Genetic Ascension

Chapter 2471 Rusted Sword

Tomoe's gaze moved over the Guardian Angel Set with open disgust, lingering on the rose-gold lines running through the armor before returning to Cassarae's face. "A sword cultivator doesn't need something like that."

Cassarae looked down at herself, then back up. "This armor is so my ass and tits aren't hanging out, a whore like you wouldn't understand."

Tomoe's grin widened.

Her empty sword hand lifted by instinct before stopping halfway, and for an instant both women seemed to remember the same thing: Tomoe had snapped her own weapon in half and thrown it away. The realization didn't seem to bother her much, while Cassarae's attention had already dropped to the rusted sword resting in her own palm.

It should have felt terrible compared to the Executioner's Blade. The balance was worse, the metal carried none of the overwhelming reinforcement she had grown accustomed to, and there wasn't a single System prompt appearing in front of her eyes to tell her how much stronger it made her.

Yet, Cassarae had never held anything that felt better.

The System's weight was gone from her shoulders in a way she hadn't realized was possible until now, and with it went years of pressure she had mistaken for guidance. She felt light enough to step into the sky without telekinesis, close enough to the world that every current of Aether brushed against her awareness, yet somehow separate from all of it at the same time.

Had Sylas been there to hear the thought, he would have recognized the similarity immediately.

Cassarae wouldn't have called it the Void, but she also didn't need a name for it.

Suppressed sword insights began surfacing one after another, not as some sudden inheritance or knowledge placed inside her head, but as things she had always known and been prevented from reaching. Years of habits broke apart under that realization, old instincts returning with enough force that Cassarae's grip shifted several times before finally settling into something simpler than anything she had used in years.

Behind them, the aura leaking from the two broken halves of Tomoe's sword crept across the courtyard toward the abandoned Executioner's Blade. Grey-black Will met the hungry pressure still clinging to Cassarae's former weapon, the two beginning to seep into one another while neither woman spared them so much as a glance.

Cassarae twisted her wrist and Earth answered.

The rivers surrounding the planet thrummed, and the response traveled downward through the atmosphere, the crust, the mountains, and the oceans until Cassarae felt the entire world sitting beneath her sword.

She hadn't asked for it, but the formation Sylas had built around Earth recognized her through the same authority that had allowed it to protect her child, and now every part of that structure seemed willing to become the extension of a strike.

Her sword moved and a river of blue-white sword light tore across the courtyard.

Tomoe's fingers came together.

She pinched the leading edge between two fingertips and twisted, Formless Will spreading through the attack in threads too fine for Cassarae to follow. The river split around her body, cutting two trenches through the city behind her, but the effort drove Tomoe backward hard enough for her heels to carve through stone.

Her grin only grew.

Tomoe stepped forward and flicked one finger.

Sword Will appeared beside Cassarae's neck without crossing the distance between them, so thin that she only noticed it because the rusted sword moved before conscious thought caught up. She blocked late, the strand slicing through the edge of her armor and opening a shallow line beneath it, but the moment Cassarae swung back the mountains beneath Sky Roaming seemed to swing with her.

Tomoe crossed both arms, blocking with her body.

She flew through the air with a harsh whistle before twisting in midair, her hair exploding outward as hundreds of strands sharpened into blades. Each one invaded the Aether around Cassarae from a different angle, converting the atmosphere itself into Sword Will until she stood inside a sphere of cuts that seemed to have no beginning or end.

Cassarae didn't understand half of what Tomoe was doing, so she cut all of it.

Her sword came down in a crude vertical line, and Earth supplied the rest. Rivers circling the planet flashed, buried formations beneath continents resonated, and the pressure gathering behind Cassarae's blade became so overwhelming that Tomoe's delicate network of Sword Will collapsed under the difference in sheer weight.

The backlash opened cuts across Tomoe's arms and cheek, then Cassarae lunged after her.

There was none of Tomoe's elegance in the movement, no disappearing blade or attack that appeared from impossible angles. Cassarae stepped, swung, recovered, and swung again, but every simple motion carried the support of a planet that had decided her sword was its sword.

Tomoe slipped the first slash by a finger's width and guided the second away with the back of her hand. The third forced her to bend almost flat beneath it while her hair stabbed into the ground, using hundreds of blade-like strands to pull her body sideways before the strike could split her through the waist.

Cassarae chased without hesitation.

Tomoe's palm struck the flat of her blade and sent Sword Will racing backward toward her wrist, but Cassarae's Will surged through the rusted metal and shattered the invasion before it reached her arm. She drove her shoulder forward at the same time, and the collision launched Tomoe through another mountain hard enough to fold the structure inward.

Dust hadn't settled before Tomoe came back out.

Blood ran from one side of her mouth, several fingers sat at awkward angles, and a long wound crossed her ribs where Cassarae's last attack had reached her despite the block. Tomoe looked more delighted than injured, her hands opening as the air around each finger sharpened into invisible extensions.

Tomoe's control was better in every conceivable way.

Her palms redirected forces rather than meeting them, her fingers slipped into tiny weaknesses between Cassarae's attacks, and her hair attacked from angles no ordinary swordswoman could have defended. Cassarae lost pieces of armor, suffered cuts along her shoulders and thighs, and came close to losing an eye when a strand of hair slid through her guard.

But Tomoe couldn't overcome the difference in power.

Every hill, trench, river, and buried Rune across Earth fed into Cassarae's movements, and the more aware she became of that support, the harder it became for Tomoe to hide from it. Formless Will could blur boundaries and slip into foreign Aether, but Cassarae was standing inside a world where the Aether itself had already chosen a side.

Their next clash ripped the courtyard apart.

Cassarae's rusted blade met the edge Tomoe formed along her palm, blue-white Sword Will colliding with grey-black strands until the pressure between them condensed and burst. Both women were thrown backward, Cassarae sliding several dozen meters before stopping while Tomoe smashed through the remains of a mountain and landed on one knee.

For the first time, she took a moment to breathe.

Cuts covered her body now, one arm hanging lower than the other while blood ran freely from her side. Without her sword, and with Cassarae consciously drawing on the same planetary formations Tomoe had slipped past to enter Earth, there was nowhere left for her presence to disappear.

Cassarae raised the rusted sword again.

Tomoe wiped blood from her mouth and smiled, a wild, manic grin painting her face red.