Chapter 2400: Sylas Grimblade (4)

The Fate Dragon surged forward along the arc of Sylas’ swing, its immense black body coiling through the skies as though the stroke of the fused scythe and brush had become a path carved specifically for it.

Void-dark scales swallowed the surrounding light, only allowing faint traces of emerald and gold to run along their edges, while its sweeping horns, clawed limbs, and long strands of condensed Will trailing from its maw gave the impression of something that had crawled out of the deepest layers of existence.

The World Serpent roared as their Wills collided, its enormous body still trying to force itself through the cracked portal while the weight of its bloodline spread outward like a world descending onto another. For an instant, the two creatures seemed locked together, ancient lineage pressing against something that shouldn’t have possessed anywhere near enough history to resist it, then the Fate Dragon’s coils tightened and its head drove forward again.

The World Serpent was pushed backward.

Its descending body stopped first, then reversed, scales scraping against the edges of the God Plane portal as the enormous creature was forced back through a passage it had only barely managed to enter.

The surrounding space screamed beneath the pressure, cracks racing outward from the portal while the Fate Dragon followed far enough to drive the last visible portion of the World Serpent beyond the threshold.

Then the portal collapsed around it.

Silence followed for only a moment, but within that moment the meaning of everything Sylas had written sank deeper into the watching Wills. Human, twenty-nine, three, Milky Way, four simple pieces that should have meant almost nothing on their own had become something impossible to ignore once they were allowed to exist together.

Sylas wasn’t even thirty years old. Worse than that, or perhaps far more absurdly, he hadn’t even possessed access to the system for three full years.

That realization sank into the watching geniuses differently than the first had. Age alone was one thing, especially among Races capable of producing monsters from birth, but less than three years...

None of them had time to properly process what that meant before another change began spreading through the World of Spirits.

Fear.

It appeared quietly at first, little more than an instinctive tightening around the Will, but the emotion deepened with every passing breath as the image Sylas had painted continued pressing itself into their understanding.

They hadn’t chosen to fear him, and some of them would have denied the emotion even if it had been pointed out directly, yet that hardly mattered when the same narrative was being reinforced by everyone around them at once.

Sylas Grimblade had gone from a Mortal trapped behind the chains of a Summoning to someone capable of forcing a World Serpent back into the God Plane in less than three years.

The fear attached itself to that truth, sank into their bodies, and grew like a cancer.

It painted itself across their Wills whether they wanted it there or not, leaving behind something closer to a stain than an emotion, an instinctive understanding that this was a person who couldn’t be measured by the same assumptions used for anyone else.

Even those who managed to remain calm felt the change taking hold somewhere deeper, where reason had far less influence over what the soul decided was dangerous.

Tomoe frowned.

Her blood-red eyes narrowed as the foreign impression tried to settle into her Will, and for the first time since arriving, her expression lost some of its manic excitement. The taint lasted less than a heartbeat before her Formless Will flashed, Sword Will running through it like a sharpened current and cutting the fear apart before it could properly root itself.

Januar reacted at almost the exact same moment.

The historian’s lazy expression tightened as something foreign brushed against his Will, then the world around him seemed to flicker beneath a pressure that didn’t belong to ordinary strength. Whatever foundation held Januar together rejected the fear almost immediately, shattering the impression so completely that even the remnants vanished before they could reform.

Neither looked pleased.

Far away from the center of the conflict, Rhykan looked considerably more amused.

He remained reclined across Caracos Thar’s broad back as the lightning lioness moved through the World of Spirits, blue-steel arcs dancing across her white fur while the path ahead of them opened toward one of the Representative Thrones. There had been very little resistance by the time they reached it, and while the rest of the world was still reeling beneath the story Sylas had written into the sky, Rhykan simply reached the first of the five positions.

A ripple passed through the surrounding Will as the spot acknowledged him.

Rhykan chuckled and shook his head.

Of everyone currently watching Sylas, there were very few people who understood his story as well as Rhykan did, and even then there were certainly pieces Sylas had never allowed anyone else to see. What the others had just learned was already ridiculous enough, yet they were still missing the part that made the entire thing far more troublesome.

Sylas hadn’t merely accomplished all of this in less than three years. He had succeeded where even a Race feared by the God Races had failed, all while moving beneath the pressure of a hidden hand whose face he probably still hadn’t seen.

Rhykan had sensed that hand more clearly on the day Sylas cleared the Summoning at the center of Earth, when another layer of the plot had almost closed around the planet before Sylas saw through it and ruined the arrangement.

At the time, Rhykan hadn’t given much thought to who stood behind it. He had certainly taken advantage of plenty of things happening on Earth, but he wasn’t the one who had originally found the planet. That had been Legacy, and the deeper Rhykan looked back at the sequence of events, the harder it became to believe that everything surrounding Earth had simply grown by coincidence.

Someone had been there first. Someone had been arranging pieces long before Sylas understood there was even a board. But what else was new?

Rhykan’s smile slowly disappeared as his expression became far colder, a trace of something sinister settling into his eyes while he watched the remnants of the cracked God Plane portal fade from the distant sky.

If Sylas continued pulling his own history into the open like this, then sooner or later one small corner of that existence’s machinations would be exposed along with it. And once that happened, they might finally have to step into the light to rein everything back in.

Rhykan sneered.

It seemed he should thank Sylas again.

BOOM.