Chapter 2479: Kill

The crimson fractures accelerated, spreading from Sylas’ chest into his arms and neck before disappearing beneath his clothes, but the physical change barely registered compared to what was happening within his mind. Something had begun pushing upward from depths he had never properly looked into, and now that he had stopped instinctively forcing it back down, he finally understood why some part of himself had kept that door closed for so long.

Kill him.

The thought came before Sylas even looked at the Heaven Creator across from him, and his mind supplied the rest without needing to be prompted. Tear apart the challenge formation before the next battle could lock into place. Crush the man’s Will before the Tower reacted. Use the Death Seal to sever whatever authority protected him, then slaughter everyone else standing between himself and the exit until the Creation Tower either released him or collapsed around them.

Sylas’ gaze cooled.

There was no anger behind any of it, and that disturbed him far more than the thought of murder itself. He had killed enough people that another corpse meant very little, but those deaths had always followed a precise decision. He observed, calculated, weighed the consequences, then chose the most efficient path forward. This was different. The answer had appeared first, polished and complete, while the reasoning rushed in afterward to justify it.

Another crimson tendril pushed into his thoughts.

Kill everyone who refuses.

Willborne Crown descended before the thought could settle. Sylas’ Will turned inward with enough force to suppress a God Plane genius, gathering around that rising bloodthirst and crushing it beneath his authority until, for half a breath, the pressure vanished.

The crimson cracks across his body doubled.

Sylas’ jaw tightened as understanding came almost at once. Suppressing it was wrong, not because his Will lacked the strength, but because he had spent his entire life doing exactly that. Suppress the impulse. Ignore the thought. Move forward as though it had never existed. The only difference now was that he possessed enough awareness to finally notice the pieces of himself disappearing beneath the surface.

His attention shifted toward Selfwrought Emperor.

He had created the Class because conventional Skills had become increasingly meaningless to him. Rune Mastery could reproduce almost anything his body required, and once he had learned to construct a perfect copy of himself, the next step had seemed obvious. If he could reproduce his body with absolute precision, then he could use that same comprehension to excavate every trace of potential buried within it and continuously rebuild himself toward the greatest state he could reach.

Until now, Sylas had never questioned the standard being used.

Perfect according to what? According to him.

More precisely, according to the Sylas he understood.

That flaw sat at the heart of Selfwrought Emperor. Every reconstruction, every improvement, every attempt to draw out more of his potential depended on a blueprint Sylas himself had defined, which meant anything he refused to acknowledge had never entered that blueprint in the first place. He had been demanding perfection from an incomplete definition.

Sylas’ Will entered the Class and pulled at its foundation. The System resisted for less than a fraction of a second before yielding because there was nothing foreign here for it to protect. Selfwrought Emperor had been born from his own Rune Mastery, his own comprehension, his own definition of what the Self should be.

So he changed that definition.

The Self could not be limited to whatever portions of himself happened to be convenient to understand. Every instinct belonged to him. Every thought that surfaced before conscious reasoning caught up belonged to him. Every desire his parents had taught him to restrain, every impulse civilization had taught him to bury, every quiet thing that had watched from behind the door in his mind while Sylas pretended it wasn’t there—

All of it was Sylas.

—

[Class Foundation Altered]

[Selfwrought Emperor]

[The Self cannot be perfected while portions of it remain undefined.]

—

Something broke open.

Sylas’ pupils constricted as murder flooded his mind with enough force that the world around him changed.

Nosphaleen became bones, muscles, blood vessels, nerves and points of failure. Rheos became seventeen separate methods of execution, several of which could be carried out before the man understood Sylas had moved. Even the Creation Tower ceased to feel like a structure and became a body waiting to be dissected, its formations turning into organs, its channels of authority into arteries, its World Spirit into a heart Sylas suddenly wanted to tear free just to observe whether everything else would continue functioning without it.

His breathing stopped, not because he had forgotten how, or because of a pressure, but instead because his inner self found it useless. With his current strength, he didn’t need to breathe at all. Why waste time on something so human, so mundane. For what? For optics? For posterity? To fit in? Since when had you ever cared about such things?

Sylas forced air back into his lungs and studied what was happening without retreating from it.

Selfwrought Emperor was obeying him perfectly. It was excavating the Self without prejudice now, dragging buried structures into the open and forcing them into his conscious definition rather than allowing them to remain hidden simply because Sylas found them inconvenient.

The problem was no longer suppression. The problem was capacity.

There was nowhere to put any of it.

That realization brought Void Sovereign into focus, and Sylas understood almost immediately that he had restricted this Class in exactly the same way. He had created Void Sovereign because Selfwrought Emperor could perfect his body so thoroughly that there would eventually be no room left for his Healing Factor or future growth.

Void Sovereign solved that contradiction by inserting emptiness where emptiness shouldn’t exist, convincing a body already pushed to its limit that another horizon still remained beyond it.

Sylas had only ever applied that principle to his physical existence and the structures directly attached to it, but his mind was part of his existence too.

Void Sovereign opened.