Genetic Ascension novel Chapter 2430

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.

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