Chapter 2399: Sylas Grimblade (3) [Bonus]

[Bonus thanks to Fireblazerx12 <3]

Sylas’ next swing looked almost lazy, without any explosive windup or great gathering of force to warn the battlefield of what was coming. The fused scythe and calligraphy brush simply moved through the air as though Sylas was drawing another ordinary stroke, yet the world around that motion began bending before the weapon ever reached it.

Space curved out of the way while the surrounding layers of the Spirit World warped as though reality itself felt it impossible to stand in the way, as though it was better not just for it, but for everyone to understand this truth to be whole.

The farther the arc traveled, the stranger it became, black and emerald gradually fading from its edge while something milky and white spilled through the stroke. Countless points of light appeared within that whiteness like stars scattered across an endless sea, each one faint when viewed alone, yet together they painted something so familiar that the watching geniuses began to feel the answer before Sylas completed the motion.

"Milky Way."

The words echoed through the World of Spirits, and the four things Sylas had written finally latched together.

For several breaths, the world seemed frozen in realization, then broken in understanding before finally shattering beneath comprehension. The Milky Way painted by Sylas didn’t hang freely in the skies, and as more of its shape settled into existence, enormous chains began appearing around it.

They wrapped around the Galaxy itself.

Some were buried so deeply into the manifested Milky Way that they looked almost fused to it, forming an enormous cage around countless stars and worlds. Those chains carried a feeling none of the watching geniuses had personally experienced, yet almost every one of them recognized immediately, since there were few forces in existence that could mistake the oppressive restrictions of a world still undergoing its Summoning.

The Summoning wasn’t simply an event in the picture Sylas painted. It was a prison.

The Milky Way had been locked inside of it, its people born and raised beneath ceilings they hadn’t chosen, their paths restricted before they even understood that something beyond those restrictions existed. Yet those weren’t the only chains wrapped around the Galaxy, and as Sylas’ Will continued pouring into the image, more appeared from beyond the Milky Way itself.

Those chains belonged to others.

Some tightened around Earth, others sank into the edges of the Galaxy, while more stretched away into darkness toward powers whose faces Sylas didn’t bother giving form.

They represented the hands that had reached toward Earth before it could properly stand, the forces that had tried to use it, invade it, manipulate it, or crush it before its people had even escaped the first cage placed around them.

Then the meaning of three finally settled.

The number hadn’t meant three lives or three victories, it had represented a ceiling, a ceiling of just three years, of less than 36 short months between the appearance of these chains and Sylas breaking free of them.

For almost the entirety of Sylas’ life, the Milky Way had existed beneath restrictions so severe that the heights surrounding this battlefield shouldn’t have even been visible from where he began, let alone reachable.

The truth spilled outward with the image.

A young man born to a Summoned world, barely more than halfway to thirty years of age, had climbed from inside that prison to stand here now. The distance between those two points was so absurd that even the geniuses who had been raised beneath the inheritances of ancient Clans and Races struggled to properly fit the two versions of Sylas into the same existence.

From Mortal to Demi-God, from Mortal to enemy of the Gods, and from Mortal to the very heart of a battlefield where beings descending from the God Plane had come specifically to stop him.

From Sylas Brown to Sylas Grimblade.

BOOM.

A dragon’s roar peeled across the skies.

Will and Aether surged around Sylas, but neither moved like ordinary energy anymore, as the layered reality of the Spirit World began peeling apart around him. Colors, concepts, fragments of Will, and even portions of the manifested scene were ripped free and dragged toward Sylas’ existence until something enormous began taking shape behind him.

Black scales emerged first, each one so dark that they seemed carved from the void itself, swallowing the surrounding light before faint streaks of emerald and gold reflected along their edges.

The body that followed was long and coiling, winding through the skies in immense loops while powerful clawed limbs unfolded beneath it, each motion carrying the oppressive weight of a creature that needed no wings to claim the heavens.

Its head rose high above Sylas, sweeping horns curling backward from a skull lined with dark ridges while long strands of condensed Will drifted from either side of its maw. Its eyes seemed almost bottomless, filled with a depth that made even the Heavenly Serpentes appear unfinished by comparison, and when its jaws opened, the second roar caused the portals to the God Plane to tremble.

The Fate Dragon had manifested. And for the first time, the World Serpent’s descent visibly faltered.

Its body had continued forcing itself through the portal throughout Sylas’ demonstration, carrying the certainty that once enough of it descended, the battle would simply end beneath the weight of what it was.

But now the World Serpent reacted by driving itself downward harder, its projected world expanding as ancient bloodline Will crashed against the image Sylas had written into the skies.

But Sylas continued to swing and his Fate Dragon followed the arc.

Its immense body twisted behind the fused scythe and brush, every coil tightening before snapping forward as though Sylas’ stroke had become the spine around which its entire existence moved.

The milky stars of the manifested Galaxy stretched with it, while the chains surrounding that world groaned beneath a Will that had climbed from within them and earned the right to stand beyond them.

The World Serpent roared and forced more of itself through, but then its descent stop and the portal cracked.

Then the Fate Dragon crashed into it.

BOOM.