Genetic Ascension

Chapter 2470 Coward

The sword's howl reached Cassarae before anything else did.

Her body no longer gave her much to work with, split so completely that the ordinary processes of life had already begun giving up, but the Sword Will leaking from what remained of her still responded to that sound.

It spread through the blood soaking the courtyard, through the severed flesh and exposed bone, until Cassarae could no longer tell where her Will ended and the pieces of her body began.

The distinction suddenly felt unnecessary.

Tomoe had done something similar during her battle with Sylas, turning the Aether around herself into Sword Will until injury became little more than another flaw that could be sharpened away. Cassarae couldn't copy Tomoe's Formless Will, but with death already pulling apart the boundaries of her existence and that old song ringing louder than it ever had before, she finally understood the part that mattered.

If her Sword Will was hers, then whatever accepted that Will could become part of her too.

The blood closest to her trembled first, losing its ordinary shape as thin currents of Sword Aether formed through it. Broken stone followed, then the Aether hanging above the courtyard, all of it dragged into the same resonance until countless narrow streams began converging on Cassarae's remains.

Flesh started to pull together. Bone moved next, fractured sections drawing toward one another as Sword Aether filled the spaces between them and forced chaos to structure and structure to form.

The process should have been impossible, but Cassarae had very little patience left for impossible things when she had already spent years watching her husband treat the impossible as another step to climb, another challenge to conquer.

But then the reconstruction suddenly stopped. Something foreign stirred inside of her.

Cassarae felt it immediately now that her own Will had become the framework holding everything together. A grey-black presence threaded through the cut Tomoe had left behind.

It wasn't some technique Tomoe had planted there on purpose, nor an attempt to finish her off after the fact; the woman's Sword Will had simply been so complete that the slash carried part of it into everything it severed.

Cassarae pushed against it.

The grey-black Will pushed back without thought, maintaining the meaning of the cut because that was what Tomoe's sword had told it to do. Wherever Cassarae attempted to reconnect herself, the wound opened again, Sword Aether gathering into new flesh only for that foreign edge to remind the world that she had already been split apart.

Across the courtyard, Tomoe watched the struggle with widening eyes.

The broken body itself didn't interest her nearly as much as what was rising through it, because beneath the uneven reconstruction and clumsy first attempts was something she had almost forgotten she could still encounter.

A True Sword Will was forming, one that belonged completely to the person wielding it rather than an inheritance repeated from some dead master or a path polished smooth by generations of people too afraid to step elsewhere.

Tomoe's fingers tightened around her Executioner's Blade, and the weapon answered with hunger.

Its Will surged down her arm with a sharp demand that needed no words, pressing her to attack now, before Cassarae completed whatever was happening. It wanted the weakened Sword Will crushed while it was still forming, wanted the other blade silenced before its song could settle into something that might threaten it later.

Tomoe's expression darkened.

She had spent most of her life searching for swords worth drawing her own against, and the few people she found had either died beneath her blade or fallen so far behind that remembering them became pointless. Now a True Sword Will was struggling to rise in front of her, and the weapon in her hand wanted her to murder it before she even learned what it could become.

"Coward."

The Executioner's Blade trembled.

Tomoe stared down at it, disgust replacing the excitement that had been building across her face. "You want me to stop her now?"

The blade answered with another violent pulse of bloodlust, and whatever small patience Tomoe possessed disappeared with it. Her hands shifted along the weapon, one gripping the hilt while the other closed around the flat of the blade, then she bent both arms in opposite directions.

Metal screamed.

The Executioner's Blade snapped in two.

Tomoe let both pieces fall without looking at them again, the broken weapon striking the ruined courtyard with two dull sounds that meant nothing to her. Her attention had already moved toward the ordinary sword racing through the sky, and when its keening cry spread across the courtyard again, the anger left her face.

"What a good sword."

The weapon plunged downward and stopped beside Cassarae.

Its edge vibrated while the song passed straight through what remained of her Will, and for the first time Cassarae understood why she had missed that feeling for so long.

The sword wasn't telling her what to become or asking her to give it anything. It was simply answering her, the same way it had years ago before she had started chasing power above all else.

Her body pulled together another few inches, but Tomoe's Sword Will tore it apart again.

Cassarae would have screamed if her lungs weren't split apart, but the fury that came instead worked better than air. She could feel her child now, faint but present within the reconstruction, and every trace of patience she had somehow found while facing death disappeared under the realization of how close Tomoe had come to ending a life that hadn't even had the chance to begin.

The grey-black Will pushed against her one more time.

Cassarae pushed back harder.

She stopped treating it like an obstacle she needed to carefully work around and flooded every unfinished piece of herself with Sword Will at once, converting blood, Aether, broken stone, and even the foreign pressure around the wound into more Sword Aether. Tomoe's Will resisted, but Cassarae no longer cared what it knew.

"Fuck off."

The words barely existed as sound, but her Will carried them well enough.

Blue Sword Will erupted across the courtyard and the grey-black threads were expelled from her body in one violent release, slicing trenches through the surrounding stone before dispersing into the air. The two halves of Cassarae's body folded toward one another immediately afterward, muscle reconnecting over reforged bone while skin sealed behind it and color slowly returned to a face that had already gone pale with death.

The Guardian Angel World Set answered the moment there was enough of her to recognize.

Armor spread across Cassarae's body from the inside outward, fitting itself over newly formed flesh while rose-gold patterns lit along its surface. The helmet remained open long enough for her to draw a full breath, and when she finally stood, her legs shook once before Sword Will passed through them and forced the weakness away.

Tomoe smiled.

Cassarae reached out and the old sword slapped into her palm, its song settling into her grip so naturally that she wondered how she had ever convinced herself she couldn't hear it.

Her face remained pale, blood still covered half the courtyard, and the woman across from her had strength Cassarae couldn't begin to properly measure, but none of those facts managed to cool what was boiling inside her now.

"You almost killed my baby, you fucking bitch."

Cassarae raised her sword, every trace of the acceptance she had felt moments before burned away beneath a fury she had spent far too long burying.

"I'm going to tear your head off your shoulders."