Chapter 2450: Heaven’s Answer. (1)

The pressure above Sylas continued to gather until the clouds lost any resemblance to weather, layers of black and grey compressing against one another while white-gold light moved through their depths in broad, silent currents.

Looking up at them pulled the memory of Gogo’s Ancestor across his mind, that enormous Serpentes rising beneath an open sky only for something higher to answer its refusal to bow.

Before Sylas could even finish processing the thought the first bolt descended.

It wasn’t thin enough to be called a streak of lightning. A column of white tore out of the clouds with gold wrapped around its edges, broad enough to swallow Sylas and the ground surrounding him, and the thunder arrived at almost the same instant as he flooded his body with Dragon Will and crossed his scaled forearms over his head.

The impact drove sensation from his body for a fraction of a second before pain returned all at once. Heat bit through his scales, burned past skin, and sank into the muscle beneath until both arms felt as though they had been filled with molten metal. The current forced every fiber to contract hard enough that Sylas could feel tendons pulling against bone.

The earth gave way beneath him as stone liquefied around his legs, and the lightning continued through his shoulders into his chest without losing much of its force. His heart locked in place, the pressure inside his ribs swelling with every fraction of a second it refused to beat, until Selfwrought Emperor seized the damaged structure and forced one brutal contraction through it.

When the light finally cleared, Sylas found himself standing several meters below where the ground had once been, surrounded by glowing stone and streams of molten earth running down the crater walls. Most of the scales covering his forearms had disappeared with the flesh beneath them, leaving pale bone visible through blackened muscle while his fingers shook from nerves that could no longer agree on what they were feeling.

The second strike formed before his arms finished rebuilding, violet threads winding through a thicker body of white and gold as the clouds rolled inward around it. Sylas stepped into the descending light and drove a fist upward, letting the new Dragon structure in his Race spread through his shoulders and spine until the force of his body gathered behind the blow.

Pain snapped through his wrist before he felt the impact anywhere else. His hand disappeared inside the lightning, the bones across his knuckles breaking first before the fracture raced backward into his forearm, and then the bolt forced those broken pieces through the surrounding muscle as it drove Sylas down hard enough to collapse another layer of earth beneath him.

His breath escaped through clenched teeth when he landed, though he barely heard it beneath the thunder still rolling through the crater. The ruined arm hung at his side while pulses of heat continued moving through the exposed nerves, each beat of his heart sending another sharp wave from his fingertips to his shoulder even as fresh tissue began closing around the damage.

The heavens brightened again, this time in three different places, and Sylas was moving before any of them descended. The first pillar struck where he had stood and bent after him when he changed direction, carving a white path through the clouds, while the second crossed from his left before he could fully escape the first and tore across his shoulder with enough force to send him through the crater wall.

Stone broke against his back for kilometers as he was driven underground, each impact adding another layer of dull pain beneath the burning already running through his body. He hadn’t stopped moving when the third bolt followed him into the trench, filling everything ahead with white-gold radiance before entering through his back and exploding outward through his chest.

His spine arched as the current seized him. Several ribs cracked beneath the contraction of his own muscles, one lung refused to expand when he tried to breathe, and the Phoenix wing on his left side came apart in a spray of radiant fragments that burned out before they touched the ground.

Sylas remained buried in the shattered earth for only as long as it took his body to obey him again, then pushed himself upward with one arm while blood ran from his mouth. His vision still carried a white stain from the last strike, but the next mass of lightning was already gathering overhead, and this time golden rings began rotating through his emerald irises before it could fall.

The seamless pillar changed beneath his Runeweaver Eyes, its overwhelming light separating into Foundations and Strokes layered so densely that their borders became more defined than just a blinding flash of light for the first time.

Sylas didn’t linger on the change, his gaze following the structure downward and catching the repeating junctions as they formed, watching as each section of lightning built the next while the bolt propagated down and through the sky.

The Unravelling Pupils reached into one of those junctions just before the strike arrived.

Instead of one pillar swallowing him, four thinner streams tore apart in different directions, their gold-edged bodies twisting violently as the structure that had held them together disappeared. Sylas slipped between the first two, punched through the third, and cut the fourth with a narrow blade of telekinetic force, though the broken lightning still crawled over his fist and opened burning channels through the half-healed flesh of his arm.

He felt every one of them. The smaller currents didn’t carry the crushing force of the original bolt, but they found exposed muscle and nerves with cruel precision, setting his hand into involuntary spasms while several scattered branches punched through his abdomen and left narrow lines of molten heat buried deep inside him.

The sky answered his success with more light.

White and gold spread across the entire cloud layer, violet and crimson appearing deeper within it until there was no darkness left untouched. Thunder merged into one continuous pressure that shook the ruined ground beneath Sylas, and then the heavens released dozens of bolts in a descending field that covered everything he could see.

His Runeweaver Eyes strained until veins reddened their whites, but he never stopped looking upward. One bolt separated high above him after he stripped apart three supporting Foundations, another broke into branching pieces under a sweep of his Will, while a third survived long enough that Sylas had to meet what remained with his shoulder and felt scales, skin, and a layer of muscle tear away together.

The storm never gave him enough time to recover cleanly. Lightning punched through his thigh and locked the muscles around the wound until his knee almost folded, another clipped the side of his skull and nearly burst his left eye beneath the pressure, while a broken fragment entered beneath his ribs and burned through enough of one lung that his next breath came with blood.

None of it became distant of fading pain, Sylas’ mind remaining a cool, frigid stream of analysis and cold calculation. His body told him exactly what had happened with every movement—the wrong slide of fractured bone, the wet resistance in his chest when he breathed, the crawling fire left behind wherever current had travelled. Unfortunately, even Selfwrought Emperor could only rebuild so much before the next strike arrived to tear something else open.

Still, his eyes grew faster.

The lightning began breaking farther and farther above him as familiar Rune structures entered his sight, no longer requiring conscious examination before his Will found the points that mattered. He stopped wasting effort on pieces his body could survive, allowing lesser currents to hammer into his scales and flesh while he reserved the Unravelling Pupils for the dense central structures that would otherwise crush straight through him.

By then, hundreds of bolts filled the sky, and Sylas stood beneath them with blood running down his chest and arms while broken Dragon scales regenerated only to shatter again.

The recovering Phoenix wing behind him flickered with every impact, his heart had stopped enough times that the momentary emptiness in his chest had become familiar, and yet the storm continued climbing in power as though everything before this had only been preparation.

Then the light disappeared.

Sylas looked up through one properly functioning eye and watched every current remaining in the clouds pull toward a single point overhead, leaving the world beneath it dark for the first time since the tribulation began. The clouds followed, entire layers twisting inward while the accumulated lightning compressed beyond them until white-gold radiance returned with enough intensity to wash the mountains in the distance into pale silhouettes.

The forming strike continued to widen as more of the storm vanished into it, swallowing tens of kilometers of sky and then hundreds until Sylas could no longer see where its edges ended.

Beneath his Runeweaver Eyes, its Runes were packed into such depth that looking directly at them sent fresh pain through the newly reconstructed eye, layer behind layer descending through one another until the bolt looked less like lightning than a portion of the heavens themselves being driven downward.

Mountain after mountain disappeared beneath its brilliance while the earth around Sylas began to tremble before the strike had even moved.

He stood at the center of the ruined land with blood covering most of his body, one wing still incomplete behind him and both emerald eyes fixed upward as the clouds finally split from horizon to horizon.

Then the strike began to fall.