Genetic Ascension novel Chapter 2476

Chapter 2476: Worth

Sylas remained silent while another challenge assembled around him. Rheos kept speaking from the other side of the formation, but the words had become little more than noise while Sylas followed what was happening on Earth.

Cassarae moved.

For a moment, Sylas thought the connection he sensed was only the remnant of her Sword Will refusing to disappear. Then blood, stone, and Aether around her began answering that Will, and the two halves of her body pulled themselves back together.

Nosphaleen noticed the change in Sylas’ focus, though whatever she expected to see afterward never appeared. His wife had just returned from being cut in half, yet the fractures running through Sylas’ hands and neck didn’t close.

Cassarae rose with the old sword in her hand and the Guardian Angel World Set reforming around her body. Her Sword Will spread through Earth with a freedom Sylas had never felt from her before, and within moments she was fighting Tomoe again.

Sylas should have felt relief. Instead, his attention settled on the empty space around Cassarae’s neck.

The necklace was gone.

He traced the sequence backward without taking his attention from the battle. The necklace shattered, Cassarae’s Sword Will changed almost immediately, and everything about her Path that had seemed disjointed for years suddenly began fitting together in a way Sylas should have noticed long ago.

He had gotten that necklace back for her. Cassarae had lost it, and Sylas had gone out of his way to return it without spending more than a passing thought on what it might actually be doing to her.

That realization cut even deeper than Tomoe slipping through Earth’s defenses. Sylas hadn’t lacked information this time. He had seen enough strange things around Cassarae’s necklace and Path to know there were questions worth asking, then simply decided those questions weren’t important.

Sylas had never cared whether Cassarae was powerful or weak. That had always felt simple to him, almost self-evident; Cassarae was Cassarae, and her value had nothing to do with whether she could keep pace with him.

There had been another thought beneath that one. So long as Sylas became strong enough, none of it would matter.

Cassarae didn’t need to stand at the same height. She didn’t need to understand every threat coming toward them or possess a Path capable of surviving everything the universe could throw at her, since Sylas had already decided that anything dangerous enough to reach her would first have to get past him.

So why investigate her inheritance? Why waste time pulling apart her Class, her sword, the necklace around her neck, or the strange Destiny connected to all of them when Sylas intended to become powerful enough to deal with whatever eventually emerged?

Another challenge ended, and Rheos immediately forced the next one to begin. Nosphaleen stepped closer to Sylas when a fracture reached farther across his wrist, but she stopped herself from speaking when she saw that his attention had never shifted.

The questions Sylas had failed to ask were painfully ordinary. Where had Cassarae’s inheritance come from, what happened when she first received it, why had the System reacted so strangely to her Path, and what exactly had the necklace changed when she put it on?

Cassarae would have answered him. She might have sworn at him for digging into her business first, but she would have answered.

Sylas had even seen the connection it all had to Madness.

His own life had become tangled with Madness Seeds, Madness Paths, Virtues, Sins, and the consequences hidden beneath all of them. He knew how easily they could offer enormous power while concealing something rotten underneath, and he had personally suffered enough from those structures that any connection between Cassarae’s Path and Madness should have demanded his full attention.

He hadn’t given it any.

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