Chapter 2430: Impossible

The difference appeared the instant Caelum completed his breakthrough.

Sylas had already understood that the gap between Rune Creation Tiers couldn’t be treated like an ordinary increase in strength, but understanding something and experiencing it were different matters. The golden panels Caelum had formed pressed forward without resistance, swallowing the emerald around Sylas so quickly that the battlefield they had fought over for so long became almost entirely gold.

Caelum laughed as the mechanisms within both of his eyes accelerated.

His Time Runes had become far more intricate after entering the B-tier, while his Order Path seemed to benefit even more. What had once required layers of corrections now happened naturally, each piece of chaos finding a place in the whole before Sylas could introduce another contradiction.

Sylas didn’t move, and there was only a slight flicker in his eyes as another hundred of his Runes disappeared beneath the gold.

Caelum seemed to take that silence as acceptance that the battle was over, and his attacks became more elaborate rather than more direct. Time mechanisms nested inside one another, golden hands turning across invisible faces while gears shifted backward and forward at once, each sequence hiding another several levels beneath it.

Sylas watched in silence.

The gap really was enormous. A single C-tier Rune was already made up of millions of parts. A B-tier Rune was on the order of several billion. If he continued using Time alone, he would lose, if not in skill, then in raw power alone. Just to keep up with one B-tier Rune he had to draw several thousand C-tier ones, and he had to layer and combine them so that they worked in a proper mesh fast enough that Caelum couldn’t immediately snap it back into Order.

It was impossible. It was an issue of scale. They were fighting over one specific section for control. If Sylas did that, he would have to reach impossibly far beyond the battlefield and ironically lose the battlefield he was on.

Still, the conclusion didn’t bother him much. Sylas had limited himself because he wanted to understand Caelum’s Path, not because Time was all he had, and now that Caelum had crossed into the B-tier there was no reason to continue pretending otherwise.

The tesseract in Sylas’ eyes flashed with full color and Space moved.

Caelum’s next temporal formation reached Sylas and found that the distance it was meant to cross no longer had the same meaning. The attack wasn’t stopped or destroyed, its relation to Sylas had simply changed, several meters becoming thousands before another Spatial Rune folded those thousands back onto the formation that created them.

Caelum’s laughter stopped.

Emerald gears began appearing among Sylas’ Time Runes, meshing with them so naturally that Caelum misunderstood what he was seeing at first. His expression darkened as he assumed Sylas had revealed an Order Path of his own, and the thought clearly irritated him.

Sylas could understand why. Losing to someone more talented in Time was one matter. Finding out that the same person could also use the second half of your own Path better than you could, immediately after you had broken through because of him, was something else entirely.

The problem was that this wasn’t Order. It was better suited to Time than Order could ever be.

Time only had meaning relative to something else, and Space decided much of that relativity. Distance, position, movement, and perspective could all change what a fraction of a second meant, which allowed Sylas to coordinate his temporal Runes without forcing them into rigid positions at all.

One layer of Caelum’s B-tier Rune Mastery still crushed one of Sylas’, so Sylas used two.

Golden mechanisms advanced, only to meet two sets of emerald gears rotating in opposite directions. Caelum adjusted and overwhelmed those as well, so Sylas used three layers, then four, each one changing the spatial relationship of the temporal layer beneath it.

Caelum’s expression slowly changed.

The number continued rising.

Six layers became eight, then twelve, until the emerald structures surrounding Sylas no longer looked like individual gears at all. They began joining into larger glyphs and symbols, every piece carrying several relationships at once as Time and Space folded through one another.

Caelum knew exactly how much Will complicated Rune structures consumed, especially when every additional layer multiplied the number of relationships that had to be maintained. Yet Sylas’ output continued increasing while his Will showed no sign of thinning.

Then Caelum finally sensed it.

"Eternal..."

The word slipped out before he could stop it.

Sylas’ Will wasn’t merely stronger than his Fragmented Infinite Will. The difference was so great that the pressure Caelum had once been proud of now felt unfinished, as though he had spent his life celebrating an ocean only to realize he had been standing beside a pond.

Sylas continued drawing.

The emerald glyphs became more complicated for several breaths before something strange happened...

They became simpler.

Rigid geometry began disappearing from them, the gears losing their teeth and the glyphs losing their clean boundaries until all that remained were flowing Strokes of emerald Will. They curved through Caelum’s golden mechanisms without obeying any single shape, sometimes becoming Time, sometimes Space, and sometimes existing somewhere between the two before Sylas decided what they needed to be.

They were Fathomless.

Sylas had once thought of it as an ocean because there was no better comparison. It flowed forward when there was room, retreated when there wasn’t, seeped through cracks too small for anything rigid to enter, and returned with enough persistence that even something immovable would eventually erode.

Caelum’s Order needed definitions.

Sylas didn’t.

The realization finally struck the Gold.

His mechanical eyes widened as he stared at the emerald current slipping between his Runes, and for the first time he stopped treating it as another form of Order. He saw Space bending around Time, each one changing the meaning of the other without ever becoming separate.

"IMPOSSIBLE!" Caelum’s Will erupted as though volume could force reality to agree with him. "YOU CAN’T COMBINE TIME AND SPACE!"

Sylas looked at him. Not with surprise, but with the same faint indifferent he seemed to face everything with.

"You can’t."

The emerald sea surged.

Caelum’s Order shattered.