Chapter 2364: Command the Skies (2)

The next collision came before the echoes of the last one had finished rolling across the Mesmeryx world, Sylas stepping through folded space as his scythe carved a dark crescent toward the feathered Serpentes’ neck.

The God twisted away while several emerald-gold feathers flared across his flank, complex Runes igniting over their surfaces and commanding the atmosphere between them to harden into layers that caught the blade before it could bite deeply.

Sylas felt the resistance, adjusted the angle of his wrist, and drew three Runes into the air with the edge of the scythe before the momentum of his first attack had even ended.

The Runes snapped into place around the Serpentes and immediately began altering the structure of the space enclosing him, one compressing distance, another fixing direction, while the last gave Sylas a stable point through which he could transmit force.

His telekinesis flooded into all three at once, not merely pushing against them from the outside, but moving through their structure until the Runes themselves became extensions of his martial arts.

The Serpentes roared as his feathers flashed and the skies around him folded outward, brute authority colliding with Sylas’ carefully constructed control until the atmosphere detonated between them.

A wave of pressure stripped clouds from half the horizon and sent distant oceans surging toward their shores, but Sylas was already drawing again.

His fingers moved this time rather than his weapon, emerald lines appearing beside him as though his hand were writing directly across the fabric of the world. Some Runes remained suspended externally, forming layered fields that redirected wind, force, and space around him, while others vanished into Sylas’ body and sank toward the Core Stat Runes woven throughout his Genes.

Telekinetic Martial Arts had never been limited to simply adding invisible force behind a punch, because Sylas could apply that same control directly to the structures responsible for producing his physical capabilities in the first place.

Strength responded first.

The Core Stat Runes threaded through his Genes tightened beneath his Will, their output becoming cleaner as telekinesis corrected countless minute inefficiencies before they could ever reach muscle or bone.

Speed followed, then Dexterity, and with each adjustment Sylas wasn’t adding foreign power so much as forcing every part of himself to act with a degree of precision it would never have reached naturally.

He stepped and space cracked beneath his foot.

The Serpentes barely managed to cross his tail in front of his chest before Sylas’ fist landed, and even then the impact sent him spiraling backward through several layers of cloud. Feathers scattered in his wake, but rather than allowing them to fall, the God snapped his wings outward and every loose feather stopped at once.

Thousands of Runes awakened.

The scattered plumage spread across the skies in a vast formation, each feather acting independently while still resonating with the whole, and for the first time the Serpentes began using his natural Rune Armor with something approaching true intent.

One group strengthened the atmosphere around Sylas until simple movement became a battle, another gathered light into concentrated lines that fired from dozens of directions at once, while a third reinforced the God’s body until every sweep of his tail carried the pressure of the heavens behind it.

The battlefield split.

One half belonged to the God, filled with emerald-gold feathers, violet light, and skies that obeyed his every movement as though he had been born with authority over them.

The other belonged to Sylas, where external Runes appeared and vanished in cascading layers, space compressed into impossible angles, Time shifted by fractions too small for ordinary senses to notice, and void opened wherever structure became too oppressive.

The feathered Serpentes felt his anger giving way to disbelief.

A Mortal shouldn’t have been able to do this.

Even after stepping into the Demi-God Plane, Sylas’ body should have carried imperfections left behind by his lower existence, small flaws in his Genes, his energy pathways, his Will, or simply in the relationship between them.

Instead, every exchange made the opposite clearer, because Sylas’ body moved with a completeness that made the God feel as though he was fighting something that had somehow skipped the necessary grinding out of imperfections that should have taken generations to temper out.

"Impossible."

Sylas didn’t react.

His emerald eyes moved across the Serpentes’ body instead, cataloguing changes in Rune output, feather alignment, recovery speed, and the way that faint Godly aura interacted with the physical body beneath it. By now, he was certain this wasn’t merely a powerful Demi-God taking advantage of the Heaven Clash’s loosened restrictions. This was a God.

That realization didn’t make Sylas more cautious. It made him curious.

There had to be something separating one tier of existence from another beyond simply possessing stronger energy or a higher level of power, because if that were all it took, then the difference between Mortal, Demi-God, and God would be far too shallow to justify the barriers surrounding them.

The Serpentes standing before him had something woven through his existence that Sylas could feel but not yet completely define, and suddenly killing him too quickly felt almost wasteful.

A beam of concentrated light tore through the region where Sylas stood.

He shifted his shoulder, drew a Rune with two fingers, and allowed the attack to pass within inches of his body while a void channel swallowed the pressure following behind it.

At the same moment, his telekinesis sank deeper through the Core Stat Runes of his own Genes, refining his movement until his body slipped between attacks that should have left no space to escape.

The Serpentes’ feathers collapsed inward.

Hundreds became armor again while thousands more formed rotating halos around his body, each layer reinforcing the next until his control over the skies became suffocating.

He surged forward behind that pressure, claws of light extending from his feathers while the atmosphere compressed around Sylas from every direction.

Sylas met him in the center.

Scythe struck wing, fist met tail, Rune formations shattered against natural Heaven Runes, and every collision sent cascading consequences across the planet below. Mountains fractured beneath misplaced pressure, oceans lifted into walls before crashing back down, while distant Mesmeryx watched the heavens continuously change color as emerald lightning, violet light, and black veins of void tore through one another.

Sylas’ expression never shifted.

Then his left hand opened and a familiar seal appeared.

Life and Death.

The two forces rotated around one another between his palms, balanced so perfectly that the surrounding Runes seemed to quiet in their presence. Sylas brought his hands together.

The shockwave that followed spread across the world.

His eyes brightened, vigor and something deeper dancing behind the emerald Runes within them as the Life and Death Seal resonated through everything his Will had already touched. Across from him, the feathered Serpentes attacked again, feathers blazing as another command gathered across the heavens.

One scale dimmed in the God’s mighty formation dimmed. Just one, but one was more than enough.

The God froze.

The formation across his body faltered for less than a heartbeat, and Sylas was already there.

His scythe ripped through the weakened layer of Rune Armor and carved deep across the Serpentes’ chest, blood exploding into the skies as the God was launched backward harder than at any point since the battle began.

For the first time, his natural Heaven Runes failed to answer him quickly enough, and the expression in his eyes changed as Sylas watched the wound with cold, focused interest.