Genetic Ascension

Chapter 2469 Bucket [Bonus]

[Bonus thanks to Chronotitan <3]

For several seconds, no one moved.

Isolde's face had gone completely white, her eyes fixed on the two halves of Cassarae's body as though refusing to accept what they were showing her. Cedric stood beside her with his mouth slightly open, one hand lifting without purpose before falling again because there was nothing within reach for him to grab, nothing he could pull his daughter-in-law back from.

The last time he had watched Sylas get hurt, his son had escaped two S-tiers with half his Will torn apart and still looked his parents in the eyes and insisted that he would be fine. Cedric had thought him reckless then, wondered how many times Sylas planned to nearly kill himself before accepting that there were people waiting for him at home, but as Cassarae's blood spread across the courtyard he understood the other side of that conversation in a way he wished he never had to.

This was what Sylas kept running toward before it could reach them.

Isolde made a broken sound beside him and Cedric reached for her, but she slipped past his arm and took a step toward Cassarae before stopping again. Her gaze had fallen to the hand that had been resting against Cassarae's belly only moments earlier, and whatever fragile denial remained on her face collapsed with it.

Xarvenya hadn't moved either.

Blood still stained her lips from the Heaven System's punishment, but she seemed to have forgotten the pain entirely. Her eyes remained fixed upon the ruined body before her, and the silence in her expression carried something far worse than shock. Grief, helplessness, guilt... she had been right here, with more power in her fingertips than anyone else on this world could fathom, and yet she had still failed.

...

Elsewhere in the city, Geraldene Hale looked up from the book open across her lap.

She didn't know what caught her attention, only that something had changed, causing every thought in her head to disappear at once. A tear rolled down her cheek before she even realized she was crying, and Paul frowned from the opposite side of the room as he crossed toward her and wiped it away with his thumb.

"What's wrong?"

Geraldene touched the moisture left along her cheek and stared at her fingertips for a long moment. "I don't know."

Paul waited. Thirty years of marriage had taught him when another question would help and when it wouldn't. Geraldene closed the book without marking the page, then rose from her chair with a discomfort sitting beneath her ribs that refused to leave no matter how many times she told herself there was nothing wrong.

"I haven't seen my baby girl in too long. Let's go visit today."

"We saw her two days ago."

Geraldene looked at him.

Paul held her gaze for perhaps half a second before reaching a hand toward her. "We can go now."

...

Several streets away, Olivia stopped in the middle of tightening the bindings around her wrist.

A frown pulled across her face as she looked toward the center of the city, though there had been no sound loud enough to reach her and nothing obvious had changed in the Aether around her. But even if there had been, there was so much commotion between everything Sylas got up to and Earth being attacked every other week that she might not have been able to tell the difference.

She'd usually have the same thought she always had... Sylas will handle it. But this time...

She pressed one hand against her chest, waiting for the strange discomfort to pass. Then her frown deepened when it didn't.

...

Back in the courtyard, blood continued spreading between the broken stones.

Xarvenya rose.

Crimson gathered around her body in slow rotations, thick enough that the air itself seemed stained by it, and the canines behind her lips lengthened as something ancient pushed closer to the surface. She didn't rush Tomoe or make any dramatic show of force, but the delicate press of her foot against the courtyard shattered stone beneath her heel and sent fractures racing outward through the ground.

Tomoe finally looked away from Cassarae.

Her head tilted as her blood-red eyes settled on Xarvenya, carrying remarkably little concern for the fact she had just butchered the woman standing beside her. If anything, interest began taking the place of indifference as the crimson pressure continued building, and the fingers around her sword shifted slightly in anticipation.

Xarvenya took another step, and this time the courtyard sank beneath it.

Cassarae barely noticed. There wasn't much of her left capable of noticing anything in the normal sense, and the separation between thought, Will, and body grew wider with every passing fraction of a second.

Her life had been severed cleanly, and there was no body left to fight for survival. The Wills she had spent years building were already beginning to loosen from one another as death stripped away the connections holding them together.

Yet the farther they drifted, the clearer something became.

The song.

Cassarae had spent years thinking it was gone, then spent even longer convincing herself that it had never mattered because the Executioner's Blade gave her something better. Now that the necklace was shattered, the Executioner's Blade was no longer in her hand, and even her own Will was beginning to disappear, there was finally nothing left drowning the sound out.

It was beautiful.

There was no demand hidden inside it, no hunger asking her to give more, and no path laid out ahead that required her to become whatever someone else had decided an Executioner should be. The song simply existed, carrying the same strange freedom she remembered from the first ordinary sword she had swung after the world changed.

Cassarae's fading awareness reached toward it, and deep within the City Lady's manor, something answered.

A neglected blade rested inside a bucket with several pieces of old equipment that had long since stopped being useful. Its steel had none of the impossible presence of the Executioner's Blade, and nothing about the weapon would have made anyone looking through the room twice stop on it for longer than a second.

The sword trembled.

Then again.

The bucket began rattling against the floor as the sword struck its sides harder with every movement, metal clanging against metal until several servants elsewhere in the manor stopped what they were doing and looked toward the sound. Before any of them could investigate, a clear note rang through the building and every loose weapon nearby fell silent.

The bucket shattered.

Steel fragments and broken pieces of equipment exploded across the room as the sword shot upward, punching through the ceiling without slowing. Formation Runes flashed to life across the manor and collapsed the instant the blade touched them, one defensive layer after another splitting apart as the sword carved a straight path toward the open sky.

The howl that followed swept across Casstle Main.

It wasn't loud in the ordinary sense, yet every blade in the city vibrated when it passed, from cheap knives in kitchens to weapons resting in the hands of soldiers. The sound climbed higher as the sword tore free of the manor and accelerated toward the courtyard, carrying a note that Cassarae could hear even as the last pieces of her Will continued to disperse.

Tomoe's head snapped away from Xarvenya.

Her blood-red eyes widened.

For the first time since arriving on Earth, the hand holding her sword began to shake so violently that the blade rattled between her fingers, and a bloodthirst unlike anything she had shown before spilled into her expression.

Thin spindles of Sword Aether and Will began forming around her one after another, stretching into endless strands until the air surrounding Tomoe looked woven from blades.