamed through the space between them, and Xarvenya gathered herself to move despite already knowing the distance had closed too far.

Tomoe's strike landed.