Genetic Ascension

Chapter 1889: Before my Pride (1)

Sylas vanished, and the Monkey King’s staff passed through open space, or so it seemed. He had only just appeared in a distant space when the length of the staff naturally extended. But rather than experiencing every moment, it was like the staff had always been that long, appearing before Sylas with a speed that broke logic and reasoning.

A broken logic and reasoning that Sylas instantly understood with a glance.

His head tilted back, and the staff missed.

“Oh?”

The Monkey King pulled his staff back, his head tilting to one side. Most people wouldn’t understand how you could dodge something that took no time at all to happen. But for Sylas, it was practically a matter of child’s play, as though he had done it all his life.

The staff slammed its butt against the ground, a reverberating impact flowing out in waves and punishing cadences. Despite having protected his life once already, Sylas was practically blown off his feet by this casual movement alone, his body swaying from side to side in an uneasy imbalance.

The Monkey King’s head tilted to the other side. Part of him expected Sylas to keep standing there, to keep letting him observe him. After all, Sylas was heavily injured. For whatever reason, he had chosen to enter this Dungeon despite his state, but that probably meant that he was just desperate.

In that case, taking every waking moment to rest when he could only made logical sense.

It was too bad that Sylas was anything but logical.

Logic also dictated that he would keep his Summons out to give himself the best chance.

He cared not.

Not in the slightest.

As the Monkey King was tilting his head for the second time, it was Sylas who acted first. It was Sylas who closed the distance. It was Sylas who descended in a mighty tempest of rotating and forming Runes, each one stamping itself into being one after another and then being twisted and shrunk down in flickering green tesseracts until they were little more than points of light in the skies.

Sylas looked as though he was surrounded by the twinkling skies, shining brighter than even the sun that hung high above.

Every calculation that Sylas made when acting was the worst-case scenario. He always lowballed himself. The fact he still assumed that he would come out on top had little to do with overestimating himself and everything to do with the fact that even when he underestimated himself on purpose… His enemies were still not enough.

There was one thing that Sylas had purposely not added to his calculations when he entered the Dungeon, and that was the possibility that upon entering the Dungeon, he would enter a world perfectly formed to his Monkey King Spirit, a reflection of his bloodline, a kernel of reality that reflected himself in the most perfect of ways… A world his Glassvolt Throne would instantly comprehend.

Of course, this was useless on the surface. Glassvolt Throne was meant to improve his Glassvolt Aether beyond his normal limits. But that was by using the world around him as a proxy.

If Sylas was in an E-tier world, then the Glassvolt he could summon was—at best-E-tier as well. The effects would be marginal.

But there was another benefit that Sylas had seen during his battle at the Sanctum’s gathering…

His Will had simply felt… endless back then. He just hadn’t focused on it because he had been too focused on his life.

But when he did think about it, the answer was obvious to him.

When he perfectly understood a world, he would no longer be suppressed by it. And when he was no longer suppressed by it… His Infinite Will was no longer just an empty title, a vapid moniker slapped onto him that only showed its true strength from time to time.

No. It became Infinite in the truest sense.

And all at once, Sylas’ dwindling Will burned like an infinite, inextinguishable flame.

He punched out and met the swinging staff of the Monkey King. Laughter filled the air as their attacks collided, the world whining and bending.

If one looked closely, their strikes didn’t even touch one another, the air compressed between them so finely and controlled that it couldn’t even escape to the sides.

“What a surprise! What a surprise! A True Rune Creator!”

The Monkey King’s laughter pealed across the skies. He licked at his lips, saliva dripping from his canines as though his stomach was grumbling and his appetite was calling.

He had originally come just to smack down an annoying ant, but this was different. Now he was intrigued; now he could feel his blood boiling for the first time in a very long while.

BANG. BANG. BANG.

It sounded like firecrackers were going off between their attacks, the space compressing so much it threatened to collapse into a black hole.

“But you have only reached this level at the F-tier. And right now, we stand at the E-tier. If you want to defeat me with this alone, it is not enough.

“If you were an E-tier True Rune Creator, I might give you a 40% chance of winning.

“But at the F-tier?”

The Monkey King’s laughter rolled like tsunamis and boomed like thunder.

“Not a chance. Not a single chance.”

Sylas’ Runes cracked, their compression collapsing and destabilizing.

“Before my Pride, where do you have to stand?”

BOOM.

Sylas’ arm was blown back and his body was thrown entirely off balance. He dispersed the impact through his Runes and took just a single step back, but the Monkey King seemed to anticipate this, slamming his staff into the ground and swinging around it like a pole.

He kicked Sylas across the jaw, landing, picking up his staff, and then swinging it at his knee in one fluid motion.

Sylas’ leg buckled and more Runes collapsed, but the Monkey King’s relentless barrage was endlessly chaotic and furiously consistent.

A punch, a kick, a staff, a knee, an elbow, a barrage of combinations that left Sylas at the center of one explosion after another, craters appearing in his body.