Genetic Ascension

Overloaded, the Ouro, with a head full of blue-scaled hydra, didn’t even know when he died. When his eyes cleared, he found a claw phasing through his chest, splicing into his cells as though vibrating its way through, and then suddenly solidifying.

PCHU.

Blood spurted, and crimson bubbled up from his mouth, spilling over his jaw and falling in a waterfall.

The eyes of the Ouro suddenly widened as he snapped out of it. His Will surged, and his body sent out a wave of violent aura in all directions, only to find that he had been trapped in an illusion of what might happen, as though Schrédinger’s cat.

However, when he picked the path of life, he found Sylas’ fist right in front of him.

He hurried to try and dodge, but as fast as he was, he was still a beat slow, the side of his nose and a single cheek suffering a devastating blow.

In that moment, his entire world was consumed by the sight of Sylas’ eyes. His Charisma pulled him in until his senses weren’t capable of feeling anything else.

Just… what level of Rune Master was this? This wasn’t a battle against a man—it was a battle against a god capable of bending reality itself.

He barely completed the thought before his head snapped back in pain.

Green flickered along Sylas’ body, and he was instantly coated in his F-Grade and E- Grade Scorpion Warlord Armors. They melded into one, and the latter took another step forward.

Before, it provided him “just” 20,000 Physical stat points when combined. Now, it had been doubled as his Mastery took a step forward, leaving Breath behind and entering Flesh.

The world felt as though it was in the palm of Sylas’ hands, his body flowing faster than it ever had before. It was still too slow to keep up with his mind, and yet he was so far ahead of his opponent it didn’t seem to matter.

He saw counters and counters to counters. He played a game of chess a hundred moves ahead, his body twitching, dancing, and shifting to timelines that his opponent hadn’t even felt play out yet.

But he had.

His opponent was more than twice as fast as him, more than twice as strong, and had treasures and trump cards an infinite span beyond his adornless body.

Yet, it looked as though Sylas was taking a stroll through the park, dodging before punches were thrown, attacking locations without opponents, only for them to suddenly appear in his path as though to present themselves to death.

The combination of strikes started with just a single punch, but the moment it began, it was as though the blue-scaled Ouro was trapped in an illusion he couldn’t peel himself out of.

Fists, knees, elbows—every attack began to layer the sense of danger in the man’s mind once again.

He couldn’t sense the constant shift in the timeline, but his Luck could. Every time Sylas attacked, it was as though the blue-scaled Ouro was facing every timeline of failure all at once… And it was overwhelming.

Sylas exhaled a mouthful of air so heated it steamed out of the corners of his mouth, and yet to the Ouro it looked little different from a dragon breathing out its flames, lifting its head to the skies and roaring at the puny, insignificant creatures beneath it.

With his hair dancing wildly, Sylas unleashed a low kick to the side of the Ouro’s knee, stomping down with the same leg and exploding into an elbow across the latter’s chin in the same fluid motion.

Every blow resounded through the skies, echoing through space, stamping through time.

The Ouro’s head flung so hard to one side a tooth flew from his mouth, and the world spun around him.

Sylas sidestepped his body, hooking his ankle with a foot and swinging his own leg forward.

The Ouro was flipped off his feet, with Sylas right by him, his eyes sparking with lightning as he sensed an attack coming from the distance.

Everything had happened so fast. The two seemed trapped in their own time warp, the world bending around Sylas so much that even thousands of exchanges felt like nothing more than a breath of time to those not participating in it.

And yet, this Boradora seemed to have a method of breaking Sylas’ control, launching an attack that would interrupt them.

Impressive, to be sure.

But not nearly enough.

Sylas’ hand snapped out to the side, moving like lightning and catching the blue-scaled Ouro’s neck out of the ai.

He flicked his wrist, his arm moving with the flexibility of a polearm.

BANG.

The Ouro’s body shot out with such speed he blurred into the outline of a projectile, his body slamming into the oncoming attack.

Blood spurted, bone fell in a hail, flesh rending across the skies in sparks of a lost life. Sylas took a step forward, and the world seemed to fast-forward, the timeline of his bubble and the real world snapping back together.

At first, the Ouro down below were confused, and then the realization hit them all at once as though they had been there to witness the battle from start to end.

They watched Sylas toy with one of the strongest among them, watching as a young man they had great confidence in became little more than a toy.

And then they watched Boradora attack him, only to be the one who killed him in the end.

Sylas reached out a hand and then clenched it.

All at once, the blood falling from the dead Ouro stopped and then solidified into a single bulb of crimson.

The skies trembled, the clouds churning, and large sums of water droplets as large as small hills fell from above, only to freeze as well and fall into the crimson ball that was left of the Ouro.

The water burst into Runes before reforming in on itself, forging a hydra of blue liquid that roared into the skies.