Chapter 2357: Wild Woman

Sylas entered the Beast Heaven without the slightest hesitation, walking forward as though the boundary between Heavens was little more than another road beneath his feet.

His expression remained indifferent, but his eyes carried something ancient and heavy now, their sensitivity toward Will having reached a level that made the surrounding Heaven feel like a structure as ready to be read as an open book.

Nosphaleen’s presence was faint, but Sylas knew her too intimately for distance alone to hide her from him. He could feel the direction of her influence threaded through the Beast Heaven, and all he needed to do was continue walking toward it. In fact, this was the real reason he had been so certain she was still connected to the Mesmeryx at all.

Logically, she shouldn’t have been.

Nosphaleen had become an unwilling piece in a completely different scheme, elevated into something the Efivara worshipped as a Goddess, and that should have severed or at least transformed many of her old ties. Yet the Mesmeryx still carried something of her, enough that Sylas could feel the resemblance through their Wills, which left a simple question without an answer.

Why was she still a Mesmeryx?

Sylas wasn’t sure, but he would be soon.

As for the Skai Heaven, he had already stopped caring much about its immediate situation. Victory would be his whether it came now or later, and even the suppression of the Beast Heaven pressing down on him failed to inspire concern. He no longer enjoyed many of the old benefits his Titles had once given him against such pressure, but right now the weight of an entire Heaven felt strangely trivial.

Every step revealed more of it.

His Will brushed against the hidden Runes woven through the Beast Heaven’s suppression, understanding pieces of them without any conscious effort, and the more he saw, the duller that pressure became. It wasn’t that the Heaven weakened, but rather that something understood ceased to be quite as oppressive as something unknown.

PING.

A beacon appeared above his head.

Sylas stopped for half a breath.

The feeling of déjà vu was almost irritating, because this certainly wasn’t the first time the system had gone out of its way to dog him out wherever he went. Usually he would have ignored it, but this time the attention promised to become inconvenient.

He hadn’t brought out the Hollow Ship because doing so would dull his sensitivity toward Nosphaleen’s location. Walking openly, however, meant every idiot attracted by the bounty would continue throwing themselves in his way, and eventually the interruptions might waste more time than the ship would cost him.

"Yamero."

The scholarly Serpentes looked over from where he had shamelessly wrapped himself beneath Vaelith like a living mount. His expression fell almost immediately.

"So I actually have to work now." he grumbled.

Vaelith smiled at the exchange, still entirely convinced that Yamero was some strange extension of Sylas’ own Will. She seemed to find the idea of Sylas complaining to himself amusing, right up until Yamero’s body suddenly began expanding beneath her.

Space warped around them.

Before Yamero could finish changing, a massive object flashed into existence in the distance, and the pull that followed made it feel as though the gravity of an entire world had suddenly locked onto them. Sylas couldn’t immediately tell whether that sensation came from some formation aboard the vessel or from its ridiculous size alone, because the ship was so enormous that entire mountain ranges could have fit across its upper deck.

What interested him more was that Beasts were using something this technological at all.

Then his eyes sharpened.

They weren’t Beasts.

Humanoids moved across the deck, broad-shouldered men and women wearing cloaks and armor made from treated Beast hides, some still bearing horns, claws, or fur from whatever creatures they had been taken from. Wearing such things openly in the Beast Heaven was bold enough to be provocative, but if Beasts could exist in the other Heavens, there was no reason humanoids couldn’t have carved out territory here as well.

A woman stepped onto the forward hull.

She planted one foot on the railing and leaned forward with a sort of relaxed aggression, thick black hair falling down her back while two pronounced canines pressed against her lower lip. Her clothing consisted mostly of layered Beast-hide straps and a short mantle over one shoulder, and with Sylas’ new eyes, it was immediately obvious she wasn’t wearing underwear despite the provocative pose.

It was equally obvious that she didn’t care.

She hadn’t bothered grooming herself either, and when she noticed exactly where Sylas’ gaze had landed, she didn’t lower her leg. Instead, her smile widened into something dangerous, as though looking had been the first step into a trap she had deliberately left open.

Vaelith noticed as well and her expression darkened.

Before either woman could speak, two enormous shadows descended between the vessels.

Vaegor and Vaelor landed hard enough to distort the surrounding space, white fur tinged blue rippling across ten-meter frames while the exposed brains atop their skulls and hands pulsed visibly beneath translucent membranes. Both twins looked first toward Sylas, then toward the woman on the ship, and their interest immediately shifted.

Vaelor’s lips peeled back.

"Humans."

The woman’s smile vanished.

Behind her, several warriors stiffened at once.

They belonged to the Draeven Clan, one of the rare humanoid powers strong enough to hold territory in the Beast Heaven without bending the knee to a Beast Race.

Their survival alone had earned them a reputation for brutality, but their leader’s youngest daughter, Kaesha Draeven, was somehow even further along on that spectrum.

Vaegor scratched at one of the secondary brains on his hand.

"Still pretending you’re the finished product?"

Kaesha lowered her foot from the railing, though not out of modesty, and rolled one shoulder as the ship’s pressure began climbing around her. "Still pretending growing extra brains made you smarter?"

Vaelor laughed.

"Better than cutting off everything useful and calling it evolution."

Kaesha’s canines showed.

"Come closer and I’ll show you what I kept."

The surrounding Beast Heaven warriors immediately began backing away from both sides.

Sylas stood between them, almost forgotten.

Vaegor and Vaelor had spent their lives believing the Vaulkyn represented the superior path humanity should have taken, retaining the bodies of Beasts while gaining intelligence beyond them. Kaesha and the Draeven Clan represented the exact insult to that belief, humanoids who had survived and prospered in the Beast Heaven without becoming anything other than what they already were.

Within seconds, neither side seemed to remember why they had come.

Sylas looked from one to the other.

Then he kept walking.